by Sarah Waters
‘Of course not.’
‘Want one?’
‘I’ve got my own here somewhere—’
‘Don’t be silly. Here.’
‘Well, thanks.’
They shared the flame, their heads coming rather close together, the smoke rising up and into their eyes. Without thinking, Helen touched her fingers, very lightly, to Julia’s hand.
‘Your knuckles are grazed,’ she said.
Julia looked. ‘So they are. That must be from broken glass.’ She lifted the knuckles to her mouth and sucked them. ‘I had to lower myself through the fanlight of a house this morning.’
‘Goodness!’ said Helen. ‘Like Oliver Twist!’
‘Yes, just like that.’
‘Isn’t that illegal?’
‘So you might think. But we have a sort of special dispensation, my father and I. If a house is empty and we can’t get hold of the keys, we’re allowed to get in however we can. It’s a filthy business, not at all as exciting as it sounds: the rooms all smashed, the carpets wrecked, the mirrors in splinters. The water-pipes might have had it: the water runs and turns the soot to sludge. I went into places last month and found things frozen: sofas and tablecloths and things like that. Or, things get burnt. An incendiary will land on a roof: it might burn right through, quite neatly, from one floor to the next; you can stand in the basement and look at the sky…I find damage like that more miserable, somehow, than if a house has been blasted to bits: it’s like a life with a cancer in it.’
‘Is it frightening?’ asked Helen, very taken with Julia’s description. ‘I think it would frighten me.’
‘It spooks me a bit. Then there’s always the chance, of course, of discovering someone—a looter, who’s got in the same way you did. Boys who’ve gone in for a lark. You see rotten drawings on the walls, sometimes; you pity the family that must come back. Then again, sometimes the house hasn’t been abandoned at all. My father got into one, a few months ago: he went into every room to look at the damage, and in the last room of all was a very old woman, in a yellow nightdress and with silver hair, asleep in a four-poster bed with tattered curtains.’
Helen saw the scene, quite clearly. She said, fascinated, ‘What did your father do?’
‘He left her to it—went silently back downstairs, then told the local warden. The warden said the old woman had a girl who came and cooked her dinners for her, and lit her fires; that she was ninety-three, and could never be got to come out when a raid was on. That she remembered seeing Prince Albert with Queen Victoria once in a carriage in Hyde Park.’
The sun, all the time that Julia was speaking, was moving in and out of cloud. When it grew bright she put her hand to her eyes or, as she had before, lifted her book; now, its growing brighter than ever, she stopped talking, shut her eyes completely for a moment, and put back her head.
How lovely she is! thought Helen suddenly, jolted out of the story about the old woman; for the sun lit Julia as a spotlight might, and the blue of the dungarees and the jacket set off the tan of her face, the dark of her lashes and neat, straight brows; and because her hair was swept up by the turban you saw more clearly the graceful lines of her jaw and her throat. She had parted her lips. Her mouth was full, slightly crowded, the teeth not quite even. But even that was lovely, somehow: one of those flaws of feature that mysteriously render a handsome face more handsome than genuine flawlessness could.
No wonder, Helen thought, with an unsettling mix of feelings—envy, and admiration, and a slight sinking of heart—No wonder Kay was in love with you.
For that was all the connection she and Julia had. They could not be said, even, to be friends. Julia was Kay’s friend, as Mickey was—or rather, not at all as Mickey was, for she did not, as Mickey did, spend time with Kay and Helen, at their flat, in pubs, at parties. She wasn’t open and easy and kind. She had a sort of mystery to her—a sort of glamour, Helen thought it.
The mystery and glamour had been there, right from the start. ‘You must meet Julia,’ Kay had used to say, after Helen had moved into her flat. ‘I do so want you two to meet up.’ But there had always been something in the way of it: Julia was busy, Julia was writing; Julia kept odd hours and could never be pinned down. They’d met, at last, about a year before, by accident: bumped into each other at the theatre, after a performance of—of all things—Blithe Spirit. Julia had been handsome, charming, frightening, remote: Helen had taken one look at her, noted the awkward, slightly flustered manner with which Kay introduced her; and guessed everything.
Later that night she’d asked Kay: ‘What was there, between you and Julia?’—and Kay had instantly grown awkward again.
