Sarah Waters - The Night Watch

'I'm glad you've got feet, Julia, rather than a tail,' she said, working with her thumb at the arch of Julia's foot.

'Are you, darling? So am I.'

'Your breasts would look handsome, though, in a brassière made of shells.' She smiled. She'd remembered a joke. 'What,' she asked Julia, 'did the brassière say to the hat?'

Julia thought about it. 'I don't know. What?'

'“You go on ahead, and I'll give these two a lift.”'

They laughed-not so much at the joke, as at the silliness of Helen's having told it. Julia still had her head put back: her laughter, caught in her throat, was bubbling, childish, nice-not at all like her conventional 'society' laugh, which always struck Helen as rather brittle. She put a hand across her mouth to stifle the sound. Her stomach quivered as she shook, her navel narrowing.

'Your navel's winking at me,' said Helen, still laughing. 'It looks awfully saucy… The Saucy Navel. That sounds like a sea-side pub, doesn't it?' She moved her legs, yawning. She was rather tired, now, of stroking Julia's foot; she let it fall. 'Do you love me, Julia?' she whispered, as she changed her pose.

Julia closed her eyes again. 'Of course I do,' she said.

They lay for a time, then, not speaking. The water-pipes creaked, cooling down. From some hidden part of the plumbing there came a steady drip - drip . In the basement there were thumps, as the man who lived there walked heavily from room to room; soon they heard him shouting at his wife or his daughter: ' No , you great daft bitch! '

Julia tutted. 'That revolting man.' Then she opened her eyes and, 'Helen,' she cried softly, 'how can you?'-for Helen, unembarassed, had tilted her head over the side of the bath and was trying to listen. She waved her hand for Julia to be silent. ' Work it up your arse! ' they heard the man say: a phrase he liked, and used often. Next came the gnat-like whining that was all that ever reached them of his wife's replies.

'Really, Helen,' said Julia, disapprovingly. Helen moved meekly back into the bath-tub. Sometimes, if the shouting started up and she was alone, she'd go so far as to kneel on the carpet, draw back her hair, put her ear to the floor. ' You'll end up like those fucking eunuchs upstairs! ' she had heard the man shout one day, by doing this. She'd never told Julia.

Today he grumbled on for a minute or two, then gave it up. A door was slammed. The things that Helen and Julia had brought down to the bathroom-the scissors and tweezers, the safety-razor in its case-gave a jump.

It was half-past eleven. They planned an idle sort of day, with books and a picnic, in Regent's park; they lived quite near it, in one of the streets just to the east of the Edgware Road. Helen lay a little longer, until the water began to cool; then she sat up and washed herself-turning awkwardly around, so that Julia could soap her back and rinse it; and doing the same for Julia herself, when Julia had turned. But when she'd risen and stepped out of the tub Julia sank back down again, stretching out into the extra space and smiling like a cat.

Helen studied her for a second, then bent and kissed her-liking the look and the feel of Julia's slick, warm, soap-scented mouth.

She put on her dressing-gown and opened the door-listening first, to be sure there was no-one in the hall. Then she ran lightly towards the stairs. Their sitting-room was on this floor, beside the bathroom. Their kitchen and bedroom were one floor up.

She had just finished dressing, and was combing her hair at the bedroom mirror, when Julia joined her: Helen watched her through the glass, carelessly dusting herself with talcum powder, then tugging the handkerchief from her head and going naked about the room, picking out knickers, stockings, suspenders and a bra. Her towel she added to a pile of garments on the cushions that made a little window-seat; almost at once it slid to the floor, taking a sock and a petticoat with it.

The window-seat was one of the things that had attracted them to the house when they'd first viewed it. 'We'll be able to sit there together in the long summer evenings,' they had said. Now Helen looked at the mess of clothes which obscured the sill; she looked at the unmade bed; and then at the cups and mugs, and the piles of read and unread books, which lay on every surface… She said, 'This room's impossible. Here we are, two middle-aged women and we live like sluts. I can't believe it. When I was young, and used to think about the house I'd have when I was grown up, I always pictured it as terribly neat and tidy-just like my mother's. I always imagined that neat houses came to one, like- I don't know.'

'Like wisdom teeth?'

'Yes,' said Helen, 'just like that.' She passed her sleeve across the surface of the mirror; it came away grey with dust.

Other people of their age and class, of course, had chars. They couldn't do that, because of the business of sharing a bed. There was another little room on the floor above this, which got presented to neighbours and visitors as 'Helen's room'; it had an old-fashioned divan in it, and a severe Victorian wardrobe where they kept their overcoats and jerseys and wellington boots. But it would be too much fuss, they thought, to have to pretend to a daily woman that Helen slept there every single night; they'd be sure to forget. And weren't char-ladies, anyway, awfully knowing about that sort of thing? Now that Julia's books were doing so well they had to be more careful than ever.

Julia came to the mirror. She had put on a creased dark linen dress and run her fingers roughly through her hair; but she could step out of any kind of chaos, Helen thought, and look, as she did now, absurdly well-groomed and handsome. She moved closer to the glass, to dash on lipstick. Her mouth was a full, rather crowded one. But she had one of those faces, so regular and even, it was exactly the same in reflection as it was in life. Helen's face, by contrast, looked rather queer and lopsided when studied in a mirror. You look like a lovely onion , Julia had told her once…

They finished putting on their make-up, then went out to the kitchen to gather food. They found bread, lettuce, apples, a nub of cheese, and two bottles of beer. Helen dug out an old madras square they'd used as a dust-sheet when decorating; they put it all in a canvas bag, then added their books, their purses and keys. Julia ran upstairs to her study for her cigarettes and matches. Helen stood at the kitchen window, looking out into the back yard. She could just see the bad-tempered man, moving and stooping. He kept table-rabbits down there, in a little home-made hutch: he was giving them water or food, or perhaps checking the plumpness of them. It always bothered her, imagining them all crushed together like that. She moved away, and shouldered the bag. The bottles clinked against the keys. 'Julia,' she called, 'are you ready?'

They went down, and out to the street.

Their house was part of an early nineteenth-century terrace, facing a garden. The terrace was white-that London white, more properly a streaked and greyish yellow; the grooves and sockets of its stucco facade had been darkened by fogs, by soot, and-more recently-by brick-dust. The houses all had great front doors and porches-must once, in fact, have been grand residences: home, perhaps, to minor Regency strumpets, girls called Fanny, Sophia, Skittles… Julia and Helen liked to imagine them tripping down the steps in their Empire-line dresses and soft-soled shoes, taking their mounts, going riding in Rotten Row.

In miserable weather the discoloured stucco could look dreary. Today the street was filled with light, and the house-fronts seemed bleached as bones against the blue of the sky. London looked all right, Helen thought. The pavements were dusty-but dusty in the way, say, that a cat's coat is dusty, when it has lain for hours in the sun. Doors were open, sashes raised. The cars were so few that, as Helen and Julia walked, they could make out the cries of individual children, the mutter of radios, the ringing of telephones in empty rooms. And as they drew closer to Baker Street they began to hear music from the Regent's Park Band, a faint sort of clash and parp-parp-parp -swelling and sinking on impalpable gusts of air, like washing on a line.