The Night Watch

Mickey lowered her head and said nothing. She began, rather grimly, to unfasten the strap that held Viv to the bunk. 'Come on, Vivien,' Kay said, when she'd done it. 'It's all right.'

Viv still gripped her hand. 'All right? Are you sure?'

'Yes,' said Kay. 'We have to move you, that's all. But listen to me, just for a second.' She was speaking, now, in a rushed sort of whisper. She glanced over her shoulder, then touched Viv's face. 'Are you listening? Look at me… Your card and your ration book, Vivien. I've made a tear in the lining of your coat. You can say you lost them when you fell. All right? Do you understand me, Vivien?'

Viv did understand; but her mind had drifted to something else, that seemed more important. She'd felt her hand come unstuck from Kay's, and her fingers had pins and needles in them. Their surface was sticky, but cold and bare-

'The ring,' she said. Now there seemed to be pins and needles in her lips. 'I've lost the ring. I've lost-' But she hadn't lost it, she remembered now. She'd taken it off, to wash the blood from beneath it; and she'd left it, in the fancy bathroom, on the basin, beside the tap.

She looked wildly at Kay. Kay said, 'It doesn't matter, Vivien. It's not like the other things.'

'Here's the trolley coming,' said Mickey sharply.

Viv tried to rise. 'The ring,' she said, growing breathless again. 'Reggie got me a ring. We had it, so that Mr Imrie would think-'

'Hush, Vivien!' said Kay urgently. 'Vivien, hush! The ring doesn't matter.'

'I've got to go back.'

'You can't,' said Mickey. 'Bloody hell, Kay!'

'What's the trouble?' called the sister.

'I've got to go back!' said Viv, beginning to struggle. 'Just let me go back and get my ring! It's no good, without it-'

'Here's your ring!' said Kay, suddenly. 'Here's your ring. Look.'

She had drawn away from Viv and put her own hands together; she worked them as if wringing them for a second, then produced a little circle of gold. She did it so swiftly and so subtly, it was like magic.

'You had it, after all?' asked Viv, in amazement and relief; and Kay nodded: 'Yes.' She lifted Viv's hand, and slid the ring along her finger.

'It feels different.'

'That's because you're ill.'

'Is it?'

'Of course. Now, don't forget about the other things. Put your arm across my shoulders. Hold tight. Good girl.'

Viv felt herself being lifted. Soon she was moving through cold air… When Kay took her hand for the last time, she found that she could hardly return its pressure. She couldn't speak, even to say thank you or goodbye. She closed her eyes. They were just taking her through into the hospital lobby when the Warning went.

Helen heard the sirens from Julia's flat in Mecklenburgh Square. Almost at once there were crackles and thuds. She thought of Kay, and lifted her head.

'Where's that, do you think?'

Julia shrugged. She had got up to fetch a cigarette and was fishing about in a packet. She said, 'Maybe Kilburn? It's impossible to say. I heard a whopper come down last week and could have sworn it was the Euston Road. It turned out to be Kentish Town.' She went to the window, drew back the curtain, and put her eye to one of the little chinks in the grey talc boards. 'You should look at the moon,' she said. 'It's extraordinary tonight.'

But Helen was still listening out for the bombs. 'There's another,' she said, flinching. 'Come away from the window, will you?'

'There's no glass in it.'

'I know, but-' She stretched out her arm. 'Come back, anyway.'

Julia let the curtain fall. 'Just a minute.' She went to the fireplace, and held a spill of paper to the glowing coals in the grate, to light her cigarette. Then she straightened up, and drew in smoke-putting back her head, savouring the taste of the tobacco. She was quite naked, and stood with one hip raised: relaxed and unembarassed in the firelight, as though at the edge of a pool of water in some lush Victorian painting of Ancient Greece.

Helen lay still, to watch her. 'You look like your name,' she said softly.

'My name?'

'Julia, Standing. I always want to put a comma in it. Hasn't anyone ever said it to you like that before? You look like your own portrait… Come back. You'll get cold.'

The room was too well-sealed to be really chill, however. Julia put her hand to her forehead to smooth away tangled hair, then came slowly to the couch and slid back beneath the blankets. She lay bare to the waist, with her hands behind her head, sharing the cigarette with Helen, letting Helen put it between her lips and take it away when she'd drawn on it. After it was smoked, she closed her eyes. Helen studied the rise and fall of her chest and stomach as she breathed; the flutter of a pulse at the base of her throat.

There was the hollow boom of another distant explosion, a burst of gun-fire, possibly the noise of planes. In the flat above Julia's the Polish man moved restlessly about: Helen could follow his passage across the floor, back and forth, by the creaks of its boards. In the room below, a wireless was playing; there was the echoey, rattling sound of somebody stirring up coke in a fireplace. The sounds were familiar to Helen now, just as the feel and sight of Julia's blankets and pillows and mismatched furniture had grown familiar. She had lain here like this perhaps six or seven times in the past three weeks. And she said to herself, as she had before: Those people don't know that Julia and I are together here, naked in one another's arms… It seemed incredible. She herself felt exposed-deliciously exposed, as if the flesh above dormant nerves had been sloughed off, peeled back.

She would never again, she thought, cross a floor, never switch on a wireless, never put a poker to the fire-never do anything at all-without thinking of the lovers who might be embracing in rooms close by.

She moved her hand to Julia's collarbone-not to the skin itself, but to a place in the air about an inch above it.

'What are you doing?' asked Julia, without opening her eyes.

'I'm divining you,' said Helen. 'I can feel the heat of you, rising up. I can feel the life of you. I can tell where your skin is pale, and where it's sallower. I can tell where it's clear and where there are freckles.'

Julia caught hold of her fingers. 'You're unhinged,' she said.

'Unhinged,' said Helen, 'by love.'

'That sounds like a book. One by Elinor Glyn or Ethel M. Dell.'

'Don't you feel a little crazy, Julia?'

Julia thought about it. 'I feel shot at by an arrow,' she said.

'Only by an arrow? I feel harpooned. Or- No, a harpoon's too brutal. I feel as if a small sort of hook had been plunged into my breast-'

'A small sort of hook?'

'A crochet hook, or something even finer.'

'A button hook?'

'A button hook, exactly.' Helen laughed. For at Julia's words a very clear image had sprung into her mind-something from her childhood, probably-a tarnished silver button hook with a slightly chipped mother-of-pearl handle. She put her hand across the place where she imagined her heart to sit. 'I feel,' she said, 'exactly as though a button hook had been plunged into my breast, and my heart were being drawn from me, fibre by fibre.'

'That sounds frightful,' said Julia. 'What a morbid girl you are.' She took Helen's fingers to her mouth and kissed them, then held them to examine their tips. 'And what little nails you have,' she said vaguely. 'Little nails, and little teeth.'

Helen grew self-conscious, though the light was so dim. 'Don't look at me,' she said, pulling her hand away.

'Why not?'

'I- I'm not worth it.'

Julia laughed. 'You mutt,' she said.

They closed their eyes, after that; and Helen, in time, must have fallen into a light sort of sleep. She was vaguely aware of Julia getting up again, putting on a dressing-gown and going down the hall to the lavatory; but she was in the midst of some absurd dream, and only came properly awake at the closing of the door, on Julia's return.