The Night Watch

'Let me come in with you, Pearce, will you?' he said. 'Let me share your bunk, I mean.' And, when Duncan didn't answer, he added simply, 'It's this bloody war. I can't bear to lie alone.'

So Duncan put back the covers and moved in closer to the wall, and Fraser got in beside him and lay still. They didn't speak. But every time another bomb fell, or a burst of anti-aircraft fire went up, Fraser would flinch and tense-like a man in pain, being knocked and jolted about. Soon Duncan found himself tensing with him-not in fear, but in sympathy.

That made Fraser laugh. 'God!' he said. His teeth were chattering. 'I'm sorry, Pearce.'

'There's nothing to be sorry for,' said Duncan.

'Now that I've started shaking, I can't seem to stop.'

'That's how it works.'

'I'm making you shake.'

'It doesn't matter. You'll warm up soon, and then you'll be all right.'

Fraser shook his head. 'It isn't just through being cold, Pearce.'

'It doesn't matter.'

'You keep saying that. It matters terribly. Don't you see?'

'See what?' asked Duncan.

'Don't you think I never wonder, about-about fear? It's the very worst thing, the very worst thing of all. I could take any amount of tribunals. I could take women calling me gutless in the streets! But to think to oneself, quietly, that the tribunals and the women might be right; to have the suspicion gnawing and gnawing at one: do I truly believe this, or am I simply a-a bloody coward?' He wiped his face again, and Duncan realised that the sweat upon his cheeks was mixed with tears. 'You won't catch men like me admitting it,' he went on, less steadily. 'But we feel it, Pearce, I know we feel it… And meanwhile, one sees the most ordinary types of men-men like Grayson, like Wright-going cheerfully off to fight. Are they the less brave, because they're stupid? Do you think I don't wonder how I'll feel, when the war's over-knowing that I'm probably only still alive because of fellows like them? Meanwhile, here I am, and here's Watling, and Willis, and Spinks, and all the other COs in every other gaol in England. And if-' A plane buzzed loudly overhead. He grew tense again, until it passed-'And if we're all burnt to death by an oil-bomb, will that make us brave men?'

'I think it's brave,' said Duncan, 'to do what you've done. Anyone would think it.'

Fraser wiped his nose. 'An easy kind of bravery, doing nothing at all! You're a braver man than I am, Pearce.'

'Me!'

'You did something, didn't you?'

'What do you mean?'

'You did the thing-the thing you were talking about, that brought you here.'

Duncan shuddered, turning away.

'It took a kind of courage, didn't it?' insisted Fraser. 'Christ knows, it took more courage than I've got.'

Duncan moved again. He raised his hand-as if, even in the darkness, to push away Fraser's gaze. 'You don't know anything about it,' he said roughly. 'You think- Oh!' He felt disgusted. For even now, with Fraser trembling at his side, he couldn't bring himself to tell him the simple truth. 'Don't talk about it,' he said instead. 'Shut up.'

'All right. I'm sorry.'

They were silent after that. The buzz of aeroplanes was still heavy overhead, the pounding of ack-ack fire still dreadful. But when the next explosion came it was further off, and the next was further off again, as the raiders moved on…

Fraser grew calmer. In another minute the All Clear went, and he gave a final quiver, passed his sleeve across his face, and then lay still. The hall was quiet. No-one stood at their window to whistle or to cheer. Men who must have been lying, rigid like him, or curled into balls, now lifted their heads, put out their limbs, to test the stillness of the night; and fell back exhausted.

Only the officers stirred: out they came, like beetles from underneath a stone. Duncan heard their footsteps on the cinder surface of the yard-slow, and halting, as if they were amazed to have emerged and found the prison still intact.

