The Night Watch

1

So this, said Kay to herself, is the sort of person you've become: a person whose clocks and wristwatches have stopped, and who tells the time, instead, by the particular kind of cripple arriving at her landlord's door.

For she was standing at her open window, in a collarless shirt and a pair of greyish underpants, smoking a cigarette and watching the coming and going of Mr Leonard's patients. Punctually, they came-so punctually, she really could tell the time by them: the woman with the crooked back, on Mondays at ten; the wounded soldier, on Thursdays at eleven. On Tuesdays at one an elderly man came, with a fey-looking boy to help him: Kay enjoyed watching for them. She liked to see them making their slow way up the street: the man neat and dark-suited as an undertaker, the boy patient, serious, handsome-like an allegory of youth and age, she thought, as done by Stanley Spencer or some finicky modern painter like that. After them there came a woman with her son, a little lame boy in spectacles; after that, an elderly Indian lady with rheumatics. The little lame boy would sometimes stand scuffing up moss and dirt from the broken path to the house with his great boot, while his mother spoke with Mr Leonard in the hall. Once, recently, he'd looked up and seen Kay watching; and she'd heard him making a fuss on the stairs, then, about going on his own to the lavatory.

'Is it them angels on the door?' she had heard his mother say. 'Good heavens, they're only pictures! A great boy like you!'

Kay guessed it wasn't Mr Leonard's lurid Edwardian angels that frightened him, but the thought of encountering her. He must have supposed she haunted the attic floor like a ghost or a lunatic.

He was right, in a way. For sometimes she walked restlessly about, just as lunatics were said to. And other times she'd sit still, for hours at a time-stiller than a shadow, because she'd watch the shadows creeping across the rug. And then it seemed to her that she really might be a ghost, that she might be becoming part of faded fabric of the house, dissolving into the gloom which gathered, like dust, in its crazy angles.

A train ran by, two streets away, heading into Clapham Junction; she felt the thrill and shudder of it in the sill beneath her arms. The bulb in a lamp behind her shoulder sprang into life, flickered for a second like an irritated eye, and then went out. The clinker in the fireplace-a brutal little fireplace; this had been a room for a servant, once-gently collapsed. Kay took a final draw on her cigarette, then pinched out the flame of it between her forefinger and thumb.

She had been standing at her window for more than an hour. It was a Tuesday: she'd seen a snub-nosed man with a wasted arm arrive, and had been waiting, in a vague kind of way, for the Stanley Spencer couple. But now she'd decided to give up on them. She'd decided to go out. The day was fine, after all: a day in the middle of a warm September, the third September after the war. She went through to the room, next to this one, that she used as a bedroom, and began to get changed.

The room was dim. Some of the window-glass had been lost, and Mr Leonard had replaced it with lino. The bed was high, with a balding candlewick bedspread: the sort of bed which turned your thoughts, not pleasantly, to the many people who must, over the years, have slept on it, made love on it, been born on it, died on it, thrashed around on it in fevers. It gave off a slightly sour scent, like the feet of worn stockings. But Kay was used to that, and didn't notice. The room was nothing to her but a place in which to sleep or to lie sleepless. The walls were empty, featureless, just as they had been when she'd moved in. She'd never hung up a picture or put out books; she had no pictures or books; she didn't have much of anything. Only, in one of the corners, had she fixed up a length of wire; and on this, on wooden hangers, she kept her clothes.

The clothes, at least, were very neat. She picked her way through them now and found a pair of nicely-darned socks, and some tailored slacks. She changed her shirt to a cleaner one, a shirt with a soft white collar she could leave open at the throat, like a woman might.

But her shoes were men's shoes; she spent a minute polishing them up. And she put silver links in her cuffs, then combed her short brown hair with brushes, making it neat with a touch of grease. People seeing her pass in the street, not looking at her closely, often mistook her for a good-looking youth. She was regularly called 'young man', and even 'son', by elderly ladies. But if anyone gazed properly into her face, they saw at once the marks of age there, saw the white threads in her hair; and in fact she would be thirty-seven on her next birthday.

When she went downstairs she stepped as she carefully as she could, so as not to disturb Mr Leonard; but it was hard to be soft-footed, because of the creaking and popping of the stairs. She went to the lavatory, then spent a couple of minutes in the bathroom, washing her face, brushing her teeth. Her face was lit up rather greenishly, because ivy smothered the window. The water knocked and spluttered in the pipes. The gesyer had a spanner hanging beside it, for sometimes the water stuck completely-and then you had to bang the pipes about a bit to make it fire.

The room beside the bathroom was Mr Leonard's treatment-room, and Kay could hear, above the sound of the toothbrush in her own mouth and the splash of water in the basin, his passionate monotone, as he worked on the snub-nosed man with the wasted arm. When she let herself out of the bathroom and went softly past his door, the monotone grew louder. It was like the throb of some machine.

'Eric,' she caught, 'you must hmm-hmm. How can buzz-buzz when hmm-buzz whole again?'

She stepped very stealthily down the stairs, opened the unlatched front door, and stood for a moment on the step-almost hesitating, now. The whiteness of the sky made her blink. The day seemed limp, suddenly: not fine so much as dried out, exhausted. She thought she could feel dust, settling already on her lips, her lashes, in the corners of her eyes… But she wouldn't turn back. She had, as it were, her own brushed hair to live up to; her polished shoes, her cufflinks. She went down the steps and started to walk. She stepped like a person who knew exactly where they were going, and why they were going there-though the fact was, she had nothing to do, and no-one to visit, no-one to see. Her day was a blank, like all of her days. She might have been inventing the ground she walked on, laboriously, with every step.

She headed west, through well-swept, devastated streets, towards Wandsworth.

'No sign of Colonel Barker today, Uncle Horace,' said Duncan, looking up at the attic windows as he and Mr Mundy drew closer to the house.

He was rather sorry. He liked to see Mr Leonard's lodger. He liked the bold cut of her hair, her mannish clothes, her sharp, distinguished-looking profile. He thought she might once have been a lady pilot, a sergeant in the WAAF, something like that: one of those women, in other words, who'd charged about so happily during the war, and then got left over. 'Colonel Barker' was Mr Mundy's name for her. He liked to see her standing there, too. At Duncan 's words he looked up, and nodded; but then he put down his head again and moved on, too out of breath to speak.

He and Duncan had come all the way to Lavender Hill from White City. They had to come slowly, getting buses, stopping to rest; it took almost the whole day to get here and home again afterwards. Duncan had Tuesday as his regular day off, and made the hours up on a Saturday. They were very good about it, at the factory where he worked. 'That boy's devoted to his uncle!' he'd heard them say, many times. They didn't know that Mr Mundy wasn't actually his uncle. They had no idea what kind of treatment he received from Mr Leonard; probably they thought he went to a hospital. Duncan let them think what they liked.

He led Mr Mundy into the shadow of the crooked house. The house always looked at its most alarming, he thought, when looming over you like this. For it was the last surviving building in what had once, before the war, been a long terrace; it still had the scars, on either side, where it had been attached to its neighbours, the zig-zag of phantom staircases and the dints of absent hearths. What held it up, Duncan couldn't imagine; he'd never quite been able to shake off the feeling, as he let himself and Mr Mundy into the hall, that he'd one day close the door a shade too hard and the whole place would come tumbling down around them.

So he closed the door softly; and after that the house seemed more ordinary. The hall was dim and rather hushed; there were hard-backed chairs set all the way around it, a coatless coat-rack, and two or three pallid-looking plants; the floor was a pattern of white-and-black tiles, some of which had got lost, exposing the grey cement beneath. The shade of the light was a lovely rose-coloured porcelain shell-meant for a gas-lamp, probably, but now fitted up with a bulb in a bakelite socket and a fraying brown flex.

Duncan noticed flaws and features like this; it was one of the pleasures of life for him. The earlier they arrived at the house, the more he liked it, for that gave him time to help Mr Mundy to a chair and then wander quietly around the hall, looking everything over. He admired the finely-turned banisters, and the stair-rods with their tarnished brass ends. He liked the discoloured ivory knob on a cupboard door; and the paint on the skirting-boards, that had been combed to look like wood. But at the back of the passage which led to the basement was a bamboo table, set out with tawdry ornaments; and amongst the plaster dogs and cats, the paperweights and majolica vases, was his favourite thing of all: an old luster bowl, very beautiful, with a design of serpents and fruits. Mr Leonard kept dusty walnuts in it, with a pair of iron nutcrackers on the top, and Duncan never approached the bowl without feeling, as if in the fibres of his bones, the fatal little concussion that would occur if some careless person were to take the nutcrackers up and let them slip against the china.

But the walnuts sat in the bowl today just as usual, the layer of dust upon them woolly, undisturbed; and Duncan had time, too, to look quite closely at a couple of pictures hanging crookedly on the wall-for everything hung crookedly, in this house. They turned out to be rather commonplace, with very ordinary Oxford frames. But that gave him a sense of pleasure, too-a different sort of pleasure-the pleasure he got from looking at a moderately handsome thing and thinking, You're not mine, and I don't have to want you!

When there was movement in the room upstairs, he stepped nimbly back to Mr Mundy's side. A door had opened on the landing, and he heard voices: it was Mr Leonard, seeing out the young man who always had the hour before them. Duncan liked seeing this man, almost as much as he liked seeing Colonel Barker and the luster bowl; for the man was cheery. He might be a sailor. 'All right, mates?' he said today, giving Duncan a bit of a wink. He asked what the weather was doing now, and enquired after Mr Mundy's arthritis-all the while removing a cigarette from its packet, then putting it to his mouth, taking out a box of matches and striking a light: all perfectly easily and naturally with one hand, while the other, undeveloped, arm hung at his side.

Why did he come, Duncan always wondered, when he could get along so well just as he was? He thought that perhaps the young man wanted a sweetheart; for of course, the arm was something a girl might object to.

The young man tucked the box of matches back into his pocket and went on his way. Mr Leonard led Duncan and Mr Mundy upstairs-going slowly, of course; letting Mr Mundy set the pace.

'Blinking nuisance,' said Mr Mundy, embarassed. 'What can you do with me? Put me on the scrap heap.'

'Now, now!' said Mr Leonard.

He and Duncan helped Mr Mundy into the treatment room. They lowered him into another hard-backed chair, took his jacket from him, made sure he was comfortable. Mr Leonard got out a black notebook and looked briefly inside it; then he sat facing Mr Mundy in a stiff chair of his own. Duncan went to the window and sat on a low sort of padded box that was there, with Mr Mundy's jacket in his lap. The window had a bitter-smelling net curtain across it, slightly sagging from a wire. The walls of the room were done in lincrusta, painted a glossy chocolate brown.

Mr Leonard rubbed his hands together. 'So,' he said. 'How are we, since I saw you last?'

Mr Mundy ducked his head. 'Not too bright,' he said.

'The idea of pains, still?'

'Can't seem to shake them off at all.'

'But you've had no resort to false remedies of any kind?'

Mr Mundy moved his head again, uneasily. 'Well,' he admitted after a second, 'perhaps a little aspirin.'

Mr Leonard drew in his chin and looked ar Mr Mundy as if to say: Dear, dear. 'Now, you know very well, don't you,' he said, 'what a person is like, who employs false remedies and Spiritual treatment at the same time? He is like an ass pulled by two masters; he moves nowhere. You do know this, don't you?'

'It's only,' said Mr Mundy, 'so awfully sore-'

'Soreness!' said Mr Leonard, with a mixture of amusement and great contempt. He shook his chair. 'Is this chair sore, because it must support my weight? Why not, since the wood from which it is made is as material as the bone and muscle of your leg, which you say hurts from bearing your weight? It is because nobody believes that a chair may hurt. If you will only not believe in the hurt of your leg, that leg will become as negligible to you as wood is. Don't you know this?'

'Yes,' said Mr Mundy meekly.

'Yes,' repeated Mr Leonard. 'Now, let us make a start.'

Duncan sat very still. It was necessary to be very still and quiet through all of the session, but particularly now, while Mr Leonard was gathering his thoughts, gathering his strength, concentrating his mind so that he might be ready to take on the false idea of Mr Mundy's arthritis. He did this by slightly putting back his head and looking with great intensity, not at Mr Mundy, but at a picture he had hung over the mantelpiece, of a soft-eyed woman in a high-necked Victorian gown, who Duncan knew to be the founder of Christian Science, Mrs Mary Baker Eddy. On the black frame of the picture someone-possibly Mr Leonard himself-had written a phrase, not very handily, in enamel paint. The phrase was: Ever Stand Porter at the Gate of Thought.

The words made Duncan want to laugh, every time: not because he found them especially comical, but simply because to laugh, just now, would be so dreadful; and he always, at this point, began to grow panicked at the thought of having to sit so silently, for so long: he felt he would be bound to make some sound, some movement-leap up, start shrieking, throw a fit… But it was too late. Mr Leonard had changed his pose-had leaned forward and fixed Mr Mundy with his gaze. And when he spoke again, he spoke in a whisper, intently, with a tremendous sense of urgency and belief.

'Dear Horace,' he said, 'you must listen to me. All that you think about your arthritis is untrue. You have no arthritis. You have no pain.You are not subject to those thoughts and opinions, which have illness and pain as a law and condition of matter… Dear Horace, listen. You have no fear. No memory frightens you. No memory makes you think misfortune will come to you again. You have nothing to fear, dear Horace. Love is with you. Love fills and surrounds you…'

The words went on and on-like a rain of gentle blows, from a stern lover. It was impossible, Duncan thought-forgetting, now, his desire to laugh-not to want to surrender yourself to the passion of them; impossible not to want to be impressed, moved, persuaded. He thought of the young man with the wasted arm; he imagined the man sitting where Mr Mundy was now, being told, 'Love fills you,' being told, 'You must not fear,' and willing and willing his arm to lengthen, to flesh itself out. Could such a thing happen? Duncan wanted, for Mr Mundy's sake, and the young man's sake, to think that it could. He wanted it more than anything.

He looked at Mr Mundy. Soon after the start of the treatment he had closed his eyes; now, as the whispers went on, he began, very gently, to cry. The tears flowed thinly down his cheeks, they gathered at his throat and wet his collar. He made no attempt to catch them, but sat with his hands loosely in his lap, his neat, blunt fingers now and then twitching; and every so often he drew in his breath and let it out again in a great shuddering sigh.

'Dear Horace,' Mr Leonard was insisting, 'no mind has any power over you. I deny the power of thoughts of disorder over you. Disorder does not exist. I affirm the power of harmony over you, over every organ of you: the arms of you, the legs of you; the eyes and ears of you; the liver and kidneys of you; the heart and brain and stomach and loins of you. Those organs are perfect. Horace, hear me…'

He kept it up for forty-five minutes; then sat back, quite untired. Mr Mundy got out his handkerchief at last and blew his nose and wiped his face. But his tears had already dried; he stood without help, and seemed to walk a little easier, and be a little lighter in his mind. Duncan took him his jacket. Mr Leonard rose and stretched, had a sip of water from a glass. When Mr Mundy paid him, he took the money with an air of great apology.

'And tonight, of course,' he said, 'I shall include you in my evening benediction. You'll be ready for that? Shall we say, half-past nine?' For he had many patients, Duncan knew, whom he never saw: patients who sent him money, and whom he worked on from a distance, or by letter and telephone.

He shook Duncan 's hand. His palm was dry, his fingers soft and smooth as a girl's. He smiled, but his look was inward-seeming, like a mole's. He might, at that moment, have been blind.

And how awkward for him, Duncan thought suddenly, if he were!

The idea made him want to laugh again. When he and Mr Mundy were back on the path in front of the house, he did laugh; and Mr Mundy picked up his hilarity and began to laugh too. It was a sort of nervous reaction, to the room, the stillness, the barrage of gentle words. They caught one another's eye, as they left the shadow of the crooked house and walked towards Lavender Hill, and laughed like children.

'I shan't want a flighty sort of woman,' the man was saying. 'I had enough of that sort of thing with my last girl, I don't mind telling you.'

Helen said, 'We always advise our clients to keep as open a mind as possible, at this stage of things.'

The man said, 'Hmm. And an open wallet, too, I dare say.'

He wore a dark blue demob suit, already shiny at the elbows and the cuffs, and his face was sallow with a tired tropical tan. His hair was combed with fantastic neatness, the parting straight and white as a scar; but the oil had little crumbs of scurf caught in it, that kept drawing Helen's eye.

'I dated a WAAF once,' he was saying bitterly now. 'Every time we passed a jeweller's she'd just happen to turn her ankle-'

Helen drew out another sheet. 'What about this lady here? Let's see. Enjoys dressmaking and trips to the cinema.'

The man leaned to look at the photograph and at once sat back, shaking his head. 'I don't care for girls in spectacles.'

'Now, remember my advice about the open mind?'

'I don't want to sound harsh,' he said, giving a quick glance at Helen's own rather sensible brown outfit. 'But a girl in spectacles-well, she's let herself down already. You've got to ask yourself what's going to go next…'

They went on like this for another twenty minutes; eventually, from the file of fifteen women that Helen had initially drawn up, they'd put together a list of five.

The man was disappointed, but hid his dismay in a show of aggression. 'So, what happens now?' he asked, pulling at his shiny cuffs. 'This lot are shown my ugly face, I suppose, and have to say whether or not they like the look of it. I can see already how that will turn out. Perhaps I should have had myself photographed with a five-pound note behind my ear.'

Helen imagined him at home that morning, choosing a tie, sponging his jacket, straightening and restraightening the parting in his hair.

She saw him down the stairs to the street. When she went back up to the waiting-room she looked at Viv, her colleague, and blew out her cheeks.

Viv said, 'Like that, was he? I did wonder. He wouldn't do for our lady from Forest Hill, I suppose?'

'He's after someone younger.'

'Aren't they all?' Viv stifled a yawn. On the desk before her was a diary. She patted her mouth, looking over the page. 'We've no-one, now,' she said, 'for nearly half an hour. Let's have a cup of tea, shall we?'

'Oh, let's,' said Helen.

They moved about more briskly, suddenly, than they ever did when dealing with clients. Viv opened the lowest drawer of a filing cabinet and brought out a neat little electric kettle and a tea-pot. Helen took the kettle down to the lavatory on the landing, and filled it at the sink. She set it on the floor, plugged it into a socket in the skirting-board, then stood waiting. It took about three minutes to boil. The paper above the socket was rising, where steam had struck it in the past. She smoothed it down, as she did every day; it lay flat for a moment, then slowly curled back up.

The bureau was in two rooms above a wig-makers, in a street behind Bond Street Station. Helen saw the clients, individually, in the room at the front; Viv sat at her desk in the waiting-room, greeting them as they came in. There was a mismatched sofa and chairs, where people could sit when they came early. A Christmas cactus in a pot sent out occasional startling blooms. A low table held nearly-current copies of Lilliput and Reader's Digest.

Helen had worked here since just after the end of the war; she'd taken it on as a temporary thing-something light-hearted, a contrast to her old job in a Damage Assistance department in Marylebone Town Hall. The routines were straightforward enough; she tried to do her best for the clients, and genuinely wished them well; but it was sometimes hard to remain encouraging. People came to look for new loves, but often-or so it seemed to her-only really wanted to talk about the loves that they had lost. Recently, of course, business had been booming. Servicemen, returning from overseas, found wives and girlfriends transformed out of all recognition. They came into the bureau still looking stunned. Women complained about their ex-husbands. 'He wanted me to stay in all the time.' 'He told me he didn't care for my friends.' 'We went back to the hotel we spent our honeymoon in, but it wasn't the same.'

The water boiled. Helen made the tea and took the cups into the lavatory; Viv was in there already, and had raised the window. At the back of their building there was a fire-escape: if they climbed out they could reach a rusting metal platform with a low rail. The platform shuddered as they moved about on it, the ladder heaving against its bolts; but the spot was a sun-trap, and they made straight for it whenever they had the chance. They could hear the ring of the street-door and telephone from there; and, like hurdlers, had perfected a way of getting over the sill of the window with great speed and efficiency.

At this time of day the sun fell rather obliquely; but the bricks and metal it had been striking all morning still held its heat. The air was pearly with petrol fumes. From Oxford Street there came the steady grumble of traffic, and the tap-tap of workmen fixing roofs.

Viv and Helen sat down and carefully eased off their shoes, stretching out their legs-tucking in their skirts, in case the men from the wigmaker's should happen to come out and glance upwards-and working and turning their stockinged feet. Their stockings were darned at the toes and the heels. Their shoes were scuffed; everybody's were. Helen got out a packet of cigarettes and Viv said, 'It's my turn.'

'It doesn't matter.'

'I'll owe you, then.'

They shared a match. Viv put back her head and sighed out smoke. Then she looked at her watch.

'God! There's ten minutes gone already. Why does time never go so quickly when we've got the clients in?'

'They must work on the clocks,' said Helen. 'Like magnets.'

'I think they must. Just as they suck away at the life of you and me-suck, suck, suck, like great big fleas… Honestly, if you'd told me, when I was sixteen, that I should end up working in a place like this-well, I don't know what I would have thought. It wasn't what I had in mind at all. I wanted to be a solicitor's secretary…'

The words dissolved into another yawn-as if Viv hadn't the energy, even, to be bitter. She patted at her mouth with one of her slim, pale, pretty ringless hands.

She was five or six years younger than Helen, who was thirty-two. Her features were dark, and still vivid with youth; her hair was a rich brownish-black. Right now it lay bunched behind her head against the warm brick wall, like a velvet cushion.

Helen envied Viv her hair. Her own hair was light-or, as she thought of it, colourless; and it did that unforgiveable thing-grew absolutely straight. She wore it waved, and the constant perming dried it out and made it brittle. She'd recently had it waved, now: she could catch the faint stink of the chemicals every time she turned her head.

She thought over what Viv had said, about wanting to be a solicitor's secretary. She said, 'When I was young, I wanted to be a stable-girl.'

'A stable-girl?'

'You know, with horses, ponies. I'd never ridden a horse in my life. But I'd read something or other, I suppose, in a girl's annual or somewhere. I used to go trotting up and down the street, making clopping noises with my tongue.' She remembered the thrill of it, very clearly; and had an urge to get up, now, and try cantering up and down the fire-escape. 'My horse was called Fleet. He was very fast and very muscular.' She drew on her cigarette, then added in a lower tone, 'God knows what Freud would say about it.'

She and Viv laughed, flushing slightly.

Viv said, 'When I was really young I wanted to be a nurse. Seeing my mother in the hospital put me off that, though… My brother wanted to be a magician.' Her gaze grew distant; she started to smile. 'I always remember. My sister and I made him a cloak, from an old curtain. We dyed it black-but of course, we didn't know what we were doing, we were only kids, it came out looking terrible. We told him it was a specially magic one… And then my father got him one of those boxes of magic tricks, for his birthday. I bet it cost a fortune, too! He got everything he wanted, my brother; he was absolutely ruined. He was the sort of kid who, every time you took him into a shop, he'd want something. My auntie used to say, “You could take Duncan into a wool shop, and he'd come out wanting a ball of wool…”'

She sipped her tea, laughing again. 'He was a lovely kid really. My dad gave him that box, and he couldn't believe it. He spent hours reading the book, trying to work the tricks out; but in the end, you know, he put it all away. So we said, “What's the matter? Didn't you like the box after all?” And he said, Well, it was all right; but he'd thought it was going to show him how to do real magic, and it was just tricks.' She bit her lip, and shook her head. 'Just tricks! Poor little thing. He was only about eight.'

Helen smiled. 'It must have been nice, having a baby brother. My brother and I were too close in age; we just used to quarrel. Once he tied one of my plaits to the handle of a door, and slammed it.' She touched her scalp. 'It hurt like hell. I wanted to kill him! I believe I would have, if I'd known how… I do think children would make the most perfect little murderers, don't you?'

Viv nodded-but a little vaguely, this time. She sipped at her tea, smoked her cigarette; and they sat together, for a minute or two, in silence.

There's that curtain come down, thought Helen; for she was used to Viv doing this: giving little confidences, sharing memories-then drawing back suddenly, as though she had given away too much. They had worked together for almost a year, but what Helen knew about Viv's home life she'd had to put together from bits and pieces, scraps that Viv had let drop… She knew, for example, that her background was a very ordinary one; that her mother had died, ages ago; that she lived with her father in South London, cooking his dinners when she went home from work at night, and doing his laundry. She wasn't married or engaged-which seemed odd to Helen, for such a good-looking girl. She never spoke of having lost a lover to the war, but there was something-something disappointed about her, Helen thought. A sort of greyness. A layer of grief, as fine as ash, just beneath the surface.

But it was her brother, this Duncan, who was the biggest mystery. He had some queerness or scandal attached to him-Helen had never been able to work out what. He didn't live at home, with Viv and their father; he lived with an uncle or something like that. And though he was apparently quite healthy, he worked-she'd gathered-in an odd kind of factory, for invalids and charity cases. Viv always spoke about him in a very particular way; she often said, for example, 'Poor Duncan,' just as she had a minute ago. But the tone could have an edge of annoyance to it, too, depending on her mood: 'Oh, he's all right.' 'He hasn't got a clue.' 'He's in a world of his own, he is.' And then, down would come that curtain.

Helen had a respect for curtains like that, however; having one or two things in own life that she preferred to keep in darkness…

She drank more of her tea, then opened up her hand-bag and brought out a piece of knitting. She'd got into the habit, during the war, of knitting socks and scarves for soldiers; now, every month, she sent off a parcel of various lumpy, muddy-coloured items to the Red Cross. Currently she was working on a child's balaclava. The wool was second-hand, with strange kinks; it was hot work for summer; but the turns in the pattern were absorbing. She moved her finger and thumb rapidly along the needle, counting stitches under her breath.

Viv opened her own bag. She got out a magazine and began to leaf through it.

'Want your Stars?' she asked Helen, after a while. And, when Helen nodded: 'Here we are, then. Pisces, The Fish: Caution is the best course today. Others may not be sympathetic to your plans. That's your gentleman from Harrow, earlier on… Where's mine? Virgo, The Maiden: Look out for unexpected visitors.-That makes it sound like I'm going to get nits! Scarlet brings luck.' She made a face. 'It's only a woman in some office somewhere, isn't it? I'd like her job…' She turned another couple of pages, then held the magazine over. 'How about that for a hair-do?'

Helen was counting stitches again. 'Sixteen, seventeen,' she said, and glanced at the picture. 'Not bad. I shouldn't like to have to set and re-set it every time, though.'

Viv yawned again. 'Well, that's one thing I do have: time.'

They spent a few more minutes looking over the fashions, then glanced at their watches again and sighed. Helen made a mark on her paper pattern, and rolled her knitting up. They pulled on their shoes, dusted down their skirts, climbed back over the window-sill. Viv rinsed out the cups. She got out her powder and lipstick and moved to the mirror.

'Better freshen up the old war-paint, I suppose,' she said.

Helen briefly tidied her own face, then went slowly back up into the waiting-room. She straightened the pile of Lilliputs, put away the tea-things and the kettle. She looked through the diary on Viv's desk-turning the pages, reading the names. Mr Symes, Mr Blake, Miss Taylor, Miss Heap… She could guess already at the various disappointments that had prompted them to call: the jilts, the betrayals, the rankling suspicions, the deadnesses of heart.

The thought made her restless. How horrible work was, really! Even with Viv to make it bearable, how awful it was to be here, while everything that was important to you, everything that was real, had meaning, was somewhere else, out of reach…

She went into her office and looked at the telephone on her desk. She oughtn't to call at this sort of time in the day, for Julia hated to be interrupted when she was working. But now that she'd thought of it, the idea took hold: a little thrill of impatience ran through her, she found herself physically almost twitching, wanting to pick the receiver up.

Oh, bugger it, she thought. She snatched up the telephone and dialled her own number. It rang once, twice-and then came Julia's voice.

'Hello?'

'Julia,' said Helen quietly. 'It's only me.'

'Helen! I thought you were my mother. She's already called twice today. Before her I had the Exchange, some sort of problem with the line. Before that there was a man at the door, selling meat!'

'What sort of meat?'

'I didn't enquire. Cat-meat, probably.'

'Poor Julia. Have you managed any writing at all?'

'Well, a little.'

'Killed anybody off?'

'I have, as it happens.'

'Have you?' Helen settled the receiver more comfortably against her ear. 'Who? Mrs Rattigan?'

'No, Mrs Rattigan's had a reprieve. It was Nurse Malone. A spear through the heart.'

'A spear? In Hampshire?'

'One of the Colonel's African trophies.'

'Ha! That will teach him. Was it awfully grisly?'

'Awfully.'

'Lots of blood?'

'Buckets of it. And what about you? Been putting out the banns?'

Helen yawned. 'Not much, no…'

She had nothing to say, really. She had just wanted to hear Julia's voice. There was one of those noisy telephone silences, full of the tinny electric muddle of other people's conversations in the wire. Then Julia spoke again, more briskly.

'Look here, Helen. I'm afraid I'll have to ring off. Ursula said she'd call.'

'Oh,' said Helen, suddenly cautious. 'Ursula Waring? Did she?'

'Just some tiresome thing about the broadcast, I expect.'

'Yes. Well, all right.'

'I'll see you later.'

'Yes, of course. Goodbye, Julia.'

'Goodbye.'

Puffs of air; and then the line went dead as Julia put the telephone down. Helen spent a moment with the receiver still at her ear, listening to the faint, gusty echo that was all that remained of the severed connection.

Then she heard Viv coming out of the lavatory, and quickly and softly set the receiver back in its cradle.

'How's Julia?' Viv thought to ask, as she and Helen were going around the office at the end of that day, emptying the ashtrays, gathering their things. 'Has she finished her book?'

'Not quite,' said Helen, without looking up.

'I saw her last book the other day. What's it called? The Dark Eyes of-?'

'The Bright Eyes,' said Helen, 'of Danger.'

'That's right. The Bright Eyes of Danger. I saw it in a shop on Saturday; and moved it right to the front of the shelf. A woman started looking at it, too, after that.'

Helen smiled. 'You ought to get a commission. I'll make sure to tell Julia.'

'Don't you dare!' The idea was embarassing. 'She's doing ever so well though, isn't she?'

'She is,' said Helen. She was shrugging on her coat. She seemed to hesitate, and then went on, 'You know, there's a write-up on her in the Radio Times this week. Her book's going to be on Armchair Detective.'

'Is it?' said Viv. 'You ought to have told me. The Radio Times! I shall have to buy one on my way home.'

'It's only a brief thing,' said Helen. 'There's- There's a nice little photo, though.'

She didn't seem as excited about it, somehow, as she ought to have been. Perhaps she was just used to the idea. It seemed an incredible thing to Viv, to have a friend who wrote books, had her picture in a paper like the Radio Times, where so many people would see it.

They switched off the lights and went downstairs, and Helen locked the door. They stood for a minute, as they usually did, looking in at the wigs in the wig-maker's window, deciding which wigs they would buy if they had to, and laughing at the rest. Then they walked together as far as the corner of Oxford Street-yawning as they said goodbye, and making comical faces at the thought of having to come back tomorrow and do another day, all over again.

