The Night Watch

'Well, son,' said Duncan 's father, as he and Viv sat down, 'how are you? Been treating you all right, have they?'

'Yes,' Duncan answered, 'I suppose so.'

'Eh?'

Duncan cleared his throat. 'I said, Yes, they have.'

His father nodded, grimacing awfully as he tried to follow the words. This was the worst sort of setting for him, Duncan knew. The room had six tables in it, and theirs was the last; but every table had two prisoners at one end, and the prisoners' visitors at the other; and everyone was shouting. Duncan 's neighbour was a man named Leddy, a post-office clerk, in for forging money orders. Sitting next to Viv was Leddy's wife. Duncan had seen her before. She gave Leddy hell, every time she came. 'If you think I'm happy,' she was saying now, 'about having a woman like that come into my home-' At the table next to her was a girl with a baby. She was jiggling the baby up and down, trying to get it to smile at its father. But the baby was crying: shrieking open-mouthed like a siren, then pulling in great shuddering breaths and shrieking again… The room was just an ordinary small prison room, with ordinary closed prison windows. It smelt of ordinary prison smells-unwashed feet, sour mops, bad food, bad breath. But above the regular smells were other ones, too, much more disturbing: perfume, make-up, permanent waves; the smells of children; the smells of traffic, dogs, pavements, open air.

Viv was taking off her coat. She was wearing a lavender-coloured blouse done up with little pearl buttons, and the buttons caught Duncan 's eye. He'd forgotten about buttons like that. He'd forgotten what they felt like. He wished he could reach across the table, now, and take one, just for a second, between his finger and his thumb.

She saw him looking, and moved about as if self-conscious. She folded her coat across her lap. 'How are you, really?' she asked, when she'd done it. 'Are you all right?'

'Yes, I'm OK.'

'You look awfully pale.'

'Do I? You said that last time, though.'

'I always forget.'

'How've you liked this past month, son?' said his father loudly. 'Made you jump, has it? I said to Mrs Christie, Jerry's got us on the hop, he's caught us with our feet up. What a time of it we had, though, a night or two ago! Bangs so loud, they woke me up! That'll give you an idea how bad it was.'

'Yes,' said Duncan, trying to smile.

'Mr Wilson's place lost its roof.'

'Mr Wilson's place?'

'You know the one.'

'Where we used to go,' said Viv, seeing Duncan struggle, 'when we were little. That man and his sister, who used to give us sweets. Don't you remember? They had a little bird, in a cage. You used to ask to feed it.'

'-a great big lump of a girl,' Leddy's wife was saying now, 'with habits like that! It turned my stomach-'

'I don't remember,' said Duncan.

His father was shaking his head-a beat behind, because of his hearing. 'No,' he said, 'you hardly credit it when it all dies down. You'd think from the racket that the world had been smashed to nothing. It gives you a turn to see so many houses still standing up. Puts you right back in the blitz.-Well, they're calling it the Little Blitz, aren't they?' He said this last to Viv; then turned to Duncan again. 'You won't feel it so much, I suppose,' he said, 'in here?'

Duncan thought of the darkness, Giggs calling out, the officers going down to their shelter. He moved in his chair. 'It depends what you mean,' he said, 'by “feel it”.'

But he must have mumbled. His father tilted his head, grimaced again. 'What's that?'

'It depends what you- God! No, we don't feel it so much.'

'No,' answered his father mildly. 'No, I shouldn't have thought you would…'

Mr Daniels walked up and down behind the prisoners, scuffing his shoes. The baby still cried: Duncan 's father started trying to catch its eye, making faces at it. A few tables on, Fraser was sitting; his mother and father had come to see him. Duncan could just make them out. His mother was dressed in black, with a hat with a veil, as if for a funeral. His father's face was brick-red. Duncan couldn't hear what they were saying. But he could see Fraser's hands where they rested on the table, the blistered fingers moving restlessly about.

Viv said, 'Dad's been moved to another shop at Warner's, Duncan.'

He looked back at her, blinking, and she touched their father's arm, spoke into his ear. 'I was just telling Duncan, Dad, that you've been moved to another shop.'

Duncan 's father nodded. 'That's right.'

'Oh yes?' said Duncan. 'Is it all right?'

'It's not too bad. I'm working with Bernie Lawson now.'

'Bernie Lawson?'

'And Mrs Gifford's daughter, June.' Duncan 's father smiled. He started to tell Duncan some story… Duncan lost the thread of it almost at once. His father never realised. He spoke of all the little factory jokes and intrigues as if Duncan was still at home. 'Stanley Hibbert,' he was saying, and, 'Muriel and Phil. You should have seen their faces! I told Miss Ogilvy-' Duncan recognised some of the names, but the people were like ghosts to him. He watched the words being formed on his father's lips, and took his cue from his father's expressions and nodded and smiled, as if he were deaf himself…

'They said to give you their best, anyway,' his father finished. 'They always ask after you. And Pamela sends her love, of course. She said to tell you, she's sorry she can't get in to see you more.'

Duncan nodded again-forgetting, for a moment, who Pamela was. Then, with a little jolt, he remembered that she was his other sister… She'd come to see him about three times, in the three years he'd been in here. He didn't much mind; Viv and his father, however, always looked embarassed about it.

Viv said awkwardly, 'It's hard, when there are babies.'

'Oh yes,' said their father, seizing on this, 'that makes things hard. No, you don't want to be hauling kids about with you, when you come here. Unless you're bringing them in to see their dads; that's a different thing, of course. Mind you-' he glanced at the girl with the crying baby, and tried, and failed, to lower his voice-'I shouldn't have cared to have any of you kids see me in a place like this, if it'd been me. Well, it's not nice. It doesn't give you nice things to think back on. I hardly liked to have you see your mother, up at the hospital that time.'

'It's nice for the fathers, though,' said Viv. 'It was nice for Mother, I expect.'

'Oh yes, there is that…'

Duncan glanced down the room again, to Fraser's parents. This time, too, he saw Fraser himself: Fraser was looking along the tables, as he was. He met Duncan 's gaze, and slightly turned down the corners of his mouth. Then he looked at Duncan 's father and at Viv, an in interested way… Duncan grew embarassed, thinking of his father's threadbare coat. He lowered his head and started picking bits of varnish from the table.

His hands were clean, because he'd taken care to wash them that morning, and to pare his nails. His trousers had a sharp crease down each leg, from where he'd slept with them beneath his mattress the night before. His hair was combed flat, and greased with a mixture of wax and margarine… He had a vision, every time, of how it would be when he was brought in here: he wanted his father and Viv to look at him and be somehow impressed by him; he wanted them to think, He's a credit to us! But always, at about this point in their visit, his mood began to plunge. He remembered that he and his father had never had anything to say to each other, even years before. And his disappointment-in his father, in himself, even in Viv-would start to rise up and almost choke him. He'd wish, perversely, that he'd come with dirty fingernails and uncombed hair. He'd realise that what he really wanted was for Viv and his father to see that he lived in filth: he wanted them to tell him that he was a sort of hero for doing it without complaining, without being turned by it into a beast. The fact that they talked to him, every time, about ordinary things-as if they'd come to visit him in a hospital or a boarding-school, rather than a prison-made his disappointment turn to rage. Sometimes it would be as much as he could do to look at his father's face without wanting to hurl himself across the room and hit it.