Sarah Waters - The Night Watch

Julia caught Helen's wrist, grew childish, pretending to tug. 'Come on! Come quick! We'll miss the parade!' Her fingers moved against Helen's palm, then slid away. 'It makes one feel like that, doesn't it? What tune is it, d'you think?'

They slowed their steps and listened more carefully. Helen shook her head. 'I can't imagine. Something modern and discordant?'

'Surely not.'

The music rose. 'Quick!' said Julia again. They smiled, grown-up; but walked on, faster than before. They went into the park at Clarence Gate, then followed the path beside the boating lake. They approached the band-stand and the music grew louder and less ragged. They walked further, and the tune revealed itself at last.

'Oh!' said Helen, and they laughed; for it was only 'Yes! We Have No Bananas'.

They left the path and found a spot they liked the look of, half in sunlight, half in shade. The ground was hard, the grass very yellow. Helen put down the bag and unpacked the cloth; they spread it out and kicked off their shoes, then laid out the food. The beer was still cold from the frigidaire, the bottles sliding deliciously in Helen's warm hand. But she went back to the bag and, after a moment's searching, looked up.

'We forgot a bottle-opener, Julia.'

Julia closed her eyes. 'Hell. I'm dying for a drink, as well. What can we do?' She took a bottle and started picking at its lid. 'Don't you know some terribly bright way of getting the tops off?'

'With my teeth, do you mean?'

'You were in the Brownies weren't you?'

'Well they rather jibbed, you know, at Pale Ale, in my pack.'

They turned the bottles in their hands.

'Look, it's hopeless,' said Helen at last. She looked around. 'There are boys over there. Run and ask them if they have a knife or something.'

'I can't!'

'Go on. All boys have knives.'

'You do it.'

'I carried the bag. Go on, Julia.'

'God,' said Julia. She rose, not graciously, took up the bottles, one in each hand, and began to walk across the grass to a group of lounging youths. She walked stiffly, rather bowed, perhaps only self-conscious, but Helen saw her, for a second, as a stranger might: saw how handsome she was, but also how grown-up, how almost matronly; for you could catch in her something of the angular, wide-hipped, narrow-breasted figure she'd have in earnest in ten years' time… The youths, by contrast, were practically schoolboys. They put up their hands to their eyes, against the sun, when they saw her coming; they rose lazily from their places, reached into their pockets; one held a bottle against his stomach as he worked with something at the top. Julia stood with folded arms, more self-conscious than ever, smiling unnaturally; when she came back with the opened bottles her face and throat were pink.

'They only used keys, after all,' she said. 'We might have done that.'

'We'll know next time.'

'They told me to “take it easy, missus”.'

'Never mind,' said Helen.

They had brought china cups to drink from. The beer foamed madly to the curving porcelain lips. Beneath the froth it was chill, bitter, marvellous. Helen closed her eyes, savouring the heat of the sun on her face; liking the reckless, holidayish feel of drinking beer in so public a place… But she hid the bottles, too, in a fold of the canvas bag.

'Suppose one of my clients should see me?'

'Oh, bugger your clients,' said Julia.

They turned to the food they'd brought, broke the bread, made little slices of the cheese. Julia stretched out with the bunched-up canvas bag behind her head as a pillow. Helen lay flat and closed her eyes. The band had started on another tune. She knew the words to it, and began quietly to sing.

' There's something about a soldier! Something about a soldier! Something about a soldier that is fine!-fine!-fine! '

Somewhere a baby was crying from a pram; she heard it stumbling over its breath. A dog was barking, as its owner teased it with a stick. From the boating-lake there came the creak and splash of oars, the larking about of boys and girls; and from the streets at the edges of the park, of course, came the steady snarl of motors. Concentrating, she seemed to hear the scene in all its individual parts: as if each might have been recorded separately, then put with the others to make a slightly artificial whole: 'A September Afternoon, Regent's Park'.

Then a couple of teenage girls walked past. They had a newspaper, and were talking over one of the cases in it. 'Mustn't it be awful to be strangled?' Helen heard one of them say. 'Should you rather be strangled, or have an atomic bomb fall on you? They say at least with an atomic bomb it's quick…'

Their voices faded, drowned out by another gust of music.

' There's something about his bearing! Something to what he's wearing! Something about his buttons all a-shine!-shine!-shine! '

Helen opened her eyes and gazed into the luminous blue of the sky. Was it crazy, she wondered, to be as grateful as she felt now, for moments like this, in a world that had atomic bombs in it-and concentration camps, and gas chambers? People were still tearing each other into pieces. There was still murder, starvation, unrest, in Poland, Palestine, India -God knew where else. Britain itself was sliding into bankruptcy and decay… Was it a kind of idiocy or selfishness, to want to be able to give yourself over to trifles: to the parp of the Regent's Park Band; to the sun on your face, the prickle of grass beneath your heels, the movement of cloudy beer in your veins, the secret closeness of your lover? Or were those trifles all you had? Oughtn't you, precisely, to preserve them?-to make little crystal drops of them, that you could keep, like charms on a bracelet, to tell against danger when next it came?

She moved her hand, thinking this-just touched her knuckles to Julia's thigh, where no-one could see.

'Isn't this lovely, Julia?' she said quietly. 'Why don't we come here all the time? The summer's nearly over now, and what have we done with it? We might have come here every evening.'

'We'll do that next year,' answered Julia.

'We will,' said Helen. 'We'll remember, and do it then. Won't we? Julia?'

But Julia wasn't listening now. She had raised her head to talk to Helen, and her attention had been caught by something else. She was looking across the park. She lifted a hand to shade her eyes and, as Helen watched, her gaze grew fixed and she started to smile. She said, 'I think that's- Yes, it is. How funny!' She raised the hand higher, and waved. ' Ursula! ' she called-so loudly, the word jarred against Helen's ear. 'Over here!'

Helen propped herself up and peered in the direction in which Julia was waving. She saw a slim, smart-looking woman making her way across the grass towards them, beginning to laugh.

'Good Lord,' the woman said, as she drew closer. 'Fancy seeing you, Julia!'

Julia had got to her feet and was brushing down her linen dress. She was laughing too. She said, 'Where are you off to?'

'I've been lunching with a friend,' said the woman, 'up at St John's Wood. I'm on my way to Broadcasting House. We don't have time for picnics and so on, at the BBC. What a charming spread you've made here, though! Perfectly bucolic!'

She looked at Helen. Her eyes were dark, slightly mischievous.

Julia turned, made introductions. 'This is Ursula Waring, Helen. Ursula, this is Helen Giniver-'

'Helen, of course!' said Ursula. 'Now, you won't mind my calling you Helen? I've heard such a lot about you.-No need to look nervous! It was all of it good.'

She leaned to shake Helen's hand, and Helen half rose, to meet it. She felt at a disadvantage, sitting down while Julia and Ursula were standing up; but she was very conscious, too, of her Saturday-morning appearance-of her blouse, which she'd once unpicked and refashioned in an attempt at 'make-do and mend', and her old tweed skirt, rather seated at the back. Ursula, by contrast, looked neat, moneyed, tailored. Her hair was put up in a chic, rather masculine little hat. Her leather gloves were soft and unscuffed, and her low-heeled shoes had flat fringed tongues to them-the kind of shoes you expected to see on a golf-course, or a Scottish highland, somewhere expensively hearty like that. She was not at all as Helen had pictured her, from the things that Julia had said about her over the past few weeks. Julia had made her sound older and almost dowdy. Why would Julia have done that?