Viv went slowly after that, almost dawdling: gazing into the windows of shops; wanting the worst of the going-home rush to be over before she tried to catch a train. Usually she took a bus, for the long journey home to Streatham. Tonight, however, was a Tuesday night; and on Tuesdays she took the Tube and went to White City, to have tea with her brother. But she hated the Underground: hated the press of people, the smells, the smuts, the sudden warm gusts of air. At Marble Arch, instead of going down into the station, she went into the park, and walked along the path beside the pavement. The park looked lovely with the late, low sun above it, the shadows long, cool-seeming, blueish. She stood at the fountains and watched the play of the water; she even sat on a bench for a minute.

A girl with a baby came and sat beside her-sighing as she sat, glad of the rest. She had on a headscarf left over from the war, decorated with faded tanks and spitfires. The baby was asleep, but must have been dreaming: he was moving his face-now frowning, now amazed-as if he was trying out all the expressions he would need, Viv thought, when he was grown up.

She finally went down into the Underground at Lancaster Gate; she only had five stops, then, to Wood Lane. Mr Mundy's house was a ten-minute walk from the station, round the back of the dog-track. When races were on you could hear the crowds-a funny sound: loud, almost frightening, it seemed to surge after you down the streets like great waves of invisible water. Tonight the track was quiet. The streets had children in them-three of them balanced on one old bicycle, weaving about, raising dust.

Mr Mundy's gate was fastened with a fussy little latch, that somehow reminded Viv of Mr Mundy himself. His front door had panels of glass in it. She stood at them now, and lightly tapped, and, after a moment, a figure appeared in the hall beyond. It came slowly, with a limp. Viv put on a smile-and imagined Mr Mundy, on his side, doing the same.

'Hello, Vivien. How are you, dear?'

'Hello, Mr Mundy. I'm all right. How are you?'

She moved forward, wiping her feet on the bit of coconut-matting on the floor. 'Can't complain,' said Mr Mundy.

The hall was narrow, and there was a moment's awkwardness, every time, as he made room for her to pass him. She went to the bottom of the stairs and stood beside the umbrella-stand, unbuttoning her coat. It always took her a minute or two to get used to the dimness. She looked around, blinking. 'My brother about, is he?'

Mr Mundy closed the door. 'He's in the parlour. Go on in, dear.'

But Duncan had already heard them talking. He called out, 'Is that Vivien? V, come and see me in here! I can't get up.'

'He's pinned to the floor,' said Mr Mundy, smiling.

'Come and see!' called Duncan again.

She pushed at the parlour door and went inside. Duncan was lying on his stomach on the hearth-rug with an open book before him, and in the small of his back sat Mr Mundy's little tabby cat. The cat was working its two front legs as if kneading dough, flexing and retracting its toes and claws, purring ecstatically. Catching sight of Viv, it narrowed its eyes and worked faster.

Duncan laughed. 'What do you think? She's giving me a massage.'

Viv felt Mr Mundy at her shoulder. He had come to watch, and to laugh along with Duncan. His laugh was light, and dry-an old man's chuckle. There was nothing to do but laugh too. She said, 'You're barmy.'

Duncan began to lift himself up, as if about to start physical jerks. 'I'm training her.'

'What for?'

'The circus.'

'She'll snag your shirt.'

'I don't mind. Watch.'

The cat worked on as if demented while Duncan raised himself higher. He began to straighten up. He tried to do it in such a way that the cat could keep her place on his back-even, could walk right up his body. All the time he tried it, he kept laughing. Mr Mundy called encouragement… At last though, the cat had had enough, and sprang to the floor. Duncan brushed at his trousers.

'Sometimes,' he said to Viv, 'she gets on my shoulders. I walk about-don't I, Uncle Horace?-with her draped around my neck. Quite like your collar, in fact.'

Viv had a little false-fur collar on her coat. He came and touched it. She said, 'She's snagged your shirt after all.'

He twisted to look. 'It's only a shirt. I don't have to be smart like you. Doesn't Viv look smart, Uncle Horace? A smart lady secretary.'

He gave her one of his charming smiles, then let her hug him and kiss his cheek. His clothes had a faintly perfumed smell-that, she knew, was from the candle factory-but beneath the scent he smelt like a boy; and when she lifted her hands to him his shoulders seemed ridiculously narrow and full of slender bones. She thought of the story she'd told Helen that afternoon, about the box of magic tricks; and remembered him vividly, again, when he was little-how he'd used to come into her and Pamela's bed, and lie between them. She could still feel his thin arms and legs, and his forehead, that would get hot, the dark hair sticking to it, fine as silk… She wished for a moment that they were all children again. It still seemed extraordinary to her, that everything had turned out the way it had.

She took off her coat and her hat, and they sat down. Mr Mundy had gone back out to the kitchen. There came the sounds of him, after a minute, preparing tea.

'I ought to go and give a hand,' she said. She said this every time she came. And Duncan always answered, as he did now, 'He prefers it on his own. He'll start up singing in a minute. He had his treatment this afternoon; he's a little bit better. Anyway, I'll do the washing up. Tell me how you are.'

They exchanged their little pieces of news.

'Dad sends his love,' she said.

'Does he?' He wasn't interested. He'd only been seated for a moment, but now he got up excitedly and brought something down to her from a shelf. 'Look at this,' he said. It was a little copperish jug, with a dent in its side. 'I got it on Sunday, for three and six. The man asked seven shillings, and I knocked him down. I think it must be eighteenth-century. Imagine ladies, V, taking tea, pouring cream from this! It would have been silvered then, of course. Do you see where the plating's come off?' He showed her the traces of silver, at the join of the handle. 'Isn't it lovely? Three and six! That bit of damage is nothing. I could knock that out if I wanted.'

He turned the jug in his hands, delighted with it. It looked like a piece of rubbish to Viv. But he had some new object to show her every time she came: a broken cup, a chipped enamel box, a cushion of napless velvet. She could never help thinking of the mouths that had touched the china, the grubby hands and sweating heads that had rubbed the cushions bald. Mr Mundy's house, itself, rather gave her the creeps: an old person's house, it was, its little rooms crowded with great dark furniture, its walls swarming with pictures. On the mantelpiece were flowers of wax, and pieces of coral, under spotted glass domes. The lamps were gas ones still, with fish-tail flames. There were yellow, exhausted photographs: of Mr Mundy as a slim young man; another of him as a boy, with his sister and mother, his mother in a stiff black dress like Queen Victoria. It was all dead, dead, dead; and yet here was Duncan, with his quick dark eyes, his clear boy's laugh, quite at home amongst it all.

She picked up her bag. 'I've brought you something.'

It was a tin of ham. He saw it and said, 'I say!' He said it in the affectionate, faintly teasing way he'd said smart lady secretary, before; and when Mr Mundy came limping in with the tea-tray, he held the tin up extravagantly.

'Look here, Uncle Horace! Look what Viv has brought us.'

There was corned beef on the tray, already. She had brought that last time. Mr Mundy said, 'By golly, we are well set up now, aren't we?'

They pulled out the leaves of the table and put out the plates and cups, the tomato sandwiches, the lettuce-hearts and cream crackers. They drew up their chairs, shook out their napkins, and began to help themselves to the food.

'How is your father, Vivien?' Mr Mundy asked politely. 'And your sister? How's that fat little chap?' He meant Pamela's baby, Graham. 'Such a fat little chap, isn't he? Fat as butter! Quite like the kids you used to see about when I was a boy. Seemed to go out of fashion.'

He was opening the tin of ham as he spoke: turning its key over and over with his great, blunt fingers, producing a line of exposed meat like a thin pink wound. Viv saw Duncan watching; she saw him blink and look away. He said, as if with a show of brightness, 'Are there fashions in babies, then, like in skirts?'

'I'll tell you one thing,' said Mr Mundy, shaking out the ham, scooping out the jelly. 'What you never used to see, that was wheeled perambulators. You saw a wheeled perambulator round here, that was something marvellous. That was what you used to call, top-drawer. We used to cart my cousins about in a wagon meant for coal. Kids walked sooner then, though. Kids earned their living in those days.'

'Were you ever sent up a chimney, Uncle Horace?' asked Duncan.

'A chimney?' Mr Mundy blinked.

'By a great big brute of a man, setting fire to your toes to make you go faster?'

'Get away with you!'

They laughed. The empty ham tin was set aside. Mr Mundy took out his handkerchief and blew his nose-blew it short and hard like a trumpet-then shook the handkerchief back into its folds and put it neatly back in his pocket. His sandwiches and lettuce-hearts he cut into fussy little pieces before he ate them. When Viv left the lid of the mustard-pot up, he tipped it down. But the slivers of meat and jelly that were left on his plate at the end of the meal he held to the cat: he let her lick them from his hand-lick all about his knuckles and nails.

When the cat had finished, she mewed for more. Her mew was thin, high-pitched.

'She sounds like pins,' said Duncan.

'Pins?'

'I feel as though she's pricking me.'

Mr Mundy didn't understand. He reached to touch the cat's head. 'She'll scratch you, mind, when her dander's up. Won't you Catty?'

There was cake to be eaten, after that; but as soon as the cake was finished, Mr Mundy and Duncan got up and cleared the cups and plates away. Viv sat there rather tensely, watching them carrying things about; soon they went out to the kitchen together and left her alone. The doors in the house were heavy and cut off sound; the room seemed quiet and dreadfully airless, the gas-lamps hissing, a grandfather clock in the corner giving a steady tick-tick. It sounded laboured, she thought-as though its works had got stiff, like Mr Mundy's; or else, as if it felt weighted down by the old-fashioned atmosphere, like her. She checked the face of it against her wristwatch. Twenty to eight… How slowly the time ran here. As slowly as at work. How unfair it was! For she knew that later-when she would want it-it would seem to rush.

Tonight, at least, there was a distraction. Mr Mundy came in and sat down in his armchair beside the fire, as he always did after dinner; Duncan, however, wanted Viv to cut his hair. They went out to the kitchen. He put down newspaper on the floor, and set a chair in the middle. He filled a bowl with warm water, and tucked a towel into the collar of his shirt.

Viv dipped a comb in the water, wet his hair and started cutting. She used a pair of old dressmaking scissors; God knows what Mr Mundy was doing with those. Probably he did his own sewing, she wouldn't put it past him… The newspaper crackled under her shoes as she moved about.

'Not too short,' said Duncan, hearing her clip.

She turned his head. 'Keep still.'

'You did it too short last time.'

'I'll do it how I do it… There such a things as a barber's, you know.'

'I don't like the barber's. I always think he's going to cut me up and put me in a pie.'

'Don't be silly. Why would he want to do that?'

'Don't you think I'd make a nice pie?'

'There's not enough meat on you.'

'He'd make a sandwich of me, then. Or he'd put me in one of those little tins. And then-' He turned and caught her eye, looking mischievous.

She straightened his head again. 'It'll end up crooked.'

'It doesn't matter, there's no-one to see. Only Len, at the factory. I haven't got any admirers. I'm not like you-'

'Will you shut up?'

He laughed. 'Uncle Horace can't hear. He wouldn't mind, even if he could. He doesn't trouble over things like that.'

She stopped cutting and put the point of the scissors to his shoulder. 'You haven't told him, Duncan?'

'Of course I haven't.'

'Don't you, ever!'

'Cross my heart.' He licked his finger, touched his chest; looked up at her, still smiling.

She wouldn't smile back. 'It isn't a thing to joke about.'

'If you can't joke about it, why do you do it?'

'If Dad should hear-'

'You're always thinking about Dad.'

'Well, somebody has to.'

'It's your life, isn't it?'

'Is it? I wonder, sometimes.'

She cut on in silence-unsettled, but wanting to say more; almost hoping that he'd keep teasing her; for she had no-one else to talk to, he was the only person she'd told… But she left it too long; he got distracted, tilting his head to look at the damp black locks on the newspaper under his chair. They'd falled as curls, but as they dried they were separating into individual strands and growing fluffy. She saw him grimace.

'Isn't it queer,' he said, 'how nice one's hair is when it's on one's head; and how gruesome it becomes, the instant it's cut off. You ought to take one of those curls, V, and put it in a locket. That's what a proper sister would do.'

She straightened his head again, less gently than before. 'I'll proper sister you in a minute, if you don't keep still.'

He put on a silly Cockney voice. 'I was proper sistered!'

That made them laugh. When she'd finished cutting he moved the chair aside and opened the back door. She got her cigarettes, and they sat together on the step, gazing out, smoking and chatting. He told her about his visit to Mr Leonard's; about the buses he and Mr Mundy had had to take, their little adventures… The sky was like water with blue ink in it, the darkness sinking, stars appearing one by one. The moon was a slim and perfect crescent, almost new. The little cat appeared, and wound itself around their legs, then threw herself on to its back and writhed, ecstatic again.

Then Mr Mundy came out from the parlour-came out to see what they were doing, Viv supposed; had perhaps heard them laughing, through the window. He saw Duncan 's hair and said, 'My word! That's a bit better, now, than the cuts you used to get from Mr Sweet!'

Duncan got up and started tidying the kitchen. He made a parcel of the paper and the hair. 'Mr Sweet,' he said, 'used to nip you with his scissors, just for fun.' He rubbed his neck. 'They said he took a man's ear off once!'

'That was all talk,' said Mr Mundy comfortably. 'Prison talk: that's all that was.'

'Well, that's what a man told me.'

They quarrelled about it for another minute or two; Viv had the feeling they were almost doing it on purpose-showing off, in some queer way, because she was there. If only Mr Mundy hadn't come out! He couldn't leave Duncan alone for a minute. She'd liked it, sitting on the step, watching the sky get darker. But she couldn't bear it when they started talking so airily about prison, all of that; it set her teeth on edge. The closeness and the fondness she'd felt for Duncan a moment before began to recede. She thought of her father. She found herself thinking in her father's voice. Duncan moved gracefully across the kitchen and she looked at his neat dark head, his slender neck, his face, that was handsome as a girl's, and she said to herself almost bitterly: All he put us through, look, and there's not a bloody mark on him!

She had to go back into the parlour and finish her cigarette there, on her own.

But there wasn't any point in getting worked-up about it. It would wear her out, just as it had worn out her father. And she had other things to think about. Duncan made more tea, and they listened to a programme on the wireless; and at quarter past nine she put her coat on. She left at the same time every week. Duncan and Mr Mundy stood at the front door to watch her go, like an old married couple.

'You don't want your brother to walk you to the station?' Mr Mundy would ask her; and Duncan would answer before she could, in a negligent sort of way, 'Oh, she's all right. Aren't you, Viv?'

But tonight he kissed her, too, as if aware that he'd annoyed her. 'Thanks for the haircut,' he said quietly. 'Thanks for the ham. I was only teasing, before.'

She looked back twice as she went off, and they were still there, watching; the next time she looked, the door was closed. She imagined Mr Mundy with his hand on Duncan 's shoulder; she pictured them going slowly back into the parlour-Duncan to one armchair, Mr Mundy to the other. She felt again the airless, flannel-like atmosphere of the house on her skin, and walked more briskly-growing excited, suddenly; liking the chill of the evening air and the crispness of the sound of her heels on the pavement.

Walking quickly, however, meant that she arrived too soon at the station. She had to stand about in the ticket-hall while trains came and went, feeling horribly exposed in the harsh, dead light. A boy tried to catch her eye. 'Hey, Beauty,' he kept saying. He kept going past her, singing. To put herself out of his way she went to the book-stall; and it was only as she was looking over the rack of magazines that she remembered what Helen had said, that afternoon, about the Radio Times. She took down a copy and opened it up, and almost at once found an article headed:

“Dangerous Glances”

URSULA WARING introduces Julia Standing's thrilling new novel The Bright Eyes of Danger, featured on “Armchair Detective” at 10.10 on Friday evening (Light Prog.).

The article was several columns long, and gave an account of the novel in very glowing terms. Above it was a photograph of Julia herself: her face tilted, her eyes downcast, her hands raised and pressed together at the side of her jaw.

Viv looked at the photo with a touch of dislike: for she'd met Julia once, in the street outside the office, and had not taken to her. She'd seemed too clever-shaking Viv's hand when Helen introduced them, but not saying, 'How do you do?' or 'Pleased to meet you,' or anything like that; saying coolly instead, as if she'd known Viv for years: 'Successful day? Have you got heaps of people married?' 'More fool them if we have,' Viv had answered; and at that she'd laughed, as if at a joke of her own, and said, 'Yes, indeed…' Her voice was very well-to-do, and yet she'd talked slangily: 'louse up your plans', 'go dotty'. What Helen, who was so nice, saw in her to like so much, Viv couldn't imagine.-But then, that was their own business. Viv closed her mind to it.

She put the magazine back in the rack and moved away. There was no sign, now, of the boy who'd sung at her. The clock showed two minutes to half-past ten. She went across the ticket hall-not towards the platforms, but back to the station entrance. She stood close to a pillar, looking out into the street: drawing her coat more tightly around her because, with so much standing about, she'd got chilled.

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.

2

'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.

Winnie called to him, 'Aren't you going to take our picture?'

The photographer looked her over. He looked at the girls who sat beside her-one of whom had a burnt face and hands, shiny with scars, another of whom was almost blind. But, 'All right,' he said. He waited for them to draw together and smile, then held up his camera and put his eye to it. But he only pretended to release the shutter. He pressed the button half-way and made a clicking sound with his tongue.

The girls complained. 'The bulb didn't flash!'

The photographer said, 'It flashed all right. It's a special, invisible one. It's an x-ray kind. It sees through clothes.'

This was so obviously something he had come up with to flatter plain girls who pestered him to take their picture, Duncan was almost embarassed. But Winnie herself, and the other girls, all shrieked with laughter. Even the older women laughed. They were still laughing when Mrs Alexander came over with the fair-haired man.

'Well, ladies,' she said indulgently, in her well-bred Edwardian voice, 'what's all this?'

The girls tittered. 'Nothing, Mrs Alexander.' Then the photographer must have winked or made some gesture, because they all burst out laughing again.

Mrs Alexander waited, but could see at last that she wasn't going to be let in on the joke. She turned her attention, instead, to Duncan. 'How are you, Duncan?'

Duncan wiped his hands on his apron and got slowly to his feet. He was well-known, throughout the factory, as one of Mrs Alexander's favourites. People would say to each other, in his hearing, 'Mrs Alexander's going to leave Duncan all her money! You'be better be nice to Duncan Pearce, he's going to be your boss one day!' Sometimes he made the most of it, hamming it up, raising a laugh. But he always felt a sort of pressure when Mrs Alexander singled him out; and he felt that pressure even more today, because she had brought her visitors with her, and was very obviously about to introduce him to them as if he was her 'star worker'.

She turned her head, looking for the fair-haired man, who was still putting notes in his book about the candle-making machine. She reached, and just touched his arm. 'May I show you-?' Along the bench, the girls had stopped tittering and were all looking up, expectant. The man drew nearer and raised his head. 'Here's our little night light department,' Mrs Alexander said to him. 'Perhaps Duncan could explain the process to you? Duncan, this is-'

The man, however, had stopped in his tracks and was gazing at Duncan as if he couldn't believe his eyes. He started grinning. 'Pearce!' he said, before Mrs Alexander could go on. And then, at Duncan 's blank stare: 'Don't you know me?'

Duncan looked properly into his face; and recognised him at last. He was a man named Fraser-Robert Fraser. He had once been Duncan 's cell-mate in prison.

Duncan was too stunned, for a moment, even to speak. He'd felt, in an instant, plunged right back into the world of their old hall: the smells of it, the muddled, echoey sounds of it, the grinding misery and fear and boredom… His face grew chill, then very warm. He was aware of everyone watching, and felt caught out-caught out by Fraser on the one hand, and by Mrs Alexander, and Len and the girls, on the other.

Fraser, however, had started laughing. He looked as though he felt the oddness of the situation just as Duncan did; but he seemed able to pass it off as a tremendous joke. 'We've met before!' he said, to Mrs Alexander. 'We knew each other-well,' he caught Duncan 's eye, 'years ago.'

Mrs Alexander looked, Duncan thought, almost put out. Fraser didn't notice. He was still grinning into Duncan 's face. He held out his hand, quite formally; but with his other hand he grabbed hold of Duncan 's shoulder and playfully shook him. 'You look exactly the same!' he said.

'You don't,' managed Duncan at last.

For, Fraser had grown up. When Duncan had last seen him he'd been twenty-two: lean and white and angular, with a rash of spots on his jaw. Now he must be almost twenty-five-a little older than Duncan himself, in other words, but he was as different from Duncan as it was possible to imagine: broad-shouldered, where Duncan was slender; tanned, and madly healthy-looking and fit. He was dressed in corduroy trousers, an open-necked shirt, and a brown tweed jacket with leather patches on the sleeves. He carried a satchel like a hiker's bag, with the strap across his chest. His fair hair was long-Duncan, of course, had only ever seen him with it cropped-and quite ungreased: every so often, because of the vigour of his gestures, a lock of it would tumble over his brow, and he kept putting up a hand to smooth it back. His hands were as sun-tanned as his face. His nails were cut bluntly, but shone as if polished.

He looked so grown-up and confident, and so at home in his ordinary clothes, that Duncan, on top of his embarassment, was suddenly shy of him. In his nervousness he almost laughed; and Mrs Alexander, seeing him smile, smiled too.

'Mr Fraser,' she said, 'has come to write about you, Duncan.'

But at that, he must have looked startled. Fraser said quickly, 'I'm putting together a piece on the factory, that's all, for one of the picture weeklies. That's what I'm doing just now; things like that. Mrs Alexander has been kind enough to show me around. I had no idea-'

For the first time, his grin faltered. He seemed to realise at last what he was doing at Duncan 's bench; and what Duncan was. 'I had no idea,' he finished, 'of finding you here. How long have you been here?'

' Duncan 's been with us for almost three years,' said Mrs Alexander, when Duncan hesitated.

Fraser nodded, taking that in.

'He's one of our ablest workers.-Duncan, since you and Mr Fraser are such old friends, why don't you show him what your job entails? Mr Fraser, perhaps your man could take a photograph?'

Fraser looked round, rather vaguely, and the photographer stepped forward. He moved about, lifting the camera to his eye again, squaring up the shot as, reluctantly, Duncan picked up one of the little stubs of wax and began explaining to Fraser about the wicks, the metal sustainers, the flame-proof cups. He did it badly. When the flash of the camera went he blinked and, for a second, lost the thread of what he was saying. Meanwhile Fraser nodded and smiled, struggling to hear, and gazing with a fixed, preoccupied interest at every new thing that was pointed out to him; once or twice putting back that lock of ungreased hair from before his brow. 'I see how it goes,' he said, and, 'Yes, I've got it. Of course.'

It only took a minute to explain. Duncan put the night light he had made on to the shuffling belt in the middle of the bench, and it was carried off to the cart at the end of it. 'That's all it is,' he said.

Mrs Alexander moved forward. She had been hovering, all this time, and had the slightly disappointed air of a parent who'd seen their child making a mess of its lines in the school play. But, 'There,' she said, as if in satisfaction. 'Quite a simple process. But every one of our little night lights, you see, has to be put together by hand… I suppose you couldn't guess at how many you've assembled in your time here, Duncan?'

'Not really,' answered Duncan.

'No… Still, you're keeping well, I hope? And how's'-she'd thought of a way to save the situation-'how's the collection?' She turned to Fraser. 'I expect you know, Mr Fraser, that Duncan is a great collector of antiques?'

Fraser, looking partly embarassed and partly amused, admitted that he didn't know this. 'Oh!' said Mrs Alexander with great enthusiasm, 'Oh, but it's quite a hobby of his! All the handsome things he turns up! I call him the scourge of the dealers. What's your latest find, Duncan?'

Duncan saw that there was no way out of it. He told her, in a rather stilted way, about the cream-jug he'd shown Viv at Mr Mundy's earlier that week.

Mrs Alexander widened her eyes. Apart from the fact that her voice was raised to combat the din and clatter of the factory floor, she might have been at a tea-party.

'Three-and-six, you say? I shall have to tell my friend Miss Martin. Antique silver's her great passion, she'll be mad with envy. You must bring the little jug in, Duncan, and show me. Will you do that?'

'Yes,' said Duncan. 'If you like.'

'Yes, do.-And how, by the way, is your uncle? Duncan takes great care, Mr Fraser, of his uncle-'

Duncan heard this, and gave a twitch, took a step, almost in panic. Mrs Alexander saw the expression on his face and misinterpreted it. 'There,' she laughed, patting his shoulder, 'I'm embarassing you. I'll leave you to your night lights.' She nodded down the bench. 'Len, how are you? Everything all right, Winnie? Mabel, you've spoken to Mr Greening about your chair? Good girl.' She touched Fraser's arm again. 'Would you care to follow me, now, to the Packing Room, Mr Fraser?'

Fraser said he would, in just a moment. 'I'd like to make a note of something here first,' he said… He waited for her to move off, then began to scribble something in his book. He came close to Duncan again as he did it, saying, in an apologetic way, 'I have to go, Pearce, as you can see. God! This is queer, isn't it? But, look here. Here's my address.' He ripped the page out and handed it over. 'You'll give me a call? Some time this week? Will you?'

'If you like,' said Duncan again.

Fraser grinned at him. 'Good man. We can talk properly then. I want to know everything you've been doing.' He moved off, as if reluctantly. 'Everything!'

Duncan lowered his head, to draw out his stool. When he looked up again, Fraser, the photographer and Mrs Alexander were just going out of the door that took them through to the next building.

The girls started laughing again the moment the door was closed. Winnie called down, in her squashed-up voice: 'What's he given you, Duncan? Is it his address? I'll give you five bob for it!'

'I'll give you six!' said the girl beside her.

She and another girl got up and tried to grab the paper from him. He fought them off, beginning to laugh-relieved that they'd chosen to take the whole thing in this sort of spirit and not another. Len said, about Fraser, 'See how he browned up to you, Duncan? He's heard you're in line for promotion. Where d'you know him from?'

Duncan was still fending off the girls, and didn't answer. By the time they'd finished teasing him and moved on to something else, the scrap of paper with Fraser's address on it had got crumpled almost to a ball. He put it into his apron pocket: he put it right at the bottom of the pocket so that it shouldn't fall out, but for the next hour or so he kept slipping his hand to it, slyly, as if to reassure himself that it was still there. What he really wanted to do was take it out and have a proper look at it; he didn't want to do that, though, with so many people about. At last he could bear it no longer. When Mr Champion came round, he asked permission to go to the lavatory. He went into one of the stalls, and locked the door; and took the paper from his pocket and smoothed it out.

He felt much more excited doing this, than he'd felt when talking to Fraser face to face; he'd been too self-conscious then, but now the fact of Fraser's having turned up, and having been so friendly-having gone to the trouble of writing

down his address, of saying, 'You'll give me a call? Will you?'-seemed wonderful. The address was a Fulham one, and not very far away. Duncan looked at it and began to imagine how it would be if he went round there-say, one evening. He pictured himself making the journey. He thought of the particular clothes he'd wear-not the clothes he was wearing now, that smelt of stearine and scent, but a nice pair of trousers he had, and an open-necked shirt, and a smart jacket. He imagined how he'd be with Fraser when Fraser opened his door. 'Hello, Fraser,' he'd say, nonchalantly; and Fraser would cry, in amazement and admiration: 'Pearce! You look like a proper man at last, now you've left that wretched factory!' 'Oh, the factory,' Duncan would answer, with a wave of his hand. 'I only go there as a favour to Mrs Alexander…'

He went on daydreaming like this for five or ten minutes-playing the same scene over and over, of himself arriving at Fraser's door; unable, quite, to imagine what would happen once Fraser had asked him in… He went on doing it, even though he had no intention, actually, of ever going to Fraser's house; even while a part of him was saying, Fraser won't want to see you really. He gave you his address for politeness' sake. He's the sort of person who gets madly pleased over little things, for a minute, and then forgets all about them…

He heard the swing of the wash-room door, and Mr Champion's voice: 'All right in there, Duncan?'

'Yes, Mr Champion!' he called; and pulled the chain.

He looked again at the paper in his hand. He didn't know what to do with it now. Finally he tore it into little pieces and added them to the swirling water in the lavatory.

'Must you wriggle so, darling?' Julia was saying.

Helen moved a shoulder. She said fretfully, 'It's these taps. This one's freezing; the other nearly burns your ear off.'

They were lying together in the bath. They did this every Saturday morning; they took it in turns who had the smooth end, and this week it was Julia's turn. She was lying with her arms stretched out, her head put back, her eyes closed; she had tied up her hair in a handkerchief but a few strands had fallen and, as the water slopped over them, they moulded themselves to her jaw and throat. Frowning, she tucked them back up behind her ear.

Helen moved again, then found an almost comfortable position and grew still, enjoying at last the lovely creep of the warm water into her armpits, her groin-all the creases and sockets of her flesh. She put her hands flat upon the water's surface, testing its resistance, feeling its skin. 'Look at our legs all mixed up,' she said softly.

She and Julia always spoke quietly when they were taking their bath. They shared the bathroom with the family who lived in the basement of their house; they all had regular bath-times, so there was not much danger of being caught out; but the tiles on the walls seemed to magnify sound, and Julia had the idea that their voices, the splashing, the rub of their limbs in the tub, might be heard in the rooms downstairs.

'Look how dark your skin is, compared to mine,' Helen went on. 'Really, you're as swarthy as a gypsy.'

'The water makes me seem darker, I suppose,' answered Julia.

'It doesn't make me seem dark,' said Helen. She prodded the pink and yellowish flesh of her own stomach. 'It makes me look like pressed meat.'

Julia opened her eyes and gazed briefly at Helen's thighs. 'You look like a girl in a painting by Ingres,' she said comfortably.

She was full of ambiguous compliments like this. 'You look like a woman in a Soviet mural,' she had said recently, when Helen had returned from a shopping trip with two bulging string bags; and Helen had pictured muscles, a square jaw, a shadowy lip. Now she thought of odalisques with spreading bottoms… She put a hand to Julia's leg. The leg was rough with little hairs, interesting to the palm; the shin was slender and pleasant to grip. On the bone of the ankle a single vein stood out, swollen with heat. She studied it, pressed it, and saw it yield; she thought of the blood gushing inside it, and gave a little shudder. She slid her hand from Julia's ankle to her foot, and began to rub it. Julia smiled: 'That's nice.'

Julia's feet were broad and unhandsome-an Englishwoman's feet, Helen thought, and the only really unlovely part of Julia's whole body; and she held them in a special sort of regard, for that reason. She tugged slowly, now, at the toes, then worked her fingers between them; she put her palm against them and gently pressed them back. Julia sighed with pleasure. A strand of her hair had fallen again, and again clung to her throat-dark, flat and lustrous as a piece of seaweed, or a lock from a mermaid's head. Why, Helen wondered, were the mermaids' heads that you saw in books and films always coloured gold? She was sure that a real mermaid would certainly be dark, like Julia. A real mermaid would be strange, alarming-nothing like an actress or a glamour-girl at all.

'I'm glad you've got feet, Julia, rather than a tail,' she said, working with her thumb at the arch of Julia's foot.

'Are you, darling? So am I.'

'Your breasts would look handsome, though, in a brassière made of shells.' She smiled. She'd remembered a joke. 'What,' she asked Julia, 'did the brassière say to the hat?'

Julia thought about it. 'I don't know. What?'

'“You go on ahead, and I'll give these two a lift.”'

