The Night Watch

1

Every time Viv and her father came out of the prison they had to stop for a minute or two so that Mr Pearce could rest, could get out his handkerchief and wipe his face. It was as though the visits knocked the breath from him. He'd gaze back at the quaint, grey, medieval-looking gate like a man who'd just been punched. 'If I'd ever thought,' he'd say, or, 'If someone had told me.'

'Thank God your mother's not here, Vivien, to have to see this,' he said today.

Viv took his arm. 'At least it's not for much longer.' She spoke clearly, so that he would hear. 'Remember what we said, at the start? We said, “It's not for ever.”'

He blew his nose. 'That's right. That's true.'

They started to walk. He insisted on carrying her satchel for her, but she might as well have been holding it herself: he seemed to lean against her with all his weight, and every so often he let out his breath in a little puff. He could have been her grandfather, she thought. All this business with Duncan had made an old man of him.

The February day had been cold, but bright. Now it was quarter to five and the sun was setting: there were a couple of barrage balloons up and they were the only things that still caught the light, drifting pinkly, vividly, in the darkening sky. Viv and her father walked along towards Wood Lane. There was a café, close to the station, where they usually stopped. When they reached it today, however, they found women there, whose faces they recognised: the girlfriends and wives of men in other parts of the prison. They were freshening up their make-up, peering into compacts; laughing their heads off. Viv and her father walked on to another place. They went in, and bought cups of tea.

This café was not so nice as the other. There was one spoon, to be used by all, tied to the counter by a piece of string. The tables were covered with greasy oilcloths, and the steamed-up window had patches and smears where men must have leaned their heads against it as they lolled in their chairs. But her father, Viv thought, saw none of this. He still moved as though winded or bewildered. He sat, and lifted his cup to his mouth, and his hand was shaking: he had to dip his head and quickly sip at the tea before it should spill. And when he rolled himself a cigarette the tobacco fell from the paper. She put down her own cup and helped him pick up the strands from the table-using her long nails, making a joke of it.

He was a little calmer after his smoke. He finished his tea, and they walked together to the Underground-going quickly now, feeling the cold. He had a long journey home to Streatham, but she was going, she said, back to work at Portman Square-working extra hours to make up for the ones she'd taken off in order to visit Duncan. They sat side by side in the train, unable to talk because of the roar and rattle of it. When she got out at Marble Arch he got out with her, to say goodbye on the platform.

The platform was one that was used as a shelter in the night. There were bunks, buckets, a litter of papers, a sour uriney smell. People were already coming in, kids and old ladies, settling down.

'There we are,' said Viv's father, as they waited. He was trying to make the best of things. 'It's another month done, I suppose.'

'Yes, that's right.'

'And how did you think he was looking? Did you think he was looking all right?'

She nodded. 'Yes, he looked all right.'

'Yes… And what I always think to myself, Vivien, is this: at least we know where he is. We know he's being looked after. There's plenty fathers can't say that of their sons in wartime, can they?'

'No.'

'There's plenty fathers would envy me.'

He took out his handkerchief again and wiped his eyes. But his look grew bitter rather than sad. And after a moment he said, in a different voice, 'God help me, though, for talking ill of the dead; but it ought to be that other boy in there, not Duncan!'

She pressed his arm, saying nothing. She saw the anger in him, tightening then draining away. He let out his breath, patted her hand.

'Good girl. You're a good girl, Vivien.'

They stood without speaking until another train roared in. Then, 'Here you are,' she said. 'Go on, now. I'll be all right.'

'You don't want me to walk you up to Portman Square?'

'Don't be daft! Go on, look… And give my love to Pamela!'

He didn't hear her. She watched him board but, the windows being all blacked out, when he moved further in to find a seat she lost sight of him. But she didn't want him to glimpse her rushing away: she waited for the doors to close and the train to start up, before moving off herself.

Then, however, it was as though she became a different girl. The slightly exaggerated manner she had to adopt when speaking to her father-the mouthing, the gestures-fell away. She was suddenly neat, smart, guarded: she looked at her watch and went quickly, her heels clicking on the concrete floor. Anyone watching her, after hearing the conversation she'd just had, would have been baffled: for she didn't head for the steps that would have taken her up to the street; she didn't even glance that way. Instead she went purposefully across to the westbound platform and waited there for a train; and when the train drew in, she got on it and travelled back in the direction she'd just come from. And at Notting Hill Gate she changed to the Circle Line, and rode to Euston Square.

She didn't have to go back to work, after all. She was going to a hotel in Camden Town. She was meeting Reggie. He'd sent her the address of a place and a rough sort of map, and she'd memorised it, so that now, when she left the train, she could go quickly and not hang about. She was dressed in her sober office clothes and a navy mackintosh and scarf, and the day had darkened properly. She moved like a shadow through the blacked-out streets around Euston, heading north.

These streets were full of small hotels. Some were nicer than others. Some were not nice at all: they looked like places that tarts would use; or they had refugee people in them, families from Malta, Poland, Viv wasn't sure where else. The one she wanted was in a street off Mornington Crescent. It smelt of gravy dinners and dusty carpets. But the woman at the desk was all right. 'Miss Pearce,' she said, smiling, looking at Viv's identification card, then going through her book for the reservation. 'Just passing through? That's right.'

For there were a thousand reasons, these days, why a girl should spend a night on her own in a London hotel.

She gave Viv a key with a wooden tag on it. The room was a cheap one, up three flights of creaking stairs. There was a single bed, an ancient-looking wardrobe, a chair with cigarette burns, and a little wash-basin in the corner that was coming away from the wall. A radiator, painted over and over with different kinds of paint, gave off a tepid heat. On the bedside table was an alarm clock, fastened down with a length of wire. The clock said ten past six. She thought she had thirty or forty minutes.

She took off her coat, and opened her satchel. Inside were two bulky buff Ministry of Food envelopes, marked Confidential. One held a pair of evening shoes. In the other was a dress, and real silk stockings. She had been worried about the dress all day, because it was crêpe and easily creased: she took it carefully from the envelope and let it hang from her hands, then spent a few minutes tugging at it, trying to flatten out the folds. The stockings she had worn and washed many times; there were patches of darning, the stitches tiny and neat, like fairy-work. She ran them over her fingers, liking the feel of them, looking for faults.

She wished she could bathe. She thought she could feel the sour prison smells still clinging to her. But there wasn't time for it. She went down the hall and used the lavatory, then came back to her room and stripped to her brassière and knickers, to wash herself at the little basin.

There was no hot water, she discovered: the tap went round and round in her hand. She ran the cold, and splashed her face, then lifted her arms and leaned to the wall and rinsed her armpits-the water running down to her waist, making her shiver, wetting the carpet. The towel was yellowy-white and thin, like a baby's napkin. The soap had fine grey seams in it. But she'd brought talcum powder with her; and she dabbed scent, from a little bottle, on her wrists and throat and collarbones, and between her breasts. When she put on the flimsy crêpe dress, and replaced her lisle winter stockings with the flesh-coloured silk ones, she felt as though she was in her nightie, light and exposed.

So she went a little self-consciously down to the bar, and got herself a drink-a gin and ginger-to settle her nerves.

'It's only one each miss, I'm afraid,' the barman said; but he made the measure, it seemed to her, a large one. She sat at a table, keeping her head down. It was nearly dinner-time, and people were just beginning to come in. If some man were to catch her eye, drift over, insist on joining her, it would spoil everything. She'd brought a pen and a piece of paper with her, and now spread the paper out. She actually started to write a letter to a girl she knew, in Swansea.

Dear Margery-Hello there, how are you getting along? This is just a word to let you know that I am still alive, despite Hitler doing his best, ha ha. Hope things are a bit quieter where you are-

He arrived at just after seven. She'd been glancing slyly over at every man who had appeared, but had heard a step and, for some reason not thinking it was his, looked up unguardedly: she met his gaze as he crossed the doorway, and blushed like crazy. A moment later she heard him talking with the woman at the desk-telling her that he was meeting someone, a man. Would they mind if he waited? The woman said they wouldn't mind it one little bit.

He came into the bar, had a joke with the barman: 'Just pour me a drop of that stuff there, will you?'-nodding to one of the fancy bottles that were kept, for show, on the shelves behind the counter. In the end he got gin, like everyone else. He brought it to the table next to hers and set it down on a beer-mat. He was dressed in his uniform-wearing it badly, as he always did, the jacket looking as though it was meant for someone half a size bigger. He plucked at his trousers, and sat; then got out a packet of service cigarettes and caught her eye.

'How do you do?' he said.

She changed her pose, drew in her skirt. 'How do you do?'

He offered the cigarettes. 'Care to smoke?

'No, thank you.'

'You won't mind if I do?'

She shook her head, and went back to her letter-though with the nearness of him, the excitement of it all, she'd lost the sense of what she'd been writing… After a second she saw him tilt his head: he was trying to read the words over her shoulder. When she turned to him, he straightened up as if caught out.

'Must be the hell of a fellow,' he said, nodding to the page, 'to get all that.'

'It's a lady-friend, actually.' She sounded prim.

'Well, my mistake.-Oh, now don't be like that!' For she'd folded the paper, begun to screw together the pen. 'Don't leave on my account, will you?'

She said, 'It's nothing to do with you. I've got an appointment.'

He rolled his eyes, then winked at the barman. 'Why do girls always say something like that when I appear?'

He loved all this. He could spin it out for hours. It only put her on edge: she thought they must be like a pair of painful amateur actors. She was always afraid she'd start laughing. Once, in another hotel, she had started laughing; and that had made him laugh; they'd sat there, giggling like kids… She finished her drink. This was the worst part. She picked up her paper, her pen, her bag, and-

'Don't forget this, miss,' he said, touching her arm and taking up her key. He held it out to her by its flat wooden tag.

She blushed again. 'Thank you.'

'Don't mention it.' He straightened his tie. 'That's my lucky number, as it happens.'

Perhaps he winked at the barman again, she didn't know. She went out of the bar and up to her room-so excited now, she was practically breathless. She put on the lamp. She looked in the mirror and re-combed her hair. She began to shiver. She'd got chilled from sitting in the bar in her dress: she put her coat over her shoulders and stood at the tepid radiator, hoping to warm up, feeling the goose-pimples rising on her bare arms and trying to rub them away. She watched the tethered alarm clock, and waited.

After fifteen minutes there was a gentle tapping at the door. She ran to open it, throwing off the coat as she went; and Reggie darted inside.

'Jesus!' he whispered. 'This place is crawling! I had to stand about for ages on the stairs, pretending to tie my shoelaces. A chamber-maid passed me, twice, and gave me the hell of a funny look. I think she thought I was peeping through key-holes.' He put his arms around her and kissed her. 'God! You glorious girl, you.'

It was so wonderful to stand in his arms, she felt suddenly almost light-headed. She even thought, for an awful moment, that she might cry. She kept her cheek against his collar, so that he shouldn't see her face; and when she could speak again what she said was: 'You need a shave.'

'I know,' he answered, rubbing his chin against her forehead. 'Does it hurt?'

'Yes.'

'Do you mind?'

'No.'

'Good girl. To have to start messing about with razors, now, would just about kill me. God! I had a bloody awful time of it getting down here.'

'Are you sorry you came?'

He kissed her again. 'Sorry? I've been thinking of this all day.'

'Only all day?'

'All week. All month. For ever. Oh, Viv.' He kissed her harder. 'I've missed you like hell.'

'Wait,' she whispered, pulling away.

'I can't. I can't! All right. Let me look at you. You look beautiful, you fabulous girl. I saw you downstairs and, I swear to God, it was all I could do to keep my hands off you, it was like torture.'

They moved further into the room, hand-in-hand. He stood rubbing his eyes, looking about. The bulb in the lamp was dim; even so, he saw enough, and made a face.

'This joint is a bit of a hole, isn't it? Morrison said it was OK. I think it's worse than the Paddington one.'

'It's all right,' she said.

'It's not all right. It breaks my heart. You wait till after the war, when I'm back on a proper man's pay. It'll be the Ritz and the Savoy then, every time.'

'I won't care where it is,' she said.

'You wait, though.'

'I won't care where it is, so long as you're there.'

She said it almost shyly. They looked at each other-just looked at each other, getting used to the sight of one another's faces. She hadn't seen him for a month. He was stationed near Worcester, and got to London every four or five weeks. That was nothing, she knew, in wartime. She knew girls with boyfriends in North Africa and Burma, on ships in the Atlantic, in POW camps… But she must be selfish, because she hated time, for keeping him from her even for a month. She hated it for making them strangers to each other, when they ought to be closest. She hated it for taking him away from her again, when she'd just got used to him.

Perhaps he saw all this in her face. He pulled her to him, to kiss her again. But when he felt the press of her against him he moved back, remembering something.

'Hang on,' he said, unbuttoning the flap of his jacket pocket. 'I've got a present for you. Here.'

It was a paper case of hair-grips. She'd been complaining, when she saw him last, about how she had run out. He said, 'One of the boys at the base was selling them. It's not much, but-'

'They're just the thing,' she said shyly. She was touched by his having remembered.

'Are they? I thought they would be. And look, don't laugh.' He'd coloured slightly. 'I brought you these, too.'

She thought he was going to give her cigarettes. He'd produced a bashed-up packet. But he opened it very carefully, then took hold of her hand and gently tipped the contents out into her palm.

They turned out to be three wilting snowdrops. They fell in a tangle of fine green stems.

He said, 'They're not broken, are they?'

'They're beautiful!' said Viv, touching the tight bud-like white flowers, the little ballerina skirts. 'Where did you get them?'

'The train stopped for forty-five minutes, and half of us blokes got out for a smoke. I looked down and there they were. I thought- Well, they made me think of you.'

She could see he was embarassed. She pictured him stooping to pick the flowers, then putting them into that cigarette packet-doing it quickly, so that his friends wouldn't see… Her heart seemed too big, suddenly, for her breast. Again she was afraid that she might cry. But she mustn't do that. Crying was stupid, was pointless!-such a dreadful waste of time. She lifted a snowdrop and gently shook it, then looked at the basin.

'I should put them in water.'

'They're too far gone. Pin them to your dress.'

'I haven't got a pin.'

He took up the hair-grips. 'Use one of these. Or- Here, I've a better idea.'

He fixed the flowers to her hair. He did it rather fumblingly; she felt the point of the grip cut slightly into her scalp. But then he held her face in his swarthy hands, and looked her over.

'There,' he said. 'I swear to God, you get more beautiful every time I see you.'

She went to the mirror. She didn't look beautiful at all. Her face was flushed, her lipstick smeared by his kisses. The stems of the flowers had got crushed by the grip and hung rather limply. But the white of them was vivid, lovely, against the black-brown of her hair.

She turned back to the room. She oughtn't to have moved away from his arms. They seemed to feel the distance, suddenly; and grew shy with each other again. He went to the armchair and sat down, unfastening the top two buttons of his jacket and loosening the collar and tie beneath. After a little silence he cleared his throat and said, 'So. What do you want to do tonight, glamour girl?'

She lifted a shoulder. 'I don't know. I don't mind. Whatever you like.' She just wanted to stay here with him.

'Are you hungry?'

'Not really.'

'We could go out.'

'If you want to.'

'I wish we had some drink.'

'You've just had one!'

'Some whisky, I mean…'

Another silence. She felt herself getting chilly again. She moved to the radiator, and rubbed her arms, as she had before.

He didn't notice. He'd gone back to looking around the room. He asked, as if politely, 'You didn't have any trouble finding this place?'

'No,' she said. 'No, it was easy.'

'Were you working today, or what?'

She hesitated. 'I went to see Duncan,' she said, looking away, 'with Dad.'

He knew about Duncan -at least, he knew where Duncan was. He thought he was in for stealing money… His manner changed. He looked at her properly again.

'Poor baby! I thought you seemed a bit blue. How was it?'

'It was all right.'

'It's stinking, you having to go to a place like that!'

'He doesn't have anyone else, except Dad.'

'It's lousy, that's all. If it was me, and my sister-'

He stopped. There had come the bang of a closing door, amazingly close; and now voices started up, on the other side of the wall. A man's and a woman's, slightly raised, perhaps in argument: the man's sounding most clearly, but both of them muffled, fitful-like the squeals made by a cloth as it polished a table.

'Hell!' whispered Reggie. 'That's all we need.'

'Do you think they can hear us?'

'Not if we're quiet; and not if they carry on like that. Let's hope they do! The fun'll start if they decide to kiss and make up.' He smirked. 'It'll be like a race.'

'I know who'd win,' she said, at once.

He pretended to be hurt. 'Give a fellow a chance!'

He looked her over, in a new sort of way; then held out his hand and said, in a coaxing voice, 'Come here, glamour girl.'

She shook her head, smiling, and wouldn't go to him.

'Come here,' he said again; but she still wouldn't go. So he rose, and reached for her fingers, and drew her to him-pulling at her arm as a sailor pulls on a rope, hand over hand. 'Look at me,' he murmured as he did it. 'I'm a drowning man. I'm a goner. I'm desperate, Viv.'

He kissed her again-lightly enough, at first; but then, as the kiss went on, they both grew serious, almost grim. The stir of feelings which, a moment before, had been gathered about her heart, expanded further. It was as if he was drawing all the life of her to the surface of her flesh. He began to move his hands over her, cupping and working her hips and buttocks, pressing her to him so that she could feel, through her flimsy dress, the points and bulges of his uniform jacket, the buttons and the folds. He began to grow hard: she felt the movement of it, inside his trousers, against her belly. An amazing thing, she thought it, even now; she'd never got used to it. Sometimes he'd move her hand to it. 'That's thanks to you,' he might say, jokily. 'That's all yours. That's got your name on it.' But today he said nothing. They were both too serious. They pulled and pressed at one another as if ravenous for each other's touch.

She was aware of the voices, still sounding fitfully in the neighbouring room. She heard someone walk, whistling a dance-tune, past the door. Down in the stairwell a gong was rung, calling guests to dinner… She and Reggie kissed on, at the centre of it all, silent and more or less still, but, as it seemed to her, enveloped by a storm of motion and noise: the rushing of breath, of blood, of moisture, the straining of fabric and of skin.

She began to move her hips against his. He let her do it for a moment, then pulled away.

'Jesus!' he whispered, wiping his mouth. 'You're killing me!'

She drew him back. 'Don't stop.'

'I'm not going to stop. I just don't want to finish before I've started. Hang on.'

He took off his jacket and threw it down, then shrugged off his braces. He put his arms around her again and walked her to the bed, meaning to lie her down on it. As soon as they sank upon it, however, it creaked. It creaked, whichever spot they tried. So he spread his jacket out on the floor and they lay down together on that.

He pulled up her skirt and ran his hand over the bare part of her leg, beneath her buttock. She thought of the crêpe dress getting creased, her precious fairy-worked stockings snagging-but let the thought go. She turned her head, and the snowdrops tumbled from her hair and were squashed, and she didn't care. She caught the dusty, nasty smell of the hotel carpet; she pictured all the men and women who might have embraced on it before, or who might be lying like this, now, in other rooms, in other houses-strangers to her, just as she and Reggie were strangers to them… The idea was lovely to her, suddenly. Reggie lowered himself properly upon her and she let her limbs grow loose, giving herself up to the weight of him; but still moving her hips. She forgot her father, her brother, the war; she felt pressed out of herself, released.

The waiting about, Kay thought, was the hardest part; she had never got used to it. When the Warning went, at just after ten, she actually felt better. She stretched in her chair and yawned, luxuriously.

'I'd like a couple of simple fractures tonight,' she told Mickey. 'Nothing too bloody, I've had enough blood and guts for a while. And no-one too heavy. I nearly broke my back last week, on that policeman in Ecclestone Square! No, a couple of slim little girls with broken ankles would just about do it.'

'I'd like a nice old lady,' said Mickey, yawning too. She was lying on the floor, on a camping-mattress, reading a cowboy book. 'A nice old lady with a bag of sweets.'

She had just put the book aside and closed her eyes when Binkie, the station leader, came into the common-room clapping her hands. 'Wake up, Carmichael!' she told Mickey. 'No snoozing on the job. That was the Yellow, didn't you hear? I should say we've an hour or two before the fun starts, but you never know. How about making a tour of the fuel stores? Howard and Cole, you can go too. And put the water on, on your way, for the bottles in the vans. All right?'

There were various curses and groans. Mickey climbed slowly to her feet, rubbing her eyes, nodding to the others. They got their coats, and went out to the garage.

Kay stretched again. She looked at the clock, then glanced around for something to do: wanting to keep herself alert, and take her mind off the waiting. She found a deck of greasy playing cards, picked them up and gave them a shuffle. The cards were meant for servicemen, and had pictures of glamour girls on them. Over the years, ambulance people had given the girls beards and moustaches, spectacles and missing teeth.

She called to Hughes, another driver. 'Fancy a game?'

He was darning a sock, and looked up, squinting. 'What's your stake?'

'Penny a pop?'

'All right.'

She shuffled her chair over to his. He was sitting right beside the oil-stove, and could never be persuaded away from it; for the room-which was part of the complex of garages under Dolphin Square, close to the Thames-had a concrete floor and walls of whitewashed brick, and was always chilly. Hughes wore a black astrakhan coat over his uniform and had turned up the collar. His hands and wrists, where they projected from his long, voluminous sleeves, looked pale and waxy. His face was slender as a ghost's, his teeth very stained from cigarettes. He wore glasses with dark tortoiseshell frames.

Kay dealt him a hand, and watched him sorting delicately through his cards. She shook her head. 'It's like gaming with Death,' she said.

He held her gaze, and extended a hand-pointed a finger, then turned and crooked it. 'Tonight,' he whispered in horror-film tones.

She threw a penny at him. 'Stop it.' The coin bounced to the floor.

'Hey, what's the idea?' said someone-a woman called Partridge. She was kneeling on the concrete, cutting out a dress from paper patterns.

Kay said, 'Hughes was giving me the creeps.'

'Hughes gives everyone the creeps.'

'This time he was actually meaning to.'

Hughes did his Death-act, then, for Partridge. 'That's not funny, Hughes,' she said. When two more drivers passed through the room, he did it for them. One of them shrieked. Hughes got up and went to the mirror and did it for himself. He came back looking quite unnerved.

'I've had a whiff of my own grave,' he said, picking up his cards.

Presently Mickey came back in.

'Any sense of what it's like out there?' they asked her.

She was rubbing her cold hands. 'A few wallops over Marylebone way, according to R and D. Station 39 are out already.'

Kay caught her eye. She said quietly, ' Rathbone Place all right, d'you think?'

Mickey took off her coat. 'I think so.' She blew on her fingers. 'What's the game?'

For a time there was relative silence. A new girl, O'Neil, got out a First Aid manual and started testing herself on procedure. Drivers and attendants drifted in and out. A woman who by day was tutor in a dancing-school changed into a pair of woollen knickerbockers and started exercising: bending, stretching, lifting her legs.

At quarter to eleven they heard the first close explosion. Shortly after that, the ack-ack started up in Hyde Park. Their station was a couple of miles away from the guns: even so, the booms seemed to rise up from the concrete into their shoes, and the crockery and cutlery, out in the kitchen, began to rattle.

But only O'Neil, the new girl, exclaimed at the sound. Everyone else simply got on with what they were doing without looking up-Partridge pinning her paper patterns a little more swiftly, perhaps; the dancing-tutor, after a moment, putting down her clubs and going off to change back into her trousers. Mickey had taken off her boots; now, lazily, she pulled them on again and began to lace them. Kay lit a cigarette, from the stub of an old one. It was worth smoking more cigarettes than you really wanted, she felt, at this stage, to make up for the frantic time to come, when you might have to go without for hours at a stretch…

There was the rumble of another explosion. It seemed closer than the last. A teaspoon which had been travelling eerily across a table, as if pushed by spirits, now flew right off.

Somebody laughed. Somebody else said, 'We're in for it tonight, kids!'

'Could be nuisance raiders,' said Kay.

Hughes snorted. 'Could be my Aunt Fanny. They dropped photograph flares last night, I swear it. They'll be back for the railway lines, if nothing else-'

He turned his head. The telephone, in Binkie's office, had started to ring. Everyone grew still. Kay felt a quick, sharp stab of anxiety, deep in her breast. The phone was silenced, as Binkie picked it up. They heard her voice, very clearly: 'Yes. I see. Yes, at once.'

'Here we go,' said Hughes, getting up, taking off his astrakhan coat.

Binkie came briskly into the common-room, pushing back her white hair.

'Two incidents so far,' she said, 'and they're expecting plenty more. Bessborough Place, and Hugh Street. Two ambulances and a car to the first; an ambulance and car to the second. Let's make it'-she pointed from person to person, thinking it over as she spoke-'Langrish and Carmichael, Cole and O'Neil, Hughes and Edwards, Partridge, Howard… All right, off you go!'

Kay and the other drivers at once went out into the garage, putting on their tin hats as they ran. The grey vans and cars stood parked and ready; Kay climbed into the cabin of hers and started its engine, pressing and easing off the accelerator pedal, warming it up. After a moment, Mickey joined her. She'd been to Binkie, to pick up the chit that would tell them more precisely what was needed and where they must go. She came quickly-hopping on to the running-board and climbing into the cabin as Kay moved off.

'Which one did we get?'

' Hugh Street.'

Kay nodded, swinging the van out of the garage and up the slope to the street-going slowly at first, so that Partridge, in the car behind, could catch up and follow, then putting her foot down. The van was an old commercial one that had been converted at the start of the war; she had to double-declutch with every gear change-a rather tiresome business. But she knew the vehicle and all its quirks, and went smoothly, confidently. Ten minutes before, playing cards with Hughes, she'd been almost dozy. At the ring of the telephone there had come that stab of anxiety around her heart. Now she felt-not unafraid, because only a fool would be unafraid in a job like this; but awake, alert, alive in all her limbs.

They had to go north-west to get to Hugh Street, and the route was a grim one, the shabby houses at the heart of Pimlico giving way, with dismal regularity, to patches of devastated land-to mounds of rubble, or hollowed-out terraces. The ack-ack guns still pounded on; between bursts of fire Kay could make out, too, the dreary throb of aircraft, the occasional whistle and whizz of bombs and rockets. The sounds were very like those of an ordinary Guy Fawkes night, from before the war; the smells, however, were different: not the simple-minded smell-as Kay thought of it now-of ordinary gunpowder, but the faint stink of burning rubber from the guns, and the putrid scent of exploded shells.

The streets were deserted, and lightly fogged. In raids, like this, Pimlico had an odd sort of haunted feel-the feel of having until recently swarmed with lives, that had all been violently extinguished or chased off. And when the guns stopped, the atmosphere could be even weirder. Kay and Mickey had once or twice walked along the edge of the river after their shift was finished. The place was uncanny: quieter, in its way, than the countryside would have been; and the view down the Thames, to Westminster, was all of humped, irregular masses-as if the war had stripped London back, made a series of villages of it, each of them defending itself against unkown forces, darkly and alone.

They arrived at the top of St George's Drive and found a man-a Police Reserve-looking out for them, waiting to direct them to the site. Kay raised her hand to him, and wound down her window; he ran over to the van-ran lumpishly, because of the weight of his uniform, his hat, the canvas bag that was strapped to his chest and swung as he moved. 'Around to the left,' he said. 'You'll see it all right. Keep well out, though, because of glass.'

He ran off, then, to flag down Partridge and say the same thing to her.

Kay went on more cautiously. As soon as she turned into Hugh Street there began to come, as she knew there would, specks and smuts upon the windscreen of the van: dust, from pulverised brick and stone, plaster and wood. The light from her headlamps-which was poor enough, because the lamps were dimmed-seemed to thicken, to cloud and swirl, like stout settling down in a glass. She leaned forward, trying to see-driving more and more slowly, hearing the crunch and snap of things beneath her wheels; afraid for the tyres. Then she made out another faint light, fifty yards ahead: the beam from the torch of an ARP man. He slightly raised it, hearing her come. She parked the van, and Partridge drew up behind her.

The warden came over-taking off his hat, wiping beneath it with a handkerchief, then blowing his nose. Behind him was a line of houses, dark against the almost-dark of the sky. Peering through the swirling dust, Kay could see now that one of the houses had been almost demolished-its front compressed, reduced to rubble and beams, as if under the carelessly-placed boot of a roving giant.

'What was it?' she asked the warden as she and Mickey got out. 'HE?'

He was putting his hat back on, and nodded. 'Hundred pounder at least.' He helped them get blankets, bandages and a stretcher from the back of the van, then began to lead them over the rubble, shining his torch about as he went.

'This place caught all of it,' he said. 'Three flats. The top and the middle we think were empty. But the people from the other were all at home-had been in their shelter and were just coming out again, if you can believe it. Thank God they never made it to the house! The man's pretty cut about with glass from one of the windows. The others were all more or less knocked flying, you'll be able to tell how badly. One old lady's got the worst of it: she's the one I think you'll need the stretcher for. I told them all to keep in the garden till you arrived. They ought to have a doctor look at them, really; but Control say the doctor's car's been caught in a blast-'

He lost his footing, then righted himself and went on without speaking. Partridge was coughing because of the dust. Mickey was rubbing grit from her eyes. The chaos was extraordinary. Every time Kay put down her feet, things cracked beneath them, or wrapped themselves around her ankles: broken window-glass mixed up with broken mirrors, crockery, chairs and tables, curtains, carpets, feathers from a cushion or a bed, great splinters of wood… The wood surprised Kay, even now: in the days before the war she'd imagined that houses were made more or less solidly, of stone-like the last Little Pig's, in the fairy tale. What amazed her, too, was the smallness of the piles of dirt and rubble to which even large buildings could be reduced. This house had had three intact floors to it, an hour before; the heap of debris its front had become was no more than six or seven feet high. She supposed that houses, after all-like the lives that were lived in them-were mostly made of space. It was the spaces, in fact, which counted, rather than the bricks.

The rear of the house, however, was more or less intact. They went through a creaking passageway and emerged, bizarrely, into a kitchen, still with cups and plates on its shelves and pictures on its walls, its electric light burning and its black-out curtain up. But part of the ceiling had come down, and streams of dust were tumbling from cracks in the plaster behind; beams were still falling, the warden said, and the place was expected to collapse.

He took them out to the little garden, then went back through the house to the street, to check on the neighbours. Kay put up the brim of her hat. It was hard to see, through the darkness, but she made out the figure of a man, sitting on a step with his hands at his head; and a woman, lying flat and very still on a blanket or rug, with another woman beside her, perhaps chafing her hands. A girl behind them was going dazedly about. A second girl was sitting in the open doorway of a shelter. She had a whimpering, yelping thing in her arms-Kay took it at first to be an injured baby. Then it wriggled and gave a high-pitched bark, and she saw that it was a dog.

The dust was still swirling, making everyone cough. There was that queer, disorientating atmosphere that Kay had always noticed at sites like this. The air felt charged, as if with a rapidly beating pulse-as if still ringing, physically vibrating-as if the atoms that made up the house, the garden, the people themselves, had been jolted out of their moorings and were still in the process of settling back. Kay was aware, too, of the building behind her, threatening its collapse. She went very quickly from person to person, tucking blankets over their shoulders, and shining her torch, looking into their faces.

Then, 'Right,' she said, straightening up. One of the girls, she thought, might have a broken leg or ankle: she sent Partridge to look at her. Mickey went to the man on the step. Kay herself went back to the woman who was lying on the rug. She was very elderly, and had taken some sort of blow to the chest. When Kay knelt beside her and felt for her heart, she let out a moan.

'She's all right, isn't she?' asked the other woman, loudly. She was shivering, and her long greyish hair was wild about her shoulders; probably she'd had it in a plait or a bun and the blast had ripped it free. 'She hasn't said a word since she lay down. She's seventy-six. It's all on account of her we were out here at all. We'd been sitting in there-' she gestured to the shelter, 'as good as gold, just playing cards and listening to the wireless. Then she said she wanted the lavatory. I brought her out-and the dog came tearing out behind us. Then the girls started crying, and then he comes out,'-she meant her husband-'with no more sense than to start running round the garden, in the black-out, like a fool. And then- Honest to God, miss, it was like the end of the world had come.' She clutched the blanket, still shivering. Now that she'd started talking, she couldn't stop. 'Here's his mother,' she went on, in the same loud, chattering, complaining way, 'and here's me, and the girls, with God knows how many broken bones between us. And what about the house? I think the roof's come off, hasn't it? The warden won't say a word-wouldn't let us back into the kitchen, even. I'm afraid to go and look.' She put a jumping hand on Kay's arm. 'Can you tell me, miss? Are the ceilings down?'

None of them had seen the front of the house yet; from the back, and in the darkness, it looked almost untouched. Kay had been moving her hands quickly over the elderly lady, checking her arms and legs. She said now, without looking up, 'I'm afraid there's rather a lot of damage-'

'What?' said the woman. She was deaf, from the blast.

'I'm afraid it's hard to say, in the dark,' said Kay, more clearly. She was concentrating on what she was doing. She thought she'd been able to feel the jut of broken ribs. She reached for her bag and brought out bandages, and began, as swiftly as she could, to bind the lady up.

'It's all on account of her, you know-' the woman started again.

'Help me with this, if you can!' Kay shouted, to distract her.

Mickey, meanwhile, had been examining the man. His face had seemed black to Kay, at first; she'd imagined it covered with earth or soot. Once she'd shone her torch on it, however, the black had become brilliant red. His arms and chest were the same, and when she'd moved the light over him it had sent back dainty little glints. He had shards of glass sticking out of him. Mickey was trying to get out the worst, before bandaging him up. He was wincing as she did it, and moving his head as if blind. His eyes were half-closed-stuck together with thickening blood.

He must have felt Mickey hesitating. 'Is it bad?' Kay heard him ask.

'It's not so bad,' answered Mickey. 'It's made a bit of a hedgehog of you, that's all. Now, don't try and speak. We've got to stop up those holes. You'll never be able to drink a pint again, otherwise; it'll all come sprinkling out.'

He wasn't listening, or couldn't hear. 'How's Mother?' he said, over the end of her words. He called hoarsely to Kay. 'That's my mother.'

'Do try and not speak,' said Mickey again. 'Your mother's all right.'

'How are the girls?'

'The girls, as well.'

Then the dust caught in his throat. Mickey held his head so that he could cough. Kay imagined his cuts reopening as he shuddered and jerked, or the glass that was still in him moving in deeper… She was aware, too, of the buzz of planes, still sounding monotonously overhead. And once there came the slithering, splintering sound of a falling roof, from a street nearby. She worked more quickly. 'OK, Partridge?' she called, as she tied off the bandage. 'How much longer?'

'Nearly there.'

'And you, Mickey?'

'We'll be ready when you are.'

'Right.' Kay unfolded the stretcher she'd brought from the van. The warden reappeared as she was doing it; he helped her lift the lady on and tuck the blanket around her.

'Which way can we take her?' Kay asked him, when she was in place. 'Is there a way to the street through the garden?'

The warden shook his head. 'Not this garden. We'll have to go back through the house.'

'Through the house? Hell. We'd better go right now. Ready to lift? OK. One, two-'

As she felt herself rise, the old lady opened her eyes at last and looked about her in amazement. She said in a whisper, 'What you doing?'

Kay felt for a firmer grip on the arms of the stretcher. 'We're taking you to hospital. You've hurt your ribs. But you'll be all right.'

'To hospital?'

'Can you lie still for us? It won't take long, I promise. We must just get you out to the ambulance.' Kay spoke as she might to a friend-to Mickey, say. She had heard policemen and nurses address injured people as though they were idiots: 'All right, dearie.' 'Now then, ma.' 'Don't you worry about that.'

'Here's your son coming, too,' she said, when she saw Mickey helping up the bleeding man. 'Partridge, are you ready with the girls? OK, everybody. Come now. Quickly, but softly.'

They trooped raggedly into the kitchen. The light made them wince and cover their eyes. And then the girls, of course, saw how filthy and cut about they were-and how dreadful their father looked, with the blood and the bandages on his face. They began to cry.

'Never mind,' their mother said, shaken. She was still shivering. 'Never mind. We're all right, aren't we? Phyllis, turn the key in the door. Bring the tea, Eileen. And cover up that tin of corned beef! Just to be on the safe- Oh, my Lord!' She had reached the door that led from the kitchen and seen the chaos that lay beyond. She couldn't believe it. She stood with her hand at her heart. 'Oh, my good Lord!'

The girls, behind her, let out screams.

Kay's feet slid about again, as she and the warden tried to manoeuvre the elderly lady over the rubble. Every step they took sent up a new cloud of dust, feathers, soot. But finally they got her to the edge of what was once the front garden. They found a couple of schoolboys swinging from the handles of the ambulance doors.

'Need any help, mister?' the boys said, to the warden or, perhaps, to Kay.

The warden answered them. 'No, we don't. You clear off back to your shelter, before you get your bloody heads blown off. Where are your mothers? What do you think those planes are, bumble-bees?'

'Is that old Mrs Parry? Is she dead?'

'Get out of it!'

'Oh, my Lord!' the woman was still saying, as she made her way through the wreckage of her flat.

The ambulance had four metal bunks, of the kind used in shelters. There was a dim light, but no form of heating, so Kay tucked another blanket around the elderly lady and fastened her into the bunk with a canvas belt, then put one of the hot-water bottles under her knees, and another next to her feet. Mickey brought the man. His eyes were gummed shut completely now, with blood and dust; she had to guide his arms and his legs as if he'd forgotten how to use them. His wife came after. She had started picking little things up: a single tartan slipper, a plant in a pot. 'How can I leave all this?' she said, when the warden tried to get her into Partridge's car so that she could be driven to the First Aid Post. She'd started crying. 'Won't you run and get Mr Grant, from out of his house across the road? He'll watch our things. Will you, Mr Andrews?'

'We can't let you bring it,' Partridge was saying, meanwhile, to the girl with the dog.

'I don't want to go, then!' cried the girl. She gripped the dog harder, making it squeal. Then she looked down at her feet. 'Oh, Mum, here's that picture you had from Uncle Patrick, all smashed to bits!'

'Let her take the dog, Partridge,' said Kay. 'What harm can it do?'

But it was Partridge's decision, not hers; and there wasn't time, anyway, to stay and debate it. She left them all arguing-just nodding to Mickey in the back of the van, closing the doors, then running round to the front and wiping off the windscreen: for in the twenty minutes or so that the vehicle had been sitting idle in the street it had got thickly coated with dust. She got in the cabin and started the engine.

'Andrews,' she called to the warden, as she began to turn, 'watch my tyres for me, will you?' A puncture now would be disastrous… He moved away from the woman and the girls and shone his torch about her wheels, then raised his hand to her.

She went cautiously at first, speeding up when the road grew clearer. They were supposed to keep to a steady sixteen miles per hour when carrying casualties-but she thought of the elderly lady with her broken ribs, and the bleeding man, and drove faster. Now and then, too, she'd lean closer to the windscreen to peer up into the sky. The drone of aeroplanes was still heavy, the thumping of the guns still loud, but the sound of the engine was loud, too, and she couldn't tell if she was driving into the worst of the action or leaving it behind.

In the wall of the cabin behind her head was a sliding glass panel: she was aware of Mickey, moving about in the back of the van. Keeping her eyes on the road ahead she turned slightly and called, 'All right?'

'Just about,' answered Mickey. 'The old lady's feeling the bumps, though.'

'I'll do what I can,' said Kay.

She peered at the surface of the road, trying desperately to avoid the breaks and potholes, until her eyes began to smart.

When she pulled up at the stretcher entrance of the hospital on the Horseferry Road, the reception nurse came running out to greet her, ducking her head as if it was raining. The ward sister, however, followed at an almost leisurely pace, apparently quite unperturbed by the flashes and the bangs.

'Can't keep away from us, Langrish?' she said, over a new burst of gun-fire. 'Well, and what do you have for us this time?'

She was large-bosomed and fair, and the wings of her cap curled into points: they always struck Kay as being like the Viking horns worn by certain opera singers. She sent for a trolley and a wheeled chair, chivvying the porters as though they were geese. And when the man who'd been cut about by glass came dazedly out of the van, she chivvied him, too: 'Quickly, please!'

Kay and Mickey lifted out the elderly lady and set her gently on the trolley. Mickey had pinned a label to her, saying where and when she'd been hurt. She was putting out her hand as if frightened, and Kay took hold of her fingers. 'Don't worry, now. You'll be all right.'

Then they helped the man into the wheeled chair. He reached to pat Mickey's arm, saying, 'Thank you, son.' He'd caught a glimpse of her at the start and had thought her a boy, all this time…

'Poor bloke,' she said, when she and Kay had got back in the van. She was trying to wipe the worst of his blood from her hands. 'He'll be scarred like anything, won't he?'

Kay nodded. But the fact was, having handed the man and his mother over safely, she was already beginning to forget them. She was fixing her mind, instead, on her route back to Dolphin Square; and she was conscious, too, of the continuing row of aeroplanes and guns. She leaned forward again, to peer at the sky. Mickey peered too, and, after a minute, wound down her window and stuck out her head.

'How's it look?' asked Kay.

'Not very clever. Just a couple of planes, but they're right overhead. They look like they're going round in a circle.'

'A circle with us in it?'

''Fraid so.'

Kay speeded up. Mickey's tin helmet bounced against the frame of the window; she raised her hand to steady it. 'The searchlight's got him, now,' she said. 'Now they've lost him. Now- Whoops.' She drew in her head, very quickly. 'Here's the guns again.'

Kay turned a corner, and looked up. She could make out now the beam of a searchlight and, in it, the shining body of a plane. As she watched, a line of shells rose towards the aircraft, apparently in silence-for though she could hear and feel the pounding of the guns, it was hard, somehow, to attach that clamour to the string of darting lights, or to the little puffs of smoke produced when the lights were extinguished… Soon, anyway, she was distracted, by falling shrapnel. It struck the roof and the bonnet of the van with a series of clatters-as if the bombers had brought their cutlery drawers with them, and were emptying them out.

But then there was a more substantial thud, and then another; and the road ahead, suddenly, was lit by a fierce white light. The plane was dropping incendiaries, and one had burst.

'Great,' said Mickey. 'What'll we do?'

Automatically Kay had slowed, and her foot was hovering over the brake. They were meant to keep going, whatever they passed. If you got involved in some new incident, it could prove fatal. But she found it hard, every time, simply to drive away from danger…

She made a decision, and stopped the van, as close as she dared get to the spluttering rocket. 'I'm not going to leave this street to catch fire,' she said, opening her door and jumping out. 'I don't care what Binkie'll have to say about it.'

She looked around, saw a heap of sand-bags before the window of a house, and, shielding her face and hands from the rocket's mad magnesium frothing, she dragged one over and let it sink. The white light disappeared. But then another rocket, further down the street, started up. She took a second sand-bag to that. The incendiaries which were only smouldering she kicked; they went out in a shower of viscous sparks. Mickey came and helped her, and after a minute a man and a girl emerged from a house and joined in, too: they all went capering up and down the street like crazy footballers… But some of the rockets had fallen on to roofs and into gardens, where they couldn't get at them; one had lodged in a wooden 'To Let' sign, which was already beginning to burn.

'Where the hell's your warden?' Kay asked the man.

'You tell me,' he said, panting. 'This street's on the border of two Posts. They sit there arguing about who's supposed to patrol it. Do you think we need firemen?'

'A couple of stirrup-pumps would do it, if we only had ladders or ropes.'

'Shall I run to a telephone?'

Kay looked around in frustration. 'Yes,' she said. 'Yes, I think you ought to.'

He went off. Kay turned to the girl. 'You should get back under cover.'

The girl was dressed in a man's teddy-bear coat, and a pixie-hood. She shook her head, grinning. 'I like it out here. It's more lively.'

'Well, it may be too bloody lively in a minute.-There, what did I tell you?'

There had come a bang, a sort of whump, from one of the houses further down the street, followed by the tinkling of falling glass. Kay and Mickey ran towards it, and the girl ran after them. They found a ground-floor window with its shutters blown open and its curtains sagging on a broken rod; the curtains were black with soot or smoke, and a black cloud, with scraps of plaster in it, was billowing out, but with no sign of flame.

'Watch out,' said Kay, as she and Mickey got onto the window-sill and looked in. 'It might be a timed one.'

'I dunno,' answered Mickey. She shone in her torch. The room was a kitchen: quite wrecked, with chairs and crockery flung about and the wallpaper scorched, and the kitchen table thrown against the wall and upended. Just beyond the table they could see the figure of a man sprawled in the chaos. He was wearing pyjamas and a dressing-gown, and was clutching his thigh. 'Oh! Oh!' they heard him say. 'Oh, to fuck!'

Mickey gripped Kay's arm. She was peering through the dust. 'Kay,' she said huskily. 'I think his leg's gone. I think it's blown clean off! We'll need a strap, for the bleeding.'

'What's that?' called the man, beginning to cough. 'Who's there? Help!'

Kay turned and ran to the ambulance. 'Don't look,' she said to the girl, who was hovering about outside. The drone of aeroplanes had faded, but the little fires that had been started up and down the street were taking proper hold now, the flames of them yellow, orange, red, rather than white. They would bring more planes, with real explosives, but she could do nothing at all about them. She got out a box of dressings and hurried back to the house. She found Mickey in the room with the wounded man. She had pushed back some of the mess and was ripping open the man's pyjamas.

'Help me up,' he was saying.

'Don't try and talk.'

'It's just, my leg-'

'I know. It's all right. We need to put a tourniquet on you.'

'A what?'

'To keep you from bleeding.'

'Bleeding? Am I bleeding?'

'You must be, mate,' said Mickey grimly.

She gave a final tug on the seam of the pyjamas and swung the beam of her torch on to the man's bare thigh. The flesh ended a little way above the knee. The stump, however, was pink, smooth, almost shiny… 'Hang on,' said Kay, putting her hand on Mickey's shoulder. The man let out his breath. He began to laugh, and then to cough again.

'Fuck me,' he said. 'If you find a leg on the end of that you'll be a fucking magician. I lost that in the last war-'

The leg he was missing was a cork one. On top of that, the blast that had knocked him down had come not from a bomb, but only from a faulty gas-cooker. He'd been bending down to put a match to the ring beneath a kettle, and the whole thing had gone up. His artificial leg had been ripped from him and sent flying with everything else: they looked around and found it, hanging by one of its buckles from the picture-rail.

Mickey handed it to him in disgust. 'As if there aren't enough bangs going off just now, without you having to make more.'

'I was only after a cup of tea,' he said, still coughing. 'A man's entitled to his cup of tea, isn't he?'

When they got him upright, they saw how badly shaken he was. He had burns on his face and on his hands, and part of his hair, and his brows and lashes, had been singed away. They thought they might as well take him to hospital as leave him here; they carried him out into the street and put him into the ambulance.

All around the square, fires were still burning, but the girl who'd helped extinguish the rockets had started banging on the doors of houses; one or two people appeared now with pails of water, and pumps, and buckets of sand. The man with the artificial leg called to someone he knew, to ask him to board up the window of his flat.

'Looks like we're well out of here,' he said to Kay and Mickey, watching the figures running about. 'I hope they don't turn their pumps on my house, though. I'd rather a fire than a flood, any day.-What's this?' he went on, as Kay pushed closed the door. 'You're not going to lock me up in this van with her, are you?' He meant Mickey.

'I think you'll be all right,' said Kay.

'That's what you say. You didn't see the way she went for my pyjamas…'

'Proper caution he was,' Mickey said, when they'd dropped the man at the hospital.

'Laugh?' said Kay.

'Honestly, though-a cork leg! If the others should find out-'

Kay tittered. '“Kay! Kay!”' she said throatily. '“I think it's blown clean off!”'

Mickey lit them cigarettes. 'Get lost.'

'Don't mind it, dear. Anyone would have thought the same.'

'Maybe… Still, didn't that girl have lovely brown eyes?'

'Did she?'

'You never notice the dark ones.'

The guns, for the moment, had fallen silent. The plane that had dropped the incendiaries had been chased off. It was like the lifting of a weight. Kay and Mickey chatted and laughed, all the way back to Dolphin Square… But they were met in the garage by Partridge, who gave them a warning look. 'You're in trouble, girls.'

Binkie appeared. She had a sheaf of chits in her hand.

'Langrish and Carmichael, where the hell have you been? You were seen heading back almost an hour ago. I was just about to call Control and report you missing.'

Kay explained about the incendiaries and the wounded man.

'That's too bad,' said Binkie. 'You're to come straight back between jobs. You've been in this business too long not to know that, Langrish.'

'You'd like me to leave a street to burn and bring more bombs? We'd have lots of jobs, then.'

'You know the procedure. I'm warning you. You'll do this sort of thing once too often.'

She was called back to her office by the ring of the telephone; and returned, in another moment, to send Kay and Mickey out again. The bombers had moved away from Pimlico, but there was trouble in Camberwell and Walworth. A couple of the section's ambulances had been struck and put out of service: Kay and Mickey, and four other drivers from Dolphin Square, went over the river to take their place. The jobs were rather grisly ones. In Camberwell a house had fallen and its occupants been struck by beams: Kay had to help a doctor fix splints to a child's crushed legs, and the child screamed and screamed whenever they touched her. In another street, a little later, two men were hit by flying shrapnel: they were so cut about, they looked as though some sort of maniac had gone at them with knives…

By quarter-past two-almost the end of their shift at the station-Kay and Mickey had been out five times. They drew into Dolphin Square, more or less exhausted. Kay switched off the engine as she turned in from the street, and let the vehicle coast down the slope into the garage under its own speed. When she tugged on the brake, she and Mickey put back their heads and closed their eyes.

'What can you see?' she asked.

'Bandages,' answered Mickey. 'You?'

'The road, still moving.'

