Sarah Waters - The Night Watch

'Hey!' someone called behind her. 'You, without a hat! Are you crazy?'

She thumped the flashes on her shoulder. 'Ambulance!' she shouted, panting. 'Ambulance!'

'Hey! Come back!'

But after a second, the voices faded. The wind had turned, and she found herself, suddenly, smothered in smoke. She got out her handkerchief and pressed it to her nose and mouth, but kept on running; the smoke came on in gusts, so that she passed, for a hundred feet or more, through alternate states of blindness and stinging light. Once she was caught in a shower of sparks, that singed her hair and burnt her face. A moment later she fell, and in getting to her feet lost her sense of direction: she ran forward a couple of steps, and met a wall; turned, went on, and seemed almost at once to meet another… Finally, something came hurtling towards her head-a piece of burning paper, she thought it was, as she dodged away. Then she saw that it was a pigeon, with blazing wings. She put out her hands and ran from it, stumbling in horror, dropping her handkerchief, drawing breath as a new wave of smoke came against her face, and starting to choke. She staggered forwards-and suddenly found herself in space and heat and chaos. She put her hands on her thighs, and coughed, and spat. Then she looked up.

She had come very close to the heart of the fire; but recognised nothing. The buildings about her, that she ought to know; the running firemen; the pools of water on the ground; the snaking hoses-everything was lit with a garish, unnatural intensity, or hidden by leaping black shadows. She tried calling to a man, but he couldn't hear her over the roaring of the fire, the throbbing of the pumps. She went to somebody else-taking him by the shoulders, bellowing into his face: 'Where am I? Where the hell am I? Where's Pym's Yard?'

'Pym's Yard?' he answered, shaking her off and already moving away. 'You're in it, mate!'

She looked down, and saw cobbles beneath her boots; gazing around again, she began to make out little familiar details. And she realized at last that the warehouse, Palmer's, must be right here, ahead of her, not quite at the centre of the blaze; and that the reason she could not make out the shape of her own building was because a side and part of the roof of Palmer's had fallen and flattened it.

The knowledge undid her. She stood, unable to act-simply gazing into the flames. Once a fireman caught hold of her arm and pushed her: 'Get out of the way, can't you?' But she took the three or four steps he made her take, and then stood slackly again. Finally someone called her by her name. It was Henry Varney, the Goodge Street warden. His face and hands were black with smoke. The sockets of his eyes were white, where he'd rubbed them. He looked like a stage minstrel.

He was gripping her by the shoulders. 'Miss Langrish!' he was saying in amazement. 'How long have you been here?'

She couldn't answer. He began to walk her away from the fire. He took off his hat and tried to put it on her head, and it was hot, like a roasting-dish… 'Come away from the flames,' he said. 'You're burnt, you're- Come back from the flames, Miss Langrish!'

'I came to get Helen,' she said to him.

He said again, 'Come back!' Then he met her gaze, and looked away. 'I'm sorry,' he said. 'The warehouse- The place went up like tinder. The shelter caught it, too.'

'The shelter, too?'

He nodded. 'God knows how many were in there.'

He had led her to the sill of a broken window; he made her sit down, and squatted beside her, holding her hand. She said to him once, 'They're sure, Henry, about the shelter?'

'Quite sure. I'm so sorry.'

'And nobody was saved?'

'No-one.'

A fireman came over. 'You ambulance people,' he said roughly to Kay, 'should have cleared out of here bloody forty minutes ago! There's nothing for you, didn't you hear?'

Henry stood up, and said something to him; the man ducked his head and moved off. 'Christ,' Kay heard him say…

Henry took her hand again. 'I've got to leave you, Miss Langrish. I hate to do it. Won't you go to the first-aid post? Or, is there someone-a friend-I could send for?'

She nodded to the fire. 'My friend was in there, Henry.'

He pressed her hand, and moved away; and in a second he was running, calling out… The fire, however, had reached its peak before Kay had arrived. Flames no longer leapt into the sky. The roar had lessened; the heat, if anything, was greater than before, but the warehouse walls burned shrunkenly in the midst of the blaze, and soon, with a final gust of sparks, they shivered and collapsed. The firemen moved from one spot to another. The water ran filthily across the cobbles, or rose as a thick acid steam. Once the ground gave a series of rumbles and thuds, that must have come from the dropping of bombs nearby; but the blast, if anything, worked on the scene as a riddling by a giant poker would have: the fire flared up brightly again for ten or fifteen minutes, then began to die. One of the engines was switched off, and its hoses reeled in. The fierce light faded, along with the clamour of the pumps. The moon had set, or been covered by cloud. Objects lost their sharp edges, their look of unrealness; little details faded back into the shadows, like so many moths folding up their wings.

No-one came to Kay again, through all this time. She might have been gradually reabsorbed into the darkness, too. She sat with her hands on her thighs, simply gazing into the hot, still core of the burning building; she saw the fire change colour, from fathomless white, to yellow, to orange and to red. The second engine was turned off and driven away. Someone called to someone else that the All Clear had gone, that the roads were opened.

She thought of roads, of movement, and could make no sense of it. She lifted her hands to her head. Her hair felt strange-it was coarse, had been singed by sparks. The skin of her face was tender where she pressed it; she dimly remembered someone telling her she was burnt.

Then Henry Varney came to her again, and touched her shoulder. She tried to look at him-tried to blink-and could hardly do it, for her eyes had been dried, been almost baked, by the heat of the fire.

'Miss Langrish,' he said-just what he'd said before; only now, his voice was gentle, and choked and queer. She watched his face, and saw tears running down his cheeks, making crooked white channels through the soot. 'Can you see?' he was saying. 'Will you look?' He'd raised his hand. She understood, at last, that he was pointing.

She turned her head, and saw two figures. They were standing a little way off, and seemed as still and as speechless as she. The dying fire lit them, picked them out of the darkness: what she noticed first was the unnatural paleness, in that filthy place, of their faces and their hands. Then one of the figures took a step, and she saw that it was Helen.

She covered her eyes. She didn't get up. Helen had to come to her and help her to her feet. And even then she wouldn't take the hand from before her face; she let Helen embrace her, awkwardly, and she laid her brow against Helen's shoulder and wept like a child into her hair. She didn't feel pleasure or relief. She felt only, still, a mixture of pain and fear so sharp, she thought it would kill her. She shuddered and shuddered, in Helen's arms; and finally raised her head.

Through the stinging film of her own tears, she saw Julia. She was hanging back, as if afraid to come any nearer; or as if she was waiting. Kay met her gaze, and shook her head, and began to weep again. 'Julia,' she said, in a kind of bafflement-for she could understand nothing, at that moment, except that Helen had been taken, and now was returned. 'Julia. Oh, Julia! Thank God! I thought I'd lost her.'

Viv was on a train, somewhere between Swindon and London-it was impossible to say where exactly, for the train kept stopping at what might or might not have been stations; and there was no point trying to see from the windows, for the blinds were down and, anyway, the station names all painted over or removed. Viv had been sitting for the last four hours with seven other people in a second-class compartment meant for six. The mood was awful. A couple of soldiers kept larking about with lighted matches, trying to set fire to each other's hair; a po-faced WAAF officer kept asking them to stop. Another woman was knitting, and the knobs of her needles were striking the thighs of the people sitting next to her. One of them-a girl in trousers-had just said, 'Do you mind? These slacks weren't cheap. Your needles are making snags in them.'