by Sarah Waters
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Helen. ‘Truly, it doesn’t. After all—’ Her feelings had faltered, just a little, but now rose again, buoyed up by wine, by the darkness. ‘After all, we’re in a funny sort of situation, you and I.’
‘Are we?’
‘I mean, because of what happened between you and Kay—’
At once, even in the darkness, she knew that she had made a mistake. Julia stiffened. She said sharply, ‘Kay told you that?’
‘Yes,’ said Helen, growing wary, speaking slowly. ‘At least, I guessed it.’
‘And you spoke with Kay about it?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did she say?’
‘Only, that there had been a—’
‘A what?’
Helen hesitated. Then, ‘A misaffection, she called it,’ she said.
‘A misaffection?’ Julia laughed. ‘Christ!’ She turned away again.
Helen reached for her arm. She caught hold of the sleeve of her coat instead. ‘What’s the matter?’ she said. ‘What is it? It doesn’t matter, does it? It’s never mattered to me, in the past. Is that what you’re thinking? Or are you thinking that it’s none of my business? But then, it has been my business, in a way. And since Kay was so open and honest about it with me—’ She was forgetting, in her anxiety, that Kay had not really been open with her about it, at all. ‘Since Kay was so open and honest about it, then shouldn’t you and I be open and honest about it, too? If it’s never mattered to me, why should it matter, now, to us?’
‘How gallant you sound,’ said Julia.
She said it so coldly, Helen felt afraid. ‘Is it a matter for gallantry? I hope not. All I’m trying to say is that I should hate for any of this to make a sort of—of coolness, or shadow, between us. Kay’s never wanted that—’
‘Oh, Kay,’ said Julia. ‘Kay’s a great sentimentalist. Don’t you think? She pretends to be so hard-boiled, but—I remember I once took her to see an Astaire and Rogers picture. She cried all the way through it. “What were you weeping at?” I asked her at the end. “The dancing,” she said.’
Her manner had changed completely. She sounded almost bitter, now. ‘I wasn’t at all surprised,’ she went on, ‘when Kay met you. I wasn’t surprised at the way she met you, I mean. It was like something from a picture in itself, wasn’t it?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Helen, confused. ‘I suppose so. It didn’t seem like that at the time.’
‘Didn’t it? Kay told me all about it—about how she found you, and so on. She put it that way, you see: that she found you. She said how frightened it made her, when she thought of how nearly you might have been lost. She described touching your face…’
‘I remember hardly any of it,’ said Helen, wretchedly. ‘That’s the stupid thing.’
‘Kay remembers very well. But then, as I say, Kay’s a sentimentalist. She remembers it as though there were a touch of fate to it, a touch of kismet.’
‘There was a touch of kismet to it!’ said Helen. ‘But don’t you see, how dreadfully tangled the whole thing is? If I’d never met Kay, I should never have met you, Julia. But Kay would never have loved me at all, if you had let her love you—’
‘What?’ said Julia.
‘I used to be grateful to you,’ Helen went on, her voice rising and starting to break. ‘It seemed to me that in not wanting Kay you had somehow given her to me. Now I’ve done what she did.’
‘What?’ said Julia again.
‘Haven’t you guessed?’ said Helen. ‘I’ve fallen in love with you, Julia, myself!’
She hadn’t known, until that moment, that she’d been going to utter the words; but as soon as she said them, they became true.
Julia didn’t answer. She had turned her face back to Helen’s and her breath, as it had before, came fluttering, warm and bitter, against the wetness of Helen’s cold lips. She sat quite still, then put out her hand and caught hold of Helen’s fingers; and she gripped them hard, almost madly—as someone would clutch at a hand, or a strap of leather, blindly, in pain or grief. She said, ‘Kay—’
‘I know!’ said Helen. ‘But I simply can’t help it, Julia! It makes me hate myself; but I can’t help it! If you’d seen me, today. She was so kind. And all I could think of was you. I wished she was you! I wished—’ She stopped. ‘Oh, God!’
For she’d felt, very clearly, that odd little thrill or vibration that always came before the sounding of the Warning; and even before her voice had died away, the sirens started up. On and on they went, rising hectically up the scale again after every plunge towards silence; and it was impossible, even after so many years, to sit perfectly still and not mind them, not feel the urgent pull of them, the little clawing out of panic from within one’s breast.