‘Nothing,’ she’d said.
‘Nothing?’
‘A sort of—misaffection, that was all. Ages ago.’
‘You were in love with her,’ Helen had said, bluntly.
And Kay had laughed—‘Look here, let’s talk of something else!’—but also, what was rare for her, had blushed.
That blush was all the link there was, between Helen and Julia—a funny sort of link, when you thought about it.
Julia smiled and tilted her head. They were only fifty yards or so from the entrance to Marylebone Station, and through a lull in the traffic there had come a sudden burst of noise from one of the platforms: a blown whistle, followed by the letting out of steam. She opened her eyes. ‘I like that sound.’
‘So do I,’ said Helen. ‘It’s a holiday sound, isn’t it? A buckets-and-spades sort of sound. It makes me long to get away, get out of London, just for a bit.’ She swilled the tea in the bottom of her cup. ‘No chance of that, I suppose.’
‘No?’ said Julia, looking at her. ‘Can’t you fix something up?’
‘Where’s there to go to? And then, the trains…And, anyway, I’d never persuade Kay. She’s working extra shifts, now, at Dolphin Square. She’d never take time off, while things are so bad.’
Julia drew on her cigarette, then threw it down and covered it over with her shoe. ‘Kay’s such a heroine, though, isn’t she?’ she said, blowing out smoke. ‘Kay’s such a brick.’
She meant it jokingly, Helen supposed; but her tone was not quite light, and she looked at Helen, as she said it, from the corner of her eye, almost slyly—as if testing her, weighing up her response.
Helen remembered, then, something she’d once heard Mickey say about Julia: that she longed to be admired; that she couldn’t bear to have anyone liked over herself; and that she was hard. And she thought, with a flicker of dislike, It’s true, you are hard. She felt suddenly, in that one moment, exposed, unsafe.
But the queer thing was, the sensation of unsafeness, even of dislike, was almost exciting. She glanced again at Julia’s smooth, handsome, upper-class face and thought of jewels, of pearls. Wasn’t hardness a condition of glamour, after all?
And then Julia changed her pose, and the moment passed. She caught hold of her wrist-watch again; Helen saw how late it was and said, ‘Damn.’ She quickly finished her cigarette, dropped the stub into her almost empty cup, and heard it hiss. ‘I must get back to work.’
Julia nodded, drinking off her tea. She said, ‘I’ll go with you.’
They went quickly back to the canteen, to leave their cups on the counter, then walked the couple of hundred yards to Helen’s office.
‘Will your Miss Prism give you hell, for staying out so long?’ asked Julia, as they went.
‘Miss Chisholm,’ said Helen, smiling. ‘She might.’
‘You’d better put the blame on me, then. Say I’m an emergency case. That I’ve—what? Lost my house, and everything in it?’
‘Everything?’ Helen thought it over. ‘That’s about six separate departments, I’m afraid. I could only help you with a grant for light repairs. You’d have to see someone over at the War Damage Commission about rebuilding work; they’re just as likely, however, to send you back to us. Miss Links, on the third floor, might be able to give you some assistance with the cleaning of any salv
ageable items—curtains, carpets, things like that. But be sure to bring your cleaners’ bills with you; and the chit we gave you, when you first filed your report of the incident.—What’s that? You’ve lost the chit? Oh, dear. You must get another, and start all over again…It’s like snakes and ladders, you see. And this is always assuming, of course, that we’ve found time to see you in the first place.’
Julia grimaced. ‘You enjoy your job.’
‘It’s frustrating, that’s all. You hope to make some sort of difference. But now the people we rehoused three years ago are coming back; they’ve been bombed out all over again. We’ve less money than ever. And still the war is costing us—how much do they say? Eleven million a day?’
‘Don’t ask me,’ said Julia. ‘I’ve given up reading the papers. Since the world’s so obviously bent on killing itself, I decided months ago to sit back and let it.’
‘I wish I could,’ said Helen. ‘But I find I feel even worse, not knowing, than I do when I know it all.’
But now they had reached the Town Hall; and paused, at the bottom of the steps, to say goodbye. The steps were flanked by two anxious-looking stone lions, furred grey with a coating of ash. Julia reached to pat one, and laughed.
‘I’m awfully tempted to hop up on the back of it. What do you think Miss Chisholm would say about that?’