Their van was now filthier than ever: they spent another quarter of an hour filling bucket after bucket with freezing water, rinsing it out and washing it down. Then they had to clean themselves off. There was an unheated room, its door marked DECONTAMINATION: FEMALE, where they were expected to do that. The room had a sort of trough in it, and more cold water… The combination of dust and blood was terribly hard to remove from clothes and skin. Mickey's fingers, at least, were bare. Kay wore a ring of plain gold on her smallest finger, that she never liked to take off; she had to ease it up to her knuckle to get the dirt from underneath.

When they'd done the best they could with their hands, they took off their hats. Where the straps had gripped, across their brows and under their chins, there was clean pink flesh, but the skin between was reddish-black from brick-dust and smoke, only showing lighter where they'd wiped sweat away, or in channels where water had run from their eyes. Their lashes had grit in them: they paid attention to that, because sometimes the grit contained little pieces of glass. They took it in turns to examine each other in the light: 'Look up… Look down… Lovely!'

Kay went through to the common-room. Most of the drivers were already home. Hughes was having his hand bandaged by O'Neil, the new girl.

'Not so tight, ducks.'

'Sorry, Hughes.'

'What's up?' asked Kay, sitting down beside them.

'This?' said Hughes. 'Oh, nothing. O'Neil's just practising.'

Kay yawned. It was always a mistake to sit, before the All Clear had sounded: she felt exhausted, suddenly. 'What kind of a shift have you two had?' she asked, in an effort to stay awake.

Hughes shrugged, his gaze on the winding bandage. 'Not too bad. Ruptured stomach, and a lost eye.'

'And you, O'Neil?'

'Four broken bones in Warwick Square.'

Kay frowned. 'That's a music-hall song, surely?'

'Howard and Larkin,' O'Neil went on, 'got a man who fell down a flight of steps, on Bloomfield Terrace. It wasn't even blast; he was whizzed, that's all.'

'Whizzed!' said Kay, liking the word, beginning to laugh. The laugh became another yawn. 'Well, good luck to him. Anyone who can put their hands, these days, on enough booze to get whizzed by, deserves a medal.'

Out in the kitchen, Mickey was making tea. Kay listened to the clink of china for a moment, then hauled herself up and went to help. They added fresh leaves to the filthy-looking black mixture that was kept, almost permanently, in the bottom of the pot; but then had to wait for the water to boil on a shrunken flame, because the gas pressure was low. The All Clear sounded just as they were pouring out, and the last of the drivers appeared. Binkie went from room to room, counting heads.

The mood of the place began to grow jolly. It was a sort of exhilaration, at having survived, got through, taken on another raid and beaten it. Everyone was streaked with blood and dust, impossibly weary from wading through rubble, from stooping and lifting, from driving through the dark; but they turned the ghastly things they'd seen and done into jokes. Kay took in the mugs, and was greeted with cheers. Partridge picked up a teaspoon and used it to fire paper pellets around the room. O'Neil had finished bandaging Hughes's hand and started on his head. She put his spectacles back on him, on top of the crêpe.

When the telephone rang, no-one grew quiet and tried to listen: they supposed it was Control, calling with confirmation of the All Clear. But then Binkie came in again. She raised her hands, and had to shout to make herself heard.

'There's a single ambulance needed,' she said, 'up at the north end of Sutherland Street. Who's been back longest?'

'Drat,' said O'Neil, taking a safety-pin from her mouth. 'That's Cole and me. Cole?'

Cole yawned and got to her feet. There were more cheers.

'Good for you, girls,' said Kay, settling back.

'Yes, cheerio girls!' said Hughes, pushing up the bandage from one of his eyes. 'Splint one for me!'

'Just a minute,' said Binkie. 'O'Neil, Cole,'-she lowered her voice-'I'm afraid it's a mortuary run. No survivors at all. One body for certain, and they think two more. A mother and children. The parts are to be carried to storage… Think you can take it?'

The room fell silent. 'Christ,' said Hughes, letting the bandage fall back down, and drawing up his collar.

O'Neil looked sick. She was only seventeen. 'Well-' she said.

There was a moment's stillness. Then, 'I'll do it,' said Kay. She got to her feet. 'I'll partner Cole instead. Cole, you won't mind?'

'I won't mind at all.'

'Look here,' said O'Neil. She had grown white before, but was now blushing. 'It's all right. I don't want you nannying me, Langrish.'

'No-one's doing that,' said Kay. 'But you'll see enough awful things in this job, that's all, without being made to see them when you don't have to… Mickey, you'll be OK with O'Neil, if another call comes through?'

'Sure,' said Mickey. She nodded to O'Neil. 'Kay's right, O'Neil. Forget it.'

'Yes, think yourself lucky,' said Hughes. 'Do the same when it's my turn, Langrish!'

O'Neil was still blushing. 'Well,' she said, 'thanks, Langrish.'

Kay followed Cole out to the garage. Cole started up her van, and moved off slowly. 'No point in rushing, I suppose… Do you want a smoke? There are some in there.'

She gestured to a pocket in the dashboard. Kay fished about inside it and brought out a flat gun-metal case marked, in nail-varnish, E.M. Cole, Hands Off! She lit two cigarettes and handed one over.

'Thanks,' said Cole, taking a puff. 'God, that's better… That was nice, by the way, what you did for O'Neil.'

Kay rubbed her eyes. 'O'Neil's just a kid.'

'Still.-Hell, this engine pinks like crazy! I think the choke's buggered.'

They rode the rest of the way in silence, concentrating on the route. The site they wanted was back up towards Hugh Street. 'Is this really the place?' asked Kay, as Cole put the brake on; for the house looked fine. The damage, they found when they got out, was all in the back garden-a direct hit on a shelter. People who must recently have emerged from shelters of their own were gathered at the garden wall, trying to see. Policemen had set up a tarpaulin. A man led Kay and Cole around it, to show them what had been recovered: a woman's body, clothed and slippered but minus its head; and the naked, sexless torso of an oldish child, still tied round with its dressing-gown cord. These lay under a blanket. Wrapped in an oilcloth sheet beside them were various body-parts: little arms, little legs; a jaw; and a chubby jointed limb that might have been a knee or an elbow.

'We thought at first: a woman, a daughter and a son,' said the policeman quietly. 'But there are, frankly-' He wiped his mouth. 'Well, there are more limbs than we can account for. We think now that there must have been three children, perhaps four. We're talking to the neighbours… Do you think you can manage?'

Kay nodded. She turned, and went back to the van. It was better to be moving, doing something, after sights like that… She and Cole got stretchers: they lifted on the woman's body and the torso and fixed labels to them with string. The limbs they wanted to keep in their oil-cloth sheet, but the policeman said he couldn't spare it. So they brought a crate, and lined it with newspaper, and put the arms and legs in that. The worst thing to handle was the jaw, with its little milk-teeth. Cole picked it up, then almost threw it into the box-overcome, in the end, not with sadness, but simply with the horror of the thing.

'All right?' asked Kay, touching her shoulder.

'Yes. I'm all right.'

'Walk about over there. I'll see to this.'

'I said I'm all right, didn't I?'

They took the crate to the ambulance, labelled it up and put it on board. Kay made sure to tie a strap around it. Once she'd carried a load like this from a mortuary to Billingsgate, where unidentified body parts were stored. She hadn't fastened down the crate, and when she'd opened the ambulance doors at the market a man's head had rolled out and landed at her feet.

'What a pissing awful job,' said Cole, as they climbed into the van.

They got back to the station at quarter past four. The shift had changed by then: Mickey, Binkie, Hughes-everyone had gone. The new people, not knowing where they'd been, laughed at them. 'What's this, Langrish? Your own shift not enough for you that you have to do ours too?' 'Yes, want to stay and take my place, Langrish? Cole, how about you?'

'We'd make a better bloody show of it than you lot,' said Kay, 'that's for certain!'

She joined Cole in the wash-room. They stood side by side in silence, cleaning their hands, not catching one another's eye. When they'd put on their coats and started to walk together towards Westminster, Cole looked up at the sky.

'Wasn't it lucky that the rain held off?' she said.

They went different ways at St James's Park, and after that Kay walked more swiftly. Her flat was north of Oxford Street, in a sort of mews or yard off Rathbone Place. She had a route to it through the little streets of Soho -a fine, quick route, if you didn't mind, as she didn't, the loneliness of it at this time of night, and the eeriness of so many knocked-about houses and silent restuarants and shops. Tonight she saw nobody much at all except, close to home, her warden, Henry Varney.

'All right, Henry?' she called quietly.

He lifted his hand. 'All right, Miss Langrish! I saw Jerry buzzing about over Pimlico, and thought of you. Keep you on your toes, did he?'

'Just a bit. Anything doing round here?'

'Very quiet.'

'That's what we want, isn't it? Good night.'

'Good night, Miss Langrish. Put your ear-plugs in just in case, though!'

'I will!'

She went on, still quickly, to Rathbone Place; only at the mouth of the mews did she begin to step more lightly-for she had a secret, persistent dread of coming back and finding that the place had been hit, was in flames or ruins… But all was quiet. Her flat was at the blank far end of the yard, above a garage, beside a warehouse; she had to go up a flight of wooden steps to get to its door. At the top she paused, to take off her jacket and her boots; she let herself in with her latchkey and passed inside very softly. She made her way into the sitting-room and switched on a table-lamp, then tiptoed to the bedroom door and gently pushed it open. With the light of the lamp she could just make out the bed, and the sleeping figure in it-the flung-out arms, the tangled hair, the sole of a foot, thrust out from underneath the bedclothes.

She pushed the door further, went to the bed and squatted beside it. Helen stirred, opening her eyes: not quite awake, but awake enough to put up her arms, be kissed.

'Hello,' she said, in a blurred kind of way.

'Hello,' murmured Kay.

'What time is it?'

'Horribly late-or horribly early, I don't know which. Have you been here all this time? You didn't go over to the shelter?' Helen shook her head. 'I wish you would.'

'I don't like it, Kay…' She touched Kay's face, checking for cuts. 'Are you all right?'

'Yes,' said Kay, 'I'm fine. Go back to sleep now.'

She smoothed Helen's hair away from her brow, watching for the stilling of her eye-lids: feeling the rising of emotion in her own breast; and made amost afraid, for a moment, by the fierceness of it. For she thought of the little bits of bodies she and Cole had had to collect, tonight, from the garden on Sutherland Street, and felt the ghastliness of them, suddenly, as she had not felt it then-the awful softness of human flesh, the vulnerability of bone, the appalling slightness of necks and wrists and finger-joints… It seemed a sort of miracle to her, that she should come back, from so much mayhem, to so much that was quick and warm and and beautiful and unmarked.

She kept watch for another minute, until she was sure that Helen had sunk back into sleep; then she rose and tucked the bed-clothes around her shoulders and lightly kissed her again. She shut the bedroom door as softly as she had opened it, and went back into the sitting-room. She pulled at her tie, undid her collar-stud. When she rubbed at her neck with her fingers, she felt grit.

Against one of the walls of the sitting-room was a little book-case. Behind one of the books was a bottle of whisky. She got herself a tumbler and fished the bottle out. She lit a cigarette, and sat down.

She was fine, for a moment or two. But then the whisky began to shiver in the glass as she raised it to her mouth, and the cigarette to shed ash over her knuckles. She'd started to shake. Sometimes it happened. Soon she was shaking so hard she could barely keep the cigarette in her mouth or sip from her drink. It was like the passing through her of a ghost express-train; there was nothing to be done, she knew, but let the train rattle on, through all its boxes and cars… The whisky helped. At last she grew calm enough to finish her cigarette and sit more comfortably. When she was perfectly steady, and sure the express train wouldn't come back again, she'd go to bed. She mightn't sleep, for an hour or more. Instead, she'd lie and listen to Helen's steady breathing in the darkness. She might put her fingers to Helen's wrist, and feel for the miraculous tick-tick-ticking of her pulse.

It was extraordinary how still the prison could get at this time of night; fantastic, to think of the number of men who lay in it-three hundred, in Duncan 's hall alone-so quietly and without fuss. And yet it was always at about this hour that Duncan woke: as if a certain point of stillness, when reached in the atmosphere of the place, acted on him like a sound or a vibration.

He was awake, now. He was lying on his bunk, on his back, with his hands behind his head; he was gazing into the blackness made by Fraser's bunk, a yard above his face. He felt clear-headed and quite calm: relieved of an awful burden, now that visiting-day had come and gone-now that he'd managed to get through his father's visit without arguing or sulking, without breaking down or making a fool of himself in some way. There was a whole month, now, until visiting-day came round again. And a month in prison was an age. A month in prison was like a street with a fog in it: you could see the things that were near to you clearly enough, but the rest was grey, blank, depthless.

He said to himself, How changed you are! For he'd used to brood over all the little details of his father's visits, for days at a time; he'd lie tormented, seeing his father's face, hearing his father's voice and his own-like a mad projectionist with a picture, making it play over and over. Or else he'd compose wild letters, telling his father not to come again. One time he had thrown off the bedclothes, sprung from his bunk, sat down at his table and actually, in the near-pitch darkness, started to write a letter to Viv. He had written feverishly, with a stub of pencil, on a sheet of paper torn from the back of a library book; and when he looked next morning at what he'd done it was like the work of a lunatic, the lines all running across each other, the same ideas and phrases coming up again and again: The filth of this place-I can't describe it-I'm afraid, Viv-the filth-I'm afraid- He'd been put on report, then, for damaging the book.

He turned on to his side, not wanting to remember it.

The moon had set, but there must be starlight: he and Fraser had drawn back the black-out, and the window-a series of ugly little panes-cast an interesting shadow on the floor. You could see it move, Duncan had found, if you watched hard enough; or you could lie looking up, with your head at a tiring angle, and see the stars themselves, see the moon, the odd sparkle of gunfire… The lights made you shiver. The cell was cold. Low in the wall beneath the window was an opening in the bricks with a piece of Victorian fret-work across it: it was meant to circulate heat, but the air that rose from it was always freezing. Duncan was wearing his prison pyjamas, his vest and his socks; the rest of his clothes-his shirt, his jacket and trousers and cape-he'd spread on top of the blankets which covered him, for extra warmth. In the bunk above, Fraser had done the same.

But Fraser had moved in his sleep, and his cape or his shirt was hanging slightly to one side. He'd flung out his arm, too, and the fingers of his hand showed: shapely, dark, like the legs of some impossibly large and well-muscled spider. As Duncan watched, the fingers gave a twitch-as if feeling for a purchase, trying for a spring… Don't look at it, Duncan said to himself-because he sometimes found that small, idiotic things like that could get a grip on his thoughts at night, and really unnerve him. He turned the other way, and that was better. If he stretched out his own hand now and touched the wall, he could feel where the plaster had been scratched away by men who'd lain here years before: J.B. December 1922, L .C.V. nine months ten days 1934… The dates were not old enough to be really quaint, but he liked to think of the men who had made them, and the little instruments they must have used, the stolen needles and nails, the broken bits of china… R.I.P. George K, a fine screwsman: that made him wonder if a prisoner had died in this cell, been killed, or killed himself. One man had scored a calendar-but he had given every month thirty days, so the calendar was next to useless. Another had written verses: Five lonely years I must walk my cell, I wish my wife was here as well-and underneath this someone else had put, She don't you cunt, shes getting stuffed by your best pal ha ha.

Duncan closed his eyes. Who else, he wondered, was awake, in the whole of the building? Perhaps only the officers. You could hear them pass: back and forth they went, once every hour, like figures on an old-fashioned clock. Their shoes were soft, but made the metal landings ring: a chilly, shivering sound with a steady beat to it, like the pulsing of icy blood. You rarely heard it during the day, probably the place was too noisy then; to Duncan it seemed part of the special feel of the night, as if produced by the stillness and the dark. He would wait, to catch it. It meant another sixty minutes of prison time done, after all. And if he were the only man awake and knowing, then those sixty minutes, he felt, belonged exclusively to him: they went into his account, with a slither and a chink, like coins in the back of a china pig. Hard luck on the men who slept! They got nothing… But if someone stirred-if someone coughed, or banged on his door for an officer to come; if a man started weeping or calling out-then Duncan would share the minutes with him, fifty-fifty, thirty minutes each. That was only fair.

It was stupid, really-because of course, your time passed quickest of all when you were asleep; and lying awake, as Duncan was now, only made things worse. But you had to have little schemes, little tricks like this; you had to be able to turn your waiting into something more palpable-a piece of work or a puzzle. It was all you had to do. It was all that prison was: not a china pig after all, but a great, slow machine, for the grinding up of time. Your life went into it, and was crushed to a powder.

He lifted his head, then changed his pose again-rolled back on to his other side. The shivering sound had started up on the landing, and this time the beat was so slight, so subtle, he knew that it must be Mr Mundy who walked there; because Mr Mundy had been at the prison longer than any other officer and knew how to walk in a careful way, so as not to disturb the men. The beat came closer, but began to slow; like a fading heartbeat it came, until at last it stopped completely. Duncan held his breath. Beneath the door to his cell was a bar of sickly blue light, and in the vertical centre of the door, five feet from the floor, was a covered spy-hole. Now, as he watched, the bar of light was broken and the spy-hole, for a second, grew bright, then dimmed. Mr Mundy was standing, looking in. For, just as he knew how to walk so gently, so he also knew, he said, when any of his men were troubled and couldn't sleep…

He stood there, quite still, for almost a minute. Then, 'All right?' he called, very softly.

Duncan didn't answer at first. He was afraid that Fraser would wake. But finally, 'All right!' he whispered. And then, when Fraser didn't stir, he added: 'Good night!'

'Good night!' Mr Mundy answered.

Duncan closed his eyes. In time he heard the shivering beat start up again and grow faint. When he looked again, the bar of light beneath his door was unbroken, and the pale little circle of the spy-hole had been snuffed out. He rolled on to his other side, and put his hands beneath his cheek-like a boy in a picture-book, waiting patiently for sleep.

2

'Helen!' Helen heard somebody call, above the snarl of traffic on the Marylebone Road. 'Helen! Over here!'

She turned her head, and saw a woman in a blue jeans jacket and dungarees, rather filthy at the knee, with her hair done up in a dusty turban. The woman was smiling, and had lifted her hand. 'Helen!' she called again, beginning to laugh.

'Julia!' said Helen, at last. She crossed the road. 'I didn't recognise you!'

'I'm not surprised. I must look like a chimney-sweep, do I?'

'Well, a little.'

Julia got up. She'd been sitting in the sun, on a stump of wall. She had a Gladys Mitchell novel in one hand and a cigarette in the other: now she took a hasty final draw on the cigarette and threw it away. She rubbed her hand across the bib of her dungarees, so that she could offer it to Helen. But when she glanced at her palm, she looked doubtful.

'I think the dirt's there permanently. Do you mind?'

'Of course not.'

They shook hands. Julia said, 'Where are you going?'

'I'm going back to work,' answered Helen, a little self-consciously; for something about Julia-Julia's manner, Julia's clear, upper-class voice-always made her shy. 'I've just had lunch. I work just over there, in the Town Hall.'

'The Town Hall?' Julia peered along the street. 'We've probably passed one another before, then, and not noticed. My father and I've been working our way through all the streets around here. We've set up a sort of headquarters, in a house on Bryanston Square. We've been there for a week. He's just gone off to see a warden, and I'm making it an excuse for a little sit down.'

Julia's father, Helen knew, was an architect. He was making a survey of bomb-damaged buildings, and Julia was helping. But Helen had always imagined them working miles away, in the East End or somewhere like that. She said, ' Bryanston Square? How funny! I walk through there all the time.'

'Do you?' asked Julia

They looked at each other, for a second, frowning and smiling. Then Julia went on, more briskly, 'How are you, anyway?'

Helen shrugged, rather shy again. 'I'm all right. A bit tired, of course; like everyone. How are you? Are you writing?'

'Yes, a little.'

'You manage to do it, in between bangs?'

'Yes, in between bangs. It keeps my mind off them, I think. I'm just reading this-' she showed the book-'as a way of checking out the competition… But tell me, how's Kay?'

She asked it, perfectly easily; but Helen felt herself blush. She nodded. 'Kay's all right.'

'Still at the Station? At Dolphin Square?'

'Yes. Still there.'

'With Mickey? And Binkie? They're quite a pair, aren't they?'

Helen laughed, agreeing that they were… The sun grew brighter, and Julia lifted the book to her brow, to make a shade. But she kept her gaze on Helen's face as she did it, as if turning something over in her mind.

Then, 'Look,' she said. She tugged at her wristwatch, which had worked its way around her arm. 'My father will be ten minutes yet. I was just about to go and get myself a cup of tea. There's a canteen thing up by the station. Care to join me? Or do you have to get back to work?'

'Well,' said Helen, surprised. 'I ought to be back at my desk, as it happens.'

'Ought you? But, look at it this way. The tea will make you work harder.'

'Well, perhaps,' said Helen.

She was still aware of having blushed; and she didn't want Julia to suppose that she couldn't stand in a street and talk about Kay, as if the whole thing weren't perfectly natural, perfectly fine… And Kay herself would be pleased to hear they'd met up; she thought of it like that. So she glanced at her own watch, then smiled and said, 'All right, so long as we're quick. I'll brave the wrath of Miss Chisholm, just this once.'

'Miss Chisholm?'

'A colleague of mine, and frightfully proper. Her pursed lips are something awful… She scares the life out of me, to be honest.'

Julia laughed. They started to walk. They went very quickly up the street and joined a short line of people waiting to be served at the window of a mobile canteen.

The day, though sunny and almost breezeless, was cold. The winter so far had been a very bitter one. But that made the blueness of today's sky, Helen thought, more lovely. Everyone looked cheerful, as if reminded of happier times. A soldier in khaki had leaned his kitbag and rifle against the canteen van and was lazily rolling a cigarette. The girl in front of Helen and Julia was wearing sunglasses. The elderly man in front of her had on a cream Panama hat. But he and the girl had gas-mask boxes hung over their shoulders, too: people had dug them out, Helen had noticed, and started carrying them again. And fifty yards further along the Marylebone Road an office building had been freshly bombed: an emergency water tank had been set up; there were scraps of wet, charred paper clinging to the pavements, a coating of ash on walls and trees, and muddy tracks leading in and out of the wreckage where hoses had been dragged across the street.

The queue moved forward. Julia asked for teas from the girl behind the counter. Helen took out her purse, and there was the usual women's quarrel over who should pay. In the end, Julia did; she said it was her idea in the first place. The tea looked ghastly, anyway: greyish, probably made from chlorinated water, and the milk was powdered and formed lumps. Julia picked up the cups and led Helen a little way off, to a heap of sandbags underneath a boarded window. The bags had had the sun on them; they smelt, not unpleasantly, of drying jute. Some had split, and showed pale earth, the limp remains of flowers and grass.

Julia pulled on a broken stalk. '“Nature triumphant over war”,' she said, in a wireless voice; for it was the sort of thing that people were always writing about to the radio-the new variety of wildflower they had spotted on the bomb-sites, the new species of bird, all of that-it had got terribly boring. She sipped her tea, then made a face: 'God, this is awful.' She got out a packet of cigarettes and a lighter. 'You won't mind my smoking in the street?'

'Of course not.'

'Want one?'

'I've got my own here somewhere-'

'Don't be silly. Here.'

'Well, thanks.'

They shared the flame, their heads coming rather close together, the smoke rising up and into their eyes. Without thinking, Helen touched her fingers, very lightly, to Julia's hand.

'Your knuckles are grazed,' she said.

Julia looked. 'So they are. That must be from broken glass.' She lifted the knuckles to her mouth and sucked them. 'I had to lower myself through the fan-light of a house this morning.'

'Goodness!' said Helen. 'Like Oliver Twist!'

'Yes, just like that.'

'Isn't that illegal?'

'So you might think. But we have a sort of special dispensation, my father and I. If a house is empty and we can't get hold of the keys, we're allowed to get in however we can. It's a filthy business, not at all as exciting as it sounds: the rooms all smashed, the carpets wrecked, the mirrors in splinters. The water-pipes might have had it: the water runs and turns the soot to sludge. I went into places last month and found things frozen: sofas and tablecloths and things like that. Or, things get burned. An incendiary will land on a roof: it might burn right through, quite neatly, from one floor to the next; you can stand in the basement and look at the sky… I find damage like that more miserable, somehow, than if a house has been blasted to bits: it's like a life with a cancer in it.'

'Is it frightening?' asked Helen, very taken with Julia's description. 'I think it would frighten me.'

'It spooks me a bit. Then there's always the chance, of course, of discovering someone-a looter, who's got in the same way you did. Boys who've gone in for a lark. You see rotten drawings on the walls, sometimes; you pity the family that must come back. Then again, sometimes the house hasn't been abandoned at all. My father got into one, a few months ago: he went into every room to look at the damage, and in the last room of all was a very old woman, in a yellow night-dress and with silver hair, asleep in a four-poster bed with tattered curtains.'

Helen saw the scene, quite clearly. She said, fascinated, 'What did your father do?'

'He left her to it-went silently back downstairs; then told the local warden. The warden said the old woman had a girl who came and cooked her dinners for her, and lit her fires; that she was ninety-three, and could never be got to come out when a raid was on. That she remembered seeing Prince Albert with Queen Victoria once in a carriage in Hyde Park…'

The sun, all the time that Julia was speaking, was moving in and out of cloud. When it grew bright she put her hand to her eyes or, as she had before, lifted her book; now, its growing brighter than ever, she stopped talking, shut her eyes completely for a moment and put back her head.

How lovely she is! thought Helen suddenly, jolted out of the story about the old woman; for the sun lit Julia as a spot-light might, and the blue of the dungarees and the jacket set off the tan of her face, the dark of her lashes and neat, straight brows; and because her hair was swept up by the turban you saw more clearly the graceful lines of her jaw and her throat. She had parted her lips. Her mouth was full, slightly crowded, the teeth not quite even. But even that was lovely, somehow: one of those flaws of feature which mysteriously render a handsome face more handsome than genuine flawlessness could.

No wonder, Helen thought, with a queer mix of feelings-envy, and admiration, and a slight sinking of heart-No wonder Kay was in love with you.

For that was all the connection she and Julia had. They could not be said, even, to be friends. Julia was Kay's friend, as Mickey was-or rather, not at all as Mickey was, for she did not, as Mickey did, spend time with Kay and Helen, at their flat, in pubs, at parties. She wasn't open and easy and kind. She had a queer sort of mystery to her-a sort of glamour, Helen thought it.

The mystery and glamour had been there, right from the start. 'You must meet Julia,' Kay had used to say, after Helen had moved into her flat. 'I do so want you two to meet up.' But there had always been something in the way of it: Julia was busy, Julia was writing; Julia kept odd hours and could never be pinned down… They'd met, at last, about a year before, by accident: bumped into each other at the theatre, after a performance of-of all things-Blithe Spirit. Julia had been handsome, charming, frightening, remote: Helen had taken one look at her; noted the awkward, slightly flustered manner with which Kay introduced her; and guessed everything.

Later that night she'd asked Kay: 'What was there, between you and Julia?'-and Kay had instantly grown awkward again.

'Nothing,' she'd said.

'Nothing?'

'A sort of-misaffection, that was all. Ages ago.'

'You were in love with her,' Helen had said, bluntly.

And Kay had laughed-'Look here, let's talk of something else!'-but also, what was rare for her, had blushed.

That blush was all the link there was, between Helen and Julia-a funny sort of link, when you thought about it…

Julia smiled and tilted her head. They were only fifty yards or so from the entrance to Marylebone Station, and through a lull in the traffic there had come a sudden burst of noise from one of the platforms: a blown whistle, followed by the letting out of steam. She opened her eyes. 'I like that sound.'

'So do I,' said Helen. 'It's a holiday sound, isn't it? A buckets-and-spades sort of sound. It makes me long to get away-get out of London, just for a bit.' She swilled the tea in the bottom of her cup. 'No chance of that, I suppose.'

'No?' said Julia, looking at her. 'Can't you fix something up?'

'Where's there to go to? And then, the trains… And, anyway, I'd never persuade Kay. She's working extra shifts, now, at Dolphin Square. She'd never take time off, while things are so bad.'

Julia drew on her cigarette, then threw it down and covered it over with her shoe. 'Kay's such a heroine, though, isn't she?' she said, blowing out smoke. 'Kay's such a brick.'

She meant it jokingly, Helen supposed; but her tone was not quite light, and she looked at Helen, as she said it, from the corner of her eye, almost slyly-as if testing her, weighing up her response.

Helen remembered, then, something she'd once heard Mickey say about Julia: that she longed to be admired; that she couldn't bear to have anyone liked over herself; and that she was hard. And she thought, with a flicker of dislike, It's true, you are hard. She felt suddenly, in that one moment, exposed, unsafe.

But the queer thing was, the sensation of unsafeness, even of dislike, was almost exciting. She glanced again at Julia's smooth, handsome, upper-class face and thought of jewels, of pearls. Wasn't hardness a condition of glamour, after all?

And then Julia changed her pose, and the moment passed. She caught hold of her wristwatch again; Helen saw how late it was and said, 'Damn.' She quickly finished her cigarette, dropped the stub into her almost empty cup, and heard it hiss. 'I must get back to work.'

Julia nodded, drinking off her tea. She said, 'I'll go with you.'

They went quickly back to the canteen, to leave their cups on the counter; then walked the couple of hundred yards to Helen's office.

'Will your Miss Prism give you hell, for staying out so long?' asked Julia, as they went.

'Miss Chisholm,' said Helen, smiling. 'She might.'

'You'd better put the blame on me, then. Say I'm an emergency case. That I've- What? Lost my house, and everything in it?'

'Everything?' Helen thought it over. 'That's about six separate departments, I'm afraid. I could only help you with a grant for light repairs. You'd have to see someone over at the War Damage Commisson about rebuilding work; they're just as likely, however, to send you back to us. Miss Links, on the third floor, might be able to give you some assistance with the cleaning of any salvageable items-curtains, carpets, things like that. But be sure to bring your cleaners' bills with you; and the chit we gave you, when you first filed your report of the incident.-What's that? You've lost the chit? Oh, dear. You must get another, and start all over again… It's like snakes and ladders, you see. And this is always assuming, of course, that we've found time to see you in the first place.'

Julia grimaced. 'You enjoy your job.'

'It's frustrating, that's all. You hope to make some sort of difference. But now the people we rehoused three years ago are coming back; they've been bombed out all over again. We've less money than ever. And still the war is costing us-how much do they say? Eleven million a day?'

'Don't ask me,' said Julia. 'I've given up reading the papers. Since the world's so obviously bent on killing itself, I decided months ago to sit back and let it.'

'I wish I could,' said Helen. 'But I find I feel even worse, not knowing, than I do when I know it all…'

But now they had reached the Town Hall; and paused, at the bottom of the steps, to say goodbye. The steps were flanked by two anxious-looking stone lions, furred grey with a coating of ash. Julia reached to pat one, and laughed.

'I'm awfully tempted to hop up on the back of it. What do you think Miss Chisholm would say about that?'

'I think you'd give her a heart attack,' said Helen… 'Goodbye, Julia.' She held out her hand. 'Don't climb through any more fanlights, will you?'

'I'll do my best. Goodbye, Helen. It's been nice.-That's an awful word, isn't it?'

'It's a grand word. It's been nice to see you, too.'

'Has it? I hope I'll bump into you again, then. Or, you must have Kay bring you over, some time, to Mecklenburgh Square. We could have dinner.'

'Yes,' said Helen. For after all, why shouldn't they? It seemed easy now. 'Yes, I will.' They moved apart. 'And, thanks for the tea!'

'We've rather a lot of people waiting, Miss Giniver,' said Miss Chisholm, when she went in.

'Have we?' asked Helen. She went through the office, and down the staff corridor to the lavatory, to take off her coat and hat, to stand at the mirror and re-powder her face. She saw again, as she did it, Julia's smooth, striking features: the slender throat, dark eyes, neat brows; the full, irregular, distracting mouth.

The door opened, and Miss Links came in.

'Oh, Miss Giniver, I'm glad I caught you. Rather sad news, I'm afraid. Mr Piper, at the Mayor's Fund: his wife's been killed.'

'Oh, no,' said Helen, lowering her hand.

'Yes, a timed one. Got her early this morning. Awfully bad luck. We're sending a card. We won't ask everyone to sign it-gets rather monotonous after a while-but I thought you'd like to know.'

'Yes, thanks.'

Helen closed her compact and put it away, and went sadly back to her desk-and hardly thought of Julia again, after that; hardly thought of her at all.

'Well,' said the prisoner in front of Duncan in the dinner-queue, an awful old pansy called Auntie Vi, 'and what have we today? Lobster Thermidore, perhaps? Paté? Veal?'

'It's mutton, Auntie,' said the boy dishing up the food.

Auntie Vi tutted. 'Doesn't even have the imagination to dress itself as lamb, I suppose. Heigh ho. Give me a plateful, darling. I hear the lunches at Brooks are hardly much better these days.'

She said this last to Duncan, rolling her eyes and touching her hair. Her hair was blonded at the front with a bit of peroxide, and beautifully waved-for she slept every night with strings around her head, to put the kinks in. Her cheeks were rouged, and her lips as red as a girl's: you couldn't pick up a scarlet-bound book in the library without finding pale little patches on it, where men like her had sucked at the boards for lipstick.

Duncan couldn't stand her. He got his food, saying nothing, and after a moment she moved on. But, 'My,' she murmured as she went, 'aren't we proud today?' And when he glanced her way again he saw her setting down her dinner on her table and touching her hand to her breast. 'My dears!' he heard her cry to her cronies. 'I've just been cut! Cut to the quick! Who? Why, Little Miss Tragedy Pearce over there…'

He put down his head, and took his plate across the hall in the other direction. He shared a table, near the gates, with Fraser and eight other men. Fraser was there already. He was talking animatedly to the man who had the seat across from him-a man called Watling, another Objector. Watling was sitting with folded arms, and Fraser was leaning forwards and tapping at the oilcloth cover on the table to make his point. He didn't notice Duncan come and draw out a chair, a few places away. The other men, however, looked up and nodded, pleasantly enough: 'Hello, Pearce.' 'All right, son?'

They were mostly older men. Duncan and Fraser were two of the youngest prisoners there. Duncan, in particular, was liked, and often looked out for… 'How are you?' the elderly man beside him asked him now. 'Had a visit lately, from your nice sister?'

'She came on Saturday,' said Duncan, as he sat.

'She's good to you. Nice-looking, too.' The man winked. 'And that never hurts, does it?'

Duncan smiled, but then started sniffing, screwing up his face. 'What's that awful smell?'

'What do you think?' said the man on his other side. 'That blasted recess has blocked again.'

A few yards away from their table was the sink where the men from the ground-floor cells on this side had to empty their chamber-pots. The sink was always getting blocked; Duncan glanced over at it now, incautiously, and saw it brimming over with a nauseating stew of urine and rigid brown turds.

'God!' he said, turning his chair. He started picking at his dinner. But that made him feel sick, too. The mutton was fatty, the potatoes grey; the unwashed, overboiled cabbage still had soil clinging to it.

The man sitting opposite saw him struggling, and smiled. 'Appetising, isn't it? Do you know, I found mouse-droppings in my cocoa last night.'

'Evans, from the Threes,' said someone else, 'says he once found toe-nails in his bread! Those buggers in C Hall do it on purpose. The worst thing was, Evans said, he was so bloody hungry he had to keep eating! He just picked the toenails out as he went along!'

The men made faces. Duncan 's elderly neighbour said, 'Well, it's like my old dad used to say: “Hungry dogs will eat dirty puddings.” I tell you, I never knew the truth of that until they put me in here…'

They chatted on. Duncan scraped more dirt from his cabbage and loaded up his fork. As he ate, he caught snatches of Fraser's conversation with Watling, carrying over the other men's talk: 'But you don't mean to tell me, that with so many COs here and at Maidstone-?' The rest was lost. The table they were sitting at was one of fifteen, laid out on the concrete floor of their hall. Each table held ten or twelve men, so that the noise of conversation and laughter, the scrape of chairs, the shouts of the officers, was almost unbearable-and it was made much worse, of course, by the queer acoustics of the place, which turned any sort of cry into that of a platform announcer at King's Cross.

Now, for example, a sudden commotion made everyone flinch. Mr Garnish, the PO, had gone galloping down the hall and started screaming and swearing into some man's face-'You little git!'-and all because the man had dropped a potato, or spilt his gravy, or something like that… The curses were like the dreadful bayings of a furious beast; but men turned to look, and at once turned back, as if bored. Fraser, Duncan noticed, didn't turn at all. He was still arguing with Watling. He gripped his cropped hair and said, laughing, 'We shall never agree!'

His voice carried clearly now; the hall had quietened down a little after Mr Garnish's outburst. The man on Watling's right-a man named Hammond; a deserter, in for robbery-looked at Fraser very sourly. 'Why don't you fucking well stop arguing, then,' he said, 'and give the rest of us a break? Gas, gas, gas, it's all you do. It's all right for you to talk, anyhow. It's your sort who'll do all right out of this war-just as you've done all right out of peace.'

'You're right,' answered Fraser, 'we will. Because my sort-as you call them-can rely on your sort thinking exactly that. While working men can see no good in peace-time, they'll have no reason not to go to war. Give them decent jobs and houses, give their children decent schools, and they'll soon get the point of pacifism.'

'For fuck's sake!' said Hammond in disgust; but despite himself, he was drawn into arguing. The man on the other side of him was drawn in, too. Someone else said Fraser seemed to think that the ordinary working man could do no wrong. 'You ought to try managing a factory load of them,' he said. He was in for embezzlement. 'That will soon change your politics, believe me.' Then Hammond said, 'And what about the Nazis? They're ordinary working men too, aren't they?'

'Indeed they are,' said Fraser.

'And what about the Japs?'

'Now, the Japs,' said the man next to Fraser-another deserter, called Giggs-'ain't human. Everybody knows that.'

The conversation ran on for several minutes. Duncan ate his filthy dinner, listening but saying nothing. From time to time he glanced at Fraser-who, having started the whole thing off, having stirred the table up, was leaning back in his chair with his hands behind his head, looking delighted. His uniform, Duncan thought, fitted him about as badly as everyone else's fitted them; the grey of the jacket, with its grubby red star, sucked the colour from his face; the collar of his shirt was black with dirt; and yet he managed, somehow, to look handsome-to look merely slender, say, where everyone else looked pinched and underfed. He'd been at Wormwood Scrubs three months, and only had another nine to do; but he'd already done a year at Brixton Prison, and Brixton was known to be harder than here. He'd once told Duncan, too, that even Brixton wasn't so much worse than his old public school… But only his hands had really suffered, from life in the Scrubs-for he was in the Basket Shop, and he hadn't yet got the knack of handling the tools. His fingers had blisters on them the size of shillings.

Now, turning his head, he caught Duncan watching him; and smiled. 'You don't join in our discussion, Pearce?' he called down the table. 'What's your opinion on all this?'

'Pearce hasn't got an opinion on anything,' said Hammond, before Duncan could answer. 'He just keeps his head down-don't you, cock?'

Duncan coloured, self-conscious. 'I don't see the point of going on about things all the time, if that's what you mean. We can't change anything. Why should we try? It's someone else's war, not ours.'

Hammond nodded. 'It's someone else's fucking war, all right!'

'Is it?' Fraser asked Duncan.

'It is,' said Duncan, when you're in here. Just like everything else is someone else's, too. Everything that counts, I mean: nice things, as well as bad-'

'Bloody hell,' said Giggs, yawning. 'You sound like a right old lag, son. You sound like a fucking lifer!'

'In other words,' said Fraser, 'you're doing just what they want you to do. Garnish, and Daniels, I mean-and Churchill, and all the rest of them. You're giving up your right to think! I don't blame you, Pearce. It's hard, in here, when there's no encouragement to do anything else. When they don't let you listen, even, to the news! As for this-' He reached down the table. There was a newspaper lying there, the Daily Express. But when he opened it up, it was like one of those Christmas snowflakes made by children at school: pieces of news had been clipped out of it, and virtually all that was left were the family pages, the sporting pages, and cartoons. Fraser threw it down again. 'That's what they'll do to your mind,' he said, 'if you let them. Don't let them, Pearce!'

He spoke very passionately, holding Duncan 's gaze with his clear blue eyes; and Duncan felt himself blush again. 'It's easy for you-' he started to say.

But Fraser's gaze had moved to a point behind Duncan 's shoulder, and his look had changed. He'd seen Mr Mundy, making his way between the tables. He lifted his hand.

'Why, Mr Mundy, sir!' he called, in a stagey kind of way. 'You're just the man!'

Mr Mundy ambled over. He saw Duncan and gave him a nod. But he looked more warily at Fraser and said, in his soft, pleasant voice, 'Now, what's the matter?'

'Nothing's the matter,' Fraser answered. 'I just thought you might be able to explain to us why the prison system seems so keen on turning its inmates into morons, when it might-oh, I don't know-educate them?'

Mr Mundy smiled tolerantly, but would not be drawn. 'There you are,' he said, starting to move on. 'You grumble all you like. Prison lets a man do that, anyway.'

'But it won't let him think, sir!' pursued Fraser. 'It won't let him read the papers, or listen to the wireless. What's the point of that?'

'You know what the point is, son. It does you men no good to hear about things from the world outside that you've got no part in. It stirs you up.'

'It give us minds and opinions of our own, in other words; and makes us harder for you to manage.'

Mr Mundy shook his head. 'You got a grievance, son, you take it up with Mr Garnish. But if you'd been in the service as long as I have-'

'How long have you been in the service, Mr Mundy?' broke in Hammond. He and Giggs had been listening. The other men at the table were listening, too. Mr Mundy hesitated. Hammond went on, 'Mr Daniels told us, sir, that you'd been here for forty years, something like that.'

'Well,' said Mr Mundy, slowing his step, 'I've been here twenty-seven years; and before that, I was at Parkhurst for ten.'

Hammond whistled. Giggs said, 'Christ! That's more than murderers get, ain't it? What was it like here in the old days, though? What were the men like, Mr Mundy?'

They sounded like boys in a classroom, Duncan thought, trying to distract the master into talking about his time at Ypres; and Mr Mundy was too kind to walk away. Probably, too, he would rather talk to Hammond than to Fraser… He shifted his pose, to stand more comfortably. He folded his arms and thought it over.

'The men, I should say,' he said at last, 'were about the same.'

'About the same?' said Hammond. 'What, you mean there've been blokes like Wainwright, going on about the grub-and Watling and Fraser, boring everyone's arse off about politics-for thirty-seven years? Blimey! I wonder you haven't gone right off your chump, Mr Mundy. I wonder you haven't gone clean round the twist!'

'What about the twirls, sir?' asked Giggs excitedly. 'I bet they was cruel men, wasn't they?'

'Well,'said Mr Mundy fairly, 'there's good officers and bad, kind and hard, everywhere you go. But prison habits-' He wrinkled his nose. 'Prison habits were awfully hard in those days; yes, awfully hard. You fellows think you have it rough; but your days are like lambswool, compared to those. I've known officers would whip a man as soon as look at him. I've seen lads flogged-lads of eleven, twelve, thirteen, it'd break your heart. Yes, they were awfully brutal days… But, there it is. What I always say is, in prison you see men at their worst, and at their best. I've known plenty of gentlemen, in my time here. I've known fellows come in as villains, and leave as saints-and the other way around. I've walked with men to the gallows, and been proud to shake their hands-'

'That must have cheered them up no end, sir!' called Fraser.

Duncan looked at Mr Mundy and saw him flush, as if embarassed, caught out. Hammond said quickly, 'Who was the hardest man you ever had in here, sir? Who was the biggest villain?'-but Mr Mundy would not be drawn again. He unfolded his arms, straightened up.

'All right,' he said, as he moved off. 'You men ought to get on and finish your dinners, now. Come on.'

He started his circuit of the hall again-going slowly, and limping slightly, because of his hip.

Giggs and Hammond snorted with laughter.

'He's a soft fucking git!' said Hammond, when Mr Mundy was out of earshot. 'He's a fucking peach, isn't he? I tell you what though, he must be out of his fucking mind to have stood it in prison for-how long did he say? Thirty-seven years? Thirty-seven days was enough for me of this fucking place. Thirty-seven minutes. Thirty-seven seconds-'

'Look!' said Giggs. 'Look at him go! What's he walk like that for? He walks like a fucking old duck. Imagine if some bloke was to have it away over the wall while Mr Mundy was with him! Imagine Mr Mundy starting off after him-!'

'Leave him alone,' said Duncan suddenly, 'can't you?'

Hammond looked at him, amazed. 'What's it matter to you? We're only having a bit of a laugh. Christ, if you can't have a laugh in this place-'

'Just leave him alone.'

Giggs made a face. 'Well, pardon us. We forgot you and him were so fucking thick.'

'We're not anything,' said Duncan. 'Just-'

'Yes, give it a rest, can't you?' said another man, the embezzler. He'd been trying to read the cut-up Daily Express. He gave it a shake, and a bit of it fell out. 'It's like feeding time in the blasted Zoo.'

Giggs pushed back his chair and got up. 'Come on, mate,' he said to Hammond. 'This table fucking stinks, anyhow.'

They picked their plates up and moved off. After a moment the embezzler and another man went, too. The men left at Duncan 's end of the table shifted closer together. One of them had a little set of dominoes, made from cast-off pieces of wood, and they began setting out the pieces for a game.

Fraser stretched in his chair again. 'Just another dinner-hour,' he said, 'at Wormwood Scrubs, D Hall…' He looked at Duncan. 'I never thought I'd see you take on Hammond and Giggs, Pearce. And all on Mr Mundy's behalf! He'd be quite touched.'

Duncan was trembling a little, as it happened. He hated arguments, confrontations; he always had. He said, 'Hammond and Giggs get on my nerves. Mr Mundy's all right… He's better than Mr Garnish and the others, anybody will tell you that.'

But Fraser curled his lip. 'Give me Garnish over Mundy, any day. Give me an honest sadist, I mean, rather than a hypocrite. All that bloody nonsense about shaking hands with the condemned man.'

'He's only doing a job, like everyone else.'

'Like state-paid bullies and murderers everywhere!'

'Mr Mundy's not like that,' said Duncan stubbornly.

'He certainly,' said Watling, glancing at Duncan but addressing Fraser, 'has some very queer ideas about Christianity. Have you ever heard him talk on the subject?'

'I think I have,' said Fraser. 'He's one of the Mary Baker Eddy crowd, isn't he?'

'He said something to me once, when I was over at the Infirmary with some very painful boils. He said the boils were simply manifesting-these were the very words he used, mind-they were manifesting my belief in pain. He said, “You believe in God, don't you? Well then, God is perfect and He made a perfect world. So how can you have boils?” He said, “What the doctors call your boils is really only your false belief! Make your belief a true one, and your boils will disappear!”'

Fraser gave a shout of laughter. 'What poetry!' he cried. 'And what a comfort, to a man who's just had his leg blown off, or his stomach bayoneted!'

Duncan frowned. 'You're as bad as Hammond. Just because you don't agree with it.'

'What's there to agree with?' Fraser said. 'You can't agree, or disagree, with gibberish. And gibberish it is, most certainly. One of those things dreamed up to pacify sex-starved old women.' He sniggered. 'Like the WVS.'

Watling looked prim. 'Well, I don't know about that.'

'He's not so different, anyway, from you,' said Duncan.

Fraser was still smiling. 'What do you mean?'

'It's like Watling said. You both think the world can be perfect, don't you? But at least he's doing something to make it perfect, by willing bad things away. Instead of just- Well, instead of just sitting in here, I mean.'

Fraser's smile faded. He looked at Duncan, then looked away. There was an awkward little silence… Then Watling moved forward again. 'Let me ask you this, Fraser,' he said, with an air of continuing a conversation in which Duncan had no part. 'If at your Tribunal they had told you…'

Fraser folded his arms and listened, and gradually started smiling again-his good humour, apparently, quite restored.

Duncan waited, then turned away. The men on the other side of him had just finished a game. Two of them were lightly clapping. 'Well played,' said one, politely. He and his neighbour passed over the tiny twists of tobacco they were using as wagers; then the three of them began to flip the dominoes over and mix them up, to start again. 'Care to join us?' they asked, seeing Duncan sitting more or less alone; but Duncan shook his head. He had the impression that he'd hurt Fraser's feelings, and was sorry. He was going to wait another minute, to see if Fraser might give up the argument with Watling and turn back to him…

But Fraser didn't turn; and soon the stink of the blocked recess grew too much to bear. Duncan put his knife and fork together and, 'See you later,' he said to the domino players.

'Yes, see you later Pearce. Don't-'

Their words were interrupted by a cry: 'Yoo hoo! Miss Tragedy! Yoo hoo!'

It was Auntie Vi, and a couple of her friends-two boys a few years older than Duncan, called Monica and Stella. They were mincing down the hall between the tables, smoking, and waving their hands. They must have noticed Duncan getting to his feet. Now they called again: 'Yoo hoo! What's the matter, Miss Tragedy? Don't you like us?'

Duncan pushed in his chair. Fraser, he saw, had looked up as if irritated. Watling was making another prim, repressive sort of face… Auntie Vi, and Monica and Stella, minced closer. Duncan took up his plate and moved off with it just as they drew level with his table.

'Off she trips, look!' he heard Monica say, behind his back. 'Where's she going in such a hurry? Do you think she has a husband, up in that flowery of hers?'

'Not her, my dears,' said Aunti Vi, puffing on her roll-up. 'Not while she's still in black for the last one. Why, she's sitting like Patience on a Monument, positively grinning at Grief! You know her story, don't you? Haven't you ever seen her in Mailbags One? Stitch, stitch, stitch she goes, with her little white hand; and at night, my dears I swear she creeps back over there and pulls all the stitches out…'

Their voices faded as they moved on. But Duncan felt himself blushing at their words-blushing horribly, guiltily, from his throat to his scalp. And, what was worse, he glanced back to his table and saw Fraser's face; and Fraser's expression was such an unpleasant one-such a mixture of awkwardness and anger and distaste-he grew almost sick.

