Sarah Waters - The Night Watch

'She looks at me like that,' said Helen.

Julia laughed. 'She ought to have seen this.' She opened her satchel and brought out an enormous bunch of keys, each with a tattered label attached. She held it up and shook it like a gaoler. 'What do you think? I got these from the local warden. I've been in and out of half the houses around here. Marylebone has no more secrets from me. You'd think people would have got used to the sight of me ferreting around-but, no. A couple of days ago someone saw me having trouble with a lock, and called the police. She said an “obviously foreign-looking” woman was trying to force her way into a house. I don't know if she took me for a Nazi, or a vagrant refugee. The police were pretty decent about it. Do you think I look foreign?'

She had been sorting through the keys, but raised her head as she asked this. Helen looked into her face, then looked away.

'It's your dark colouring, I suppose.'

'Yes, I suppose so. I should be all right, anyway, now you're with me. You've those English flower looks, haven't you? No-one could mistake you for anything but an Ally.-Here we are. The place we want is just over there.'

She took Helen to the door of a grim, tall, dilapidated house, and put one of her keys into its lock. A stream of dust fell from the lintel as she pushed the door open, and Helen went gingerly inside. She was met at once by a bitter, damp smell, like that of old washcloths.

'That's just from rain,' said Julia, as she closed the door and fiddled with the latch. 'The roof's been hit, and most of the windows blasted out. Sorry it's so dark. The electricity's off, of course. Go through that doorway over there, it's a little lighter.'

Helen moved across the hall and found herself at the entrance to a sitting-room, cast in a sort of flat twilight by a partly-shuttered window. For a moment, until her eyes had grown used to the gloom, the room looked almost all right; then she began to see more clearly, and stepped forward, saying, 'Oh! What an awful shame! This lovely furniture!'-for there was a carpet on the floor, and a handsome sofa and chairs, and a footstool, a table-all of it dusty, and heavily marked by flying glass and fallen plaster, or else damp, the wood with a bloom on it and beginning to swell. 'And the chandelier!' she cried softly, looking up.

'Yes, watch your step,' said Julia, coming to her and touching her arm. 'Half the lustres have fallen and smashed.'

'I thought, from what you'd said, that the place would be quite empty. Why on earth don't the people who own it come back, and fix it up, or take these things away?'

'They think there's no point, I suppose,' said Julia, 'since it's half-way wrecked already. The woman's probably holed up with relatives in the country. The husband might be fighting; he might even be dead.'

'But these lovely things!' said Helen again. She thought of the men and women who came into her office. 'Somebody else could live here, surely? I see so many people with absolutely nothing.'

Julia tapped with her knuckles against the wall. 'The place isn't sound. Another close hit, and it may collapse. It probably will. That's why my father and I are in here. We're recording ghosts, you see, really…'

Helen moved slowly across the room, looking in dismay from one spoiled handsome thing to another. She went to a set of high double doors and carefully pulled them ajar. The room beyond was just as wretched as this one-its window smashed, its velvet curtains marked with rain, spots on the floor where birds had dirtied, soot and cinders blasted from the hearth. She took a step, and something crunched beneath her shoe-a piece of burnt-out coke. It left a smudge of black on the carpet. She looked back at Julia and said, 'I'm afraid to keep going. It doesn't seem right.'

'You get used to that, don't worry. I've been tramping up and down the stairs for weeks and not given it a thought.'

'You're absolutely sure there's no-one here? No-one like the old lady you told me about last week? And no-one's likely to come back?'

'No-one,' said Julia. 'My father may put his head in later, that's all. I've left the door unlocked for him.' She held out her hand, in a beckoning gesture. 'Come downstairs, and you can see what he and I have been doing.'

She went back into the hall, and Helen followed her down a set of unlit stairs to a basement room, where she had laid out, on a trestle table in the light of a barred but broken window, various plans and elevations of the houses of the square. She showed Helen how she was marking the damage-the symbols she was using, the system of measurement, things like that.

'It's looks very technical,' said Helen, impressed.

But Julia answered, 'It's probably no more technical than the kind of thing you're used to doing at that office of yours-balancing books, filling in forms and whatnot. I'm utterly useless at things like that. I should hate, too, to have to deal with people coming in and out, wanting things; I don't know how you bear it. This suits me because it's so solitary, so silent.'

'You don't find it lonely?'

'Sometimes. I'm used to it, though. The author's temperament, and all that…' She stretched. 'Shall we eat? Let's go through to the next room. It's cold, but not so damp as upstairs.'

She picked up her satchel and led the way along a passage into the kitchen. There was an old deal table in the middle of the room, thick with fallen flakes of plaster; she began to clear the plaster off.

'I really do have rabbit-meat sandwiches, by the way,' she said, as the plaster tumbled. 'One of my neighbours has a gardener, who traps them. Apparently they're all over London now. He said he caught this one in Leicester Square! I'm not sure I believe him.'

Helen said, 'A friend of mine who firewatches says she saw a rabbit, one night, on the platform at Victoria Station; so perhaps he did.'

'A rabbit at Victoria! Was it waiting for a train?'

'Yes. Apparently it was looking at its pocket-watch, and seemed awfully het-up about something.'

Julia laughed. The laughter was different to the sort of laughter Helen had heard from her before. It was real, unforced-like water welling briefly from a spring, and to have called it up made Helen feel pleased as a child. She said to herself, For goodness' sake! You're like a second-former blushing over a prefect! She had to move about to hide her feelings-looking across the dusty jars and pudding moulds on the kitchen shelves while Julia set her bag on the table and rummaged inside it.

The kitchen was an old Victorian one, with long wooden counters and a chipped stone sink. The window had bars before it, like the other, and in between the bars curled ivy. The light was green and very soft. Helen said, as she walked about, 'You can see the cook and the scullery maids in here.'

'Yes, can't you?'

'And the local policeman, slipping in in the middle of his beat, for his cup of tea.'

'“No Followers”,' said Julia, smiling… 'Come and sit down, Helen.'

She had got out a wax-paper packet of sandwiches, and a nightwatchman's bottle of tea. She'd drawn up chairs-but looked dubiously from the dusty seats to Helen's smartish coat. She said, 'I could put paper down, if you like.'

'It's all right,' said Helen. 'Really.'

'Sure? I'll take you at your word, you know. I won't be like Kay about it.'

'Like Kay?'

'Laying down my cloak, all of that, like Walter Raleigh.'

It was the first time they had mentioned Kay, and Helen sat without answering. For Kay would have made a fuss about the dust, she thought; and she knew instinctively how tiresome that sort of thing would seem to Julia. It made her aware, more than ever, of the curious situation she was in: that she had accepted a love, a set of attentions, that Julia herself had had the chance to accept first, and had rejected…