Sarah Waters - The Night Watch

He groaned, at the feel of her bare fingers. He twitched against her palm. He said, 'Oh, Viv. Christ, Viv.'

The seams of his underpants were taut against her wrist and made her clumsy; after a moment he reached and brought himself right out, then put his hand loosely

around hers. He kept the hand there as she was doing it, and had his eyes shut tight the whole time; in the end she felt he might as well be doing it himself. The tartan rug went up and down over their fists. Two or three times she lifted her head and looked around, still anxious.

And she remembered, as she did it, other times, from years before, when he'd been in the army. They'd had to meet in hotel rooms-grubby rooms, but the grubbiness hadn't mattered. Being together was what had mattered. Pushing against each other's bodies, each other's skin and muscle and breath. That was what bursting for somebody meant. It wasn't this. It wasn't jokes about feather beds and Lovers' Lanes…

At the very last second he closed her hand, to make a sort of trap for the spunk. Then he lay back, flushed and sweating and laughing. She held on to him a little longer before she drew her fingers away. He raised his head, the flesh of his throat bunching up. He was worried for his trousers.

'Got it all?'

'I think so.'

'Careful.'

'I am being careful.'

'Good girl.'

He tucked himself away, then fastened up his buttons. She looked around for a handkerchief, something like that; and finally wiped her hand on the grass.

He watched her do it, approvingly. 'That's good for the ground,' he said. He was full of life now. 'That'll make a tree grow. That'll make a tree, and a knickerless girl will one day come and climb it; and she'll get in the club, by me.' He held out his arms. 'Come here and give me a kiss, you beautiful creature!'

The simplicity of him, she thought, was quite amazing. But it had always been his faults and frailties that she'd loved most. She'd wasted her life on his weaknesses-his apologies, his promises… She moved back into his embrace. He lit another cigarette and they lay and smoked it together, gazing up again into the trees. The kestrel had vanished; they didn't know if it had caught its mouse or gone after another. The blue of the sky seemed to have thinned.

But then, it was September-the end of September-and not summer: presently she gave a shiver, getting cold. He rubbed her arms, but soon they sat up, drank the last of the gin and orange, then stood and brushed down their clothes. He turned the cuffs of his trousers inside out, to shake the grass from them. He borrowed her handkerchief, and wiped her lipstick and powder from his mouth. He walked a little way off, and turned his back, and had a pee.

When he came back she said, 'Stay here'; and she went herself to a clump of bushes, drew up her skirt, pushed down her knickers and got into a squat. 'Watch out for nettles!' he called after her; but he called it vaguely, he didn't see where she had gone and couldn't see her once she'd stooped. She watched him bending at the car's wing-mirror, combing his hair. She watched him rinsing out the beakers in the stream. Then she looked at her hand. The spunk on her fingers had dried as fine as pretty lace; she rubbed at it, and it became plain white flakes that drifted to the ground and were lost.

He had to be home by seven o'clock, and it was already half-past four. They strolled to the little bridge again, and stood looking down into the water. They wandered back to the ruined mill; he picked up a piece of broken glass and cut their initials into the plaster, alongside the dirty messages. RN , VP , and a heart with an arrow.

But when he'd thrown the glass away, he looked at his watch.

'Better get going, I suppose.'

They went back to the car. She shook out the rug, and he folded it up and put it away, with the beakers, in the boot. Where the rug had been there was a square of flattened grass. It seemed a shame, in so lovely a place: she went over it, kicking the grass back up.

The car had been sitting in the sun all this time. She climbed in, and almost burnt her leg on the hot leather seat. Reggie got in beside her and gave her his handkerchief-spread it out beneath the crook of her knees, to keep her from burning.

When he had done it, he bent forward and kissed her thigh. She touched his head: the dark, oiled curls; the white scalp showing palely through. She looked at the lush green clearing again and said softly, 'I wish we could stay here.'

He let his head drop until it was resting in her lap. 'So do I,' he said. The words were muffled. He twisted round, to meet her gaze. 'You know- You know I hate it, don't you? You know, if I could have done it differently-? All of it, I mean.'

She nodded. There was nothing to say, that they hadn't said before. He kept his head in her lap a moment longer, then kissed her thigh again and straightened up. He turned the key, and the engine rumbled into life. It seemed horribly loud, in the silence-just as the silence had seemed weird and wrong to them when they'd first arrived.

He turned the car, drove slowly back up the bumping track, and rejoined the road they'd come out on; they went past the cheese-coloured cottage without slowing down, then picked up the main road to London. The traffic was much heavier now. People were coming back, like them, from afternoons out. The speeding cars were noisy. The sun was in front of them, making them squint: every so often they'd make a turn, or pass through trees, and lose it for a minute; then it would reappear, bigger than before, pink and swollen and low in the sky.

The sun, and the warmth, and perhaps the gin that she had drunk, made Viv feel dozy. She put her head against Reggie's shoulder and closed her eyes. He rubbed his cheek against her hair again, sometimes turning his head to kiss her. They sang together, sleepily, old-fashioned songs-'I Can't Give You Anything But Love', and 'Bye Bye Blackbird'.

No-one here can love or understand me .

Oh what hard luck stories they all hand me!

Make my bed and light the light,

I'll arrive late tonight .

Blackbird, bye bye .

When they reached the outskirts of London, she yawned and reluctantly straightened up. She got out her compact and powdered her face, redid her lipstick. The traffic seemed worse than ever, suddenly. Reggie tried a different route, through Poplar and Shadwell, but that was bad too. Finally they got caught in a jam at Tower Hill. She saw him looking at his watch, and said, 'Let me out here.' But he kept saying, 'Just give it a second.' He hated to give way to other drivers. 'If that little twerp in front would just- Christ! It's blokes like him who-'

The car moved forward. Then they got in another jam on Fleet Street, going into the Strand. He looked for a way to get out of it, but the side-streets were blocked by drivers with the same idea. He beat his fingers on the steering-wheel, saying, 'Damn, damn.' He looked at his watch again.

Viv sat tensely, catching his mood, shrinking down a little in her seat in case someone should spot her; but thinking of the place in the woods still, not wanting to give it up yet: the mill, the stream and bridge, the hush of it. It ain't Piccadilly … Reggie had brushed out the car before they'd started back, getting out all the petals and bits of grass that had been shaken in from the hedges. He'd nudged at the butterfly with his fingers until it had quivered and fluttered away.

She turned her head and looked into the lighted windows of shops, at the boxes of mocked-up chocolates and fruits, at the perfume bottles and liquor bottles-the same kind of coloured water doing, probably, for 'Nights of Parma' and 'Irish Malt'. The car inched forward. They drew near a cinema, the Tivoli. There were people outside it, queuing for tickets, and she gazed rather wistfully across them, at the girls and their boyfriends, the husbands and wives. The cinema had coloured lights on it, and the lights seemed to shine more luridly, more luminously, for shining in the twilight rather than the dark. She saw odd little disconnected details: the glint of an earring, the gleam of a man's hair, the sparkle of crystal in the paving-stones.