He scraped the uneaten food from his plate, then swilled the plate and his knife and fork in the tub of soapless cold water that was provided for them to wash their dinner-things in. He went across the hall to the staircase and began to climb it, as quickly as he could.

He grew breathless almost at once. Any sort of exercise left them all winded. At the Threes he had to pause to catch his breath. At his own landing he leaned on the rail outside his cell, waiting for his heart to slow. He folded his arms and rested on his elbows and looked back down into the hall.

The din of quarrelling voices, of laughter and shouts, was milder up here. The view was horribly impressive. For the hall was as long as a small city street, with a roof of blacked-out glass. Strung right across it, at the level of the first landing, was a net: Duncan saw the men through a haze of wire and cigarette smoke and sickly, artificial light; it was like gazing at creatures in a cage or under water; they were like strange, pallid things that never saw daylight. And what you noticed most, he thought, from this height, was the drabness of it all: the concrete floor, the lustreless paint upon the walls, the shapeless grey uniforms with their single spots of red, the spew-coloured oilcloths on the tables… Only Fraser, it still seemed to him, stood out as a single point of brightness: for his cropped hair was fair, where most of the other men's was dark or dull brown; and he moved animatedly, where others slouched; and when he laughed-as he did again now-he laughed with a shout, that carried even to here.

He was talking to Watling, still; he was listening hard to something Watling was saying, and occasionally nodding his head. He didn't like Watling much, Duncan knew; but the fact was he'd talk to anyone, for hours at a time, just for the sake of it: it didn't mean anything when he looked at you, spoke passionately to you, he was passionate about everything…

'That boy Fraser oughtn't to be here,' Mr Mundy had said to Duncan, privately. 'Coming from a family like that, with all the advantages he's had!' He took Fraser's being here as a sort of insult to the other men. He said he was playing at being in prison. He didn't like the fact that Duncan had to share a cell with him; he said that he'd end up giving Duncan queer ideas. If he could have found a way to do it, he would have got Duncan a cell all to himself.

Perhaps Mr Mundy was right, Duncan thought, looking again at Fraser's smooth fair head. Perhaps Fraser was only playing at being in prison-like a prince, dressing up as a pauper. But then, what was the difference, in a place like this, between playing at something and doing it for real? It was like playing at being tortured, or being killed! It was like going into the army and saying you were only doing it for fun: the soldiers shooting at you from the other side wouldn't know you were only pretending…

Fraser stretched right back in his chair again, raising his arms, putting out his long legs. But he kept his back to Duncan; and Duncan suddenly found himself wishing that he would turn and look up. He stared at the back of Fraser's head and tried to will him to turn around. He concentrated all his mind on it-sent out the words as a sort of ray. Look, Fraser! he thought. Look, Robert Fraser! He even used Fraser's prison number. Look, 1755 Fraser! 1755 Robert Fraser, look at me!

But Fraser didn't look. He kept on talking with Watling, and laughing; and at last Duncan gave it up. He blinked, and rubbed his eyes. And when he looked again, it was Mr Mundy's gaze he met: for Mr Mundy must have spotted him leaning there, and been watching him. He gave Duncan a nod, and then moved on slowly between the tables. Duncan turned and went into his cell and lay down, exhausted.

'You're late,' said Viv's friend Betty, as Viv ran down the stairs to the cloakroom at Portman Court.

'I know,' said Viv breathlessly. 'Has Gibson noticed?'

'She's in with Mr Archer. They sent me all the way to the basement, for these.' Betty held up files. 'If you hurry you'll be OK. Where've you been, anyway?'

Viv shook her head, smiling. 'Nowhere.'

She ran on, pulling off her gloves and her hat as she went; throwing back the locker door when she got to it and bundling her coat inside. Miss Gibson let them keep their handbags at their desks, so she held on to that; but before she closed the locker door she quickly opened the handbag up and looked inside it, to be sure she had, what she thought she might need-because her period was due, and her breasts and stomach were sore-a sanitary towel and a box of aspirin. She'd have liked to go to the lavatory and put the towel in place right now, but there wasn't the time. She took an aspirin, anyway, as she started back up the stairs-chewing it up without any water and swallowing it down, making a face against the bitter chalky taste of it.

She had been all the way back to John Adam House, in her lunch-hour; she'd gone back there to check the post. For she knew there'd be a card for her, from Reggie: he always sent her a note after one of their Saturdays; it was the only way he had of telling her he was all right. The card, this time, was a picture postcard with a daft illustration on it, a soldier and a pretty girl in the black-out, the soldier winking and the caption underneath saying, Keeping it dark. Next to this Reggie had written, Lucky ****ers!!! And on the back he'd put: G.G.-that meant Glamour Girl. Looked for brunette, but could only find blondes. Wish I was him amp; she was you! xxx. She had the card in her bag now, beside the box of aspirin.

It was quarter past two, and her room was up on the seventh floor. She might have taken the lift-but the lifts were slow, and she'd got stuck waiting about for them before; she kept to the stairs. She went quickly, steadily, like a distance runner: folding her arms beneath her breasts; keeping her heels up, because the stairs were hard, of marble, and heels made a row. When she passed a man, he laughed. 'I say! What's the rush? Do you know something the rest of us don't?' That made her slacken her pace slightly, until he'd moved on; then she speeded up again. Only at the turn of the seventh floor did she slow right down, to catch her breath, to blot her face with her handkerchief and smooth her hair.

A mad sort of noise began to reach her now, a crackety-crack-crack-crack!-it was like the bursting of midget shells. She went quickly down a corridor and opened a door, and the noise grew almost defeaning: the room beyond was crowded with desks, each with a girl at it, furiously typing. Some wore earphones; most were typing from shorthand notes. They were plunging away so vigorously because their machines held not just one sheet of paper, but two or three and sometimes four, with carbons in between. The room was large, but stuffy. The windows had been gas-proofed years before. The panes had strips of brown paper gummed to them in case of blast.

The smell was a rather overpowering one: a mixture of talcum powder, permanent waves, typewriter ink, cigarette smoke, BO. On the walls were posters from various Ministry campaigns: pictures of Potato Pete and other cheery root vegetables, imploring you to boil them up and eat them; slogans, like old religious samplers.

PLANT NOW!

SPRING and SUMMER will come as usual-EVEN in WARTIME.

At the head of the room was a table, separated from the others; its chair was empty. But a minute after Viv had sat down, taken off her typewriter's cover and started work, the door to Mr Archer's office opened and Miss Gibson looked in. She glanced once around the room and, seeing the girls all typing away, disappeared again.

The moment the door was closed, Viv felt something small and light strike her on the shoulder and bounce to the floor. Betty had thrown a paperclip at her from her desk ten feet away.

'You lead a charmed life, Pearce,' she mouthed, when Viv looked over.

Viv stuck out her tongue, and went back to her work.

She was typing up a table, a list of foodstuffs and their calorific values-a fiddly job, since you had to type the vertical columns first, with the right sort of space between them, and then you had to take the papers out and put them back in horizontally and type the lines. And you had to do it all, of course, without letting the papers slide about against each other, otherwise the top sheet would look all right, but the copies underneath would turn out crazy…

What with the effort of getting it right, and the noisiness and stuffiness of the room, you might as well, Viv thought, be working in a factory, making precision parts for planes. You'd probably earn more in a factory. And yet people thought it glamorous, when you told them you were a typist at a Ministry; and lots of the girls were upper-class-they had names like Nancy, Minty, Felicity, Daphne, Faye. Viv had nothing much in common with any of them. Even Betty-who chewed gum, and liked to talk like a wise-cracking New York waitress in a film-even Betty had been to a finishing school, and had money coming out of her ears.

Viv, by contrast, had come to the job after completing a secretarial course at a college in Balham; she'd had a nice instructor there, who'd encouraged her to apply. 'There's really no reason, these days,' the instructor had said, 'why a girl with a background like yours shouldn't do just as well for herself as a girl from a better sort of family.' She'd advised Viv to take elocution lessons, that was all; and so, for half an hour each week for three months, Viv had stood blushing in front of an elderly actress in a basement room in Kennington, reciting poetry. She could still remember whole chunks of Walter de la Mare.

On the day of her interview, the sight and sound of the well-bred young women in the Ministry waiting-room had absolutely appalled her. One had said carelessly, 'Oh, it'll be a cinch, girls! They'll just want to see that our hair's not dyed, and that we don't use words like dad and toilet and horrors like that.'

The interview had passed off all right, as it happened. But Viv could never hear the word 'toilet', even now, after so long, without remembering that moment, and that girl.

When all the trouble with Duncan had started up, she had kept it to herself. No-one, not even Betty, knew she had a brother at all. Early on in the war girls at John Adam House had now and then asked her, in the blunt, casual way that people asked you things like that: 'Don't you have a brother, Viv? Lucky you! Brothers are awful, I can't bear mine.' These days, however, no-one asked after brothers, boyfriends, husbands-just in case.

She finished the table she'd been typing, and started on another. The girl at the desk in front of her-a girl named Millicent-leaned back in her chair and shook her head. A hair came flying on to the paper in Viv's machine: it was long, and brown, quite dry through having been over-waved, but it had a blob of grease on it like a pin-head, where it had been fixed to Millicent's scalp. Viv blew it to the floor. She'd discovered that if you looked closely at the floor at this time of day, you could see that it was full of hairs like that. She thought, sometimes, of the amazing amount of tangled hair that must end up in the char ladies' brooms, when they'd gone through the building and finished sweeping… The thought, just now-on top of the smells and general stuffiness of the room-depressed her rather. For how fed-up she was, she realised, of living with women! How absolutely sick to death she was, of the closeness of so many girls! Of powder! Of scent! Of lipstick marks on the rims of cups and the ends of pencils! Of razored armpits and razored legs! Of bottles of veramon and boxes of aspirin!

That made her think of the aspirin in her bag; and her mind moved from that to Reggie's card. She pictured Reggie writing it, posting it. She saw his face, heard his voice, felt the touch of him-and began to miss him, dreadfully. She started to count up all the different dingy hotel rooms they'd made love in. She thought of all the times he'd had to leave her, to go to his mother-in-law's, to his wife. 'I wish it was you I was going home to,' he always said… She knew he meant it. God knows what his wife thought about it. Viv wouldn't let herself wonder. She'd never been the sort to ask things about his family, to pry and make digs. She'd seen a picture of his wife and little boy, but that was years ago. Since then, she might have passed them on the street! She might meet them in a bus, on a train, get talking. 'What nice, handsome children.'-'Do you think so? They're the image of their dad. Let me show you a snapshot-'

Milk, eggs, cheese, bugger, she had typed. She quickly looked up, embarassed; and had to pull the papers out and start again… What was Reggie doing, she wondered, as she turned the reel, right now? Was he thinking of her? She tried to reach out to him with her mind. My darling, she called him, in her thoughts. She'd never call him that to his face. My darling, my darling… She flicked closed the paper guard and started typing again; but she typed fluently, and one of the advantages-or disadvantages-of being able to type so well was that, while your fingers flew over the keys, your thoughts could start racing. If you had something on your mind, it could seem to pick up the typewriter's rhythm and run like a train… Now her mind ran with the idea of Reggie. She remembered the feel of him in her arms. She remembered the working of his hands over her thighs. She felt the memory in her own fingers, in her breasts, her mouth, and in between her legs… Awful to be thinking things like that, so vividly, with all these upper-class girls about, and in the arid crack-crack-cracking of so many typewriters. But- She glanced around the room. Weren't any of these girls in love? Really in love, like she was with Reggie? Even Miss Gibson must once have been kissed. A man must have wanted her; a man might have lain with her on a bedroom floor, taken off her knickers, put himself inside her, pushed and pushed-

Abruptly, the door to Mr Archer's office opened again and Miss Gibson herself reappeared. Viv blushed, and put her head down. Pork, bacon, beef, lamb, poultry, she typed. Herring, sardine, salmon, shrimp-

But Miss Gibson, having caught her eye, called her over.

'Miss Pearce,' she said. She had a roneo stencil in her hand. 'You seem for some reason to have time to spare. Take this down to the ink room, will you, and have them run off two hundred copies? Quickly as you can, please.'

'Yes, Miss Gibson,' said Viv, still blushing. She took the stencil and went out.

The ink room was two floors down, at the end of another marble corridor. Viv spoke to the girl in charge of it-a plain-faced girl in spectacles, whom no-one much liked. She was turning the handle of one of the machines; she looked at Miss Gibson's stencil and said, with great contempt, 'Two hundred? I'm making a batch of a thousand here, for Mr Brightman. The trouble with all you people is, you seem to think that copies can be whistled up by magic. You'll have to turn them out yourself, I'm afraid. Ever worked one of these machines? The last girl I had in here made such a muck of things, the drum was unusable for days.'

Viv had been shown how to fit a stencil, but months before. She fumbled about with the cradle now-the girl, still turning her own machine, looking over and calling, witheringly: 'Not that way!' and, 'There, look! There!'

At last the stencil and the paper and the ink were all in place; and all Viv had to do then was stand and turn the handle, two hundred times… The motion hurt her tender breasts. She felt herself begin to grow sweaty. And to make things worse, a man from another department came in, and stood, smiling, and watched her.

'I always like to see you girls doing that,' he said, when she'd finished. 'You look just like milkmaids, churning butter.'

He only had a few copies of his own to make. By the time she'd counted out her sheets and let them dry he had finished, and he held the door for her when she went out. He did it rather awkwardly, because he walked with a cane: he'd been an airman, she knew, at the start of the war, and had been lamed in some sort of smash. He was young, quite fair: the kind of man of whom girls said, 'He's got nice eyes,' or, 'He's got nice hair'-not because his eyes or his hair were especially handsome, but because the rest of his face wasn't handsome at all, and yet you wanted to find something pleasant to say about him… They set off together down the corridor and she felt obliged to walk at his pace.

He said, 'You're one of Miss Gibson's girls, aren't you? Up on the top floor? I thought so. I've noticed you about the place before.'

They got to the staircase. Her arm was aching, from turning the handle of the machine. She had an uncomfortable, moistish feeling between her legs. It was probably sweat, but might, she thought, be something worse. If the man hadn't been with her, she would have run downstairs; but she didn't want him to see her dashing off to the lavatory. He took the staircase one step at a time, steadying himself by gripping the banister; perhaps he was laying it on a bit thick, too, to give himself a few extra minutes with her…

'That must be your room along there,' he said, when they got to the top. 'I can tell by the clatter.' He moved his cane from his right hand to his left, so that he could shake hands with her. 'Well, goodbye, Miss-?'

'Miss Pearce,' said Viv.

'Goodbye, Miss Pearce. Perhaps I'll see you churning milk again, some time? Or else- Well, if you'd care to make it a stiffer drink-?'

She told him she'd think about it; because she didn't want him to suppose she wouldn't, because of his leg. She might even let him take her on a date. She might let him kiss her. Where was the harm? It wouldn't mean anything. It was just what you did. It wouldn't be what she had with Reggie.

She gave the papers to Miss Gibson; but on the way back to her seat she hesitated, still thinking of the lavatory. She remembered a girl who, a few weeks before, had been seen all over the building with blood on her skirt… She picked up her handbag, went back to Miss Gibson, and asked if she could be excused.

Miss Gibson looked at the clock, and frowned. 'Oh, very well. But this is why you girls have lunch-hours, don't forget.'

This time, to keep herself from being jolted about by the stairs, Viv took the lift. But then she almost ran into the cloakroom: she went into one of the lavatory stalls, pulled up her skirt, lowered her knickers; she pulled a couple of sheets of paper from the box and pressed them between her legs.

When she drew the paper away, however, it was quite unmarked. She thought, maybe peeing would bring the blood down… But she peed, and it made no difference.

'Hell,' she said, aloud. For periods were annoying enough when they came; but waiting around for them was almost worse. She got the sanitary towel out and pinned it in place, just to be on the safe side; she looked in her bag, and saw Reggie's card, and was almost tempted to take it out and read it again…

But beside the card there was her little pocket diary: a slim blue Ministry diary, with a pencil in its spine. And when she saw that, she checked herself. She thought of dates. How long had it been since her last period, anyway? It seemed like ages, suddenly.

She got the diary out and opened it up. The pages looked cryptic, like a spy's, for there were all sorts of codes on them: a symbol for the days she'd visited Duncan, another for her Saturdays with Reggie; and a discreet little asterisk, every twenty-eight or twenty-nine days. She began now to count up the dates from the last asterisk: she got to twenty-nine, and counted on-to thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three.

She couldn't believe it. She went back and counted again. She'd never been so late before. She'd never really been late at all; she always joked to other girls that she was like a clock, like a calendar. She said to herself: It's because of the raids. That must be what it was. The raids mucked everybody up. It stood to reason. She was tired. She was probably run-down.

She pulled more paper from the box and pressed it between her legs again; and when, again, the paper came away unmarked, she even got to her feet and did a couple of little jumps, trying to jolt the blood out. But jumping made her breasts hurt: they hurt so much they were almost stinging, and when she put her hands to them she felt how swollen they were, how stretched and full…

She picked up the diary again, and went through it a third time. Maybe she'd made some mistake with the last date.

There was no mistake, she knew it. She thought, I can't be. I can't! But if she was- Her mind was racing. For if she was, then it must have happened not this last time with Reggie, but the time before; and that was already a month ago-

No, she thought. She wouldn't believe it. She said to herself, You'll be all right. She straightened her clothes. Her hands were shaking. Every girl gets scares; but not you. Reggie's too careful. You're OK. You're all right. You can't be!

'Here she is at last,' said Binkie, as Kay stepped on to Mickey's boat and opened up the cabin doors. 'Kay! We thought you weren't coming.'

The boat rocked about.

'Hello, Bink. Hello, Mickey. Sorry I'm late.'

'Never mind. You're just in time for a drink. We're making gimlets.'

'Gimlets!' said Kay, putting down her bag. She looked at her watch. It was only quarter past five.

Binkie saw her expression. 'Oh, balls to that! I can't speak for your liver, but mine's still on peace-time hours.'

Kay took off her cap. She was dressed, as Mickey and Binkie were, in uniform, ready for work. But the cabin had a stove in it, and a hissing lamp, and was very warm: she sat down across from Binkie, undid her jacket and loosened her tie.

Mickey was busy bringing out tumblers, spoons, a siphon of soda water. She put them on an upturned beer crate between Binkie and Kay, then got the gin and opened the lime. The gin was some nameless, cheap variety, and instead of cordial she had real lime juice: it was in a brown medicine bottle with a white screw cap; Binkie had bought it from a chemist's, she said, as a food supplement.

Mickey stirred the ingredients together and handed the glasses over, keeping one for herself. They raised them up, then tasted and winced.

'It's like battery acid!' said Kay.

'Never mind that, dear girl,' said Binkie. 'Think of the Vitamin C.'

She offered round cigarettes. She favoured a rough Turkish brand, difficult to get hold of. She had them in a fancy gold case, but had cut each one in half to make a packet last longer; she smoked with a tarnished ivory holder. Mickey and Kay each took a stub-pinching them, as they had to, between their forefingers and thumbs; leaning very close to the lighter.

'I feel like my father,' said Mickey, puffing, moving back. Her father was a bookmaker.

'You look like a gangster,' said Kay. 'Talking of which-' Her heart gave a little flutter of excitement. 'Doesn't either of you want to know what it was that made me late?'

Mickey put the cigarette down. 'God, I forgot all about it. You've been to see those spiv friends of Cole's! You didn't go and get yourself arrested, did you?'

'Not those beastly black-market boys?' said Binkie, taking the ivory holder from her mouth. 'Oh Kay, how could you?'

'I know,' said Kay, raising her hands. 'I know. I know. It's perfectly lousy. But I've been getting whisky from them for months.'

'Whisky doesn't count. Whisky's practically medicinal in a job like ours. Anything else-'

'But Bink, it's for Helen. It's her birthday at the end of the month. Have you looked in the shops lately? They're worse than ever. I wanted to get her-I don't know, something handsome. A bit of glamour. This filthy war's knocked all the glamour out of life for women like her. It's all right for us, we can just kick about in the muck and pretty well like it-'

'But stolen goods, Kay! Stolen goods!'

'Cole says the insurers take care of all that. Anyway, most of it's stuff from before the war-left over, lying useless. Not actually looted. Good God, I'd never touch looted stuff.'

'I'm glad to hear it! But you can hardly expect me to approve. And if Headquarters should find out-'

'I don't approve, either,' said Kay. 'You know I don't. It's just-' She grew self-conscious. 'Well, I'm sick of gazing into Helen's face and seeing it look more and more tired and worn. If I were her husband I'd be off fighting, there wouldn't be a thing I could do about it. But the fact is, I'm here-'

Binkie put up a hand. 'Save the hearts and flowers,' she said, 'for your tribunal. God knows it'll be my tribunal, too, if it gets out that I've been a party to something like this.'

'You haven't been a party to anything, yet!' said Mickey impatiently. 'What did you get, Kay? What was it like?'

Kay described the place she had been to-a room in the basement of a ruined shop, in Bethnal Green.

'They were perfectly polite,' she said, 'once they knew I was a friend of Cole's and not a lady detective. And oh! if you could see the things they have there! Crates and crates of cigarettes! Soaps! Razor blades! Coffee!'

'Coffee!'

'And stockings. I was tempted by the stockings, I must admit. But you see, I had in mind a nightdress. Helen's nightdress is absolutely falling to bits, it breaks my heart. They picked through all the things they had-cotton bed-jackets, flannel pyjamas… And then, I saw this.'

She had picked up her bag, and opened it now to bring out a flat rectangular box. The box was pink, with a silk bow across it. 'Look at it,' she said, as Binkie and Mickey leaned in to see. 'It looks like the kind of thing-doesn't it?-that a fellow in an American picture would be carrying under his arm, when he calls on a chorus-girl, backstage.'

She set the box flat upon her lap-paused a moment, for effect-then carefully lifted off the lid. Inside were layers of silver paper. She put them back, and revealed a satin pyjama-suit, the colour of pearls.

'Wow,' said Mickey.

'Wow, and how,' said Kay. She lifted up the jacket and shook it out. It was as heavy, in her hands, as a girl's full head of hair; and though it was cold, from having been carried about in its box, she felt it warming even as she held it. Something about it-the smoothness of it, the lustre of it-had made her think of Helen. She thought of Helen again, now, as she shook it again to watch it ripple.

'Look at its shine!' she said. 'Look at the buttons!'-for the buttons were bone, fine as wafers, and amazingly pleasing to the finger and the eye.

Binkie moved her cigarette-holder from one hand to the other, so that she could lift up the jacket's cuff and run her thumb over the satin. She said, 'It's damn fine stuff, I'll give you that.'

'D'you see the label? It's French, look.'

'French?' said Mickey. 'There you are, then. Helen'll be doing her bit for the Resistance, just by wearing it.'

'Dear girl,' said Binkie. 'She won't be putting up any resistance once she's in this.'

They laughed. Kay turned the jacket about, to marvel at it a little longer; she even stood, and held it and the trousers against herself: 'They look absurd on me, of course, but you get the idea…'

'They're lovely,' said Mickey, sitting back. 'I bet they cost a fortune though, didn't they? Come on, tell us the truth: how much did you give for them?'

Kay had started to fold the suit up; and felt herself colour. 'Oh,' she said, without lifting her head. 'You know.'

'No,' said Mickey watching her. 'Not really.'

'One doesn't expect a quality thing like this to come cheaply. Not in wartime-'

'How much? Kay, you're blushing!'

'It's warm, that's all. It's that damn stove!'

'Five pounds? Six?'

'Well, I've got to squander the Langrish family fortune on something! And what the hell else is there, these days, to spend one's money on? There's no liquor in the pubs, no tobacco in the tobacconists'-'

'Seven pounds? Eight?' Mickey stared at her. 'Kay, not more?'

Kay said quickly, but rather vaguely, 'No. About eight.'

In fact she'd paid ten for the pyjamas, and another five pounds for a bag of coffee beans and a couple of bottles of whisky; but was too embarassed to admit it.

'Eight pounds!' Mickey cried. 'Are you barmy?'

'But think how happy it'll make Helen!'

'Not half as happy as you made those spivs.'

'Oh, so what!' said Kay-feeling the effect of the gin suddenly, and growing belligerent. 'All's fair in love and war, isn't it? Especially this war; and more especially-' she lowered her voice-'more especially, our sort of love. Christ! I've done my bit, haven't I? It's not even as if Helen would get any kind of pension if I was killed-'

'The trouble with you, Langrish,' said Binkie, 'is, you have a gallantry complex.'

'So? Why shouldn't I? We have to be gallant, people like us. No-one else is bloody well going to be gallant on our behalf.'

'Well, but don't take it too far. There's more to love than grand gestures.'

'Oh, spare me,' said Kay.

She had folded the pyjamas away, and now checked her watch again-suddenly afraid that Helen, who was due to join the three of them here for a drink, after work, might turn up early and spoil the surprise. She held the box out to Mickey. 'Look after this for me, will you? Just until the beginning of next month? If I keep it at home, Helen might find it.'

Mickey carried it down to the other end of the cabin, and stowed it away under her bed.

When she came back, she mixed more drinks. Binkie took a fresh glassful but sat swirling the gin, gazing down into it, looking suddenly gloomy. After a minute or so she said, 'All this stuff about gallantry, girls, has rather depressed me.'

'Oh, Bink!' said Mickey. 'Don't say that.'

'But I'm afraid it has. It's all very well, Kay, for you to set yourself up as some kind of champion-the Queers' Best Friend-you, with your dear little Helen, your silk pyjamas, all of that. But your sort of story is awfully rare. Most of us- Well, take Mickey and me. What do we have?'

'Speak for yourself!' said Mickey, coughing.

'The gin's made you maudlin,' said Kay. 'I knew cocktails before six was a bad idea.'

'It's not the gin. I'm quite serious. Tell me truly: doesn't the life we lead ever get you down? It's all right when one is young. It's positively thrilling, when one is twenty! The secrecy, the intensity-being keyed up, like a harp. Girls were fabulous things to me, once-all that flying into rages over bits of nonsense; threatening to slash their wrists in the lavatories at parties, that sort of thing. Men were like shadows, like paper puppets, like little boys! compared with that. But one gets to an age, where one sees the truth of it. One gets to an age, where one is simply exhausted. And one realises one has finished with the whole damn game… Men begin to seem almost attractive after that. Sometimes I think quite seriously of finding some nice little chap to settle down with-some quiet little Liberal MP, someone like that. It would be so restful.'

Kay had once felt something similar, as it happened. But that was before the war, and before she'd met Helen. Now she said drily, 'The deep, deep peace of the marital bed, after the hurly-burly of the Sapphic chaise longue.'

'Precisely.'

'What rubbish.'

'I mean it!' said Binkie. 'You wait till you're my age,'-she was forty-six-'and wake every morning to gaze on the vast tract of uncreased linen that is the other side of the divan. Try being gallant to that… We shan't even have children, don't forget, to look after us in our old age.'

'God!' said Mickey. 'Why don't we just cut our throats right now and get it over with?'

'If I had the spunk,' said Binkie, 'I might do just that. It's only the station I keep going for. Thank God for the war, is what I say! The thought of peace starting up again, I don't mind telling you, fills me with horror.'

'Well,' said Kay, 'you'd better get used to the idea. Now we're only seventeen miles from Rome -or whatever it is-it's surely only a matter of time…'

They discussed the state of things in Italy for the next ten minutes or so; then got on-as people did get on, these days-to the subject of Hitler's secret weapons.

'You know there are absolutely gigantic guns,' said Binkie, 'being put in place in France? The government's trying to keep it hush-hush, but Collins, at Berkeley Square, knows a chap in one of the Ministries. He says the shells from those guns will make it as far as north London. They'll take out entire streets, apparently.'

'I heard the Germans,' said Mickey, 'are putting together a kind of ray-'

The boat tilted, as someone stepped on to it from the tow-path. Kay-who'd been listening out for footsteps-leaned forward to put down her glass. She said in a whisper, 'That'll be Helen. Remember, now: not a word about pyjamas, birthdays, or anything like that.'

There was a knock, the doors were opened, and Helen appeared. Kay rose, to take her hand and help her down the couple of steps into the cabin, and to kiss her cheek.

'Hello, darling.'

'Hello, Kay,' said Helen, smiling. Her cheek was cold, curved, soft and smooth as a child's. Her lips were dry beneath their lipstick, slightly roughened by the wind. She looked around, at the clouds of smoke. 'Goodness! It's like a Turkish harem in here. Not that I've ever been in a Tukish harem-'

'Dear girl, I have,' said Binkie. 'I can tell you, they're awfully overrated.'

Helen laughed. 'Hello, Binkie. Hello, Mickey. How are you both?'

'All right.'

'Fighting fit, dear girl. And you?'

Helen nodded to the glasses that were sitting about. 'I shall be fine, with something like that inside me.'

'We're drinking gimlets-sound all right?'

'Right now I'd drink powdered glass if it had a splash of alcohol in it.'

She took off her coat and hat, and glanced about for a mirror. 'Do I look awful?' she said, not finding one, and trying to tidy her hair.

'You look wonderful,' said Kay. 'Come and sit down.'

She slipped an arm around Helen's waist, and they sat. Binkie and Mickey leaned forward to make a fresh round of cocktails. They were still debating secret weapons. 'I don't believe it for a second,' Binkie was saying. 'Invisible rays-?'

'All right, darling?' murmured Kay, touching her lips to Helen's cheek again. 'Did you have a lousy day?'

'Not really,' said Helen. 'How was yours? What have you been doing?'

'Nothing at all. Thinking of you.'

Helen smiled. 'You always say that.'

'That's because I'm always doing it. I'm doing it now.'

'Are you? What are you thinking?'

'Ah,' said Kay…

She was thinking, of course, of the satin pyjamas. She was imagining buttoning up the pyjama jacket over Helen's bare breasts. She was thinking of the look and the feel of Helen's bottom and thighs, in the pearl-coloured silk… She moved her hand to Helen's hip, and began to stroke it-enchanted, suddenly, by the lovely swell and spring of it; remembering what Binkie had said, and feeling the force of her own good fortune; marvelling that Helen was here-right here, in this funny little clog-shaped boat, warm and pink and rounded and alive, in the curve of her arm.

Helen turned her head, and met her look. She said, 'You're tight.'

'I belive I am. Here's a thought. Get tight too.'

'Get tight, for forty-five minutes with you? Then have to sleep it off all by myself?'

'Come over to the station with us when we go,' said Kay. She raised and lowered her eyebrows. 'I'll show you the back of my ambulance.'

'You nit,' said Helen, laughing. 'What on earth's the matter with you?'

'I'm in love, that's all.'

'I say, you two,' said Binkie loudly, handing Helen a glass. 'If I'd known this was going to turn into a petting-session, I might not have come. Stop making wallflowers of Mickey and me, will you?'

'We were just being friendly,' said Kay. 'I might get my head blown off later on. I've got to make the most of my lips while I still have them.'

'I've got to make the most of mine, then,' said Binkie, raising her glass. 'Here's how.'

At six o'clock they heard the wireless starting up on the barge next door: they opened the doors, to listen to the news. Then a programme of dance-music came on; it was too cold to keep the doors open, but Mickey slid back a window so that they could still hear the music a little, mixed up with the buzz and splutter of passing engines, the bumping of the boats. The song was a slow one. Kay kept her arm around Helen's waist, still lightly stroking and smoothing it, while Mickey and Binkie chatted on. The heat from the stove, and the gin in her cocktail, had made her dozy.

Then Helen moved forward, to reach for her drink again; and when she sat back, she turned and caught Kay's eye, a little awkwardly.

'Who do you think I saw today?' she said.

'I don't know. Who?'

'A friend of yours. Julia.'

Kay stared at her. 'Julia?' she said. 'Julia Standing?'

'Yes.'

'You mean, you saw her in the street?'

'No,' said Helen. 'That is, yes. But then we had a cup of tea together, from a van near my office. She'd been to a house nearby-you know, that job she has, with her father?'

'Yes, of course,' said Kay slowly.

She was trying to push away the mix of feelings that the sound of Julia's name always conjured up in her. She said to herself, as she always did, Don't be silly. It was nothing. It was too long ago. But it wasn't nothing, she knew that… She tried to picture Helen and Julia together: she saw Helen, with her round child's face, her untidy hair and chapped lips; and Julia, smooth and self-possessed as a cool dark gem… She said, 'Was it all right?'

Helen laughed, self-conscious. 'Yes. Why shouldn't it have been?'

'I don't know.'

But Binkie had heard. She knew Julia too, but only very slightly. 'Is that Julia Standing you're talking about?'

'Yes,' said Kay, reluctantly. 'Helen saw her today.'

'Did you, Helen? How is she? Still looking as though she's spent the entire war eating steak tartare and drinking glasses and glasses of milk?'

Helen blinked. 'Well,' she said, 'I suppose so.'

'She's so frightfully handsome, isn't she? But- I don't know. I've always found looks like hers rather chilling, somehow. What do you think, Mickey?'

'She's all right,' said Mickey shortly-glancing at Kay; knowing more than Binkie.

But Binkie went on. 'Is she still doing that thing of hers, Helen-going over bombed houses?'

'Yes,' said Helen.

Mickey picked up her drink and narrowed her eyes. 'She ought,' she murmured, 'to try pulling somebody out from underneath one, some time.'

Kay laughed. Helen lifted her own drink again, as if not trusting herself to answer. Binkie said to Mickey, 'Dear girl, talking of pulling out bodies-did you hear what happened to the crew over at Station 89? Jerry struck a cemetary and hit the graves. Half of the coffins were blown wide open-'

Kay drew Helen close again. 'I don't know, I'm sure,' she said very quietly, 'why one's chums should like each other, just because they are one's chums; and yet one expects them to, somehow.'

Helen said, without looking up, 'Julia's the vivid kind of person people either like or don't like, I suppose. And Mickey's loyal to you, of course.'

'Yes, perhaps that's it.'

'It was only a cup of tea. Julia was perfectly nice about it.'

'Well, good,' said Kay, smiling.

'I don't expect we'll do it again.'

Kay kissed her cheek. She said, 'I hope you do.'

Helen looked at her. 'Do you?'

'Of course,' said Kay-thinking, actually, that she rather hoped they wouldn't, since the whole idiotic situation clearly made Helen so uneasy…

But Helen laughed, and kissed her back-not uneasy, suddenly, at all.

'You darling,' she said.

3

'Miss Giniver,' said Miss Chisholm, putting her head around Helen's door, 'there's a lady to see you.'

It was a week or so later. Helen was fastening papers together with a clip, and didn't look up. 'Does she have an appointment?'

'She asked in particular for you.'

'Did she? Blast.' This was what came of giving out your name too freely. 'Where is she?'

'She said she wouldn't come in, as she's rather shabby.'

'Well, she can hardly be too shabby to come in here. Tell her we're not fussy. She must make an appointment, though.'

Miss Chisholm came further into the room and held out a folded piece of paper. 'She wanted me to give you this,' she said, with a hint of disapproval. 'I told her we weren't in the habit of accepting personal post.'

Helen took the note. It was addressed to Miss Helen Giniver, in a hand she didn't recognise, and there was a dirty thumb-print on it. She opened it up. It said: Are you free for lunch? I have tea, and rabbit-meat sandwiches! What do you say? Don't worry, if not. But I'll be outside for the next ten minutes.

And it was signed, Julia.

Helen saw the signature first, and her heart gave an astonishing sort of fillip in her breast, like a leaping fish. She was horribly aware of Miss Chisholm, watching. She closed the paper smartly back up.

'Thank you, Miss Chisholm,' she said, as she ran her thumb-nail along the fold. 'It's just a friend of mine. I'll- I'll go out to her, when I've finished here.'

She slipped the note under a pile of other papers and picked up a pen, as if meaning to write. But as soon as she heard Miss Chisholm going back to her desk in the outer office, she put the pen down. She unlocked a drawer in her own desk and took out her handbag, to tidy her hair, put on powder and lipstick.

Then she squinted at herself in the mirror of her compact. A woman could always tell, she thought, when a girl had just done her face; she didn't want Miss Chisholm to notice-worse, she didn't want Julia to think she had put on make-up especially for her. So she got out her handkerchief and tried to wipe some of the powder away. She drew in her lips and bit repeatedly at the cloth, to blot off the lipstick. She slightly disarranged her hair. Now, she thought, I look like I've been in some sort of tussle-

For God's sake! What did it matter? It was only Julia. She put the make-up away, got her coat and hat and scarf; went lightly past Miss Chisholm's desk and out along the Town Hall corridors to the lobby and the street.

Julia was standing in front of one of the grey stone lions. She had on her dungarees and her denim jacket again, but this time, instead of a turban, her hair was tied up in a scarf. She had her hands looped around the strap of a leather stachel, slung over her shoulder, and she was gazing at nothing, rocking slightly from foot to foot. But when she heard the swinging back of the bomb-proofed doors she looked round and smiled. And at the sight of her smile, Helen's heart gave another absurd lurch-a twitch, or wriggle, that was almost painful.

But she spoke calmly. 'Hello, Julia. What a nice surprise.'

'Is it?' asked Julia. ' I thought that, since I know where you work now…' She looked up at the sky, which was clouded and grey. 'I was hoping for a sunny day, like last time. It's pretty chilly, isn't it? I thought- But tell me, if this sounds like a lousy idea. I've been working so long among ruins, on my own, I've forgotten all the social niceties. But I thought you might like to come and look at the house I've pitched up in, in Bryanston Square-see what I've been up to. The place has been empty for months, I'm sure no-one would mind.'

'But, I'd love to,' said Helen.

'Really?'

'Yes!'

'All right,' said Julia, smiling again. 'I won't take your arm, as I'm so filthy; but this way is nicest.'

She led Helen along the Marylebone Road, and soon made a turn into quieter streets. 'Was that the famous Miss Chisholm,' she said as they went, 'who took my note? I see what you mean about those pursed lips. She looked at me as though she thought I had designs on the office safe!'

'She looks at me like that,' said Helen.

Julia laughed. 'She ought to have seen this.' She opened her satchel and brought out an enormous bunch of keys, each with a tattered label attached. She held it up and shook it like a gaoler. 'What do you think? I got these from the local warden. I've been in and out of half the houses around here. Marylebone has no more secrets from me. You'd think people would have got used to the sight of me ferreting around-but, no. A couple of days ago someone saw me having trouble with a lock, and called the police. She said an “obviously foreign-looking” woman was trying to force her way into a house. I don't know if she took me for a Nazi, or a vagrant refugee. The police were pretty decent about it. Do you think I look foreign?'

She had been sorting through the keys, but raised her head as she asked this. Helen looked into her face, then looked away.

'It's your dark colouring, I suppose.'

'Yes, I suppose so. I should be all right, anyway, now you're with me. You've those English flower looks, haven't you? No-one could mistake you for anything but an Ally.-Here we are. The place we want is just over there.'

She took Helen to the door of a grim, tall, dilapidated house, and put one of her keys into its lock. A stream of dust fell from the lintel as she pushed the door open, and Helen went gingerly inside. She was met at once by a bitter, damp smell, like that of old washcloths.

'That's just from rain,' said Julia, as she closed the door and fiddled with the latch. 'The roof's been hit, and most of the windows blasted out. Sorry it's so dark. The electricity's off, of course. Go through that doorway over there, it's a little lighter.'

Helen moved across the hall and found herself at the entrance to a sitting-room, cast in a sort of flat twilight by a partly-shuttered window. For a moment, until her eyes had grown used to the gloom, the room looked almost all right; then she began to see more clearly, and stepped forward, saying, 'Oh! What an awful shame! This lovely furniture!'-for there was a carpet on the floor, and a handsome sofa and chairs, and a footstool, a table-all of it dusty, and heavily marked by flying glass and fallen plaster, or else damp, the wood with a bloom on it and beginning to swell. 'And the chandelier!' she cried softly, looking up.

'Yes, watch your step,' said Julia, coming to her and touching her arm. 'Half the lustres have fallen and smashed.'

'I thought, from what you'd said, that the place would be quite empty. Why on earth don't the people who own it come back, and fix it up, or take these things away?'

'They think there's no point, I suppose,' said Julia, 'since it's half-way wrecked already. The woman's probably holed up with relatives in the country. The husband might be fighting; he might even be dead.'

'But these lovely things!' said Helen again. She thought of the men and women who came into her office. 'Somebody else could live here, surely? I see so many people with absolutely nothing.'

Julia tapped with her knuckles against the wall. 'The place isn't sound. Another close hit, and it may collapse. It probably will. That's why my father and I are in here. We're recording ghosts, you see, really…'

Helen moved slowly across the room, looking in dismay from one spoiled handsome thing to another. She went to a set of high double doors and carefully pulled them ajar. The room beyond was just as wretched as this one-its window smashed, its velvet curtains marked with rain, spots on the floor where birds had dirtied, soot and cinders blasted from the hearth. She took a step, and something crunched beneath her shoe-a piece of burnt-out coke. It left a smudge of black on the carpet. She looked back at Julia and said, 'I'm afraid to keep going. It doesn't seem right.'

'You get used to that, don't worry. I've been tramping up and down the stairs for weeks and not given it a thought.'

'You're absolutely sure there's no-one here? No-one like the old lady you told me about last week? And no-one's likely to come back?'

'No-one,' said Julia. 'My father may put his head in later, that's all. I've left the door unlocked for him.' She held out her hand, in a beckoning gesture. 'Come downstairs, and you can see what he and I have been doing.'

She went back into the hall, and Helen followed her down a set of unlit stairs to a basement room, where she had laid out, on a trestle table in the light of a barred but broken window, various plans and elevations of the houses of the square. She showed Helen how she was marking the damage-the symbols she was using, the system of measurement, things like that.

'It's looks very technical,' said Helen, impressed.

But Julia answered, 'It's probably no more technical than the kind of thing you're used to doing at that office of yours-balancing books, filling in forms and whatnot. I'm utterly useless at things like that. I should hate, too, to have to deal with people coming in and out, wanting things; I don't know how you bear it. This suits me because it's so solitary, so silent.'

'You don't find it lonely?'

'Sometimes. I'm used to it, though. The author's temperament, and all that…' She stretched. 'Shall we eat? Let's go through to the next room. It's cold, but not so damp as upstairs.'

She picked up her satchel and led the way along a passage into the kitchen. There was an old deal table in the middle of the room, thick with fallen flakes of plaster; she began to clear the plaster off.

'I really do have rabbit-meat sandwiches, by the way,' she said, as the plaster tumbled. 'One of my neighbours has a gardener, who traps them. Apparently they're all over London now. He said he caught this one in Leicester Square! I'm not sure I believe him.'

Helen said, 'A friend of mine who firewatches says she saw a rabbit, one night, on the platform at Victoria Station; so perhaps he did.'

'A rabbit at Victoria! Was it waiting for a train?'

'Yes. Apparently it was looking at its pocket-watch, and seemed awfully het-up about something.'

Julia laughed. The laughter was different to the sort of laughter Helen had heard from her before. It was real, unforced-like water welling briefly from a spring, and to have called it up made Helen feel pleased as a child. She said to herself, For goodness' sake! You're like a second-former blushing over a prefect! She had to move about to hide her feelings-looking across the dusty jars and pudding moulds on the kitchen shelves while Julia set her bag on the table and rummaged inside it.

The kitchen was an old Victorian one, with long wooden counters and a chipped stone sink. The window had bars before it, like the other, and in between the bars curled ivy. The light was green and very soft. Helen said, as she walked about, 'You can see the cook and the scullery maids in here.'

'Yes, can't you?'

'And the local policeman, slipping in in the middle of his beat, for his cup of tea.'

'“No Followers”,' said Julia, smiling… 'Come and sit down, Helen.'

She had got out a wax-paper packet of sandwiches, and a nightwatchman's bottle of tea. She'd drawn up chairs-but looked dubiously from the dusty seats to Helen's smartish coat. She said, 'I could put paper down, if you like.'

'It's all right,' said Helen. 'Really.'

'Sure? I'll take you at your word, you know. I won't be like Kay about it.'

'Like Kay?'

'Laying down my cloak, all of that, like Walter Raleigh.'

It was the first time they had mentioned Kay, and Helen sat without answering. For Kay would have made a fuss about the dust, she thought; and she knew instinctively how tiresome that sort of thing would seem to Julia. It made her aware, more than ever, of the curious situation she was in: that she had accepted a love, a set of attentions, that Julia herself had had the chance to accept first, and had rejected…

Julia unwrapped the sandwiches, drew out the cork from the steaming tea; she'd had the bottle wrapped in a pullover, she said, to keep it hot. She poured a little of the tea into two dainty porcelain cups from one of the cupboards; then swilled it around, to warm the china, threw that away and poured out more.

The tea was sugary, and very creamy. It must have had all Julia's ration in it. Helen sipped it, closing her eyes, feeling guilty. When Julia offered her a sandwich she said, 'I ought to give you money or something for this, Julia.'

Julia said, 'Really.'

'I could give you a coupon-'

'For God's sake! Is that what this war has done to us? You can buy me a drink some time, if you feel as badly about it as all that.'

They began to eat. The bread was coarse, but the meat sweet and very tender; the flavour was a heavy, distinctive one-Helen realised, after a moment, that it must be garlic. She had tasted garlic in restaurants, but had never cooked with it herself; Julia had bought it, she said as they ate, from a shop on Frith Street, Soho. She'd managed, too, to get macaroni, olive oil, dried parmesan cheese. And she had a relative in America who sent her parcels of food. 'You can get more Italian food in Chicago,' she said, swallowing, 'than you can in Italy. Joyce sends me olives, and black salad vinegar-'

'How lucky you are!' said Helen.

'I suppose I am. You don't have any people abroad who could do something like that for you?'

'Oh, no. My family are all still in Worthing, where I grew up.'

Julia looked surprised. 'You grew up in Worthing? I didn't know that. Though I suppose, now I think about it, you had to grow up somewhere… My family has a house near Arundel, we used to swim at Worthing sometimes. Once I ate too many whelks or cockles-or toffee apples, or something-and was vilely sick, all over the pier. What was it like there, growing up?'

'It was all right,' said Helen. 'My family- Well, they're very ordinary. Did you know that? They're not- They're not like Kay's.' They're not like yours, was what she really meant. 'My father's an optician. My brother makes lenses for the RAF. My parents' house-' She looked around. 'It isn't like this house, it isn't anything like this.'

Perhaps Julia saw that she was embarassed. She said quietly, 'Well, but nothing like that matters any more, does it? Not these days. Not now we all dress like scarecrows, and talk like Americans-or else, like chars. “Here's your grub, ducks,” a girl in a café said to me the other day; I swear she'd been to Roedean, too…'

Helen smiled. 'It makes people feel better, I suppose. It's another kind of uniform.'

Julia made a face. 'I hate this passion for uniforms, too. Uniforms, armbands, badges.-I thought the military impulse, as it's grown up in Germany, was what we were against!' She sipped her tea, then almost yawned. 'But perhaps I take the whole thing too seriously…' She looked at Helen over the rim of her cup. 'I ought to be like you. Well-adjusted, and so on.'

Helen stared-amazed to think that Julia had formed any sort of opinion of her, much less one like that. She said, 'Is that how I seem? It isn't how I feel. Well-adjusted. I'm not even sure I know what it means.'

'Well,' said Julia, 'you always give the impression of being pretty thoughtful, pretty measured. That's what I mean. You don't say much; but what you do say seems to be worth listening to. That's quite rare, isn't it?'

'It must be a trick,' said Helen lightly. 'When you're quiet, people imagine you're awfully deep. In fact all you're doing is thinking-I don't know-how tight your bra is; or wondering whether or not you need the lavatory.'

'But that,' said Julia, 'sounds exactly like good adjustment, to me! Thinking about yourself, rather than the effect you might be having on other people. And the whole-' She hesitated. 'Well, the whole grisly “L” business. You know what I mean… You seem to handle that awfully coolly.'

Helen looked down into her cup, and didn't answer. Julia said, more quietly, 'How impertinent of me. I'm sorry, Helen.'

'No, it's all right,' said Helen quickly, looking up again. 'I'm not very used to talking about it, that's all. And I'm not sure, you know, that I've ever really thought of it as being much of a business. It was just how things turned out… I didn't think about it at all, to tell you the truth, when I was younger. Or if I did, I suppose I thought the usual sort of thing: spinster teachers, earnest girls…'

'There was no-one, in Worthing?'

'Well, there were men.' Helen laughed. 'That makes me sound like a call-girl, doesn't it? There was only one boy, really. I moved to London to be near him; but it didn't work out… And, then I met Kay.'

'Ah, yes,' said Julia, sipping her tea again. 'And then you met Kay. And in such terribly romantic circumstances.'

Helen looked at her, trying to gauge her tone and expression. She said shyly, 'It did seem romantic. Kay's rather glamorous, isn't she? At least, she seemed glamorous to me. I'd never met anyone like her before. I'd been in London less than six months then. She made such a-such a fuss of me. And she seemed so certain of what she wanted. That was terribly exciting somehow. It was hard to resist, anyway. It never felt strange, as perhaps it ought to have done… But then, so many impossible things were becoming ordinary, just then.' She thought back, with a slight shudder, to the night that she and Kay had met. 'And as impossible things go, being with Kay was, I suppose, quite a mild one…'

She was speaking, she realised, in almost a tone of apology; for she was conscious, still, of what she thought of as a gaucheness in herself-conscious that all the things she was describing to Julia as attractive in Kay were things that Julia herself must have found it easy to resist… Part of her wanted to defend Kay; part of her was simply embarassed. But part of her, too, wanted to confide in Julia, almost as one wife to another. She'd never spoken like this to anyone. She'd left her own friends behind, when she moved in with Kay; or she kept Kay a secret from them. And Kay's friends were all like Mickey-all like Kay, in other words… Now she wanted to ask how it had been for Julia, with Kay. She wanted to know if Julia had felt what she herself sometimes, guiltily, felt: that Kay's constant fussing, which had once been so appealing, so exciting, could also be rather like a burden; that Kay made an absurd kind of heroine of you; that Kay's passion was so great there was something unreal about it, it could never be matched…

But she didn't ask any of these things. She looked down into her cup again, and was silent. Julia said, 'And, when the war's over? And everything goes back to normal?'-and she took refuge, then, in briskness. She shook her head.