They laughed-not so much at the joke, as at the silliness of Helen's having told it. Julia still had her head put back: her laughter, caught in her throat, was bubbling, childish, nice-not at all like her conventional 'society' laugh, which always struck Helen as rather brittle. She put a hand across her mouth to stifle the sound. Her stomach quivered as she shook, her navel narrowing.

'Your navel's winking at me,' said Helen, still laughing. 'It looks awfully saucy… The Saucy Navel. That sounds like a sea-side pub, doesn't it?' She moved her legs, yawning. She was rather tired, now, of stroking Julia's foot; she let it fall. 'Do you love me, Julia?' she whispered, as she changed her pose.

Julia closed her eyes again. 'Of course I do,' she said.

They lay for a time, then, not speaking. The water-pipes creaked, cooling down. From some hidden part of the plumbing there came a steady drip-drip. In the basement there were thumps, as the man who lived there walked heavily from room to room; soon they heard him shouting at his wife or his daughter: 'No, you great daft bitch!'

Julia tutted. 'That revolting man.' Then she opened her eyes and, 'Helen,' she cried softly, 'how can you?'-for Helen, unembarassed, had tilted her head over the side of the bath and was trying to listen. She waved her hand for Julia to be silent. 'Work it up your arse!' they heard the man say: a phrase he liked, and used often. Next came the gnat-like whining that was all that ever reached them of his wife's replies.

'Really, Helen,' said Julia, disapprovingly. Helen moved meekly back into the bath-tub. Sometimes, if the shouting started up and she was alone, she'd go so far as to kneel on the carpet, draw back her hair, put her ear to the floor. 'You'll end up like those fucking eunuchs upstairs!' she had heard the man shout one day, by doing this. She'd never told Julia.

Today he grumbled on for a minute or two, then gave it up. A door was slammed. The things that Helen and Julia had brought down to the bathroom-the scissors and tweezers, the safety-razor in its case-gave a jump.

It was half-past eleven. They planned an idle sort of day, with books and a picnic, in Regent's park; they lived quite near it, in one of the streets just to the east of the Edgware Road. Helen lay a little longer, until the water began to cool; then she sat up and washed herself-turning awkwardly around, so that Julia could soap her back and rinse it; and doing the same for Julia herself, when Julia had turned. But when she'd risen and stepped out of the tub Julia sank back down again, stretching out into the extra space and smiling like a cat.

Helen studied her for a second, then bent and kissed her-liking the look and the feel of Julia's slick, warm, soap-scented mouth.

She put on her dressing-gown and opened the door-listening first, to be sure there was no-one in the hall. Then she ran lightly towards the stairs. Their sitting-room was on this floor, beside the bathroom. Their kitchen and bedroom were one floor up.

She had just finished dressing, and was combing her hair at the bedroom mirror, when Julia joined her: Helen watched her through the glass, carelessly dusting herself with talcum powder, then tugging the handkerchief from her head and going naked about the room, picking out knickers, stockings, suspenders and a bra. Her towel she added to a pile of garments on the cushions that made a little window-seat; almost at once it slid to the floor, taking a sock and a petticoat with it.

The window-seat was one of the things that had attracted them to the house when they'd first viewed it. 'We'll be able to sit there together in the long summer evenings,' they had said. Now Helen looked at the mess of clothes which obscured the sill; she looked at the unmade bed; and then at the cups and mugs, and the piles of read and unread books, which lay on every surface… She said, 'This room's impossible. Here we are, two middle-aged women and we live like sluts. I can't believe it. When I was young, and used to think about the house I'd have when I was grown up, I always pictured it as terribly neat and tidy-just like my mother's. I always imagined that neat houses came to one, like- I don't know.'

'Like wisdom teeth?'

'Yes,' said Helen, 'just like that.' She passed her sleeve across the surface of the mirror; it came away grey with dust.

Other people of their age and class, of course, had chars. They couldn't do that, because of the business of sharing a bed. There was another little room on the floor above this, which got presented to neighbours and visitors as 'Helen's room'; it had an old-fashioned divan in it, and a severe Victorian wardrobe where they kept their overcoats and jerseys and wellington boots. But it would be too much fuss, they thought, to have to pretend to a daily woman that Helen slept there every single night; they'd be sure to forget. And weren't char-ladies, anyway, awfully knowing about that sort of thing? Now that Julia's books were doing so well they had to be more careful than ever.

Julia came to the mirror. She had put on a creased dark linen dress and run her fingers roughly through her hair; but she could step out of any kind of chaos, Helen thought, and look, as she did now, absurdly well-groomed and handsome. She moved closer to the glass, to dash on lipstick. Her mouth was a full, rather crowded one. But she had one of those faces, so regular and even, it was exactly the same in reflection as it was in life. Helen's face, by contrast, looked rather queer and lopsided when studied in a mirror. You look like a lovely onion, Julia had told her once…

They finished putting on their make-up, then went out to the kitchen to gather food. They found bread, lettuce, apples, a nub of cheese, and two bottles of beer. Helen dug out an old madras square they'd used as a dust-sheet when decorating; they put it all in a canvas bag, then added their books, their purses and keys. Julia ran upstairs to her study for her cigarettes and matches. Helen stood at the kitchen window, looking out into the back yard. She could just see the bad-tempered man, moving and stooping. He kept table-rabbits down there, in a little home-made hutch: he was giving them water or food, or perhaps checking the plumpness of them. It always bothered her, imagining them all crushed together like that. She moved away, and shouldered the bag. The bottles clinked against the keys. 'Julia,' she called, 'are you ready?'

They went down, and out to the street.

Their house was part of an early nineteenth-century terrace, facing a garden. The terrace was white-that London white, more properly a streaked and greyish yellow; the grooves and sockets of its stucco facade had been darkened by fogs, by soot, and-more recently-by brick-dust. The houses all had great front doors and porches-must once, in fact, have been grand residences: home, perhaps, to minor Regency strumpets, girls called Fanny, Sophia, Skittles… Julia and Helen liked to imagine them tripping down the steps in their Empire-line dresses and soft-soled shoes, taking their mounts, going riding in Rotten Row.

In miserable weather the discoloured stucco could look dreary. Today the street was filled with light, and the house-fronts seemed bleached as bones against the blue of the sky. London looked all right, Helen thought. The pavements were dusty-but dusty in the way, say, that a cat's coat is dusty, when it has lain for hours in the sun. Doors were open, sashes raised. The cars were so few that, as Helen and Julia walked, they could make out the cries of individual children, the mutter of radios, the ringing of telephones in empty rooms. And as they drew closer to Baker Street they began to hear music from the Regent's Park Band, a faint sort of clash and parp-parp-parp-swelling and sinking on impalpable gusts of air, like washing on a line.

Julia caught Helen's wrist, grew childish, pretending to tug. 'Come on! Come quick! We'll miss the parade!' Her fingers moved against Helen's palm, then slid away. 'It makes one feel like that, doesn't it? What tune is it, d'you think?'

They slowed their steps and listened more carefully. Helen shook her head. 'I can't imagine. Something modern and discordant?'

'Surely not.'

The music rose. 'Quick!' said Julia again. They smiled, grown-up; but walked on, faster than before. They went into the park at Clarence Gate, then followed the path beside the boating lake. They approached the band-stand and the music grew louder and less ragged. They walked further, and the tune revealed itself at last.

'Oh!' said Helen, and they laughed; for it was only 'Yes! We Have No Bananas'.

They left the path and found a spot they liked the look of, half in sunlight, half in shade. The ground was hard, the grass very yellow. Helen put down the bag and unpacked the cloth; they spread it out and kicked off their shoes, then laid out the food. The beer was still cold from the frigidaire, the bottles sliding deliciously in Helen's warm hand. But she went back to the bag and, after a moment's searching, looked up.

'We forgot a bottle-opener, Julia.'

Julia closed her eyes. 'Hell. I'm dying for a drink, as well. What can we do?' She took a bottle and started picking at its lid. 'Don't you know some terribly bright way of getting the tops off?'

'With my teeth, do you mean?'

'You were in the Brownies weren't you?'

'Well they rather jibbed, you know, at Pale Ale, in my pack.'

They turned the bottles in their hands.

'Look, it's hopeless,' said Helen at last. She looked around. 'There are boys over there. Run and ask them if they have a knife or something.'

'I can't!'

'Go on. All boys have knives.'

'You do it.'

'I carried the bag. Go on, Julia.'

'God,' said Julia. She rose, not graciously, took up the bottles, one in each hand, and began to walk across the grass to a group of lounging youths. She walked stiffly, rather bowed, perhaps only self-conscious, but Helen saw her, for a second, as a stranger might: saw how handsome she was, but also how grown-up, how almost matronly; for you could catch in her something of the angular, wide-hipped, narrow-breasted figure she'd have in earnest in ten years' time… The youths, by contrast, were practically schoolboys. They put up their hands to their eyes, against the sun, when they saw her coming; they rose lazily from their places, reached into their pockets; one held a bottle against his stomach as he worked with something at the top. Julia stood with folded arms, more self-conscious than ever, smiling unnaturally; when she came back with the opened bottles her face and throat were pink.

'They only used keys, after all,' she said. 'We might have done that.'

'We'll know next time.'

'They told me to “take it easy, missus”.'

'Never mind,' said Helen.

They had brought china cups to drink from. The beer foamed madly to the curving porcelain lips. Beneath the froth it was chill, bitter, marvellous. Helen closed her eyes, savouring the heat of the sun on her face; liking the reckless, holidayish feel of drinking beer in so public a place… But she hid the bottles, too, in a fold of the canvas bag.

'Suppose one of my clients should see me?'

'Oh, bugger your clients,' said Julia.

They turned to the food they'd brought, broke the bread, made little slices of the cheese. Julia stretched out with the bunched-up canvas bag behind her head as a pillow. Helen lay flat and closed her eyes. The band had started on another tune. She knew the words to it, and began quietly to sing.

'There's something about a soldier! Something about a soldier! Something about a soldier that is fine!-fine!-fine!'

Somewhere a baby was crying from a pram; she heard it stumbling over its breath. A dog was barking, as its owner teased it with a stick. From the boating-lake there came the creak and splash of oars, the larking about of boys and girls; and from the streets at the edges of the park, of course, came the steady snarl of motors. Concentrating, she seemed to hear the scene in all its individual parts: as if each might have been recorded separately, then put with the others to make a slightly artificial whole: 'A September Afternoon, Regent's Park'.

Then a couple of teenage girls walked past. They had a newspaper, and were talking over one of the cases in it. 'Mustn't it be awful to be strangled?' Helen heard one of them say. 'Should you rather be strangled, or have an atomic bomb fall on you? They say at least with an atomic bomb it's quick…'

Their voices faded, drowned out by another gust of music.

'There's something about his bearing! Something to what he's wearing! Something about his buttons all a-shine!-shine!-shine!'

Helen opened her eyes and gazed into the luminous blue of the sky. Was it crazy, she wondered, to be as grateful as she felt now, for moments like this, in a world that had atomic bombs in it-and concentration camps, and gas chambers? People were still tearing each other into pieces. There was still murder, starvation, unrest, in Poland, Palestine, India -God knew where else. Britain itself was sliding into bankruptcy and decay… Was it a kind of idiocy or selfishness, to want to be able to give yourself over to trifles: to the parp of the Regent's Park Band; to the sun on your face, the prickle of grass beneath your heels, the movement of cloudy beer in your veins, the secret closeness of your lover? Or were those trifles all you had? Oughtn't you, precisely, to preserve them?-to make little crystal drops of them, that you could keep, like charms on a bracelet, to tell against danger when next it came?

She moved her hand, thinking this-just touched her knuckles to Julia's thigh, where no-one could see.

'Isn't this lovely, Julia?' she said quietly. 'Why don't we come here all the time? The summer's nearly over now, and what have we done with it? We might have come here every evening.'

'We'll do that next year,' answered Julia.

'We will,' said Helen. 'We'll remember, and do it then. Won't we? Julia?'

But Julia wasn't listening now. She had raised her head to talk to Helen, and her attention had been caught by something else. She was looking across the park. She lifted a hand to shade her eyes and, as Helen watched, her gaze grew fixed and she started to smile. She said, 'I think that's- Yes, it is. How funny!' She raised the hand higher, and waved. 'Ursula!' she called-so loudly, the word jarred against Helen's ear. 'Over here!'

Helen propped herself up and peered in the direction in which Julia was waving. She saw a slim, smart-looking woman making her way across the grass towards them, beginning to laugh.

'Good Lord,' the woman said, as she drew closer. 'Fancy seeing you, Julia!'

Julia had got to her feet and was brushing down her linen dress. She was laughing too. She said, 'Where are you off to?'

'I've been lunching with a friend,' said the woman, 'up at St John's Wood. I'm on my way to Broadcasting House. We don't have time for picnics and so on, at the BBC. What a charming spread you've made here, though! Perfectly bucolic!'

She looked at Helen. Her eyes were dark, slightly mischievous.

Julia turned, made introductions. 'This is Ursula Waring, Helen. Ursula, this is Helen Giniver-'

'Helen, of course!' said Ursula. 'Now, you won't mind my calling you Helen? I've heard such a lot about you.-No need to look nervous! It was all of it good.'

She leaned to shake Helen's hand, and Helen half rose, to meet it. She felt at a disadvantage, sitting down while Julia and Ursula were standing up; but she was very conscious, too, of her Saturday-morning appearance-of her blouse, which she'd once unpicked and refashioned in an attempt at 'make-do and mend', and her old tweed skirt, rather seated at the back. Ursula, by contrast, looked neat, moneyed, tailored. Her hair was put up in a chic, rather masculine little hat. Her leather gloves were soft and unscuffed, and her low-heeled shoes had flat fringed tongues to them-the kind of shoes you expected to see on a golf-course, or a Scottish highland, somewhere expensively hearty like that. She was not at all as Helen had pictured her, from the things that Julia had said about her over the past few weeks. Julia had made her sound older and almost dowdy. Why would Julia have done that?

'You caught the broadcast last night?' Ursula was saying.

'Of course,' said Julia.

'Rather good, wasn't it? Did you think so, Helen? I think we did awfully well… And wasn't it tremendous, seeing Julia's face in the middle of the Radio Times!'

'Oh, it was rotten,' said Julia, before Helen could answer. 'That picture's so frightfully Catholic! I look like I'm about to be bound to a wheel, or have my eyes put out!'

'Nonsense!'

They laughed together. Then Julia said, 'But, look here, Ursula. Why don't you join us?'

Ursula shook her head. 'I know if I sit, I simply shan't want to get up… I shall be sick with envy, though, thinking about you all day. It's just too disgustingly clever of you both. But of course, you live so very near. And such a charming house, too!' She spoke to Helen again. 'I said to Julia, one would never know such a place existed, so close to the Edgware Road.'

'You've seen it?' asked Helen in surprise.

'Oh, just for a moment-'

Julia said, 'Ursula called round, one day last week. Surely I told you, Helen?'

'I must have forgotten.'

'I wanted to take a peek,' said Ursula, 'at Julia's study. It's always so fascinating, I think, seeing where writers do their work. Though I'm not sure whether I really envy you, Helen. I don't know how I'd feel, having my friend scribbling away over my head, working out the best way to despatch her next victim-by poison, or the rope!'

She said the word 'friend', Helen thought, in a special sort of way-as if to say: We understand one another, of course. As if to say, in fact: We're all 'friends' together. She had taken off her gloves, to bring out a silver cigarette-case from her pocket; and as she opened the case up Helen saw her short manicured nails, and the discreet little signet ring on the smallest finger of her left hand…

She held the cigarettes out. Helen shook her head. Julia, however, moved forward, and she and Ursula spent a moment fussing with a lighter-for a breeze had risen and kept blowing out the flame.

They spoke further about 'Armchair Detective' and the Radio Times; about the BBC and Ursula's job there… Then, 'Well, my dears,' said Ursula, when her cigarette was finished, 'I must be off. It's been so nice. You must both come over, some time, to Clapham. You must come for supper-or, better still, I could put together a bit of a party.' Her gaze grew mischievous again. 'We could make it an all-girl thing. What do you say?'

'But of course, we'd love to,' said Julia, when Helen said nothing.

Ursula beamed. 'That's settled, then. I'll let you know.' She took Julia's hand and playfully shook it. 'I've one or two friends who would be thrilled to meet you, Julia. They're such fans!' She started putting on her gloves, and turned to Helen again. 'Goodbye, Helen. It's been so nice to meet you properly…'

'Well,' said Julia, as she sat back down. She was watching Ursula making her quick, smart way across the park in the direction of Portland Place.

'Yes,' said Helen, rather thinly.

'Amusing, isn't she?'

'I suppose so… Of course, she's more your class than mine.'

Julia looked round, laughing. 'What's that supposed to mean?'

'She's a bit hearty, is all I meant… When did you take her to the house?'

'Just last week. I told you, Helen.'

'Did you?'

'You don't think I did it in secret?'

'No,' said Helen quickly. 'No.'

'It was only for a minute.'

'She's not how I imagined. I thought you told me she was married.'

'She is married. Her husband's a barrister. They live apart.'

'I didn't know she was- Well.' Helen lowered her voice. 'Like us.'

Julia shrugged. 'I don't know what she is, really. A bit of an oddity, I think… Still, that party might be fun.'

Helen looked at her. 'You wouldn't want to go, really?'

'Yes, why not?'

'I thought you were just being polite. “An all-girl thing.” You know what that means.' She looked down, her colour rising slightly. 'Anyone might be there.'

Julia didn't answer for a moment. When she spoke, she sounded impatient or annoyed. 'Well, what if they are? It won't kill us… It might even be fun. Imagine that!'

'It'll certainly be fun for Ursula Waring, anyway,' said Helen, before she could stop herself. 'Having you there, like some sort of prize pig-'

Julia was watching her. She said coldly, 'What's the matter with you?' And then, when Helen wouldn't answer: 'It's not- Oh, no.' She began to laugh. 'Not really, Helen? Not because of Ursula?'

Helen moved away. 'No,' she said; and she lay back down, with a sharp, graceless movement. She put her arm across her eyes, to keep off the sun and Julia's gaze… After a moment she felt Julia lie down, too. She must have reached into the bag and brought out her book: Helen heard her leafing through its pages, looking for her place.

But what Helen could see, in the shifting blood-coloured depths of her own eyelids, was Ursula Waring's mischievous dark gaze. She saw the way that Ursula and Julia had stood together, lighting their cigarettes. She saw again Ursula playfully shaking Julia's hand… Then she thought back. She remembered how keen Julia had been to get to the park: Come on! Come quick!-her fingers slipping away from Helen's in her impatience. Was it Ursula she'd wanted to see? Was it? Had they arranged the whole thing?

Her heart beat faster. Ten minutes before she had been lying just like this, enjoying the familiar, secret nearness of Julia's limbs. She'd wanted to hold on to that moment, make a crystal bead of it. Now the bead felt shattered. For what was Julia to her, after all? She couldn't lean to her and kiss her. What could she do, to say to the world that Julia was hers? What did she have, to keep Julia faithful? She had only herself: her pressed-meat thighs, her onion face…

These thoughts raged through her like a darkness in her blood, while Julia read on; while the band played a final parp-parp-parp, then put its instruments away; while the sun crept slowly over the sky, and shadows extended themselves across the yellow ground… But at last the miserable panic subsided. The darkness shrank, folded itself up. She said to herself, What an idiot you are! Julia loves you. It's only this beast in you she hates, this ridiculous monster-

She moved her wrist again, so that it just touched Julia's thigh. Julia kept still for a moment, then moved her own wrist, to meet it. She put down her book and propped herself up. She took up an apple and a knife. She peeled the apple in one long strip, then cut the fruit into quarters and handed two of them to Helen. The ate together, watching the running about of dogs and children, as they had before.

Then they caught each other's gaze. Julia said, with a hint of coolness still, 'All over, now?'

Helen coloured. 'Yes, Julia.'

Julia smiled. When she'd finished eating the apple she lay back down, and picked up her book again; and Helen watched her as she read. Her eyes were moving from word to word, but apart from that her face was still, closed, blemishless as wax.

'You look like a film-star,' said Reggie, as Viv got into his car. He made a show of looking her over. 'Can I have your autograph?'

'Just get going, will you?' she said. She'd been standing in the sun, waiting for him, for half an hour. They moved together and briefly kissed. He let down the handbrake and the car moved off.

She was wearing a light cotton dress and a plum-coloured cardigan, and sunglasses with pale plastic frames; instead of a hat she had a white silk scarf, that she'd tied in a knot beneath her chin. The scarf and the sunglasses looked striking against the dark of her hair and the red of her lipstick. She straightened her skirt, making herself comfortable; then wound down her window and sat with her elbow on the sill, her face in the draught-like a girl in an American picture, just as Reggie had said. Slowing the car for a traffic-light, he put his hand on her thigh and murmured admiringly, 'Oh, if the boys in Hendon could only see me now!'

But of course, he kept well away from north London. He'd picked her up at Waterloo and, having crossed the river and got to the Strand, he headed east. They had places they liked, an hour from the city: villages in Middlesex and Kent, where there were pubs and tea-rooms; little beaches on the coast. Today they were motoring out towards Chelmsford; they were just going to drive, until they found a pretty spot. They had hours together: all afternoon. She'd told her father she was going on a picnic with a girlfriend. She'd stood at one end of the kitchen table the night before, making sandwiches, while he'd sat at the other fixing rubber soles to his shoes…

They wove through the City and Whitechapel; when they started on a wider, smoother road Reggie put the car in a higher gear and moved his hand back to her thigh. He found the line of her suspender, and began to follow it; her dress being thin, she could feel the pressure of his touch-his thumb and palm and moving finger-as vividly as if she'd been naked.

But her mood was wrong, somehow. She said, 'Don't,' and caught his hand.

He gave a groan like a man in torment and pretended to fight against her grip. 'What a teaser you are! Can I stop the car? It's that, you know, or run it off the road.'

But he didn't stop the car. He speeded up. The streets grew clearer. Billboards appeared at the side of the road, advertising Players, Please! and Wrigley's, “Jiffy” Dyes and Vim. She sat more loosely, watching the peeling back of the city-the blitzed Victorian high streets giving way to red Edwardian villas, the villas giving way to neat little houses like so many bowler-hatted clerks, the little houses becoming bungalows and prefabs. It was like hurtling backwards through time-except that the bungalows and prefabs gave way to open green fields, and after that, she thought, if you narrowed your eyes and didn't look at things like telegraph poles or aeroplanes in the sky, you could have been in any time, or no time at all.

They passed a pub, and Reggie worked his mouth as if thirsty. He'd laid out his jacket on the back seat, but got her to reach into its pocket and bring out a little flask of Scotch. She watched him lifting it to his mouth. His lips were soft and smooth; his chin and throat were freshly shaved, but already dark with dots of stubble. He drank clumsily, concentrating on the road. Once the whisky ran from the corner of his mouth and he had to catch it with the back of his swarthy hand.

'Look at you,' she said, half playfully, half crossly. 'You're dribbling.'

He said, 'I'm drooling. It's from sitting next to you.'

She made a face at the idea. They drove on more or less in silence. He kept to the main road for almost an hour, but then, coming to an unsigned junction, followed the quietest-looking route; and after that they took the lanes which caught their fancy. London, suddenly, became almost unimaginable-the hardness and dryness and dirt of it. The hedges which bordered the lanes were high and moist and, though it was autumn, still filled with colour: sometimes Reggie drew close to the side to let another driver pass, and flowers shook their petals through the window into Viv's lap. Once a white butterfly came into the car and spread out its papery, powdery wings on the curve of the seat beside her shoulder.

Her mood began to lift. They started to point out little things to each other-old-fashioned churches, quaint-looking cottages. They remembered a day, years before, when they had come into the country and stopped at a cottage and spoken to its owner, and he'd taken them for a married couple and asked them into his parlour and given them glasses of milk… Reggie said now, as he slowed the car before a little house the colour of creamy French cheese, 'There's space at the back, look, for pigs and chickens. I can see you, Viv, chucking out the swill. I can see you picking apples in an orchard. You could make me apple pies, and bloody great suet puddings.'

'You'd get fat,' she said, smiling, poking his stomach.

He dodged away from her. 'It wouldn't matter. You're supposed to be fat, aren't you, in the country?' He kept an eye on the road, but dipped his head to look at the upstairs window. He lowered his voice. 'I bet there's the hell of a feather mattress in the room up there.'

'Is that all you think about?'

'It is, when you're around.-Oops.'

He swerved, to avoid the hedge; then put his foot down again.

They began to look about for a place to stop the car and eat their lunch, and took a track that led between fields towards a wood. The track seemed well-maintained at first; the further they drove, however, the rougher and narrower it grew. The car bumped about, getting whipped by brambles, and long grass swept and crackled underneath it like rushing water beneath a boat. Viv bounced on the seat, laughing. But Reggie frowned, leaning forward, tugging at the steering-wheel. 'If we meet someone coming the other way, we're buggered,' he said. And she knew he was thinking about what would happen if they were to have an accident, smash up the car, get stuck…

But the track dipped and turned and they found themselves, all at once, in a lush green clearing beside a stream, breathtakingly pretty. Reggie put on the brake and turned off the engine; they sat for a moment, amazed and awed by the quiet of the place. Even after they'd opened the doors and begun to climb out they hesitated, feeling like intruders: for all they could hear was the tumbling of the stream, the calling of birds, the shushing of leaves.

'It sure as hell ain't Piccadilly,' said Reggie, getting out at last.

'It's lovely,' said Viv.

They spoke almost in murmurs. They stretched their arms and legs, then walked across the grass to the edge of the stream. When they gazed along the bank they could see, half hidden in the trees, an old stone building with shattered windows and a broken roof.

'That's a mill,' said Reggie, moving towards it, catching hold of Viv's hand. 'Can you see the shaft of the wheel? This must have been a proper river once.'

She pulled him back. 'Someone might be there.'

But no-one was there. The house had been abandoned years before. Grass grew through the gaps between its flagstones. Pigeons fluttered in its beams, and its floors were covered with bird droppings and broken slate and glass. Somebody, at some point, had cleared a space and made a fire; there were cans and bottles, and filthy messages on the walls. But the cans were rusty, the bottles silvery with age.

'Tramps,' said Reggie. 'Tramps, or deserters. And courting couples.' They went back to the stream. 'I bet this is a regular Lovers' Lane.'

She gave him a pinch. 'Trust you to find it, then.'

He still had hold of her hand. He lifted her fingers to his lips, looking coy, pretending modesty. 'What can I say? Some men are gifted like that, that's all.'

They were talking, now, in normal voices, had lost their sense of awe and caution and begun to feel as though the place was theirs: that it had been waiting, picturesquely, just for them to come and claim it. They followed the stream in the other direction and found a bridge. They stood on the hump of it, smoking cigarettes; Reggie put his arm around her waist and rested his hand on her backside, moving his thumb, making her dress and her petticoat slide against the silk of her knickers.

They threw the ends of their cigarettes into the stream and watched them race. Then Reggie peered more closely at the water.

'There's fish in there,' he said. 'Big sods, look at that!' He went down to the side of the stream, took off his wristwatch and dipped in his hand. 'I can feel them nibbling!' He was as excited as a boy. 'They're like a bunch of girls, all kissing! They think my hand's a man-fish. They think their luck's in!'

'They think you're lunch,' Viv called back. 'They'll have one of your fingers if you're not careful.'

He leered. 'That's like a girl, too.'

'The sort of girls you know, maybe.'

He rose and shook water at her. She laughed and ran away. The water struck the lenses of her sunglasses and when she wiped them, the lenses smeared.

'Now look what you've done!'

They went back to the car for their picnic, leaving the car's doors open. Reggie got out a tartan rug from the boot and they spread it on the grass. He brought out a bottle of gin and orange, too, and a couple of beakers-one pink, one green. The beakers were meant for children, Viv knew: they were rough against the lip where they'd been bitten and thrown about. But she was used to that sort of thing; there was simply no point minding. The gin and orange had become warm in the car: she swallowed, and felt the glow of it almost once, loosening her up. She unwrapped the sandwiches. Reggie ate his in great, quick bites, swallowing the bread before he'd chewed it, then biting again; talking with the food still on his tongue.

'This is that Canadian ham, isn't it? It's not too bad after all.'

He'd pulled at his tie, undone the button of his shirt. The sun was on him, making him frown, showing up the creases in his forehead and beside his nose. He was thirty-six, but had recently, Viv thought, begun to look a little older. His face was sallow-that was the Italian blood in him-and his hazel eyes were still very handsome, but he was losing his hair-losing it not neatly, in a round little patch; it was thinning all over, his scalp here and there showing luminously through. His teeth, which were straight and very even, and which Viv remembered as having once been dazzlingly white, were turning yellow. The flesh of his throat was getting loose; there were folds in the skin in front of ears… He looks like his father, she thought, watching him chew. He'd shown her a picture once. He could be forty, at least.

But he caught her eye, and gave her a wink; and something of her old, pure affection for him flared up in her heart. When they'd finished their sandwiches he drew her to him and they lay on the rug, he on his back with his arm around her, she with her cheek in the firm, warm hollow between his shoulder and his chest. Now and then she raised herself a little to sip, awkwardly, at her drink; finally she swallowed it all in a gulp and let the empty beaker fall. He rubbed his face against her head, his rough chin plucking at her hair.

She looked into the sky. Her view of it was framed by branches, by the restless tips of trees. The branches were thick with leaves still, but the leaves were ruddy, or golden, or the greenish-yellow of army uniforms. The sky itself was perfectly cloudless: blue as the bluest skies of summer.

'What bird is that?' she asked, pointing.

'That? That's a vulture.'

She gave him a nudge. 'What is it, really?'

He shaded his eyes. 'It's a kestrel. See how it hovers? It's waiting to dive. It's after a mouse.'

'Poor mouse.'

'There he goes!' He lifted his head, the muscles in his chest and throat growing tight beneath her cheek. The bird had swooped, but now rose again with empty claws. He lay back down. 'He's lost it.'

'Good.'

'It's only another sort of lunch. He's entitled to his bit of lunch, isn't he?'

'It's cruel.'

He laughed. 'I'd no idea you were so tender-hearted.-Look, now he's trying again.'

They watched the bird for a minute, marvelling together at the buoyancy of it, its graceful swoops and soars. Then Viv took off her sunglasses, to see it more clearly; and Reggie looked, not at the kestrel, but at her.

'That's better,' he said. 'It was like talking to a blind girl, before.'

She settled back on the rug and closed her eyes. 'You're used to them, of course.'

'Ha-ha.'

He was still for a moment, then reached across her and picked something up. After a second she felt a tickling on her face, and brushed her cheek, thinking a fly had settled on it. But it was him: he had a long blade of grass and was stroking her with the tip of it. She frowned, but closed her eyes again and let him do it. He followed the lines of her brow and her nose, the curve above her mouth; he worked the grass across her temples.

'You've changed your hair, haven't you?' he said.

'I got it cut, ages ago.-You're tickling me.'

He moved the blade of grass more firmly. 'How's that?'

'That's better.'

'I like it.'

'Like what?'

'Your hair.'

'Do you? It's all right.'

'It suits you… Open your eyes, Viv.'

She opened them, briefly, then screwed them up again. 'The sun's too bright.'

He raised his hand-held it a foot away from her face, to make a shade. 'Open them now,' he said.