‘I think you’d give her a heart attack,’ said Helen. ‘Goodbye, Julia.’ She held out her hand. ‘Don’t climb through any more fanlights, will you?’
‘I’ll do my best. Goodbye, Helen. It’s been nice. That’s an awful word, isn’t it?’
‘It’s a grand word. It’s been nice to see you, too.’
‘Has it? I hope I’ll bump into you again, then. Or, you must have Kay bring you over, some time, to Mecklenburgh Square. We could have dinner.’
‘Yes,’ said Helen. For after all, why shouldn’t they? It seemed easy now. ‘Yes, I will.’ They moved apart. ‘And, thanks for the tea!’
‘We’ve rather a lot of people waiting, Miss Giniver,’ said Miss Chisholm, when she went in.
‘Have we?’ asked Helen. She went through the office, and down the staff corridor to the lavatory, to take off her coat and hat, to stand at the mirror and repowder her face. She saw again, as she did it, Julia’s smooth, striking features: the slender throat, dark eyes, neat brows; the full, irregular, distracting mouth.
The door opened, and Miss Links came in.
‘Oh, Miss Giniver, I’m glad I caught you. Rather sad news, I’m afraid. Mr Piper, at the Mayor’s Fund: his wife’s been killed.’
‘Oh, no,’ said Helen, lowering her hand.
‘Yes, a timed one. Got her early this morning. Awfully bad luck. We’re sending a card. We won’t ask everyone to sign it—gets rather monotonous after a while—but I thought you’d like to know.’
‘Yes, thanks.’
Helen closed her compact and put it away, and went sadly back to her desk—and hardly thought of Julia again, after that; hardly thought of her at all.
Well,’ said the prisoner in front of Duncan in the dinner-queue, an awful old pansy called Auntie Vi, ‘and what have we today? Lobster Thermidore, perhaps? Paté? Veal?’
‘It’s mutton, Auntie,’ said the boy dishing up the food.
Auntie Vi tutted. ‘Doesn’t even have the imagination to dress itself as lamb, I suppose. Heigh-ho. Give me a plateful, darling. I hear the lunches at Brooks are hardly much better these days.’
She said this last to Duncan, rolling her eyes and touching her hair. Her hair was blonded at the front with a bit of peroxide, and beautifully waved—for she slept every night with strings around her head, to put the kinks in. Her cheeks were rouged, and her lips as red as a girl’s: you couldn’t pick up a scarlet-bound book in the library without finding pale little patches on it, where men like her had sucked at the boards for lipstick.
Duncan couldn’t stand her. He got his food, saying nothing, and after a moment she moved on. But, ‘My,’ she murmured as she went, ‘aren’t we proud today?’ And when he glanced her way again he saw her setting down her dinner on her table and touching her hand to her breast. ‘My dears!’ he heard her cry to her cronies. ‘I’ve just been cut! Cut to the quick! Who? Why, Little Miss Tragedy Pearce over there…’
He put down his head, and took his plate across the hall in the other direction. He shared a table, near the gates, with Fraser and eight other men. Fraser was there already. He was talking animatedly to the man who had the seat across from him, a man called Watling, another Objector. Watling was sitting with folded arms, and Fraser was leaning forward and tapping at the oilcloth cover on the table to make his point. He didn’t notice Duncan come and draw out a chair, a few places away. The other men, however, looked up and nodded, pleasantly enough: ‘Hello, Pearce.’ ‘All right, son?’
They were mostly older men. Duncan and Fraser were two of the youngest prisoners there. Duncan, in particular, was liked, and often looked out for. ‘How are you?’ the elderly man beside him asked him now. ‘Had a visit lately, from your nice sister?’
‘She came on Saturday,’ said Duncan, as he sat.
‘She’s good to you. Nice-looking, too.’ The man winked. ‘And that never hurts, does it?’
Duncan smiled, but then started sniffing, screwing up his face. ‘What’s that awful smell?’
‘What do you think?’ said the man on his other side. ‘That blasted recess has blocked again.’
A few yards away from their table was the sink where the men from the ground-floor cells on this side had to empty their chamber-pots. The sink was always getting blocked; Duncan glanced over at it now, incautiously, and saw it brimming over with a nauseating stew of urine and rigid brown turds.