'It's pointless thinking about that, isn't it?' It was what everybody said, to all sorts of questions. 'We might get blown to bits tomorrow. Until then-well, I'd never want to advertise it. I'd never dream, for example, of telling my mother! But, why should I? It's a thing between Kay and me. And we're two grown women. Who does it harm?'

Julia watched her for a moment, then poured more tea from the bottle. She said, as if with a touch of sarcasm, 'You are well-adjusted.'

So then Helen grew embarassed again. She thought, I've said too much, and bored her. She preferred me before, when I was quiet and she thought I was deep…

They sat without speaking, until Julia shivered and rubbed her arms. 'God!' she said. 'This isn't much fun for you, is it? Me, giving you the third degree, in the basement of a ruined house! It's like lunch with the Gestapo!'

Helen laughed, her embarassment fading. 'No. It's nice.'

'Are you sure? I could- Well, I could show you over the whole place, if you like.'

'Yes, I'd like that.'

They finished their sandwiches and their tea, and Julia tidied away the bottle and the paper and rinsed out the cups. They went back upstairs, going past the doors to the sitting-room and the room behind it, and up the dimly-lit staircase to the floors above.

They went softly, sometimes murmuring together over some particular detail or piece of damage, but more often moving about in silence. The rooms on these higher floors were bleaker, even, than the ones downstairs. The bedrooms still had their beds and wardrobes in them, and the wardrobes were damp, because of the broken windows, the ancient clothes inside them eaten through by moths or growing mouldy. Sections of the ceilings had come down. Books and ornaments lay about, ruined. And in the bathroom, a mirror hung on the wall with a weird, blank face: its glass had shattered and fallen, and filled the basin beneath it in a hundred silvery shards.

As they climbed up to the attic floor there was a scuttling, fluttering sound. Julia turned. 'Pigeons, or mice,' she said softly. 'You won't mind?'

'Not rats?' asked Helen apprehensively.

'Oh, no. At least, I don't think so.'

She went on, and opened a door. The scuttling changed, became the sound of clapping hands. Peering over Julia's shoulder, Helen saw a bird fly up and then, as if by magic, disappear. The sloping ceiling had a hole in it, where an incendiary had burned through. The rocket had landed on a feather mattress underneath and made a crater: it looked like an ulcerated leg. You could still smell the bitter smell of burnt, damp feathers.

The room was a housekeeper's or maid's. There was a photograph in a frame, on the bedside table, of a little girl. And on the floor was a single slim leather glove, much nibbled by mice.

Helen picked the glove up and did her best to smooth it out. She put it neatly down beside the photograph. She stood for a second looking up through the hole in the ceiling at the close, gun-coloured sky. Then she went with Julia to the window, and gazed out at the yard at the back of the house.

The yard was ruined, like everything else: its paving-stones broken, its plants run wild, the column of a sundial blown from its base and lying in pieces.

'Isn't it sad?' said Julia quietly. 'Look at the fig tree.'

'Yes. All that fruit!' For the tree was lolling with broken branches, and the ground beneath it was thick with rotting figs that must have fallen from it and gone uncollected the summer before.

Helen got out cigarettes, and Julia moved closer to her, to take one. They smoked together, their shoulders just touching, the sleeve of Julia's jacket just catching at Helen's coat as she raised and lowered her cigarette. Her knuckles were still marked, Helen noticed, from where she'd grazed them the week before; and Helen thought of how, that time, she'd lightly touched them with her fingertips. She and Julia had only been standing together-just standing together, like this. Nothing had happened to make a change. But she couldn't imagine, now, touching any part of Julia so carelessly as that.

The thought was thrilling, but also frightening. They chatted a little, about the houses which backed on to Bryanston Square; Julia pointed out the ones she had visited, and described the things she'd seen in them. But her sleeve still caught against Helen's, and it was that brushing and clinging of fabric, rather than Julia's words, which held Helen's attention; at last she began to feel the flesh of her arm rising up-as if Julia, or the nearness of Julia, was somehow tugging, drawing at it…

She shivered and moved away. She'd almost finished her cigarette, and made that the excuse. She looked around for somewhere to stub it.

Julia saw. 'Just drop it, and stamp on it,' she said.

'I don't like to,' said Helen.

'It'll hardly make things worse.'

'I know, but-'

She took the cigarette to the fireplace, to crush it out there; and she did the same with Julia's, when Julia had finished. But then she didn't want to leave the two stubs behind in the empty grate: she waved them about to cool them down, and put them back, with the fresh ones, in her packet.

'Suppose the people come back?' she said, when Julia stared at her in disbelief. 'They won't like to think that strangers have been in here, looking at their things.'

'You don't think they'd be a shade more troubled by the rainwater, the broken windows, the rocket in the bed?'

'Rain and rockets and windows are just things,' said Helen. 'They're impersonal, not like people… You think I'm silly.'

Julia was gazing at her, shaking her head. 'On the contrary,' she said quietly. She was smiling, but sounded almost sad. 'I was thinking-well, how awfully nice you are.'

They looked at each other for a moment, until Helen lowered her gaze. She put away the packet of cigarettes, then went back across the room to the charred mattress. The room seemed small to her, suddenly: she was very aware of herself and Julia in it, at the top of this chill, silent house-the warmth and the life and the solidness of them, in comparison with so much damage. She could feel the rising, again, of goose-pimples, on her arms. She could feel the beating of her own heart, in her throat, her breast, her fingertips…

'I ought,' she said, without turning round, 'to get back to work.'

And Julia laughed. 'Now you're nicer than ever,' she said. But she still sounded sad, somehow. 'Come on. Let's go down.'

They went out to the landing and down one flight of stairs. They moved so quietly, still, that when a door was closed, somewhere at the bottom of the house, they heard it, and stopped. Helen's heart, instead of rushing, seemed to falter. 'What's that?' she whispered, nervously gripping the banister rail.

Julia was frowning. 'I don't know.'

But then a man called lightly up the stairs. 'Julia? Are you there?'-and her expression cleared.

'It's my father,' she said. She leaned, and yelled cheerfully into the stairwell: 'I'm up here, Daddy! Right at the top!-Come and meet him,' she said, turning back, taking hold of Helen's hand and squeezing her fingers.

She went quickly down the stairs. Helen followed more slowly. By the time she got down to the hall, Julia was brushing dust from her father's shoulders and hair, and laughing. 'Darling, you're filthy!'

'Am I?'

'Yes! Look, Helen, what a state my father's in. He's been burrowing through coal cellars… Daddy, this is my friend Miss Helen Giniver. Don't shake her hand! She thinks we're a family of gipsies as it is.'

Mr Standing smiled. He was wearing a dirty blue boiler suit with grubby medal ribbons on the breast. He'd taken off a crumpled-looking cap, and now smoothed down his hair where Julia had disarranged it. He said, 'How do you do, Miss Giniver? I'm afraid Julia's right about my hand. Been taking a look around, have you?'

'Yes.'

'Queer sort of job, isn't it? All dust. Not like the other war: that was all mud. Makes one wonder what the next one will be. Ashes, I expect… What I should really like to be doing, of course, is putting up new places, rather than grubbing around in these old ones. Still, it keeps me busy. Keeps Julia out of trouble, too.' He winked. His eyes were dark, as Julia's were, the lids rather heavy. His hair was grey, but darkened by dirt; his brow and temples were dirty, too-or else freckled, it was hard to see. As he spoke he ran his gaze, in a practised, casual way, over Helen's figure. 'Glad to see you taking an interest, anyway. Care to stay, and help?'

Julia said, 'Don't be silly, Daddy. Helen has a terribly important job already. She works for the Assistance Board.'

'The Assistance Board? Really?' He looked at Helen properly. 'With Lord Stanley?'

Helen said, 'Only in the local office, I'm afraid.'

'Ah. Pity. Stanley and I are old friends…'

He stood chatting with them for another few moments; then, 'Jolly good,' he said. 'I'm off down to the basement, to take a quick look at those plans. If you'll excuse me, Miss-?'

He stepped around them and headed downstairs. As he moved out of the thickest of the shadows Helen saw that what she'd taken to be dirt, or freckles, on his face, were really the scars of old blisters, from fire or gas.

'Isn't he a darling?' said Julia, when he'd gone. 'Really, he's the most awful rogue.' She opened the door, and she and Helen stood together on the step. She shivered again. 'It looks like rain. You'll have to be quick! You know your way back all right? I'd come with you, only- Oh, hang on.'

She'd put her hand, suddenly, on Helen's shoulder, to keep her from moving on to the pavement, and Helen turned back to her, alarmed-thinking, almost, that Julia meant to kiss her, embrace her, something like that. But all she was doing was brushing dust from Helen's arm…

'There,' she said, smiling. 'Now, turn around and let me see the back of you. Yes, here's another bit… Now, the other way. How biddable you are! But we mustn't give Miss Chisholm any grounds for complaint.' She raised an eyebrow. 'Nor Kay, for that matter… There. That's splendid.'

They said goodbye. 'Come and find me some other lunchtime!' Julia called, as Helen moved off. 'I'll be here for two more weeks. We could go to a pub. You can buy me that drink!'

Helen said she would.

She began to walk. Once the door was closed she looked at her wristwatch, and started to run. She got back to her office at a minute past two. 'Your first appointment's waiting, Miss Giniver,' Miss Chisholm told her, with a glance at the clock; so she didn't have time, even, to visit the lavatory or comb her hair…

She worked very steadily, for an hour and a half. The job was tiring in times like these. The sort of people she'd been interviewing in the past few weeks were like the people she'd got used to seeing during the big blitz, three years before. Some of them came fresh from the wreckage of their homes, with dirty hands, cut about and bandaged. One woman had been bombed out, she said, three times; she sat on the other side of Helen's desk and wept.

'It's not the house having gone,' she said. 'It's the moving about. I feel like a bit of tinder, miss. I haven't slept since all this happened. My little boy's got delicate health. My husband's in Burma, I'm all on my own.'

'It's awfully hard,' said Helen. She gave the woman a form, and patiently showed her where to fill it. The woman looked at it, not understanding.

'All this?'

'I'm afraid so.'

'But, if I could just have a pound or two-'

'I can't give you money, I'm afraid. You see, it's a rather lengthy process. We must send a valuer to assess the damage before we can make an advance. We must have someone from our own department see your old home and make a report. I'll try to get them to the site as quickly as I can, but with all the new raids…'

The woman was gazing, still, at the pieces of paper in her hand. 'I feel like tinder,' she said again, passing her hand across her eyes. 'Just like tinder.'

Helen watched her for a second; then took the form back. She filled in the woman's details herself, back-dating it all to the month before; and in the space that requested the date and serial number of the valuer's report, she wrote some likely but vaguely illegible inky figures. She put the form in a tray marked Approved, ready to be sent up to Miss Steadman on the first floor; and she clipped on a note, to say it was urgent.

But she didn't do anything like that for the next person, or for the people after him. She'd been struck by the woman's describing herself as being like tinder, that was all. In the first blitz, she'd tried to help everyone; she'd given money to people, sometimes, from her own purse. But the war made you careless. You started off, she thought sadly, imagining you'd be a kind of heroine. You ended up thinking only of yourself.

For at the back of her mind, all afternoon, was the idea of Julia. She was thinking of Julia even as she was comforting the crying woman-even as she was saying, 'It's awfully hard.' She was remembering the feel of Julia's arm as it brushed against hers; the closeness of Julia, in that small attic room.

Then, at a quarter to four, her telephone rang.

'Miss Giniver?' said the girl on reception. 'An outside call. A Miss Hepburn. Shall I put her through?'

Miss Hepburn? thought Helen, distractedly… Then she understood, and her stomach fluttered with anxiety and guilt. 'Just a second,' she said. 'Ask the caller to hold, will you?' She put the receiver down, and went to her door and called out: 'Miss Chisholm? No more applicants, please, just for a minute! I've got the Camden Town office on the line.' She sat back at her desk, and willed herself steady. 'Hello, Miss Hepburn,' she said quietly, when the call had been put through.

'Hello, you.' It was Kay. They had a sort of game, with names, like that. 'This is just a nuisance call, I'm afraid.' Her voice sounded deep, and rather lazy. She was smoking a cigarette: she moved the receiver, to blow out smoke… 'How's life in Assistance?'

'Pretty hectic, actually,' said Helen, glancing at the door. 'I can't talk long.'

'Can't you? I oughtn't to have rung, ought I?'

'Not really.'

'I've been kicking my heels at home. I- Just a minute.'

There was a little puff of air, and then a sense of deadness: Kay had put her palm over the receiver and started to cough. The cough went on. Helen pictured her as she'd often seen her-doubled over, her eyes watering, her face scarlet, her lungs filled up with smoke and brick-dust. She said, 'Kay? Are you all right?'

'Still here,' said Kay, coming back. 'It's not so bad.'

'You oughtn't to be smoking.'

'The smoking helps… Hearing your voice helps.'

Helen didn't answer. She was thinking of the switchboard girl. A friend of Mickey's had lost her job, when a girl had listened in on a private call between her and her lover.

'I wish you were here, at home,' Kay went on. 'Can't they get along without you?'

'You know they can't.'

'You have to go, don't you?'

'I do, really.'

Kay was smiling: Helen could hear it in her voice. 'All right… Nothing else to report, though? No-one tried to storm the office? Mr Holmes still giving you the eye?'

'No,' said Helen, smiling too. Then her stomach fluttered again, and she drew in her breath. 'Actually-'

'Hang on,' said Kay. She moved the receiver, and began to cough again. Helen heard her wiping her mouth… 'I must let you go,' she said, when she came back.

'Yes,' said Helen leadenly.

'I'll see you later. You're coming straight home? Come quickly, won't you?'

'Yes, of course.'

'Good girl… Goodbye, Miss Giniver.'

'Goodbye, Kay.'

Helen put the receiver down and sat very still. She had a clear image of Kay, getting up, finishing her cigarette, wandering restlessly around the flat, perhaps coughing again. She might stand at the window with her hands in her pockets. She might whistle or hum-old songs from the music hall, 'Daisy, Daisy,' songs like that. She might put down paper on the sitting-room table, to polish her shoes. She might get out a funny little sailor's sewing-kit she had, and darn her socks… She didn't know that Helen, a few hours before, had been standing at a window, feeling the flesh on her arm rise up like the petals of a flower to the sun, because Julia was beside her. She didn't know that Helen, in a little attic room, had had to turn away from Julia's gaze, because the quickening of her own blood had made her afraid…

Helen snatched up the telephone again and gave the girl a number. The phone rang twice, and then, 'Hello,' said Kay, surprised by Helen's voice. 'What did you forget?'

'Nothing,' said Helen. 'I- I wanted to hear you again, that's all. What were you doing?'

'I was in the bathroom,' said Kay. 'I'd just started to cut my hair. I've dropped hair everywhere, now. You'll hate it.'

'No I won't. Kay, I just wanted to tell you- You know, that thing.'

She meant, I love you. Kay was silent for a second, and then said, 'That thing.' Her voice had thickened. 'I wanted to tell you that, too…'

What an absolute idiot I've been! thought Helen, when she'd put the phone down again. Her heart felt, now, as though it was swollen inside her-was rising up, like dough, into her throat. She was almost trembling. She got out her hand-bag and looked for her cigarettes. She found the packet and opened it up.

Inside the packet were those two stubs. She'd put them in there and forgotten. There was lipstick on them, from her own mouth, and from Julia's.

She put them in the ashtray on her desk. Then she found that the ashtray kept drawing her eye. In the end she took it from the room, and tipped it out into one of the wire bins in Miss Chisholm's office.

At half-past six, Viv was in the cloakroom at Portman Court. She was standing in a lavatory cubicle, being sick into the bowl. She was sick three times, then straightened up and closed her eyes and, for a minute, felt wonderfully tranquil and well. But when she opened her eyes and saw the lumpy brown mess she'd brought up-a mixture of tea and half-digested Garibaldi biscuits-she retched again. The cloakroom door was opened just as she was coming out to rinse her mouth. It was one of the girls from her own department, a girl called Caroline Graham.

'I say,' said the girl, 'are you all right? Gibson sent me to find you. What's up? You look rotten.'

Viv wiped her face, gingerly, on an edge of roller-towel. 'I'm OK.'

'You don't look it, honestly. Do you want me to go with you to the Nurse?'

'It's nothing,' said Viv. 'Just- Just a hangover.'

Caroline heard that, and her manner changed. She leaned her hip comfortably against one of the basins, and got out a stick of chewing-gum. 'Oh,' she said, folding the stick into her mouth, 'I know all about those. And crikey, it must have been bad if you're still throwing up at this hour! I hope the chap was worth it. It's not so rotten, I always think, if you've had a really good time. The worst is, when the boy's a dud, and you sort of drink just in the hope that it'll start to make him look better… You want to eat a raw egg or something.'

Viv felt her stomach quiver again. She moved away from the sight of the tumbling grey gum in Caroline's mouth. 'I don't think I could.' She glanced into the mirror. 'God, look at the state of me! Have you got any powder on you?'

'Here,' said Caroline. She got out a compact and handed it over; and when Viv had used it she took it back and used it herself. Then she stood at the mirror, re-curling her hair-the chewing-gum still for a moment; the tip of her tongue showing pinkly between her painted lips, her face smooth and plump with health and youth and the absence of worry: so that Viv looked at her and thought miserably, How bloody mean and unfair life is! I wish I was you.

Caroline caught her gaze. 'You do look rotten,' she said, beginning to chew again. 'Why don't you stay longer? It's no skin off my nose. We've only got another half-hour, anyway. I could tell Gibson I looked and couldn't find you. You could say you were collared by Mr Brightman, something like that. He's always sending girls out for soda-mints.'

'Thanks,' said Viv, 'but I'll be OK.'

'Are you sure?'

'Yes.'

But she'd lowered her head to straighten the waistband of her skirt; and now, in looking up too quickly, she grew queasy again. She put her hand out to one of the basins and closed her eyes-swallowing, swallowing, feeling the gathering of sickness in her stomach and fighting to keep it from rushing up… All at once, it surged. She darted back into the lavatory cubicle and retched drily into the bowl. In that narrow space, the sounds she made seemed dreadful. She tugged on the chain to try and disguise them. When she went back out to the basins, Caroline looked embarassed.

'I think you ought to let me take you to the Nurse, Viv.'

'I can't go to the Nurse with a hangover.'

'You ought to do something. You look terrible.'

'I'll be all right,' said Viv, 'in a minute.'

But she thought of the little journey she'd have to make back up to the typing room: the hard flights of stairs, the corridors. She imagined being sick on one of the polished marble floors. She pictured the typing room itself: the chairs and tables all crowded together, the black-outs up, making everything stuffy, the smells of ink and hair and make-up worse than ever…

'I wish I could just go home,' she said miserably.

'Well, why don't you? There's only twenty minutes now.'

'Shall I? What about Gibson?'

'I'll tell her you're poorly. It's the truth, isn't it? But, look here, what about getting home? Suppose you faint on the way or something?'

'I don't think I'll faint,' said Viv. But didn't women faint, when they were-? God! She turned away. She was suddenly afraid that Caroline, in looking at her, would see what the real matter was… She looked at her watch and said, with an effort at calmness, at brightness, 'Will you do me a favour? I think I'll wait for Betty Lawrence and walk home with her. Will you tell her, after you've told Gibson? Will you say I'll meet her here?'

'Of course,' said Caroline, straightening up, getting ready to go. 'And don't forget, about that raw egg. I know it sounds like an awful waste of the ration, but I had a colossal hangover once, on some filthy cocktails a boy mixed up for me at a party; the egg did the trick like you wouldn't believe. I think Minty Brewster's got her hands on a couple of eggs; ask her.'

'I will,' said Viv, trying to smile. 'Thanks, Caroline.-Oh, and if Gibson asks what the matter is, don't tell her I've been sick, will you? She's bound to guess- About the hangover, I mean.'

Caroline laughed. She blew out a little grey cherwing-gum bubble, and burst it with a pop. 'Don't worry. I'll be frightfully female and mysterious, and she'll think it's the curse. Will that do?'

Viv nodded, laughing too.

The moment Caroline went out, her laughter died. She felt the flesh on her face sink, grow heavy. The cloakroom had hot pipes running through it, and the air was dry; it felt under pressure, like a room in a submarine. Viv wanted more than anything to be able to open the window and put her face in a breeze. But the lights were on, and the curtain was already drawn: all she could do was go to the side of it and pull the dusty, scratchy cloth around her head like a sort of hood, and get what she could of the chill evening air that was seeping in through gaps in the window-frame.

The window opened on to a courtyard. She could hear typing, the ring of telephones, from rooms on the floors above. But if she listened carefully, too, she could just make out, beyond those sounds, the ordinary sounds of Wigmore Street and Portman Square: cars and taxis, and men and women going shopping, going out, going home from work. They were the sort of sounds, Viv thought, that you heard a thousand, thousand times, and never noticed-just as, when you were well, you never thought about being well, you could only really feel what it was like to be healthy for about a minute, when you stopped being sick. But when you were sick, it made you into a stranger, a foreigner, in your own land. Everything that was simple and ordinary to everyone else became like an enemy to you. Your own body became like an enemy to you, plotting and scheming against you and setting traps…

She stood at the window, thinking all this, until, at just before seven, the sound of typing faded and was replaced, across the building, by the scrape of wooden chairs on bare floors. A minute after that, the first of the women appeared: they came bowling into the cloakroom to visit the lavatory and get their coats. Viv went out to her locker and, very slowly, put on her own coat, her hat and gloves. She moved between the women like some sort of phantom, gazing at the dullest of them, the plainest of them, the plump and bespectacled, with a mad sort of ravening envy; feeling herself impossibly separated from them and alone. She listened to their clear, confident voices and thought, This is what happens to people like me. I'm just like Duncan, after all. We try to make something of ourselves and life won't let us, we get tripped up-

Betty appeared. She came in frowning, turning her head. When she saw Viv, she came straight over.

She said, 'What's up? Caroline Graham said you couldn't make it back upstairs. She laid it on as thick as anything for Gibson-said you'd been taken by surprise by something. Now word's gone round you've got the squits.' She looked Viv over. 'Hey, you do look bad.'

Viv tried to move away from her gaze as, earlier, she'd tried to move from Caroline's. She said, 'I just felt a bit sick.'

'Poor kid. You need bucking up. I've got just the thing for that, too. Jean, from Shipping, has been spreading the word about an MOI party. One of their boys got his divorce papers through today, and they say they need girls. They've been hoarding for weeks by the sound of it, so it should be a pretty good blow. We've just got time to change, come on.'

Viv looked at her, appalled. 'You're joking,' she said. 'I can't manage that. I look like a wreck!'

'Oh, throw on a bit of Max Factor,' said Betty as she shrugged on her coat, 'and the Ministry boys won't notice.'

She took Viv's arm and led her out of the room, and they began the journey up to the lobby. Climbing the stairs, Viv found, was awful, like being at sea; but there was a comfort to be had from the feel of Betty's arm in hers-from being helped and guided. They got to the desk and signed themselves out. The street was not quite dark enough for them to have to switch on their torches. But the evening was cold. Betty stopped for a moment to get out a pair of gloves.

She caught sight of another girl, and lifted one of the gloves and waved it.

'Jean! Jean, come over here! Tell Viv about this do tonight, will you? She needs persuading.'

The girl called Jean started to walk with them. 'It should be terrific, Viv,' she said. 'They told me to bring as many pals as I could get hold of.'

Viv shook her head. 'I'm sorry, Jean. I can't, tonight.'

'Oh, but Viv!'

'Don't listen to her, Jean,' said Betty. 'She's not herself.'

'I'll say she's not herself! Viv, they've been hoarding for absolute weeks-'

'I told her that.'

'I can't,' said Viv again. 'Honestly, I don't feel up to it.'

'What's there to be up to? All those boys are after is a few swell-looking girls in tight sweaters.'

'No, really.'

'It isn't every day a chap gets his divorce through, after all.'

'No, honestly,' said Viv, her voice beginning to break, 'I can't. I can't! I-'

She stopped walking, put her hand across her eyes; and there, in the middle of Wigmore Street, she began to cry.

There was a moment's silence. Then Betty said, 'Uh-oh. Sorry, Jean. Looks like the party'll have to do without us after all.'

'Well, it's hard luck on those fellows. They'll be awfully disappointed.'

'Look at it this way: there'll be more for you.'

Jean said, 'That's a thought, I suppose.' She touched Viv's arm. 'Cheer up, Viv. He must be a rotter, you know, if he makes feel like this… I'm going to fly back to Johnnie Adam House, girls! If you change your minds, you know where to find me!' She went off, almost running.

Viv took out her handkerchief and blew her nose. She raised her head, and saw people watching her, mildly curious, as they passed by.

'I feel such a fool.'

'Don't be daft,' said Betty gently. 'We all cry, sometimes. Come on, kid.' She drew Viv's arm through hers again, and squeezed her hand. 'Let's get you home. What you need's a nice hot-water bottle, and a gin with a couple of aspirin in it… Come to think of it, that's what I need, too.'

They began to walk again, more slowly. Viv's limbs seemed to tingle, almost to buzz, with tiredness. The thought of going back to John Adam House-at this time of night, when the place would be in chaos, with chairs being dragged across the dining-room floor, the lights blazing, the wireless blasting out dance-music, girls running up and down the stairs in their underwear, ripping curlers from their hair, calling to each other at the top of their voices-the thought exhausted her.

She pulled at Betty's arm. 'I can't face going back just yet. Let's go somewhere else, somewhere quiet. Can we?'

'Well,' said Betty, doubtfully, 'we could go to a café, something like that-'

'I can't face a café, either,' said Viv. 'Can we just sit down somewhere? Just for five minutes?' Her voice was rising, threatening to break again.

'All right,' said Betty, leading her off.

They found themselves, after a short walk, in one of the area's residential squares, and went into the garden. It was the sort of place that would have been locked to them in the years before the war; now, of course, the railings had gone and they went straight in. They found a bench away from the thickest bushes, on the quietest side of the square. It was not quite dark, but getting darker all the time, and Betty, looking around, said, 'Well, we'll either get raped, or someone'll think we're a couple of good-time girls and offer us money. I don't know about you, but if the price was right I might be tempted to take it…' She still had hold of Viv's arm. 'All right, kid,' she said, as they sat and drew close their coats. 'Tell me what's wrong. And remember: I've given up the chance of getting groped by an MOI divorcé for this, so it had better be good.'

Viv smiled. But the smile grew almost painful, almost at once. She felt the rising of tears in her throat just as, before, she'd felt the rushing up of sickness. She said, 'Oh, Betty-' and her voice dissolved. She put a hand across her mouth, and shook her head. After a second she said in a whisper, 'I'll cry, if I say it.'

'Well,' said Betty, 'I'll cry if you don't!' Then, more kindly: 'All right, I'm not stupid. I've a pretty good idea what this is about. Or who, I should say… What's he done now? Come on, there's a limit to the kind of thing a man can do to a girl to make her cry. They just don't have the imagination. He either stands her up, or chucks her over, or knocks her down.' She snorted. 'Or knocks her up.'

She said it jokingly, beginning to laugh. Then she met Viv's gaze through the gathering darkness, and her laughter faded.

'Oh, Viv,' she said quietly.

'I know,' said Viv.

'Oh, Viv! When did you find out?'

'A couple of weeks ago.'

'A couple of weeks? That's not so much. Are you sure it's not just-you know, just a bit late? With all these raids-'

'No,' said Viv. She wiped her face. 'I thought that, at first. But it's not just that. I know it's happened. I just know. Look at the state of me… I've been sick.'

'You've been sick?' said Betty, impressed. 'In the mornings?'

'Not in the mornings. In the afternoons and at night… My sister was like that. All her friends were sick first thing, but she was sick nearly every night, for three months.'

'Three months!' said Betty.

Viv glanced around. 'Shush, will you?'

'Sorry… But crikey, kid. What are you going to do?'

'I don't know.'

'Have you told Reggie?'

Viv looked away. 'No, I haven't.'

'Why not? It's his fault, isn't it?'

'It's not his fault,' said Viv, looking back. 'I mean, it's my fault as much as his.'

'Your fault?' said Betty. 'How's that? For giving him-' she lowered her voice even further, 'permission to come aboard? That's all very well, but he should-you know, have worn his raincoat.'

Viv shook her head. 'It's been all right, until now. We never use those. He can't stand them…'

They sat in silence for a second. Then, 'I think you should tell him,' said Betty.

'No,' said Viv firmly. 'I'm not telling anyone except you. Don't you tell anyone, either! God!' The idea was awful. 'Suppose Gibson finds out? Remember Felicity Withers?'

Felicity Withers was a Ministry of Works girl who'd got herself pregnant by a Free French airman, the year before. She'd thrown herself down the stairs at John Adam House; there'd been the most awful row about it. She'd been dismissed from the Ministry, sent home, back to her parents-a vicar and his wife-in Birmingham.

'We all said what a nit she was,' said Viv. 'God, I wish she was here now! She got-' She looked around, and spoke in a murmur. 'She got some pills, didn't she? From a chemist's?'

'I don't know,' said Betty.

'She did,' said Viv. 'I'm sure she did…'

'You could take Epsom salts.'

'I've done that. It didn't work.'

'You could try a red-hot bath, and gin.'

Viv almost laughed. 'At John Adam House? I'd never get the water hot enough. And then, imagine if someone saw, or smelt the gin… I couldn't do it at my father's, either.' She shuddered, just thinking about it. 'Isn't there anything else? There must be other things.'

Betty thought it over. 'You could squirt yourself, with soapy water. That's supposed to work. You have to hit the right spot, though… Or you could use-you know-a knitting needle-'

'God!' said Viv, growing sick again. 'I don't think I could bear to. Could you, if you were me?'

'I don't know. I might, if I was worried enough… Can't you just-lift weights?'

'What weights?' said Viv.

'Sandbags, things like that? Can't you jump up and down on the spot?'

Viv thought of the various uncomfortable ordinary journeys she'd had to make in the past two weeks: the bumping about on trains and buses, the flights of stairs she'd climbed at work… 'That kind of thing won't do it,' she said. 'It doesn't want to come out like that, I know it doesn't.'

'You could soak pennies in drinking-water.'

'That's just an old wives' tale, isn't it?'

'Well, don't old wives know a thing or two? That's why they're old wives, after all, and not-'

'And not old you-know-whats, like me?'

'That's not what I meant.'

Viv looked away. It was quite dark now. From the pavements beyond the garden there was the occasional blur of shaded torchlight, the shrinking and spreading and darting about of beams. But the tall, flat houses which edged the square were perfectly still… She felt Betty shiver, and shivered herself. But they didn't get up. Betty drew in her collar and folded her arms. She said, again, 'You could talk to Reggie.'

'No,' said Viv. 'I'm not going to tell him.'

'Why not? It's his, isn't it?'

'Of course it is!'

'Well, I'm only asking.'

'What a thing to say!'

'You ought to tell him, though. I'm not being funny, Viv, but the fact is, well, him being a married man… He ought to have an idea of what you could do.'

'He won't have a clue,' said Viv. 'His wife-she's kid-crazy. It's all she wants him for. What he gets from me, it's different.'

'I'll bet it is.'

'It is!'

'Well, not in nine months' time it won't be.-Eight months' time, I mean.'

'That's why I've got to fix it by myself,' said Viv. 'Don't you see? If it turns out that, after all, I'm just like her-'

'And you really want to fix it? You couldn't- Well, you couldn't have it, and keep it, or-?'

'Are you kidding?' said Viv. 'My father- It would kill my father!'

It would kill him, she meant, after everything with Duncan … She couldn't say that, however, to Betty; and suddenly the burden of so many secrets, so much caution and darkness and care, seemed unbearable. 'Oh!' she said. 'It's so bloody unfair! Why does it have to be like this, Betty? As if things weren't hard enough already!-then this comes along, to make things harder. It's such a little thing-'

'I hate to break this to you kid,' said Betty, 'but it won't be little for long.'

Viv looked at her, through the darkness. She folded her arms across her stomach. 'That's what I can't bear,' she said quietly, 'the thought of it inside me, getting bigger and bigger.' She seemed, all at once, to be able to feel it, sucking at her like a leech… She said, 'What's it like? It's like a fat little worm, isn't it?'

'A fat little worm,' answered Betty, 'with Reggie's face.'

'Don't say things like that! If I start thinking about it like that, it'll make it worse… I've got to try the pills that Felicity Withers tried.'

'But they didn't work for her. That's why she chucked herself down the stairs! And didn't they make her sick?'

'Well, I feel sick anyway! What's the difference?'

She didn't exactly feel sick now, however. She felt agitated, almost feverish. It seemed to her, suddenly, that she'd been living in a kind of trance. She couldn't believe it. She thought of the days and days that had slipped by, while she'd done nothing. She sat up straighter and looked around.

'I need a chemist's shop,' she said. 'Where can I find that kind of chemist's? Betty, come on.'

'Hang on,' said Betty. She'd opened her bag. 'Hell, you can't just drop this sort of thing on a girl, and then expect her to- Let me just have a cigarette.'

'A cigarette?' repeated Viv. 'How can you be thinking about a cigarette?'

'Calm down,' said Betty.

Viv pushed her. 'I can't calm down! Do you think you'd be able to calm down, if you were me?'

But all at once she felt exhausted. She slumped back again, and closed her eyes. When she looked up, she found Betty watching her. Her expression, in the darkness, was hard to read. There might have been pity in it, or fascination; even a touch of scorn.

'What are you thinking?' Viv asked quietly. 'You're thinking I'm soft, aren't you? Like we said Felicity Withers was.'

Betty shrugged. 'Any girl can get caught out.'

'You never have.'

'God!' Betty took off her glove and tapped like mad at the bench. 'Touch wood, can't you? That's all it is, after all: just luck, good luck and bad…' She fished about in her bag again, looking for her lighter. 'I still say, anyway, that you should tell Reggie. What's the point of going with a married man, if you can't tell him things like this?'

'No,' said Viv, almost soundlessly. They'd gone back to speaking in murmurs. 'I'll try the pills first; and if they don't work, I'll tell him then. And then, if they do, he'll be none the wiser.'

'Unlike you, hopefully.'

'You do think I'm soft.'

'All I'm saying is, if he had worn his raincoat-'

'He doesn't like it!'

'That's too bad. You can't muck about, Viv, when you're a chap in Reggie's shoes. If he was a single boy it would be different, you could take chances; the worst thing would be, you'd end up married sooner than you meant.'

'You're making it sound,' said Viv miserably, 'like it's something you think about, something you plan-like buying a three-piece suite! You know how we feel about each other. It's like you said just now, about touching wood. He's only married to another girl through rotten luck, through bad timing. Some things just can't be helped, that's all; it's just how they are.'

'And it'll go on being just how things are, for years and years,' said Betty. 'And he'll be grand, thank you very much; and how will you be?'

'You can't think like that,' said Viv. 'Nobody thinks like that! We might all be dead tomorrow. You have to take what you want, don't you? What you really want? You don't know what it's like. There isn't anything else for me, except Reggie. If I didn't have him-' Her voice thickened. She took out her handkerchief and blew her nose. 'He makes me happy,' she said, after a minute. 'You know he does. He makes me laugh.'

Betty finally found her lighter. 'Well,' she said, as she struck it, 'you're not laughing now.'

Viv watched the spurting up of the flame; she blinked against the plunge back into darkness, and didn't answer. She and Betty sat almost without speaking until it grew too cold to sit any longer; then they linked arms, wearily, and stood.

They had just moved off across the garden when they heard the sirens go. Betty said, 'There you are. That'd put an end to all your problems-a nice fat bomb.'

Viv looked up. 'God, it would. And no-one would know, except for you.'

She'd never thought of that before-about all the secrets that the war must have swallowed up, left buried in dust and darkness and silence. She had only ever thought of the raids as tearing things open, making things hard… She kept glancing up at the sky as she and Betty walked to John Adam House, telling herself that she wanted to see the searchlights go up; that she wanted the planes to come, the guns to start, all hell to break loose…

But when the first of the guns began to pound, up in north London somewhere, she grew tense, and made Betty walk faster-afraid of the bombing, even in her wretchedness; afraid of getting hurt; not wanting to die, after all.

'Hey, Jerry!' Giggs was calling out of his window, two hours later. 'Hey, Fritz! This way! This fucking way!'

'Shut up, Giggs, you gobshite!' called someone else.

'This way, Jerry! Over here!'

Giggs had heard of a prison being bombed, and all the men with less than six months left to serve in it being released; he only had four and a half still to do, and so, every time a raid started up, he'd drag his table across his cell, climb up on to it, and call to the German pilots out of his window. If the raid was a bad one, Duncan found, the shouts could really unsettle you: you began to picture Giggs as something like a great big magnet, sucking bullets and bombs and areoplanes out of the sky… Tonight, however, the raid seemed distant, and no-one was much bothered by it. The thuds and flashes were occasional, and soft; the darkness thickened and thinned slightly, that was all, as searchlights swept over the sky. Other men had got up on to their tables and were calling to each other, about ordinary things, across Giggs's shouts.

'Woolly! Woolly, you owe me half a dollar, you git!'

'Mick! Hey, Mick! What are you doing?'

There wasn't an officer to make them be silent. The officers went straight down into their shelter as soon as a raid started up.

'You owe me-!'

'Mick! Hey, Mick!'

The men had to shout themselves almost hoarse, in order to be heard; someone might call from a window at one end of the hall, and be answered by a man fifty cells away. Lying in bed and hearing them yell was like going through the wireless, finding stations in the dark. Duncan almost liked it; he found, at least, that he could filter the voices out when they began to get on his nerves. Fraser, on the other hand, was driven mad by them, every time. Now, for example, he was moving restlessly about, grumbling and cursing. He raised himself up, and punched out the lumps of horsehair in his mattress. He plucked at the bits of uniform he'd laid on his blanket for extra warmth. Duncan couldn't see him, because the cell was too dark; but he could feel the movement of him through the frame of the bunks. When he lay heavily back down, the bunks rocked from side to side, and creaked and squealed slightly, like bunks in a ship. We might be sailors, Duncan thought.

'You owe me half a dollar, you cunt!'

'God!' said Fraser, raising himself again and punching the mattress more violently. 'Why can't they be quiet? Shut up!' he shouted, slapping the wall.

'It's no good,' said Duncan, yawning. 'They won't be able to hear you… Now they're after Stella, listen.'

For someone had begun calling out: 'Ste-lla! Ste-lla!' Duncan thought it was a boy named Pacey, down on the Twos. 'Ste-lla! I've got something to tell you… I saw your twat, in the bath-house! I saw your twat! It was black as my hat!'

Another man whistled and laughed. 'You're a fucking poet, Pacey!'

'It looked like a fucking black rat with its throat cut! It looked like your old man's beard, with your old girl's fat fucking lips in the middle! Ste-lla! Why don't you answer?'

'She can't answer,' came another voice. 'She's got her gob on Mr Chase!'

'She's got her gob round Chase,' said someone else, 'and Browning is slipping her a length from the back. She's got her fucking hands full, boys!'

'Shut up, you naughty things!' cried a new voice. It was Monica, on the Threes.

Pacey started on her, then. 'Moni-ca! Moni-ca!'

'Shut up, you beasts! Can't a girl get her beauty sleep?'

This was followed by the crump! of a distant explosion and, 'Jerry!' Giggs called again. 'Fritz! Adolf! This way!'

Fraser groaned and turned his pillow. Then, 'Hell!' he said. 'That's all we need!'

For on top of everything else, somebody had started singing.

'Little girl in blue, I've been dreaming of you… Little girl in blue…'

It was a man called Miller. He was in for running some sort of racket from a nightclub. He sang all the time, with horrible sincerity-as if crooning into a microphone at the front of a band. At the sound of his voice now, men up and down the hall began to complain.

'Turn it off!'

'Miller, you bastard!'

Duncan 's neighbour, Quigley, began to beat with something-his salt-pot, probably-on the floor of his cell. 'Shut up,' he roared, as he did it, 'you fucking slags! Miller, you cunt!'

'I've been dreaming of you…'

Miller sang on, through all the complaints, through all the distant roar of the raid; and the worst of it was, the song was tuneful. One by one, the men fell silent, as if they were listening. Even Quigley, after a while, threw down his salt-pot and stopped roaring.

Fraser, too, had grown still. He'd lifted his head, the better to hear. 'Hell, Pearce,' he said now. 'I think I danced to this tune once. I'm sure I did.' He lay back down. 'I probably laughed at the bloody thing, then. Now- Now it seems stinkingly apt, doesn't it? Christ! Trust Miller and a popular song to be so honest about longing.'

Duncan said nothing. The song went on.

Though we're apart, I can't forget you.

I bless the hour that I first met you-

Abruptly, another voice broke across it. This one was deep, tuneless, lusty.

Give me a girl with eyes of blue,

Who likes it if you don't but prefers it if you do!

Someone cheered. Fraser said, in a tone of disbelief, 'Who the hell is that, now?'

Duncan tilted his head, to listen. 'I don't know. Maybe Atkin?'

Atkin, like Giggs, was a deserter. The song sounded like something a serviceman would sing.

Give me a girl with eyes of black,

Who likes it on her belly but prefers it on her back!

'Cause I'll be seeing you again, when you-

Miller was still going. For almost a minute the two songs ran bizarrely together; then Miller gave in. His voice trailed away. 'You wanker!' he yelled. There were more cheers. Atkin's voice-or whoever's it was-grew louder, lustier. He must have been cupping his hands around his mouth and bellowing like a bull.

But then the 'Raiders Past' siren started up. Atkin turned his song into a whoop. Men on every landing joined in, drumming with their fists on their walls, their window-frames, their beds. Only Giggs was disappointed.

'Come back, you gobshites!' he called, hoarsely. 'Come back, you German cunts! You forgot D Hall! You forgot D Hall!'

'Get down out of those fucking windows!' roared someone out in the yard, and there was the rapid crunch, crunch of boots on cinders, as the officers emerged from their shelter and started heading towards the prison. From all along the hall, then, there came the thump and scrape of tables: the men were leaping down from their windows, hurling themselves back into their bunks… In another minute, the electric lights were switched on. Mr Browning and Mr Chase came pounding up the stairs and started racing down the landings, hammering on doors, flinging open spy-holes: 'Pacey! Wright! Malone, you little shit- If I catch any of you fuckers out of your beds, the whole lot of you'll be banged up from now till Christmas, do you hear?'

Fraser turned his face into his pillow, groaning and cursing against the light. Duncan drew up his blanket over his eyes. Their door was thumped, but the racing footsteps went past. They faded for a moment; stopped; grew loud, then faded again. Duncan had a sense of Mr Browning and Mr Chase turning snarling about, thwarted and furious, like dogs on chains… 'You shit-cakes!' one of them cried, for show. 'I'm warning you-!'

They paced back and forth along the landings for another minute or two; eventually, however, they tramped down the stairs. In another moment, with a little phut, the lights in the cells were switched off again.

Duncan quickly put down his blanket and moved his head to the edge of his pillow. He liked the moment when the current was cut. He liked to see the bulb in the ceiling. For the light faded slowly, and for three or four seconds, if you watched for it, you could make out the filament inside the glass, a curl of wire that turned from white to furious amber, to burning red, to delicate pink; and then, when the cell was dark, you could still see the yellow blur of it inside your eye.

A man gave a whistle, quietly. Someone shouted to Atkin. He wanted Atkin to carry on singing. He wanted to know about the girl whose hair was yellow-what did she like? What about her? He called it twice, three times; but Atkin wouldn't answer. The matey, mischievous feeling that had gripped them all, ten minutes before, was losing its hold. The silence was deepening, growing daunting, and to try to break into it, now, was to make it seem worse… For after all, thought Duncan, you could sing or bellow as much as you liked; it was only a way of putting off this moment-this moment that always, finally, came-when the loneliness of the prison night rose up about you, like water in a sinking boat.

He could still hear the words of the songs, however-just as he'd still been able to see the glowing filament in the bulb against the darkness of his own eyelids. Give me a girl, he could hear in his head. Give me a girl, and I'll be seeing you, over and over.

Perhaps Fraser could hear it, too. He changed his pose, rolled on to his back, kept fidgeting. Now that the place was so quiet, when he passed his hand across the stubble on his chin-when he rubbed his eye, even, with his knuckle-Duncan heard it… He blew out his breath.

'Damn,' he said, very softly. 'I wish I had a girl, Pearce, right now. Just an ordinary girl. Not the kind of girls I used to meet-the brainy types.' He laughed, and the frame of the bunks gave a shiver. 'God,' he said, 'isn't that a phrase to freeze a man's blood? “A brainy girl”.' He put on a voice. '“You'd like my friend, she's ever so brainy.” As if that's what one wants them for…' He laughed again-a sort of snigger, this time, too low to make the bed-frame jump. 'Yes,' he said, 'just an ordinary little girl is what I'd like right now. She wouldn't have to be pretty. Sometimes the pretty ones are no good-do you know what I mean? They think too much of themselves; they don't want to mess their hair up, smudge their lips. I wish I had a plain, stout, stupid girl. A plain, stout, stupid, grateful girl… Do you know what I'd do with her, Pearce?'

He wasn't talking to Duncan, really; he was talking to the darkness, to himself. He might have been murmuring in his sleep… But the effect was more intimate, somehow, than if he'd been whispering into Duncan 's ear. Duncan opened his eyes and gazed into the perfect, velvety blackness of the cell. There was a depthlessness to it that was so queer and unnerving, he put up his hand. He wanted to remind himself of the distance between his and Fraser's bunk: he'd begun to feel as though Fraser was nearer than he ought to have been; and he was very aware of his own body as a sort of duplication or echo of the one above… When his fingers found the criss-crossed wire underside of Fraser's bed, he kept them there. He said, 'Don't think about it. Go to sleep.'

'No, but seriously,' Fraser went on, 'do you know what I'd do? I'd have her, fully clothed. I wouldn't take off a stitch. I'd only loosen a button or two at the back of her dress-and I'd undo her brassière, while I was about it-and then I'd draw the dress and the brassière down to her elbows and get my fingers on to her chest. I'd give her a pinch. I might pull her about a bit-there wouldn't be a thing she could do if I did, for the dress-do you see?-the dress would be pinning her arms to her sides… And when I'd finished with her chest, I'd push up her skirt. I'd push it right up to her waist. I'd keep the knickers on her, but they'd be that silky, flimsy kind that you can work your way about, work your way up…' The words tailed away. When he spoke again, his voice had changed, was bare and not at all boastful. 'I had a girl like that, once. I've never forgotten it. She wasn't a beauty.'

He fell silent. Then, 'Damn,' he said softly again. 'Damn, damn.' And he moved about, so that the wires supporting his mattress flexed and tightened, and Duncan quickly drew back his fingers. He had rolled on to his side, Duncan thought; but though he lay still, there was a tension to him-something charged and furtive, as if he might be holding his breath, calculating. And when he moved again, to draw up the blanket, the movement seemed false, seemed stagey: as if it was being made, elaborately, to conceal another, more secret…

He had put his hand, Duncan knew, to his cock; and after another moment he began, with a subtle, even motion, to stroke it.

It was a thing men did all the time, in prison. They made a joke of it, a sport of it, a boast of it; Duncan had once shared a cell with a boy who had done it, not even at night, with a blanket to cover him, but during the day, obscenely. He had learned to turn his head from it-just as he'd learned to turn his head from the sight and sound and smell of other men belching, farting, pissing, shitting into pots… Now, however, in the utter darkness of the cell, and in the queer, uneasy atmosphere raised by Miller's and Atkin's singing, he found himself horribly aware of the stealthy, helpless, purposeful, half-ashamed motion of Fraser's hand. For a moment or two he kept quite still, not wanting to betray the fact that he was awake. Then he found that his stillness only made his senses more acute: he could hear the slight thickening, now, of Fraser's breath; he could smell him as he sweated; he could even catch, he thought, the faint, wet, regular sound-like a ticking watch-of the tip of Fraser's cock being rhythmically uncovered… He couldn't help it. He felt his own cock give a twitch and begin to grow hard. He lay another minute, perfectly still save for that gathering and tightening of flesh between his legs; then he made the same sort of stealthy, stagey movements that Fraser had: pulled up the blanket over himself, slid his hand into his pyjamas, and took the base of his cock in his fist.

But his other hand, he raised. He found the wires of Fraser's bed again and just touched them with his knuckles, lightly at first; then he caught the tension in them, the hectic little jolts and quivers they were giving in response to the regular jog-jog-jog of Fraser's fist… He worked one of his fingers about them-clinging to them, almost, with the tip of that one finger; bracing himself against them, as he tugged with his other hand at his cock.

He was aware, after a minute or so of this, of Fraser giving a shudder, and of the wires beneath his mattress growing still; but he couldn't have stopped his own hand, then, for anything, and a moment later his own spunk rushed: he felt the travelling and bursting of it as if it were hot and scalded him. He thought he made a sound, as it came; it might just have been the roaring of the blood through his ears… But when the roaring died, there was only the silence: the awful, abashing stillness of the prison night. It was like emerging from some sort of fit, a spell of madness; he thought of what he'd just done and imagined himself pounding, gasping, plucking at Fraser's bunk like some kind of beast.

Only after a minute did Fraser move. There was the rustle of bed-clothes, and Duncan guessed he was wiping spunk from himself with his sheet. But the rustling went on, the movement became tense, almost savage; finally, Fraser struck his pillow.

'Damn this place,' he said, as he did it, 'for turning us all into schoolboys! Do you hear me, Pearce? I suppose you liked that. Did you, Pearce? Hey?'