'What for?'

'I want to look into your eyes.'

She laughed. 'Why?'

'I just do.'

'They're the same as they were the last time you looked into them.'

'That's what you think. Women's eyes are never the same. You're like cats, the lot of you.'

He tickled her face until she did as he asked and opened her eyes again. But she opened them wide, being silly.

'Not like that,' he said. So she looked at him properly… 'That's better.' His expression was soft. 'You've got lovely eyes. You've got beautiful eyes. Your eyes were the first thing I noticed about you.'

'I thought it was my legs you noticed first.'

'Your legs, too.'

He held her gaze, then threw the blade of grass away and leaned and kissed her. He did it slowly, parting her lips with his own, pushing gently into her mouth. He tasted of the ham, still; the ham and the gin and orange. She supposed she must taste of it too. As the kiss went on, a speck of something-meat, or bread-came between their tongues, and he broke away to pick it from his mouth. But when he came back to her, he kissed her harder; and began to lean more heavily against her. He ran his hand down her body, from her cheek to her hip; then he stroked upwards again and cupped her breast. His hand was hot, and gripped her hard, almost painfully. When he drew it away and began to pluck instead at the buttons at the front of her dress, she stopped his fingers and lifted her head.

'Someone might come, Reg.'

'There's nobody about,' he said, 'for miles!'

She looked at his hand, still tugging at the buttons. 'Don't. You'll crease it.'

'Undo it for me, then.'

'All right. Wait.'

She looked around, conscious that anyone could be watching, hidden in the shadows of the trees. The sun was bright as a spotlight, the piece of ground they were lying on flat and quite unobscured. But the only sounds, still, were those of the stream, the birds, the restless leaves. She unfastened two of the buttons on her dress; then, after a moment, two more. Reggie drew the bodice back, exposing her bra; he put his mouth to the silk of it, feeling for her nipple, drawing at her breast. She moved about under his touch… But the queer thing was, she'd wanted him more, before, in the car in the middle of Stepney; she'd wanted him more while they were standing on that bridge. He kept his mouth fixed hard to her breast, and moved his hand back down her body to her thigh. When he caught hold of her skirt and began to push it up, she stopped his fingers again, and again said, 'Someone might see.'

He moved away, wiped his mouth. He tugged at the rug. 'I'll put this over us.'

'They could still see.'

'Jesus, Viv, I'm at that point where a troupe of girl-guides could go past and it wouldn't put me off! I swear, I'm bursting. I've been bursting for you all day.'

She didn't think he had been. For all his talk, for all his nonsense-here, and in the car-she didn't think he had been; and she wanted it less than ever now. He pulled up the rug and tucked it around her, then put his arm beneath it and tried to reach between her legs again. But she kept her thighs closed; and when he looked at her she shook her head-let him think what he liked. She said, 'Let me-' and moved her own hand to the buttons of his trousers, easing them open one by one, then sliding inside.

He groaned, at the feel of her bare fingers. He twitched against her palm. He said, 'Oh, Viv. Christ, Viv.'

The seams of his underpants were taut against her wrist and made her clumsy; after a moment he reached and brought himself right out, then put his hand loosely

around hers. He kept the hand there as she was doing it, and had his eyes shut tight the whole time; in the end she felt he might as well be doing it himself. The tartan rug went up and down over their fists. Two or three times she lifted her head and looked around, still anxious.

And she remembered, as she did it, other times, from years before, when he'd been in the army. They'd had to meet in hotel rooms-grubby rooms, but the grubbiness hadn't mattered. Being together was what had mattered. Pushing against each other's bodies, each other's skin and muscle and breath. That was what bursting for somebody meant. It wasn't this. It wasn't jokes about feather beds and Lovers' Lanes…

At the very last second he closed her hand, to make a sort of trap for the spunk. Then he lay back, flushed and sweating and laughing. She held on to him a little longer before she drew her fingers away. He raised his head, the flesh of his throat bunching up. He was worried for his trousers.

'Got it all?'

'I think so.'

'Careful.'

'I am being careful.'

'Good girl.'

He tucked himself away, then fastened up his buttons. She looked around for a handkerchief, something like that; and finally wiped her hand on the grass.

He watched her do it, approvingly. 'That's good for the ground,' he said. He was full of life now. 'That'll make a tree grow. That'll make a tree, and a knickerless girl will one day come and climb it; and she'll get in the club, by me.' He held out his arms. 'Come here and give me a kiss, you beautiful creature!'

The simplicity of him, she thought, was quite amazing. But it had always been his faults and frailties that she'd loved most. She'd wasted her life on his weaknesses-his apologies, his promises… She moved back into his embrace. He lit another cigarette and they lay and smoked it together, gazing up again into the trees. The kestrel had vanished; they didn't know if it had caught its mouse or gone after another. The blue of the sky seemed to have thinned.

But then, it was September-the end of September-and not summer: presently she gave a shiver, getting cold. He rubbed her arms, but soon they sat up, drank the last of the gin and orange, then stood and brushed down their clothes. He turned the cuffs of his trousers inside out, to shake the grass from them. He borrowed her handkerchief, and wiped her lipstick and powder from his mouth. He walked a little way off, and turned his back, and had a pee.

When he came back she said, 'Stay here'; and she went herself to a clump of bushes, drew up her skirt, pushed down her knickers and got into a squat. 'Watch out for nettles!' he called after her; but he called it vaguely, he didn't see where she had gone and couldn't see her once she'd stooped. She watched him bending at the car's wing-mirror, combing his hair. She watched him rinsing out the beakers in the stream. Then she looked at her hand. The spunk on her fingers had dried as fine as pretty lace; she rubbed at it, and it became plain white flakes that drifted to the ground and were lost.

He had to be home by seven o'clock, and it was already half-past four. They strolled to the little bridge again, and stood looking down into the water. They wandered back to the ruined mill; he picked up a piece of broken glass and cut their initials into the plaster, alongside the dirty messages. RN, VP, and a heart with an arrow.

But when he'd thrown the glass away, he looked at his watch.

'Better get going, I suppose.'

They went back to the car. She shook out the rug, and he folded it up and put it away, with the beakers, in the boot. Where the rug had been there was a square of flattened grass. It seemed a shame, in so lovely a place: she went over it, kicking the grass back up.

The car had been sitting in the sun all this time. She climbed in, and almost burnt her leg on the hot leather seat. Reggie got in beside her and gave her his handkerchief-spread it out beneath the crook of her knees, to keep her from burning.

When he had done it, he bent forward and kissed her thigh. She touched his head: the dark, oiled curls; the white scalp showing palely through. She looked at the lush green clearing again and said softly, 'I wish we could stay here.'

He let his head drop until it was resting in her lap. 'So do I,' he said. The words were muffled. He twisted round, to meet her gaze. 'You know- You know I hate it, don't you? You know, if I could have done it differently-? All of it, I mean.'

She nodded. There was nothing to say, that they hadn't said before. He kept his head in her lap a moment longer, then kissed her thigh again and straightened up. He turned the key, and the engine rumbled into life. It seemed horribly loud, in the silence-just as the silence had seemed weird and wrong to them when they'd first arrived.

He turned the car, drove slowly back up the bumping track, and rejoined the road they'd come out on; they went past the cheese-coloured cottage without slowing down, then picked up the main road to London. The traffic was much heavier now. People were coming back, like them, from afternoons out. The speeding cars were noisy. The sun was in front of them, making them squint: every so often they'd make a turn, or pass through trees, and lose it for a minute; then it would reappear, bigger than before, pink and swollen and low in the sky.

The sun, and the warmth, and perhaps the gin that she had drunk, made Viv feel dozy. She put her head against Reggie's shoulder and closed her eyes. He rubbed his cheek against her hair again, sometimes turning his head to kiss her. They sang together, sleepily, old-fashioned songs-'I Can't Give You Anything But Love', and 'Bye Bye Blackbird'.

No-one here can love or understand me.

Oh what hard luck stories they all hand me!

Make my bed and light the light,

I'll arrive late tonight.

Blackbird, bye bye.

When they reached the outskirts of London, she yawned and reluctantly straightened up. She got out her compact and powdered her face, redid her lipstick. The traffic seemed worse than ever, suddenly. Reggie tried a different route, through Poplar and Shadwell, but that was bad too. Finally they got caught in a jam at Tower Hill. She saw him looking at his watch, and said, 'Let me out here.' But he kept saying, 'Just give it a second.' He hated to give way to other drivers. 'If that little twerp in front would just- Christ! It's blokes like him who-'

The car moved forward. Then they got in another jam on Fleet Street, going into the Strand. He looked for a way to get out of it, but the side-streets were blocked by drivers with the same idea. He beat his fingers on the steering-wheel, saying, 'Damn, damn.' He looked at his watch again.

Viv sat tensely, catching his mood, shrinking down a little in her seat in case someone should spot her; but thinking of the place in the woods still, not wanting to give it up yet: the mill, the stream and bridge, the hush of it. It ain't Piccadilly… Reggie had brushed out the car before they'd started back, getting out all the petals and bits of grass that had been shaken in from the hedges. He'd nudged at the butterfly with his fingers until it had quivered and fluttered away.

She turned her head and looked into the lighted windows of shops, at the boxes of mocked-up chocolates and fruits, at the perfume bottles and liquor bottles-the same kind of coloured water doing, probably, for 'Nights of Parma' and 'Irish Malt'. The car inched forward. They drew near a cinema, the Tivoli. There were people outside it, queuing for tickets, and she gazed rather wistfully across them, at the girls and their boyfriends, the husbands and wives. The cinema had coloured lights on it, and the lights seemed to shine more luridly, more luminously, for shining in the twilight rather than the dark. She saw odd little disconnected details: the glint of an earring, the gleam of a man's hair, the sparkle of crystal in the paving-stones.

Then Reggie braked and tooted his horn. Someone had sauntered across the road in front of him and moved casually on. He threw up his hands. 'Don't mind me, mister, will you? Jesus Christ!' He followed the sauntering figure with his gaze, looking disgusted; but then his face changed. The figure, in stepping on to the pavement, must have given something away. Reggie started to laugh. 'My mistake,' he said, nudging Viv. 'What do you think of that? It's not a mister, it's a miss.'

Viv turned to look-and saw Kay, in a jacket and trousers. She was drawing a cigarette from a case and, with a stylish, idle gesture, tapping it lightly against the silver before raising it to her lip…

'What the hell's the matter?' asked Reggie in amazement.

For Viv had cried out. Her stomach had contracted as if she'd been struck in it. She put up a hand to hide her face and, ducking further down in her seat, said to Reggie with awful urgency: 'Go on. Drive on!'

He gaped at her. 'What's the matter?'

'Just drive on, can't you? Please!'

'Drive on? Have you gone barmy?'

The way ahead was still jammed with cars. Viv moved about as if tormented. She looked back, towards Fleet Street. She said desperately, 'Go that way, can't you?'

'Which way?'

'The way we came.'

'The way we came? Are you-?' But now she'd actually grabbed the steering-wheel. 'Jesus!' said Reggie, pushing her hand away. 'All right. All right!' He looked over his shoulder and began, laboriously, to turn the car. The car behind gave a blast of its horn. The drivers heading for Ludgate Circus gazed at him as if he was a lunatic. He worked the gears, sweating and cursing, and slowly edged the car round.

Viv kept her head down; but looked back once. Kay had joined the line of people outside the cinema: she was holding a lighter to her cigarette, and the flame of it, springing up, through the twilight, lit her fingers and her face… Hush, Vivien, Viv remembered her saying. The memory was stark, after all this time-stark and terrible-the grip of her hand, the closeness of her mouth. Vivien, hush.

'Thank God for that!' said Reggie, when they were inching forwards again in the other direction. 'Talk about not drawing attention to ourselves. What on earth was all that for? Are you all right?'

She didn't answer. She'd felt the grinding of the gears, the lurching forwards and backwards of the car, in what seemed to be all her muscles and bones. She folded her arms across herself, as if to hold herself together.

'What is it?' asked Reggie.

'I saw someone I knew,' she said at last; 'that's all.'

'Someone you knew? Who was it?'

'Just someone.'

'Just someone. Well, I expect they got a bloody good look at you and me, too. Hell, Viv…'

He went grumbling on. She didn't listen. He stopped the car at last in some street near Blackfriars Bridge; she said she'd take a bus from there, and he didn't argue. He pulled up in a quiet-looking spot, and drew her to him so that they could kiss; afterwards he borrowed her handkerchief again and wiped his mouth. He wiped the sweat from his forehead, too, and, 'What a trip!' he said-as if the afternoon had been some sort of disaster; as if he'd forgotten, already, the stream and the ruined mill, the initials on the wall… She didn't care. The feel of his hand on her arm, of his lips against her mouth, was suddenly frightful. She wanted to get home, be on her own, away from him.

But as she opened her door he reached for her again. He'd put his hand into a pocket in the dashboard and was bringing something out. It turned out to be two tins of meat: one beef, and one pork.

She was so distracted, she started to take them. She opened her bag to put them away. But then something seemed to give way inside her, and she was suddenly furious. She pushed them back at him. 'I don't want them!' she said. 'Take them- Give them to your wife!'

The tins fell, and bounced from the seat. 'Viv!' said Reggie, astonished, hurt. 'Don't be like that! What have I done? What the hell's the matter? Viv!'

She got out, closed the door and walked away. He leaned across the seat and wound down the window, still calling her name-still saying, in amazement, 'What's the matter? What have I done? What-?' Then his voice began to grow hard-not so much, she thought, with anger, as with simple weariness. 'What the hell have I done, now?'

She didn't look back. She turned a corner, and the words faded. After that he must have started the engine again and driven off. She joined a queue at a bus-stop, and waited ten minutes for a bus; and he didn't come after her.

When she got home, she found the flat full of people. Her sister Pamela had come round, with her husband, Howard, and their three little boys. They'd come to bring Viv's father some tea. Pamela had warmed it up on the stove, and the narrow kitchen was stuffy and hot. There was washing draped on the laundry rack, hoisted up but dangling almost to the floor; Pamela must have done that, too. The wireless was on full-blast. Howard was sitting on the kitchen table. The two eldest boys were charging about, and Viv's father had the baby in his lap.

'Nice day?' asked Pamela. She was drying her hands, working the towel into the creases between her fingers. She looked Viv over. 'You've caught the sun. All right for some.'

Viv went to the sink and peered into her father's shaving mirror. Her face was pink and white, blotchy. She drew forward her hair. 'It was hot,' she said. 'Hello, Dad.'

'All right, love? How was your picnic?'

'It was OK. How's things, Howard?'

'All right, Viv. Doing our best, aren't we? How d'you like this weather? I tell you-'

Howard could never stop talking. The two boys were the same. They had things to show her: noisy little pop-guns; they put in the corks and fired them off. Her father followed the words on everybody's mouths-nodding, smiling, moving his own lips slightly; for he was awfully deaf. The baby was struggling in his arms, reaching for the pop-guns, wanting to get down. When Viv drew close her father held him out to her, glad to give him up. 'He wants you, love.'

But she shook her head. 'He's too big, that one. He weighs a ton.'

'Give him here,' said Pamela. 'Maurice- Howard, don't just bloody well sit there-!'

The racket was terrible. Viv said she was going to go and take her shoes and stockings off. She went into her bedroom and closed the door.

For a second she just stood, not knowing what to do with herself-thinking that she might start crying, be ill… But she couldn't start crying with her dad and her sister in the other room. She sat on the bed, then lay down with her hands on her stomach; lying down, however, made her feel worse. She sat up again. She got to her feet. She couldn't shake off the shock of it, the upset of it.

Hush, Vivien.

She took a step; then tilted her head, hearing a noise above the muffled din of the radio, thinking it might be Pamela or one of the boys, in the hall. But the noise turned out to be nothing. She stood undecided, for almost a minute, biting her hand…

Then she went quickly to her wardrobe and drew back its door.

The wardrobe was filled with bits of rubbish. There were some of Duncan 's old school-clothes there, hanging up beside her dresses; there were even two or three ancient frocks of her mother's, that her father had never wanted to throw away. Above the rail was a shelf, where she kept her sweaters. Behind the sweaters were photograph albums, old autograph books, old diaries, things like that.

She tilted her head, listening again for footsteps in the hall; then she reached into the shadows behind the albums and brought out a little tobacco tin. She brought it out as naturally as if she reached for it every day, when in fact she'd placed it there three years before and hadn't looked at it since. She'd pressed the lid down very tightly then, and now the joints in her wrists and fingers felt weak. She had to get a coin, and prise away at it with that. And when the lid was loosened she hesitated again-still listening out, anxiously, in case someone should come.

Then she drew the lid off.

Inside the tin was a small parcel of cloth. Inside the parcel of cloth was a ring: a plain gold ring, quite aged, and marked with dents and little scratches. She took it up, held it for a second in the palm of her hand; then slipped it on her finger and covered her eyes.

At ten to six, when the men who ran the candle-making machines turned off the pumps, the sudden silence in the factory made your ears ring. It was like coming out of water. The girls at Duncan 's bench took it as a signal to start getting ready to go home: they got out their lipsticks and their compacts and things like that. The older women started rolling cigarettes. Len took a comb from his trouser pocket and ran it through his hair. He wore his hair a bit spivvily, swept back behind his ears. When he put the comb away he caught Duncan 's eye, and leaned forward.

'Have a guess what I'll be doing tonight,' he said, with a glance down the bench. He lowered his voice. 'I'm taking a girl to Wimbledon Common. She's stacked like this.' He gestured with his hands, then rolled his eyes and gave a whistle. 'Oh, mama! She's seventeen. She's got a sister, too. The sister's a looker, but got less up top… What do you think? You doing anything tonight?'

'Tonight?' said Duncan.

'Want to come along? The sister's a heart-throb, I'm telling you. What kind do you like? I know loads of girls. Big ones, little ones. I could fix you up, like that!' Len snapped his fingers.

Duncan didn't know what to say. He tried to picture a crowd of girls. But each one was like the little figure of wax that Len had made earlier, with curves and juts and waving hair, and a rough blank face. He shook his head, beginning to smile.

Len looked disgusted. 'You're missing out, I swear to God. This girl's a stunner. She's got a bloke, but he's in the army. She's used to doing it regular and she's feeling the pinch. I tell you, if the sister wasn't so friendly I'd be after her myself-'

He went on like that until the factory whistle sounded; then, 'Well, it's your funeral,' he said, getting to his feet. 'You think of me, that's all, at ten o'clock tonight!' He gave Duncan a wink of his brown gipsy eye, then hurried away-lurching a little from side to side, like a stout old lady; for his left leg was short, and fused at the knee.

The girls and the women went off quickly, too. They called goodbye as they went: 'Ta ta, Duncan!' 'So long, love!' 'See you Monday, Duncan!'

Duncan nodded. He couldn't bear the mood of the factory at this time of the day-the forced, wild jollity, the dash for the exit. Saturday nights were worst of all. Some people actually ran, to be first out through the gates. The men who had cycles made a sort of race of it: the yard, for ten or fifteen minutes, was like a sink with its plug pulled. He always found a reason to linger or dawdle. Tonight he got a broom, and swept up the parings of wax and the cuttings of wick from the floor beneath his stool. Then he walked very slowly to the locker-room and got his jacket; he visited the lavatory and combed his hair. When he went outside he'd taken so long, the yard was almost deserted: he stood for a moment on the step, getting used to the feel of space and the change of temperature. The Candle Room was kept cool because of the wax, but the evening was warm. The sun was sinking in the sky, and he had a vague, unhappy sense that time had passed-real time, proper time, not factory time-and he had missed out on it.

He had just put down his head and started to make his way across the yard when he heard his name called: 'Pearce! Hi, Pearce!' He looked up-his heart giving a thump inside his chest, because he'd already recognised the voice, but couldn't believe it. Robert Fraser was there, at the gate. He looked as though he'd just come running up. He was hatless, as Duncan was. His face was pink, and he was smoothing back his hair.

Duncan quickened his pace and went over to him. His heart was still lurching about. He said, 'What are you doing here? Have you been here all afternoon?'

'I came back,' said Fraser breathlessly. 'I thought I'd missed you! I heard the whistle go when I was still three streets away… You don't mind? After I'd gone this morning I thought how crazy it was, that you were here and- Well. Do you have an hour? I thought we could go for a drink. I know a pub, right on the river.'

'A pub?' said Duncan.

Fraser laughed, seeing his expression. 'Yes. Why not?'

Duncan hadn't been to a pub in ages, and the thought of going inside one now, with Fraser-of sitting at a table at Fraser's side, drinking beer, like an regular chap-was tremendously exciting, but alarming too. He was thinking, as well, of Mr Mundy, who would be waiting for him at home. He pictured the table set for tea: the knives and forks put neatly out, the salt and pepper, the mustard already mixed in its pot…

Fraser must have seen the look of indecision in his face. He said, as if disappointed, 'You've got other plans. Well, never mind. It was just a chance. Which way are you going? I could walk with you-'

'No,' said Duncan quickly. 'It's all right. If it's just for an hour-'

Fraser clapped him on the arm. 'Good man!'

He led Duncan south, towards Shepherd's Bush Green: the opposite direction to the one which Duncan would normally have taken. He walked loosely, easily, with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders back, and now and then he jerked his head to keep the hair out of his eyes. His hair seemed very fair with the evening sunlight on it; his face was still pink and lightly sweating. When they'd picked their way through the worst of the traffic he got out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead and the back of his neck, saying, 'I need a drink! I need several drinks, in fact. I've been out at Ealing since two o'clock, putting together a humorous piece on pig farming. My photographer spent more than an hour trying to coax a whimsical expression out of a sow. I tell you, Pearce, the next time I see a pig it had better be on a plate and have sage and onion coming out of its ears…'

He kept talking as they walked. He told Duncan about some of the other writing jobs he'd recently been sent on: a beautiful baby competition; a haunted house. Duncan listened just closely enough to be able to nod and laugh when he was meant to. The rest of the time he was looking Fraser over, getting used to the amazing sight of him on a street, in ordinary clothes… But Fraser must have been doing something similar, for after a while he stopped talking and caught Duncan 's eye, looking almost rueful.

'This is bloody queer, isn't it? I keep expecting Chase or Garnish to appear and start barking at us. “Keep in!” “Fall Back!” “Stand to your doors!” I saw Eric Wainwright last year. You remember him? He saw me, too, I know he did-but cut me dead. He was in Piccadilly, with some awful tart of a girl. I ran into that prig Dennis Watling, too, a couple of months ago, at a political meeting. He was going on about prison at the top of his voice-as if he'd spent twelve years there, instead of twelve months. I think he was sorry to see me turn up. I think he thought I stole his thunder…'

They were passing through Hammersmith now, crossing cheerless residential streets; soon, however, at Fraser's direction, they made a turn. The feel of the area began to change. The houses were replaced, here and there, by bigger buildings, warehouses and works; the air smelt sourer-dark and vinegary. The dirt surface of the road fell away, exposing cobbles, and the cobbles were slippery, as if with grease. Duncan didn't know this area at all. Fraser stepped on, in his confident way, and he had to hurry to keep up. He suddenly felt almost nervous. What on earth am I doing here? he thought. He looked at Fraser and saw a stranger. The preposterous idea came to him that Fraser might be mad; that he might have lured Duncan here and be meaning to kill him. He didn't know why Fraser would want to do such a thing, but his mind ran on with the idea, extravagantly. He pictured his own body, strangled or stabbed. He wondered who might find it. He thought of his father and Viv, being visited by policemen; being told that he had been found in this queer place, and never knowing why…

Then all at once they turned again and emerged from shadow, and were at the river. Here was the pub that Fraser had been making for: a wooden, wonderfully quaint-looking building that made Duncan think, at once, of Dickens, of Oliver Twist. He was enchanted with it. He forgot all his anxiety about being stabbed or strangled. He stopped, put his hand on Fraser's arm, and said, 'But, it's lovely!'

'You think so?' said Fraser, grinning at him again. 'I thought you'd like it. The beer's not bad, either. Come on.' He led Duncan through the narrow, crooked little doorway.

Inside, the place was not quite so charming as its exterior promised; it had been done up like an ordinary public bar, and there were nonsensical things on the walls, horse-brasses and warming-pans and bellows. It was also, already, at half-past six, rather crowded. Fraser pushed his way to the bar and bought a four-pint jug of beer. He gestured to doors at the back of the room, which opened on a pier, overlooking the river; but the pier was busier, even, than the bar. He and Duncan turned around and made their way back through the crush of people and went out again to the street. There was a set of river-stairs there. Fraser stood at the top and looked over. There was plenty of room, he said, down on the beach. 'The tide's right out. It's perfect. Come on.'

They climbed down the steps, going carefully because of the jug of beer and the glasses. The beach was muddy, but the mud had had the afternoon sun on it and was more or less dry. Fraser found a spot at the base of the wall: he took off his jacket and spread it out, and the two of them sat on it, side by side, their shoulders almost touching. The wall was warm, and stained from the Thames: you could see very clearly the line, about six feet up, where the greenish stain of the water gave way to the grey of permanently exposed stone. But the tide, at the moment, was low; the river looked narrow-absurdly narrow, as if you could very easily just nip across, on tiptoe, from this side to the other. Duncan screwed up his eyes, making the view grow blurry; imagining for a moment the water rushing in, swallowing him up. The wall was warm against his back, and he could just feel the nudging of Fraser's arm against his own, as Fraser undid his cuffs and rolled up his sleeves.

Fraser poured out beer. 'Here's yours,' he said, lifting his glass. He drained it in three or four gulps, then wiped his mouth. 'Christ! That's better, isn't it?' He poured out more, and drank again.

Then he put his hand into his pocket and drew out a pipe and a pouch of tobacco. As Duncan watched, he began the business of filling the pipe up-teasing out strands of tobacco with his long brown fingers, then thumbing them firmly into the bowl. He caught Duncan 's eye, and smiled. 'A bit different to the old days, eh? It's the first thing I bought when I got out.' He put the stem of the pipe to his mouth, then struck a match and held the flame of it to the bowl; his throat tighened as he sucked, and his cheeks went in and out, in and out-like the sides, Duncan thought, of a hot-water bottle; or, if you wanted to be more romantic about it, like a Spanish wineskin. He watched the blueish smoke rise up from Fraser's mouth and be snatched away by breezes.

For a while they just sat, drinking their beer-shading their eyes to look at the sun, which seemed fantastically pink and swollen in the late summer sky. The heat of it brought out the stink of the river and the beach, but it was hard to mind that in a place like this, there was too much glamour to the scene. Duncan thought of sailors, smugglers, lightermen, jolly jack tars… Fraser laughed. 'Look at those lads,' he said.

A group of boys had appeared, further along the beach. They had taken off their shirts, their shoes and socks, rolled up their trousers, and were running to the water. They ran in that shrinking, girlish way that even grown-up men must run across pointed stones; and when they reached the river they began to splash and lark about. They were young-much younger than Duncan and Fraser, perhaps fourteen or fifteen. Their hands and feet were too big for their bodies, which were all very slender and slight. They looked as though they had too much life in them-that the life was rushing about inside them, giving them awkward angles and tilts.

The people drinking out on the pier at the back of the pub had seen the boys too, and started to call encouragement. The boys began to splash mud instead of water; one fell right in, and emerged quite black, like a thing of clay-like some weird sort of mannequin, meant to be paraded about the streets. He waded further out, then plunged head first into the water and came up clean again, shaking the river from his hair.

Fraser laughed and leaned forward. He put his hand to his mouth and cheered, like the people on the pier. He seemed as full of life as the boys themselves, his bare lower arms very tanned, his long hair bouncing about his brow.

After a minute he sat back, smiling. He drew on his pipe again, then struck another match and held it to the bowl, cradling the flame. But he looked at Duncan as he did it, from beneath his slightly lowered brows; and as soon as the tobacco was properly re-lit and the match shaken out, he took the pipe from his lips and said, 'Wasn't it queer, my running into you at the factory like that?'

Duncan 's heart sank. He didn't answer. Fraser went on, 'I've been thinking about it all day. It's just, not at all the sort of place I'd have expected to find you working.'

'Isn't it?' said Duncan, lifting his glass.

'Of course it isn't! Doing work like that, amongst people like that? The place is only one step up from a charity, isn't it? How can you stand it?'

'Everybody else there stands it. Why shouldn't I?'

'You really don't mind it?'

Duncan thought it over. 'I don't like the smells much,' he said at last. 'They seep into your clothes. And sometimes you get a headache, from all the noise; or your eyes go funny, because of the belt.'

Fraser frowned. 'That wasn't what I meant, exactly,' he said.

Duncan knew that it wasn't what he'd meant. But he lifted a shoulder, and went on in the same light tone, 'It's easy work. It's not so different from sewing canvas, actually… And it lets you think of other things. I like that.'

Fraser still looked baffled. 'You wouldn't rather do something a little more-well-a little more inspiring?'

That made Duncan snort. 'It doesn't matter what I'd rather. Can't you just imagine the look on the face of the DPA man, if I'd said I'd rather this or I'd rather that? I'm lucky to have any job at all; even a pretend one. It was different for you. If you were like me-if you had my sort of past, I mean-' He couldn't be bothered. He began to pick and prise at the surface of the beach: at the stones and bits of broken china, the oyster shells and bones. 'I don't want to talk about it,' he said, when he saw Fraser still waiting. 'It's boring. Tell me, instead, what you've been doing.'

'I want to know about you, first.'

'There's nothing to know. You know it all, already!' He smiled. 'I mean it. Tell me where you've been. You wrote me a letter, once, from a train.'

'Did I?'

'Yes. Just after you'd got out. Don't you remember? Of course, they wouldn't let me keep it; I read it, though, about fifty times. Your handwriting was all over the place, and the paper had a mark on it-you said it was onion-juice.'

'Onion juice!' said Fraser thoughtfully. 'Yes, now I remember. A woman on the train had an onion, and it was the first any of us had seen in about three years. Someone got out a knife and we cut it up and ate it raw. It was glorious!' He laughed, and drank more of his beer, his adam's apple leaping like a fish in his throat…

The train, he said, must have been the one he'd taken to Scotland; he'd been at a sort of logging-camp up there, with other COs, right until the end of the war. 'I came down to London after that,' he said, 'and got some work with a refugee charity-sorting out people who'd just got over here, finding them houses, getting their children into schools.' He shook his head, thinking about it. 'The things I heard would make your hair curl, Pearce. Stories of people who'd lost everything. Russians, Poles, Jews; stories of the camps- I couldn't believe it. What you've read in the papers is nothing, nothing at all… I did it for a year. That was as long as I could stand it. Any more of it, and I think I would have finished up wanting to blow my own brains out!'

He smiled-then realised what he'd said, caught Duncan 's eye, and blushed; and at once started talking again, to cover the blunder up… He'd been at the charity, he said, until the previous Autumn; then he'd started to try his hand at journalism, with a view to writing for political magazines. A friend of his had got him the 'hack job' he was doing now; he was sticking with it in the hope that something more serious would come along. He'd been involved with a girl, for a month or two, but it hadn't worked out-he coloured again as he told Duncan that. She'd been one of the other people, he said, at the charity for refugees…

He spoke seriously, fluently-like a commentator on the radio. His well-bred accent was very marked, and once or twice Duncan found himself almost wincing, knowing that the accent must be carrying across the beach, reaching the ears of other drinkers. He began to look at Fraser and, as he had before, to see him as a stranger. He couldn't imagine the life that Fraser had had, in the logging-camp in Scotland and then in London, with a girl; he could only really picture him, still, as he'd used to see him every day, in the small chill cell at Wormwood Scrubs, with the coarse prison blanket over his shoulders, mopping up his cocoa with his breakfast bread, or standing at the window, his lean white face lit up by moonlight or by coloured flares in the sky…

He gazed down into his glass, then became aware that Fraser had fallen silent and was watching him.

