Sarah Waters - The Night Watch

'Your flat's charming,' she said, conventionally.

'You think so?' Julia closed the cupboard door and straightened up. She had a bottle, a corkscrew, glasses. 'It's mostly my cousin Olga's stuff, not mine.'

'Your cousin Olga's?'

'The flat's my aunt's. I'm living here to keep it from being requisitioned. One of those genteel dodges at which the upper-middle classes so excel. There's only this room and the kitchen; the kitchen serves as a bathroom, too. The loo's down the hall… Really, it's in a dreadful sort of mess. There's no glass in the windows at all: they got broken so often, Olga just gave up. Last summer I had sheets of gauze put in: it was lovely, like living in a tent. Now it's too cold for gauze, I've put in talc boards instead. It's all right at night, with the curtains drawn. But in the daytime, it does tend to get me down. Makes me feel like a tart or something.'

She was screwing the corkscrew into the bottle as she spoke and now, with a little effort, she brought out the cork. She glanced at Helen as she poured the wine, and smiled. 'Aren't you going to take your things off?'

Rather reluctantly, Helen unwound her scarf, took off her hat, and started to unfasten the buttons of her coat. Her dress was the one she'd put on that morning-the Cedric Allen one with the cream lapels, that Kay admired so much. She'd kept it on, she realised now, with the idea of impressing Julia with it; but the sight of Julia herself, with her newly-washed hair and crumpled trousers, her socks and slippers and colourless mouth-and, worse, the air of easy glamour with which she carried all this off-was disconcerting. She drew her arms from the coat clumsily, as if she'd never taken a coat off before in her life. Julia glanced her way again and said, 'I say, what a swell you look! What's the occasion?'

Helen hesitated. Then, 'It's my birthday,' she said.

Julia thought she was joking, and laughed. When she saw that she was serious, her expression softened. 'Helen! Why didn't you tell me? If I'd known-'

'It's nothing,' said Helen. 'Really. It's silly, how like a child the whole thing makes one feel. Everyone conspires in it… Kay gave me an orange,' she added miserably. 'She picked out Happy Birthday in the peel.'

Julia handed her a glass of red wine. 'I'm glad she did,' she said. 'I'm glad you feel like a child about it.'

'I wish she hadn't,' said Helen. 'I was awful, today. I was worse than a child. I was-' She couldn't finish. She made some gesture, as if to brush away the memory of her own behaviour.

'Never mind,' said Julia gently. She lifted her glass. 'Here's how. Bung-ho. Cheerio.-And all those other idiotic things people say, that always make me feel I'm about to go off on my last mission… Touch top and bottom, for luck.' They clinked glasses, twice; then drank. The wine was rough, and made them grimace.

They moved apart. Helen cleared a space for herself among the cushions on the divan. Julia perched on the arm of the pink velvet chair, stretching out her legs. Her legs seemed impossibly slender and long, in the flannel trousers; her hips had a fragile, vulnerable look-as if, Helen thought, you could place your two hands upon them and, with a pressing motion, make them snap. She'd picked up the ashtray, and now reached to the mantelpiece for cigarettes and matches. Her sweater rose up as she did it, and her shirt was unbuttoned at the bottom; the tails of it parted, exposing her tense, sallow stomach, her neat navel. Helen looked, then at once looked quickly away.

One of the cushions fell from the divan to the floor. Helen leaned and picked it up again-and realised, as she did it, that it wasn't a cushion but a pillow; that the divan must serve, in this two-roomed flat, as Julia's bed; that every night Julia must stand here, lay down sheets and blankets, take off her clothes… The image was not exactly erotic, for one saw beds, pillows, nightclothes, everywhere, they'd long ago lost their charge of intimacy, of sex. Instead she found it poignant, faintly troubling. She looked again at Julia's handsome, fragile figure and thought, What is it about Julia? Why is she always so alone?

They were sitting in silence. Helen found she had nothing to say. She gulped down more of her wine, then became aware of noises on the floor above: irregular steps, and creaking boards. She put back her head and looked up.

Julia looked up too. 'My neighbour's a Polish man,' she murmured. 'He's only in London by some sort of fluke. He walks about, like that, for hours. Every piece of news he gets from Warsaw, he says, is worse than the last…'

'God,' said Helen. 'This wretched war. Do you really think it's true, what everyone says? That it'll be over soon?'

'Who knows? If the Second Front kicks off, then perhaps. But I'd say we were in it for another year at least.'

'Another year… So I'll be thirty.'

'And I'll be thirty-two.'

'The worst sort of ages, don't you think? If we were twenty, we'd get over it, we'd still be almost young. And if we were forty, we'd be old enough not to mind being older still. But thirty… I'll have gone from youth to middle age. What will I have to look forward to? The Change of Life, I suppose. They say it's worse for childless women… Don't laugh! At least you'll have achieved something, Julia. Your books, I mean.'

Julia drew in her chin, still smiling. 'Them! They're like so many crossword puzzles. I only wrote the first one, you know, as a sort of joke. Then I discovered I was rather good at them. What that reveals about me, I can't imagine. Kay's always said that it's a queer thing to do-writing about murder, just now, while so many people are being murdered all around us.'

This was the second or third time that they had mentioned Kay's name; but they both seemed struck by it, now, in a way they hadn't been before. They sat in silence again. Julia swirled the wine in her glass, gazing fixedly into it like a fortune-teller. Without looking up, and in a different sort of voice, she said, 'I never asked you. What did Kay make of our running into each other like that, that day?'

'She was glad,' said Helen, after a second.

'And she didn't mind us meeting up again? She won't mind your coming round here, tonight?'

Helen sipped her drink and didn't answer. When Julia looked up and caught her gaze, she must have coloured or seemed guilty. Julia frowned. She said, 'You haven't told her?'

Helen shook her head.

'Why not?'

'I don't know.'

'You didn't think it worth mentioning? That's fair enough, I suppose.'

'No, Julia, it wasn't that. Don't be silly.'

Julia laughed. 'What, then? Do you mind my asking? I'm curious. But I'll shut up about it, if you'd rather. If it's something, you know, between you and Kay-'

'It's nothing like that,' said Helen quickly. 'I told you, Kay was pleased to hear we'd met up. She'd be pleased, too, to think we've gone on meeting.'

'Are you sure?'

'Of course I'm sure! She's so very fond of you; and that makes her want me to like you, too. It always has.'

'How big of her. Do you like me, Helen?'

'Well, naturally I do.'

'There's no naturally about it.'

'Unnaturally, then,' said Helen, making a face.

'Yet you won't tell Kay?'

Helen moved uncomfortably. She said, 'I ought to have, I know. I wish I had. It's just, sometimes, with Kay-' She stopped. 'It sounds childish, ungracious. It's just, the way Kay is with me-taking such care of me. It makes me long, now and then, to keep things from her, even commonplace, trifling things. Just so that those things can be wholly mine…'

Her heart was fluttering as she spoke: she was afraid that Julia would hear the flutter in her voice. For even as she said all this, and meant it, she knew that it wasn't quite the truth. She was trying to make the whole thing be about something else. She was playing it down, using words like commonplace and childish . She was trying to pretend that there wasn't that fine, invisible, vibrating thread telling her when Julia moved, when Julia breathed…