'No,' said Duncan at last-but his mouth was dry, and his tongue caught against his palate. The word came out as a sort of whisper.

Then he flinched. The bed-frame had rocked, and something warm and light had struck him, in the face. He put up his hand, and felt a sticky kind of wetness on his cheek. Fraser must have leaned over the edge of the bunk and flicked spunk at him.

'You liked it all right,' said Fraser bitterly. His voice was close, for a moment. Then he moved back beneath his blanket. 'You liked it all right, you blasted bugger.'

4

'Goodness,' said Helen, opening her eyes. 'What's this?'

'Happy birthday, darling,' said Kay, putting down a tray at the side of the bed, and leaning to kiss her.

Helen's face was dry and warm and smooth, quite beautiful; her hair had frizzed up a little, like a sleepy child's. She lay for a moment, blinking, then pushed herself higher in the bed and drew up the pillow to the small of her back. She did it clumsily, still not quite awake; and when she yawned, she put her hands to her face and worked her fingers into the corners of her eyes, to remove the crumbs of sleep from them. Her eyes were slightly puffed.

'You don't mind that I've woken you?' asked Kay. It was a Saturday, still early, and she had worked the night before; but she'd been up for an hour and was already dressed, in a pair of tailored slacks and a jersey. 'I couldn't bear to wait any longer. Look, here.'

She brought the tray to Helen's lap. There was a spray of paper flowers in a vase, china pots and cups, an upturned bowl on a plate; and the pink box, with the silk bow, containing the satin pyjamas.

Helen went from item to item, politely, slightly self-conscious. 'What beautiful flowers. What a lovely box!' She looked as though she was struggling to wake up, be charmed and excited… I should have let her sleep, Kay thought.

But then she lifted the lids of the china pots. 'Jam,' she said, 'and coffee!' That was better. 'Oh, Kay!'

'It's real coffee,' said Kay. 'And, look here.'

She nudged the upturned bowl, and Helen picked it up. Underneath, on a paper doily, was an orange. Kay had worked on it for half an hour with the point of a vegetable knife, carving HAPPY BIRTHDAY into the peel.

Helen smiled properly, her dry lips parting over her small white teeth. 'It's wonderful.'

'The R's a bit ropey.'

'Not at all.' She took the orange up and held it to her nose. 'Where did you get it?'

'Oh,' said Kay vaguely. 'I coshed a small child for it, in the black-out.' She poured out coffee. 'Open your gift.'

'In a minute,' said Helen. 'I must pee first. Hold the tray, will you?'

She kicked off the blankets and ran to the bathroom. Kay drew the bed-covers back up so that the mattress should stay warm. Heat rose from the bed, even as she did it-rose palpably, against her face, like steam or smoke. She sat with the tray on her lap, and rearranged the flowers, admired the orange-fretting, slightly, over that crooked R…

'What a fright I looked!' said Helen, laughing, coming back. 'Like Struwwelpeter.' She had washed her face and brushed her teeth and tried to calm her cloud of hair.

'Don't be silly,' said Kay. 'Come here.' She put out her hand; Helen took it, and let herself be drawn into a kiss. Her mouth was chill, from the cold water.

She got back into bed, and Kay sat beside her. They drank the coffee, ate toast and jam.

'Have your orange,' said Kay.

Helen turned it in her hands. 'Shall I? It seems a shame. I ought to keep it.'

'What for? Go on.'

So Helen broke the skin, and peeled the orange, and divided it into pigs. Kay took one, but said that she must eat the rest herself. The fruit was slightly sour, and dry-the segments tore too easily. But the sensation of them yielding up their juice upon the tongue was glorious.

'Now open your present,' said Kay impatiently, when the orange was finished.

Helen bit her lip. 'I hardly dare. Such a beautiful box!' She picked it up, self-conscious again. She held it beside her ear, and playfully shook it. When she began, very gingerly, to ease off the lid, Kay laughed at her.

'Just pull it right off!'

'I don't want to spoil it.'

'It doesn't matter.'

'No,' said Helen. 'It's too pretty.-Oh!' She looked startled. She'd removed the lid at last and, the box being tilted against her knees, the folds of paper inside had parted and the pyjama-suit, like quicksilver, had come tumbling fluidly out. She gazed at it for a moment without moving; then, as if reluctantly, she caught hold of the jacket and lifted it up. 'Oh, Kay.' She was blushing.

'Do you like it?'

'It's beautiful. Too beautiful! It must have cost a fortune! Where ever did you get it?'

Kay smiled and wouldn't answer. She took a sleeve of the jacket and held it up. 'Do you see the buttons, look?'

'Yes.'

'They're bone. Here on the sleeve, too?'

Helen held the satin to her face, and closed her eyes.

'The colour suits you,' said Kay. And then, when Helen didn't answer: 'You do like it, really?'

'Darling, of course. But- I don't deserve it.'

'Don't deserve it? What are you talking about?'

Helen shook her head and laughed, opening her eyes. 'Nothing. I'm being silly, that's all.'

Kay took away the tray, the cups and plates and paper. 'Try it on,' she said.

'I oughtn't to. Not without bathing first.'

'Oh, rubbish. Put it on. I want to see you in it!'

So Helen got slowly out of bed, drew off her threabare nightdress, stepped into the pyjama trousers and buttoned on the top. The trousers were fastened with a linen cord. The jacket tied at the waist: it was full like a blouse but, the satin being heavy, it showed very clearly the swell of her breasts, the tips of her nipples. The sleeves were long: she buttoned the cuffs and folded them back, but they slid out of the folds at once and fell almost to her fingertips. She stood, as if shyly, for Kay to look her over.

Kay whistled. 'How glamorous you look! Just like Greta Garbo in Grand Hotel.'

She didn't look glamorous really, however; she looked young, and small, and rather solemn. The room was cold, and the satin chill; she shivered and blew on her hands. She worked again at folding back the sleeves, almost fretfully-gazing once, as she did it, into the mirror, and then turning quickly away.

Kay watched her, with a sort of ache about her heart. She felt her love, at moments like this, as a thing of wonder-it was wonderful to her, that Helen, who was so lovely, so fair and unmarked, should be here at all, to be looked at and touched… Then again, it was impossible to imagine her in any other place, with any other lover. No other lover, Kay knew, would feel about her quite as Kay did. She might have been born, been a child, grown up-done all the particular, serious and inconsequential things she'd done-just so she could arrive at this point, now; just so she could stand, barefoot, in a satin pyjama-suit, and Kay could watch her.

But then she moved away from the mirror.

'Don't go,' said Kay.

'Just to start my bath off.'

'No,' said Kay. 'Not yet.'

She got off the bed and crossed the room and took Helen in her arms. She ran her fingers over her face, and kissed her lips. She slid her hands beneath the satin jacket to touch the smooth, warm flesh of her back and waist. Then she moved behind her and held her breasts, taking the weight of them against her palms. She felt the swell of Helen's buttocks, the sliding of the skin of her plump thighs inside the satin. She put her cheek against Helen's ear.

'You're beautiful.'

'No,' said Helen.

Kay turned her to face the mirror. 'Can't you see yourself? You're lovely. I knew you were, the first time I saw you. I held your face in my hand. You were smooth, like a pearl.'

Helen closed her eyes. 'I know,' she said.

They kissed again. The kiss went on. But then Helen drew away. 'I have to pee again,' she said. 'I'm sorry, Kay. And I really should bathe.'

The satin made her slippery: she moved from Kay's grasp, turning her head and laughing-playful but determined, like a nymph eluding a satyr. She went back to the bathroom and closed the door. There was the rush of the faucets, the whoosh of flame in the water-heater; and then, in a minute or so, the rub of her heels against the enamel of the tub.

Kay took the coffee-pot to the sitting-room fire and put it close to the grate. She went back to the bedroom, cleared away the tray, made up the bed, folded the torn tissue paper. The flowers she set, in their vase, on the sitting-room table, beside the cards that Helen had already received, by yesterday's post, from her family in Worthing. She moved a chair. Where the chair had stood she saw a sprinkling of crumbs. She got a brush and a pan from the kitchen, and swept them up.

Kay had lived in this flat for almost seven years. She'd got it from a woman she'd once been lovers with, a woman who'd worked here, more or less-though Kay had never told Helen this-as a prostitute. Kay's life had been rather chaotic in those days. She'd had too much money; she'd drunk too much; she'd careered from one unhappy love-affair to another… The woman had taken up with a businessman in the end, and moved to Mayfair; but she'd given Kay the flat as a parting gift.

Kay liked it here more than anywhere she'd ever lived. The flat's rooms were L-shaped; she liked those. She liked, too, the funny little mews or yard that the flat overlooked. The warehouse next door served some of the furniture stores on the Tottenham Court Road; before the war, Kay had been able to stand at her window and watch young men and women in the workshops painting swags and cupids on lovely old tables and chairs. Now the workshops had been closed down. The warehouse was used for holding utility furniture for the Board of Trade. The fact of there being so much wood there, and so much varnish and paint, made the mews a dreadfully unsafe place. But when Kay thought of moving, her heart sank. She felt about the flat rather as she felt about Helen: that it was secret, special, hers.

She checked the warmth of the coffee in its pot. On the mantelpiece was a box of cigarettes; that made her think of the case in her pocket. She took it out, and started to fill it. Presently she heard Helen come out of the bathroom and begin the business of getting dressed. She called to her, across the hall. 'What shall we do today, Helen? What would you like to do?'

'I don't know,' answered Helen.

'I might take you to a smart restaurant for lunch. How about that?'

'You've spent too much on me already!'

'Oh, balls to that!-as Binkie might say. Wouldn't you like a fancy luncheon?'

There was no reply. Kay shut the cigarette case and put it back in her pocket. She poured more coffee into Helen's cup and took it through to the bedroom. Helen was dressed in her bra, her petticoat and stockings. She was combing her hair-combing it carefully, trying to turn the curls into waves. The pyjama-suit lay on the bed, very neatly folded.

Kay set the cup down on the dressing-table. 'Helen,' she said.

'Yes, darling?'

'You seem awfully distracted. Isn't there anywhere you'd like to go? Not Windsor Castle, somewhere like that? The Zoo?'

'The Zoo?' said Helen, laughing, but also frowning. 'My goodness, I feel like a child being offered a day out by its aunt.'

'Well, that's how one's supposed to feel on one's birthday. And you did, you know, mention Windsor Castle -and the Zoo-when we talked about this last week.'

'I know I did,' said Helen. 'I'm sorry, Kay. But Windsor-oh, won't it take an age to get there? Won't the trains be awful?' She had gone to the wardrobe and was looking through her dresses. 'You'll have to be home for work at seven.'

'We have ages till seven,' said Kay. Then she saw the dress that Helen was taking from its hanger. 'That one?' she said.

'Don't you like it?'

'It's your birthday. Wear the Cedric Allen one. I like that one more.'

Helen looked doubtful. 'It's awfully smart.' But she put the first dress back and drew out another-a dark blue dress with cream lapels. It had cost £2 11s, two years before; Kay had bought it, of course. Kay had bought most of Helen's things, especially in those days. A section of the hem was slightly puckered, where it had got worn and had to be darned; but apart from that, it looked almost new. Helen shook it open and stepped inside it.

Kay held out her hands. 'Come here,' she said, 'and I'll hook you up.'

So Helen came to her and turned her back, and lifted up her hair. Kay settled the dress more smoothly on her shoulders, drew close its panels and, starting at the bottom, began to fasten together its hooks. She did it slowly. She'd always liked the sight and the feel of a woman's back. She liked, for example, the look of an evening dress on naked shoulders-the tautness of it-the way, when the shoulder-blades were drawn together, it gaped, giving you a glimpse of the underclothes or the pink, pressed flesh behind… Helen's back was firm-not muscular, but plump, resilient. Her neck was handsome, with a down of fair hair. When Kay had closed the final hook and eye she bent her head and kissed it. Then she put her arms around Helen's waist, laid her hands upon her stomach and pulled her closer.

Helen moved her cheek against Kay's jaw. 'I thought you wanted to go out.'

'But you look so lovely in your dress.'

'Perhaps I ought to take it off, if you feel like that about it.'

'Perhaps I ought to take it off for you.'

Helen pulled away. 'Be sensible, Kay.'

Kay laughed and let her go. 'All right… Now, how about the Zoo?'

Helen had gone back to the dressing-table and was screwing on earrings. 'The Zoo,' she said, frowning again. 'Well, perhaps. But won't it look funny? Two women, our age?'

'Does that matter?'

'No,' said Helen, after a moment, 'I suppose not.'

She sat and drew on her shoes-bending her head, so that her hair fell before her face. 'You don't,' she added lightly, as Kay was turning from the room, 'want to ask other people?'

'Other people?' asked Kay, surprised, turning back. 'You mean, like Mickey?'

'Yes,' said Helen, after a second. Then, 'No, it was just a thought.'

'Would you like to call in on Mickey, on the way?'

'No. It's all right, really.' She straightened up, laughing at herself-her face quite pink, from the effort of leaning forward and reaching to tie her laces.

They didn't go to the Zoo, in the end. Helen said she didn't, after all, like the idea of looking at so many poor little creatures in their cages and pens. They began to walk, and saw a bus marked up for Hampstead; and ran to catch that, instead. They got off at the High Street, and had a lunch of sardines and chips in a little café; they looked in a couple of second-hand bookshops, then made their way, through the handsome, higgledy-piggledy, red-brick streets, to the Heath. They walked arm-in-arm-Helen not minding the fact that they were two women, now, for one expected to see women, she said, on a Saturday afternoon on Hampstead Heath; it was a place for plain, brisk women, spinsters, and dogs.

Actually, there were many young couples about. One or two of the girls wore trousers, like Kay; most were in service uniforms, or in the glamourless austere get-ups that passed, these days, for weekend best. The boys were in battledress: khaki and navy blue and every shade between-the uniforms of Poland, Norway, Canada, Australia, France.

The day was cold. The sky was so white it hurt the eye. Kay and Helen hadn't come to the Heath since the summer before last, when they'd gone bathing in the Ladies' pond; they remembered it as lush, green, lovely. But now the trees were utterly bare, revealing, here and there, the brutal, barbed-wired flanks of anti-aircraft batteries and military gear. The leaves that had fallen months before had turned to mulch, and the mulch had a rime of frost on it: it looked unhealthy, liked rotting fruit. Much of the ground had been marked by shrapnel, or torn by the tyres of trucks; and in the west there were enormous canyons and pits where earth had been dug, at various points, for filling sand-bags.

They tried to keep away from the worst of it-going more or less aimlessly, but following the more secluded routes. At the junction of two broad paths they turned north; the path led them up, then down through a wood, and they emerged, in another few minutes, at a lake. The water was frozen, right across. A dozen or so ducks were huddled together, like refugees, on an island of twigs.

'Poor things,' said Helen, squeezing Kay's arm. 'I wish we'd brought bread.'

They went closer to the water. The ice was thin, but must have been strong, for it was littered with sticks and stones, that people had thrown in an effort to break it. Kay bared her hands-for she was dressed against the cold, in gloves and a belted coat, a scarf and a beret-and picked up a stone of her own, and tossed it, just for the pleasure of seeing it skitter. Then she went right to the lake's edge and pressed at the ice with the toe of her shoe. A couple of children came to watch her: she showed them the silvery pockets of air which bulged beneath the ice's surface, then squatted and prised at the ice with her hands, bringing up great jagged sheets, which she broke into smaller pieces for the children to hold, and fling, or stamp on with their heels. When the ice was crushed, it became white powder-exactly the powder of broken glass at a bomb site.

Helen was standing where Kay had left her, watching. She'd kept her gloved hands in her pockets; the collar of her coat was turned up, and she was wearing a soft wool hat, like a tam o'shanter, pulled down low over her brow. Her expression was a queer one-a smile, that was soft but also troubled. Kay fished out a last piece of ice for the children and went back to her.

'What's up?' she asked.

Helen shook her head, and smiled properly. 'Nothing. I was enjoying looking at you. You looked like a boy.'

Kay was banging her hands together, to knock the chill and the dirt from them. She said, 'Ice turns everyone into boys, doesn't it? The lake at home, when I was a kid, used to freeze sometimes. It was much bigger than this. Or maybe it only seemed big to me, then. Tommy, Gerald and I used to go out on it. My poor mother!-she used to hate it, she used to think we'd all be drowned. I didn't understand. All the boys she knew, of course, were getting killed, one after another… Are you cold?'

Helen had shivered. She nodded. 'A bit.'

Kay looked around. 'There's a milk-bar here somewhere. We could get a cup of tea. Would you like that?'

'Yes, perhaps.'

'You ought to have a cake or a bun, too, on your birthday. Don't you think?'

Helen wrinkled up her nose. 'I'm not sure I want one, really. It's sure to be awful, whatever we get.'

'Oh,' said Kay, 'but you must.'

She thought she knew where the milk-bar was. She put her arm through Helen's and drew her close and led her along a new path; they walked for another twenty minutes, however, without finding anything. So then they went back to the frozen lake, and tried another path. Then, 'There it is!' said Kay.

But when they drew close to the building they saw that it was half burnt-out, the window-frames glassless, the curtains in ribbons, the brickwork black. A notice on the door said, Blitzed Last Saturday. Underneath it someone had fixed a sad-looking paper Union Jack, the kind that had once, before the war, been stuck on sand-castles.

'Damn,' said Kay.

Helen said, 'It's all right. I didn't really want anything.'

'There's sure to be somewhere else.'

'If I have tea, it'll only make me need the lavatory.'

Kay laughed. 'Darling, you'll need the lavatory, whatever you do… And, it's your birthday. You ought to have a cake.'

'I'm too old for cakes!' said Helen, with a touch of impatience. She took out a handkerchief and blew her nose. 'God, it's cold! Let's keep walking.'

She was smiling again; but seemed distant to Kay, distracted. Perhaps it was only the weather. It was hard to be cheerful, of course, when it was as cold as this…

Kay lit them both cigarettes. They went back yet again to the lake, and up through the wood-going more quickly, to try and get warm.

The path, from this angle, began to look more familiar to Kay. She remembered, suddenly, an afternoon she'd spent here in the past… She said, without thinking, 'You know, I believe I came this way once, with Julia.'

'With Julia?' asked Helen. 'When was that?'

She spoke with a try at lightness; but self-consciously, too. Kay thought: Bugger. She said, 'Oh, years ago, I don't know. I remember a bridge, something like that.'

'What sort of bridge?'

'Just a bridge. A funny little bridge, quite rococo, overlooking a pond.'

'Where was it?'

'I thought it was this way, but now I'm not sure. It's the sort of thing, I expect, like Shangri-La, that you can only find by not really meaning to look for.'

She wished she'd said nothing. Helen, she thought, was pretending an interest in the bridge-overdoing it slightly, to make up for the awkwardness that had been conjured by the saying of Julia's name. They walked on. Kay tried one way, half-heartedly, and then another; she was about to give it up when the path they were walking on suddenly opened up and they found themselves in exactly the place she'd been looking for.

The bridge wasn't nearly as charming as she'd recalled; it was plainer, not rococo at all. But Helen went at once to the side of it and stood gazing down at the pond beneath, as if enchanted.

'I can see Julia here,' she said, smiling, when Kay joined her.

'Can you?' asked Kay.

She didn't want to think of Julia, especially. She stood for a second, looking down at the new pond; it was iced and littered like the other one, and had its own straggling band of refugee ducks. But then she turned to Helen and gazed at her profile, at her cheek and throat-which had pinked, at last, with what seemed real excitement and interest; and she caught a glimpse, beyond the turned-up collar of Helen's coat, of the cream lapel beneath it, and beneath that, the smooth, blemishless skin. She remembered standing in the bedroom, fastening up the handsome dress; she remembered the sliding of the silk pyjamas, the feel of the weight of Helen's hot, suspended breasts.

She grew warm with desire all over again. She took Helen's arm and drew her closer. Helen turned, saw her expression, and glanced about in alarm.

'Someone will come,' she said. 'Don't, Kay!'

'Don't what? All I'm doing is looking at you.'

'It's the way you're looking.'

Kay shrugged. 'I might be- Here.' She put her hands to one of Helen's earrings and began to unscrew it. She spoke more softly. 'I might be fixing your earring for you. Say your earring was caught? I'd have to unfasten it like this, wouldn't I? Anyone would do that. I'd have to put back your hair, that would only be natural. I might have to move closer…'

As she spoke, she was drawing the ornament from Helen's ear, and smoothing the chill, naked lobe with her fingers.

Helen blushed. 'Someone will come,' she said again.

'Not if we're quick.'

'Don't be silly, Kay.'

But Kay kissed her, anyway; then felt her break almost roughly away. For someone had come-a nice-looking woman, walking a dog. She'd appeared on the other side of the bridge, soundlessly, from nowhere.

Kay held up the earring and said, in an ordinary voice, 'No, it's no good. I'm afraid you'll have to do it.' Helen turned her back to her and stood stiffly, as if absolutely riveted by some little detail in the scene below.

As the woman passed, Kay caught her eye and smiled. The woman smiled back-but smiled uncertainly, Kay thought. She must have glimpsed the end of their embrace, but was doubtful: puzzled and embarassed. The dog came trotting over and sniffed at Helen's heels. He took ages to go.

'Smuts!' cried the woman, getting redder and redder in the face. 'Smuts! Bad dog!'

'God!' said Helen when they had gone. She tilted her head to put the earring back on, her hands at her jaw, her fingers working furiously at the little screw.

Kay was laughing. 'Oh, so what? It's not the nineteenth bloody century.'

But Helen wouldn't smile. Her mouth was set, almost grim, as she fumbled with the earring. And when Kay made to help her she moved sharply away. Kay gave it up. What a lot of fuss, she thought about nothing… She got out her cigarettes again, and offered the case. Helen shook her head. They went on with unlinked arms, in silence.

They rejoined the path they had come in on and, without debating it, crossed to another, heading south. This led, they saw after a moment, to the crest of Parliament Hill. The slope was gentle at first, but soon grew steep, and Kay glanced at Helen from the corner of her eye, and saw her moving brusquely, breathing hard; she looked as though she might be working herself into a temper, looking for a reason to start complaining, a way of somehow blaming Kay… But then they got to the top, and saw the view. Her expression changed, cleared, grew simple and pleased again.

For you could see right across the city from here, to all the landmarks of London; and because of the distance-and because of the smoke from so many chimneys, which hung in the chill, windless air like a net in water-even the patches of rubble and the hollowed-out, roofless buildings had a certain smudgy charm. Four or five barrage balloons were up, seeming to swell, and then to shrink, as they turned and drifted. They were like pigs in a barnyard, Kay thought. They gave the city a jovial, cosy look.

A few people were taking photographs. 'There's St Paul 's Cathedral,' a girl was saying to her American soldier boyfriend. 'There's the Houses of Parliament. There's-'

'Be quiet, will you?' a man said loudly to her. 'There might be fifth columnists about.'

The girl shut up.

Helen and Kay stood gazing at the view with everyone else, shading their eyes against the glare of the bleached-out sky. Then, a little way along the path, a bench became free, and Kay darted to claim it. Helen joined her, moving more slowly. She sat, leaning forward, frowning-still gazing hard across the city.

Kay said, 'Isn't it marvellous?'

Helen nodded. 'Isn't it. I wish it was clearer, though.'

'But then it wouldn't be so charming. It's romantic, like this.'

Helen still peered. She pointed. 'That's St Pancras Station, isn't it?' She spoke quietly, glancing about for the officious man.

Kay looked. 'Yes, it must be.'

'And there's the University building.'

'Yes. What are you looking for? Rathbone Place? I doubt we'd be able to see it from here.'

'There's the Foundling Estate,' said Helen, as if she hadn't heard.

'It's further west than the Coram's Fields, and further south.' Kay looked again, and pointed. 'There's Portland Place, I think. It's nearer to there.'

'Yes,' said Helen, vaguely.

'Can you see? You're not looking in the right direction.'

'Yes.'

Kay put her hand on Helen's wrist. 'Darling, you're not-'

'God!' said Helen, sharply moving her arm away. 'Must you call me that?'

She spoke almost in a hiss, glancing about as she had before. Her face was white, with cold and with annoyance. The lipstick was standing out on her lips.

Kay turned her head. She felt, suddenly, a rush not so much of anger as of disappointment: a disappointment in the weather, in Helen, in the day-in the whole damn thing. 'For Christ's sake,' she said. She lit up yet another cigarette, without offering the case. The smoke was bitter in her mouth, like her own soured mood.

Helen said quietly, after a time, 'I'm sorry, Kay.' She'd clasped her hands together in her lap and was gazing down at them.

'What on earth's the matter with you?'

'I feel a bit blue, that's all.'

'Well, don't for God's sake start looking like that, or-' Kay threw away the cigarette, and lowered her voice-'I shall have to put my arm around you; and think how much you'll hate it…'

Her mood had changed again. The bitterness had gone, had sunk as quickly as it had risen; the disappointment, after all, had been too huge a thing to bear. She felt filled, instead, with tenderness. She felt actually sore, about her heart. 'I'm sorry, too,' she said gently. 'I suppose that birthdays are never as much fun for the people having them, as they are for the people putting them together.'

Helen looked up and smiled, rather sadly. 'I must not like being twenty-nine. It's a funny age, isn't it? Much better to have got it over with and gone straight to thirty.'

'It's a perfect age,' said Kay, with some of her former gallantry, 'on you. Any age would be that-'

But Helen had flinched. 'Don't, Kay,' she said. 'Don't- Don't be so nice to me.'

'Don't be nice to you!'

'Don't-' Helen shook her head. 'I don't deserve it.'

'You said that this morning.'

'It's true, that's why. I-'

She looked out across London again, in the same direction she'd gazed in before; and wouldn't go on. Kay watched her, perplexed; then rubbed her arm, gently, with her knuckles.

'Hey,' she said quietly. 'It doesn't matter. I wanted to make the day a special one, that's all. But maybe you can't expect to have a special day in wartime. Next year- Who knows? The war might have ended. We'll do it properly. I'll take you away! I'll take you to France! Would you like that?'

Helen didn't answer. She had turned to Kay and was holding her gaze, and her look had grown earnest. After a moment she said, in a murmur, 'You won't get tired of me, Kay, now that I'm a beastly bad-tempered old spinster?'

For a second, Kay couldn't reply. Then she said, in the same low tone, 'You're my girl, aren't you? I'll never grow tired of you, you know that.'

'You might.'

'I shan't ever. You're mine, for ever.'

'I wish I was,' said Helen. 'I wish- I wish the world was different. Why can't it be different? I hate having to sneak and-' She waited, while a woman and a man went silently by, arm in arm. She lowered her voice still further. 'I hate having to sneak and slink so grubbily about. If we could only be married, something like that.'

Kay blinked and looked away. It was one of the tragedies of her life, that she couldn't be like a man to Helen-make her a wife, give her children… They sat in silence for a moment, gazing out again at the view but not seeing any of it now. Kay said quietly, 'Let me take you home.'

Helen was pulling at a button on her coat. 'We'll only have an hour or two before you'll have to go out.'

Kay made herself smile. 'Well, I know a way to fill an hour or two.'

'You know what I mean,' said Helen. She looked up again, and Kay saw then that she was almost crying. 'Can't you stay home with me tonight, Kay?'

'Helen,' said Kay, appalled. 'What's the matter?'

'I just- I don't know. I wish you could stay with me, that's all.'

'I can't. I can't. I have to go in. You know I do.'

'You're always there.'

'I can't, Helen… God, don't look at me like that! If I have to think of you, at home, unhappy, I'll-'

They had drawn closer together. But now, as before, a man and a girl came strolling along the path, beside their bench, and Helen drew away. She took out a handkerchief and wiped her eyes. Kay watched the couple-who had paused to look at the view, like everyone else-and wanted to kill them. The urge to take Helen in her arms-and the consciousness that she must not do it-was making her twitch, making her ill.

When the couple moved on, she looked at Helen again and said, 'Tell me you won't be unhappy tonight.'

'I'll be ecstatic tonight,' said Helen unhappily.

'Tell me you won't be lonely. Tell me- Tell me you'll go to the pub and get canned, and pick up some boy, some soldier-'

'Would you like me to?'

'I'd love it,' said Kay… 'I'd hate it, you know I would. I'd jump in the river. You're the only thing that makes this bloody war bearable.'

'Kay-'

'Tell me you love me,' said Kay, in a whisper.

'I do love you,' said Helen. She closed her eyes, as if the better to feel it or show it; and her voice grew earnest again. 'I do love you, Kay.'

'Well, son,' said Duncan 's father, as he and Viv sat down, 'how are you? Been treating you all right, have they?'

'Yes,' Duncan answered, 'I suppose so.'

'Eh?'

Duncan cleared his throat. 'I said, Yes, they have.'

His father nodded, grimacing awfully as he tried to follow the words. This was the worst sort of setting for him, Duncan knew. The room had six tables in it, and theirs was the last; but every table had two prisoners at one end, and the prisoners' visitors at the other; and everyone was shouting. Duncan 's neighbour was a man named Leddy, a post-office clerk, in for forging money orders. Sitting next to Viv was Leddy's wife. Duncan had seen her before. She gave Leddy hell, every time she came. 'If you think I'm happy,' she was saying now, 'about having a woman like that come into my home-' At the table next to her was a girl with a baby. She was jiggling the baby up and down, trying to get it to smile at its father. But the baby was crying: shrieking open-mouthed like a siren, then pulling in great shuddering breaths and shrieking again… The room was just an ordinary small prison room, with ordinary closed prison windows. It smelt of ordinary prison smells-unwashed feet, sour mops, bad food, bad breath. But above the regular smells were other ones, too, much more disturbing: perfume, make-up, permanent waves; the smells of children; the smells of traffic, dogs, pavements, open air.

Viv was taking off her coat. She was wearing a lavender-coloured blouse done up with little pearl buttons, and the buttons caught Duncan 's eye. He'd forgotten about buttons like that. He'd forgotten what they felt like. He wished he could reach across the table, now, and take one, just for a second, between his finger and his thumb.

She saw him looking, and moved about as if self-conscious. She folded her coat across her lap. 'How are you, really?' she asked, when she'd done it. 'Are you all right?'

'Yes, I'm OK.'

'You look awfully pale.'

'Do I? You said that last time, though.'

'I always forget.'

'How've you liked this past month, son?' said his father loudly. 'Made you jump, has it? I said to Mrs Christie, Jerry's got us on the hop, he's caught us with our feet up. What a time of it we had, though, a night or two ago! Bangs so loud, they woke me up! That'll give you an idea how bad it was.'

'Yes,' said Duncan, trying to smile.

'Mr Wilson's place lost its roof.'

'Mr Wilson's place?'

'You know the one.'

'Where we used to go,' said Viv, seeing Duncan struggle, 'when we were little. That man and his sister, who used to give us sweets. Don't you remember? They had a little bird, in a cage. You used to ask to feed it.'

'-a great big lump of a girl,' Leddy's wife was saying now, 'with habits like that! It turned my stomach-'

'I don't remember,' said Duncan.

His father was shaking his head-a beat behind, because of his hearing. 'No,' he said, 'you hardly credit it when it all dies down. You'd think from the racket that the world had been smashed to nothing. It gives you a turn to see so many houses still standing up. Puts you right back in the blitz.-Well, they're calling it the Little Blitz, aren't they?' He said this last to Viv; then turned to Duncan again. 'You won't feel it so much, I suppose,' he said, 'in here?'

Duncan thought of the darkness, Giggs calling out, the officers going down to their shelter. He moved in his chair. 'It depends what you mean,' he said, 'by “feel it”.'

But he must have mumbled. His father tilted his head, grimaced again. 'What's that?'

'It depends what you- God! No, we don't feel it so much.'

'No,' answered his father mildly. 'No, I shouldn't have thought you would…'

Mr Daniels walked up and down behind the prisoners, scuffing his shoes. The baby still cried: Duncan 's father started trying to catch its eye, making faces at it. A few tables on, Fraser was sitting; his mother and father had come to see him. Duncan could just make them out. His mother was dressed in black, with a hat with a veil, as if for a funeral. His father's face was brick-red. Duncan couldn't hear what they were saying. But he could see Fraser's hands where they rested on the table, the blistered fingers moving restlessly about.

Viv said, 'Dad's been moved to another shop at Warner's, Duncan.'

He looked back at her, blinking, and she touched their father's arm, spoke into his ear. 'I was just telling Duncan, Dad, that you've been moved to another shop.'

Duncan 's father nodded. 'That's right.'

'Oh yes?' said Duncan. 'Is it all right?'

'It's not too bad. I'm working with Bernie Lawson now.'

'Bernie Lawson?'

'And Mrs Gifford's daughter, June.' Duncan 's father smiled. He started to tell Duncan some story… Duncan lost the thread of it almost at once. His father never realised. He spoke of all the little factory jokes and intrigues as if Duncan was still at home. 'Stanley Hibbert,' he was saying, and, 'Muriel and Phil. You should have seen their faces! I told Miss Ogilvy-' Duncan recognised some of the names, but the people were like ghosts to him. He watched the words being formed on his father's lips, and took his cue from his father's expressions and nodded and smiled, as if he were deaf himself…

'They said to give you their best, anyway,' his father finished. 'They always ask after you. And Pamela sends her love, of course. She said to tell you, she's sorry she can't get in to see you more.'

Duncan nodded again-forgetting, for a moment, who Pamela was. Then, with a little jolt, he remembered that she was his other sister… She'd come to see him about three times, in the three years he'd been in here. He didn't much mind; Viv and his father, however, always looked embarassed about it.

Viv said awkwardly, 'It's hard, when there are babies.'

'Oh yes,' said their father, seizing on this, 'that makes things hard. No, you don't want to be hauling kids about with you, when you come here. Unless you're bringing them in to see their dads; that's a different thing, of course. Mind you-' he glanced at the girl with the crying baby, and tried, and failed, to lower his voice-'I shouldn't have cared to have any of you kids see me in a place like this, if it'd been me. Well, it's not nice. It doesn't give you nice things to think back on. I hardly liked to have you see your mother, up at the hospital that time.'

'It's nice for the fathers, though,' said Viv. 'It was nice for Mother, I expect.'

'Oh yes, there is that…'

Duncan glanced down the room again, to Fraser's parents. This time, too, he saw Fraser himself: Fraser was looking along the tables, as he was. He met Duncan 's gaze, and slightly turned down the corners of his mouth. Then he looked at Duncan 's father and at Viv, an in interested way… Duncan grew embarassed, thinking of his father's threadbare coat. He lowered his head and started picking bits of varnish from the table.

His hands were clean, because he'd taken care to wash them that morning, and to pare his nails. His trousers had a sharp crease down each leg, from where he'd slept with them beneath his mattress the night before. His hair was combed flat, and greased with a mixture of wax and margarine… He had a vision, every time, of how it would be when he was brought in here: he wanted his father and Viv to look at him and be somehow impressed by him; he wanted them to think, He's a credit to us! But always, at about this point in their visit, his mood began to plunge. He remembered that he and his father had never had anything to say to each other, even years before. And his disappointment-in his father, in himself, even in Viv-would start to rise up and almost choke him. He'd wish, perversely, that he'd come with dirty fingernails and uncombed hair. He'd realise that what he really wanted was for Viv and his father to see that he lived in filth: he wanted them to tell him that he was a sort of hero for doing it without complaining, without being turned by it into a beast. The fact that they talked to him, every time, about ordinary things-as if they'd come to visit him in a hospital or a boarding-school, rather than a prison-made his disappointment turn to rage. Sometimes it would be as much as he could do to look at his father's face without wanting to hurl himself across the room and hit it.

He felt himself begin to tremble. His hands were still before him, on the table, and he saw them jump. So he drew them back and folded them together in his lap. He glanced at the visiting-room clock. Eleven minutes still to go…

Duncan 's father had been making faces at the baby again, and the baby had quietened. Now he and Viv were looking idly about the room. They've got bored of me, Duncan thought. He saw them as being like people in a restaurant who'd run out of things to say-who'd reached that point in a dull evening when it became all right to start studying the other diners, to pick out little quirks and flaws… He looked again at the clock. Ten minutes, now. But his hands still trembled. He felt himself, too, begin to sweat. The urge rose in him, suddenly, to muck things up, to do the worst he possibly could; to make Viv and his father hate him. His father turned back to him and said pleasantly, 'Who's that chap, son, right down at the end there?' and he answered with great scorn, as if the question was an utterly fatuous one: 'That's Patrick Grayson.'

'He's a nice-looking fellow, isn't he? Has he just come in?'

'No, he hasn't. You saw him last time. You said he was nice-looking, then. His time's almost up.'

'Is it? I bet he's pleased. I bet his wife is, too.'

Duncan curled his lip. 'Do you? He's going into the army as soon as he gets out. He might as well stay here. At least in here he gets to see her once a month; and there's no chance, of course, of him getting his head shot off.'

His father tried to follow the words. 'Well,' he said vaguely, 'he'll be glad to do his bit, I expect.' He turned his head again. 'Yes, he's a nice-looking chap all right.'

Duncan exploded. 'Why don't you go and sit with him, instead of me, if you like him so much?'

'What's that?' said his father, turning back.

' Duncan,' said Viv.

But Duncan went on. 'I expect you'd rather I was like him. I expect you'd rather I was going out, into the army, to get my head blown off. I suppose you'd rather the army was going to make a murderer of me-'

' Duncan,' said Viv again, looking startled but also tired. 'Don't be silly.'

His father, however, was losing his temper. 'Don't talk bloody nonsense,' he said. 'Going into the army to get your head blown off? What do you know about it? If you'd gone into the army when you were supposed to-'

'Dad,' said Viv.

He ignored her, or didn't hear her. 'A spell in the bloody army,' he said, moving about in his seat, 'is what he needs. Talking like that. Am I ashamed! Of course I'm bloody well ashamed!'

She touched his arm. ' Duncan didn't mean anything by it, Dad. Did you, Duncan?'

Duncan didn't answer. His father glared at him for a second, then said, 'You don't know what shame feels like, in here! You'll know it when you come out, though. You'll know it, the first time you have to pass that woman and her husband in the street-'

He meant Alec's parents. But he could never say Alec's name. He bit off the words now and, with an effort, swallowed them down. The colour had risen into his face. 'Am I ashamed!' he said again. He looked at Duncan. 'What do you want me to say to you, boy?'

Duncan shrugged. He felt ashamed himself, now; but curiously better, too, for having made this happen. He went back to picking at the table, saying lightly but clearly, 'Don't come, if you feel like that about it.'

That started his father off again. 'Don't come? What are you talking about, don't come? You're my own son, aren't you?'

'So?'

Mr Pearce looked away in disgust.

' Duncan,' said Viv.

'What? He doesn't have to come.'

' Duncan, for God's sake!'

But now he'd started to smile. The smile didn't come from a sense of pleasure. His feelings were plunging about like a madman's. They were like a kite, in a storm: it was all he could do keep his balance, hauling at the string… He put his hand across his mouth and said, 'I'm sorry.'

His father looked up, and his colour rose even higher. 'What's he smiling at?'

'He's not really smiling,' said Viv.

'If his mother was here-! No wonder you're poorly.'

'Just leave it, Dad.'

'Vivien's not well,' said Mr Pearce aggressively to Duncan. 'She had to stop, on the way here. The last thing she wants is some of your nonsense. You ought to be grateful she's come to see you at all! Plenty sisters wouldn't bother, I can tell you that.'

'They haven't a clue,' said Leddy's wife, chiming in. She'd heard it all, of course. 'They sit in here. They get their dinners brought to them. They don't give a thought to what it's like for us, out there.'

Viv made some gesture, but wouldn't answer. Her expression was grim. Duncan gazed into her face and noticed, what he hadn't seen before, that she was pale beneath her make-up, and her eyes were shadowed and red at the rims… He felt, suddenly, that his father was right. He felt sick with himself, for spoiling things. She's the nicest, prettiest sister a fellow could have! he thought, almost wildly, still looking at Viv. He wanted to draw the other men's attention to her. Look here, he wanted to be able to cry, at my nice sister!

It took all his strength and will just to sit there, wretchedly, in silence. He looked at Mr Daniels, longing for him to call out that visiting-time was up; and finally, with great relief, he saw him checking his watch against the face of the clock, then unlocking a cupboard and bringing out a hand-bell. He gave the bell a couple of half-hearted rings, and the muddle of voices at once grew louder. Chairs were pushed back. People got up quickly-as if, like Duncan, they were relieved. The baby gave a start in its mother's arms and started crying all over again.

Duncan 's father rose, grimly, and put on his hat. Viv looked at Duncan in a way that said, Well done.

He said, 'I'm sorry.'

'You ought to be.' They were speaking too softly, now, for their father to hear. 'You're not the only one who's badly off, you know. You might just try thinking about that.'

'I do. It's just-' He couldn't explain it. He said instead, 'Are you really not well?'

She looked away. 'I'm all right. I'm just tired, that's all.'

'Because of the raids?'

'Yes, I expect so.'

He watched her stand and shrug on her coat. Her lavender blouse, with its little pearl buttons, got covered over. Her hair fell forward as she dipped her head, and she tucked it back, behind her ear. He saw again how pale she was beneath her powder.

They weren't allowed to kiss or embrace, but before she moved off she reached her arm across the table and just touched her hand to his.

'Look after yourself, all right?' she said, without smiling, as she drew the hand back.

'I will. Look after yourself, too.'

'I'll try,' she said.

He nodded to his father-wanting to catch his father's eye, but afraid of it, too. He said, 'Goodbye, Dad. I'm sorry, for the silly things I said.'

But perhaps he didn't say it clearly enough. His father turned away while he was still speaking, dipping his head, looking for Viv's arm so that he could link his own with it.

Ten minutes earlier Duncan had almost wanted to strike his face; now he stood with his thighs pressed hard against the table, watching Viv and his father find a place in the crowd of visitors; not wanting to leave the room until his father had left it, in case his father should look back.

But only Viv looked back-just once, very briefly. And a second later Mr Daniels came to Duncan and gave him a push.

'Into the line with you, Pearce. And you, Leddy… All right, you buggers, let's go.'

He took them out of the visiting-room, back to the junction of passages which led to the workshops, and handed them over to Mr Chase. Mr Chase looked wearily at his watch. It was twenty to five. The men from the Basket Shop, he said, could make their way back to it by themselves; one of them was a Redband. As for the others-well, he was fucked if he was going to escort them all the way over to Mailbags One and Two, just for the sake of twenty minutes; he led them back to the hall instead. They walked without speaking: depressed, subdued; all of them, like Duncan, with neatly combed hair and creaseless trousers and clean hands… The hall looked vast with no-one in it. There were so few of them-eight men, only-that when they trudged up the staircases the landings made that chilly, shivering sound that Duncan listened for at night.

Each man went straight into his own cell, as if glad to get in there. Duncan sat on his bunk and put his head in his hands.

He stayed like that for three or four minutes. Then he heard firm, soft footsteps on the landing outside his door, and quickly tried to dry his eyes. But he couldn't do it quickly enough.

'Now, then,' said Mr Mundy gently. 'What's all this?'

That made Duncan cry properly. He covered his face and sobbed into his fingers, his shoulders shaking, making the bed-frame jump. Mr Mundy didn't try to stop him; he didn't come to him, put an arm on his shoulder, anything like that. He simply stood, and waited for the worst of the tears to be over; and then he said, 'There. Had a visit from your dad, haven't you? That's right, I saw the Order. Shook you up a bit, has it?'

Duncan nodded, wiping his face on his coarse prison handkerchief. 'A bit.'

'It always shakes a fellow up, seeing faces from home. Well, put it this way, it's hard to be natural. You go on and cry some more, if that's what you want. It won't trouble me. I've seen harder men than you cry, I can tell you.'

Duncan shook his head. His face felt hot, felt bruised and pulled about, from the contortions of his sobs. 'I'm all right, now,' he said unsteadily.

''Course you are.'

'I just- I make such a mess of things, Mr Mundy. I make such a mess of things, every time.'

His voice was rising. He bit his mouth, drew in his arms and clenched his fists, to keep himself from crying again. When the fit passed and he let himself relax, he felt exhausted. He groaned and rubbed his face.

Mr Mundy stood watching for another moment; then he caught hold of Duncan 's chair and turned it and, slightly awkwardly, with a little sigh of discomfort, sat down. 'Tell you what,' he said, as he did it. 'Have a smoke. Look what I've got here.'

He brought out a packet of Player's cigarettes. He opened it up, and leaned to offer it to Duncan. 'Go on,' he said, giving the cigarettes a shake.

Duncan drew a cigarette out. It seemed as fat as a small cigar compared to the usual prison roll-ups. The tobacco was tight inside its smooth, cool sheath of paper-so nice in his hand, he turned it in his fingers and began to feel better.

'All right, isn't it?' said Mr Mundy, watching him.

'It's lovely,' said Duncan.

'Aren't you going to smoke it?'

'I don't know. I ought to keep it, to take the tobacco out. I could get four or five smokes from this.'

Mr Mundy smiled. He started to sing, in a tuneful old man's voice. 'Five little fags in a dainty little packet…' He wrinkled up his nose. 'Smoke it now.'

'Shall I?'

'Go on. I'll keep you company. We can be two chaps, smoking together.'

Duncan laughed. But the laughter came too soon on top of his tears: it caught in his chest and made him tremble. Mr Mundy pretended not to notice. He got out a cigarette for himself, and a box of matches. He held the flame to Duncan first, then drew on it himself. They smoked, for half a minute, in silence. Then Duncan held the cigarette off and said, 'It's making my eyes sting. It's making me giddy! I'm going to faint!'

'Get away with you!' said Mr Mundy, chuckling.

'I am!' said Duncan. He sat back, pretending to swoon. He became like a boy, sometimes, with Mr Mundy… But then he grew serious again. 'God,' he said, 'what a state to be in! Knocked down by one little cigarette!'

He kept his feet on the floor but let himself fall right back, supporting himself on one of his elbows. He wondered where Viv and his father were, now. He tried to picture his father's journey back to Streatham; he couldn't do it. Then he tried to visualise the various rooms of his father's flat. He had, instead, a sudden, violent, vivid image of his father's kitchen on the day he'd last seen it, with the spreading mess of darkening scarlet on the walls and floor-

He sat up again, quickly. Ash fell from his cigarette. He brushed it away, then rubbed his still-aching face and, after a moment, without looking up, said quietly, 'Do you think I'll do all right, Mr Mundy, when I get out?'

Mr Mundy took another puff of his own cigarette. 'Of course you will,' he said comfortably. 'You'll just need time to-well, to find your feet.'

'To find my feet?' Duncan frowned. 'You mean, like a sailor?' He saw himself staggering about on a tilting pavement.

'Like a sailor!' Mr Mundy laughed, tickled by the idea.

'But what will I do, say, for work?'

'You'll be all right.'

'But why should I be?'

'There'll always be jobs for clever young fellows like you. You mark my words.'

It was the sort of thing that Duncan 's father said, that made Duncan want to kill him. But now he bit at one of his fingernails and looked at Mr Mundy across his knuckles and said, 'Do you think so?'

Mr Mundy nodded. 'I've seen all sorts of fellows come through here. They all felt like you, at one time or another. They did just fine.'

'But the sorts of fellows you've seen,' persisted Duncan, 'didn't they probably have wives and children, things like that, to go back home to? Were any of them-frightened, do you think?'

'Frightened?'

'Frightened of what was going to happen to them-how they were going to be-?'

'Now then,' said Mr Mundy again, but more sternly. 'What sort of talk is that? You know what sort it is, don't you?'

Duncan looked away. 'Yes,' he said, after a moment. 'It's letting Error in.'

'That's right. It's the worst thing a boy in your situation can do, to start thinking like that.'

'Yes, I know,' said Duncan. 'It's just- Well, you look so much at walls, in this place. I try to look into the future but that's like a wall, too, I can't see myself getting over it. I try to think of what I'll do, where I'll live. There's my dad's house,'-he saw again that scarlet kitchen-'but my dad's house is only two streets away from-' he lowered his voice, 'from Alec's. Alec, you know, the boy, my friend-? My father used to go down that street to go to work. Now he goes half a mile around it every time, my sister told me. How will it be, if I go back there? I keep thinking about it, Mr Mundy. I keep thinking, if I was to see someone who knew Alec-'

'That boy Alec,' said Mr Mundy firmly, 'was a troubled boy, from everything you've told me. That boy lived in Error, if anybody ever did. He's free of all that now.'

Duncan moved, uncomfortable. 'You said that before. But it never feels like that. If you'd been there-'

'No-one was there,' said Mr Mundy, 'but you. And that's what you might call, your Burden. But I'd lay a pound against a penny Alec is looking at you right now, longing to pluck that Burden from you-saying, Put it down, chum! and wishing you could hear him. I'd bet you he is laughing, but also crying: laughing, to be where he is, in the sunshine; crying, because you are still in the dark…'

Duncan nodded-liking the comforting sound of Mr Mundy's voice; liking the quaintness of the words-pluck, Burden, Error, chum; but not, in his heart, believing any of it. He wanted to think that Alec was where Mr Mundy described: he tried to imagine him surrounded by sunlight and flowers, smiling… But Alec had never been like that, he'd said it was common to sit about in parks and gardens or go bathing; and he hardly ever really smiled, because his teeth were bad and he was ashamed of them.

Duncan looked up, into Mr Mundy's face. 'It's hard, Mr Mundy,' he said simply.

Mr Mundy didn't answer for a moment. Instead he got slowly to his feet, then came to Duncan 's bunk and sat beside him; and he put his hand-his left hand, with the cigarette in it-on Duncan 's shoulder. He said, in a quiet, confidential tone, 'You think of me, when you get low; and I'll think of you. How's that? You and me are alike, after all: for I shall be out of here next year, just as you will. My date for retirement's coming up, you see; and the idea's as queer to me as it is to you-queerer, perhaps, for you know what they say, that if a prisoner does two years in gaol, then his guard does one… So you think of me, when you get low. And I'll think of you. I'll think of you-well, I won't say, as a father thinks of his son, for I know you've got your own dad to do that; but let's say, as a man might think of his nephew… How about that?'