'I know what you're thinking,' Fraser said, when he looked up. He'd lowered his voice, and seemed self-conscious. 'You're wondering how it was for me, working with those refugees, listening to the stories I had to hear-knowing other men had fought while I'd done nothing…' He threw a stone, so that it bounced across the beach. 'It made me sick, if you want to know. Sick with myself-not because I'd objected; but because objection hadn't been enough. Sick because I hadn't tried harder, hadn't tried to find other ways-and hadn't made other people try to find them with me-earlier in the war. Sick, for being healthy. Sick, simply, for being alive…' He blushed again, and looked away. He said, more quietly than ever, 'I thought of you, as it happens.'

'Me!'

'I remembered-well, things you'd said.'

Duncan gazed down into his glass again. 'I thought you'd forgotten all about me.'

Fraser moved forward. 'Don't be an ass! My time's been taken up, that's all. Hasn't yours been?'

Duncan didn't answer. Fraser waited, then turned away as if irritated. He drank more of his beer, then went back to fiddling with his pipe, sucking at the stem, making his cheeks like wineskins again.

He's wishing he'd never asked me here, thought Duncan, prising at a stone. He's wondering why he did. He's working out how soon he can get rid of me… He thought again of Mr Mundy, waiting at home, with the tea ready; looking at the clock; perhaps opening the front door to gaze anxiously down the street…

He became aware, once again, that Fraser was watching him. He looked round, and their gazes met. Fraser smiled and said, 'I'd forgotten how inscrutable you can be, Pearce. I'm used to fellows, I suppose, who do nothing but talk.'

'I'm sorry,' said Duncan. 'We can go, if you like.'

'For God's sake, I didn't mean that! I just- Well, won't you tell me anything about yourself? I've been going on like a lunatic, while you've hardly said a word. Don't you- Don't you trust me?'

'Trust you!' said Duncan. 'It isn't that. It's nothing like that. There's nothing to tell, that's all.'

'You've tried that once. It won't wash, Pearce! Come on.'

'There's nothing to say!'

'There must be something. I don't even know where you live! Where do you live? Up near that factory of yours?'

Duncan moved uncomfortably. 'Yes.'

'In a house? In rooms?'

'Well,' said Duncan. He moved again; but could see no way out of it… 'In a house,' he admitted, after a moment, 'up in White City.'

Fraser stared, just as Duncan had known he would. ' White City? You're joking! So close to the Scrubs? I wonder you can stand it! Fulham was near enough for me, I don't mind telling you. White City…' He shook his head, unable to believe it. 'But, why there? Your family-' He was thinking back. 'They used to live in-where was it? Streatham?'

'Oh,' said Duncan automatically, 'I don't live with them.'

'You don't? Why not? They've looked after you all right, haven't they? You've sisters, haven't you? One in particular- What was her name? Valerie? Viv!' He pulled at his hair. 'God, it's all coming back. She used to visit. She was good to you. She was better to you than my bloody sister was to me, anyway! Isn't she good to you, still?'

'It isn't her,' said Duncan. 'It's the others. We never got on, even before- Well, you know. When I got out it was worse than ever. My oldest sister's husband hates my guts. I heard him talking about me once, to one of his friends. He called me- He called me Little Lord Fauntleroy. He calls me Mary Pickford, too.-Don't laugh!' But he began to laugh, himself.

'I'm sorry,' said Fraser, still smiling. 'He sounds like a regular charmer.'

'He's the sort of person, that's all, who can't bear it when people are different to him. They're all like that. But Viv isn't. She understands-well, that things aren't perfect. That people aren't perfect. She-' He hesitated.

'She what?' asked Fraser.

They were recapturing some of their old closeness. Duncan lowered his voice. 'Well, she's seeing some man.' He glanced around. 'A married man. It's been going on for ages. I never knew, when I was inside.'

Fraser looked thoughtful. 'I see.'

'Don't look like that! She isn't a- Well, she isn't a tart, or whatever you're thinking.'

'I'm sure she isn't… Still, I'm sorry to hear it, somehow. I remember her; I remember liking the look of her. And these things, you know, hardly ever turn out well-especially for the woman.'

Duncan shrugged. 'It's their business, isn't it? What does “turning out well” mean? Do you mean, being married? If they were married they'd probably hate each other.'

'Perhaps… But, what's the man like? What kind of bloke is he? Have you met him?'

Duncan had forgotten this way Fraser had, of catching hold of a subject and niggling away at it, just for the pleasure of thinking it through. He said, more reluctantly, 'He's some sort of salesman, that's all I know. He gets her tins of meat. He gets her loads, all the time. She can't take them home, my dad would wonder. She gives them to me and Uncle Horace-'

He stopped, in confusion and embarassment at what he'd just said. Fraser didn't notice; he latched on to Duncan 's words instead.

'Your uncle,' he said. 'That's right, Mrs Alexander mentioned him, at the factory. She said what a wonderful nephew you are, or something like that.' He smiled. 'So your family isn't quite so bad as you paint it, after all… Well, I'd like to meet your uncle, Pearce. I'd like to meet Viv, too. I'd certainly like to see where you live. Will you let me come and visit you, some other time? For we- Well, there's nothing to stop us from being friends again, is there? Now that we've hooked up together like this?'

Duncan nodded; but didn't trust himself to speak. He finished the beer that was in his glass, then turned his head-imagining the look that he knew would appear on Fraser's face, if he was ever to go home with Duncan and see Mr Mundy there…

He went back to picking at the litter of things on the beach. Soon his eye was drawn by something in particular, and he prised it up. It turned out, as he'd thought, to be the stem and part of the bowl of an old clay pipe. He showed it to Fraser, then started picking the mud from it with a piece of wire. Partly to change the subject he said, as he did it, 'There might have been a man here, three hundred years ago, smoking tobacco just like you. Isn't that a funny thought?'

Fraser smiled. 'Isn't it?'

Duncan held the pipe up and studied it. 'I wonder what that man's name was. Doesn't it torment you, that we'll never know? I wonder where he lived and what he was like. He didn't know, did he, that his pipe would be found by people like us, in 1947?'

'Perhaps he was lucky not to be able to imagine 1947.'

'Maybe someone will find your pipe, three hundred years from now.'

'Not a chance of it!' said Fraser. 'I'd lay a thousand pounds to a penny that my little pipe, and everything else, will be burnt to cinders by then…' He finished his beer, and got to his feet.

'Where are you going?' Duncan asked him.

'To get more beer.'

'It's my turn.'

'It doesn't matter. I drank most of this jug. I need the lavatory, too.'

'Shall I come with you?'

'To the lavatory?'

'To the bar!'

Fraser laughed. 'No, stay here. Someone will take our place. I won't be long.'

He'd started to move off across the beach as he was speaking, beating idly with the empty jug against his thigh. Duncan watched him climb the water-stairs and disappear over the top.

The pub, it was true, was more crowded than before. People had brought their drinks out, as Fraser and Duncan had, to the street and the beach; a few men and women were sitting or perching on the wall above Duncan 's head. He hadn't realised, before, that they were there. He didn't like to think that they were looking down at him, or might have been listening to the things he had been saying…

He piece of clay pipe in his pocket; then gazed out at the river. The tide was turning, and the surface of the water seemed to tussle with itself, like snakes. The boys who'd been splashing about in the mud had all sat down at the edge of the shore; but now they rose and came back up the beach, driven in by the tide. They looked younger than ever. They were grinning, but also shivering, like dogs. They walked more wincingly, too: Duncan imagined the soles of their feet having softened in the water, getting cut by stones and shells. He tried to stop himself looking at them as they climbed the water-stairs; he had a sudden horror of seeing a boy's white foot with blood on it.

He lowered his head, and started picking at the beach again. He found a comb with broken teeth. He prised up a shard of china from a cup, its dainty handle still attached.

And then-he didn't know why; it might have been that someone spoke his name, and the words reached his ears through some freak lull in the sounds of voices, laughter, water-but he turned his head towards the pier again, and his gaze met that of a bald-headed man who was sitting with a woman at one of its tables. Duncan knew the man at once. He came from Streatham; he lived in a street close to the one in which Duncan had grown up. But now, instead of nodding to Duncan, instead of smiling or lifting his hand, the bald-headed man said something to the woman he was with, something like, 'Yes, that's him all right'; and the two of them stared at Duncan, with an extraordinary mixture of malevolence, avidity and blankness.

Duncan quickly looked away. When he glanced back, and found the man and woman still watching, he changed his pose-turned his head, moved his legs, shifted his weight to his other shoulder. But he was still horribly aware of being observed, being discussed, sized-up, disliked. Look at him, he imagined the man and woman saying. He thinks he's all right, he does. He thinks he's just like you and me. For he tried to picture himself as he must appear to them; and he saw himself, without Fraser beside him, as a kind of oddity or fraud… He turned his head again, more slyly-and yes, there they were, still watching him: they were lifting drinks and cigarettes, looking at him now with the empty yet bullying expressions of people who have settled down for a night at the cinema… He closed his eyes. Someone above him gave a raucous laugh. It seemed to him that the laughter could only be directed at him-that, one by one, the drinkers outside the pub were nudging their neighbours, nodding and smiling, spreading the story that Pearce was here-Duncan Pearce was here, drinking beer on the beach, just as if he had as perfect a right to do it as anybody else!

If only Fraser would come! How long had it been, since he'd gone off with the jug? Duncan wasn't sure. It seemed like ages. He'd probably got talking to someone-some ordinary man. He was probably flirting with the barmaid. And suppose, for some reason, he never came back? How would Duncan get home? He wasn't sure he could remember the way. His mind was getting blank or dark-he tried to concentrate, and it was just as though he was blindfolded and putting out his foot, and could feel soft ground, crumbling away… Now he began really to panic. He opened his eyes and looked down at his hands-for he'd once heard a doctor say that looking at your own hands, when you were frightened, could make you feel calmer. But he'd grown too conscious of himself: his hands seemed odd to him, like a stranger's. His whole body felt queer and wrong: he was aware all at once of his heart, his lungs; it began to seem to him that if he was to draw his attention away from those organs for a single instant, they'd fail. He sat on the beach with his eyes shut tight, sweating and almost panting under the frightful burden of having to breathe, press blood through his veins, keep the muscles in his arms and legs from flying into a spasm.

In what might have been five minutes more-or what might easily have been ten or even twenty-Fraser came back. Duncan heard the chink of the full jug being set down on the stones, then felt the touch of Fraser's thigh against his own as Fraser sat.

'It's crazy in there,' he was saying. 'It's like a scrum. I- What's the matter?'

Duncan couldn't answer. He opened his eyes and tried to smile. But even the muscles of his face were against him: he felt his mouth twist, and must have looked ghastly. Fraser said again, more urgently, 'What is it, Pearce?'

'It's nothing,' said Duncan at last.

'Nothing? You look like absolute hell. Here.' He passed Duncan his handkerchief. 'Wipe your face, you're sweating… Is that better?'

'Yes, a bit.'

'You're trembling like a leaf! What's it all about?'

Duncan shook his head. He said unsteadily, 'It'll sound stupid.' His tongue was sticking to his mouth.

'I don't care about that.'

'It's just, there's a man over there-'

Fraser turned to look. 'What man? Where?'

'Don't let him see you! He's over there, on the pier. A man from Streatham. A bald-headed man. He's been looking at me, him and his girl. He- He knows all about me.'

'What do you mean? That you've-been inside?'

Duncan shook his head again. 'Not just that. About why I was in there. About me and-and Alec-'

He couldn't go on. Fraser watched him a little longer, then turned and gazed again at the figures on the pier. Duncan wondered what the man would do when he saw Fraser looking. He imagined him making some awful gesture-or simply nodding at Fraser and smiling…

But after a moment, Fraser turned back. He said gently, 'There's no-one looking, Pearce.'

'There must be,' said Duncan. 'Are you sure?'

'Quite sure. No-one's looking at all. See for yourself.'

Duncan hesitated, then put his hand across his eyes and peered between his fingers… And it was true. The man and the woman had disappeared and a quite different couple were sitting at their table. This man had sandy-coloured hair; he was pouring crumbs into his mouth from a bag of crisps. The woman was yawning: patting at her lips with a plump white hand. The rest of the drinkers were talking amongst themselves, or gazing back into the bar, or out at the water-gazing anywhere, in fact, but at Duncan.

Duncan let out his breath, and his shoulders sank. He didn't know what to think now. For all he knew, he might have imagined the whole thing… He didn't care. His panic had drained him, emptied him out. He wiped his face again and said shakily, wretchedly, 'I ought to go home.'

'In a minute,' said Fraser. 'Drink some of this beer, first.'

'All right. But you'll-you'll have to pour it.'

Fraser lifted the jug and filled their glasses. Duncan took a gulp, and then another. He had to hold his glass with two hands, to keep it from spilling… In time, however, he began to feel calmer. He wiped his mouth and glanced at Fraser.

'I suppose you must think me a bit of a fool.'

'Don't talk tripe! Don't you remember-?'

Duncan spoke over his words. 'I'm not used, you see, to going about like this, on my own. I'm not like you.'

Fraser shook his head, as if annoyed or exasperated. He looked at Duncan, then looked away. He seemed embarassed about something. He shifted his pose, drank more of his beer… Finally he said, very awkwardly, 'I wish, Pearce, that I'd kept in touch with you. I wish I'd written, more than I did. I- I let you down. I see that now, and I'm sorry. I let you down badly. But that year, in the Scrubs: once I'd got out, it seemed-I don't know-it seemed like a dream…' He met Duncan 's gaze, his eyelids fluttering. 'Do you understand me? It seemed like someone else's life, not mine. It was just as though I'd been plucked right out of time-then dropped back in it, and had to take up where I left off.'

Duncan nodded. He said slowly, 'It wasn't like that, for me. When I came out, everything was different. Everything was changed. I'd always known it would be, and it was. People said, “You'll do all right.” But I knew I never would.'

They sat without speaking, as if both exhausted. Fraser got out his matches and his pipe-and now the flame showed brightly, the day was darkening. He rolled down his sleeves and fastened his cuffs, and Duncan felt him shiver.

They watched the movement of the river. The surface of the water, in just a few minutes, had lost its hectic, restless look. The shore had narrowed further already, the water creeping forwards as if, like a cat's rough tongue, it was wearing the land away with every stroke and lap. Then a tug went rapidly by, and made waves: they rushed and were sucked back, then rushed again; then wore themselves out and ran more feebly.

Fraser threw a stone. He said, 'How does Arnold have it? The eternal note of sadness-is it? And the something naked shingles of the world…' He passed his hand over his face, laughing at himself. 'Christ, Pearce, the moment I start quoting poetry, we're done for! Come on.' He levered himself up. 'Forget the beer, and let's go. I'll walk you home. Right to the door. And you can introduce me to your-Uncle Horace, was it?'

Duncan thought of Mr Mundy, pacing the parlour, coming limping to answer their ring… But he hadn't the energy, now, for fear or embarassment or anything like that. He got to his feet, and followed Fraser up the water-stairs; and they started off together-northwards, towards White City, through the steadily darkening streets.

3

'Don't you know the war's over?' the man behind the counter in a baker's shop asked Kay.

He said it because of her trousers and hair, trying to be funny; but she had heard this sort of thing a thousand times, and it was hard to smile. When he caught her accent, anyway, his manner changed. He handed over the bag, saying, 'There you are, Madam.' But he must have given some sort of look behind her back because, as she went out, the other customers laughed.

She was used to that, too. She tucked the bag under her arm and put her hands in her trouser pockets. The best thing to do was brazen it out, throw back your head, walk with a swagger, make a 'character' of yourself. It was tiring, sometimes, when you hadn't the energy for it; that's all.

Today, as it happened, her spirits were rather high. The idea had come to her, that morning, to pay a visit to a friend. She'd walked from Lavender Hill to Bayswater, and was now heading up the Harrow Road. Her friend, Mickey, worked in a garage there, as an attendant on the pumps.

Kay could see her in the forecourt of the garage as she drew closer: Mickey had set up a canvas chair, and was lounging in it reading a book. Her legs were spread out-for she was dressed, not exactly mannishly, as Kay was, but like a boy-mechanic, in dungarees and boots. Her hair was fair, the colour and texture of dirty rope; it was sticking up as if she had just got out of bed. As Kay watched, she licked a finger and turned a page. She didn't hear Kay coming, and Kay walked towards her with a queer sort of stirring in her heart. It was simply the pleasure of seeing a friend, after seeing, for weeks at a time, only strangers; that's all it was. But for a second Kay thought the feeling was going to expand up into her throat and make her cry. She imagined how ridiculous she'd look to Mickey, turning up out of the blue like this, in tears. And she thought seriously of giving the whole thing up-slipping away before Mickey should see her.

But then the feeling shrank back down again.

'Hello, Mickey,' she called blandly.

Mickey looked up, saw Kay, and laughed with pleasure. She laughed all the time, in an unforced, natural sort of way that people found awfully winning. Her voice was a throaty one, with a permanent cough in it. She smoked too much. 'Hey!' she said.

'What's the book?'

Mickey showed the cover. She read the books that people left in their cars, when they brought their cars to the garage to be fixed. This one was a paperback copy of Wells's The Invisible Man. Kay took it, and smiled. 'I read that,' she said, 'when I was young. Have you got to the bit where he makes the cat invisible, except for its eyes?'

'Yes, isn't it funny?' Mickey was rubbing her greasy palm on her dungarees, so that she could take Kay's hand. She was so small and slender, her hand was not much bigger than a child's. She tilted her head, half-closed one eye. She looked like the Artful Dodger. She said, 'I'd just about given up on you, I haven't seen you in so long! How are you keeping?'

'I thought it might be your lunch-break. Do you get a lunch-break? I brought you some buns.'

'Buns!' said Mickey, taking the bag and looking inside it. Her blue eyes widened. 'Jam ones!'

'With genuine saccharine.'

A car drew in. 'Hang on,' said Mickey. She put the buns down and went to speak to the driver; and after a second, began the business of filling up the car's tank. Kay took her place in the canvas chair, lifting the book and opening it at random.

“But you begin to realise now,” said the Invisible Man, “the full disadvantage of my condition. I had no shelter-no covering-to get clothing was to forgo all my advantage, to make of myself a strange and terrible thing. I was fasting; for to eat, to fill myself with unassimilated matter, would be to become grotesquely visible again.”

“I hadn't thought of that,” said Kemp.

Meanwhile, the pump had sprung into life and begun to throb and whine and click, and the smell of petrol, which had been faint before, grew heady. Kay put the book down and looked at Mickey. She was standing rather nonchalantly, one hand on the roof of the car, the other tense about the trigger of the petrol-gun, her eyes on the tumbling counters on the face of the machine. She was not quite handsome, but carried herself with a certain style; and it was extraordinary how many girls-even normal girls-could be intrigued and impressed by a pose like this.

The driver of this car, however, was a man. Mickey tapped the last few drops of petrol from the gun, screwed on the cap of his tank, took his coupons; and came sauntering back to Kay, pulling a face.

'No tip?' said Kay.

'He gave me threepence, and told me to buy a lipstick with it. His motor was rubbish, too. Wait here, will you? I'll talk to Sandy.'

She disappeared into the garage. When she came back a few minutes later she had taken off her dungarees to reveal ordinary blue slacks and a funny little Aertex shirt, full of creases and stains. She had washed her face and combed her hair. 'He's given me forty-five minutes. Shall we go to the boat?'

'Do we have time?' asked Kay.

'I think so.'

They went, as quickly as they could, down a couple of side-streets until they reached the Regent's Canal. A hundred yards along the tow-path there was a line of house-boats and barges. Mickey had lived here since before the start of the war. It was quite a little village. There were warehouses and boatyards all about it, but the residents were artists and writers as well as real bargees-all rather self-consciously 'interesting' and 'picturesque', Kay sometimes thought them; all rather overpleased with the figures they knew they cut to the people who lived in ordinary flats and houses. Still, perhaps that was fair enough. Mickey's boat-Irene-was a stubby little barge with a pointed prow, that always made Kay think of a clog. Its hull was tarred, and patched alarmingly. Every morning Mickey had to spend twenty minutes or more thrusting and drawing on the handle of a horrid little pump. Her WC was a bucket, set up behind a canvas screen. In winter the contents of the bucket could turn to ice.

But the interior of the boat was very charming. The walls were panelled with varnished wood, and Mickey had made shelves for ornaments and books. The lights were Tilly lamps, and candles in coloured shades. The galley kitchen was like a giant version of a child's pencil-box, with secret drawers and sliding panels. The plates and cups were kept in their places with bars and straps. Everything was fastened as if against the swell of a high sea; in fact, the roll of the surface of the canal was quite gentle, and only disconcerting if you were unused to it or had forgotten what to expect.

Kay always stooped a little, when she stood in Mickey's boat. If she straightened, the top of her head just brushed the ceiling. Mickey herself moved about with perfect ease and comfort-sliding back some of the panels in the galley to bring out tea, a tea-pot, two enamel mugs. 'I can't boil the water,' she said-the stove had gone out, and they hadn't time to relight it-'but I'll get some from the girl next door.'

She went off with the tea-pot in her hand, and Kay sat down. The boat rocked, bumping hollowly against the bank, as a series of barges went by. She heard the voices of men, unnervingly clear: '-up Dalston way. I swear to God! Going up and down, like a ruddy great monkey on a-'

Mickey returned with the water, and set out tin plates. Kay picked up her bun, then put it down again. She took out her cigarettes instead-but paused, with the lighter in her hand. She gestured to the stains on Mickey's shirt.

'I suppose it's all right to smoke around you? After all that prancing about, I mean, with the petrol-gun. You won't go up in a whoosh of flame or anything?'

'Not if you're careful,' said Mickey, laughing.

'Well, thank goodness for that. For I should hate it, you know, if you did.' She held the cigarettes out. 'Care for a tickler?'

Mickey took one. Kay lit it for her, then lit her own. Behind her head was a sliding window: she pushed it open, to draw off the smoke.

'How are things at Sandy 's?' she asked, turning back.

Mickey shrugged. She was only at the garage, really, because it was one of the few places a woman could work and wear trousers. She had to have some sort of job: she didn't, like Kay, have a wealthy family behind her, an income of her own. She'd begun to think, she told Kay now, of trying for a post as a chauffeur. She liked the idea of driving again, and of getting out of London…

They talked this over while they smoked. Mickey ate her bun, then opened the bag and ate another. Kay, however, left her own bun sitting in front of her, untasted; and Mickey said at last, 'Aren't you going to eat that?'

'Why? Do you want it?'

'That's not what I meant.'

'I've already eaten.'

'I bet you have. I know your meals. Tea and tobacco.'

'And gin, if I'm lucky!'

Mickey laughed again. The laugh became a cough. But, 'Eat it up,' she said, wiping her mouth. 'Go on. You're still too thin.'

'So what?' said Kay. 'Everybody's thin, aren't they? I'm in fashion, that's all.'

Actually the greasy, saccharine look of the bun had made her start to feel almost queasy; but now, for Mickey's sake, she picked the thing up and began to nibble at it. The sensation of the dough on her tongue and in her throat was horrible; but Mickey watched until she'd eaten it all.

'All right now, matron?'

'Not bad,' said Mickey, narrowing her eye, looking like the Artful Dodger again. 'Next time, I'll buy you a dinner.'

'You want to feed me up.'

'Why not? We could make a night of it, get a bit of a crowd together.'

Kay pretended to shudder. 'I'd be the skeleton at the feast. Besides-' she tossed her head like a debutante-'I'm awfully busy these days. I go out all the time.'

'You go to funny places.'

'I go to the cinema,' said Kay; 'there's nothing funny about that. Sometimes I sit through the films twice over. Sometimes I go in half-way through, and watch the second half first. I almost prefer them that way-people's pasts, you know, being so much more interesting than their futures. Or perhaps that's just me… But you can get up to all sorts at the movies; you take my word for it. You can even-'

'Even what?'

Kay hesitated. Even get up a woman, she'd been going to say, crudely; for one night recently at the cinema she'd got talking to a tipsy girl, and had finished by leading the girl into an empty lavatory and kissing her and feeling her up. The thing had been rather savagely done; she felt ashamed, thinking of it now. 'Even nothing,' she said flatly, at last. 'Even nothing… Anyway, you could always come and visit me.'

'At Mr Leonard's?' Mickey made a face. 'He gives me the creeps.'

'He's all right. He's a miracle worker. One of his patients told me. He cured her shingles. He could fix your chest.'

Mickey drew back, coughing again. 'No fear!'

'You dear butch thing,' said Kay. 'He wouldn't actually have to look at it. You just sit in a chair and he whispers at you.'

'He sounds bloody depraved. You've been there too long; you can't tell how queer it is any more… And what about that house? When's it going to fall down?'

'It's on its way,' said Kay, 'believe me. When the wind gets up, I can feel it swaying. I can feel it groaning. It's like being at sea. I think it's only thanks to Mr Leonard that it stays up at all. I think he keeps the place standing through sheer force of mind.'

Mickey smiled. But she was looking into Kay's face, and her gaze had grown serious. And when her smile had faded she said, in a different sort of voice, 'How much longer are you going to stay there, Kay?'

'Till the day it collapses, I hope!'

'I mean it,' said Mickey. She hesitated, as if thinking something over. Then, 'Listen,' she said, leaning forward. 'Why don't you come and live here with me?'

'Live here?' said Kay, surprised. 'On the Quaint Irene?' She glanced around. 'She's not much bigger than a shoe-box. That's all right for a little powder-monkey like you.'

'Just for a while,' said Mickey. 'If I get that driving job, I'd be away on overnights.'

'What about the rest of the time? Say you brought a girl back?'

'We could work something out.'

'Hang up a blanket? No fear! I might as well be back at boarding-school… Besides, I couldn't leave Lavender Hill. You don't know what it means to me. I'd miss Mr Leonard. I'd miss the little boy with his great big boot. I'd miss the Stanley Spencer couple! I've grown attached to the old place.'

'I know you have,' said Mickey. She said it in a way that meant: That's what bothers me.

Kay looked away. She'd been talking lightly all this time-putting on an act, trying to hide the fact that, as before, real emotion was rising up in her, making her embarassed and afraid. For here, she thought, was Mickey, on about a pound a week, ready to share it-just like that, at the drop of a hat, through simple kindness. And here was Kay herself, with money unspent, and with absolutely nothing wrong with her, living like a cripple, like a rat…

She moved forward and picked up her tea. She found, to her horror, that her hands were shaking. She didn't want to put the mug back down and draw attention to the tremor; she lifted it higher, and tried to meet it with her mouth. But the tremor grew worse. Tea spilled; she saw it stain one of Mickey's cushions. Abruptly, she set the mug down again and tried to mop up the worst of it with her handkerchief.

She caught Mickey's eye as she was doing it; and her shoulders sank. She leaned forward, putting her elbows on her knees, her face in her hands.

'Look at me, Mickey!' she said. 'Look at the creature I've become! Did we really do those things we did?-you and I, when the war was on? Sometimes I can't bring myself to get out of bed in the mornings. We carried stretchers, for God's sake! I remember lifting-' She spread her hands. 'I remember lifting the torso of a child… What the hell happened to me, Mickey?'

'You know what happened,' Mickey said softly.

Kay sat back and turned away, in disgust at herself. 'It's no more than happened to thousands of us. Who didn't lose someone, or something? I could walk on any street in London, stretch out my arm, touch a woman or a man who lost a lover, a child, a friend… But I- I can't get over it, Mickey. I can't get over it.' She laughed, unhappily. 'Get over it. What a funny phrase that is! As if one's grief is a fallen house, and one has to pick one's way over the rubble to the ground on the other side… I've got lost in my rubble, Mickey. I can't seem to find my way across it. I don't think I want to cross it, that's the thing. The rubble has all my life in it still-'

For a second she couldn't go on. She looked around the cabin of the boat; then spoke more quietly.

'Do you remember that night, when we all sat here? That night just before-? Sometimes I think about times like that. I bloody torture myself with thinking about times like that! Do you remember it?'

Mickey nodded. 'I remember it.'

'I'd been to that place in Bethnal Green. You made gin slings.'

'Gin gimlets.'

Kay looked up. 'Gin gimlets? Are you sure?' Mickey nodded. 'Weren't there lemons?'

'Lemons? Where the hell would we have got lemons? We had lime juice, remember, in a bottle of Binkie's?'

Kay did remember it, now. The fact that she'd misremembered before-misremembered to the extent that she'd been able to picture Mickey actually cutting up the lemons, squeezing out the juice-made her uneasy.

'Lime juice,' she said, frowning, 'in a bottle. Why should I have forgotten that?'

'Don't think about it, Kay.'

'I don't want to think about it! But I don't want to forget it, either. Sometimes I can think of nothing else but things like that. My mind has hooks in it. Little hooks-'

But now she sounded almost crazy. She turned her head again, and looked out of the window. The sunlight made patterns on the water. A slick of oil had colours in, silver and blue… She turned back into the cabin, and found Mickey checking her watch.

'Kay,' said Mickey, embarassed. 'I'm sorry, mate. I've got to get back to Sandy 's.'

'Of course you have.'

'Why don't you stay here till I get home?'

'Don't be silly. I'm all right, really. It's a bore, that's all.'

She finished her tea. Her hand was quite steady now. She brushed crumbs from her lap, got to her feet, and helped clear away the plates.

'What'll you do now?' Mickey asked her, as they made their way down the Harrow Road.

Kay became a debutante again. She made a flighty gesture. 'Oh, I've heaps of things.'

'Have you, really?'

'Yes, of course.'

'I don't believe you. Have a think about what I said-about coming to live with me. Will you? Or come out, some time! We could go for a drink. We could go to Chelsea. There's no-one there these days, the crowd's all changed-'

'All right,' said Kay.

She got out her cigarettes again, took one for herself, gave one to Mickey; and tucked another behind one of Mickey's boyish little ears. Mickey caught hold of her hand when she had done it, and gave it a squeeze; they stood for a second, smiling into each other's eyes.

They had kissed once, Kay remembered-years ago, and without success. They'd both been drunk. They'd ended up laughing. That's what happened, of course, when you were both, as it were, on the same side…

Mickey moved away. 'Ta-ta, Kay,' she said. Kay watched her running back to the garage. She saw her turn, once, to wave. Kay raised her hand, then started to walk, back in the direction of Bayswater.

She walked briskly, for as long as she thought that Mickey might be watching; but as soon as she'd turned a corner, she slowed her step. And when she got to Westbourne Grove and the street grew busy, she found a doorstep in the shadow of a broken wall, and sat down. She thought of what she'd said to Mickey, about standing in a crowd, stretching out her hand… And she studied the faces of the people as they passed, thinking, What did you lose? How about you? How do you bear it? What do you do?