He knew, then, what sound would come next: the shivering sound of the metal landings, as Mr Mundy made his round… After a moment it started up, and he lifted his head, the better to hear it. The bar of light beneath the door showed extra palely now, because the cell was so dark. He saw Mr Mundy come and slide back the guard from over the spy-hole. He knew that Fraser saw it, too. But when Fraser opened his mouth, Duncan lifted his hand and put his fingers across his lips, to keep him from speaking; and when Mr Mundy called, in his night-whisper, 'All right?', Duncan didn't answer. The call came a second time, and a third, before Mr Mundy gave up and moved reluctantly away.

Duncan still had his hand across Fraser's lips. He felt Fraser's breath against his fingers, and slowly drew the hand off. They didn't speak. But Duncan was aware now, as he had not been aware before, of Fraser's body: of the heat of it, and the places-the feet, the thighs, the arms and shoulders-at which it touched Duncan 's own. The bunk was narrow. Duncan had lain alone in it every night, for almost three years. He had gone about the prison, as all the men did, being occasionally jostled, occasionally struck; he had touched his fingers to Viv's across the table in the visiting-room; he had once shaken hands with the Chaplain… It ought to have been strange, to be pressed so close to another person now; but it wasn't strange. He turned his head. He said, in a whisper, 'Are you all right?' and Fraser answered, 'Yes.' 'Don't you want to go back up?'-Fraser shook his head: 'Not yet…' It wasn't strange, at all. They moved closer together, not further apart. Duncan put up his arm and Fraser raised himself so that the arm could go beneath his head. They settled back into an embrace-as if it was nothing, as if it was easy; as if they weren't two boys, in a prison, in a city being blown and shot to bits; as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

'Why,' Mickey asked Kay, 'did you give that girl your ring?'

Kay changed smoothly up the gears. She said, 'I don't know. I felt sorry for her. It's only a ring, after all. What's a ring, in time like these?'

She tried to speak lightly; but the fact was, she was already rather regretting having given the ring up. Her hand, where it gripped the steering-wheel, felt naked and queer, unlucky.

'Maybe I'll go back to the hospital tomorrow,' she said, 'see how she's getting on.'

'Well, I hope she's still there,' said Mickey meaningfully.

Kay wouldn't look at her. She said, 'She wanted to chance it. It was up to her, not us.'

'She didn't know what she was saying.'

'She knew, all right… The lousy swine who made a muck of fixing her up is the one I'd like to get my hands on. Him, and the boyfriend.' She came to a junction. 'Which road do we want?'

'Not this one,' said Mickey, peering at the street, 'I think it's closed. Go on to the next.'

It was their heaviest night for weeks, because of the moon. After dropping Viv at the hospital they'd returned to Dolphin Square and at once been sent out again. A stretch of railway line in their district had been hit; three men who'd been patching it up from the last raid had been killed, and six more injured. They took four of those casualties in one trip, then were sent to a terrace that had got its front blown off, where a family had been buried. Two women and a girl were dug out alive; a girl and a boy were discovered dead. Kay and Mickey had taken the corpses.

Now they'd been sent out again: they were heading for a street slightly to the east of Sloane Square. Kay turned a corner, and felt the tyres of the van begin to grind. The road had grit and earth and broken glass on it. She slowed to a crawl, then stopped and put down her window as a warden came over.

She saw the leisurely way he was walking. 'Too late?' she said.

The man nodded. He took them over and showed them the bodies.

'Jesus,' said Mickey.

There were two of them: a man and a woman, killed on their way back from a party. Their house, the warden said, was only fifty yards further on. The street was crescent-shaped, broken up by a slip of garden, and it was the garden that had taken the worst of the bomb. A plane tree thirty feet high had been blasted more or less into splinters; houses had lost windows and front doors and slates from their roofs, but were otherwise unmarked. The man and woman, however, had been tossed up into the air. The man had landed on the flags of a narrow area in front of the basement window of a house. The woman had fallen on to the railings on the pavement above-been caught, chest-first, on the blunt tips of the iron spikes. She was still slumped there. The warden had found a length of curtain, that was all, and covered her over. Now he drew the curtain back, for Kay and Mickey to get a better view of the body. Kay looked only once, then turned away.