He held Duncan 's gaze, and patted his shoulder. When a little ash fell from the tip of his cigarette to Duncan 's knee, he reached with his other hand and carefully brushed it away; then let the hand stay there.

'All right?' he asked.

Duncan lowered his gaze. 'Yes,' he answered quietly.

Mr Mundy patted him again. 'Good boy. For you're a special boy-you know that, don't you? You're a very special boy. And things have a way of turning out all right, for special boys like you. You see if they don't.'

He kept his hand on Duncan 's knee for another moment; then gave the knee a squeeze, and got up. The gates, at the end of the hall, had been thrown open: the men were being brought back from the workshops. There was the sound of many footsteps, the rattling of the stairs and iron landings. Mr Chase could be heard calling out: 'Keep moving. Keep moving! Every man to his own cell. Giggs and Hammond, stop pissing about!'

Mr Mundy pinched out his cigarette and put it back into its packet; then, as Duncan watched, he took out two fresh ones, lifted up the corner of Duncan 's pillow and slipped them underneath. He gave Duncan a wink, and patted the pillow smooth, when he'd done it; he was just straightening up when the first of the men began to troop past Duncan 's door. Crawley, Waterman, Giggs, Quigley… Then Fraser appeared. He had his hands in his pockets and was kicking his boots as he walked. He brightened up, however, when he saw Mr Mundy.

'Hello,' he said. 'This is an honour, sir, and no mistake! And do I smell real tobacco? Hello, Pearce. How was your visit? About as much fun as mine, from the look of it. That was a nice trick of Mr Chase's, too-sending us back to the Basket Shop, while you Mailbags got off early.'

Duncan didn't answer. Fraser wasn't listening, anyway. He was looking at Mr Mundy, who was moving past him to the door. 'You're not leaving us, sir?'

'I've got work to do,' said Mr Mundy stiffly. 'My day's not like you men's, that finishes at five.'

'Oh, but give us proper occupations,' said Fraser in his exaggerated way. 'Teach us trades. Pay us real men's wages, instead of the pittances we get now. I'm sure we'd work like billy-oh then! Heavens, you might even find you'd make decent men of us. Imagine a prison doing that!'

Mr Mundy nodded, rather sourly. 'You're clever, son,' he said, as he went out.

'So my father always tells me, Mr Mundy,' Fraser answered. 'So clever I'll cut myself. Hey?'

He started to laugh; and looked at Duncan, as if expecting Duncan to join in.

But Duncan wouldn't meet his gaze. He lay down on his bed, on his side, with his face turned to the wall. And when Fraser said, 'What's the matter with you? Pearce? What the hell's the matter?', he flung back his arm, as if to push him away.

'Shut up, will you?' he said. 'Just fucking well shut up.'

'I'll read my book,' Helen had said, when Kay was leaving. 'I'll listen to the wireless. I'll change into my lovely new pyjamas and go to bed.' And she had meant it. For almost an hour after Kay had gone, she'd stayed on the sofa reading Frenchman's Creek. At half-past seven she made more toast; she turned on the radio, caught the start of a play… But the play was rather dull. She listened for ten or fifteen minutes, then tried another programme. Finally she switched the radio off. The flat seemed very silent after that: it was always especially silent in the evenings and at weekends, because of Palmer's, the furniture warehouse, being so shut up and dark. The silence and the stillness sometimes got on Helen's nerves.

She sat down again with her book, but found she couldn't settle to it. She tried a magazine; her gaze slid over the words on the page and took nothing in… The idea began to rise in her, that she was wasting time. It was her birthday-her birthday, in wartime. She might never have another! 'You can't expect to have a special day in wartime,' Kay had said that afternoon; but why couldn't you? How long did they have to go on, letting the war spoil everything? They had been patient, all this time. They'd lived in darkness. They'd lived without salt, without scent. They'd fed themselves little scraps of pleasure, like parings of cheese… Now she became aware of the minutes as they passed: she felt them, suddenly, for what they were, as fragments of her life, her youth, that were rushing away like so many drops of water, never to return.

I want to see Julia, she thought. And then it was exactly as if somebody was seizing her by the shoulders and whispering urgently into her face, What are you waiting for? Come on! She threw the magazine down, jumped up, and ran into the bathroom to use the lavatory and comb her hair and redo her make-up; and then she put on her coat and scarf, and the wool tam o'shanter she'd been wearing earlier that day, and went out.

The mews, of course, was perfectly dark, the cobblestones slippery with frost; but she picked her way across it without her torch. From the various pubs on Rathbone Place she could just hear the clink of glass, the buzz of beery voices, the tipsy lilt of a mechanical piano. The sounds made her feel better. It was an ordinary Saturday night. People were out, enjoying themselves. Why shouldn't she be? She wasn't thirty yet… She went along Percy Street, past the blacked-out windows of the cafés and restaurants there. She crossed Tottenham Court Road, and entered the shabby streets of Bloomsbury.

The area was quiet, and she went swiftly; then her foot struck a broken kerb and she almost fell, and after that she forced herself to walk at a sensible pace, and to pick out her way, carefully, with the beam of her torch.

But her heart was racing as though she was running. She kept saying to herself, This is crazy, Helen! What on earth would Julia think? She probably wouldn't even be at home. Why should she be? Or she might be writing. She might have visitors. There might be somebody-a friend-

That made her slow her step again. For it hadn't occurred to her, before, that Julia might have a lover. She'd never mentioned anyone; but it would be like her, Helen thought, to keep that sort of thing a secret. Why should she mention something like that to Helen, anyway? What was there between them? They had had tea together that time, outside Marylebone Station. Then they'd wandered around that house in Bryanston Square, practically in silence. After that, they'd met up again and had drinks in a pub; and one sunny lunch-time, a few days before, they had gone into Regent's Park and sat beside the lake…

That was all they had done; and yet it seemed to Helen that with those slight encounters the world had been subtly transformed. She felt connected to Julia now, as if by a slender, quivering thread. She could have closed her eyes and, with a fingertip, touched the exact small point on her breast at which the thread ran delicately into her heart and tugged at it.

She had reached Russell Square Underground Station, and the streets were busier here. She got caught up, briefly, in a little knot of people who'd just come up from the platforms and were standing around rather helplessly, waiting for their eyes to grow used to the darkness.

The sight of them, like the sounds from the Rathbone Place pubs, gave her more confidence. She went on, past the garden of the Foundling Estate; hesitated only once, at the mouth of Mecklenburgh Place; and then pushed on, into the square.

It looked forbidding in the darkness, the flat Georgian houses seeming smooth as well-bred bored blank faces-until she moved, and saw the sky behind the windows, and realised that many of them had been gutted by blast and by fire. She thought she remembered which house was Julia's, though she'd only been here once before. But she was sure that Julia's house was at the end of one of the terraces. She recalled it as having a broken step, that had rocked about under her feet.

She went up the steps of the house she thought she remembered. The steps were cracked, but stayed steady. They might have been mended, she supposed…

She wasn't sure, suddenly, if this house was right. She looked for the bell to Julia's flat: there were four bells there, unmarked, unnamed. Which was the one? She had no idea, so chose one at random. She heard it ring, somewhere in the depths of the building, as if in an empty room; she knew from the sound that it wasn't the right one and, without waiting, pressed another. The ring of this one was less clear, she couldn't gauge the location of it. She thought she heard a movement on the first or second floor; but even as she heard it she said to herself, It won't be this one, it'll be the next.-For it was never the second thing, in tales, in spells, it was always the third… But the movement came again. She heard slow, soft-soled footsteps on a staircase. Then the door was opened, and Julia was there.

It took her a moment to recognise Helen, in the darkness, with only the single, shaded bulb of a torch to light her. But when she saw who it was she gripped the edge of the door and said, 'What is it? Is it Kay?'

Has Kay found out? is what Helen took her to mean; and her heart contracted. Then she realised, horribly, that Julia thought she must have come with bad news. She said quickly, breathlessly, 'No. It's just- I wanted to see you, Julia. I just wanted to see you, that's all.'

Julia didn't answer. The torch lit her face as it must have lit Helen's, making a queer sort of mask of it. Her expression was impossible to read. But after a moment she opened the door wider, and moved back.

'Come in,' she said.

She led the way up a darkened staircase to the second floor. She showed Helen into a tiny hallway, then took her through a curtained doorway into a sitting-room. The light was dim, but seemed bright after the blacked-out street. Helen felt exposed in it, embarassed.

Julia stooped to pick up a pair of kicked-off shoes, a dropped tea-towel, a fallen jacket. She looked distracted, preoccupied: not at all glad, in the ordinary way of gladness, that Helen had come. Her hair was very dark, and curiously flat against her head: when she moved further into the light Helen saw with dismay that it was damp, that she must recently have washed it. Her face was pale, and quite unmade-up. She was wearing unpressed dark flannel trousers, a wide-collared shirt, and a sleeveless sweater. On her feet she had what looked like fishermen's socks, and a pair of red Moroccan slippers.

'Wait here, while I get rid of this lot,' she said, going back out through the curtain with the jacket and the shoes.

Helen stood, nervously, helplessly, and gazed about.

The room was large, warm, untidy, not at all like Kay's neat bachelor flat; but not quite, either, what Helen had been expecting. The walls were bare, and coloured with a patchy red distemper; the carpets were an assortment of overlapping Turkish khelims and imitation rugs. The furniture was very ordinary. There was one large divan couch, covered with mismatched cushions; and a dirty pink velvet chair, with springs and strips of torn hessian showing beneath. The mantelpiece was painted marble. It had an ashtray on it, overflowing with stubs. One of these still smoked: Julia came back, and picked it up and pinched it out.

Helen said, 'You don't mind, do you, that I've come?'

'Of course not.'

'I started to walk. Then I saw where I was. I remembered your house.'

'Did you?'

'Yes. I came here once, ages ago. With Kay. Do you remember? Kay was dropping something off to you-a ticket, or a book, something like that. We didn't come up, you said the place was too untidy. We stood about in the hall, downstairs… Do you remember?'

Julia frowned. Then, 'Yes,' she said slowly. 'I think I do.'

They looked at one another, and almost at once looked away, as if in embarassment or perplexity-for it was impossible, Helen found, to imagine a time when calling on Julia with Kay would have been an ordinary thing to do; impossible to think of standing at Kay's side on a doorstep, chatting politely, thinking only how mildly awkward things were, between Julia and Kay… And again she thought, what had happened, since then? Nothing had happened, really.

But if nothing has happened, she asked herself, why have I kept that nothing from Kay? Why the hell am I here?

She knew why she was there. She grew afraid.

'Perhaps I should go,' she said, 'after all.'

'You've only just arrived!'

'You've been washing your hair.'

Julia frowned, as if annoyed. 'You've seen wet hair before, haven't you? Don't be idiotic. Sit down, and I'll get you a drink. I have wine! I've had it for weeks, and had no occasion for opening it. It's only Algerian, but still.'

She stooped to open a cupboard and started shifting things about inside it. Helen watched her for a second, then took a step and, nervously, looked around again. She went to a shelf of books and glanced across the titles. They were detective stories, mainly, with gaudy spines. Julia's two published novels sat amongst them: Death By Degrees, and Twenty Mortal Murders.

She looked from the books to the pictures on the walls, the ornaments on the painted mantelpiece. As awkward and as anxious as she was, she wanted to absorb every little detail, for the sake of what that detail might be able to tell her about Julia.

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

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

'Your cousin Olga's?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Another year… So I'll be thirty.'

'And I'll be thirty-two.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

Helen shook her head.

'Why not?'

'I don't know.'

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

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

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

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

'Are you sure?'

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

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

'Well, naturally I do.'

'There's no naturally about it.'

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

'Yet you won't tell Kay?'

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

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

Perhaps it worked. Julia smoked her cigarette for a time, looking thoughtful, but without speaking; then she ground the cigarette out and got to her feet. 'Kay wants a wife,' she said. She smiled. 'That sounds like a children's game, doesn't it? Kay wants a wife. She always has. One must be the wife with Kay, or nothing…'

She yawned, as if bored by the idea; then went to the window and drew back the curtain. There were little chinks, Helen could see, in the grey talc boards, and she put her eye to one of these and peered out. 'Don't you hate these evenings?' she said. 'Not knowing if the Warning will sound, and so on? It's like waiting for an execution that might or might not take place.'

'Would you rather I went?' Helen asked.

'God, no! I'm glad you're here. It's much worse when one's alone, don't you think?'

'Yes, much worse. But bad in the shelters, too. Kay always wants me to go over to the one in Rathbone Place; but I can't stand it, it makes me feel trapped. I'd always rather sit and be petrified on my own, than have strangers see me being frightened.'

'Me, too,' said Julia. 'Sometimes I go out, you know. I like it better in the open space.'

'You just go strolling,' Helen asked her, 'in the black-out? Isn't it dangerous?'

Julia shrugged. 'Probably. But then everything's dangerous, just now.' She let the curtain fall and turned back into the room, and reached for her glass.

Helen felt her heart begin to flutter again. It occurred to her that she'd far rather be with Julia outside, in darkness, than in here, in the soft, exposing, intimate light. She said, 'Why don't we go out now, Julia?'

Julia looked at her. 'Now? You mean, for a walk? Would you like to?'

'Yes,' said Helen. She felt the wine inside her suddenly, and started to laugh.

Julia laughed too. Her dark eyes were shining, with excitement and mischief. She began to move more quickly-putting back her head to drink off her wine, then carelessly setting down the glass on the mantelpiece, so that it rang against the painted marble. She looked at the fire, then squatted in front of it and began to shovel ash on

the coke. She did it with the cigarette clamped at the side of her mouth, and with an expression of tremendous concentration and distaste: screwing up her eyes, holding her graceful head at an awkward angle away from the rising grey cloud-like a debutante, Helen thought, on the maid's night off… Then she got up, and dusted off her knees; went back through the curtained doorway for her coat and shoes. She reappeared after a moment in a black double-breasted jacket with polished brass buttons, like a sailor's coat. She stood at the mirror, put on lipstick, powdered her face, turned up her collar. She ran her hands, critically, over her damp head, then drew a soft black corduroy cap from out of a heap of gloves and scarves: pulled it on, and tucked up her hair.

'I shall regret this, later,' she said, 'when my hair has dried at odd angles.' She caught Helen's eye. 'I don't look like Mickey, do I?'

Helen laughed, guiltily. 'Not at all like Mickey.'

'Not like a male impersonator on the stage?'

'More like an actress in a spy-film.'

Julia adjusted the angle of the cap. 'Well, so long as I don't get us arrested for espionage… I tell you what, let's take the rest of that wine.' There was half a bottle left. 'I shan't want it tomorrow, and we've hardly touched it.'

'That really might get us arrested.'

'Don't worry, I've a plan for that.'

She went back to the cupboard, moved things around, and brought out the nightwatchman's bottle that they'd had tea from, in Bryanston Square. She pulled the cork from it, and sniffed it; then carefully filled it up with wine. There was just enough. She stoppered it up again, and put it into her jacket pocket. In her other pocket she put a torch.

'Now you look like a house-breaker,' said Helen, as she buttoned on her own coat.

'But you're forgetting,' said Julia; 'I am a house-breaker, by day. Now, there's just one more thing.' She opened a drawer and took out a sheaf of papers. The papers were thin, the 'flimsy' kind that Helen was issued with at work. They were covered all over with close black handwriting…

'That's not your manuscript?' asked Helen, impressed.

Julia nodded. 'It's a bore, but the bombs make me afraid for it.' She smiled. 'I suppose the wretched thing must be rather more to me than a sort of crossword puzzle, after all. I find I have to carry it about with me wherever I go.' She rolled the papers up and stuffed them into the inside pocket of her coat. She patted the bulge they made. 'Now I feel safe.'

'But, if you get hit?'

'Then I shan't care one way or the other.' She drew on gloves. 'Are you ready?'

She led the way downstairs. As she opened the door she said, 'I hate this bit. Let's close our eyes and count, as we're supposed to'-and so they stood on the step with their faces screwed up, saying, 'One, two, three…'

'When do we stop?' asked Helen.

'…twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen-now!'

They opened their eyes, and blinked.

'Has that made a difference?'

'I don't think so. It's still dark as hell.'

They switched on their torches and went down the steps. Julia's face showed palely, strangely, framed by the lines and angles of her turned-up collar and her cap. She said, 'Which way shall we go?'

'I don't know. You're the veteran at this sort of thing. You choose.'

'All right,' said Julia, suddenly deciding. She took Helen's arm. 'This way.'

They went left into Doughty Street; then left again, into the Gray's Inn Road; and then right, towards Holborn. The roads, even in the short space of time in which Helen had been at Julia's flat, had grown almost empty. There was only the occasional cab or lorry-like creeping black insects, they seemed in the darkness, with gleaming, brittle-looking bodies and louvred, infernal eyes. The pavements, too, were almost clear, and Julia went quickly because of the cold. Helen could feel-as if with disturbing new senses, born of the dark-the weight and pressure of her arm and hand, the nearness of her face, her shoulder, her hip, her thigh, the roll and rhythm of her step…

At what must have been the junction with Clerkenwell Road they turned left. After a little while Julia made them turn again-right, this time. Helen looked around, suddenly confused.

'Where are we?'

' Hatton Garden, I think. Yes, it must be.'

They spoke quietly, for the street seemed deserted.

'Do you know for sure? We won't get lost?'

'How can we get lost?' asked Julia. 'We don't know where we're going… Anyway, you can't get lost in London, even in the black-out and with all the street-signs gone. If you can, you don't deserve to live here. They should make it a kind of exam.'

'If you fail, you get booted out?'

'Exactly. And then,' Julia laughed, 'you must go and live in Brighton.' They turned to the left, went down a short hill. 'Look, this must be the Farringdon Road.'

There were cabs again here, other pedestrians, a feeling of space-but a dreary feel, too, for half of the buildings which lined the street had been damaged and boarded up. Julia led Helen south, towards the river. At a warden's post in one of the arches underneath Holborn Viaduct, a man heard their voices and blew his whistle.

'Those two ladies! They must get themselves a white scarf or a paper, please!'

'All right,' called Helen meekly in reply.

But Julia murmured: 'Suppose we want to be invisible?'

They crossed Ludgate Circus and went on towards the start of the bridge. They saw people going down into the Underground with bags and blankets and pillows, and paused to watch them.

'It gives one a shock, doesn't it,' said Helen quietly, 'to see people doing this, after all this time? I hear the queues still start at four and five o'clock at some of the stations. I couldn't bear to do it, could you?'

'No, I couldn't bear it,' said Julia.

'They've got nowhere else, though. And look, it's all old ladies and men, and children.'

'It's horrible. People being made to live like moles. It's like the Dark Ages. It's worse than that. It's prehistoric.'

There was something elemental, it was true, to the heavily-laden figures, as they made their uncertain way into the dimly-lighted mouth of the Underground. They might have been mendicants or pedlars; refugees from some other, medieval, war-or else, from some war of the future, as imagined by HG Wells or a fanciful writer like that… Then Helen caught snatches of their conversation: 'Head over heels! How we laughed!'; 'A pound of onions and a saddle of pork'; 'He said, “It's got fancy teeth.” I said, “It ought to have better teeth than I've got, at that price…”'

She pulled at Julia's arm. 'Come on.'

'Where to?'

'The river.'

They walked to the middle of the bridge, then turned off their torches and looked out, westwards. The river ran gleamlessly beneath a starless sky, so black it might have been of treacle or of tar-or else, might not have been a river at all, but a channel, a gash in the earth, impossible to fathom… The sensation of feeling yourself supported at a height above it, by an almost-invisible bridge, was very unnerving. Helen and Julia had unlinked their arms, to lean and peer; now they moved close together again.

But as Helen felt the pressure of Julia's shoulder against her own she remembered, with awful vividness, standing on the quaint little bridge on Hampstead Heath, a few hours before, with Kay. She said quietly, 'Damn.'

'What's the matter?' asked Julia. But she spoke quietly, too: as if she knew what the matter was. And when Helen didn't answer she said, 'Do you want to go back?'

'No,' said Helen, after a little hesitation. 'Do you?'

'No.'

So they were still for another moment, but then started to walk again: back, at first, the way they had come; back to the bottom of Ludgate Hill. But here, without debate, they turned, and headed up towards St Paul 's.

The streets grew quieter again and, once they'd passed under the railway bridge, the mood of the city seemed transformed. There was a sense-for it could not be seen, so much as felt-of exposed ground, unnatural space. The pavements were edged with fences and hoardings, but Helen found her thoughts slipping past the the flimsy panels of wood to the rubble, the burnt and broken things, the uncovered girders and yawning basements and smashed brick, beyond… She and Julia walked without speaking, awed by the strangeness of the place. They stopped at the base of the cathedral steps and Helen looked up, trying to trace the outline of the huge, irregular silhouette against the dark of the sky.

'I looked at this, this afternoon,' she said, 'from Parliament Hill.' She didn't say she had also looked, anxiously, for Mecklenburgh Square; she'd forgotten it herself, for the moment. 'How it seemed to loom over London! Like a great big toad.'

'Yes,' said Julia. She seemed to shudder. 'I'm never very sure I like it here. Everyone says how grateful they are, that St Paul 's hasn't been touched, but- I don't know, it seems freakish to me.'

Helen looked at her. 'You can't wish it had been bombed?'

'I'd rather it had been bombed, naturally, than a family in Croydon or Bethnal Green. Meanwhile it sits here, like-not like a toad, but like some great Union Jack, or-like Churchill, “ Britain can take it”, all of that-somehow making it all right that the war's still going on…'

'It does make it all right, though-doesn't it?' asked Helen quietly. 'In the sense, I mean, that while we've still got St Paul 's- I'm not talking about Churchill, or flags. But while we've still got this and all it stands for: I mean, elegance, and reason, and-and great beauty-then the war is still worth fighting. Isn't it?'

'Is that what this war's about?' asked Julia.

'What do you think it's about?'

'I think it's about our love of savagery, rather than our love of beauty. I think the spirit that went into the building of St Paul 's has shown itself to be thin: it's like gold leaf, and now it's rising, peeling away. If it couldn't keep us from the last war, and it couldn't keep us from this-from Hitler and Hitlerism, from Jew-hatred, from the bombing of women and children in cities and towns-what use is it? If we have to fight so hard to keep it-if we have to have elderly men patrolling the roofs of churches, to sweep incendiaries from them with little brushes!-how valuable can it be? How much at the centre of the human heart?'

Helen shivered-impressed, suddenly, by the awful sadness of Julia's words; and glimpsing a sort of darkness in her-a frightening, baffling darkness. She touched her arm.

'If I thought like that, Julia,' she said softly, 'I'd want to die.'

Julia was still for a moment; then moved-took a step, swept her foot, kicked gravel. 'I suppose,' she said, in a lighter voice, 'I don't think like it, really; or I'd want to die, too. It's a thing one can't think, can one? Instead one concentrates one's mind'-she must have been remembering the men and women they'd seen going into the Underground with pillows-'on the price of combs; on pork and onions. On cigarettes.-Do you want one, by the way?'

They laughed, and the darkness passed. Helen drew back her hand. Julia brought out a packet from her pocket, fumbling slightly because of her gloves. She struck a match, and her face sprang startlingly into life, yellow and black. Helen bent her head to the flame, then straightened up and made to move on. The light had made her feel blind again. When Julia tugged at her arm, she let herself be led.

Then she saw where Julia was heading: eastwards, towards the ground beyond St Paul 's. 'This way?' she asked, in surprise.

'Why not?' answered Julia. 'There's somewhere, now, I'd like to take you. If we keep to the road, I think we'll be all right.'

So they left the cathedral behind and started on the line of stone and broken tarmac that had once been Cannon Street, but was now more like the idea or the ghost of a road, on a landscape that might have been flat open country. Within a minute or two the sky seemed to have expanded over their heads, giving the illusion of light; as before, however, they could not see so much as sense the devastation that lay about them: they tried to peer into the utter darkness of the ground, and their gazes slid about. Two or three times Helen put her hand to her eyes as if to wipe veils or cobwebs from them. They might have been walking through murky water, so absolutely strange and dense was the quality of the night here, and so freighted with violence and loss.

They kept the beams of their torches very low, following the whitened line of the kerb. Every time a car or a lorry passed they slowed their step, pressed themselves against the feeble-seeming fences that had been put there to separate pavement from rubble, and felt earth and bramble and broken stone beneath their shoes. When they spoke, they spoke in murmurs.

Julia said, 'I remember making this walk, on New Year's Day in 1941. The road was almost impassable, even on foot. I came to look at the damaged churches. I think even more have gone since then. Back there'-she nodded over her left shoulder-'must be the remains of St Augustine 's. It was bad enough when I saw it then; it was bombed again, wasn't it, right at the end of the last blitz?'

'I don't know,' said Helen.

'I think it was. And ahead of us, there-can you see?' She gestured. 'You can just make it out-that must be all that's left of St Mildred, Bread Street. That was awfully sad…'

She named more churches as they walked: St Mary-le-Bow, St Mary Aldermary, St James, St Michael; she seemed to be able to identify, quite clearly, the shapes of their battered towers and attenuated spires, while Helen struggled to pick them out at all. Now and then she flicked the beam of her torch across the waste-ground, to guide Helen's eye; the light caught fragments of broken glass, patches of frost, and found colour: the green and brown and silver of nettle, bracken, thistle. Once it lit up the eyes of some creature.

'Look, there!'

'Is it a cat?'

'It's a fox! Look at its red tail!'

They watched it dart, as quick and fluid as racing water; they tried to follow it with their torch-beams as it ran. Then they turned their torches off and listened-heard the rustling of leaves and the shifting of earth. But that soon became unnerving. They thought of rats, adders, vagrants. They went on, more quickly-heading away from the open ground to the shelter of the streets behind Cannon Street Station.

The buildings here were offices and banks: some had been gutted in 1940 and left unrepaired, some were still in use, but at this sort of hour on a Saturday night it was impossible to tell the exact condition of any of them, they all had an equally haunted look-more weird, in its way, than the heath-like feel of the blasted place where buildings had been lost completely.

If the streets around Ludgate Circus had been quiet, here they seemed utterly deserted. Only now and then, from deep beneath the broken pavements, came the rumbling of the Underground; as if herds of great, complaining creatures were hurling themselves through the city sewers-as, in a way, thought Helen, they were.

She gripped Julia's arm more tightly. It was always disconcerting, in a black-out, leaving the places you knew best. A particular feeling started to creep over you, a mixture of panic and dread: as if you were walking through a rifle-range with a target on your back… 'We must be mad, Julia,' she whispered, 'to be here!'

'It was your idea.'

'I know, but-'

'Are you frightened?'

'Yes! Anyone could come at us out of the dark.'

'But if we can't see them, they can't see us. Besides, they'd probably take us for a boy and his girl. Last week I went out in this coat and cap, and a tart in a doorway thought I was a chap and showed me her breast-flashed her torch at it. That was in Piccadilly.'

'Good God,' said Helen.

'Yes,' said Julia. 'And I can't tell you how odd a single breast looks, when lit up in the dark like that.'

She slowed her step and swung her torch. 'Here's St Clement's,' she said, 'the church from the nursery rhyme. They used to bring oranges and lemons, I suppose, to the shore of the Thames, just down there.'

Helen thought of the orange Kay had given her that morning… But Kay and the morning felt far away, in a place like this. They were on the other side of that mad, impossible landscape.

They crossed a road. 'Where are we now?'

'This must be Eastcheap. We're nearly there.'

'Nearly where?'

'Only another church, I'm afraid. You won't be disappointed?'

'I'm thinking of the walk we must do, to get home. We'll get our throats cut.'

'How you fret!' said Julia. She made Helen walk a little further, then drew her towards a narrowish opening between two buildings. 'This is Idol Lane,' she murmured-or she might, Helen supposed, have said ' Idle Lane '. 'It's just along here.'

Helen hung back. 'It's too dark!'

'But it's just down here,' said Julia.

Her grip slid from Helen's elbow to her hand. She squeezed her fingers, and led her down a sloping path and then, a little way along it, made her stop. She swung up the beam of her torch and Helen could just make out, in the sweep of it, the shape of a tower: a high and elegant tower, with a sharp, slender spire supported by arches or buttresses-or simply blown through, perhaps, by bomb-blast, for the body of the church from which it rose seemed to be roofless, gutted, quite wrecked.

'St Dunstan-in-the-East,' said Julia quietly, looking up. 'It was rebuilt by Wren, like most of these churches, after the Great Fire of 1666. But they say that his daughter, Jane, helped him to design it. She's supposed to have gone to the top to lay the last stones, when the mason lost his nerve. And when they drew away the scaffolding, she lay down here, to show her faith that the tower wouldn't fall… I like to come here. I like to think of her making her way up the tower steps, with bricks and a trowel. She couldn't have been at all delicate, yet the portraits of her have made her out to be pale and slight. Shall we stay here a minute? Are you too cold?'

'No, I'm all right. Not inside the church, though.'

'No, just here. If we keep to the shadow, any sort of footpad or cut-throat could go by, and never know we were here.'

They walked cautiously around the tower, still hand in hand, guiding themselves by a set of broken railings and feeling for uneven ground. A flight of three or four shallow stone steps ran up to each of the tower doors; they made their way up to one of these doors, and sat down. The stone was icily cold. The doors, and the walls around them, were black, and threw off no light: Helen looked for Julia in her cap and dark coat and could hardly see her.

But she felt the movement of her arm, as she dipped her fingers into her pocket and brought out the nightwatchman's bottle. And she heard the moist little pop of the stopper coming out of the glass neck. Julia handed the bottle over, and Helen raised it to her mouth. The rough red liquid met her lips and seemed to flare across her tongue like a flame. She swallowed, and felt easier almost at once.

'We might,' she whispered, as she handed the bottle back, 'be the only people alive in the City. Do you think there are ghosts here, Julia?'

Julia was drinking. She wiped her mouth. 'There might,' she said, 'be the ghost of Samuel Pepys. He used to come to this church. Once he was set upon by a couple of robbers here.'

'I shouldn't like to know that,' said Helen, 'if I weren't tipsy.'

'You got tipsy rather quick.'

'I was tipsy before, I just didn't like to say… Anyway, it's my birthday and I'm allowed to be tipsy.'

'Then I ought to get tipsy, too. There's no pleasure in being tipsy on your own.'

They drank more, then sat without speaking. At last Helen, very softly, began to sing.

Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's.

Pancake and fritters say the bells of St Peter's.

'What mad sort of words they are, aren't they?' she said, interrupting herself. 'I didn't even know I'd remembered them, until now.'

Bull's eyes and targets, say the bells of St Margaret's.

Pokers and tongs, say the bells of St John's .

Julia said, 'You sing nicely… I don't suppose there's a St Helen's in the song?'

'I don't think so. What would those bells say?'

'I can't imagine. Strawberries and melons?'

'Torturers and felons… What about St Julia?'

'I don't think there ever was a St Julia. Anyway, nothing rhymes with Julia. Except peculiar.'

'You're about the most unpeculiar person I've ever met, Julia.'

They had put back their heads against the black tower door, and turned their faces to one another, to speak softly. When Julia laughed, Helen felt the rush of breath against her own mouth: warm, wine-scented, slightly soured by tobacco.

'You don't think it's peculiar,' Julia said, 'to have brought you here, to the ruin of a church, in the middle of a black-out?'

'I think it's marvellous,' said Helen simply.

Julia answered, still laughing, 'Have some more wine.'

Helen shook her head. Her heart had risen into her throat. Too high and full, it felt, to swallow back down. 'I don't want any more,' she said softly. 'The fact is, Julia, I'm afraid to be drunk while I'm with you.'

It seemed to her that there could be no mistaking the meaning of her words: that they had penetrated some thin but resilient membrane, made a tear through which a heap of unruly passions would now come tumbling… But Julia laughed again, and must have turned her head, for her breath no longer came against Helen's lips; and when she spoke, she spoke musingly, distantly. She said, 'Isn't it queer, though, that we know each other so little? Three weeks ago, when we had that cup of tea outside Marylebone Station-do you remember? I would never have said, then, that we'd be here now, like this…'

'Why did you stop me that day, Julia?' asked Helen, after a moment. 'Why did you ask me to have tea with you?'

'Why did I?' said Julia. 'Shall I tell you? I'm almost afraid to. It might make you hate me. I did it-well, out of curiosity, I suppose you'd have to call it.'

'Curiosity?'

'I wanted to-get the measure of you, something like that.' She gave an uncomfortable little laugh. 'I thought you might have guessed it.'

Helen didn't answer. She was remembering the odd, sly way in which Julia had glanced at her, when they'd been talking about Kay; she was thinking of the feeling she'd had, that Julia was testing her, weighing her up… She said slowly at last, 'I think I did guess. You wanted to see, didn't you, if you could find in me what Kay does?'

Julia moved, as if embarassed. 'It was a lousy thing to do. I'm sorry now.'

'It doesn't matter,' said Helen. 'Truly, it doesn't. After all-' Her feelings had faltered, just a little, but now rose again-buoyed up, by wine, by the darkness. 'After all, we're in a funny sort of situation, you and I.'

'Are we?'

'I mean, because of what happened between you and Kay-'

At once, even in the darkness, she knew that she had made a mistake. Julia stiffened. She said sharply, 'Kay told you that?'

'Yes,' said Helen, growing wary, speaking slowly. 'At least, I guessed it.'

'And you spoke with Kay about it?'

'Yes.'

'What did she say?'

'Only, that there had been a-'

'A what?'

Helen hesitated. Then, 'A misaffection, she called it,' she said.

'A misaffection?' Julia laughed. 'Christ!' She turned away again.

Helen reached for her arm. She caught hold of the sleeve of her coat instead. 'What's the matter?' she said. 'What is it? It doesn't matter, does it? It's never mattered to me, in the past. Is that what you're thinking? Or are you thinking, that it's none of my business? But then, it has been my business, in a way… And since Kay was so open and honest about it with me-' She was forgetting, in her anxiety, that Kay had not really been open with her about it, at all. 'Since Kay was so open and honest about it, then shouldn't you and I be open and honest about it, too? If it's never mattered to me, why should it matter, now, to us?'

'How gallant you sound,' said Julia.

She said it so coldly, Helen felt afraid. 'Is it a matter for gallantry? I hope not. All I'm trying to say is, that I should hate for any of this to make a sort of-of coolness, or shadow, between us. Kay's never wanted that-'

'Oh, Kay,' said Julia. 'Kay's a great sentimentalist. Don't you think? She pretends to be so hard-boiled, but- I remember I once took her to see an Astaire and Rogers picture. She cried all the way through it. “What were you weeping at?” I asked her at the end. “The dancing,” she said…'

Her manner had changed completely. She sounded almost bitter, now. 'I wasn't at all surprised,' she went on, 'when Kay met you. I wasn't surprised at the way she met you, I mean. It was like something from a picture in itself, wasn't it?'

'I don't know,' said Helen, confused. 'I suppose so. It didn't seem like that at the time.'

'Didn't it? Kay told me all about it-about how she found you, and so on. She put it that way, you see: that she found you… She said how frightened it made her, when she thought of how nearly you might have been lost. She described touching your face…'

'I remember hardly any of it,' said Helen, wretchedly. 'That's the stupid thing.'

'Kay remembers very well. But then, as I say, Kay's a sentimentalist. She remembers it as though there were a touch of fate to it, a touch of kismet.'

'There was a touch of kismet to it!' said Helen. 'But don't you see, how dreadfully tangled the whole thing is? If I'd never met Kay, I should never have met you, Julia. But Kay would never have loved me at all, if you had let her love you-'

'What?' said Julia.

'I used to be grateful to you,' Helen went on, her voice rising and starting to break. 'It seemed to me, that in not wanting Kay you had somehow given her to me. Now I've done what she did.'

'What?' said Julia again.

'Haven't you guessed?' said Helen. 'I've fallen in love with you, Julia, myself!'

She hadn't known, until that moment, that she'd been going to utter the words; but as soon as she said them, they became true.

Julia didn't answer. She had turned her face back to Helen's and her breath, as it had before, came fluttering, warm and bitter, against the wetness of Helen's cold lips. She sat quite still, then put out her hand and caught hold of Helen's fingers; and she gripped them hard, almost madly-as someone would clutch at a hand, or a strap of leather, blindly, in pain or grief. She said, 'Kay-'

'I know!' said Helen. 'But I simply can't help it, Julia! It makes me hate myself; but I can't help it! If you'd seen me, today. She was so kind. And all I could think of, was you. I wished she was you! I wished-' She stopped. 'Oh, God!'

For she'd felt, very clearly, that odd little thrill or vibration that always came before the sounding of the Warning; and even before her voice had died away, the sirens started up. On and on they went, rising hectically up the scale again after every plunge towards silence; and it was impossible, even after so many years, to sit perfectly still and not mind them, not feel the urgent pull of them, the little clawing out of panic from within one's breast.

With the darkness all about, the effect was magnified. Helen put her hands across her ears and said, 'Oh, it's not fair! I can't bear them! They're like wails of grief! They're like-like the bells of London! They've got voices! Take cover! they're saying. Run and hide! Here comes the chopper to chop off your head!'

'Don't,' said Julia, touching her arm; and a moment after that, the Warning ceased. The silence, then, was almost more unnerving still. They sat very tensely, straining their ears for the sound of bombers; at last they began to make out the faint groan of engines. Crazy, it was, to think of the boys inside those funny tubes of metal, wishing you harm; to think of them having walked about, two hours before-eaten bread, drunk coffee, smoked cigarettes, shrugged on their jackets, stamped their feet against the cold… Then there came the first thump-thump-thump of anti-aircraft fire, perhaps two or three miles away.

Helen put back her head and looked up. Searchlights were on, the quality of the darkness had changed; she saw, instead of the sky, the rising wall of the tower against which she was sitting. She felt the hardness of the door against her scalp, through her hair; she imagined the stones above it coming down, great pitiless blocks of masonry and mortar. She seemed to feel it swaying and lurching about, even as she peered at it.

She thought suddenly, What am I doing here? And then she thought, Where's Kay?

She scrambled to her feet.

'What is it?' asked Julia.

'I'm frightened. I don't want to stay here. I'm sorry, Julia-'

Julia drew up her legs. 'It's all right. I'm frightened, too. Help me to stand.'

She grabbed Helen's hand, braced herself against her weight, and rose. They switched on their torches and began to walk. They walked quickly, back up Idol Lane -or Idle Lane, whichever it was-to Eastcheap. But here they stopped, unsure of the safest route to take. When Julia turned to the right, Helen pulled her back.

'Wait,' she said, breathlessly. The sky, that way, was cut with the beams of searchlights. 'That's east, isn't it? That's towards the docks. Isn't it? Don't let's go that way. Let's go back the way we came.'

'Through the City? We could go into Monument Station.'

'Yes. Anywhere. I can't bear to be still, that's all, and think of things coming down-'

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

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

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

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

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

'Which way is the Underground?' asked Helen.

'I'm not sure.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Do it, then,' she said.

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

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

She had tried the tablets that Felicity Withers had tried: they had given her stomach cramps and frightful diarrohea for almost a week, but apart from that had had no effect at all. She had spent the days since then in a sort of stupor of anxiety-making endless mistakes at Portman Court; unable to smoke, unable to eat; unable to fix her mind on anything except the necessity of swallowing down the sickness that could swell inside her like a bitter black tide, for hours at a time. This morning, too, she had drawn on her skirt and, to her horror, found that the waistband wouldn't fasten; she'd had to close it with a safety-pin.

'What can I do?' she'd said to Betty; and Betty had said, what she'd always said before, 'Write and tell Reggie. For God's sake, Viv, if you don't do it, I'm going to write the letter myself!'

But Viv didn't want to write, because of the Censor. And there were two more weeks before his leave came round again. She couldn't wait that long, getting fatter and sicker and more afraid. She knew she had to tell him. She knew the only way to do it was to call him up by telephone. She was lying rigidly in bed right now, nerving herself up to go downstairs and do it.

She was hoping the raid would end; but the raid, if anything, was getting worse. When, after another couple of minutes, she heard Anne muttering in her sleep, she put back the bed-clothes. If the bombs came closer, Anne might wake. That would make it all harder. She must do it now, she thought, or never…

She got up, put on her dressing-gown and slippers, and picked up her torch.

She went out into the hall, and down one flight of stairs-going carefully, feeling her way, because the staircase was lit very badly with one blue bulb. She must have gone almost noiselessly, too: a girl coming up, with a plate in her hand, met her at the turn of the landing and nearly jumped out of her skin. 'Viv!' she hissed. 'My God! I thought you were the Ghost of Typists Past.'

'Sorry, Millie.'

'Where are you going? The basement? Rather you than me. You'll be just in time for the second round of Boy, Girl, Flower, Animal… Or, did you have your eye on those cream crackers that were knocking about in the common-room? Too bad. I've bagged the lot, look, for Jacqueline Knight and Caroline Graham and me.'

Viv shook her head. 'You can have them. I'm just getting a glass of water.'

'Watch out for mice, then,' said Millie, beginning to climb the stairs. 'And remember: if anyone asks you who took those cream crackers, you never saw me. I'll do the same for you one day…'

Her voice faded. Viv waited until she'd crossed the landing, then carried on down. The staircase grew wider the lower she went; the house was an old one, built to a rather grand scale. There were great plaster roses in all the ceilings, and hooks where chandeliers had once hung. The banister rail had elegant curves and graceful finials. But though there were handsome crimson carpets in the hallways, they were all covered up with canvas, and the canvas was much damaged by high heels. The walls were painted in dispiriting gloss shades, green and cream and grey: they looked worse than ever in the dim blue light.

The lobby was a mess of women's coats and hats and umbrellas. A table spilled over with papers and unclaimed post. The fanlight, of course, had been boarded up, but the bomb-proofed glass in the door which led to the basement was gleaming turgidly. From beyond it came one girl's voice, and then others: 'Primrose… Pansy… Primula…'

Viv put on her torch. The telephone was further on, in an alcove outside the common-room-horribly public, but over the years girls had unpicked the staples which attached the wire to the wall, and if you wanted to make a private call you could pull the telephone across the corridor into a cupboard, and sit, in darkness, on a gas-meter, amongst brooms and buckets and mops. Viv did this now, drawing shut the cupboard door and propping her torch on a shelf; looking rather fearfully into the cracks and corners, for fear of spiders and mice. Think Before You Speak, said a label on the telephone.

She had the number of Reggie's unit on an old bit of paper in her dressing-gown pocket; he'd given it to her, ages ago, for emergencies, and she'd never used it. But what was this, she thought, if not an emergency? She got the number out. She picked up the receiver and dialled 0 for the Exchange-letting the dial turn slowly; muffling the clicks of it, as best she could, with a handkerchief.

The operator's voice was as bright as glass. The call, she said, would take several minutes to connect… 'Thank you,' said Viv. She sat with the telephone in her lap, nerving herself for the ring of it. Then the beam of her torch began to waver: she thought of the battery, and turned it off. She'd left the door open, just a little, and the dim blue light of the corridor showed through the crack. Apart from that, the cupboard was absolutely dark. She could just make out bursts of laughter, and groans, from the girls in the basement. There were bumps, and shivers, and trickles of dust in the walls, as bombs kept falling.

When at last the phone rang again, the noise of the bell, and the jolt of it in her lap, frightened the life out of her. She picked up the receiver with shaking hands, and almost dropped it. The glass-voiced girl said, 'Just a moment'; and there was another wait, then, and a series of clicks, as she made the connection…

Then a man's voice came on the line: the switchboard-operator at Reggie's camp. Viv gave him Reggie's name.

'You don't know his hut?' he asked her. She didn't. He tried a central number. The phone rang and rang… 'No answer, Caller,' he said.

'Please,' said Viv, 'just a minute longer. It's awfully urgent…'

'Hello?' said another voice at last. 'Is that my call to Southampton? Hello?'

'This is an incoming call, I'm afraid,' said the operator blandly.

'Blast you.'

'You're welcome.'

The phone was picked up by somebody else after that; he gave them, at least, the number of Reggie's hut… The phone rang only twice, this time, and then came a deafening burst of noise: shouting, and laughter, and music from a radio or gramophone.

A man bellowed into the phone. 'Hello?'

'Hello?' said Viv quietly.

'Hello? Who's this?'

She told him she wanted Reggie.

'Reggie? What?' he shouted.

'Who's there?' came another man's voice.

'Some girl, calling herself Reggie.'

'She's not calling herself Reggie, you oaf. It's Reggie she wants to speak to.' The receiver was taken by another hand. 'Miss, I really must apologise- Or is it Madam?'

'Please,' said Viv. She glanced out nervously, into the corridor, through the crack in the nearly-closed door. She put her hand around her mouth, to muffle her voice. 'Is Reggie there?'

'Is he here? That would probably depend, if I know Reg, on who wants to know. Does he owe you money?'

'Is she sure it's Reg she wants?' said the first voice.

'My friend,' said the second, 'wants to know if you're sure it's Reg you want, and not him. He is making shapes with his hands, suggestive of what he considers must be the lovely colour of your eyes, the beautiful curl of your hair, the magnificent swell of your-voice.'

'Please,' said Viv again, 'I haven't got very long.'

'That won't bother my friend, from what I've heard.'

'Is Reggie there, or not?'

'May I say who's calling?'

'Tell him- Tell him it's his wife.'

'His lady wife? In that case, far be it from me to…'

The voice became a mumble, and then a distorted shout. That was followed by cheers, and a kind of scuffling sound, as the phone was passed from hand to hand… At last, Reggie's voice came on the line. He sounded breathless.

'Marilyn?' he said.

'It's not her, it's me,' said Viv, very quickly. 'Don't say my name, in case the operator's listening.'

But he said her name, anyway. 'Viv?' He sounded amazed. 'The boys told me-'

'I know. They were mucking about, and I didn't know what else to say.'

'Christ.' She heard him rubbing his bristly chin and cheeks with his hand. 'Where are you? How did you get hold of me?' He turned his mouth away. 'Woods, I swear to God, one more crack like that, and-'

'I just called the Exchange,' she said.

'What?'

'I called the Exchange.'

'Are you all right?'

'Yes. No.'

'I can't hear you. Just a minute-' He put the phone down and went off; there was more cheering, and more laughter. When he came back, he was breathless again. 'Those buggers,' he said. He had moved, or closed a door. 'Where are you? You sound like you're in the bucket at the bottom of well.'

'I'm in a cupboard,' she whispered, 'at home. I mean, at John Adam House.'

'A cupboard?'

'Where the girls make calls. It doesn't matter. It's just- Something's happened, Reggie.'

'What? Not your bloody brother?'

'Don't call him that. No, not that. Nothing like that.'

'What, then?'

'I- It's just-' She tried to see out into the hall again; then turned her head, and spoke more quietly than ever. 'My friend hasn't come,' she said.

'Your what? Your friend?' He didn't understand. 'Which friend?'

'My friend.'

There was a silence. Then, 'Christ,' he said softly. 'Christ, Viv.'

'Don't say my name!'

'No. No. How much? I mean, how long?'

'About eight weeks, I think.'

'Eight weeks?' He was turning it over in his mind. 'So you mean, you must have been, already, when I saw you last-?'

'Yes, I must have been. But I didn't know.'

'And, you're absolutely sure? You couldn't just have-have missed?'

'I don't think so. I never have before.'

'But, we've been careful, haven't we? I've been careful, every fucking time. What's the point of being careful, if this happens?'

'I don't know. It's bad luck.'

'Bad luck? Jesus.'

He sounded disgusted. He moved the phone again; she imagined him tugging at his hair. She said, 'Don't be like that. It's been hell, for me. I've been worrying myself to death. I've tried all sorts of things. I- I took something.'

He couldn't hear her. 'What?'

She covered her mouth again, but tried to speak more clearly. 'I took something. You know… But it didn't work, it just made me sick.'

'Did you get the right thing?'

'I don't know. Are there different kinds of things? I got it from a chemist's. The man said it would work, but it didn't. It was awful.'

'Can't you try again?'

'I don't want to, Reggie.'

'But it might be worth just trying again.'

'It made me feel so awful.'

'But don't you just think-?'

'It'll make me sick again. Oh Reggie, I don't think I can! I don't know what to do!'

Her voice had been trembling, all this time; now, with a rush, it tightened and rose. She'd started to panic, and was almost crying.

Reggie said, 'OK. All right. Listen to me. It's all right, baby. Listen to me. This is the hell of a shock, that's all. I just need to think about it. There's a bloke here. I think his girl- I just need some time.'

She moved the receiver, and blew her nose. 'I didn't want to tell you,' she said miserably. 'I wanted to sort it out by myself. I just- I felt so awful. If my dad found out-'

'It's OK, baby.'

'It'd break his heart. It'd-'

Pip pip pip, went the line; and the operator spoke. 'One minute, Caller.'

It was the girl who'd connected Viv right at the start; or another girl, with the same bright, glass-like voice… Viv and Reggie fell silent.

'Do you suppose she heard?' whispered Reggie at last.

'I don't know.'

'They don't listen really, do they?'

'I don't know.'

'How can they, with so many calls?'

'No. I expect they don't.'

Silence again… Then, 'Shit,' said Reggie, as if wearily. 'What luck. What lousy rotten luck. And I was so careful, every time!'

'I know,' said Viv.

'I'll ask this bloke, about his girl, about what she did. OK?'

Viv nodded.

'OK?'

'Yes.'

'You're not to worry any more.'

'No. I won't.'

'Promise me?'

'Yes.'

'We'll be all right. OK? Good girl.'

They stayed on the line, not speaking, until the operator's voice came again, asking if they'd like to extend the call. Viv said they wouldn't, and the line went dead.

