Sarah Waters - The Night Watch

A moment later a car drew slowly up to the kerb; it came to a stop a few yards on, away from the worst glare of the station. She could see its driver as it passed, dipping his head, trying to spot her. He looked anxious, handsome, hopeless: she found herself feeling towards him much what she'd felt towards Duncan, earlier on; the same mix of love and exasperation. But there was still that edge of excitement there, too: it rose again now, and grew sharper. She glanced up and down the street, then more or less ran to the passenger door. Reggie leaned across and opened it; and as she climbed inside he reached for her face, and kissed her.

Back at Lavender Hill, Kay was walking. She'd been walking, more or less, all afternoon and evening. She'd walked in a great, rough sort of circle, from Wandsworth Bridge up to Kensington, across to Chiswick, over the river to Mortlake and Putney, and now she was heading back to Mr Leonard's; she was two or three streets from home. In the last few minutes she'd fallen into step, and into conversation, with a fair-haired girl. The girl, however, wasn't much good.

'I wonder you can go so fast, in heels so high,' Kay was saying.

'One gets into the habit, I suppose,' the girl answered carelessly. 'There's not much to it. You'd be surprised.' She wasn't looking at Kay, she was looking ahead, along the street. She was meeting a friend, she said.

'I've heard it's as good an exercise,' Kay persisted, 'as riding a horse. That it's good for the shape of the legs.'

'I couldn't really say.'

'Well, perhaps your boyfriend could.'

'I might ask him.'

'I wonder he hasn't told you so already.'

The girl laughed. 'Like to wonder, don't you?'

'It makes one think, looking at you, that's all.'

'Does it?'

The girl turned to Kay and met her gaze for a second-frowning, not understanding, not understanding at all… Then, 'There's my friend!' she said, and she raised her arm to another girl across the street. She went on faster, to the edge of the kerb, looked quickly to left and to right, then ran across the road. Her high-heeled shoes were pale at the instep; they showed, Kay thought, like the whitish flashes of fur you saw on the behinds of hopping rabbits.

She hadn't said 'Goodbye', 'So long', or anything like that; and she didn't, now, look back. She had forgotten Kay already. She took the other girl's arm, and they turned down a street and were lost.

'Where's your best girl?' Len asked Duncan across the bench, at the candle factory at Shepherd's Bush. He meant Mrs Alexander, the factory's owner. 'She's late today. Have you had a tiff?'

Duncan smiled and shook his head, as if to say, Don't be silly .

But Len ignored him. He nudged the woman who sat next to him and said, 'Duncan and Mrs Alexander have had a row. Mrs Alexander caught Duncan making eyes at another girl!'

' Duncan 's a real heart-breaker,' said the woman good-humouredly.

Duncan shook his head again, and got on with his work.

It was a Saturday morning. There were twelve of them at the bench, and they were all making night lights, threading wicks and metal sustainers into little stubs of wax, then putting the stubs in flame-proof cases ready for the packers. In the centre of the bench there ran a belt, which carried the finished lights away to a waiting cart. The belt moved with a trundling sound and a regular squeak-not very noisily but, when combined with the hiss and clatter from the candle-making machines in the other half of the room, just noisily enough so that, if you wanted to speak to your neighbour, you had to raise your voice a little louder than was really comfortable. Duncan found it easier to smile and gesture. Often he'd go for hours without speaking at all.

Len, on the other hand, could not be silent. Getting no fun out of Duncan now, he started to gather up spare bits of wax; Duncan watched him begin to press them all together, moulding and shaping them into what emerged, in another minute, as the figure of a woman. He worked quite cleverly-frowning in concentration, his brow coming down and his lower lip jutting. The figure grew smoother and rounder in his hands. He gave it over-sized breasts and hips, and waving hair. He showed it to Duncan first, saying, 'It's Mrs Alexander!' Then he changed his mind. He called down the bench to one of the girls: 'Winnie! This is you, look!' He held the figure out and made it walk and wiggle its hips.

Winnie screamed. She was a girl with a deformity of the face, a squashed-in nose and a pinched-up mouth, and a pinched-up nasal voice to match. 'Look what he's done!' she said to her friends. The other girls saw and started laughing.

Len added more wax to the figure, to its breasts and bottom. He made it move more mincingly. ' Oh, baby! Oh, baby! ' he said, in a silly feminine way. Then, 'That's how you go,' he called to Winnie, 'when you're with Mr Champion!' Mr Champion was the factory foreman, a mild-mannered man whom the girls rather terrorised. 'That's how you go. I heard you! And this is what Mr Champion does.' He held the figure in the crook of his arm and passionately kissed it; finally he put his fingernail to the fork of its legs and pretended to tickle it.

Winnie screamed again. Len went on tickling the little figure, and laughing, until one of the older women told him sharply to stop. His laugh, then, became more of a snigger. He gave Duncan a wink. 'She wishes it was her, that's all,' he said, too low for the woman to catch. He pressed the wax figure back into formlessness and threw it into the scrap-cart.

He was always boasting privately to Duncan about girls. It was all he ever talked about. 'I could have that Winnie Mason if I wanted to,' he'd said, more than once. 'What do you think it would be like, though, kissing her mouth? I think it'd be like kissing a dog's arse.' He claimed he often took girls into Holland Park and made love to them there at night. He described it all, with tremendous grimaces and winks. He always talked to Duncan as if he, Len, were the older of the two. He was only sixteen. He had a freckled brown gipsy face, and a pink, plump, satiny mouth. When he smiled, his teeth looked very white and even inside that mouth, against the tan and speckle of his cheek.

Now he sat back with his hands behind his head, rocking on the two back legs of his stool. He looked lazily around the Candle Room, going from one thing to another in search of some kind of distraction. After a minute he moved forward as if excited. He called down the bench: 'Here's Mrs A, look, coming in. She's got two blokes with her!'

Still working at the night lights, the women turned their heads to see. They were grateful for any sort of break in the day's routine. The week before, a pigeon had got into the building and they had gone round the room shrieking, for almost an hour-making the most of the excitement. Now a couple of them actually stood up, to get a better look at the men with Mrs Alexander.

Duncan watched them peer until their curiosity became irresistible. He turned on his stool to look too. He saw Mrs Alexander heading for the biggest of the candle-making machines, leading a tall, fair-haired man, and one who was shorter and darker. The fair-haired man stood with his back to Duncan, nodding. Every so often he made notes in a little book. The other man had a camera: he wasn't interested in how the machine worked; he kept moving about, looking for the best shot of it and the man who ran it. He took a picture, and then another. The camera flashed like bombs.

'Time and Motion,' said Len authoritatively. 'I bet they're Time and- Look out, they're coming!'

He sat forward again, took up a stub of wax and a length of wick and started to fit them together with an air of tremendous industry and concentration. The girls all down the bench fell silent, and worked on as nimbly as before. But when they saw the photographer coming, well ahead of Mrs Alexander and the other man, they began to lift their heads, boldly, one by one. The photographer was lighting a cigarette, his camera swinging from his shoulder on its strap.