‘God!’ he said, turning his chair. He started picking at his dinner. But that made him feel sick, too. The mutton was fatty, the potatoes grey; the unwashed, overboiled cabbage still had soil clinging to it.
The man sitting opposite saw him struggling, and smiled. ‘Appetising, isn’t it? Do you know, I found mouse-droppings in my cocoa last night.’
‘Evans, from the Threes,’ said someone else, ‘says he once found toe-nails in his bread! Those buggers in C Hall do it on purpose. The worst thing was, Evans said, he was so bloody hungry he had to keep eating! He just picked the toenails out as he went along!’
The men made faces. Duncan’s elderly neighbour said, ‘Well, it’s like my old dad used to say: “Hungry dogs will eat dirty puddings.” I tell you, I never knew the truth of that until they put me in here.’
They chatted on. Duncan scraped more dirt from his cabbage and loaded up his fork. As he ate, he caught snatches of Fraser’s conversation with Watling, carrying over the other men’s talk: ‘But you don’t mean to tell me that with so many COs here and at Maidstone—?’ The rest was lost. The table they were sitting at was one of fifteen, laid out on the concrete floor of their hall. Each table held ten or twelve men, so that the noise of conversation and laughter, the scrape of chairs, the shouts of the officers, was almost unbearable—and it was made much worse, of course, by the acoustics of the place, which turned any sort of cry into that of a platform announcer at King’s Cross.
Now, for example, a sudden commotion made everyone flinch. Mr Garnish, the PO, had gone galloping down the hall and started screaming and swearing into some man’s face—‘You little git!’—and all because the man had dropped a potato, or spilt his gravy, or something like that. The curses were like the dreadful bayings of a furious beast; but men turned to look, and at once turned back, as if bored. Fraser, Duncan noticed, didn’t turn at all. He was still arguing with Watling. He gripped his cropped hair and said, laughing, ‘We shall never agree!’
His voice carried clearly now; the hall had quietened down a little after Mr Garnish’s outburst. The man on Watling’s right—a man named Hammond; a deserter, in for robbery—looked at Fraser very sourly. ‘Why don’t you fucking well stop arguing, then,’ he said, ‘and give the rest of us a
break? Gas, gas, gas, it’s all you do. It’s all right for you to talk, anyhow. It’s your sort who’ll do all right out of this war—just as you’ve done all right out of peace.’
‘You’re right,’ answered Fraser, ‘we will. Because my sort—as you call them—can rely on your sort thinking exactly that. While working men can see no good in peacetime, they’ll have no reason not to go to war. Give them decent jobs and houses, give their children decent schools, and they’ll soon get the point of pacifism.’
‘For fuck’s sake!’ said Hammond in disgust; but despite himself, he was drawn into arguing. The man on the other side of him was drawn in, too. Someone else said Fraser seemed to think that the ordinary working man could do no wrong. ‘You ought to try managing a factory load of them,’ he said. He was in for embezzlement. ‘That will soon change your politics, believe me.’ Then Hammond said, ‘And what about the Nazis? They’re ordinary working men, too, aren’t they?’
‘Indeed they are,’ said Fraser.
‘And what about the Japs?’
‘Now, the Japs,’ said the man next to Fraser—another deserter, called Giggs—‘ain’t human. Everybody knows that.’
The conversation ran on for several minutes. Duncan ate his filthy dinner, listening but saying nothing. From time to time he glanced at Fraser, who, having started the whole thing off, having stirred the table up, was leaning back in his chair with his hands behind his head, looking delighted. His uniform, Duncan thought, fitted him about as badly as everyone else’s fitted them; the grey of the jacket, with its grubby red star, sucked the colour from his face; the collar of his shirt was black with dirt; and yet he managed, somehow, to look handsome—to look merely slender, say, where everyone else looked pinched and underfed. He’d been at Wormwood Scrubs three months, and only had another nine to do; but he’d already done a year at Brixton Prison, and Brixton was known to be harder than here. He’d once told Duncan, too, that even Brixton wasn’t so much worse than his old public school. But only his hands had really suffered, from life in the Scrubs—for he was in the Basket Shop, and he hadn’t yet got the knack of handling the tools. His fingers had blisters on them the size of shillings.
