Sarah Waters - The Night Watch

She let her head sink, until her brow met the varnished glass. How easy it was, she thought unhappily as she did it, for men and women. They could stand in a street and argue, flirt-they could kiss, make love, do anything at all-and the world indulged them. Whereas she and Julia-

She thought of what she'd been meaning to do, out on the fire-escape. I'm in love with Julia , she'd been going to say. And my love is almost killing me!

She couldn't imagine saying it now. It seemed an absurd thing to say, now! She stood at the window, looking down, until she saw Fraser step forward to shake Viv's hand, as if in farewell; then she moved quickly back to her desk and took up a folder of papers.

She heard the click of the latch being fastened on the street door, and the sound of footsteps. Viv came slowly up the stairs and through the waiting-room. She stood in the doorway of Helen's office. Helen didn't raise her head. Viv was silent for a moment, then said awkwardly, 'I'm sorry about that.'

'You've nothing to be sorry for,' said Helen, looking up at last and making herself smile. 'He frightened the life out of me, though! Was the door really unlocked?'

'Yes, it was.'

'Well, then I suppose we can't blame him for coming up.'

'He just thought it would be all right to call in,' said Viv. 'I don't know him at all, really. He turned up at my brother's when I was there last week. We only talked for a little while. He knew my brother, ages ago. I don't know why he should have come here…'

She'd started biting at one of her fingers, at the skin beside a nail. Her head was bowed, and her thick dark hair had slightly fallen across her face. Helen watched her for a second, then went back to picking through the papers in the folder.

At last Viv said, rather thinly, 'Do you want to come back out, Helen?'

Helen looked up again. 'Back outside? Do we have time?' She looked at the clock. 'Only ten minutes… I don't know. Shall we?'

'Well,' said Viv. 'Not if you don't want to.'

They gazed at each other, as if meaning to speak; but the moment for confidences had passed. Helen shuffled the papers. 'I ought to look these over, I suppose,' she said.

And, 'Yes,' said Viv, at once. 'Yes, all right.'

She stood in Helen's doorway a little longer, as if she might say more; then she went out to the waiting-room. Soon there came the sound of her straightening up the magazines on the table, shaking out the sofa cushions.

Everyone has their secrets, after all , Helen thought. The thought depressed her, horribly. It made her think of Julia. She put the papers down and sat at her desk, with her head in her hands, her eyes closed. If only Julia was here, right now! She began to long for the sound of Julia's voice, for the comforting touch of her hand… What would she be doing, at this sort of hour? Helen tried to visualise her. She pressed her hands into the sockets of her eyes and sent her thoughts across the streets of Marylebone until she had a sense of Julia's presence, fantastically vivid and real. She saw her sitting in her study at home: silent, solitary, perhaps bored or restless, perhaps thinking of Helen herself. She began to miss Julia so badly, the missing felt like an ache or a sickness. She opened her eyes, and saw the telephone… But she oughtn't to call, in a mood like this. She wouldn't do it, anyway, with Viv so close, able to overhear every word; and she couldn't bring herself to go tiptoeing across the floor and silently close her office door.

If Viv goes down to the lavatory , she thought, I'll do it . Only then .

She sat tensely, listening as Viv brushed dust from the carpet and rearranged chairs. Then she heard heels on the staircase, fading. Viv must have taken the teapot down to the basin to rinse out the leaves.

At once, she picked up the telephone and dialled.

There was a tinny electric burr. She imagined the telephone on Julia's desk, beginning to ring; imagined Julia giving a start, putting down her pen, lifting her hand-holding it, perhaps, for a moment or two, above the receiver, because of course everyone preferred to let a telephone ring a little than answer it at once… But the ringing went on. Perhaps Julia was downstairs in the kitchen; or down on the floor below that, in the lavatory. Now Helen saw her running up the narrow stairs to her study, in her flapping espadrille slippers; she saw her tucking back a lock of hair that had come bouncing out from behind her ear, reaching breathlessly for the phone…

Still the ringing went on. Maybe Julia, after all, had decided not to answer. Helen had known her do that, when she was in the middle of writing a scene. But if she guessed it was Helen calling, then surely she'd pick the receiver up? If Helen would only let the thing ring for long enough, Julia would realise, Julia would answer…

Burr, burr . Burr, burr . The hateful noise went on and on. At last, after almost a minute, Helen put the receiver down-unable to bear the image of the telephone shrieking, forlorn and abandoned, in her own empty house.

'I haven't got long,' said Viv, looking up and down Oxford Street.

'It's very kind of you,' answered Fraser, 'to spare me any time at all.'

It was just after six. She had told him, at lunch-time, to come back; and had met him here, in front of the wrecked John Lewis building. She was anxious that Helen might still be about, and might see them; but when he saw her glancing nervously around, he misunderstood. The pavement was filled with people going briskly home from work or queueing for buses, and he thought she was bothered by the crowd. He said, 'No, we can't talk here, can we? Let me take you to a café, somewhere quiet-' He touched her arm.

But she said she didn't have time for that; that she was meeting someone, in forty-five minutes, in another part of town. So they walked, instead, around the corner to one of the benches in Cavendish Square. The bench was covered with fallen leaves, golden and glossy as scraps of yellow mackintosh. He swept them away so that she could sit.

She sat rather rigidly, with her hands in her pockets and her coat buttoned up. When he offered her a cigarette she shook her head. He put the cigarettes away and took out a pipe.

She watched him thumbing in the tobacco. He was like a kid, she thought, mucking about. She said, without smiling, 'I wish you hadn't come to my office today, Mr Fraser. I don't know what Miss Giniver thought.'

'She looked as though she thought I was going to fling her to the floor and ravish her, to tell you the truth!' he said. And then, when Viv wouldn't smile: 'I'm sorry. It just seemed the most straightforward way to see you.'

'I still don't know why you felt you needed to see me at all. Has my brother done something to you?'

'It's nothing like that.'

'He didn't ask you to come?'

'It's just as I told you earlier on. Your brother had nothing to do with it. He doesn't even know I'm here. He only mentioned to me, in passing, where you work. But he speaks so warmly of you. It's clear-' He held a flame to the pipe, sucking on the stem of it. 'It's clear you mean a great deal to him. It was the just the same, I remember, when we were in prison.'

He made no attempt to muffle the word, and Viv flinched. He saw, and lowered his voice. 'It was the same, I should have said, when I first knew him. He used to look forward to your visits more than to anything else in the world.'

She looked away. At the words 'your visits' she'd had a very clear and unpleasant memory of herself, her father and Duncan at one of the tables in the visiting-room at Wormwood Scrubs. She remembered the press of other visitors, the look of the men, the awful babble, the sour, airless feel of the room. She remembered Fraser himself from those days, too-for she'd seen him, more than once. She recalled his brash public-schoolboy's laugh; she remembered one of the other visitors saying, 'Isn't it a shame?' and a man actually calling out to him: ' Can't you take it, conchy? ' She'd felt rather sorry for him, then. She'd thought him brave-but brave in a pointless kind of way. He hadn't changed anything, after all… She'd felt more sympathy for his parents. She could still picture his mother, at the scratched prison table: a smart, kind, softly-spoken woman, dreadfully wounded-looking and pale.