Sarah Waters - The Night Watch

Julia unwrapped the sandwiches, drew out the cork from the steaming tea; she'd had the bottle wrapped in a pullover, she said, to keep it hot. She poured a little of the tea into two dainty porcelain cups from one of the cupboards; then swilled it around, to warm the china, threw that away and poured out more.

The tea was sugary, and very creamy. It must have had all Julia's ration in it. Helen sipped it, closing her eyes, feeling guilty. When Julia offered her a sandwich she said, 'I ought to give you money or something for this, Julia.'

Julia said, 'Really.'

'I could give you a coupon-'

'For God's sake! Is that what this war has done to us? You can buy me a drink some time, if you feel as badly about it as all that.'

They began to eat. The bread was coarse, but the meat sweet and very tender; the flavour was a heavy, distinctive one-Helen realised, after a moment, that it must be garlic. She had tasted garlic in restaurants, but had never cooked with it herself; Julia had bought it, she said as they ate, from a shop on Frith Street, Soho. She'd managed, too, to get macaroni, olive oil, dried parmesan cheese. And she had a relative in America who sent her parcels of food. 'You can get more Italian food in Chicago,' she said, swallowing, 'than you can in Italy. Joyce sends me olives, and black salad vinegar-'

'How lucky you are!' said Helen.

'I suppose I am. You don't have any people abroad who could do something like that for you?'

'Oh, no. My family are all still in Worthing, where I grew up.'

Julia looked surprised. 'You grew up in Worthing? I didn't know that. Though I suppose, now I think about it, you had to grow up somewhere… My family has a house near Arundel, we used to swim at Worthing sometimes. Once I ate too many whelks or cockles-or toffee apples, or something-and was vilely sick, all over the pier. What was it like there, growing up?'

'It was all right,' said Helen. 'My family- Well, they're very ordinary. Did you know that? They're not- They're not like Kay's.' They're not like yours , was what she really meant. 'My father's an optician. My brother makes lenses for the RAF. My parents' house-' She looked around. 'It isn't like this house, it isn't anything like this.'

Perhaps Julia saw that she was embarassed. She said quietly, 'Well, but nothing like that matters any more, does it? Not these days. Not now we all dress like scarecrows, and talk like Americans-or else, like chars. “Here's your grub, ducks,” a girl in a café said to me the other day; I swear she'd been to Roedean, too…'

Helen smiled. 'It makes people feel better, I suppose. It's another kind of uniform.'

Julia made a face. 'I hate this passion for uniforms, too. Uniforms, armbands, badges.-I thought the military impulse, as it's grown up in Germany, was what we were against!' She sipped her tea, then almost yawned. 'But perhaps I take the whole thing too seriously…' She looked at Helen over the rim of her cup. 'I ought to be like you. Well-adjusted, and so on.'

Helen stared-amazed to think that Julia had formed any sort of opinion of her, much less one like that. She said, 'Is that how I seem? It isn't how I feel. Well-adjusted . I'm not even sure I know what it means.'

'Well,' said Julia, 'you always give the impression of being pretty thoughtful, pretty measured. That's what I mean. You don't say much; but what you do say seems to be worth listening to. That's quite rare, isn't it?'

'It must be a trick,' said Helen lightly. 'When you're quiet, people imagine you're awfully deep. In fact all you're doing is thinking-I don't know-how tight your bra is; or wondering whether or not you need the lavatory.'

'But that,' said Julia, 'sounds exactly like good adjustment, to me! Thinking about yourself, rather than the effect you might be having on other people. And the whole-' She hesitated. 'Well, the whole grisly “L” business. You know what I mean… You seem to handle that awfully coolly.'

Helen looked down into her cup, and didn't answer. Julia said, more quietly, 'How impertinent of me. I'm sorry, Helen.'

'No, it's all right,' said Helen quickly, looking up again. 'I'm not very used to talking about it, that's all. And I'm not sure, you know, that I've ever really thought of it as being much of a business . It was just how things turned out… I didn't think about it at all, to tell you the truth, when I was younger. Or if I did, I suppose I thought the usual sort of thing: spinster teachers, earnest girls…'

'There was no-one, in Worthing?'

'Well, there were men.' Helen laughed. 'That makes me sound like a call-girl, doesn't it? There was only one boy, really. I moved to London to be near him; but it didn't work out… And, then I met Kay.'

'Ah, yes,' said Julia, sipping her tea again. 'And then you met Kay. And in such terribly romantic circumstances.'

Helen looked at her, trying to gauge her tone and expression. She said shyly, 'It did seem romantic. Kay's rather glamorous, isn't she? At least, she seemed glamorous to me. I'd never met anyone like her before. I'd been in London less than six months then. She made such a-such a fuss of me. And she seemed so certain of what she wanted. That was terribly exciting somehow. It was hard to resist, anyway. It never felt strange, as perhaps it ought to have done… But then, so many impossible things were becoming ordinary, just then.' She thought back, with a slight shudder, to the night that she and Kay had met. 'And as impossible things go, being with Kay was, I suppose, quite a mild one…'

She was speaking, she realised, in almost a tone of apology; for she was conscious, still, of what she thought of as a gaucheness in herself-conscious that all the things she was describing to Julia as attractive in Kay were things that Julia herself must have found it easy to resist… Part of her wanted to defend Kay; part of her was simply embarassed. But part of her, too, wanted to confide in Julia, almost as one wife to another. She'd never spoken like this to anyone. She'd left her own friends behind, when she moved in with Kay; or she kept Kay a secret from them. And Kay's friends were all like Mickey-all like Kay, in other words… Now she wanted to ask how it had been for Julia, with Kay. She wanted to know if Julia had felt what she herself sometimes, guiltily, felt: that Kay's constant fussing, which had once been so appealing, so exciting, could also be rather like a burden; that Kay made an absurd kind of heroine of you; that Kay's passion was so great there was something unreal about it, it could never be matched…

But she didn't ask any of these things. She looked down into her cup again, and was silent. Julia said, 'And, when the war's over? And everything goes back to normal?'-and she took refuge, then, in briskness. She shook her head.

'It's pointless thinking about that, isn't it?' It was what everybody said, to all sorts of questions. 'We might get blown to bits tomorrow. Until then-well, I'd never want to advertise it. I'd never dream, for example, of telling my mother! But, why should I? It's a thing between Kay and me. And we're two grown women. Who does it harm?'

Julia watched her for a moment, then poured more tea from the bottle. She said, as if with a touch of sarcasm, 'You are well-adjusted.'

So then Helen grew embarassed again. She thought, I've said too much, and bored her . She preferred me before, when I was quiet and she thought I was deep …

They sat without speaking, until Julia shivered and rubbed her arms. 'God!' she said. 'This isn't much fun for you, is it? Me, giving you the third degree, in the basement of a ruined house! It's like lunch with the Gestapo!'

Helen laughed, her embarassment fading. 'No. It's nice.'

'Are you sure? I could- Well, I could show you over the whole place, if you like.'