'Hello,' said Kay very softly, an hour or two later. She was stroking Helen's hair.

'Hello,' said Helen, opening her eyes.

'Did I wake you?'

'I'm not sure… What time is it?'

Kay got in beside her. 'Just past your birthday, I'm afraid. Just two o'clock.'

'Are you all right?'

'Not a scratch on me. We didn't go out. Bethnal Green and Shoreditch got it all.'

Helen took her hand and squeezed her fingers. 'I'm glad,' she said.

Kay yawned. 'I'd rather have gone out. I spent the night doing puzzles with Mickey and Hughes.' She kissed Helen's cheek, then fitted herself about her. 'You smell soapy.'

Helen stiffened. 'Do I?'

'Yes. Just like a kid. Did you have another bath? You must be clean as anything… Were you lonely?'

'No, not really.'

'I thought of sneaking back to you.'

'Did you?'

Kay smiled. 'Well, not really. It seemed an awful waste, that's all, to be there, doing nothing, while you were here.'

'Yes,' said Helen. She still held Kay's hand; now she drew Kay's arm around her-tight, as if wanting comfort or warmth. Her legs were bare against Kay's; her cotton nightdress had risen, almost to her bottom. Her breasts felt loose and warm beneath Kay's arm.

Kay kissed her head, stroked back her hair. She said, in a murmur, 'I suppose you're awfully sleepy, darling?'

'I am, rather.'

'Too sleepy to kiss?'

Helen didn't answer. Kay drew free her arm. She caught hold of the collar of Helen's nightgown and, very gently, pulled it down. She put her lips to the bend of Helen's neck, moved her mouth against the hot, smooth flesh. But she became aware, as she was doing it, of the feel of the threadbare fabric in her hand. She lifted her head from her pillow and said, in surprise, 'You're not wearing your new pyjamas?'

'Hmm?' said Helen, as if from the edge of sleep.

'Your pyjamas,' said Kay softly.

'Oh,' said Helen, reaching for Kay's hand again; drawing Kay's arm about her and pulling her close. 'I forgot,' she said.

5

The moon was so full and so bright that night, they didn't need their torches. Surfaces were lit up, white against black. Everything looked depthless, the fronts of houses flat as scenery on a stage, the trees like trees of papier maché touched up with glitter and silver paint… Nobody liked it. It made you feel vulnerable, exposed. People got off the train and turned up the collars of their coats, put down their heads, darted away to darker places. A hundred yards from Cricklewood Station, the streets were silent. Only Reggie and Viv, uncertain of their route, went slowly. When Reggie took out a piece of paper to check the directions on it, Viv looked fearfully up at the sky: the paper shone in his hand as if luminous.

The house, when they found it at last, was an ordinary one; but there was a name-plate screwed to the door-frame, beneath the bell. The plate looked solid, professional-reassuring, but frightening too. Viv had her arm through Reggie's and now slightly pulled him back. He caught hold of her hand and squeezed her fingers. Her fingers felt odd, because he'd got her a gold-coloured ring, that was slightly too large and kept slipping.

'All right?' he asked her. His voice was thin. He hated doctors, hospitals, things like that. She knew he wished she had come with Betty, her sister-anyone but him.

So it was she who pressed the bell. The man-Mr Imrie-came to answer it almost at once.

'Ah yes,' he said, quite loudly, looking past them into the street. 'Come in, come in.' They stood close together in the darkness, unsure of the size of the hall, while he closed the door and rearranged the black-out across its panels of frosted glass; then he led them into his waiting-room, where the light was bright and made them blink. The room smelt sweet: of polish, of rubber, of gas. There were pictures on the walls, showing teeth, pink gums; a case had a plaster model inside it of a single great molar, a slice removed to expose the enamel, the pulp and red nerve. The colours were livid, because of the light. Viv looked from one thing to another and felt her teeth begin to ache.

Mr Imrie was a dentist; and did this other thing on the side.

'Do sit down,' he said.

He took up a sheet of paper and clipped it to a board. He wore spectacles with heavy frames and, in order to see the page before him, he pushed them up, so that they gripped his brow like a pair of goggles on a band. He asked for Viv's name. She'd taken off her gloves to expose the ring, and now, with a little flush of self-consciousness, gave the name that she and Reggie had agreed on: Mrs Margaret Harrison. He said it aloud, as he wrote it down; and then he kept saying it at the start of every question: 'And now, Mrs Harrison', 'Well, Mrs Harrison'-until the name, Viv thought, sounded so false and made-up, it might have been an actress's name, or the name of a character in a film.

The questions were simple enough at first. When they grew more personal, Mr Imrie suggested that Reggie might like to wait in the hall. Viv thought he went out pretty quickly, as if in relief. She heard the slither of his shoes on the lino as he paced up and down.

Perhaps Mr Imrie heard it too. He lowered his voice. 'The date of your last period?'

Viv gave it. He made a note of it, and seemed to frown.

'Any children?' he asked her then. 'Miscarriages? You know what a miscarriage is? Of course… And have you ever before been obliged to receive the, er, treatment that you've come to receive from me?'

She said 'No' to it all; but told him, after a little hesitation, about the pills, in case they made some sort of difference.

He shook his head, dismissively, as she described them. 'It's never worth bothering, if you'll take my advice,' he said, 'with that sort of thing. Probably gave you a tummy upset, did they? Yes, I thought they would have.' He drew down his spectacles; and was left with a phantom pair, marked out in lines of red, on the flesh of his brow.

He produced a case of instruments, and Viv flinched, growing frightened. He wanted only, however, to test her blood-pressure and listen to her chest; and he made her stand and loosen her skirt, and felt her stomach-felt all about it, pressing hard with his fingers and palms.

Then he straightened, and wiped his hands. 'Well,' he said gravely, 'you're a little further along than I should have liked.' He was dating it, of course, from her last period. 'I usually recommend this treatment for pregnancies of up to ten weeks, and yours is rather past that.'

The extra weeks made a difference, apparently. He went to the door and called for Reggie and explained to them both that, because of the added element of risk, he would have to charge them more than the standard fee. 'A further ten pounds, I'm afraid.'

'Ten pounds?' said Reggie, appalled.

Mr Imrie spread his hands. 'You'll understand, with the law as it is… The risk I'm running is very grave.'

'My friend said seventy-five. Seventy-five's all I've brought.'

'Seventy-five would have seen to it, a month ago. I dare say seventy-five would see to it even now, were you to go to another sort of man. I'm not that sort of man, however… I'm thinking of your wife's health. I'm thinking of my own wife… I am sorry.'

Reggie shook his head. 'This is a rum kind of way to do business,' he said bitterly, 'if you don't mind my saying so. One price one month, and another the next. What difference does it make to you, it being in there'-he nodded in the general direction of Viv's stomach-'two or three weeks longer?'

Mr Imrie smiled, as if with tremendous patience. 'It makes a great deal of difference, I'm afraid.'

'Well, that's what you say. You'd say the same thing, I suppose, to a chap who'd come to you with a case of-of an ingrowing tooth?'

'I very well might.'

'You would, would you-?'

The argument ran on. Viv stood and said nothing, hating it all, hating Reggie, gazing at the floor. At last Mr Imrie agreed to take the extra ten pounds in the form of clothing coupons: Reggie turned his back and brought out a little stash of them, pressed them into the envelope in which he'd already put the money, and handed them over. He made a snorting noise as he did it.

'Thank you,' said Mr Imrie, with exaggerated politeness. He stowed the envelope away in a pocket of his own. 'Now, if you wouldn't mind making yourself comfortable here, just for twenty minutes or so, I'll take your wife next door.'

'Keep my coat and hat, will you?' said Viv to Reggie, coldly. He took them, and reached after her fingers.

'It'll be all right,' he said, trying to catch her eye. 'It'll be OK.'

She pulled her fingers away. A clock on the wall showed five past eight. Mr Imrie led her back across the hall and into his surgery.

She thought at first he meant to take her through this room into another. She thought he would have some quite different place set up. But he closed the door behind her and went to a counter, looking busy; and for an awful moment, then, she imagined he meant to do the operation with her sitting in his dentist's chair… Then she saw, beyond the chair, a couch, on trestle legs, covered over with a wax-paper sheet, and with a little zinc pail beside it. It looked horrible with the great steel light shining on it, and the trays of instruments all around, the queer machines, the drills, the bottles of gas. She felt the suffocated rising of tears in her chest and throat, and thought, for the first time, I can't!

'Now then, Mrs Harrison,' said Mr Imrie, perhaps seeing her hesitate. 'Just slip off your skirt, your shoes and underthings, and hop up onto the couch, and we'll make a start. All right? There's nothing to worry about. A very straightforward procedure indeed.'

He turned away, took off his jacket and washed his hands; began to fold back his sleeves. There was an electric fire burning, and she stood in front of it to undress; she put her clothes on a chair, and got quickly onto the crackling wax-paper before he should turn-for she felt more exposed and embarassed, somehow, with only her bottom half bare, than she would have felt if she had stripped completely. It was like something a tart would do… But when she lay on the hard flat couch, she felt foolish in another way-like a fish, with gaping gills and mouth, on a fishmonger's slab.

'Let me give you a pillow,' said Mr Imrie, coming over and carefully not looking at her naked hips. 'And now, if you'd care to raise yourself?' He slid a folded towel under her bottom-moving her blouse, as he did it, a little higher up her back, and saying, 'We don't want this to spoil, do we?'

She realised he was tucking it out of the way of any blood that might come; and grew frightened again. She had no idea how much blood would come-had only, in fact, the haziest notion of what he was about to do to her. He had not explained it; and it seemed too late, now, to ask. She didn't want to speak at all, with her lower half all exposed to his gaze like this; she was too embarassed. She closed her eyes.

When she felt him lift and try to part her knees, she grew more self-conscious than ever. 'Lie a little less rigidly, if you can, Mrs Harrison,' he said. And then: 'Mrs Harrison? A little less rigid?' She opened her legs, and after a second felt something warm and dry come between them and begin to probe. It was his finger. He pushed firmly into her, and with his other hand pressed again at her stomach, harder than before. She gave a little gasp. He pushed and pressed on, until she couldn't help but draw her hips away. He moved back, and wiped his hands on a towel.

'You must expect, of course,' he said, in a mild and matter-of-fact kind of way, 'a certain amount of discomfort. That can't be helped, I'm afraid.'

He turned away, then brought back a sponge, or a cloth, with some sharp-smelling liquid on it, with which he began to dab at her. She lifted her head and tried to see. She could only see his face: he had put up his spectacles again, and again they looked like goggles-like a welder's goggles, or a stonemason's… On a shelf, near his head, was a toy: a bear or a rabbit in a flowered dress and a hat. She imagined him waving it before frightened boys and girls. A notice, pinned to the wall behind him, gave Information for Patients Regarding Stoppings and Extractions.

When he placed the mask over her mouth, it was so like an ordinary respirator-so much less unpleasant, in fact, than a regular gas-mask-that she almost didn't mind it. Then she was aware of a sensation of slipping, and made a grab at the edge of the couch, to keep herself from tumbling off it… It seemed to her then that she must have fallen anyway, but had inexplicably landed on her feet; for she was suddenly standing in darkness in a crowd of people, being jostled on every side. She didn't know if she was in a street, some public place like that, or where she was. A siren was sounding, but it was strange to her, it meant nothing. She didn't know the person she was with, but she clutched at their arm. 'What's that?' she asked. 'That noise? What is it?' 'Don't you know?' the person answered. 'That's the Warning for the Bull.' 'The Bull?' she asked. 'The German Bull,' said the voice. At once, then, she understood that the Bull was a new and very terrifying kind of weapon. She turned, in fright; but she turned in the wrong direction, or not in the proper way. 'Here it is!' cried the voice in terror-and she tried to turn again, but was struck in the stomach and knew she'd been caught, in the darkness, by the horn of the terrible German Bull. She put out her hands and felt the shaft of it, smooth and hard and cold; she felt the place, even, where it entered her stomach; and she knew, too, that if she were to reach around to her back she would be able to feel the tip of it jutting out there, because the horn had run right through her…

Then she came back to herself, and to Mr Imrie; but she could still feel the horn. She thought it had pinned her to the couch. She heard her own voice, talking nonsense, and Mr Imrie giving a chuckle.

'Bulls? Oh, no. Not in Cricklewood, my dear.'

He held a bowl to her face, and she was sick.

He gave her a handkerchief to wipe her lips with, and helped her to sit upright. The towel had gone from beneath her hips. His sleeves were rolled back down, his cuffs neatly fastened, the links in place; his brow was flushed, with a faint sheen of perspiration on it. Everything-the smells of the room, the arrangement of things-seemed subtly different to her; she had a sense of time having given a sort of lurch, while her back was turned-as if she'd been playing at 'Grandmother's Footsteps'… On the floor there was a single shilling-sized spot of scarlet, but apart from that, nothing nasty to see. The zinc pail had been moved a little further away and covered over.

She swung her legs over the side of the couch, and the pain in her stomach and her back turned into a dragging internal ache; she became aware, too, of smaller, separate discomforts: a soreness between her legs, and a tenderness, as if she'd been kicked, in the flesh of her belly. Mr Imrie said that he'd put a wad of gauze inside her, to take up the blood; and he'd left, beside her on the couch, an ordinary sanitary towel and belt… Seeing that, she grew embarassed all over again, and tried too quickly to put on the belt and fasten the loops. He saw how she fumbled, and thought she was still dazed from the gas, and came and helped her.

When she began to dress, she realised how weak she was; she thought she could feel, too, where blood had gathered between her buttocks and was starting to grow sticky. The idea made her nervous. She asked if she could go to the lavatory, and he led her down the passage and showed her where it was. She sat, and felt for the ends of the plug of gauze-afraid of it; afraid that it might disappear inside her. When she peed, she felt stung. The ache in her womb and muscles was awful. Only a little blood showed on the toilet paper, however, and that made her realise that the moistness between her buttocks must just have been water: that Mr Imrie must have washed her, with a cloth or a sponge. She didn't like the idea. She still had the faintly frightening sense of having fallen or been plucked from time: of things having made a jump, with which she hadn't yet caught up…

'Now,' said Mr Imrie, when she went back into his surgery, 'you should anticipate a little bleeding, perhaps for a day or two. Don't be worried by that, that's perfectly normal. I should stay in bed, if I were you. Get your husband to spoil you a little…' He advised her to drink stout; and gave her two or three more sanitary towels, and a tub of aspirins for the pain. Then he took her back out to Reggie.

'Christ,' said Reggie, standing up, alarmed, putting out a cigarette. 'You look awful!'

She began to cry.

'There, now,' said Mr Imrie, coming in behind her. 'I've told Mrs Harrison to expect a little weakness, for twenty-four hours or so. You might telephone me, if you've any anxiety. I do ask you not to leave messages, however… Any fainting, of course; any serious bleeding; any vomiting, fitting, anything like that, you must call your doctor. But that's very unlikely. Very unlikely indeed. And needless to say, if a doctor were to be involved, you wouldn't feel it necessary to mention-' Again he spread his hands. 'Well, I'm sure you understand.'

Reggie looked rather wildly at him, and didn't answer. 'Are you OK?' he asked Viv.

'I think so,' she said, still crying.

'Christ,' he said, again. And then, to Mr Imrie: 'Is she supposed to look like this?'

'A little weakness, as I said. The slightly advanced nature of the pregnancy made things a shade more complicated, that's all. Just bear in mind, about the vomiting and the fits-'

Reggie swallowed. He put on his coat, and then helped Viv to put on hers. She leaned on his arm. It was ten to nine… They all went out into the hall-Mr Imrie closing the door of the waiting-room and then stepping nimbly across the hall to close the other door, to the surgery. He put off the light, unlatched the front door, but only opened it a little-just enough for him to peer out into the street.

'Ah,' he said. 'The moon is still rather bright. I wonder-' He turned to Viv. 'Would you mind very much, Mrs Harrison, just holding your handkerchief across your face, like this?' He put his hand to his mouth. 'That's right. It gives the impression, you see, that you've come for some ordinary dental work; which, after all, is not uncommon… I'm thinking of my neighbours. The war gives people such suspicious ideas. Thank you, so much.'

He pulled the door wide, and they left him. Viv kept the handkerchief across her mouth for a minute or two, then let her hand fall. The cloth, like the piece of paper Reggie had taken from his pocket on the way, seemed almost luminous in the moonlight; but she looked at the cloudless sky now and felt too weak and sore and miserable to be frightened… She began, instead, to grow very cold. She thought she could feel the plug of gauze inside her, slipping out of its place. The edges of the sanitary towel chafed her thighs. She leaned more heavily on Reggie's arm. But she wouldn't speak to him. 'All right?' he kept saying. 'OK? Good girl.' Then, when they'd gone a hundred yards or so, he broke out with, 'That shyster! Christ, what a thing to spring on us! All that stuff about the extra ten quid. He knew he'd got us over a barrel. Christ, what a bloody jew! I ought to have stood my ground a bit harder. For two pins-'

'Shut up!' she said at last, unable to bear it.

'No, but honestly, Viv. What a racket.'

He grumbled on. At Cricklewood Broadway they waited for ten or fifteen minutes, then picked up a cab. They were going to a place Reggie had got the use of-a flat, somewhere right in the middle of town. He had the address they wanted, on another piece of paper. The driver knew the street, but said that some of the roads were up, he had to take them a roundabout route… Reggie heard that, and gave a snort. Viv could feel him thinking, That's a nice trick, as well. The cab went slowly, and she held herself in a state of miserable tension all the way. When she thought the driver wasn't looking, she opened the tub of aspirin and took three: chewing them up, swallowing and swallowing to get them down. From time to time she slipped a hand beneath herself-afraid that the gauze and the sanitary towel might not be working after all.

She didn't look at the house, when they reached it; she never knew exactly where it was-though she remembered, later, having crossed Hyde Park, and thought that it must have been in some street in Belgravia. It had a porch with pillars, she remembered that, for Reggie had to get the key to the flat they were borrowing from an old lady in the basement, and while he ran down the steps and knocked on the door she closed her eyes and leaned against one of the pillars, and put her hands flat against her stomach to try and warm herself up. Her needs and wants had shrunk, condensed: she could think only of finding a place to be private and still, to be warm. She heard Reggie's voice. He was joking with the lady, in a strained kind of way: 'That's right… I should say so, too… Isn't it?' Come on, she thought. He reappeared, puffing, cursing, and they went inside.

The flat was up, on the highest floor. The staircase windows were uncovered, so they had to climb with only the torch to light them. She felt moisture at the top of her thighs and began to think she must be bleeding: with every step it seemed to her that she could feel the soft, hot release of a little more blood. At last she was sure that it was running down her legs, soaking her stockings, filling her shoes… She stood very still while Reggie fumbled with the keys in the unfamiliar locks, then stood still again as he went about from one window to another, kicking bits of furniture on his way, striking his shins, sending china rattling.

'For God's sake,' she said weakly, when something had fallen and he had stooped, swearing, to pick it up. 'Never mind this room. Do the bathroom first.'

'I would,' he said testily, 'if I knew where it was.'

'Can't you see?'

'No, I can't. Can you?'

'Put a light on, it's just for a minute.'

'We'll have Mother Hubbard coming up from her basement. We'll have a warden at the door. That's all we need.'

He had been fined a pound for showing a light, two years before; and had never forgotten it. The beam of the torch swept wildly about. She saw him move, then strike his head, hard, against the edge of a door.

'Christ!'

'Are you all right?'

'What do you think? Hell! That hurts like buggery!'

He rubbed his forehead, then went on more cautiously. When his voice came again, it was muffled. 'Here's the bedroom. The lav's meant to be off that, I think. Just a minute-' She heard a thud, as he struck his head again. There was the rattle of curtain-rings, and then a click, and then another. 'Oh, to fuck!' he cried. The electricity was off. They needed shillings: he made his way back to her and sorted through his change, went through her purse; then blundered around a second time, looking for the meter…

The coins went in at last, and lights sprang on. She made her way, wincing, to the bathroom. When he saw how gingerly she was moving he came forward to help her, and she pushed him off.

'Go away,' she said. 'Go away!'

She had not bled as much as she had feared, there was only a little staining on the surface of the sanitary towel; but the tip of the gauze, which had been white before, was now the colour of rust. She felt it with her fingers: it seemed looser than it had been at first, and again she worried about it travelling about inside her, getting lost. She got a smear of blood on her hand, and stood to wash it. She looked at the bath, and imagined filling it with hot water, soaking away the pain from her hips. But the bathroom was queer and luxurious, done up with a thick, milk-coloured carpet and with tiles made to look like mother-of-pearl. It made her feel grubby; she thought of the manoeuvres it would take not to leave marks or stains… She shivered, suddenly exhausted; she lowered the lavatory lid and sat back down on it, with her elbows on her knees and her face in her hands. She still had her coat and her hat on.

She sat so long, Reggie knocked on the door to ask if she was all right. When she let him in he glanced around with fluttering eyelids, nervously.

He helped her to walk. She had passed through the bedroom before and hardly looked at it; now she saw that, like the bathroom, it was done up outlandishly. There was a tiger-skin rug on top of a carpet, and satin cushions on the bed. It was like someone's idea of a film-star's bedroom; or as though prostitutes or playboys lived here. The whole flat was the same. The sitting-room had an elecric fire built into the wall, surrounded by panels of chromium. The telephone was pearly white. There was a bar, for drinks, with bottles and glasses inside it, and on the wall were pictures of Paris: the Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower, men and women sitting gaily at pavement cafés with bottles of wine.

But everything was chill to the touch and dusty; and here and there were piles of powder: paint and plaster, that must have been shaken down in raids. The rooms smelt damp, unlived-in. Viv sat, still shivering, in the armchair closest to the fire.

'Whose flat is this?' she asked.

'It's no-one's,' said Reggie, squatting beside her and fiddling with the fire's controls. 'It's a show-flat.-I think one of these elements has gone.'

'What?'

'It's just for show,' he said. 'It's just to show you what your place would be like, if you bought one. They did it all up before the war started. No-one's interested now.'

'Nobody lives here?'

'People come to stay, that's all.'

'What people?'

He turned a switch, back and forth. 'Pals of Mike's, I told you. He was one of the house-agents and he's still got the key. He leaves it with the old mother downstairs. If you've got leave, and nowhere to spend it…'

She understood. 'It's for you blokes to bring girls to.'

He glanced up, laughing. 'Don't look at me like that! I don't know anything about that. But it's better than a hotel, isn't it?'

'Is it?' She wouldn't smile. 'I suppose you'd know. I suppose you bring girls here all the time.'

He laughed again. 'I wish! I've never been here before in my life.'

'That's what you say.'

'Don't be daft. You saw how I charged about, didn't you?' He rubbed his head.

She looked away, feeling desperately sorry for herself. 'It's always the same,' she said bleakly. 'It ends up nasty, every single time. Even now.'

He was still working the switch. 'Like what? What is?'

'Like this.' Her voice dissolved. The show of bitterness, the flood of self-pity, had worn her out. She began to cry again. He left the fire and rose; came to her and sat awkwardly beside her. He took her hat from her head and smoothed her hair and kissed her.

'Don't Viv.'

'I feel so awful.'

'I know you do.'

'No, you don't. I wish I were dead.'

'Don't say that. Think how I'd feel if you were… Does it hurt?'

'Yes.'

He lowered his voice. 'Was it horrible?'

She nodded. He reached, and put his hand on her stomach. She flinched, at first. But the warmth and weight of his palm and fingers were comforting; she placed her own hands over his and held them tight. She remembered her dream about the bull, and told him.

'A bull?' he said.

'A German bull. It was sticking its horn in me. When all the time I suppose it was Mr Imrie-'

Reggie laughed. 'I knew he was a dirty old man the moment we went in. What a sod though, to hurt my girl!'

'It's not his fault.' She got out her handkerchief and blew her nose. 'It's yours.'

'Mine! I like that!' He kissed her again. 'If it wasn't for you, driving a fellow crazy…' He rubbed his cheek against her head. The weight of his hand on her lower belly began to feel different. He had moved his fingers. 'Oh, Viv,' he said.

Now she pushed him away. 'Get off!' She laughed, despite herself. 'It's all right for you-'

'It's hell for me.'

'The thought of- Oh!' She shuddered.

He laughed, too. 'You say that now. We'll see what you think in a week or two.'

'A week or two! You're loopy. A year or two, more like.'

'Two years? I will be loopy. Let a man hope, at least. That's more than they give you for desertion.'

She laughed again; then caught her breath and shook her head, suddenly quite unable to speak. They sat for a minute or two in silence. He moved her hair with his chin and his cheek, and now and then put his mouth to her brow. The room began gradually to warm up. The pain in her stomach and back subsided, until it felt like the deep but ordinary ache one got, every month, with the curse. But she felt utterly without strength.

In time, Reggie stood and stretched. He looked at the bar and said he fancied a drink. He went and picked out a bottle; when he opened it up and smelt it, however, he made a face: 'Coloured water!' He tried another. 'They're all the same. And, look!' There were cigarettes in a box; but they were made of pasteboard. 'What a dirty trick. We shall have to make do with this, I suppose.'

He'd brought a little bottle of brandy with him. He pulled the stopper from it, and offered it to her.

She shook her head. 'Mr Imrie said I ought to have stout.'

'I'll get you some stout later on, if you like. Have a nip of this for now, though.'

She hadn't eaten all day, because of the anaesthetic: she took a sip, and felt the liquid as she swallowed it, travelling down her throat to her empty stomach, warm as a tongue of fire. Reggie drank some too, then lit up a cigarette. She couldn't quite manage that; but the smell, at least, didn't make her sick… I must be better, she thought-realising it then, in that moment, for the first time. I must be OK. The thought spread through her like the brandy. She closed her eyes. There was only the pain, now; and that, compared to everything else, would be easy.

Reggie finished his cigarette and got up; she heard him go to the lavatory, and then he was moving about in the bedroom, drawing back the curtain, looking out into the street. The street was quiet. The whole house was quiet. There must have been empty flats, like this, on every side.

When he came back she was almost sleeping. He crouched beside her and touched her face.

'Are you warm enough, Viv? You feel cold as anything.'

'Do I? I feel all right.'

'Wouldn't you like to lie on the bed? Do you want me to take you?'

She shook her head, unable to speak. She opened her eyes, but almost at once they closed again, as if the lids were weighted down. Reggie put his hand on her forehead and drew the collar of her coat more closely around her neck. He kicked off his shoes and sat on the floor, resting his head against her knees. 'You tell me if you want anything,' he said.

They stayed like that for more than an hour. They might have been an old married couple. They had never been so much alone together before, without making love.

And then, at half-past ten or so, Viv gave a start. She made Reggie jump.

'What is it?' he said, looking up at her.

'What?' she said, confused.

'Is it hurting?'

'What?'

He got to his feet. 'You're white as a sheet. You're not going to be sick?'

She felt really odd. 'I don't know. I need the toilet again, I think.' She tried to rise.

'Let me help you.'

He walked her to the bathroom. She went more slowly even than before. Her head seemed separated off from her body-as if her body were squat, dense, ungainly, her head attached to it by the merest thread. But the further she walked, the sharper the ache grew in her stomach; and that brought her back to herself. By the time she sat on the lavatory she was bent almost double with griping pains. The pains were strange: part like the pains of the curse, still; but part like a bowel pain. She thought she might have diarrohea. She pressed with her muscles, as if to pee; there was a slithering sensation between her legs, and the splash of something striking the water. She looked in the bowl. The plug of gauze was there, quite sodden and misshapen with blood; and blood was falling from her still, thick and dark and knotted as a length of tarry rope.

She cried out for Reggie. He came at once, frightened by the sound of her voice.

'Jesus!' he said, when he saw the mess in the bowl. He stepped back, as pale as her. 'Was it like this before?'

'No.' She tried to stop it with sheets of lavatory paper. The blood slid about, got all over her hands. She'd begun to shake. Her heart was beating wildly. 'It won't stop,' she said.

'Put the thing against it.' He meant the sanitary towel.

'It just keeps coming out, I can't stop it. Oh, Reggie, I can't stop it at all!'

The more afraid she grew, the faster the blood seemed to tumble. At first it was viscous with specks and clots; soon it was ordinary blood, astonishingly red. It struck the lavatory paper in the bowl with a sound like water in a sink. It got on the seat, her legs, her fingers, everywhere.

'It shouldn't be like this, should it?' said Reggie breathlessly.

'I don't know.'

'What did Mr Imrie say? Did he say it would be like this?'

'He said I might get a bit of bleeding.'

'A bit? What's a bit? Is this a bit? This can't be a bit, this is tons.'

'Is it?'

'Isn't it?'

'I don't know.'

'Why don't you know? What's it like when it comes out normally?'

'Not like this. It's getting everywhere!'

He put his hand across his mouth. 'There must be something you can do to make it stop. You could take more aspirins.'

'Aspirins won't help, will they?'

'It's better than nothing.'

It was all they had. He fumbled about in her coat pocket, getting the tub. She couldn't touch anything with the blood on her hands. She took three more tablets, chewing them up as she had before; he gave her another sip of brandy, then drank the rest of the bottle himself. They pulled the plug of the lavatory and watched water gush into the bowl. It settled clear and pinkish at the top, dark red and syrupy at the bottom-like a clever sort of cocktail. More blood immediately began to flow from her, and to swirl and spread about.

'And you don't think,' Reggie said, nodding again to the sanitary towel, 'if you were to just put the thing against it-'

She shook her head, too panicked to speak. She pulled off sheets and sheets of paper and tried to stop herself up with them. They held for a minute or two, and she grew a little calmer; but then they fell from her, just like the gauze. Reggie tried again, with more sheets. He put his hand over hers, to hold the paper in place. But those sheets fell out too, and the blood came faster than ever.

At last, almost beside themselves, they decided that Reggie should call up Mr Imrie and get his advice. He ran into the sitting-room; she heard the little ting of the bell in the pearly white phone; but then Reggie gave a cry, a sort of yelp of frustration and despair. When he came back he was lurching about, pulling on his shoes. The telephone didn't work. Its wire ran for two or three feet and then stopped. It was like the bottles of coloured water, the pasteboard cigarettes, and just for show.

'I'll have to find a kiosk,' he said. 'Did you see one, when we came?'

The thought of him leaving her was terrifying. 'Don't go!'

'Is it still coming?' He looked between her legs, and swore. He put his hand on her shoulder. 'Listen,' he said, 'I'm going to go down to the old mother downstairs. She'll know where a phone is.'

'What will you tell her?'

'I'll just say I need a telephone.'

'Say-' Viv clutched at him. 'Say I'm losing a baby, Reggie.'

He checked himself. 'Shall I? She'll want to come up if I do. She'll want to bring a doctor.'

'Maybe we should get a doctor, shouldn't we? Mr Imrie said-'

'A doctor? Christ, Viv, I hadn't bargained on anything like that.' He took his hand from her and put it to his head, to grip at his hair. She could tell from his expression that he was thinking of the money, or the fuss. She began to cry again. 'Don't cry!' he said, when he saw that; and he looked, for a moment, as if he might begin to cry himself. He said, 'A doctor will be able to tell, won't he? Won't a doctor look, and know?'

'I don't care,' she said.

'He could bring in the police, Viv. He'll want our names. He'll want to know everything about us.' His voice was strained. He stood, undecided-trying to think of another way. Then a new surge of pain rose up in her, and she gasped, and clutched at her stomach. 'All right,' he said quickly. 'All right.'

He turned and went. The flat door banged, and after that she heard nothing. Her brow and her upper lip were wet with sweat; she wiped them on her sleeve. She pulled the plug of the lavatory again, then swivelled about and reached into the basin to wash her hands-taking off the gold-coloured ring, because it was so loose. The basin looked as though it had had scarlet paint put down it: she got more sheets of lavatory paper and tried to clean it-tried to clean the seat on which she was sitting, and the rim of the bowl beneath. Then she saw a little blood on the carpet: she leaned to it, and grew dizzy; the floor of the bathroom seemed to tilt. She grabbed for the wall; left a smear of pink on one of the mother-of-pearl tiles; eased herself up and sat very still, her head in her hands. If she sat still, the blood ran less freely… She longed to lie down; she remembered Mr Imrie telling her to stay in bed. But she wouldn't get up, for fear of making a mess of the milk-coloured carpet. She closed her eyes and began to count, beneath her breath. One, two, three, four. She ran through the numbers, over and over. One two three four. One two three four-

I'm going to die, she thought. She wanted her father, suddenly. If only her dad were here! But then she imagined him walking in and seeing all the blood… She started to cry again. She sat up and leaned her head against the wall-weeping, but weeping so feebly her sobs were like little snorts of pain.

She was still sitting crying like this when Reggie came back. He had the old lady with him. She was wearing a nightdress and a dressing-gown, but had slipped a coat on top and had put on a hat and rubber galoshes. It was probably the outfit she kept ready for when the Warning went. She was breathing hard, from climbing all the stairs, and had no teeth in. She had got out a hankie to wipe her face. When she saw the state of Viv, however, she let the hankie fall. She came straight to her, and felt her forehead, then pulled apart her thighs to peer at the mess between them.

Then she turned back to Reggie. 'Good heavens, boy!' she said-speaking sloppily, because of her missing teeth. 'What was you thinking of, calling a doctor? A bloody ambulance is what she needs!'

'An ambulance?' said Reggie, in horror. 'Are you sure?' He was hanging back, now that she was here.

'You heard me,' said the woman. 'Look at the colour of her! She's lost half the blood in her body. A doctor ain't going to be able to put that back in, is he?' She felt Viv's forehead again. 'Good lord… Go on! What you waiting for? You'll get one now, if you call before the sirens start up. Tell them to be quick. Tell them it's a matter of life and death!'

Reggie turned and ran.

'Now,' said the woman, shrugging off her coat. 'Do you think you ought to be sitting there, dear, letting it all come tumbling out of you like that?' She put her hand on Viv's shoulder. The hand was trembling. 'Don't you think you ought to lie down?'

Viv shook her head. 'I want to stay here.'

'All right, then. But let's just lift you up a bit and- That's it, you got the idea.'

The bathroom had a single towel in it-milk-coloured, like the carpet. Viv hadn't liked to use it. But the woman had plucked it from the rail at once and folded it up; she made Viv stand, and she lowered the lid of the lavatory and put the towel on it. 'You sit on that, my dear,' she said, helping Viv back down. 'That's right. And let's take these old drawers off you, too, shall we?' She stooped, and fumbled about Viv's knees; lifted up her feet… 'That's better. Not nice, is it, having your old man see you with your drawers around your ankles? I should say it ain't. There we are: when I was your age we hardly bothered with drawers at all. We had our skirts, do you see, to keep us decent. Long great skirts like you'd never believe… There. Never mind. Soon have you sorted out and looking like a queen again. Why, what handsome hair you've got, haven't you-?'

She went chatting sloppily on, lots of nonsense; she let Viv lean against her, and smoothed and patted her head with hard, blunt fingers. But Viv could tell, too, that she was frightened.

'Still coming, is it?' she'd say, from time to time, looking into the towel between Viv's legs. 'Well, young 'uns like you, you've got it to spare. That's what they say, don't they?'

Viv had closed her eyes. She was aware of the old lady's murmurs, but had begun to hold herself rigid: she was concentrating on the blood that was escaping from her-trying to slow it, to keep hold of it, to will it back into herself. Her fear rose and sank, in great dark plunging waves. For what felt like minutes at a time the blood seemed to still, and she would grow almost calm; but there would come another little gush between her legs, that sent her back into a panic-she'd be made frightened too, then, by the very galloping of her own heart, that was making the blood, she knew, run even faster…

Then she heard Reggie come back.

'Did you send for 'em?' called the old lady.

'Yes,' said Reggie, breathlessly. 'Yes, they're coming.'

He stood in the bathroom doorway, as pale as ash: biting his fingernails, too awed by the old lady to come in. If only he'd come and hold my hand, Viv thought. If only he'd put his arm around me… But all he did was meet her gaze and make a helpless sort of gesture: spread his hands, shook his head. 'I'm sorry,' he mouthed. 'I'm sorry.' And then he moved away. She heard him light up a cigarette. There was the rattle of curtain-hooks, and she knew he must be standing at the bedroom window, looking out.

Then the blood seeped again, and the pain inside her shut tight, like a fist around a blade; she closed her eyes and was plunged back into panic. The pain and the panic were utterly black, and timeless: it was like going under the gas at Mr Imrie's again, slipping out of the world while the world scuttled forwards… She felt the old lady's hard hands on her shoulders and in the small of her back, rubbing and rubbing, in little circles. She heard Reggie call out, 'Here it is!' But she couldn't imagine, at that moment, what he meant. She thought it must be something to do with the fact that he had drawn back the curtain from the window… When, after another minute or two, she opened her eyes and saw the ambulance people, in their trousers and jackets and tin hats, she supposed them an ARP man and a boy, come to complain about the black-out.

But the boy was laughing. The laugh was throaty, but light, like a girl's. He said, 'I like your tiger-skin rug. Doesn't it ever give you a scare, though, in the middle of the night? I should be afraid of it having a go at my ankles as I went by…' He examined the towel that Viv was sitting on, and his laugh faded, but his face stayed kind. The towel was utterly scarlet and sodden. He put his hand across her brow. He said to the man, quietly, 'Skin's pretty clammy.'

'I couldn't make it stop,' mumbled Viv.

The man had squatted before her. He had bared her arm and was strapping a band around it; now he quickly pumped at a rubber bladder and frowned at a dial. He touched her thigh and looked, as the boy had, at the towel beneath her bottom. She was past embarassment. 'How long,' he asked, 'has it been coming from you like this?'

'I don't know,' she answered weakly. She thought, Where's Reggie? Reggie would know. 'About an hour, I think.'

The man nodded. 'You've lost an awful lot of blood by the looks of it. We'll have to take you to a hospital, as quickly as we can. All right?' He spoke calmly, comfortingly. She wanted to give herself up to his arms. He still squatted before her,

putting the strap and the bladder away in his bag. He worked very swiftly. But he looked into her face again before he rose, and, 'What's your name?' he asked her gently.

'Pearce,' she answered, without thinking. 'Vivien Pearce.'

'And how far on was your baby, Mrs Pearce?'

But now she realised what she had done. She had said Vivien Pearce, when she should have said Margaret Harrison… She started looking about for Reggie again. The man touched her knee.

'I'm sorry,' he was saying. 'It's rotten luck. But for now, we must make you better. My friend Miss Carmichael and I are going to carry you downstairs.'

She was still looking for Reggie, and couldn't concentrate on his words. She thought that when he said 'Miss Carmichael' he must mean the old lady. Then he and the boy said other things-spoke to each other, calling each other 'Kay' and 'Mickey'-and she understood, with a rush of dismay, that they were not men at all, but simply short-haired women… All the confidence she'd had in them, the sense of care and safety, disappeared. She began to shake. They seemed to think that she was cold, and put a blanket around her. They had brought a folding canvas chair, into which they strapped her; and they began to manoeuvre her out of the bathroom and across the tiger-skin rug, through the sitting-room, past the bar and the pictures of Paris, and down the unlit stairs. She thought she would fall, at every turning. 'I'm sorry,' she kept saying weakly. 'I'm sorry.'

They scolded her, in a playful way, for being worried.

'If you could see some of the heavy great blokes we have to haul about!' said the boyish one-Mickey-laughing. 'We're going into business, after this, as piano movers.'

The old lady went ahead of them, to tell them about awkward steps. She held the front-door open for them, and then trotted down the path to do the same with the garden gate. The ambulance was parked just beyond it, the touches of white on its dull grey paintwork lit up by the moon and making it seem to float above the inky-black surface of the street. Kay and Mickey set Viv down, and opened up the doors.

'We're going to lay you flat,' said Mickey. 'We think that'll help the bleeding. Here we go.'

They lifted her in, got her out of the chair and put her down on the bunk. She still shook as if cold, and the blood still seeped; now, too, she'd begun to labour after air-as if she'd run a race, something like that. She heard Kay speak, telling Mickey that Mickey could drive, while she stayed in the back; then the bunk tilted slightly as Kay climbed in. Viv looked up-looking for Reggie, wanting Kay to let him sit beside her and hold her hand… One of the ambulance doors was closed, and the old lady stood in the frame of the other: she was calling out, in her sloppy voice, that Viv wasn't to be frightened now; that the doctors would have her right in no time… She stepped back. Mickey had hold of the open door and was closing it.

Viv struggled, and sat up. She said, 'Wait. Where's Reggie?'

'Reggie?' said Kay.

'Her husband!' said the old lady. 'Lord, I clean forgot him. I saw him slip away and-'

'Reggie!' called Viv, growing frantic. There was a strap holding down her hips. She began to pluck at it. 'Reggie!'

'Is he there?' asked Kay.

'I don't think so,' answered Mickey. 'Do you want me to go and have a look?'

Viv still struggled with the strap.

'All right,' said Kay. 'But be quick!'

Mickey went off. When she came back, a minute or two later, she was panting. She put up the brim of her tin hat and leaned into the van.

'There's no-one there,' she said. 'I looked all over.'

Kay nodded. 'Right, let's go. He can find her at the hospital.'

'But he was there,' said Viv breathlessly. 'You must have made a mistake- In the darkness-'

'There's no-one,' Mickey said again. 'I'm sorry.'

'Now, ain't that a shame,' said the old lady, with great feeling.

Viv fell back: weaker than ever, unable to protest. She was thinking of Reggie, on the edge of tears, saying, 'A doctor will be able to tell, won't he? A doctor will want our names, he'll want to know everything about us.' She was remembering him standing in the doorway to the bathroom, shaking his head, saying, 'I'm sorry…'

She closed her eyes. The door was slammed and, after a moment, the ambulance started up and moved off. The engine was so loud, it felt as though she had her head against its engine. It was like being trapped in the hold of a ship. Kay's voice came, close above her face. 'All right, Mrs Pearce.' She was doing something-filling in a label, fastening it to Viv's collar. 'Be brave, Mrs Pearce-'

Viv said, wretchedly, 'Don't call me Mrs. He's not my husband, like the lady said. We had to make out, that's all, for Mr Imrie-'

'Never mind,' said Kay.

'We said Harrison, because that was Reggie's mother's name. You must say Harrison at the hospital. Will you? You must say I'm Mrs Harrison. Because even if they look, and can tell-it's not so bad if a married lady does it, is it?'

'Don't worry.' Kay was holding her wrist, feeling her pulse.

'They don't send for the police, do they, when it's married ladies?'

'You're getting muddled. Send for the police? Why would they do that?'

'It's against the law, isn't it?' said Viv.

She saw Kay smile. 'Being ill? Not yet.'

'Getting rid of a baby, I mean.'

The van gave a series of bumps, as it ran over the broken surface of the road. Kay said, 'What?'

Viv wouldn't answer. She could feel a little more blood being shaken out of her with every jolt. She closed her eyes again.

'Vivien,' said Kay. 'What did you do?'

'We went to a man,' said Viv at last. She caught her breath. 'A dentist.'

'What did he do to you?'

'He put me to sleep. It was all right, at first. But he put a dressing inside me, and the dressing came out, and that's when it started bleeding. It was all right till then.'

Kay moved away and thumped on the wall of the cabin. 'Mickey!' The van slowed, then stopped; there was the ratcheting sound of the brake. Mickey's face appeared at the sliding glass panel above Viv's head.

'Is she OK?'

'It's not,' said Kay, 'what we thought. She's been to someone-a bloody dentist-he's mucked about with the pregnancy.'

'Oh, no,' said Mickey.

'She's bleeding, still. He might have-I don't know. He might have punctured the wall of the womb.'

'Right.' Mickey turned. 'I'll go as quick as I can.'

'Wait. Wait!' Mickey turned back. 'She's afraid of the police.'

Viv was watching their faces. She'd raised herself up again. 'There mustn't be police!' she said. 'There mustn't be police, or newspaper men. They can't tell my father!'

'Your father won't mind,' said Mickey, 'when he knows how ill you are-'

'She's not married,' said Kay.

Viv began to cry again. 'Don't tell,' she said. 'Oh, please don't tell!'

She saw Mickey looking at Kay. 'If there's been a puncture, she might- Hell. There might be blood poisoning, mightn't there?'

'I don't know. I think so.'

'Please,' said Viv. 'Just tell them I've lost my baby.'

Mickey shook her head. 'It's too dangerous.'

'Please. Don't tell them anything. Say you found me in the street.'

'They'll know anyway,' said Mickey.

But Viv could see Kay thinking. 'They might not.'

'No,' said Mickey. 'We can't chance it. For God's sake, Kay! She might-' She looked at Viv. 'You might die,' she said.

'I don't care!'

'Kay,' said Mickey; and when Kay didn't answer, she turned away. The van jerked into life again and moved off, quicker than before.

Viv sank back. She couldn't feel the jolts so much, now. She felt suspended. She thought that, in losing so much blood, she must be beginning to float. She was vaguely aware of Kay adding something to the label fastened to her collar, then fumbling around with the pocket of her coat; then she felt her fingers held and squeezed. Kay had taken her hand. Her grip was sticky; Viv clutched harder, so as not to float away. She opened her eyes, and gazed into Kay's face. She gazed into it as she had never gazed into any face before; as if gazing could keep her from floating away, too.

'Just a little further, Vivien,' Kay said, over and over, and, 'Be very brave. That's right. We're almost there.'

And in another moment, the van made a turn and came to a stop. The doors were unfastened and thrown open. Mickey climbed in, and someone else appeared behind her: a nurse, with a white cap, bright and misshapen in the light of the moon.

'You again, Langrish!' said the nurse. 'Well, and what have you brought us tonight?'

Kay looked at Mickey, but kept her fingers tight about Viv's. And when Mickey opened her mouth to speak, she spoke instead.

'Miscarriage,' she said firmly. 'Miscarriage, with complications. We think the lady, Mrs Harrison, has had a bad fall. She's lost an awful lot of blood, and is pretty confused.'

The nurse gave a nod. 'All right,' she said. She moved away, and called to a porter. 'You there! Yes, you! Fetch a trolley, and look smart about it!'

Mickey lowered her head and said nothing. She began, rather grimly, to unfasten the strap that held Viv to the bunk. 'Come on, Vivien,' Kay said, when she'd done it. 'It's all right.'

Viv still gripped her hand. 'All right? Are you sure?'

'Yes,' said Kay. 'We have to move you, that's all. But listen to me, just for a second.' She was speaking, now, in a rushed sort of whisper. She glanced over her shoulder, then touched Viv's face. 'Are you listening? Look at me… Your card and your ration book, Vivien. I've made a tear in the lining of your coat. You can say you lost them when you fell. All right? Do you understand me, Vivien?'

Viv did understand; but her mind had drifted to something else, that seemed more important. She'd felt her hand come unstuck from Kay's, and her fingers had pins and needles in them. Their surface was sticky, but cold and bare-

'The ring,' she said. Now there seemed to be pins and needles in her lips. 'I've lost the ring. I've lost-' But she hadn't lost it, she remembered now. She'd taken it off, to wash the blood from beneath it; and she'd left it, in the fancy bathroom, on the basin, beside the tap.

She looked wildly at Kay. Kay said, 'It doesn't matter, Vivien. It's not like the other things.'

'Here's the trolley coming,' said Mickey sharply.

Viv tried to rise. 'The ring,' she said, growing breathless again. 'Reggie got me a ring. We had it, so that Mr Imrie would think-'

'Hush, Vivien!' said Kay urgently. 'Vivien, hush! The ring doesn't matter.'

'I've got to go back.'

'You can't,' said Mickey. 'Bloody hell, Kay!'

'What's the trouble?' called the sister.

'I've got to go back!' said Viv, beginning to struggle. 'Just let me go back and get my ring! It's no good, without it-'

'Here's your ring!' said Kay, suddenly. 'Here's your ring. Look.'

She had drawn away from Viv and put her own hands together; she worked them as if wringing them for a second, then produced a little circle of gold. She did it so swiftly and so subtly, it was like magic.

'You had it, after all?' asked Viv, in amazement and relief; and Kay nodded: 'Yes.' She lifted Viv's hand, and slid the ring along her finger.

'It feels different.'

'That's because you're ill.'

'Is it?'

'Of course. Now, don't forget about the other things. Put your arm across my shoulders. Hold tight. Good girl.'

Viv felt herself being lifted. Soon she was moving through cold air… When Kay took her hand for the last time, she found that she could hardly return its pressure. She couldn't speak, even to say thank you or goodbye. She closed her eyes. They were just taking her through into the hospital lobby when the Warning went.

Helen heard the sirens from Julia's flat in Mecklenburgh Square. Almost at once there were crackles and thuds. She thought of Kay, and lifted her head.

'Where's that, do you think?'

Julia shrugged. She had got up to fetch a cigarette and was fishing about in a packet. She said, 'Maybe Kilburn? It's impossible to say. I heard a whopper come down last week and could have sworn it was the Euston Road. It turned out to be Kentish Town.' She went to the window, drew back the curtain, and put her eye to one of the little chinks in the grey talc boards. 'You should look at the moon,' she said. 'It's extraordinary tonight.'

But Helen was still listening out for the bombs. 'There's another,' she said, flinching. 'Come away from the window, will you?'

'There's no glass in it.'

'I know, but-' She stretched out her arm. 'Come back, anyway.'

Julia let the curtain fall. 'Just a minute.' She went to the fireplace, and held a spill of paper to the glowing coals in the grate, to light her cigarette. Then she straightened up, and drew in smoke-putting back her head, savouring the taste of the tobacco. She was quite naked, and stood with one hip raised: relaxed and unembarassed in the firelight, as though at the edge of a pool of water in some lush Victorian painting of Ancient Greece.

Helen lay still, to watch her. 'You look like your name,' she said softly.

'My name?'

'Julia, Standing. I always want to put a comma in it. Hasn't anyone ever said it to you like that before? You look like your own portrait… Come back. You'll get cold.'