With the darkness all about, the effect was magnified. Helen put her hands across her ears and said, ‘Oh, it’s not fair! I can’t bear them! They’re like wails of grief! They’re like—like the bells of London! They’ve got voices! Take cover! they’re saying. Run and hide! Here comes the chopper to chop off your head!’
‘Don’t,’ said Julia, touching her arm; and a moment after that, the Warning ceased. The silence, then, was almost more unnerving still. They sat very tensely, straining their ears for the sound of bombers; at last they began to make out the faint groan of engines. Crazy, it was, to think of the boys inside those funny tubes of metal, wishing you harm; to think of them having walked about, two hours before—eaten bread, drunk coffee, smoked cigarettes, shrugged on their jackets, stamped their feet against the cold…Then there came the first thump-thump-thump of anti-aircraft fire, perhaps two or three miles away.
Helen put back her head and looked up. Searchlights were on, the quality of the darkness had changed; she saw, instead of the sky, the rising wall of the tower against which she was sitting. She felt the hardness of the door against her scalp, through her hair; she imagined the stones above it coming down, great pitiless blocks of masonry and mortar. She seemed to feel it swaying and lurching about, even as she peered at it.
She thought suddenly, What am I doing here? And then she thought, Where’s Kay?
She scrambled to her feet.
‘What is it?’ asked Julia.
‘I’m frightened. I don’t want to stay here. I’m sorry, Julia—’
Julia drew up her legs. ‘It’s all right. I’m frightened, too. Help me to stand.’
She grabbed Helen’s hand, braced herself against her weight, and rose. They switched on their torches and began to walk. They walked quickly, back up Idol Lane—or Idle Lane, whichever it was—to Eastcheap. Here they stopped, unsure of the safest route to take. When Julia turned to the right, Helen pulled her back.
‘Wait,’ she said, breathlessly. The sky, that way, was cut with the beams of searchlights. ‘That’s east, isn’t it? That’s towards the docks. Isn’t it? Don’t let’s go that way. Let’s go back the way we came.’
‘Through the City? We could go into Monument Station.’
‘Yes. Anywhere. I can’t bear to be still, that’s all, and think of things coming down—’
‘Take my hand again,’ said Julia. ‘That’s right.’ Her voice was steady. Her grip was firm—not wild, as it had been before. She said, ‘It was stupid of me to make you come, Helen. I ought to have thought—’
‘I’m all right,’ said Helen. ‘I’m all right.’
They started off again, going quickly. ‘We must just pass St Clement’s,’ said Julia, as they walked. ‘St Clement’s ought to be just here.’ She shone her torch about, and hesitated; made Helen stop, then start again. They walked on, sometimes stumbling over broken paving-stones, sometimes groping with their feet for kerbs that weren’t there; for the plunging about of the searchlights, the sudden appearance and disappearance of shadows, was disorientating. Finally they picked out the whited steps of a church.
The church, however, was not St Clement’s but another. St Edmund, King and Martyr, its notice said.
Julia st
ood before it, utterly perplexed. ‘We’ve got onto Lombard Street somehow.’ She took off her cap, tugged back her hair. ‘How the hell did we do that?’
‘Which way is the Underground?’ asked Helen.
‘I’m not sure.’
Then they both gave a jump. A car had appeared, going too fast around a corner, weaving about; it went hurtling past them, then disappeared into the dark. They went on, and a moment later heard voices: men’s voices, like the voices of ghosts from the blitz, floating about, echoing queerly. It was two firewatchers, up on roofs, calling to each other across the street; one was giving a commentary on what he could see—incendiaries, he thought, on Woolwich and Bow. ‘There’s another packetful!’ they heard him say.
They were standing there, listening, hand in hand, when a warden came running out of the darkness and almost knocked them down.
‘Where the bloody hell,’ he said, panting, ‘did you two spring from? Turn those torches off, and get yourselves under cover, can’t you?’
Julia had pulled her fingers from Helen’s the moment he’d appeared, and stepped away. She said, almost irritably, ‘What does it look like we’re trying to do? Where’s the nearest shelter?’