'I knew that girl from Enfield was trouble the second she walked in,' Viv was saying, as she sprinkled Vim on the cloth. 'They always are, that brassy type.'

She and Helen had just been about to take their lunches out to the fire-escape when they'd spotted pencil-marks on the lavatory wall.

A long and thin goes right in

But a short and thick does the trick!

somebody had written, on the paint above the roller-towel. Helen had not, for a second, known where to look. Viv seemed hardly less embarassed. 'This is what comes,' she said now, rubbing madly, 'of advertising in those local magazines.'

She stepped back, flushed and blinking. The wall was pale where she had cleaned it, but the words thick and does the trick! still showed, scored faintly into the paint. She rubbed again, then she and Helen moved about, narrowing their eyes, holding their heads at different angles to the light… They became aware, all at once, of what they were doing. They looked at each other and started to laugh.

'Dear me,' said Helen, biting her lip.

Viv rinsed out the cloth and put away the Vim, her shoulders shaking. She dried her hands, then lifted her knuckles to her eyes, afraid for her mascara. 'Don't!' she said.

Still laughing, they opened the window and clambered out. They sat and unwrapped their sandwiches, sipped their tea and grew calmer at last; then caught one another's gaze and started laughing all over again.

Viv set down her spilling cup. 'Oh, what would the clients think?'

Her mascara had run after all. She got out a handkerchief, made a twist of it, put the twist to the tip of her tongue, then held up a mirror and widened her eyes, rubbing beneath them almost as savagely, Helen thought, as she'd rubbed at the marks on the lavatory wall. The blood, in rushing into her face, had made her seem youthful. Her hair was disarranged by laughter; she looked tousled, full of life.

But she tucked the handkerchief into her sleeve and picked up her sandwich; and her laughter faded into sighs. She put back a corner of the bread, and the sight of the vivid meat inside it-and the taste of it, when she'd bitten-seemed for some reason to subdue her. Her face lost its flush. Her eyes dried. She chewed very slowly, and finally put the sandwich down. She was wearing a cardigan over her dress, and began fastening up its buttons.

It was almost two weeks since that warm Saturday, when Helen had lain with Julia in Regent's Park. That had been the last warm day of the summer, though they hadn't known it then. The season had turned. The sun was moving in and out of clouds. Viv put back her head to look at the sky.

'Not quite so warm today,' she said.

'No, not quite,' said Helen.

'I suppose we'll all be complaining, soon, about the cold.'

Helen saw winter, drawing nearer, like a long dark tunnel on a railway line. She said, 'It won't be so cold as last year, will it?'

'I hope not.'

'It won't be, surely!'

Viv rubbed her arms. 'A man in the Evening Standard said our winters will go on getting colder and colder, and longer and longer; that in another ten years we'll all be living like Eskimos.'

'Eskimos!' said Helen-picturing fur hats and wide, friendly faces; quite fancying the idea.

'That's what he said. He said it was something to do with the angle of the earth-that we'd knocked it off-balance with all those bombs. It makes sense, if you think about it. He said it served us all right.'

'Oh,' said Helen, 'people in newspapers are always writing things like that. Do you remember someone, at the start of the war, saying the whole thing was a punishment on us for letting our king abdicate?'

'Yes!' said Viv. 'I always thought that was a bit hard on everyone in France and Norway and places like that. I mean, it wasn't their king, after all.'

She turned her head. The door to the wig-maker's downstairs had opened, and a man had come out into the yard with a waste-paper basket under his arm. The basket was filled to overflowing with dark fibres-a mixture, probably, of netting and hair. Viv and Helen watched him cross to a dustbin, lift its lid, and empty the mess of fibres into it. Then he wiped his hands, and went back in. He didn't look up. When the door was closed, Viv made a face.

But Helen was still thinking about the war. She took another little bite of her sandwich, then said, 'Isn't it odd, how everyone talks about the war as if it were a thing-oh, from years ago. It feels almost quaint. It's as though we all got together in private and said to each other, “Now don't, for God's sake, let's mention that!” When did that happen?'

Viv shrugged. 'We all got tired of it, I suppose. We wanted to forget it.'

'Yes, I suppose so. I never would have thought we'd all forget it, though, so quickly. When it was on- Well, it was the only thing, wasn't it? The only thing you talked about. The only thing that mattered. You tried to make other things matter, but it was always that, you always came back to that…'

'Imagine if it started again,' said Viv.

'Christ!' said Helen. 'What an awful thought! It'd be an end to this place, anyway. Would you go back to your old job?'

Viv considered it. She had worked at the Ministry of Food, just around the corner in Portman Square. 'I don't know,' she said. 'Maybe. It felt-important. I liked that. Even though all I was doing was typing, really… I had a good friend there: a girl called Betty; she was loads of fun. But she married a boy from Australia at the end of the war, and he took her back home… I envy her, now. If it really started again I might go into one of the services. I'd like to travel, get away.' She looked wistful. Then, 'How about you?' she asked Helen. 'Would you go back to your old job?'

'I suppose so, though I was glad enough to leave it. It was funny work-a bit like this, in a way: unhappy people all expecting impossible things. You tried to do your best for them, but you got tired; or you had things of your own to think about… I don't think I'd want to stay in London, though. London will get flattened, won't it, when the next war comes? But then, everywhere will get flattened. It won't be like last time. Even when things were so awful, right in the middle of the blitz, I wanted to stay-didn't you? I hadn't been here very long, but I felt a sort of-a sort of loyalty to the city, I suppose. I didn't want to let it down… It seems crazy, now! A loyalty to bricks and mortar! But then, of course, there were people I knew. I felt a loyalty to them, too. They were in London; and I wanted to be near them.'

'People like Julia?' asked Viv. 'Were you friends with her, then? Was she in London, too?'

'She was in London,' said Helen, nodding; 'but I only knew her at the end of the war. We shared a flat together, even then-a queer little flat, in Mecklenburgh Square. I remember that flat so vividly! All the mismatched bits of furniture.' She closed her eyes, recalling surfaces and scents. 'It had boards across its window. It was falling down, really. There was a man upstairs, who used to pace and make the floor creak.' She shook her head, opening her eyes. 'I remember it clearer than anywhere else I ever lived, I don't know why. We were only there for a year or so. For most of the war I was-' She looked away again; picked up her sandwich. 'Well, for most of it I was somewhere else.'

Viv waited. When Helen didn't go on she said, 'I lived in a boarding-house for Ministry girls. Down by the Strand.'

Helen looked up. 'Did you? I didn't know that. I thought you lived at home, with your father.'

'I did at weekends. But during the week they liked to have us there-so we could get to work if the railways were hit. It was an awful place. So many girls! Everyone running up and down the stairs. Everyone pinching your lipstick and your stockings. Or someone would borrow your blouse or something, and when you got it back it was a different colour or a different shape, they'd dyed it or taken the sleeves off!'

She laughed. She moved her feet to a higher step on the metal ladder-drew up her knees, tucked in her skirt, rested her chin upon her fists. Then her laughter, as it had before, faded. Her gaze grew distant, serious. Here comes that curtain, Helen thought… But instead Viv said, 'It's funny, thinking back. It's only a couple of years but, you're right, it seems ages away. Some things were easier, then. There was a way of doing things, wasn't there? Someone else had decided it for you, said that was the best way to do it; and that's what you did. It got me down, at the time. I used to look forward to peace, to all the things I'd be able to do then. I don't know what I thought those things would be. I don't know what I thought would be different. You expect things to change, or people to change; but it's silly, isn't it? Because people and things don't change. Not really. You just have to get used to them…'

Her expression, now, was so stripped, so solemn, Helen reached and touched her arm. 'Viv,' she said. 'You look so awfully sad.'

Viv grew self-conscious again. She coloured, and laughed. 'Oh, don't mind me. I've been feeling a bit sorry for myself lately, that's all.'

'What's the matter? Aren't you happy?'

'Happy?' Viv blinked. 'I don't know. Is anybody happy? Really happy, I mean? People pretend they are.'

'I don't know either,' said Helen, after a moment. 'Happiness is such a fragile sort of thing these days. It's as though there's only so much to go round.'

'As if it's on the ration.'

Helen smiled. 'Yes, exactly! And so you know, when you've got some, that it's going to run out soon; and that keeps you from enjoying it, you're too busy wondering how you're going to feel when it's all gone. Or you start thinking about the person who's had to go without so that you can have your portion.'

How own mood sank, as she thought this. She began picking at blisters of paint on the metal platform, exposing fibres of rust beneath. She went on quietly, 'Maybe it's right, after all, what the newspaper prophets say: that one gets paid back in the way one deserves. Maybe we've all forfeited our right to happiness, by doing bad things, or by letting bad things happen…'

She looked at Viv. They'd never spoken to each other quite so freely before, and she realised, as if for the first time, just how fond she was of Viv, and how much she liked doing this-just this-sitting out here, talking, on this rusting metal platform… And she thought of something else. Were you friends with Julia then? Viv had asked lightly, before-as if it was the most natural thing in the world that Helen should have been; as if it was perfectly normal that Helen should have stayed in London, in a war, for a woman's sake…

Her heart began to beat faster. She wanted, suddenly, to be able to confide in Viv. She wanted to, desperately! She wanted to say, Listen to me, Viv. I'm in love with Julia! It's a marvellous thing, but terrible, too. Sometimes it makes a sort of child of me. Sometimes it feels like it's almost killing me! It leaves me helpless. It makes me afraid! I can't control it! Can that be right? Is it like this with other people? Has it ever been like this, with you?

She felt her breath rising, until it seemed trapped in her chest. Her heart was beating wildly now, in her cheeks and fingertips. 'Viv-' she started.

But Viv had turned away. She'd put her hands to the pockets of her cardigan and, 'Oh, heck,' she said. 'I've left my cigs inside. I'll never get through the afternoon without one.' She started to rise, seizing hold of the rail of the platform and making the whole thing rock. She said, 'Will you give me a push-up?'

Helen got to her feet more quickly. 'I'm closer,' she said. 'I'll get them.'

'Are you sure?'

'Yes, of course. It'll only take a moment.'

Her breath still seemed to be crushed in her chest. She clambered awkwardly over the sill and landed with a thud beside the lavatory. There was still time, she thought, to say something. She wanted to more than ever now. And a cigarette would steady her nerves… She straightened her skirt. Viv called through the window: 'They're in my handbag!'

Helen nodded. She went quickly across the landing and up the short flight of stairs into the waiting-room. She kept her head down as she went, only glancing up at the last minute.

She found a man standing at Viv's desk, looking idly over the papers.

She started so violently at the sight of him, she almost screamed. Startled himself, the man stepped back. Then he began to laugh. 'Good Lord! Am I so terrifying as that?'

'I'm sorry,' said Helen, her hand at her breast. 'I had no idea- But the office is closed.'

'Is it? The door downstairs was open.'

'Well, it really oughtn't to have been.'

'I just walked in and up the stairs. I did wonder where everyone was. I'm sorry to have frightened you, Miss -?'

He looked frankly into her face as he said this. He was young and well-spoken, handsome, fair-haired, quite at his ease-so unlike their usual run of client that she felt at a disadvantage with him. She was aware of herself, breathless and flushed, her hair uncombed. She pictured Viv, too, waiting out on the fire-escape… Balls, she thought. But there was still time.

She calmed herself down, and turned to the diary on Viv's desk. 'Well,' she said. 'You don't have an appointment, I suppose?' She ran her finger down the page. 'You're not Mr Tiplady?'

'Mr Tiplady!' He smiled. 'No, I'm rather glad to say I'm not.'

'The fact is, we don't see anyone without an appointment.'

'So I see.' He had turned when she had, and was looking at the page over her shoulder. 'You're certainly doing a roaring trade. That's thanks to the war, I suppose…' He folded his arms and stood more easily. 'Just out of interest, how much do you charge?'

Helen glanced at the clock. Go away . Go away! But she was too polite to let the thought show. 'We charge in the first instance,' she said, 'a guinea-'

'As much as that?' He looked surprised. 'And, what will my guinea get me? I suppose you show me an album of girls, do you? Or, you don't actually bring the girls in-?'

His manner had changed. He seemed really interested-yet was smiling, too, as if at some joke of his own. Helen grew cautious. It was just possible, she thought, that he was some kind of charming lunatic: one of those men-like Heath-driven insane by the mood of the times. She didn't know whether or not to believe him about the door. Suppose he had forced it? She'd often thought how vulnerable she and Viv were, so close to Oxford Street and yet cut off, up here, from the bustle of the pavement.

'I'm afraid I really can't discuss it with you now,' she said, her anxiety and impatience making her prim. 'If you'd care to come back in ordinary hours, I'm sure my colleague-' she glanced involuntarily towards the stairs, the lavatory-'will be happy to explain the whole procedure to you.'

But that seemed to pique his interest even more. 'Your colleague,' he said, as if seizing on the word; and following her gaze with his own; even lifting and weaving his head, and clicking his tongue against his lower lip, thoughtfully, as he did it. 'I suppose your colleague's not available right now, by any chance?'

'I'm afraid we're closed for lunch just now,' said Helen firmly.

'Yes, of course. You said that. What a pity.' He said it vaguely. He was still gazing over at the stairs.

She turned a page in the diary. 'If you could come back tomorrow at, say, four-'

But now he'd looked round, and realized what she was doing. His manner changed again. He almost laughed. 'Look here, I'm sorry. I think I've given you the wrong impression-'

At that moment, Viv came up the stairs and into the office. She must have heard his voice after all, and wondered what was going on. She looked at him as if in amazement; and then, unaccountably, she blushed. Helen caught her eye, and made what she hoped was a little gesture of warning and alarm. She said, 'I was just finding this gentleman an appointment. Apparently the door downstairs was open-'

The man, however, had stepped forward and begun to laugh. 'Hello,' he said, giving Viv a nod. Then he turned back to Helen. 'I'm afraid,' he said to her, in real apology, 'I really did give you the wrong idea. It isn't a wife I'm after, you see. Just Miss Pearce.'

Viv's colour had deepened. She glanced at Helen as if horribly embarassed. She said, 'This is Mr Robert Fraser, Helen, a friend of my brother's. Mr Fraser, this is Miss Giniver… Is Duncan all right?'

'Oh, it's nothing like that,' said the man easily. 'Nothing at all. I was just passing, and thought I'd look in.'

' Duncan asked you to come?'

'I was just hoping you'd be free, to tell you the truth. It was just- Well, it was just a whim.'

He laughed again. There was a moment's awkward silence. Helen thought of the little warning gesture she'd made to Viv a minute ago; and felt a fool. For everything had changed, suddenly. It was just as though someone had taken a piece of chalk and, swiftly but firmly, bent to the floor and drawn a line: a line that had Viv and this man, Robert Fraser, on one side, and herself on the other. She made a vague kind of movement. 'Well,' she said, 'I ought to get on.'

'No, it's all right,' said Viv quickly. Her eyelids fluttered. 'I'll- I'll take Mr Fraser outside. Mr Fraser-?'

'Of course,' he said, moving with her towards the stairs. He nodded pleasantly to Helen as he went by. 'Goodbye! I'm sorry to have disturbed you. If I ever change my mind about that wife, I'll be sure to let you know!'

He went quickly down the staircase with a boyish irregular tread. When the door at the bottom was opened she heard him say to Viv, in a lower but carrying tone: 'I'm afraid I've rather landed you in it-'

There was a thump, as the door was closed.

Helen kept still for a moment; then stepped into her office and got out her cigarettes; but threw the packet down, unopened. She felt more of a fool than ever, now. She recalled the way that, on first coming up the stairs from the lavatory, she'd almost screamed-like some comedy spinster in a play!

Just as she thought this she heard laughter, down in the street. She went to the window and looked out.

The window had had cheesecloth varnished to it at some point in the war; a few scraps of net and some scrapings of varnish remained stuck to the glass, distorting the view. But she could see clearly enough the top of Fraser's head and his wide shoulders, lifting and tilting as he gestured and shrugged. And she could see, too, the curve of Viv's pink cheek and the tip of her ear, the spread of her fingers on the sleeve of her folded arm…

She let her head sink, until her brow met the varnished glass. How easy it was, she thought unhappily as she did it, for men and women. They could stand in a street and argue, flirt-they could kiss, make love, do anything at all-and the world indulged them. Whereas she and Julia-

She thought of what she'd been meaning to do, out on the fire-escape. I'm in love with Julia, she'd been going to say. And my love is almost killing me!

She couldn't imagine saying it now. It seemed an absurd thing to say, now! She stood at the window, looking down, until she saw Fraser step forward to shake Viv's hand, as if in farewell; then she moved quickly back to her desk and took up a folder of papers.

She heard the click of the latch being fastened on the street door, and the sound of footsteps. Viv came slowly up the stairs and through the waiting-room. She stood in the doorway of Helen's office. Helen didn't raise her head. Viv was silent for a moment, then said awkwardly, 'I'm sorry about that.'

'You've nothing to be sorry for,' said Helen, looking up at last and making herself smile. 'He frightened the life out of me, though! Was the door really unlocked?'

'Yes, it was.'

'Well, then I suppose we can't blame him for coming up.'

'He just thought it would be all right to call in,' said Viv. 'I don't know him at all, really. He turned up at my brother's when I was there last week. We only talked for a little while. He knew my brother, ages ago. I don't know why he should have come here…'

She'd started biting at one of her fingers, at the skin beside a nail. Her head was bowed, and her thick dark hair had slightly fallen across her face. Helen watched her for a second, then went back to picking through the papers in the folder.

At last Viv said, rather thinly, 'Do you want to come back out, Helen?'

Helen looked up again. 'Back outside? Do we have time?' She looked at the clock. 'Only ten minutes… I don't know. Shall we?'

'Well,' said Viv. 'Not if you don't want to.'

They gazed at each other, as if meaning to speak; but the moment for confidences had passed. Helen shuffled the papers. 'I ought to look these over, I suppose,' she said.

And, 'Yes,' said Viv, at once. 'Yes, all right.'

She stood in Helen's doorway a little longer, as if she might say more; then she went out to the waiting-room. Soon there came the sound of her straightening up the magazines on the table, shaking out the sofa cushions.

Everyone has their secrets, after all, Helen thought. The thought depressed her, horribly. It made her think of Julia. She put the papers down and sat at her desk, with her head in her hands, her eyes closed. If only Julia was here, right now! She began to long for the sound of Julia's voice, for the comforting touch of her hand… What would she be doing, at this sort of hour? Helen tried to visualise her. She pressed her hands into the sockets of her eyes and sent her thoughts across the streets of Marylebone until she had a sense of Julia's presence, fantastically vivid and real. She saw her sitting in her study at home: silent, solitary, perhaps bored or restless, perhaps thinking of Helen herself. She began to miss Julia so badly, the missing felt like an ache or a sickness. She opened her eyes, and saw the telephone… But she oughtn't to call, in a mood like this. She wouldn't do it, anyway, with Viv so close, able to overhear every word; and she couldn't bring herself to go tiptoeing across the floor and silently close her office door.

If Viv goes down to the lavatory, she thought, I'll do it. Only then.

She sat tensely, listening as Viv brushed dust from the carpet and rearranged chairs. Then she heard heels on the staircase, fading. Viv must have taken the teapot down to the basin to rinse out the leaves.

At once, she picked up the telephone and dialled.

There was a tinny electric burr. She imagined the telephone on Julia's desk, beginning to ring; imagined Julia giving a start, putting down her pen, lifting her hand-holding it, perhaps, for a moment or two, above the receiver, because of course everyone preferred to let a telephone ring a little than answer it at once… But the ringing went on. Perhaps Julia was downstairs in the kitchen; or down on the floor below that, in the lavatory. Now Helen saw her running up the narrow stairs to her study, in her flapping espadrille slippers; she saw her tucking back a lock of hair that had come bouncing out from behind her ear, reaching breathlessly for the phone…

Still the ringing went on. Maybe Julia, after all, had decided not to answer. Helen had known her do that, when she was in the middle of writing a scene. But if she guessed it was Helen calling, then surely she'd pick the receiver up? If Helen would only let the thing ring for long enough, Julia would realise, Julia would answer…

Burr, burr. Burr, burr. The hateful noise went on and on. At last, after almost a minute, Helen put the receiver down-unable to bear the image of the telephone shrieking, forlorn and abandoned, in her own empty house.

'I haven't got long,' said Viv, looking up and down Oxford Street.

'It's very kind of you,' answered Fraser, 'to spare me any time at all.'

It was just after six. She had told him, at lunch-time, to come back; and had met him here, in front of the wrecked John Lewis building. She was anxious that Helen might still be about, and might see them; but when he saw her glancing nervously around, he misunderstood. The pavement was filled with people going briskly home from work or queueing for buses, and he thought she was bothered by the crowd. He said, 'No, we can't talk here, can we? Let me take you to a café, somewhere quiet-' He touched her arm.

But she said she didn't have time for that; that she was meeting someone, in forty-five minutes, in another part of town. So they walked, instead, around the corner to one of the benches in Cavendish Square. The bench was covered with fallen leaves, golden and glossy as scraps of yellow mackintosh. He swept them away so that she could sit.

She sat rather rigidly, with her hands in her pockets and her coat buttoned up. When he offered her a cigarette she shook her head. He put the cigarettes away and took out a pipe.

She watched him thumbing in the tobacco. He was like a kid, she thought, mucking about. She said, without smiling, 'I wish you hadn't come to my office today, Mr Fraser. I don't know what Miss Giniver thought.'

'She looked as though she thought I was going to fling her to the floor and ravish her, to tell you the truth!' he said. And then, when Viv wouldn't smile: 'I'm sorry. It just seemed the most straightforward way to see you.'

'I still don't know why you felt you needed to see me at all. Has my brother done something to you?'

'It's nothing like that.'

'He didn't ask you to come?'

'It's just as I told you earlier on. Your brother had nothing to do with it. He doesn't even know I'm here. He only mentioned to me, in passing, where you work. But he speaks so warmly of you. It's clear-' He held a flame to the pipe, sucking on the stem of it. 'It's clear you mean a great deal to him. It was the just the same, I remember, when we were in prison.'

He made no attempt to muffle the word, and Viv flinched. He saw, and lowered his voice. 'It was the same, I should have said, when I first knew him. He used to look forward to your visits more than to anything else in the world.'

She looked away. At the words 'your visits' she'd had a very clear and unpleasant memory of herself, her father and Duncan at one of the tables in the visiting-room at Wormwood Scrubs. She remembered the press of other visitors, the look of the men, the awful babble, the sour, airless feel of the room. She remembered Fraser himself from those days, too-for she'd seen him, more than once. She recalled his brash public-schoolboy's laugh; she remembered one of the other visitors saying, 'Isn't it a shame?' and a man actually calling out to him: 'Can't you take it, conchy?' She'd felt rather sorry for him, then. She'd thought him brave-but brave in a pointless kind of way. He hadn't changed anything, after all… She'd felt more sympathy for his parents. She could still picture his mother, at the scratched prison table: a smart, kind, softly-spoken woman, dreadfully wounded-looking and pale.

Duncan, of course, even then, had thought Fraser marvellous. He thought anyone marvellous, who could talk cleverly, in a well-bred voice. Viv had arrived at Mr Mundy's on Tuesday night, and he had come to let her in, his dark eyes flashing with excitement. 'Guess who I met! You never will! He's coming round here, later on.' He'd sat listening out for Fraser, all evening; and when, a little later, Fraser had actually turned up, he'd leapt to his feet and gone rushing to the door…

It had all filled Viv with dismay. She and Mr Mundy had sat, uncomfortable, embarassed-hardly knowing where to look.

Now she watched Fraser fiddling about with the pipe, and said, 'I still don't know what it is you want me to do.'

He laughed. 'To be perfectly honest with you, neither do I.'

'You said you're a writing for a newspaper or something like that. You're not going to write about Duncan, are you?'

He looked as if the idea hadn't occurred to him. 'No,' he said. 'Of course not.'

'Because if that's what all this is about-'

'It's not “about” anything at all. How suspicious you are!' He began to laugh again. But when she still looked grave, he put back his hair, and changed his tone.

'Look,' he said. 'I know it's queer, my coming along out of the blue like this. I suppose it seems odd to you, my taking an interest in your brother after so long. I don't quite know myself why I should feel so strongly about it. It was just, coming across him so suddenly at the candle-works that time; thinking of somebody like him having to work in a place like that! And then-my God! Seeing him with Mr Mundy! I couldn't believe it. He'd told me where he was living and I thought he was joking! I can't tell you the start it gave me, the first time he took me to the house. I've been back there since, two or three times, and it still unnerves me. Has your brother really been there ever since his release? Right from the day he got out? It seems incredible.'

'It's what he wanted,' said Viv. She added: 'Mr Mundy's been very kind.'

It sounded feeble, even to her. Fraser raised his eyebrows. 'He's certainly got things nice and cosy… I'm just thinking back, to when we were inside. He was plain Mr Mundy then, of course. There was none of this “Uncle Horace” business. I thought I was hearing things, the first time I heard that!'

'It doesn't matter, does it?'

'Don't your family mind?'

'Why should they?'

'I don't know. It seems an odd sort of life, that's all, for a boy like Duncan. He's not even a boy any more, is he? And yet it's impossible to think of him as anything else. He might have got stuck. I think he has got stuck. I think he's made himself be stuck, as a way of-of punishing himself, for all that happened, years ago, all that he did and didn't do… I think Mr Mundy is taking very good care to keep him stuck; and-if you don't mind my saying so-after seeing the way you were with him on Tuesday night, I don't think anyone else is doing anything to, as it were, unstick him… All that fascination of his with things from the past, for instance.'

'That's just a hobby,' said Viv.

'It's a pretty morbid one, don't you think? For a boy like him?'

She lost her patience suddenly. '“A boy like him,”' she said. '“A boy like him.” People have always said that about Duncan, ever since he was little. “A boy like him shouldn't be at a school like this, he's too sensitive for it.” “A boy like him should go to college.”'

Fraser frowned at her. 'Did it occur to you that those people might have been saying it, because it was true?'

'Of course it was true! But what was the point of it? And look where it got him! We had to deal with all that, Mr Fraser-my family and I, not you. Four years, going back and forth to that awful place. Four years, and more, fretting about it. It nearly killed my father! Perhaps if Duncan had been like you when he was young-had the things you had, I mean, the same sort of people around him, the same sort of start-perhaps things would have been different. He went to Mr Mundy's when he came out because he felt he'd nowhere else. Where were you, then? If you're so big a friend of his, where were you?'

Fraser looked away, lowered the pipe, turned it in his fingers; and didn't answer. She went on more quietly, 'Anyway, it doesn't matter now. But I can't help thinking your coming along like this- Well, what's it going to do? When Duncan told me he'd met you, I'll be quite honest with you, I wished he hadn't. What's the good of it? It's not going to get him anywhere. It's just going to give him ideas again; it's just going to stir things up and upset him.'

He was fishing for matches, and spoke stiffly. 'You could let him decide that for himself, of course.'

'But you know what he's like. You said, just now. He's got a sort of-a sort of wisdom about some things; but in so many ways he's still more or less a boy. He can be pushed into things, like a boy can. He can be-'

She stopped, embarassed. Fraser had the box of matches in his hand but had turned, and was looking at her. 'What do you think,' he asked her slowly, 'I'm going to push him into?'

She swallowed, and dropped her gaze. 'I don't know.'

He went on, 'You're thinking of that boy, aren't you? The boy who died? Alec?' And then, when she looked up, he nodded. 'Yes. You see, I know all about him… You don't think I'm like him, though, surely?' She didn't answer. He coloured, as if angry. 'Is that what you think? Because if you do- Well, I could give you a list of girls, you know, who could put you straight on that!'

He said it seriously; but then must have caught the earnestness in his own voice. He blushed harder, put his hand again to his hair, and ducked his head. The gesture, unstudied and a little gauche, was the most appealing thing he'd done. She let herself see, for the first time, how nice-looking he was, how smooth and unmarked. He was young, after all: younger than her.

He still had the pipe and the matches in his hand, but was sitting still, with his hands slackly in his lap. He said, 'I'm sorry. I only wanted to see you as a way of helping your brother.'

'Well, I think you might help him best just by leaving him alone.'

'But, is that really what you'd like? To just leave him there, living with Mr Mundy in that peculiar way?'

'There's nothing peculiar about it!'

'Are you quite sure?' He held her gaze; and when she looked away he said slowly, 'No, you're not, are you? I saw it in your face, last week… And what about that job, that factory? You want to see him working at it for the rest of his life? Making night lights, for nurseries?'

'People work in factories, it doesn't matter what they make. My father's worked in a factory for thirty years!'

'Is that any reason your brother should?'

'So long as he's happy,' she said. 'That's what you don't seem to understand. I just want Duncan to be happy. We all do.'

But her words, as before, sounded weak. And she knew, in her heart, that he was right. She knew that part of the reason she'd been so dismayed to see him arrive at Mr Mundy's last week was that she'd looked at the house with him in it, and seen it all as if through his eyes… But, she was tired. She said to herself-as she always ended up saying to herself, about Duncan -It's not my fault. I did my best. I've got my own problems to think about.

And even as these words glided familiarly into her mind, she heard the quarter hour struck out on a nearby clock; and remembered the time.

'Mr Fraser-'

'Oh, call me Robert, will you?' he said, beginning to smile again. 'I'm sure your brother would want you to. I certainly do.'

So she said, 'Robert-'

'And may I call you Vivien? Or-what Duncan calls you-Viv?'

'If you like,' she said, feeling herself blush. 'I really don't care. It's kind of you to try and help Duncan like this. But the fact is, I can't talk about it now. I haven't got time.'

'No time for your brother?'

'I've got time for my brother; but not for this.'

He narrowed his eyes. 'You don't think much of my motives, do you?'

She said, 'I still don't know what your motives are.' And she added: 'I'm not sure you do.'

That made him colour slightly again. For a moment they sat in silence, both of them blushing. Then she changed her pose, getting ready to go-putting her hands into the pockets of her coat. The pockets had old bus tickets in it, stray coins and paper wrappers-but then her fingers found something else: that little parcel of cloth, with the heavy gold ring inside it.

Her heart gave a jolt. She stood up, abruptly. 'I've got to go,' she said. 'I'm sorry, Mr Fraser.'

'Robert,' he corrected, getting to his feet.

'I'm sorry, Robert.'

'That's all right. I ought to go, too. But, look here. I don't like you misunderstanding me. Let me walk with you and we can talk as we go.'

'I'd really rather-'

'Which way are you going?'

She didn't want to tell him. He saw her hesitate, and chose to take it, she supposed, as an invitation. When she started to walk he walked alongside her; once his arm brushed hers, and he made a show of apologising and moving further away. But an odd thing had happened between them. Somehow, in letting him go with her, she'd managed to put their relationship on a subtly different footing. As they headed back to Oxford Street they had to pause at a kerb alongside a window; she saw the two of them reflected in it, and met his gaze through the glass. He started to smile, seeing what she did: that they looked like a couple-a simple, nice-looking, young courting couple.

His manner changed. As they wove through the traffic at Oxford Circus he struggled to keep up with her and said, in a different tone from any he'd used with her yet, 'You know where you're going, anyway. I like that in a woman… Are you meeting a girlfriend?'

She shook her head.

'A boyfriend, then?'

