Sarah Waters - The Night Watch

'Take my hand again,' said Julia. 'That's right.' Her voice was steady. Her grip was firm-not wild, as it had been before. She said, 'It was stupid of me to make you come, Helen. I ought to have thought-'

'I'm all right,' said Helen. 'I'm all right.'

They started off again, going quickly. 'We must just pass St Clement's,' said Julia, as they walked. 'St Clement's ought to be just here.' She shone her torch about, and hesitated; made Helen stop, then start again. They walked on, sometimes stumbling over broken paving-stones, sometimes groping with their feet for kerbs that weren't there; for the plunging about of the searchlights, the sudden appearance and disappearance of shadows, was disorientating. Finally they picked out the whited steps of a church.

The church, however, was not St Clement's but another. St Edmund, King and Martyr , its notice said.

Julia stood before it, utterly perplexed. 'We've got onto Lombard Street somehow.' She took off her cap, tugged back her hair. 'How the hell did we do that?'

'Which way is the Underground?' asked Helen.

'I'm not sure.'

Then they both gave a jump. A car had appeared, going too fast around a corner, weaving about; it went hurtling past them, then disappeared into the dark. They went on, and a moment later heard voices: men's voices, like the voices of ghosts from the blitz, floating about, echoing queerly. It was two firewatchers, up on roofs, calling to each other across the street; one was giving a commentary of what he could see-incendiaries, he thought, on Woolwich and Bow. ' There's another packetful! ' they heard him say.

They were standing there, listening, hand in hand, when a warden came running out of the darkness and almost knocked them down.

'Where the bloody hell,' he said, panting, 'did you two spring from? Turn those torches off, and get yourselves under cover, can't you?'

Julia had pulled her fingers from Helen's the moment he'd appeared, and stepped away. She said, almost irritably, 'What does it look like we're trying to do? Where's the nearest shelter?'

The man caught her tone-or, what was more likely, Helen thought, took note of her accent-and his manner slightly changed. 'Bank Underground, miss,' he said. 'Fifty yards back there.' He jerked his thumb over his shoulder, and then ran on.

Perhaps it was the relative ordinariness of the exchange; perhaps it was the fact of seeing someone more agitated than herself; but Helen's anxiety seemed suddenly, magically, to disperse-as though drawn off by a needle. She put her arm through Julia's and they walked at quite a leisurely pace up towards what they could now easily see was a corrugated metal arch piled about with sandbags: the entrance to the station. A man and a girl went hurrying into it as they drew closer; a stout woman whose legs were sore or stiff was easing herself down the steps as quickly as she could. A schoolboy was hopping about, looking up, in great excitement, at the sky.

Julia slowed her step. 'Here it is, then,' she said, without enthusiasm.

Here's the return to company , Helen took her to mean, to chatter and bustle and ordinariness and light … She pulled Julia's arm. 'Wait,' she said. What were they doing? I've fallen in love with you! she'd cried, in the darkness, fifteen minutes before. She remembered the fluttering of Julia's breath against her mouth. She remembered the feel of Julia's hand, clutching fiercely at hers. 'I don't want to go down,' she said quietly. 'I- I don't want to share you, Julia, with other people. I don't want to lose you.'

Perhaps Julia opened her mouth to answer, Helen wasn't sure. For in the next instant they were lit by a flash: a flash, like lightning, brief but unnaturally lurid, so that a thousand little details-the stitches in Julia's collar, the anchors on the buttons of her coat-seemed to spring from her body into the air, to leap into Helen's eyes and blind her. Two seconds later, the explosion came-fantastically loud, not terribly close, perhaps even as far away as Liverpool Street or Moorgate; but close enough for them to feel the shock of it, the freakish beating against them of a gust of airless wind. The schoolboy capering about the station steps gave a whoop of absolute pleasure; some adult darted out to scoop him up and carry him inside. Helen put out her hand, and Julia gripped it. They began to run-not into the station, but away from it, back down Lombard Street. They were laughing like idiots. When the next explosion came-further off, this time-they laughed more wildly, and quickened their pace.

Then, 'In here!' said Julia, tugging Helen's hand. She had seen, lit up by the second flash, a sort of baffle-wall that had been built across the entrance to an office or a bank. The space it made was deep, jute-scented, impossibly dark: she moved into it, as if passing through a curtain of ink, and drew Helen in after her.

They stood without speaking, catching their breaths; their breaths sounded louder, in that muffled space, than all the sounds of the chaos in the street. Only when they heard footsteps did they look out: they saw the warden they had spoken to-still running, but running back, in the opposite direction. He went straight past and didn't see them.

'Now we're invisible again,' whispered Julia.

They had drawn close to one another, to look out. Helen was aware, as she had been before, of the movement of Julia's breath, against her ear and cheek; she knew that all she had to do was move her head-just turn it, just tilt it, that was all-for her lips to find out Julia's in the darkness… But she stood quite still, unable to act; and it was Julia, in the end, who started the kiss. She put up her hand and touched Helen's face, and guided their two blind mouths together; and as the kiss, like a fire, drew, took hold, she slid her hand to the back of Helen's head and pressed her even closer.

But after a moment, she drew away. She loosened the knot of Helen's scarf, began slowly to tug at the buttons of her coat. When the coat was unfastened, she started on her own: the panels of the jacket parted, she moved forward again, and the two opened coats came together to make what seemed to Helen to be a second baffle-wall, darker even than the first. Inside it, her own and Julia's bodies felt quick, hard, astoundingly warm. They kissed again, and fitted themselves against one another-Julia's thigh coming snugly between Helen's legs, Helen's thigh sliding tightly between Julia's; and they stood hardly moving, just nudging, nudging with their hips.

At last, Helen turned her head. She said, in a whisper, 'This is what Kay wanted, isn't it? I know why she did, Julia! God! I feel like- I feel like I'm her! I want to touch you, Julia. I want to touch you, like she would-'

Julia moved back. She caught hold of Helen's hand, pulled the glove from her fingers and let it drop. She took the hand to the buttons of her trousers, opened them up, and, almost roughly, slid it inside.

'Do it, then,' she said.

When the Warning sounded at John Adam House a girl would go up and down the stairs and along the corridors, knocking on every door. 'Raiders Overhead! Raiders Overhead, girls!' After that, each boarder was supposed to make her way down to the basement, in a calm and orderly way. But the basement was like shelters everywhere: too cold, too airless and too dim; and sometimes the heartier girls of the house-the girls with whom Viv had least in common, the girls for whom this sort of life was only another kind of boarding-school-would attempt to start off games, or rounds of jolly singing. Lately, too, the various smells of the place had begun to make Viv afraid of being sick.

So for the past few weeks she'd taken to staying in her room when the sirens went, with Betty and the other girl they shared with, a girl called Anne. Betty and Anne could sleep through anything-Anne dosing herself with veramon, Betty putting an eye-mask on and sticking pink wax plugs in her ears. Only Viv would lie fretful, wincing at the blasts and the ack-ack fire; thinking of Reggie, Duncan, her father, her sister; pressing with her hands at her stomach and wondering what the hell she was going to do about the thing that was growing inside it, that must be got out.