The man caught her tone—or, what was more likely, Helen thought, took note of her accent—and his manner slightly changed. ‘Bank Underground, miss,’ he said. ‘Fifty yards back there.’ He jerked his thumb over his shoulder, and then ran on.
Perhaps it was the relative ordinariness of the exchange; perhaps it was the fact of seeing someone more agitated than herself; but Helen’s anxiety seemed suddenly, magically, to disperse, as though drawn off by a needle. She put her arm through Julia’s and they walked at quite a leisurely pace up towards what they could now easily see was a corrugated metal arch piled about with sandbags: the entrance to the station. A man and a girl went hurrying into it as they drew closer; a stout woman whose legs were sore or stiff was easing herself down the steps as quickly as she could. A schoolboy was hopping about, looking up, in great excitement, at the sky.
Julia slowed her step. ‘Here it is, then,’ she said, without enthusiasm.
Here’s the return to company, Helen took her to mean, to chatter and bustle and light…She pulled Julia’s arm. ‘Wait,’ she said. What were they doing? I’ve fallen in love with you! she’d cried in the darkness, fifteen minutes before. She remembered the fluttering of Julia’s breath against her mouth. She remembered the feel of Julia’s hand, clutching fiercely at hers. ‘I don’t want to go down,’ she said quietly. ‘I—I don’t want to share you, Julia, with other people. I don’t want to lose you.’
Perhaps Julia opened her mouth to answer, Helen wasn’t sure. For in the next instant they were lit by a flash: a flash, like lightning, brief but unnaturally lurid, so that a thousand little details—the stitches in Julia’s collar, the anchors on the buttons of her coat—seemed to spring from her body into the air, to leap into Helen’s eyes and blind her. Two seconds later, the explosion came—fantastically loud, not terribly close, perhaps even as far away as Liverpool Street or Moorgate; but close enough for them to feel the shock of it, the freakish beating against them of a gust of airless wind. The schoolboy capering about the station steps gave a whoop of absolute pleasure; some adult darted out to scoop him up and carry him inside. Helen put out her hand, and Julia gripped it. They began to run—not into the station, but away from it, back down Lombard Street. They were laughing like idiots. When the next explosion came—further off, this time—they laughed more wildly, and quickened their pace.
Then, ‘In here!’ said Julia, tugging Helen’s hand. She had seen, lit up by the second flash, a sort of baffle-wall that had been built across the entrance to an office or a bank. The space it made was deep, jute-scented, impossibly dark: she moved into it, as if passing through a curtain of ink, and drew Helen in after her.
They stood without speaking, catching their breaths; their breaths sounded louder, in that muffled space, than all the sounds of the chaos in the street. Only when they heard footsteps did they look out: they saw the warden they had spoken to, still running, but running back, in the opposite direction. He went straight past and didn’t see them.
‘Now we’re invisible again,’ whispered Julia.
They had drawn close to each other, to look out. Helen was aware, as she had been before, of the movement of Julia’s breath, against her ear and cheek; she knew that all she had to do was move her head—just turn it, just tilt it, that was all—for her lips to find out Julia’s in the darkness…But she stood quite still, unable to act; and it was Julia, in the end, who started the kiss. She put up her hand and touched Helen’s face, and guided their two blind mouths together; and as the kiss, like a fire, drew, took hold, she slid her hand to the back of Helen’s head and pressed her even closer.
But after a moment, she drew away. She loosened the knot of Helen’s scarf, began slowly to tug at the buttons of her coat. When the coat was unfastened, she started on her own: the panels of the jacket parted, she moved forward again, and the two opened coats came together to make what seemed to Helen to be a second baffle-wall, darker even than the first. Inside it, her own and Julia’s bodies felt quick, hard, astoundingly warm. They kissed again, and fitted themselves against each other, Julia’s thigh coming snugly between Helen’s legs, Helen’s thigh sliding tightly between Julia’s; and they stood hardly moving, just nudging, nudging with their hips.