'It's nobody,' she said, to shut him up.

'You're meeting nobody? Well, that shouldn't take long, in a town like this… Look, you've got me all wrong, you know. What do you say to us starting again-this time, with a drink?'

They had drawn near a pub at the end of Carnaby Street. She shook her head and kept going. 'I can't.'

He touched her arm. 'Not just for twenty minutes?'

She felt the pressure of his fingers, and slowed, and met his gaze. He looked young and earnest again. She said, 'I can't. I'm sorry. There's something I've got to do.'

'Couldn't I do it with you?'

'I'd rather you didn't.'

'Well, I could wait.'

The awkwardness must have shown on her face. He looked around, at a loss. He said, 'Where the hell are you making for, anyway? Your evening job in a leg-show? You don't need to be bashful, if that's what it is. You'll find me a broad-minded sort of bloke. I could sit in the audience and keep off the rowdies.' He pushed back his long hair, and smiled. 'Let me go a bit further with you, at least. I couldn't think of myself as a gentleman, and leave you on your own in streets like these.'

She hesitated, and then, 'All right,' she said. 'I'm going to the Strand. You can come with me, of you really want to, as far as Trafalgar Square.'

He bowed. ' Trafalgar Square it is.'

He offered her his arm. She didn't want to take it-then thought of the minutes ticking by… She put her hand, lightly, in the crook of his elbow, and they moved off together. His arm was amazingly firm to the touch, the muscles shifting, beneath her fingers, with the rhythm of his walk.

As he'd hinted, the streets they were entering now were rather sleazy ones: a mixture of boarded-up houses and fenced-off ground, depressed-looking nightclubs, pubs and Italian cafés. The smell was of rotting vegetables, brick-dust, garlic, parmesan cheese; here and there an open doorway or window let out the blare of music. Yesterday she'd come this way on her own and a man had plucked at her arm and said in a phoney New York accent, 'Hey, Bombshell, how much for a grind?' He'd meant it as a sort of compliment, too… But tonight men looked but called nothing, because they assumed she was Fraser's girl. It was half amusing, half annoying. She noticed it more, perhaps, because she was unused to it. She never came anywhere like this with Reggie. They never went to nightclubs or restaurants. They only ever went from one lonely place to another; or they sat in his car with the radio on. She thought of bumping into somebody she knew, and grew nervous. Then she realised she had nothing to be nervous of…

While they walked, Fraser spoke about Duncan. He spoke as if he and she were agreed on the whole issue; as if all they had to do was put their heads together, spend a little time on it, and they'd be able to sort Duncan out. They had to do something, for a start, he said, about his job at that factory. He had a friend who worked in a printing-shop in Shoreditch; he thought this friend might be able to find Duncan a place, learning the trade. Or he knew another man, who ran a bookshop. The pay would be negligible, but maybe that sort of work would appeal to Duncan more. Did she think it would?

She frowned, not really listening; still aware of the ring in its parcel in her pocket; conscious of the time… 'Why don't you ask Duncan,' she said at last, 'instead of me?'

'I wanted your opinion on it, that's all. I thought we might- Well, I hoped we'd be friends. If nothing else, we'll be bound to run into each other again at Mr Mundy's, and-'

They had reached the northwest corner of Trafalgar Square, and begun to slacken their pace. Viv turned her head-looking for a clock. When she looked back into Fraser's face she found him gazing at her with an odd expression.

'What?' she said.

He smiled. 'You look so like your brother sometimes. You looked like him just then. You really are remarkably like him, aren't you?'

'You said that at Mr Mundy's.'

'You don't think so?'

'It's one of those things, I suppose, that you can't really see for yourself.' She caught sight of the clock on St Martin 's church: twenty to seven. 'Now, I really must go.'

'All right. But, just a minute. Look.'

He fished about in his jacket pocket and got out a piece of paper and a pencil. He quickly wrote something down: the telephone number of the house he was living in. 'You'll give me a call,' he said, as he handed it over, 'if you ever want to talk to me, in private? Not just about your brother, I mean.' He smiled. 'About other things, too.'

'Yes,' she said, stuffing the paper in her pocket. 'Yes, all right. I-' She gave him her hand. 'I'm sorry, Mr Fraser. I've got to go, now. Goodbye!'

And she turned and left him-went hurriedly across the rest of the square, without looking back. Probably he stood and watched her running, wondering who on earth she was meeting, and why; she didn't care. She ran on, through a break in the traffic, and headed into the Strand.

The evenings were drawing in at last. The street was darker than it had been when she'd driven through it that time with Reggie: the thickness of the twilight gave everyone flat, featureless faces and she found herself peering at people, as she hurried, with a mixture of frustration, excitement, dread… It wasn't true, what she'd told Fraser. She didn't have an appointment to keep. She was looking for Kay, that was all. This was the fifth or sixth time she'd come here in the past two weeks. She was hoping to see her; just hoping to pick her out of the crowd…

She drew close to the Tivoli cinema, keeping to the north side of the street, where the view was widest. She slowed her step, then moved into a doorway, out of the way.

She must have looked crazy to anyone watching, gazing so keenly from face to face. She kept seeing figures she thought were Kay's; she kept moving forward, her heart thudding. But every time, as they drew nearer the figures turned out to be not Kay at all-turned out to wildly unlikely people, teenage boys or middle-aged men.

The cinema queue dwindled. The programme, she guessed, must have already begun. But there'd be the news-films first, and then, say, Mickey Mouse. Maybe it was silly, standing here. She might have missed Kay already. All that mucking about with Fraser! She tapped her foot. Perhaps she should cross over, buy a ticket, go inside; go up and down the aisles; or find a spot where she could watch the latecomers, more closely, as they came in-

But then, she thought suddenly, what was the point? Was it really likely that Kay would come back here? She might have come just that one time, for that one film. She could be anywhere in London! What were Viv's chances of seeing her, really?

The queue had shrunk to nothing now. A group of boys and girls came hurrying up to the doors, and that was it. Viv put her hand again to her pocket, feeling the ring in its bit of cloth-turning it over and over with her fingers-knowing it was stupid to keep waiting, but not wanting to leave, unable just to give it up, go home-

Then a man's voice sounded, close beside her.

'Still looking for nobody, I suppose?'

She jumped. It was Fraser.

'God!' she said. 'What do you want, now?'

He put up his hands. 'I don't want anything! I've been sitting where you left me-in Trafalgar Square, watching the pigeons. Awfully soothing on a bloke's nerves, those pigeons. I found myself quite losing track of time. Then I thought I'd be like Burlington Bertie, and walk down the Strand… I didn't expect to find you still here, honestly. And I can see by your face just how welcome I am. Don't worry, you'll find I'm quite the gentleman in matters like this. I won't hang about, and spoil your chances with the other bloke.'

She was looking over his shoulder, still scanning the faces of passers-by. Then she took in what he'd said-and the contrast between what he was thinking and the real reason she was here seemed, all at once, to defeat her. She lowered her head and said, 'It doesn't matter, anyway. The person's not coming.'

'Not coming? How do you know?'

'I just do,' she said bitterly. 'It was stupid, my waiting here at all-'

She couldn't finish. She turned away. He put out his hand, just touched her arm. 'Look here,' he said quietly, seriously. 'I'm sorry.'

She drew in her breath. 'I'm all right.'

'You don't look all right. Let me take you in somewhere, get you a drink-'

'You mustn't trouble.'

'It's no trouble.'

'You must have somewhere to be, don't you?'

He looked rueful. 'Well, as it happens, I said I'd look in on your brother, at Mr Mundy's… He won't mind waiting an extra hour though, I'm sure. Come on.'

He drew at her arm. She'd gone back to looking up and down the street; she couldn't help it. But she let him lead her along the pavement. He said, 'There's a pub just up there-'

She shook her head. 'Not a pub.'

'Not a pub, all right. A café? Here's one, look, with a window on the street. We'll go in here. And then, if your friend turns up after all…'

They went into the café and found a table near the door. He ordered coffees, a plate of cakes. And when, after a few minutes, another table became free, right next to the window, he moved her to that.

The café was busy. The door kept opening and closing as people passed in and out. From behind the counter there came the regular clatter of crockery, the hiss of steam. Viv kept her head turned to the street. Fraser sometimes looked with her; more often, though, he kept his gaze on her face. He said once, to try and make her laugh, 'I've changed my mind about you. I don't think you work in a leg-show at all. I think you're a private detective. Am I close to the mark?'

She let her coffee sit in front of her and grow cool. The cakes arrived-nasty-looking things, the colour of luminous paint in daylight, each with a swirl of artificial cream on top, already turning back to water. She wasn't hungry. She still kept seeing, from the corner of her eye, people she thought might be Kay. She almost forgot about Fraser; she was vaguely aware that he'd fallen silent, that was all… But after another few minutes he spoke again; and his voice, this time, was quite flat.

He said, 'You know, I hope he's worth it.'

She looked at him, not understanding. 'Who?'

'This guy you're waiting for. From where I'm sitting, to tell you the truth, it rather looks as though he isn't. Since he's put you to all this trouble-'

'You think it's a he, of course,' she said, turning back to the window. 'It's like a man, to think that.'

'Well, isn't it a he?'

'No. If you must know, it's a woman.'

He didn't believe her at first. But she could see him, thinking it over. And then he leaned back, nodding, and his expression changed. 'Ah,' he said. 'I see. The wife.'

He said it in such a cynical, knowing sort of way; and his comment was so far from the truth-yet in another way, so near it-that she felt stung. She wondered what Duncan might have told him, about her and Reggie. Her face grew warm. She said, 'It's not- It's not what you're thinking.'

He spread his hands. 'I told you before, I'm a broad-minded bloke.'

'But, it's nothing like that. It's just-'

His eyes were on her. They were blue, still rather knowing but, apart from that, quite guileless; and as she gazed into them it struck her that he was the first person, in what must have been years and years, to whom she'd spoken for more than about a minute without telling some sort of lie… When the café door opened and a couple of boys came in and started joking with the man behind the counter, she said quietly, under cover of their laughter, 'I saw someone here. I saw someone here, the week before last; and I've been hoping to see her again. That's all it is.'

He could tell she was serious. He moved closer to the table again and said, 'A friend?'

She looked down. 'Just a woman. A woman I knew once, when the war was on.'

'And you made an arrangement with her, for tonight?'

'No. I just saw her there, outside the cinema. I've been back, and waited, on different nights. I thought, if I did that-' She grew self-conscious. 'It sounds barmy, doesn't it? I know it does. It is barmy. But, you see, when I saw her here, before, I sort of-ran away. Then I wished I hadn't. She was kind to me once. She was terribly kind. She did something for me…'

'You lost touch with her?' Fraser asked, in the little silence which followed. 'That happened all the time in wartime.'

'It wasn't that. I could have found out where she was if I'd wanted to; it would have been easy. But what she'd done for me, you see, made me think of something else, that I didn't want to remember…' She shook her head. 'It's stupid really, because of course I remembered it anyway.'

He didn't press her to tell him more. They sat with the silly-looking cakes between them; he stirred the remains of his cooling coffe as if thinking over her words. Then he said, still rather musingly, 'Wartime is a time of kindness. We all tend to forget. I've worked with people in the past few months, people who've come here from Germany and Poland. Their stories- God! They told me terrible things, atrocious things; things I couldn't believe an ordinary man, in ordinary clothes, in the world I knew, could be telling me… But they told me marvellous things, too. The courage of people, the impossible goodness. I think it was having heard stories like that that made me, when I saw your brother again- I don't know. But he was kind to me, in prison; I can tell you that. Just as it sounds like your friend, this woman, was kind to you.'

Viv said, 'She wasn't even a friend, really. We were strangers.'

'Well, sometimes it's easier to be kinder to strangers than to the people we're closest to… She might have forgotten you, though-have you thought of that? Or she might not want to be reminded. Are you even sure it's her?'

'It's her,' said Viv. 'I know it is. I just know. And yes, perhaps she has forgotten me, and perhaps I oughtn't to bother her. It's just- I can't explain it. It just seems the right thing to do.' She looked at him, suddenly afraid she'd said too much. She wanted to say: 'You won't tell Duncan?' But what would that do, but make yet another secret?-a secret between him and her? You had to trust someone, after all; and perhaps he was right, and it was easiest to trust strangers… So she said nothing. She reached for one of the cakes and began to crumble it up. Then she turned her head, and gazed out into the street-gazed idly, now; not looking for Kay; still sure, in her heart, that she'd had that single chance and lost it.

But even before her gaze had settled a figure came sauntering along the pavement from the direction of Waterloo Bridge: a slim, tall, quite striking figure, not at all like a boy or a middle-aged man, with its hands in its trouser pockets and a cigarette dangling nonchalantly from its lip… Viv moved closer to the window. Fraser saw, and leaned to look too.

'What is it?' he said. 'You haven't seen her? Which one are you looking at? Not the tailored type, with the swagger?'

'Don't!' said Viv, moving back, reaching across the table to pull him back with her. 'She'll see.'

'I thought that was the point! What's the matter with you? Aren't you going to go over?'

She'd lost her nerve. 'I don't know. Shall I?'

'After you've put me through all this?'

'It's so long ago. She'll think I'm crackers.'

'But you want to, don't you?'

'Yes.'

'Go on, then! What are you waiting for?'

Again, it was the youth and the excitement in his blue eyes that made her do it. She got to her feet, and went out of the café; she ran across the street and reached Kay's side just as Kay herself had reached the cinema's swing doors. She took out the ring, in its cloth, from her pocket; and just touched Kay's arm…

It only took a minute or two. It was the easiest thing she'd ever done. But she came back to the café feeling elated. She sat, and smiled and smiled. Fraser watched her, smiling too.

'Did she remember you?'

Viv nodded.

'Was she pleased to see you?'

'I'm not sure. She seemed-different. But I suppose everyone's different from how they were in those days.'

'Will you see her again? Are you glad you did it?'

'Yes,' said Viv. Then she said it again. 'Yes, I'm glad I did it.'

She looked back over at the cinema. There was no sign of Kay now. But her feeling of elation persisted. She felt capable of anything! She finished her coffee, her mind racing. She was thinking of all the things she could do. She could give up her job! She could leave Streatham, take a little flat all to herself! She could call up Reggie! Her heart jumped. She could find a telephone box, right now. She could call him up and tell him- What? That she was through with him, for ever! That she forgave him; but that forgiving wasn't enough… The possibilities made her giddy. Maybe she'd never do any of these things. But oh, how marvellous it was, just to know that she could!

She put down her cup and started to laugh. Fraser laughed, too. But his smile had a frown mixed up in it; and as he looked her over, he shook his head.

'How extraordinarily like your brother you are!' he said.

The house, when Helen got home that night, was empty. She stood in the hall, calling Julia's name-but became aware, even as she was calling, of a sort of deadness to the place. The lights were off; the stove and kettle, up in the kitchen, were quite cold. Her first, wild, idiotic thought was, Julia's gone; and she went with a feeling of dread into their bedroom and slowly drew back the wardrobe door, certain that Julia's clothes would have all been cleared away… She did this before she'd taken her own coat off, and when she saw that Julia's clothes were still there; that none of her suitcases was missing; that her hairbrush and jewellery and cosmetics were all still scattered on top the dressing-table, she sat awkwardly down on the bed and shook with relief.

You bloody idiot, she said to herself, almost laughing.

But then, where was Julia? Helen went back to the wardrobe. After a little calculation she worked out that Julia had gone out in one of her smartish dresses and one of her nicer coats. She'd taken her decent-looking bag, as opposed to her scuffed one. She might have gone to visit her parents, Helen thought. She might be out with her literary agent or her publisher. She might be with Ursula Waring, said a gnomish voice, from a dark, grubby corner of Helen's mind; but Helen wouldn't listen to that… Julia would be out with her editor or agent; probably her agent had rung up at the last minute, as he often did, and asked her to run into the office and sign some paper-something like that.

If that were the case, of course, Julia would have left a note. Helen got up and took her coat off-quite calm, now-and began to look around the house. She went back to the kitchen. Beside the pantry, hanging up from a nail, they kept a hinged brass hand with scraps of paper clasped in it, for writing lists and messages on; but all the messages gripped in it now were old ones. She searched the floor, in case a scrap of paper had fallen out. She looked on the kitchen counters and shelves and, finding nothing, began to look in all sorts of other, improbable places: in the bathroom, under the cushions on the sofa, in the pockets of one of Julia's cardigans… At last she could feel her searching taking on an edge of panic or compulsion. Again that grubby voice rose inside her-just pointed out to her that here she was, picking her way through bits of dust like an imbecile, when all the time Julia was out with Ursula Waring or some other woman, laughing at the very thought of her-

She had to thrust this voice back down. It was like pressing down the spring of a grinning jack-in-the-box. But she wouldn't give in to thoughts like that. It was seven o'clock, an ordinary evening, and she was hungry. Everything was perfectly all right. Julia had gone out without expecting to be so late. Julia had been delayed, that was all. People got delayed, for God's sake, all the time! She decided to start cooking their dinner. She gathered together the ingredients for a shepherd's pie. She said to herself that by the time the pie had gone into the oven, Julia would be home.

She put the wireless on as she cooked, but kept the volume very low; and all the time that she boiled water, fried the mince, mashed the potato, she stood quite tensely, listening out for the sound of Julia's key being put in to the lock of the door downstairs.

When the dish was ready, she didn't know whether to keep on waiting for Julia or not. She served it up on two plates; she put the plates to keep warm in the oven, and slowly did all the washing-up and the drying. Surely by the time she'd finished that, Julia would be back, and they could sit down and eat together…? By now she was starving. When the washing-up was done she got her plate back out, put it to rest on top of the stove, and began to pick at the potato with a fork. She only meant to eat a morsel or two, just to blunt her hunger; she ended up eating the whole thing-eating it like that, standing up, with her pinnie on, with the steam running down the kitchen window, and the man and the woman, out in the yard, starting up a fresh argument, or a new version of an old one.

'Work it up your arse!'

She'd been so long in the bright kitchen, when she went out into the rest of the house she found it gloomy. She moved swiftly from room to room, turning on lights. She went down to the sitting-room and poured herself a glass of gin and water. She sat on the sofa and got out her knitting; she knitted for five or ten minutes. But the wool seemed to catch at her dry fingers. The gin was souring her mood, making her clumsy, unsettling her. She threw the knitting down and got to her feet. She wandered back up to the kitchen-still looking, vaguely, for some sort of note. She reached the bottom of the narrow staircase leading up to Julia's study. The urge came over her to go up there.

There was no reason, she thought, as she climbed the stairs, for feeling self-conscious about it. Julia had never said, for example, that she would prefer it if Helen left her study alone. The subject had never arisen between them; on the contrary, there were times when Julia had gone out to some meeting or other and had telephoned to say, 'I'm sorry Helen, I've been an idiot and left a paper behind. Would you mind running up to my room and fishing it out?' That showed she didn't mind the thought even of Helen going through the drawers of her desk; and certainly, though the drawers had keys to them, the keys were never turned.

Still, there was something furtive, something troubling, about visiting Julia's study when Julia wasn't there. It was like going alone to your parents' bedroom when you were a child: you suspected that things went on there-precise, unguessable things, that were both about you and yet excluded you utterly… So Helen felt, anyway. She'd feel this even while, as now, she was simply standing in the room-not lifting up papers or peering gingerly into unsealed envelopes-just standing still in the middle of the room and looking around.

The room took up almost all of the attic floor. It was dim, quiet, with sloping ceilings-a real writer's garret, she and Julia liked to joke. The walls were a pale shade of olive; the carpet was a genuine Turkey rug, only slightly worn. A desk like a bank-manager's, and a swivel chair, were in front of one of the windows; an aged leather sofa was in front of the other-for Julia wrote in bursts, and in between liked to doze or read. A table at the sofa's end held dirty cups and glasses, a saucer of biscuit crumbs, an ash-tray, ash. The cups and stubs of cigarettes had Julia's lipstick on them. A tumbler had a smudge left by her thumb. Everywhere, in fact, there were bits of Julia-Julia's dark hairs on the sofa cushions and the floor; her kicked-off espadrilles beneath the desk; a clipping of nail beside the waste-paper basket, an eye-lash, powder from her face…

If I were to hear, Helen said to herself, that Julia had died today, I'd come in here, in exactly this way, and all this rubbish would be the stuff of tragedy. As it was, she gazed from thing to thing and felt the chafing within her of a familiar but uneasy mix of emotions: fondness, annoyance, and fear. She thought of the haphazard way in which Julia had used to write, in that studio flat in Mecklenburgh Square she'd been describing to Viv, today, on the fire-escape. She remembered lying on a divan bed while Julia worked at a rickety table by the light of a single candle-her hand, as it rested on the page, seeming to cradle the flame, her palm a mirror, her handsome face lit up… She would come to bed at last, after writing for hours like that, and lie tired-out but sleepless, distracted and remote; Helen would sometimes softly lay a hand on her forehead and seem to be able to feel the words jostling and buzzing about behind it like so many bees. She didn't mind. She almost liked it. Because the novel after all was only a novel; the people in it weren't real; it was she, Helen, who was real, she who was able to lie at Julia's side like that and touch her face…

She moved closer to Julia's desk. It was, like everything of Julia's, untidy, the blotting-paper over-inked, a pot of treasury-tags upturned, a heap of papers mixed with dirty handkerchiefs and envelopes, dried apple peel and tape. In the middle of it all was one of Julia's cheap blue Century notebooks. Sicken 2, she had put on its cover: it held her plans for the novel she was working on now, a novel set in a nursing-home and called Sicken and So Die… Helen had come up with that title. She knew all the ins and outs of the complicated plot. She opened the book and looked inside it, and the apparently cryptic jottings-Inspector B to Maidstone – check RT, and Nurse Pringle – syrup, not needle!!-made perfect sense to her. There was nothing here that she didn't understand. It was all as ordinary and as familiar to her as her own lopsided face.

Why, then, did Julia seem to recede from her, the closer she drew to objects like this? And where the hell was Julia now? She opened the notebook again and began to look more desperately through its pages, as if searching for clues. She picked up an inky handkerchief and shook it out. She looked beneath the blotting-pad. She opened drawers. She lifted a paper, an envelope, a book-

Underneath the book was the Radio Times from a fortnight before, folded open at the article about Julia.

URSULA WARING introduces Julia Standing's thrilling new novel-

And there, of course, was the little photograph. Julia had gone to a Mayfair man to have it done, and Helen had gone with her, 'for the fun of it'… The afternoon had been no fun at all. Helen had felt like a dowdy schoolgirl accompanying a good-looking friend to the hairdresser's-holding Julia's bag while the man made her pose and move about; having to watch while he smartened her hair, tilted her jaw, took her hands in his, the better to place them… The finished pictures were flattering, though Julia pretended not to like them; they made her look glamorous-but not glamourous, Helen thought, in the way she really, effortlessly was-as she lounged about the flat, say, in her unironed trousers and patched shirts. They made her look marriagable; Helen didn't know if there was any better term. And she had thought, in great dismay, of all the ordinary people who must have picked up the Radio Times and opened it at Julia's face and said to themselves, idly and admiringly, 'What a handsome woman!' She'd pictured them as so many grubby fingers, rubbing down the image on a coin; or as quarrelling birds, pecking at Julia, taking her away, crumb by crumb…

She had been secretly glad when that issue had gone out of date and been replaced by another. Now, however, she looked at the magazine-at Julia's picture, at Ursula Waring's name-and all the old anxiety rose up in her as if fresh. She got into a squat, and closed her eyes, and bowed her head until her brow met the edge of Julia's desk; she moved her face so that the edge ground into her and hurt her. I'd suffer more pain than this, she thought as she did it, to be sure of Julia! She thought of the things she'd readily give up-the tip of a finger, a toe, a day from the end of her life. She thought there ought to be a system-a sort of medieval system-whereby people could earn the things they passionately wanted by being flogged or branded or cut. She almost wished that Julia had failed. She thought the words: I wish she'd failed! What a little shit she must be! How the hell had she got to this place?-this place where she wished things like that on Julia? But it's only, she said wretchedly to herself, because I love her-

As she said the words, she heard the rattling of Julia's key in the lock of their front door. She scrambled to her feet, switched off the light and dashed downstairs; she went into the kitchen and pretended to be doing something at the sink-turning on the tap, filling a glass with water and emptying it out again. She didn't look round. She was thinking, Don't make a fuss. Everything's all right. Be perfectly natural. Be quite calm.

Then Julia came to her, and kissed her; and she smelt wine and cigarette smoke on Julia's mouth, and saw the bright, flushed, pleased expression on her face. And then her heart-for all that she was trying so desperately to hold back its jaws-her heart shut tight inside her, like a trap.

Julia said, 'Darling! I'm so sorry.'

Helen spoke coldly. 'What are you sorry for?'

'It's so late! I meant to be back hours ago. I had no idea.'

'Where have you been?'

Julia turned away. She said lightly, 'I've been with Ursula, that's all. She invited me over for afternoon tea. Somehow, you know how it is, the tea turned into supper-'

'Afternoon tea?'

'Yes,' said Julia. She was heading back into the hall, taking off her coat and hat.

'That's not like you, to cut into your working day like that.'

'Well, I'd got heaps done earlier on. I worked like a demon, from nine until four! When Ursula rang, I thought-'

'I called you at ten to two. Were you working then?'

Julia didn't answer for a moment. She said at last, from out in the hall, 'Ten to two? How very precise. I suppose I must have been.'

'You don't remember the phone ringing?'

'Probably I was downstairs.'

Helen went out to her. 'You heard Ursula Waring's ring, though.'

Julia was tidying her hair at the hall mirror. She said, as if patiently, 'Helen, don't do this.' She turned and looked, frowning, into Helen's face. 'What's the matter with your forehead? It's all red. Look, here.'

She came to Helen, her hand outstretched. Helen hit the hand away. 'I had no idea where the hell you were! Couldn't you have left me a note, even?'

'I didn't think to leave a note. One doesn't suppose, when one goes out to lunch-'

Helen pounced. 'To lunch? Not afternoon tea, then, after all?'

Julia's flushed cheeks grew pinker. She put down her head and moved past Helen into the bedroom. 'I just said lunch as an example. For God's sake!'

'I don't believe you,' said Helen, following her in. 'I think you've been out with Ursula Waring all day.' No reply. 'Well, have you?'

Julia had gone to the dressing-table and was getting herself a cigarette. Catching Helen's bullying tone, she paused with the cigarette at her lips, and narrowed her eyes, and shook her head, as if in distaste and disbelief. She said, 'Did this sort of thing seem flattering, once? Did it, ever?' She turned, struck a match and coolly lit the cigarette. When she turned back, her face had changed, become set, as if carved from coloured marble or a length of blemishless wood. She took the cigarette from her mouth and said, in a level, warning tone: 'Don't, Helen.'

'Don't what?' asked Helen, as if amazed. But a part of her, too, was cringing from the words, utterly shamed by the monster she was making of herself. 'Don't what, Julia?'

'Don't start on all this- Christ! I'm not hanging around in here to listen to this.' She pushed her way past Helen and went back into the kitchen.

Helen went after her. 'You're not hanging around, you mean, to let me catch you out in a lie. There's a supper for you, but I don't suppose you'll need it. I suppose Ursula Waring took you to some chic restaurant. Full of BBC types, I expect. How jolly for you. I had to have dinner all on my own. I stood right here, at the bloody oven, and ate it with my apron on.'

The look of distaste reappeared on Julia's face; but she laughed, too. She said, 'Well, why for God's sake did you do that?'

Helen didn't know. It seemed absurd to her, now. If only she could laugh along with Julia. If only she could say, Oh Julia, what a fool I'm being! She felt like a person fallen overboard from a ship. She looked at Julia smoking her cigarette, putting the kettle on to boil: it was like seeing people doing ordinary things, strolling, sipping drinks, on the ship's deck. There was still time, she thought, to put up her hand, to call out, Help! There was still time, and the ship would turn for her and she would be saved…

But she didn't call; and in another moment there was no time at all, the ship had accelerated away and she was alone and helpless in a flat grey disc of sea. She started to thrash. She started to bluster. She spoke in a mad sort of hiss. It was all right for Julia, she said. Julia did just as she pleased. If Julia supposed Helen didn't know what she got up to, behind Helen's back, while Helen was at work- If Julia thought she could make a fool of her- Helen had known, from the moment she'd got home, that Julia was out with Ursula Waring! Did Julia imagine-? And so on. She'd pushed away that grubby, grinning jack-in-the-box, earlier on. Now it had sprung up again and its voice had become her own.

Julia, meanwhile, moved stonily around the kitchen, making tea. 'No, Helen,' she said, wearily, from time to time, 'that's not how it was,' and, 'Don't be ridiculous, Helen.'

'When was it arranged, anyway?' Helen asked now.

'God! What?'

'This tryst of yours, with Ursula Waring.'

'Tryst-! She called me up, some time this morning. Does it matter?'

'Apparently it does matter, if you have to go creeping and sneaking about. If you have to lie to me-'

'Well, what do you expect?' cried Julia, losing her temper at last, putting down her cup so that the tea spilled. 'It's because I know you'll behave like this! You twist everything so. You expect me to be guilty. It makes me appear to be guilty, even- Christ! Even to myself!' She lowered her voice, mindful, even in her anger, of the couple downstairs. She went on, 'If every time I meet some woman, make a friend- God! I got a call, the other day, from Daphne Rees. She asked me to have lunch with her-just an ordinary lunch!-and I said no, I was too busy; because I knew what you'd imagine. Phyllis Langdale wrote to me a month ago. No, you didn't know that, did you? She said how nice it had been to meet us both, at Caroline's supper-party. I thought of writing back and telling her what hell you'd given me over it in the taxi home! What a letter that would have made! “Dear Phyllis, I'd love to have drinks with you some time, but you see the thing is my girlfriend's what they call a jealous type. If you were married, or extremely ugly, or some sort of cripple, I dare say things would be different. But a single even vaguely attractive woman-my dear, I couldn't risk it! Never mind if the girl's not queer; apparently I'm so irrestistible that if she's not a raving Lesbian when she sits down with me for a gin and French, she will be when she stands up again!”'

'Shut up,' said Helen. 'You're making me out to be a fool! I'm not a fool. I know what you're like, how you are. I've seen you, with women-'

'You think I'm interested in other women?' Julia laughed. 'Christ, if only!'

Helen looked at her. 'What does that mean?'

Julia turned her head. 'Nothing. Nothing, Helen… It always amazes me, that's all, that it should be you who has this fucking-this fucking fixation. Is there something about affairs? Is it like-I don't know-Catholicism? One only spots the other Romans when one's practised it oneself?'

She met Helen's gaze, and looked away again. They stood in silence for a moment. Then, 'Work it up your arse,' said Helen. She turned, and went back downstairs to the sitting-room.

She spoke quietly, and walked calmly; but the violence of her feelings appalled her. She couldn't sit, she couldn't be still. She drank the rest of her gin and water, and poured herself another glassful. She lit herself a cigarette-but put it out almost at once. She stood at the mantelpiece, trembling; she was afraid that, at any second, she might go shrieking and whirling about the house, pulling books from their shelves, ripping up cushions. She thought she could easily take hold of the hair on her own head and start tearing it out. If someone had handed her a knife, she would have jabbed it into herself.

