Sarah Waters - The Night Watch

Then all at once they turned again and emerged from shadow, and were at the river. Here was the pub that Fraser had been making for: a wooden, wonderfully quaint-looking building that made Duncan think, at once, of Dickens, of Oliver Twist . He was enchanted with it. He forgot all his anxiety about being stabbed or strangled. He stopped, put his hand on Fraser's arm, and said, 'But, it's lovely!'

'You think so?' said Fraser, grinning at him again. 'I thought you'd like it. The beer's not bad, either. Come on.' He led Duncan through the narrow, crooked little doorway.

Inside, the place was not quite so charming as its exterior promised; it had been done up like an ordinary public bar, and there were nonsensical things on the walls, horse-brasses and warming-pans and bellows. It was also, already, at half-past six, rather crowded. Fraser pushed his way to the bar and bought a four-pint jug of beer. He gestured to doors at the back of the room, which opened on a pier, overlooking the river; but the pier was busier, even, than the bar. He and Duncan turned around and made their way back through the crush of people and went out again to the street. There was a set of river-stairs there. Fraser stood at the top and looked over. There was plenty of room, he said, down on the beach. 'The tide's right out. It's perfect. Come on.'

They climbed down the steps, going carefully because of the jug of beer and the glasses. The beach was muddy, but the mud had had the afternoon sun on it and was more or less dry. Fraser found a spot at the base of the wall: he took off his jacket and spread it out, and the two of them sat on it, side by side, their shoulders almost touching. The wall was warm, and stained from the Thames: you could see very clearly the line, about six feet up, where the greenish stain of the water gave way to the grey of permanently exposed stone. But the tide, at the moment, was low; the river looked narrow-absurdly narrow, as if you could very easily just nip across, on tiptoe, from this side to the other. Duncan screwed up his eyes, making the view grow blurry; imagining for a moment the water rushing in, swallowing him up. The wall was warm against his back, and he could just feel the nudging of Fraser's arm against his own, as Fraser undid his cuffs and rolled up his sleeves.

Fraser poured out beer. 'Here's yours,' he said, lifting his glass. He drained it in three or four gulps, then wiped his mouth. 'Christ! That's better, isn't it?' He poured out more, and drank again.

Then he put his hand into his pocket and drew out a pipe and a pouch of tobacco. As Duncan watched, he began the business of filling the pipe up-teasing out strands of tobacco with his long brown fingers, then thumbing them firmly into the bowl. He caught Duncan 's eye, and smiled. 'A bit different to the old days, eh? It's the first thing I bought when I got out.' He put the stem of the pipe to his mouth, then struck a match and held the flame of it to the bowl; his throat tighened as he sucked, and his cheeks went in and out, in and out-like the sides, Duncan thought, of a hot-water bottle; or, if you wanted to be more romantic about it, like a Spanish wineskin. He watched the blueish smoke rise up from Fraser's mouth and be snatched away by breezes.

For a while they just sat, drinking their beer-shading their eyes to look at the sun, which seemed fantastically pink and swollen in the late summer sky. The heat of it brought out the stink of the river and the beach, but it was hard to mind that in a place like this, there was too much glamour to the scene. Duncan thought of sailors, smugglers, lightermen, jolly jack tars… Fraser laughed. 'Look at those lads,' he said.

A group of boys had appeared, further along the beach. They had taken off their shirts, their shoes and socks, rolled up their trousers, and were running to the water. They ran in that shrinking, girlish way that even grown-up men must run across pointed stones; and when they reached the river they began to splash and lark about. They were young-much younger than Duncan and Fraser, perhaps fourteen or fifteen. Their hands and feet were too big for their bodies, which were all very slender and slight. They looked as though they had too much life in them-that the life was rushing about inside them, giving them awkward angles and tilts.

The people drinking out on the pier at the back of the pub had seen the boys too, and started to call encouragement. The boys began to splash mud instead of water; one fell right in, and emerged quite black, like a thing of clay-like some weird sort of mannequin, meant to be paraded about the streets. He waded further out, then plunged head first into the water and came up clean again, shaking the river from his hair.

Fraser laughed and leaned forward. He put his hand to his mouth and cheered, like the people on the pier. He seemed as full of life as the boys themselves, his bare lower arms very tanned, his long hair bouncing about his brow.

After a minute he sat back, smiling. He drew on his pipe again, then struck another match and held it to the bowl, cradling the flame. But he looked at Duncan as he did it, from beneath his slightly lowered brows; and as soon as the tobacco was properly re-lit and the match shaken out, he took the pipe from his lips and said, 'Wasn't it queer, my running into you at the factory like that?'

Duncan 's heart sank. He didn't answer. Fraser went on, 'I've been thinking about it all day. It's just, not at all the sort of place I'd have expected to find you working.'

'Isn't it?' said Duncan, lifting his glass.

'Of course it isn't! Doing work like that, amongst people like that? The place is only one step up from a charity, isn't it? How can you stand it?'

'Everybody else there stands it. Why shouldn't I?'

'You really don't mind it?'

Duncan thought it over. 'I don't like the smells much,' he said at last. 'They seep into your clothes. And sometimes you get a headache, from all the noise; or your eyes go funny, because of the belt.'

Fraser frowned. 'That wasn't what I meant, exactly,' he said.

Duncan knew that it wasn't what he'd meant. But he lifted a shoulder, and went on in the same light tone, 'It's easy work. It's not so different from sewing canvas, actually… And it lets you think of other things. I like that.'

Fraser still looked baffled. 'You wouldn't rather do something a little more-well-a little more inspiring?'

That made Duncan snort. 'It doesn't matter what I'd rather . Can't you just imagine the look on the face of the DPA man, if I'd said I'd rather this or I'd rather that? I'm lucky to have any job at all; even a pretend one. It was different for you. If you were like me-if you had my sort of past, I mean-' He couldn't be bothered. He began to pick and prise at the surface of the beach: at the stones and bits of broken china, the oyster shells and bones. 'I don't want to talk about it,' he said, when he saw Fraser still waiting. 'It's boring. Tell me, instead, what you've been doing.'

'I want to know about you, first.'

'There's nothing to know. You know it all, already!' He smiled. 'I mean it. Tell me where you've been. You wrote me a letter, once, from a train.'

'Did I?'

'Yes. Just after you'd got out. Don't you remember? Of course, they wouldn't let me keep it; I read it, though, about fifty times. Your handwriting was all over the place, and the paper had a mark on it-you said it was onion-juice.'

'Onion juice!' said Fraser thoughtfully. 'Yes, now I remember. A woman on the train had an onion, and it was the first any of us had seen in about three years. Someone got out a knife and we cut it up and ate it raw. It was glorious!' He laughed, and drank more of his beer, his adam's apple leaping like a fish in his throat…

The train, he said, must have been the one he'd taken to Scotland; he'd been at a sort of logging-camp up there, with other COs, right until the end of the war. 'I came down to London after that,' he said, 'and got some work with a refugee charity-sorting out people who'd just got over here, finding them houses, getting their children into schools.' He shook his head, thinking about it. 'The things I heard would make your hair curl, Pearce. Stories of people who'd lost everything. Russians, Poles, Jews; stories of the camps- I couldn't believe it. What you've read in the papers is nothing, nothing at all… I did it for a year. That was as long as I could stand it. Any more of it, and I think I would have finished up wanting to blow my own brains out!'