At last, Helen turned her head. She said, in a whisper, ‘This is what Kay wanted, isn’t it? I know why she did, Julia! God! I feel like—I feel like I’m her! I want to touch you, Julia. I want to touch you, like she would—’
Julia moved back. She caught hold of Helen’s hand, pulled the glove from her fingers, and let it drop. She took the hand to the buttons of her trousers, opened them up, and, almost roughly, slid it inside.
‘Do it, then,’ she said.
When the Warning sounded at John Adam House a girl would go up and down the stairs and along the corridors, knocking on every door. ‘Raiders Overhead! Raiders Overhead, girls!’ After that, each boarder was supposed to make her way down to the basement, in a calm and orderly way. But the basement was like shelters everywhere: too cold, too airless, and too dim; and sometimes the heartier girls of the house—the girls with whom Viv had least in common, the girls for whom this sort of life was only another kind of boarding-school—would attempt to start off games, or rounds of jolly singing. Lately, too, the various smells of the place had begun to make Viv afraid of being sick.
So for the past few weeks she’d taken to staying in her room when the sirens went, with Betty and the other girl they shared with, a girl called Anne. Betty and Anne could sleep through anything—Anne dosing herself with veramon, Betty putting an eye-mask on and sticking pink wax plugs in her ears. Only Viv would lie fretful, wincing at the blasts and the ack-ack fire; thinking of Reggie, Duncan, her father, her sister; pressing with her hands at her stomach and wondering what the hell she was going to do about the thing that was growing inside it, that must be got out.
She had tried the tablets that Felicity Withers had tried: they had given her stomach cramps and frightful diarrhoea for almost a week, but apart from that had had no effect at all. She had spent the days since then in a sort of stupor of anxiety, making endless mistakes at Portman Court; unable to smoke, unable to eat; unable to fix her mind on anything except the necessity of swallowing down the sickness that could swell inside her like a bitter black tide, for hours at a time. This morning, too, she had drawn on her skirt and, to her horror, found that the waistband wouldn’t fasten; she’d had to close it with a safety-pin.
‘What can I do?’ she’d said to Betty; and Betty had said what she’d always said before, ‘Write and tell Reggie. For God’s sake, Viv, if you don’t do it, I’m going to write the letter myself!’
But Viv didn’t want to write, because of the censor. And there were two more weeks before his leave came round again. She couldn’t wait that long,
getting fatter and sicker and more afraid. She knew she had to tell him. She knew the only way to do it was to call him up by telephone. She was lying rigidly in bed right now, nerving herself up to go downstairs and do it.
She was hoping the raid would end; but the raid, if anything, was getting worse. When, after another couple of minutes, she heard Anne muttering in her sleep, she put back the bedclothes. If the bombs came closer, Anne might wake. That would make it all harder. She must do it now, she thought, or never…
She got up, put on her dressing-gown and slippers, and picked up her torch.
She went out into the hall, and down one flight of stairs—going carefully, feeling her way, because the staircase was lit very badly with one blue bulb. She must have gone almost noiselessly, too: a girl coming up, with a plate in her hand, met her at the turn of the landing and nearly jumped out of her skin. ‘Viv!’ she hissed. ‘My God! I thought you were the Ghost of Typists Past.’
‘Sorry, Millie.’
‘Where are you going? The basement? Rather you than me. You’ll be just in time for the second round of Boy, Girl, Flower, Animal…Or, did you have your eye on those cream crackers that were knocking about in the common-room? Too bad. I’ve bagged the lot, look, for Jacqueline Knight and Caroline Graham and me.’
Viv shook her head. ‘You can have them. I’m just getting a glass of water.’
‘Watch out for mice, then,’ said Millie, beginning to climb the stairs. ‘And remember: if anyone asks you who took those cream crackers, you never saw me. I’ll do the same for you one day.’
Her voice faded. Viv waited until she’d crossed the landing, then carried on down. The staircase grew wider the lower she went; the house was an old one, built to a rather grand scale. There were great plaster roses in all the ceilings, and hooks where chandeliers had once hung. The banister rail had elegant curves and graceful finials. But though there were handsome crimson carpets in the hallways, they were all covered up with canvas, and the canvas was much damaged by high heels. The walls were painted in dispiriting gloss shades, green and cream and grey: they looked worse than ever in the dim blue light.