After a minute she heard Julia going up to her study and closing its door. Then there was silence. What was she doing? What could she be doing, that she needed to close the door on it like that? She might be using the telephone… The more Helen thought about it, the more certain she began to feel that that was what Julia was doing. She was calling up Ursula Waring-calling her up to complain, to laugh, to make some fresh arrangement to meet… It was terrible, thought Helen, not to know! She couldn't bear it. She went with diabolical stealth to the bottom of the stairs, and held her breath, trying to hear…

Then she caught sight of herself in the hall mirror: saw her flushed, contorted face; and felt filled with disgust. The disgust was worse than anything. She put up a hand to cover her eyes, and went back into the sitting-room. She didn't think of going up to Julia. It seemed natural to her, now, that Julia should loathe her, should want to turn away from her; she loathed herself, she wished she could turn away from her own skin. She felt utterly trapped, suffocated. She stood for a moment not knowing what to do with herself, then went to the window and put back the curtain. She looked at the the street, the garden, the houses with their peeling stucco façades. She saw a world of devious things out to trick and mock her. A man and a woman walked by, hand in hand, smiling: it seemed to her that they must have a secret, to safety and ease and trust, that she had lost.

She sat, and switched off the lamp. Down in the basement the man, the woman and their daughter called out, from room to room; the girl started playing a recorder, going over and over the same halting nursery tune. There was no sound from the rooms upstairs until, at ten o'clock or so, Julia's door was opened and she went quietly down to the kitchen. Helen followed her movements with horrible distinctness: heard her pass back and forth from the kitchen to the bedroom; saw her come down to use the lavatory, go to the bathroom, wash her face; saw her go up again to the bedroom, switching off the lights behind her as she went; heard her moving across the creaking bedroom floor as she took off her clothes and got into bed… She didn't attempt to speak to Helen, or come to the sitting-room at all, and Helen didn't call out. The bedroom door was pushed to, but not closed: the light from the reading-lamp showed in the stair-well for a quarter of an hour, and then was extinguished.

The house was perfectly dark after that, and the darkness, and the silence, made Helen feel worse than ever. She only had to reach for the switch of the lamp, the dial of the wireless, to change the mood of the place; but she couldn't do it, she was quite cut off from ordinary habits and things. She sat a little longer, then got up and began to pace. The pacing was like something an actress might do in a play, to communicate a state of despair or dementedness, and didn't feel real. She got down on the floor, drew up her legs, put her arms before her face: this pose didn't feel real, either, but she held it, for almost twenty minutes. Perhaps Julia will come down and see me lying on the floor, she thought, as she lay there; she thought, that if Julia did that, then she would at least realise the extremity of the feeling by which she, Helen, was gripped…

Then she saw at last that she would only look absurd. She got up. She was chilled, and cramped. She went to the mirror. It was unnerving, gazing at your face in a mirror in a darkened room; there was a little light from a street-lamp, however, and she could see by this that her cheek and bare arm were marked red and white, as if in little weals, from where she'd lain upon the carpet. The marks were satisfying, at least. She had often longed, in fact, for her jealousy to take some physical form; she'd sometimes thought, in moments like this, I'll burn myself, or I'll cut myself. For a burn or a cut might be shown, might be nursed, might scar or heal, would be a miserable kind of emblem; would anyway be there, on the surface of her body, rather than corroding it from within… Now the thought came to her again, that she might scar herself in some way. It came, like the solution to a problem. I won't be doing it, she said to herself, like some hysterical girl. I won't be doing it for Julia, hoping she'll come and catch me at it. It won't be like lying on the sitting-room floor. I'll be doing it for myself, as a secret.

She didn't allow herself to think what a very poor secret such a thing would be. She went quietly up to the kitchen and got her sponge-bag from the cupboard; came back down to the bathroom, softly closed and locked the door, and turned on the light; and at once felt better. The light was bright, like the lights you saw in hospital operating-rooms in films; the bare white surfaces of the bath and basin contributed, too, a certain clinical feeling, a sense of efficiency, even of duty. She was not in the least like some hysterical girl. She saw her face in the mirror again and the scarlet had faded from her cheek, she looked perfectly reasonable and calm.

She proceeded, now, as if she'd planned the entire operation in advance. She opened the neck of the sponge-bag and drew out the slim chromium case which held the safety razor she and Julia used for shaving their legs. She took the razor out, unwound its screw, lifted off the little hub of metal and eased out the blade. How thin it was, how flexible! It was like holding nothing-a wafer, a counter in a game, a postage stamp. Her only concern was, where she might cut. She looked at her arms; she thought perhaps the inside of the arm, where the flesh was softer and might be supposed to yield more easily. She considered her stomach, for a similar reason. She didn't think of her wrists, ankles or shins, or any hard part like that. Finally she settled on her inner thigh. She put up a foot to the cold rounded lip of the bath; found the pose too cramped; lengthened her stride and braced her foot against the farther wall. She drew back her skirt, wondered about tucking it into her knickers, thought of taking it off entirely. For, suppose she should bleed on it? She had no idea how much blood to expect.

Her thigh was pale-creamy-pale, against the white of the bath-tub-and seemed huge beneath her hands. She'd never contemplated it in just this way before, and she was struck now by how perfectly featureless it was. If she were to see it in isolation, she'd hardly know it as a functioning piece of limb. She didn't think she would even recognise it as hers.

She put a hand upon the leg, to stretch the flesh tight between her fingers and her thumb; she listened once, to be sure that there was no-one out in the hall, able to hear her; then she brought the edge of the blade to the skin and made a cut. The cut was shallow, but impossibly painful: she felt it, like stepping in icy water, as a hideous shock to the heart. She recoiled for a moment, then tried a second time. The sensation was the same. She literally gasped. Do it again, more swiftly! she said to herself; but the thinness and flexibility of the metal, that had seemed almost attractive before, now struck her, in relation to the springing fatness of her thigh, as repulsive. The slicing was too precise. The cuts she'd made were filling with blood; the blood rose slowly, however-as if grudgingly-and seemed to darken and congeal at once. The edges of flesh were already closing: she put the razor blade down and pulled them apart. That made the blood come a little faster-at last it spilled from the skin and grew smeary. She watched, for a minute; two or three times more worked the flesh around the cuts, to make the blood flow again; then she rubbed the leg clean, as best she could, with a dampened handkerchief.

She was left with two short crimson lines, such as might have been made by a hard but playful swipe from the paw of a cat.

She sat down on the edge of the bath. The shock of cutting, she thought, had produced some change in her, some almost chemical change: she felt quite unnaturally clear-headed-alive, and chastened. She'd lost the certainty that the cutting of her leg was a sane and reasonable thing to do; she would have hated, for example, for Julia, or any of their friends, to have come upon her as she was doing it. She would have died of embarassment! And yet- She kept looking at the crimson lines, in a half-perplexed, half-admiring way. You perfect fool, she thought; but she thought it almost jauntily. At last she took up the blade again, washed it, screwed it back beneath its metal hub, and put the razor back in its case. She switched off the light, allowed her eyes to grow used to the darkness, then let herself into the hall and went up to the bedroom.

Julia lay on her side, turned away from the door, her face in darkness, her hair very black against her pillow. It was impossible to say whether she was sleeping or awake.

'Julia,' said Helen, quietly.

'What?' asked Julia after a moment.

'I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Do you hate me?'

'Yes.'

'You don't hate me as much as I hate myself.'

Julia rolled on to her back. 'Do you say that, as some sort of consolation?'

'I don't know,' said Helen. She went closer, put her fingers to Julia's hair.

Julia flinched. 'Your hand's freezing. Don't touch me!' She took Helen's hand. 'For God's sake, why are you so cold? Where have you been?'

'In the bathroom. Nowhere.'

'Get into bed, can't you?'

Helen moved away, to take off her clothes, unpin her hair, draw on her nightdress. She did it all in a creeping, craven sort of way. Julia said again, when she'd got into the bed beside her, 'You're so cold!'

'I'm sorry,' said Helen. She hadn't noticed the chill, before; but now, feeling the warmth of Julia's body, she began to shake. 'I'm sorry,' she said again. Her teeth chattered in her head. She tried to make herself rigid; the trembling grew worse.

'God!' said Julia; but she put her arm around Helen and drew her close. She was wearing a boy's striped nightshirt: it smelt of sleep, of unmade beds, of unwashed hair-but pleasantly, deliciously. Helen lay against her and shut her eyes. She felt exhausted, emptied out. She thought of the evening that had passed, and it was astonishing to her that a single set of hours could contain so many separate states of violent feeling.

Perhaps Julia thought the same. She lifted a hand and rubbed her face. 'What a ridiculous night!' she said.

'Do you really hate me, Julia?'

'Yes. No, I don't suppose so.'

'I can't help myself,' said Helen. 'I don't know myself, when I'm like that. It's like-'

But she couldn't explain it; she never could. It sounded childish, every time. She could never convey to Julia how utterly dreadful it was to have that seething, wizened little gnome-like thing spring up and consume you; how exhausting, to have to tuck it back into your breast when it was done; how frightening, to feel it there, living inside you, waiting its chance to spring again…

She said only, 'I love you, Julia.'

And Julia answered: 'Idiot. Go to sleep.'

They were silent after that. Julia lay tensely for a time, but soon her limbs began to slacken and her breaths to deepen and slow. Once, as if startled by a dream, she jumped, and that made Helen jump, too; but then she settled back into slumber. Out in the street, there were voices. Someone ran laughing along the pavement. In the house next door a plug was drawn from an electric socket, a window went squealing against its frame and was closed with a bang.

Julia stirred in her sleep, made uneasy by dreams again. Who, wondered Helen, was she dreaming of? Not Ursula Waring, after all. But not of me, either, Helen thought… For, wakeful, chastened, she saw it all very plainly now: Julia's staying out so late, when she might so easily have left a note; when she might so easily have done it differently, done it in secret, not done it at all… Don't, Helen, Julia said, in exasperation, every time. But if she didn't want bluster and fuss, why did she make it so easy for Helen to create them? With some part of herself, Helen thought, she must long for them. She must long for them because she knew that, beyond them, there was nothing: deadness, blankness, the arid surface of her own parched heart.

When did Julia stop loving me? Helen wondered now. But it was too frightful a thought to pursue; and she was too exhausted. She lay open-eyed, still pressed close to Julia, still feeling the heat of her limbs, the rising and falling of her breaths. But in time she changed her pose, and moved away.

And as her hand slid across the cotton of Julia's nightshirt, she thought of something else-a silly thing-she thought of a pair of pyjamas she'd once owned, when the war was on, and then had lost. They were satin pyjamas, the colour of pearls: the most beautiful pyjamas, it seemed to her now, as she lay alone and untouched in the darkness at Julia's side; the most beautiful pyjamas she'd ever seen.

Duncan had come home from work that night and heated a kettle full of water; he'd taken the kettle up to his room, stripped down to his vest, and washed his hands, his face and his hair-trying to get the feel of the factory out of them; wanting to look his best, for his evening with Fraser.

Still in his vest and trousers he'd gone downstairs, to polish his shoes, to put a towel on the kitchen counter and iron a shirt. The shirt had a soft collar to it, like the shirts that Fraser wore; and when Duncan put it on, still hot from the iron, he left it unbuttoned at the throat-just as Fraser wore his. He thought, too, of leaving the Brylcreem off his hair. He went back up to his bedroom and stood at his mirror, combing the hair this way and that-trying out different partings, different ways of letting it tumble over his brow… But the hair, as it dried, began to grow downy; he began to remind himself of the little boy in the 'Bubbles' advert for Pears Soap. So he put the Brylcreem on after all-worrying that he'd left it too late; spending five or ten more minutes with the comb, trying to get the waves to sit right.

When he'd finished he went downstairs again and Mr Mundy said, with a dreadful forced sort of brightness, 'My word! The girls are in for a treat tonight, all right! What time's he coming for you, son?'

'Half-past seven,' said Duncan shyly, 'the same as last time. But we're going to a different pub, on a different bit of the river. They sell a better sort of beer, Fraser says.'

Mr Mundy nodded, his face still stretched in a ghastly smile. 'Yes,' he said, 'the girls won't know what's hit them tonight!'

He had not been able to believe it when Duncan had brought Fraser home, that other time, two weeks before. Fraser had not been able to believe it, either. The three of them had sat in the parlour together, at a loss for things to say; in the end the little cat had come trotting innocently in, and that had saved them. They'd spent twenty minutes making her chase after bits of string. Duncan had even got down on the floor and shown Fraser his trick of letting her walk up his body… Mr Mundy had gone around since then like a wounded man. His limp had worsened; he'd begun to stoop. Mr Leonard, in his crooked house in the street off Lavender Hill, had been very dismayed at the change in him. He spoke more passionately to him than ever about the necessity of resisting the lure of Error and False Belief.

Tonight, once Fraser arrived, Duncan planned to get out as quickly as he could. He and Mr Mundy ate their tea, then stood together washing up the dishes; and as soon as the dishes were stacked away, he put on his jacket. He sat in the parlour, at the very front of his chair-ready to spring up the moment he heard Fraser's knock.

But he picked up a book, too, to pass the time, and to make himself look careless. The book was a library book on antique silver, with a table of hallmarks: he worked his finger down the page, trying to memorise the significance of anchors, crowns, lions, thistles-but all the time, of course, listening out for that tap at the door… Half-past seven came and went. He began to grow tense. He started to imagine all the ordinary things that might be keeping Fraser away. He pictured Fraser coming breathlessly to the door-just as he had come breathlessly up to the factory gate, that other time. His face would be pink, his hair would be bouncing over his brow, and he'd say, 'Pearce! Had you given up on me? I'm so sorry! I've been-' The excuses grew wilder as the minutes ticked by. He'd been stuck in an Underground train, going out of his mind with frustration. He'd seen a person get hit by a car, and had to send for an ambulance!

By quarter past eight Duncan had begun to worry that Fraser might have come, have knocked, and gone away unheard. Mr Mundy had switched the wireless on, and the programme was rather noisy. So, on the pretext of getting himself a glass of water, he went out into the hall and stood quite still, cocking his head, listening for footsteps; he even, very softly, opened the front door and looked up and down the street. But there was no sign of Fraser… He went back into the parlour, leaving the door of it propped open. The radio programme changed, then changed again a half-hour later. The grandfather clock kept sending out its heavy, hollow chimes…

It took him until half-past nine to understand that Fraser wasn't going to come. The disappointment was dreadful-but then, he was used to disappointment; the first sting of it faded, turned instead into a settled blankness of heart. He put down his book, the table of hallmarks unlearnt. He was aware of Mr Mundy's gaze, but couldn't bring himself to meet it. And when Mr Mundy got up, came awkwardly to him, and lightly patted his shoulder and said, 'There. He's a busy chap, I expect. He'll have run into a couple of pals. That's what's happened, you mark my words!'-when Mr Mundy said that, he couldn't answer. He found he almost hated the feel of Mr Mundy's hand… Mr Mundy waited, then moved off. He went out to the kitchen. He let the parlour door close behind him, and Duncan suddenly felt the closeness and the airlessness of the dim, small, crowded room. He had a horrible sense of himself-falling, falling, as if down the narrow shaft of a well.

But the panic, like the disappointment, flared in him and died. Mr Mundy returned in time with a cup of cocoa: Duncan took it from his hands and meekly drank it. He carried the cup out to the kitchen and washed it himself, turning it over and over in the stream of cold water. The milk that was left in the pan he put down in a saucer on the floor, for the cat. He went out to the lavatory and, for a little while, just stood there in the yard, looking up at the sky.

When he went back into the parlour Mr Mundy was already going about shaking cushions, getting ready for bed. As Duncan watched, he started turning off the lamps. He moved from one lamp to the next. The parlour grew dark, the faces in the pictures on the walls, the ornaments on the mantelpiece, drawing back into shadow. It was just ten o'clock.

They went upstairs together, slowly, taking one step at a time. Mr Mundy kept his hand in the crook of Duncan 's elbow; and at the top he had to pause, still with his hand on Duncan 's arm, to get his breath back.

When he spoke, his voice was husky. He said, without looking at Duncan, 'You'll come in, son, in a minute, to say goodnight?'

Duncan didn't answer straight away. They stood in silence, and he felt Mr Mundy stiffen as if afraid… Then, 'Yes,' he said, very quietly. 'All right.'

Mr Mundy nodded, his shoulders drooping with relief. 'Thank you, son,' he said. He drew off his hand and made his slow, shuffling way along the landing to his bedroom. Duncan went into his own room and started to undress.

This room was small: a boy's room-the very room, in fact, in which Mr Mundy himself had used to sleep, when he was young and lived in this house with his parents and sister. The bed was a high Victorian one, with polished brass balls at each of its corners; Duncan had once unscrewed one of these and found a slip of paper inside it, marked in a smudged childish hand: Mabel Alice Mundy twenty dredful curses on you if you read this! The books in the bookcase were boys' adventure stories with broad, colourful spines. On the mantelpiece, set out as if to fight, were some badly-painted old lead soldiers… But Mr Mundy had put up shelves, too, for Duncan to display his own things, the things he'd bought in markets and antique shops. Duncan usually spent a moment, before he went to bed, looking over the pots and jars and ornaments, the teaspoons and tear-bottles-picking them up and delighting in them all over again; thinking about where they'd come from and who'd owned them before.

But he looked at it all, tonight, without much interest. He briefly picked up the bit of clay pipe he'd found on the beach by the riverside pub, that was all. He put his pyjamas on slowly, buttoning the jacket then tucking it tidily into the trousers. He cleaned his teeth, and combed his hair again-combing it differently this time, making it neat, putting a parting in it like a child's… He was very aware, as he did all this, of Mr Mundy waiting patiently in the room next door; he pictured him lying very still and straight, his head propped up on feather pillows, the blankets drawn up to his armpits, his hands neatly folded, but ready to pat the side of the bed, invitingly, when Duncan went in… It wasn't much. It was almost nothing. Duncan thought of other things. There was a picture, hanging over Mr Mundy's bed: a scene of an angel, safely leading children over a narrow, precipitous bridge. He'd look at that until it was over. He'd look at the complicated folds in the angel's gown; at the children's large, innocent-spiteful Victorian faces.

He put down his comb and picked up the bit of clay pipe again; and this time touched it to his mouth. It was chill and very smooth. He closed his eyes and moved it lightly across his lips, backwards and forwards-liking the feel of it, but made miserable by it too; aware of the uneasy stir of sensations it was calling up inside him. If only Fraser, he thought, had come! Perhaps, after all, he'd simply forgotten. It might be something as ordinary as that. If you were another sort of boy, he said bitterly to himself, you wouldn't have sat around here just waiting for him to turn up, you'd have gone out to find him. If you were a proper sort of boy you'd go out to his house right now-

He opened his eyes-and at once met his own gaze in the mirror. His hair was combed in its neat white parting, his pyjama jacket buttoned up to the chin; but he wasn't a boy. He wasn't ten years old. He wasn't even seventeen. He was twenty-four, and could do what he liked. He was twenty-four, and Mr Mundy-

Mr Mundy, he thought suddenly, could go to hell. Why shouldn't Duncan go out and get Fraser, if that's what he wanted? He knew the way to Fraser's street. He knew the very house Fraser lived in, because Fraser had taken him past the end of his road, once, and pointed it out to him!

He moved about very quickly now. He messed up the parting in his hair. He put on his trousers and his jacket-pulled them on right over his pyjamas, not wanting to waste even a minute by taking the pyjamas off. He put on his socks and his polished shoes, and as he stooped to tie his laces he realised that his hands were shaking; but he wasn't afraid. He felt almost giddy.

His shoes must have sounded loudly against the floor as he walked about. He heard the uneasy creaking of Mr Mundy's bed-and that made him move faster. He stepped out of his room and glanced just once across the landing to Mr Mundy's door; then he went quickly down the stairs.

The house was dark, but he knew his way through it as a blind man would-putting out his hand and finding door-knobs, anticipating steps and slippery rugs. He didn't go to the front door, because he knew that Mr Mundy's bedroom overlooked the street, and he wanted to go more secretly. For even in the midst of his excitement-even after having said to himself that Mr Mundy, for all he cared, could go to hell!-even after that, he thought it would be horrible to look back and see Mr Mundy at the window, watching him go.

So he went the back way, through to the kitchen and out, past the lavatory, to the end of the yard; and only when he got to the yard door did he remember that it was kept shut with a padlock. He knew where the key was, and might have run back for it; but he couldn't bear to go back now, not even as far as the scullery drawer. He dragged over a couple of crates and clambered up them, like a thief, to the top of the wall; he dropped to the other side, landing heavily, hurting his foot, hopping about.

But the feeling, suddenly, of having a locked door behind him, was wonderful. He said to himself, in Alec's voice: There's no going back now, D.P.!

He made his way along the alley at the back of Mr Mundy's house, and emerged in a residential street. The street was one he walked down often, but it seemed transformed to him now, in the darkness. He moved more slowly, taken with the strange aspect of it all: very aware of the people in the houses that he passed; seeing lights put out in downstairs rooms and springing on in bedrooms and on landings, as the people went to bed. He saw a woman lift a white net curtain to reach for a window latch: the curtain draped her as a veil would a bride. In a modern house, a frosted bathroom window was lit up and showed, very clearly, a man in a vest: he sipped from a glass, put back his head to gargle; then jerked forward to spit the gargle out. Duncan caught the ring of the glass as it was set down on the basin, and when the man turned on a tap, he heard the water rushing through a waste-pipe, spluttering as it struck the drain below. The world seemed full, to him, of extraordinary new things. Nobody challenged him. Nobody seemed even to look at him. He moved through the streets as a ghost might.

He walked, in this unreal, fascinated way, through Shepherd's Bush and Hammersmith, for almost an hour; then slowed his step and grew more wary, finding the end of Fraser's street. The houses here were rather grander than the ones that he was used to; they were that kind of red-brick Edwardian villa you saw turned into doctors' surgeries, or homes for the blind, or-as in this street-boarding-houses. Each had its own name, set above its door in leaded letters. Fraser's house, Duncan saw as he drew close to it, was called St Day's. A sign said, No Vacancies.

Duncan stood, hesitating, at the gate to the shallow front garden. He knew that Fraser's room was the one on the ground floor, on the left-hand side. He remembered that, because Fraser had made a joke of the fact that his landlady called this room front bottom; he said it was like something one's nurse would say… The curtains at the window were drawn together. They were old black-out curtains, and perfectly dark. But there was a slim, brilliant blade of colour where Fraser hadn't pulled them quite shut. Duncan thought he could hear a voice, too, talking monotonously, in the room beyond.

The sound of the voice made him suddenly uncertain. Suppose Mr Mundy was right, and Fraser had spent the evening with his friends? What would he think of Duncan turning up in the middle of it all? What sort of people would the friends be? Duncan imagined university types, clever young men with pipes and spectacles and knitted ties… Then he had an even worse thought. He thought that Fraser might be in there with a girl. He saw the girl very cleary: stout, blowsy, with a tittering laugh; with wet red lips and cherry-brandy breath.

Until he'd had this dreadful vision he'd been going to walk to the front door, like a proper visitor, and ring the bell. Now, as he grew nervous, the temptation to tiptoe over to the window and just quickly peer inside was too much for him. So he unlatched the gate and pushed it open; it swung noiselessly on its hinge. He went up the path, then made his way between rustling bushes to the window. With his heart thudding, he put his face to the glass.

He saw Fraser at once. He was sitting in an armchair at the back of the room, beyond the bed. He was dressed in his shirt-sleeves, and had his head put back; beside his chair was a table with a mess of papers on it, and his pipe in an ashtray, and a glass, and a bottle of what looked like whisky. He was sitting quite still, as if dozing, though the voice which Duncan had heard before was still going monotonously on… But now the voice gave way to a low burst of music, and Duncan realised that it was coming from a radio, that was all. The music, in fact, seemed to wake Fraser up. He got to his feet and rubbed his face. He went across the room, moved just out of Duncan 's vision, and the sound was abruptly cut off. As he walked, Duncan saw that he'd taken his shoes off. His socks had holes in them: great big holes, showing his toes and uncut toenails.

The sight of the holes and the toenails gave Duncan courage. When Fraser moved back towards his chair as if meaning to sink down in it again, he tapped on the glass.

At once, Fraser stopped and turned his head, frowning, searching for the source of the sound. He looked at the gap in the curtains-looked right, as it seemed to Duncan, into Duncan 's eyes; but couldn't see him. The sensation was unnerving. Again Duncan felt-but less pleasantly, this time-like a ghost. He lifted his hand and tapped harder-and that made Fraser cross the room and take hold of the curtain and pull it back.

When he caught sight of Duncan, he looked amazed. 'Pearce!' he said. But then he winced, and glanced quickly at the bedroom door. He thumbed back the catch of the window and quietly raised the sash, putting a finger to his lips.

'Not too loudly. I think the landlady's in the hall… What the hell are you doing here? Are you all right?'

'Yes,' said Duncan quietly. 'I just came looking for you. I've been waiting at Mr Mundy's. Why didn't you come? I waited for you all night.'

Fraser looked guilty. 'I'm sorry. The time ran away with me. Then it was late, and-' He made a hopeless gesture. 'I don't know.'

'I was waiting for you,' Duncan said again. 'I thought something must have happened to you.'

'I'm sorry. Truly I am. I didn't suppose you'd come and find me! How did you get here?'

'I just walked.'

'Mr Mundy let you?'

Duncan snorted. 'Mr Mundy couldn't stop me! I've been walking in the streets.'

Fraser looked him over, peering at his jacket, frowning again but beginning to smile. He said, 'You've got- You've got your pyjamas on!'

'So?' said Duncan, touching his collar self-consciously. 'What's wrong with that? It'll save me time.'

'What?'

'It'll save me time, later, when I go to bed.'

'You're crazy, Pearce!'

'You're the crazy one… You smell of drink. You smell awful! What have you been doing?'

But bafflingly, Fraser had started to laugh. 'I've been out with a girl,' he said.

'I knew you had! What girl? What's so funny?'

'Nothing,' said Fraser. But he was still laughing. 'It's just-this girl.'

'Well, what about her?'

'Oh, Pearce.' Fraser wiped his lips and tried to speak more soberly. 'It was your sister,' he said.

Duncan stared at him, growing cold. 'My sister! What are you talking about? You can't mean, Viv?'

'Yes, I mean Viv. We went to a pub. She was awfully nice-laughed at all of my jokes; even let me kiss her, in the end. Had the grace to blush, too, when I opened my eyes and found her sneaking a glance at her wristwatch… I put her on the bus and sent her home.'

'But, how?' asked Duncan.

'We just walked to a bus-stop-'

'You know what I mean! How did you meet her? Why did you do it? Take her out, I mean, and-?'

Fraser was laughing again. But his laughter had changed. It was rueful now-almost embarassed. He lifted a hand, to cover his mouth.

And, after a moment, Duncan began to laugh too. He couldn't help it. He didn't know what he was laughing at, even-whether it was Fraser, or himself, or Viv, or Mr Mundy, or all of them. But for almost a minute he and Fraser stood there, on either side of the window-sill, their hands across their mouths, their eyes filling with tears, their faces flushing, as they tried, hopelessly, to stifle their laughter and snorts.

Then Fraser grew a little calmer. He glanced over his shoulder again and whispered, 'All right. I think she's gone up now. Come in though, for God's sake!-before a policeman or somebody spots us.'

And then he moved back, and put aside the black-out curtain, so that Duncan could climb in.

'Ah, Miss Langrish,' said Mr Leonard, drawing open his door.

Kay gave a jump. She had been going softly up the darkened staircase, but a creaking board must have given her away. Mr Leonard, she guessed, had been sitting up alone in his treatment room-making his night watch, sending out prayers. He was dressed in his shirt-sleeves, the cuffs rolled back. He had put on the indigo-coloured lamp he used when healing at night, and the blue of it lit the landing strangely.

He stood in his doorway, his face in shadow. He said quietly, 'I've been thinking of you tonight, Miss Langrish. How are you?'

She told him she was well. He said, 'You've been out, I imagine, enjoying the evening?' He tilted his head and added, 'You've seen old friends?'

'I've been to a cinema,' she answered quickly.

He nodded, as if sagely. 'A cinema, yes. Such curious places, I always think. Such instructive places… Next time you go to a cinema, Miss Langrish, you ought to just try something. Just turn your head and look over your shoulder. What will you find? So many faces, all lit by the restless, flickering light of impermanent things. Eyes fixed, and wide, with awe, with terror or with lust… Just so, you see, is the unevolved spirit held in thrall by material sense; by fictions and by dreams…'

His voice was low, level, compelling. When she said nothing, he came closer to her and gently caught hold of her hand. He said, 'I think you are one of those spirits, Miss Langrish. I think you are searching, but held in thrall. That is because you are searching with your eyes cast down, seeing nothing but dust. You must lift up your gaze, my dear. You must learn to look away from perishable things.'

His palm and fingertips were soft, and his grip seemed gentle; even so, she had to make a little effort in order to draw her hand away. She said, 'I will. I- Thank you, Mr Leonard'-sounding ridiculous to herself, her voice thick, uncertain, not at all like her own. She moved from him: went gracelessly up the staircase to her room; fumbled with the lock of it before she got the door open and went inside.

She waited for the click of Mr Leonard's door downstairs and then, without putting on the light, crossed to her armchair and sat down. Her foot struck something as she went, and sent it rustling over the rucked-up rug: she'd left a newspaper, open, on the floor. On the arm of her chair was a dirty plate and an old tin pie-dish, overflowing with ash and cigarette stubs. A shirt and some collars that she had recently washed were hanging from a string in the fireplace, pale and flimsy-looking in the gloom.

She kept still for a moment, then put her hand to her pocket and brought out that ring. It felt bulky to her touch, and the finger on which she'd used to wear it was too slim, now, to keep it in place. When she had taken it, in the street, it had still been warm from Viv's hand. She had sat in the cinema, staring unseeingly at the roaring, twitching pantomime being played out on the screen, turning the gold band over and over, running her fingertips across all its little scratches and dents… At last, unable to bear it, she'd clumsily put the ring away and got to her feet; had stumbled along the cinema row, gone quickly through the foyer, and out into the street.

Since then she had been walking. She'd walked to Oxford Street, to Rathbone Place, to Bloomsbury-restless and searching, just as Mr Leonard had guessed. She'd thought of going back to Mickey's boat-had got as far as Paddington, even, before she'd given the idea up. For, what was the point? She'd gone into a pub instead, and had a couple of whiskeys. She'd bought a drink for a blonde-haired girl; that had made her feel better.

After that she'd come wearily home to Lavender Hill. Now she felt exhausted. She turned the ring in her fingers as she'd turned it in the cinema, but even the slight weight of it seemed too heavy for her hand. She gazed about, listlessly, for somewhere to put it-and finally dropped it into the pie-dish, amongst the cigarette stubs.

But it lay there gleaming, undimmed by ash; it kept drawing her eye, and after a minute she fished it out again and rubbed it clean. She put it back on her slender finger; and closed her fist, to keep it from slipping.

The house was still. All London seemed still. Only, presently, did there rise, from the room below, the muffled throb of Mr Leonard's murmur, that told her he was hard at work again; and she pictured him, bathed in indigo electric light: hunched and watchful, sending out his fierce benediction into the fragility of the night.