The room was too well-sealed to be really chill, however. Julia put her hand to her forehead to smooth away tangled hair, then came slowly to the couch and slid back beneath the blankets. She lay bare to the waist, with her hands behind her head, sharing the cigarette with Helen, letting Helen put it between her lips and take it away when she'd drawn on it. After it was smoked, she closed her eyes. Helen studied the rise and fall of her chest and stomach as she breathed; the flutter of a pulse at the base of her throat.

There was the hollow boom of another distant explosion, a burst of gun-fire, possibly the noise of planes. In the flat above Julia's the Polish man moved restlessly about: Helen could follow his passage across the floor, back and forth, by the creaks of its boards. In the room below, a wireless was playing; there was the echoey, rattling sound of somebody stirring up coke in a fireplace. The sounds were familiar to Helen now, just as the feel and sight of Julia's blankets and pillows and mismatched furniture had grown familiar. She had lain here like this perhaps six or seven times in the past three weeks. And she said to herself, as she had before: Those people don't know that Julia and I are together here, naked in one another's arms… It seemed incredible. She herself felt exposed-deliciously exposed, as if the flesh above dormant nerves had been sloughed off, peeled back.

She would never again, she thought, cross a floor, never switch on a wireless, never put a poker to the fire-never do anything at all-without thinking of the lovers who might be embracing in rooms close by.

She moved her hand to Julia's collarbone-not to the skin itself, but to a place in the air about an inch above it.

'What are you doing?' asked Julia, without opening her eyes.

'I'm divining you,' said Helen. 'I can feel the heat of you, rising up. I can feel the life of you. I can tell where your skin is pale, and where it's sallower. I can tell where it's clear and where there are freckles.'

Julia caught hold of her fingers. 'You're unhinged,' she said.

'Unhinged,' said Helen, 'by love.'

'That sounds like a book. One by Elinor Glyn or Ethel M. Dell.'

'Don't you feel a little crazy, Julia?'

Julia thought about it. 'I feel shot at by an arrow,' she said.

'Only by an arrow? I feel harpooned. Or- No, a harpoon's too brutal. I feel as if a small sort of hook had been plunged into my breast-'

'A small sort of hook?'

'A crochet hook, or something even finer.'

'A button hook?'

'A button hook, exactly.' Helen laughed. For at Julia's words a very clear image had sprung into her mind-something from her childhood, probably-a tarnished silver button hook with a slightly chipped mother-of-pearl handle. She put her hand across the place where she imagined her heart to sit. 'I feel,' she said, 'exactly as though a button hook had been plunged into my breast, and my heart were being drawn from me, fibre by fibre.'

'That sounds frightful,' said Julia. 'What a morbid girl you are.' She took Helen's fingers to her mouth and kissed them, then held them to examine their tips. 'And what little nails you have,' she said vaguely. 'Little nails, and little teeth.'

Helen grew self-conscious, though the light was so dim. 'Don't look at me,' she said, pulling her hand away.

'Why not?'

'I- I'm not worth it.'

Julia laughed. 'You mutt,' she said.

They closed their eyes, after that; and Helen, in time, must have fallen into a light sort of sleep. She was vaguely aware of Julia getting up again, putting on a dressing-gown and going down the hall to the lavatory; but she was in the midst of some absurd dream, and only came properly awake at the closing of the door, on Julia's return.

'What time is it?' she asked. She picked up Julia's alarm clock. 'God, it's quarter to one! I have to go.' She rubbed her face, then lay back down.

'Stay until one,' said Julia.

'Fifteen minutes. What's the good of that?'

'Let me come with you, then. I'll walk you to the flat.'

Helen shook her head.

'Let me,' said Julia. 'I'd rather walk than be left here, you know I would.'

She began to dress. Her clothes lay tangled on the floor: she stooped and caught up a bra and knickers, stepped into trousers and drew on a blouse-tucking in her chin and frowning while she fastened up its buttons. She stood at the mirror and smoothed her face.

Helen lay and watched her, as she had before. It seemed extraordinary, that she should be able to-incredible, that Julia should offer up her own beauty like this, to Helen's gaze. It was marvellous and almost frightening that, an hour before, Julia had lain in her arms, had opened her mouth, parted her legs, to Helen's lips and tongue and fingers. It seemed an impossible thing that she would, if Helen rose and went to her now, let herself be kissed…

Julia caught her eye, and smiled in pretend exasperation.

'Don't you get tired of looking at me?'

Helen lowered her gaze. 'I wasn't looking, really.'

'If you were a man, I'd say you ought to leave the room while I dressed. I'd want to stay a mystery to you.'

'I don't want you to be a mystery,' said Helen. 'I want to know every part of you.' Then she grew slightly sick. 'Why did you say that, Julia? You wouldn't rather a man, would you?'

Julia shook her head. She was leaning closer to the mirror, pushing out her mouth, putting lipstick on. 'It's no good for me, with men,' she said absently. She worked her lips together. 'It doesn't work for me, with men.'

'Only with women?' asked Helen.

Only with you, she wanted Julia to say. But Julia said nothing: she was tugging a comb through her hair now, looking critically at her own face… Helen turned away. She thought, What the hell's the matter with me? For she found she was jealous of Julia's reflection. She was jealous of Julia's clothes. She was jealous of the powder on Julia's face!

Then she thought of something else. She thought: Is this how Kay feels, about me?

The thought must have shown in her expression. When she turned back to Julia she saw that Julia was watching her, through the mirror. She'd stopped the comb in her hair, but her hands were still raised. She said, 'OK?'

Helen nodded; then shook her head. Julia put the comb down, came to her, and put an arm across her shoulders.

Helen closed her eyes. She said quietly, 'This is dreadfully wrong, isn't it?'

'Everything's dreadfully wrong, just now,' Julia answered, after a moment.

'But this is worse, because we might put it right.'

'Might we?'

'We might-stop. We might-go back.'

'Could you stop?'

'Perhaps,' said Helen, with an effort. 'For Kay's sake.'

'But then,' said Julia, 'the dreadfully wrong thing would still have been done. It was done, before this. It was done, almost, before we did anything at all. It was done- When was it done?'

Helen looked up. 'It was done the day you took me to that house in Bryanston Square,' she said. 'Or even, the time before that, when you bought me tea. We stood in the sun, and you closed your eyes and I looked at your face… I think it was done then, Julia.'

They held each other's gaze, in silence; then moved together and kissed. Helen was still not quite used to the difference between Julia's kisses, and Kay's-to the relative strangeness of Julia's mouth, the softness of it, the dry pull of her lipstick, the tentative pressures of her tongue. But the strangeness was exciting. The kiss, being inexact, quickly became wet. They moved closer together. Julia put her fingers to Helen's bare breast-touched, then drew the fingers back; touched again, drew back again-and again-until Helen felt her flesh seem to rise, to strain after Julia's hand.

They let themselves sink back, awkwardly, on to the bunched-up blankets. Julia moved her hand between Helen's legs and, 'Christ!' she said softly. 'You're so wet. I can't- I can't feel you.'

'Put your fingers inside me!' whispered Helen. 'Push inside me, Julia!'

Julia pushed. Helen lifted her hips, to meet the movement with a movement of her own. Her breath caught. 'Do you feel me now?'

'Yes, now I feel you,' said Julia. 'I can feel you gripping me. It's amazing-'

She had what must have been her four fingers inside Helen, up to the knuckle; but her thumb, outside, was rubbing at Helen's swollen flesh. Helen raised and lowered her hips, to keep pushing against her. The blankets were rough against her bare back, and as well as the pressure between her legs she could feel Julia's dry, trousered thigh bearing down on her own naked, damp one; she could make out separate points of discomfort-the chafing against her of the buckle of Julia's belt, the buttons on her blouse, the strap of her wristwatch… She stretched out her hands behind her head, wishing with some part of herself that Julia had bound her, fastened her down: she wanted to give herself up to Julia, have Julia cover her with bruises and marks. Julia began to push almost painfully inside her, and she liked it. She was aware of herself growing rigid, as if really pulled by tightening ropes.

She lifted her head and put her mouth to Julia's again, and when she started to cry out, she cried into Julia's mouth and against her lips and cheek.

'Shush!' said Julia, even as she still pushed frantically at her. She was thinking of the people in the neighbouring flats. 'Shush, Helen! Shush!'

'I'm sorry,' said Helen breathlessly; and cried out again.

It wasn't like their leisurely lovemaking from before. Afterwards Helen lay shaken, chastened, as if from an argument. When she stood, she found she was trembling. She went to the mirror: she had Julia's lipstick all around her mouth, and her lips were swollen as though she'd been hit. Then she moved into the firelight and saw that her thighs and breasts were marked, as if with rashes, from the rubbing of Julia's clothes. It was what she'd wanted, while Julia was pushing at her; now the marks upset her, absurdly. She moved blindly about the room, picking things up, putting them down-feeling the gathering inside her of a sort of hysteria.

Julia had gone through to the kitchen to wash her hands and mouth. When she came back, Helen stood before her and said unsteadily, 'Look at the state of me, Julia! How the hell will I hide this from Kay?'

Julia frowned. 'What's the matter with you? Keep your voice down, can't you?'

The words were like a slap. Helen sat, and put her head in her hands.

'What have you done to me, Julia?' she said at last, still shakily. 'What have you done? I don't know myself. I used to loathe the sort of people who did the kind of thing we're doing. I used to think they must be cruel, or careless, or cowardly. But I don't want to be cruel to Kay. It seems to me I'm doing this, because I care too much!-too much, I mean, for her, and for you. Can that be true, Julia?'

Julia didn't answer. Helen looked up once, then lowered her head again. She pressed at her eyes with the heels of her hands-conscious that she mustn't let herself cry, because crying would only make more marks… 'And the worst thing is,' she went on. 'Do you know what the worst thing of all is? It's that when I'm with Kay I'm wretched, because she isn't you; and she's sees that I'm wretched, and doesn't know why; and she comforts me! She comforts me, and I let her! I let her console me, for wanting you!'

She laughed. The laugh sounded horrible. She put down her hands. 'I can't keep doing it,' she said, more steadily. 'I have to tell her, Julia. But I'm afraid of it. I'm afraid of how she'll be. That it should be you, Julia! That it should be you! That she loved you, before, and now-' She shook her head and couldn't finish.

She reached to the pocket of her skirt for a handkerchief, and blew her nose. She felt exhausted-limp, like a doll. Julia had moved across the room to shovel ash on to the coke in the grate; but she had risen, and was standing at the mantelpiece, without having turned around. She didn't come to Helen's side, as she had before. She stood as if gazing down at the fire, brooding over the smothered coals. And when she spoke at last, her voice seemed distant.

She said, 'It wasn't like that, you know.'

Helen was blowing her nose again, and hardly heard. 'Like what?' she asked, not understanding.

'With Kay and me,' said Julia, still without turning her head. 'It wasn't the way you think it was. Kay let you imagine it, I suppose. It's awfully like her.'

'What do you mean?'

Julia hesitated. Then, 'She was never in love with me,' she said. She said it almost casually, putting down her hand to flick a piece of ash from her trouser-leg. 'I was the one. I was in love with Kay for years. She tried to love me back, but-it never took. I'm just not her type, I suppose. We're too similar; that's all it is…' She straightened up, and started picking at the paint on the mantelpiece. 'Kay wants a wife, you see. I said that once before, didn't I? She wants a wife-someone good, I mean; someone kind, untarnished. Someone to keep things in order for her, hold things in place… I could never do that. I used to tell her, she wouldn't be happy until she'd found herself some nice blue-eyed girl-some girl who'd need rescuing, or fussing over, or something like that…' She turned her head, and met Helen's gaze at last. She said, with a sort of infinite sadness, 'That was rather a joke on me, wasn't it?'

Helen stared at her, until she blinked and looked away. She went back to picking at the mantelpiece. 'Does it matter, either way?' she asked, in the same low, casual way as before.

It mattered terribly, Helen knew. At Julia's words, something inside her had dropped, or shrunk. She felt as though she'd been tricked, made a fool of-

That was silly, for Julia hadn't tricked her. Julia hadn't lied, or anything like that. But still, Helen felt betrayed. She became aware, suddenly, of her own nakedness. She didn't want to be naked in front of Julia any more! She quickly pulled on her skirt and her blouse. She said, as she did it, 'Why didn't you tell me?'

'I don't know.'

'You knew what I thought.'

'Yes.'

'You knew it, three weeks ago!'

'It was the surprise of hearing you say it,' said Julia. 'It was thinking of Kay- You know what she's like, she's such a bloody gentleman. She more of a gentleman than any real man I ever knew… I asked her, you see, not to tell. I never imagined-' She lifted a hand, and rubbed her eye. She went on tiredly, 'And then, I was proud. That's all it was. I was proud; and I was lonely. I was fucking lonely, if you want to know the truth.'

She blew out her breath in a rough sort of sigh; and looked back again, over her shoulder. 'Does it make a difference, what I've told you? It doesn't make any difference to me. But if you want, you know, to call the whole show off-'

'No,' said Helen. She didn't want that. And she was frightened by Julia's having raised, so casually, the possibility of their parting. For one terrible moment she saw herself completely alone-abandoned by Julia, as well as by Kay.

She put on the rest of her clothes without speaking. Julia kept her pose at the fireplace. When, at last, Helen went to her and put her arms around her, she moved into Helen's embrace with something like relief. But they held one another awkwardly. Julia said, 'After all, what's changed? Nothing's changed, has it?'-and Helen shook her head and said, No, nothing had changed… 'I love you, Julia,' she said.

But there was that shrinking or dropping inside her, still-as if her heart, that before had seemed to yearn after Julia, to swell and expand, was drawing in its muscles, closing its valves.

She finished dressing. Julia moved around the room, putting things away. Now and then they caught each other's eye, and smiled; if they moved close to one another, they reached out their hands, automatically, and lightly touched, or drily kissed.

Outside, over London, bombs were still falling. Helen had forgotten all about them. But when Julia went back through the curtained doorway and left her alone for a moment, she moved softly to the window and looked out, through one of the cracks in the talc, at the square. She could see houses, still silvered with moonlight; and as she watched, the sky was lit by a series of lurid sparkles and flares. The booms produced by the explosions started a second later: she felt the slight vibration of them in the board against her brow.

At every one of them, she flinched. All her confidence seemed to have left her. She began to shake-as if she'd lost the habit, the trick, of being at war; as if she knew, suddenly, only menace, the certainty of danger, the sureness of harm.

'God!' said Fraser. 'That was close, wasn't it?'

The bombs, and the anti-aircraft fire, had woken them all up. A few men were standing at their windows, calling encouragement to the British pilots and the ack-ack guns; Giggs, as usual, was yelling at the Germans. 'This way, Fritz!' It was a kind of pandaemonium, really. Fraser had lain very rigidly for fifteen minutes, swearing at the noise; finally, unable to bear it, he'd got out of bed. He'd pulled the table across the cell and was standing on it in his socks, trying to see out of the window. Every time another blast came he flinched away from the panes of glass, sometimes covering his head; but he always moved back to them. It was better, he said, than doing nothing.

Duncan was still in his bunk. He was lying on his back, more or less comfortably, with his hands behind his head. He said, 'They sound closer than they are.'

'They don't disturb you?' asked Fraser incredulously.

'You get used to it.'

'It doesn't trouble you, that a bloody great bomb might be heading straight for you and you can't so much as duck your head?'

The cell was lit up by the moonlight, weirdly bright. Fraser's face showed clearly, but his boyish blue eyes, the blond of his hair, and the brown of the blanket across his shoulders, had lost their colours; they were all versions of silvery grey, like things in a photograph.

'They say if it's got your name on,' said Duncan, 'it'll get you wherever you are.'

Fraser snorted. 'That's the sort of thing I'd expect to hear from someone like Giggs. Except that when he says it, I really think he might imagine there's a factory somewhere on the outskirts of Berlin, stamping Giggs, R, Wormwood Scrubs, England into the casing.'

'All I mean,' said Duncan, 'is, if it's going to get us at all, it might as well get us here.'

Fraser put his face back to the window. 'I'd like to think I had a shot at improving my chances, that's all.-Oh, bugger!' He jumped, as another explosion sounded, rattling the glass, dislodging stones or mortar in the duct behind the heating grille in the wall. There came cries-whoops and cheers-from other cells; but someone called, too, in a high broken voice, 'Turn it off, you cunts!' And after that, just for a moment, there was silence.

Then the ack-ack guns started up again, and more bombs fell.

Duncan looked up. 'You'll get your face blown off,' he said. 'Can you even see anything?'

'I can see the searchlights,' said Fraser. 'They're making their usual bloody muck of things… I can see the glow of fires. Christ knows where they are. For all we know, the whole damn city could be burning to the ground.' He started biting at one of his fingernails. 'My eldest brother's a warden,' he said, 'in Islington.'

'Go back to bed,' said Duncan, after another minute. 'There's nothing you can do.'

'That's what makes it so bloody! And to think of those damn twirls, down there in their shelter- What do you think they're doing right now? I bet they're playing cards and drinking whisky; and rubbing their blasted hands together in glee.'

'Mr Mundy won't be doing that,' said Duncan loyally.

Fraser laughed. 'You're right. He'll be sitting in the corner with a Christian Science tract, imagining the bombs away. Maybe I should take a tip from him. What do you say? He's persuaded you with all that nonsense, hasn't he? Is that why you're so untroubled?' He drew in his breath, and closed his eyes. When he spoke again, he spoke in a voice of unnatural calmness. 'There are no bombs. The bombs are not real. There is no war. The bombing of Portsmouth, Pisa, Cologne-that was nothing but a mass hallucination. Those people did not die, they only made a little mistake in thinking they did, it could happen to anyone. There is no war…'

He opened his eyes. The night was suddenly silent again. He whispered, 'Has that done the trick?' Then he jumped about a foot, as another explosion came. 'Fuck! Not quite. Try harder, Fraser. You're not trying hard enough, damn you!' He pressed his hands to his temples and began to recite again, more softly. 'There are no bombs. There are no fires. There are no bombs. There are no fires…'

At last he drew his blanket tighter across his shoulders, got down from the table and, still muttering, began to pace back and forth across the cell. With every fresh explosion, he swore and walked on faster. At last Duncan lifted his head from his pillow to say irritably, 'Stop walking about, can't you?'

'I'm sorry,' said Fraser, exaggeratedly polite, 'am I keeping you awake?' He got back on the table. 'It's this wretched moon brings them,' he said, as if to himself. 'Why can't there be clouds?' He rubbed the glass where his breath had misted it. For a minute he said nothing. Then he started up again: 'There are no bombs. There are no fires. There is no poverty and no injustice. There is no piss-pot in my cell-'

'Shut up,' said Duncan. 'You shouldn't make fun of it. It- Well, it isn't fair on Mr Mundy.'

Fraser laughed outright at that. 'Mr Mundy,' he repeated. 'Not fair on Mr Mundy. What's it to you, if I make fun of old Mr Mundy?' He said this as if still to himself; but then seemed struck by the idea, and turned his head, and asked Duncan properly. 'Just what sort of a racket do you have going on with Mr Mundy, anyway?'

Duncan didn't answer. Fraser waited, then went on, 'You know what I'm talking about. Did you think I hadn't noticed? He gives you cigarettes, doesn't he? He gives you sugar for your cocoa, things like that.'

'Mr Mundy's kind,' said Duncan. 'He's the only kind twirl here, you can ask anyone.'

'But I'm asking you,' persisted Fraser. 'He doesn't give me cigarettes and sugar, after all.'

'He doesn't feel sorry for you, I suppose.'

'Does he feel sorry for you, then? Is that what it is?'

Duncan lifted his head. He'd begun picking at a length of wool that had come loose at the edge of his blanket. 'I expect so,' he said. 'People do, that's all. It's a thing of mine. It's always been like that, even before.-Before all this, I mean.'

'You've just one of those faces,' said Fraser.

'I suppose so.'

'The fascination of your eyelashes, something like that.'

Duncan let the blanket fall. 'I can't help my eyelashes!' he said, stupidly.

Fraser laughed, and his manner changed again. 'Indeed you can't, Pearce.' He got down from the table again and sat on the chair-moving the chair so that it was close to the wall, and spreading his knees, putting back his head. 'I once knew a girl,' he began, 'with eyelashes like yours-'

'Known lots of girls, haven't you?'

'Well, I don't like to boast.'

'Don't, then.'

'I say, look here, it was you who brought the subject up! I was asking about you and Mr Mundy… I was wondering if it really was just for the sake of your beautiful eyelashes that he gives you such a soft time of it.'

Duncan sat up. He'd remembered the feel of Mr Mundy's hand on his knee, and started to blush. He said hotly, 'I don't give him anything back, if that's what you mean!'

'Well, I suppose that is what I meant.'

'Is that how it works, with you and your girls?'

'Ouch. All right. I just-'

'Just what?'

Fraser hesitated again. Then, 'Just nothing,' he said. 'I was curious, that's all, about how these things go.'

'How what things go?'

'For someone like you.'

'Like me?' asked Duncan. 'What do you mean?'

Fraser moved, turned away: impatient, or simply embarassed. 'You know very well what I mean.'

'I don't.'

'You must know, at least, what gets said about you in here.'

Duncan felt himself blush harder. 'That gets said, in here, about anyone. Anyone with any kind of-of culture; who likes books, likes music. Who isn't a brute, in other words. But the fact is, it's the brutes who are worst of all at that sort of thing-'

'I know that,' said Fraser quietly. 'It isn't only that.'

'What is it, then?'

'Nothing. Something I heard, about why you're here.'

'What did you hear?'

'That you're here because- Look, forget it, it's none of my business.'

'No,' said Duncan. 'Tell me what you heard.'

Fraser smoothed back his hair. 'That you're here,' he said bluntly at last, 'because your boyfriend died, and you tried to kill yourself over it.'

Duncan lay very still, unable to answer.

'I'm sorry,' said Fraser. 'As I said, it's none of my damn business. I don't care a fig why you're here, or who you used to go around with. I think the laws about suicide are bloody, if you want to know-'

'Who told you that?' asked Duncan thickly.

'It doesn't matter. Forget it.'

'Was it Wainwright? Or Binns?'

'No.'

'Who was it, then?'

Fraser looked away. 'It was that little queer Stella, of course.'

'Her!' said Duncan. 'She makes me sick. They all do, all that crowd. They don't want to go to bed with girls, but they make themselves like girls. They make themselves worse than girls! They need doctors! I hate them.'

'All right,' said Fraser mildly. 'So do I.'

'You think I'm like them!'

'That's not what I said.'

'You think I used to be like them; or that Alec was-'

He stopped. He had never said Alec's name here, aloud, to anyone but Mr Mundy; and now he'd spat it out as if it were a curse.

Fraser was watching him through the gloom. 'Alec,' he said, carefully. 'Was that- Was that your boyfriend?'

'He wasn't my boyfriend!' said Duncan. Why did everybody have to think of it like that? 'He was only my friend. Don't you have friends? Doesn't everyone?'

'Of course. I'm sorry.'

'He was only my friend. If you'd grown up where I grew up, feeling like me, you'd know what that meant.'

'Yes. I expect so…'

The worst of the bombing seemed, for the moment, to have passed on. Fraser blew into his hands, worked his fingers, to get the cold out. Then he got up, reached under his pillow and brought out cigarettes. Almost shyly, he offered one to Duncan. Duncan shook his head.

But Fraser kept the cigarettes held out. 'I should like you to,' he said quietly. 'Go on. Please.'

'It'll be one less for you.'

'I don't care… Better let me light it, though.'

He put two cigarettes to his mouth, then took up the pot that he and Duncan kept their dinner-salt in, and a needle. You could make a flame, by sparking the metal against the stone: it took him a moment or two, but at last the paper caught and the tobacco started to glow. The cigarette he handed over was damp from his lips: collapsed, like a sucked-on straw. A strand or two of tobacco came loose upon Duncan's tongue.

They smoked without speaking. The cigarettes only lasted a minute. And when Fraser's was finished he opened it up, to keep what he could for the next one…

As he did it he said quietly, 'I envy you your friend, Pearce. Truly I do. I don't think I've ever cared so much for a man-or a woman either, come to that-as much as you must have cared for him… Yes, I envy you.'

'You're the only one who does, then,' said Duncan moodily. 'My own father's ashamed of me.'

'Well, so is mine of me, if it comes to that. He thinks my sort ought to be handed over to Germany, since we're all so keen on helping the Nazis along. A man ought to be a source of embarassment to his father, don't you think? If I ever have a son, I hope he makes my life hell. How, otherwise, will there ever be any progress?'

But Duncan wouldn't smile. 'You make a joke of things,' he said. 'It's different for people like you, for people in your world.'

'Have things really been so bad for you?'

'I dare say they wouldn't seem bad, to someone looking in from outside. My father never- He never hit me, or anything like that. It was just-' He struggled, searching for the words. 'I don't know. It was liking things you weren't supposed to like; and feeling things you weren't supposed to feel. Never being able to say the thing that people expected. And Alec felt like I did. He hated the war. His brother had died, right at the start of it, and his father kept on at him to go and fight… And it was the blitz. It was nearly the end of the blitz, though we didn't know that then. It felt like-like the end of the bloody world! It was the worst time for everything. Alec and I never wanted to fight. He wanted to make a difference, to how people felt. Instead- Well-'

'Poor chap,' said Fraser feelingly, when Duncan wouldn't go on. 'He sounds all right. I'd like to have known him.'

'He was all right,' said Duncan. 'He was clever. Not like me. People have always said I'm clever, but that's only because I make myself talk in a certain way. But he was funny. He could never be still. He was always on to something new. He was a bit like you, I suppose; or you're like he would have been, if he'd been to a proper school, had money… He made things seem exciting. He made things-I don't know; he made them seem better than they really were. Even if afterwards, when you thought about it, you realised that some of what he'd said was silly; at the time, when you were with him, you wanted to go along with it. You felt-swept along by him.'

'I'm sorry,' said Fraser quietly. 'I can see why you- Well, why you liked him so much. How old was he?'

'He was just nineteen,' said Duncan quietly. 'He was older than me. That's why he got called up first.'

'Just nineteen. That stinks, Pearce! First his brother, and then him…' He hesitated, and lowered his voice. 'And, then?'

'And then?' repeated Duncan.

'After he died? Then, you-?'

Duncan had another, violent glimpse of the scarlet kitchen in his father's house. He looked at Fraser in the moonlight, feeling his heart begin to race; wanting to tell him what had happened; longing to tell him!-but unable, finally, to say the words. He lowered his gaze and said flatly instead, 'After he died, I didn't. I meant to, and I didn't. That's all. All right?'

Fraser must not have noticed the change in his tone. He went on, 'So they put you in here! There's British justice for you, isn't it! Two lives ruined instead of one. When all you needed, I suppose-'

'Don't let's talk about it,' said Duncan.

'Not if you don't want to. Of course not… It make me sick, that's all. If only somebody, perhaps your father, or- Shit!' He leapt from his chair. 'What the hell was that?'

A bomb had fallen, closer than ever; the blast had come so forcefully, the panes of glass in the window had been blown or sucked against their frames and one, with a sound like a pistol firing, had cracked. Duncan looked up. Fraser had darted back as far as the door and had tried to push it open. The blanket had fallen from his shoulders. 'Shit! Shit!' he said again. 'That was an oil-bomb, wasn't it? They make that whining sound, don't they?'

'I don't know,' said Duncan.

Fraser nodded. 'I've heard them come down before. That was an oil-bomb all right.-God!' Now another one had fallen. He tried the door again, then looked around, his voice rising. 'Suppose an oil-bomb hit this hall: how d'you think we'd do? We'd be roasted in our beds! Do they even have fire-watchers on the roof? I've never heard anyone talk about fire-watchers, have you? Suppose a cluster of them came down? How quickly do you think a twirl could make his way to all the landings, to open all the doors? Would they even bother to come up out of their shelter? Christ! They could at least take us down to the Firsts when the Warning goes. They could let us sleep on our mattresses in the Rec!'

His voice was high and broken as a a boy's; and Duncan understood suddenly how really upset he was, and how hard he had been trying, until now, to make light of his fear. His face was white and strained and sweating. His short hair stood up: he smoothed it back with both his hands, again and again.

Then he caught Duncan's gaze; and when Duncan, embarassed, looked away, he grew calmer. 'You think I'm funking it,' he said.

'No,' said Duncan. 'I wasn't thinking that.'

'Well, perhaps I am.' He showed his hand. He was shaking. 'Look at me!'

'What does it matter?'

'What does it matter?-Christ! You've no idea! I- Shit!'

Now men were beginning to call out. They sounded afraid, like Fraser. One man was shouting for Mr Garnish. Another was thumping with something on his cell door. The windows jumped in their frames again, as another bomb fell, closer than ever… After that bombs fell, or seemed to fall, like rain. It was like being trapped in a dustbin while someone beat on it with a bat.

'Giggs, you cunt!' somebody shouted. 'This is your fucking fault! I'm going to get you, Giggs! I'm going to frigging well slaughter you!'

But Giggs had shut up; and after a moment the shouting man shut up, too. Calling into the sound of the explosions was somehow horrible: Duncan had the sense that most of the men were in their bunks, lying tensely, silently, counting the seconds, waiting for the blasts.

Fraser was still standing, flinching, at the door. Duncan said to him, 'Get back into bed until it stops.'

'Suppose it doesn't stop? Or suppose it stops, and we stop with it?'

'It's still miles away,' said Duncan. 'The yards-' he was making it up-'the yards make it sound worse than it is. They make the bangs bigger than they really are.'

'Do you think so?'

'Yes. Haven't you ever noticed, when a man calls out of his window-how queer and echoey it sounds?'

Fraser nodded, fastening on to the idea. 'That's true,' he said. 'I've noticed that. That's true, you're right.' But he was still shaking; and after a minute, he rubbed his arms. He was dressed only in his pyjamas, and the cell was freezing.

'Go back to bed,' Duncan said again. And then, when Fraser didn't move, he got to his feet and climbed on to the chair, to close the curtain. He looked out of the window as he did it, and saw the yard, and the prison building opposite, lit up by the moon. A searchlight moved, as if restless or mad, about the sky, and somewhere to the east-it might have been Maida Vale, it might have been as far away as Euston-there was the faint, irregular glow of a rising fire… He brought in his gaze, to the crack in the window-pane. It was neatly done, a perfect arc; it didn't look like something made by force or violence, at all. But when he put his fingers to it he felt it give, and he knew that if he pressed at it harder, it would shatter.

He seized the black-out curtain and pulled it across, and secured it to the sill; after that the view could have been of anything, and the cell-which was plunged into an almost perfect darkness-could have been quite a different sort of room-could have been anywhere, or nowhere. Where the moonlight struck the curtain from behind, it was baffled; but here and there it leaked through weaknesses in the weave of the fabric and made brilliant little stars and spots and crescents-like spangles on the cloak of a stage magician.

He got back into bed. He heard Fraser take a couple of steps and bend to pick up his blanket. But then he stood still-as if hesitating, still afraid… At last, very quietly, he spoke.

'Let me come in with you, Pearce, will you?' he said. 'Let me share your bunk, I mean.' And, when Duncan didn't answer, he added simply, 'It's this bloody war. I can't bear to lie alone.'

So Duncan put back the covers and moved in closer to the wall, and Fraser got in beside him and lay still. They didn't speak. But every time another bomb fell, or a burst of anti-aircraft fire went up, Fraser would flinch and tense-like a man in pain, being knocked and jolted about. Soon Duncan found himself tensing with him-not in fear, but in sympathy.

That made Fraser laugh. 'God!' he said. His teeth were chattering. 'I'm sorry, Pearce.'

'There's nothing to be sorry for,' said Duncan.

'Now that I've started shaking, I can't seem to stop.'

'That's how it works.'

'I'm making you shake.'

'It doesn't matter. You'll warm up soon, and then you'll be all right.'

Fraser shook his head. 'It isn't just through being cold, Pearce.'

'It doesn't matter.'

'You keep saying that. It matters terribly. Don't you see?'

'See what?' asked Duncan.

'Don't you think I never wonder, about-about fear? It's the very worst thing, the very worst thing of all. I could take any amount of tribunals. I could take women calling me gutless in the streets! But to think to oneself, quietly, that the tribunals and the women might be right; to have the suspicion gnawing and gnawing at one: do I truly believe this, or am I simply a-a bloody coward?' He wiped his face again, and Duncan realised that the sweat upon his cheeks was mixed with tears. 'You won't catch men like me admitting it,' he went on, less steadily. 'But we feel it, Pearce, I know we feel it… And meanwhile, one sees the most ordinary types of men-men like Grayson, like Wright-going cheerfully off to fight. Are they the less brave, because they're stupid? Do you think I don't wonder how I'll feel, when the war's over-knowing that I'm probably only still alive because of fellows like them? Meanwhile, here I am, and here's Watling, and Willis, and Spinks, and all the other COs in every other gaol in England. And if-' A plane buzzed loudly overhead. He grew tense again, until it passed-'And if we're all burnt to death by an oil-bomb, will that make us brave men?'

'I think it's brave,' said Duncan, 'to do what you've done. Anyone would think it.'

Fraser wiped his nose. 'An easy kind of bravery, doing nothing at all! You're a braver man than I am, Pearce.'

'Me!'

'You did something, didn't you?'

'What do you mean?'

'You did the thing-the thing you were talking about, that brought you here.'

Duncan shuddered, turning away.

'It took a kind of courage, didn't it?' insisted Fraser. 'Christ knows, it took more courage than I've got.'

Duncan moved again. He raised his hand-as if, even in the darkness, to push away Fraser's gaze. 'You don't know anything about it,' he said roughly. 'You think- Oh!' He felt disgusted. For even now, with Fraser trembling at his side, he couldn't bring himself to tell him the simple truth. 'Don't talk about it,' he said instead. 'Shut up.'

'All right. I'm sorry.'

They were silent after that. The buzz of aeroplanes was still heavy overhead, the pounding of ack-ack fire still dreadful. But when the next explosion came it was further off, and the next was further off again, as the raiders moved on…

Fraser grew calmer. In another minute the All Clear went, and he gave a final quiver, passed his sleeve across his face, and then lay still. The hall was quiet. No-one stood at their window to whistle or to cheer. Men who must have been lying, rigid like him, or curled into balls, now lifted their heads, put out their limbs, to test the stillness of the night; and fell back exhausted.

Only the officers stirred: out they came, like beetles from underneath a stone. Duncan heard their footsteps on the cinder surface of the yard-slow, and halting, as if they were amazed to have emerged and found the prison still intact.

He knew, then, what sound would come next: the shivering sound of the metal landings, as Mr Mundy made his round… After a moment it started up, and he lifted his head, the better to hear it. The bar of light beneath the door showed extra palely now, because the cell was so dark. He saw Mr Mundy come and slide back the guard from over the spy-hole. He knew that Fraser saw it, too. But when Fraser opened his mouth, Duncan lifted his hand and put his fingers across his lips, to keep him from speaking; and when Mr Mundy called, in his night-whisper, 'All right?', Duncan didn't answer. The call came a second time, and a third, before Mr Mundy gave up and moved reluctantly away.

Duncan still had his hand across Fraser's lips. He felt Fraser's breath against his fingers, and slowly drew the hand off. They didn't speak. But Duncan was aware now, as he had not been aware before, of Fraser's body: of the heat of it, and the places-the feet, the thighs, the arms and shoulders-at which it touched Duncan 's own. The bunk was narrow. Duncan had lain alone in it every night, for almost three years. He had gone about the prison, as all the men did, being occasionally jostled, occasionally struck; he had touched his fingers to Viv's across the table in the visiting-room; he had once shaken hands with the Chaplain… It ought to have been strange, to be pressed so close to another person now; but it wasn't strange. He turned his head. He said, in a whisper, 'Are you all right?' and Fraser answered, 'Yes.' 'Don't you want to go back up?'-Fraser shook his head: 'Not yet…' It wasn't strange, at all. They moved closer together, not further apart. Duncan put up his arm and Fraser raised himself so that the arm could go beneath his head. They settled back into an embrace-as if it was nothing, as if it was easy; as if they weren't two boys, in a prison, in a city being blown and shot to bits; as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

'Why,' Mickey asked Kay, 'did you give that girl your ring?'

Kay changed smoothly up the gears. She said, 'I don't know. I felt sorry for her. It's only a ring, after all. What's a ring, in time like these?'

She tried to speak lightly; but the fact was, she was already rather regretting having given the ring up. Her hand, where it gripped the steering-wheel, felt naked and queer, unlucky.

'Maybe I'll go back to the hospital tomorrow,' she said, 'see how she's getting on.'

'Well, I hope she's still there,' said Mickey meaningfully.

Kay wouldn't look at her. She said, 'She wanted to chance it. It was up to her, not us.'

'She didn't know what she was saying.'

'She knew, all right… The lousy swine who made a muck of fixing her up is the one I'd like to get my hands on. Him, and the boyfriend.' She came to a junction. 'Which road do we want?'

'Not this one,' said Mickey, peering at the street, 'I think it's closed. Go on to the next.'

It was their heaviest night for weeks, because of the moon. After dropping Viv at the hospital they'd returned to Dolphin Square and at once been sent out again. A stretch of railway line in their district had been hit; three men who'd been patching it up from the last raid had been killed, and six more injured. They took four of those casualties in one trip, then were sent to a terrace that had got its front blown off, where a family had been buried. Two women and a girl were dug out alive; a girl and a boy were discovered dead. Kay and Mickey had taken the corpses.

Now they'd been sent out again: they were heading for a street slightly to the east of Sloane Square. Kay turned a corner, and felt the tyres of the van begin to grind. The road had grit and earth and broken glass on it. She slowed to a crawl, then stopped and put down her window as a warden came over.

She saw the leisurely way he was walking. 'Too late?' she said.

The man nodded. He took them over and showed them the bodies.

'Jesus,' said Mickey.

There were two of them: a man and a woman, killed on their way back from a party. Their house, the warden said, was only fifty yards further on. The street was crescent-shaped, broken up by a slip of garden, and it was the garden that had taken the worst of the bomb. A plane tree thirty feet high had been blasted more or less into splinters; houses had lost windows and front doors and slates from their roofs, but were otherwise unmarked. The man and woman, however, had been tossed up into the air. The man had landed on the flags of a narrow area in front of the basement window of a house. The woman had fallen on to the railings on the pavement above-been caught, chest-first, on the blunt tips of the iron spikes. She was still slumped there. The warden had found a length of curtain, that was all, and covered her over. Now he drew the curtain back, for Kay and Mickey to get a better view of the body. Kay looked only once, then turned away.

The woman's coat and hat had gone, and her hair was loose about her face; the evening-gloves were smooth and unmarked, still, on her dangling arms. Her silk dress, silvered by the moonlight, was pooled about her on the pavement as though she were curtseying; but the flesh of her bare back bulged where the iron pressed at it from within.

'The last set of railings in the street,' said the warden, as he took Kay and Mickey down the area steps. 'What luck was that, eh? Left here, I think, because they were rusty… I'll be quite honest with you, I didn't want to try and move her. I could see she was dead, though. Killed at the first blow, I hope. Her husband, believe it or not, was sitting up twenty minutes ago, having a conversation with me. That's why I put in the call to you lot. But look at the state of him.'

He moved aside a piece of rubbish and they saw the man's body: he was sitting with his legs drawn up and his back to the area wall. Like the woman, he was dressed in evening gear-the neck-tie in a neat bow, still, around his collar, but the collar itself, and most of his shirt-front, stained ghastly red. Dust had settled, like a cap, on the brilliantine in his hair, but where the light of the torch played over the side of his head Kay could see his torn-up scalp, and more blood, thick and glistening as jam.

'Nice bit of muck,' said the warden, tutting, 'for the people of the house to come out to, eh, when they show their heads?' He looked Kay and Mickey over. 'Not much of a job for women, this. Got anything to wrap 'em in?'

'Only blankets.'

'Fine mess,' he said in his grumbling way, as they went back up the steps, 'they'll make of blankets…' He kicked his way along the street, and found a length of something. 'Look here, what's this? The lady's cloak, blown off her back. We could- Oh, by jiminy!'

He and Kay ducked, instinctively. But the blast was a mile or two away, somewhere to the north: not so much a bang as a muffled sort of whump. It was followed by a series of crashes, from somewhere closer to hand: falling timbers, slithering slates, the almost musical sound of shattering glass. A couple of dogs began barking.

'What was it?' called Mickey. She had gone to the ambulance and was bringing out stretchers. 'Something going up?'

'Sounds like it,' said Kay.

'A gas-main?'

'Factory, I'll bet,' said the warden, rubbing his chin.

They looked at the sky. There were searchlights playing, thinned-out by the moonlight, but making it difficult to see; but when the beams went down, the warden pointed: 'Look.' There had come, on the underside of clouds, the first reflection of some great fire. Where smoke rose up in whorls and tangles it was lit a dark, unhealthy pink.

'A grand view that'll give to Jerry, too,' said the warden.

'Where do you think it is?' Mickey asked him. 'King's Cross?'

'Could be,' he answered doubtfully. 'Could be further south than that, though. I'd say it was Bloomsbury.'

'Bloomsbury?' said Kay.

'Know the area?'

'Yes.' She narrowed her eyes-scanning the sky-line, suddenly afraid. She was looking for landmarks-spires, chimneys, something she knew. But she could see nothing-and anyway, she forgot for the moment which way she was facing, north-east or north-west, the curve of the street made things confusing… Then the searchlights went up again, and the sky became a mess of shadow and colour. She turned away, went back to the woman's body. 'Come on,' she said to Mickey.

She must have sounded odd. Mickey looked at her. 'What's the matter?'

'I don't know. Got the creeps, that's all. Christ, this is awful! Give me a hand, can you? It's no good just lifting her, there are barbs; she must be caught on them.'

By rocking the woman's body back and forth they managed to free it; but the grinding of the iron against her ribs, and the lurching about of the point of the spike beneath the skin of her back, were ghastly to feel and hear. She came away wetly. They didn't turn her over, didn't try to close her eyes, but laid her quickly on a stretcher and wrapped her around with the torn curtain that had covered her before. Her hair was fair, tangled as if from sleep-like Helen's hair, Kay thought, when Helen woke, or when she rose from a bed after making love.

'Christ,' she said again, wiping her mouth with the back of her cuff. 'This is bloody!' She moved a little way off and lit a cigarette.

But while she stood smoking it, she became anxious. She looked at the sky. The play of colour was as wild as before, the glow sometimes more intense, sometimes dimmer, as the flames producing it must have been bucking and leaping about in the breeze beneath. Again she was afraid, without quite knowing why. She threw her cigarette away after two or three puffs; the warden saw and said, 'Hey!' He picked it up and started smoking it himself.

Kay caught up the second stretcher from beside the body of the woman, and carried it down the area steps. She took a roll of bandage with her, and used it to bind up the dead man's head. Mickey came to help her-holding the head rather gingerly while Kay passed the dressing around it. Then they laid the stretcher flat, and tried to lift the body on to it. There was not much space, and the ground was cluttered, with soil thrown up from the garden, with branches and broken slates. They started to kick the rubbish aside; they began to breathe more harshly as they did it, to mutter and curse. Even so, when Kay's name was said in the street above-said urgently, but not called, or shrieked-she heard it. She heard it, and knew. She straightened up, grew still for a second; then simply stepped over the body of the man and went quickly back up the steps.

Someone was talking with the warden. She recognised him, in the darkness, by the leanness of his face, and by his glasses. It was Hughes, from the station. He'd been running. He'd taken his hat off, to come more quickly, and was pressing at his side. He saw her and said, 'Kay'-and that made it worse, for she didn't think he had ever called her Kay before; usually he called her Langrish. 'Kay-'

'What is it?' she said. 'Tell me!'

He blew out his breath. 'I've been with Cole and O'Neil, three streets away. The warden took a call, from Station 58… Kay, I'm sorry. They think it was a packet of three that was aimed at Broadcasting House but went east. One was caught before it could do much damage. The other two have started fires-'

'Helen,' she said.

He caught at her arm. 'I wanted to let you know. But they couldn't say where, exactly. Kay, it might not be-'

'Helen,' she said again.

It was what she had dreaded, every single day of the war; and she'd told herself that, by dreading it, she'd be calm when it finally came. Now she understood that the dread had been, for her, a sort of pact: she'd imagined that, if her fear was only sharp enough and unbroken, it would earn Helen's safety. But that was nonsense. She'd been afraid-and the terrible thing had happened anyway. How could she be calm? She drew her arm from Hughes's grip and covered her face; and she shook, right through. She wanted to sink to her knees, cry out. The violence of her weakness appalled her… Then she thought, How will this help Helen? She lowered her hands, and saw that Mickey had come, and was reaching for her, as Hughes had reached. Kay shrugged her off, beginning to move.

'I have to go there,' she said.

'Kay, don't,' said Hughes. 'I came because I didn't want you to hear from someone else. But there's nothing you can do there. It's 58's area. Leave it to them.'

'They'll funk it,' said Kay.

'They'll fuck it up! I have to get there.'

'It's too far! There's nothing you'll be able to do.'

'Helen's there! Don't you understand?'

'Of course I understand. That's why I came. But-'

'Kay,' said Mickey, grabbing at her arm again. 'Hughes is right. It's too far.'

'I don't care,' said Kay, almost wildly. 'I'll run. I'll-' Then she saw the ambulance. She said, more steadily, 'I'm taking the van.'

'Kay, no!'

'Kay-'

'Hey,' said the warden, who'd been looking on all this time. 'What about these bodies?'

'To hell with them,' said Kay.

She'd begun to run. Mickey and Hughes came close behind her, trying to stop her.

'Langrish,' said Hughes, growing angry. 'Don't be idiotic.'

'Get out of my way,' said Kay.

She'd gone to the back of the ambulance first, to fasten its doors. Now she went to the cabin and climbed inside. Hughes stood in the doorway, pleading with her. 'Langrish,' he said. 'For God's sake, think what you're doing!'

She felt for the key; then caught Mickey's eye, over Hughes's shoulder.

'Mickey,' she said quietly. 'Give me the key.'

Hughes turned. 'Carmichael, don't.'

'Give me the key, Mickey.'

'Carmichael-'

Mickey hesitated, looking from Kay to Hughes and back again. She took out the key, hesitated again; and then threw it. Her aim was true as a boy's. Hughes made a grab at it, but it was Kay who caught it. She fitted it into its socket and started the engine.

'Damn you!' said Hughes, striking the metal frame of the door. 'Damn you both! You'll be thrown out of the service for this! You'll be-'

Kay punched him. She punched him blindly, and caught his cheek and the edge of his glasses; and as soon as he'd fallen back she let down the handbrake and moved off. The door swung to, and she grabbed for its handle and drew it closed. Her tin hat had fallen low on her brow; she tugged at its strap and pulled it from her head, and at once felt better. She glanced in the mirror-saw Hughes sitting in the road with his hands at his face, and Mickey standing slackly, doing nothing, looking after her as she pulled away… She made herself drive with maddening care across the soil- and glass-strewn street; and then, when the road was smoother, she speeded up.

As she drove, she pictured Helen; she pictured her as she had last seen her, hours before: unmarked, unharmed. She saw her so clearly, she knew that she couldn't be dead or even hurt. She thought, It can't be Rathbone Place, it must be some other street. It can't be! Or, if it is, then Helen will have heard the Warning and gone to the shelter. She'll have gone to the shelter, for my sake, just this once…

She had got on to Buckingham Palace Road, and now sped on past Victoria Station. She turned into the park-hardly slowing, so that the tyres squealed on the surface of the road and something was tilted out of its place in the back of the van, and tumbled and smashed. But ahead was that glow, irregularly pulsing, like a faltering life-dreadful, dreadful. She changed up the gears and went faster. The raid was still on, and the Mall, of course, was empty; only at Charing Cross did she meet activity: a warden and policemen attending to another incident, they heard her coming and waved her on, thinking she'd been sent to them from her station. 'Just along that way,' they called, pointing east, along the Strand. She nodded; but she didn't think, even for a moment, of stopping, of giving help… When, a little later, another man, seeing the ambulance crest on the front of her van, came lurching off the pavement, his hands at his head, his face dark with blood, she swerved around him and drove on.

Charing Cross Road was up, because a water main had been struck there three days before. She went west, to the Haymarket; drove up to Shaftesbury Avenue, and got on to Wardour Street, meaning to get to Rathbone Place like that. She found the entrance to Oxford Street blocked by trestles and ropes, and manned by policemen. She braked madly, and began to turn. A policeman came running over to her window as she was doing it.

'Where are you trying for?' he asked. She named her mews. He said at once, 'I thought your lot were there already. You can't get through this way.'

She said, 'Is it bad?'

He blinked, catching something in her voice. 'Two warehouses gone, so far as I know. Didn't you get the details from Control?'

'The furniture warehouse?' she said, ignoring his question. 'Palmer's?'

'I don't know.'

'Christ, it must be! Oh, Christ!'

She had wound the window down to talk to him; and could suddenly smell the burning. She put the van into gear, and the policeman leapt back. The engine shuddered as she reversed. She changed gear again-double-declutching as usual, but timing it badly and crashing the cogs: swearing, enraged by the clumsiness of the mechanism; almost weeping. Don't cry, you fool! she said to herself. She struck at her thigh, savagely, with the ball of her fist. The van swayed about. Don't cry, don't cry…

She was heading south now, but saw an unblocked road to the left, and turned sharply into it. A little way along it she was able to turn left again, into Dean Street. Here, for the first time, she saw the tips of the flames of the fire, leaping into the sky. There began to come smuts-dark, fragile webs of drifting ash-against the windscreen of the van. She pressed hard on the accelerator pedal, and sped forwards; she got only a hundred yards, however, before the road was blocked again. She stuck out her head. 'Let me through!' she called to the policemen here. They made gestures with their hands: 'No chance. Go back.' She turned and, in desperation, went west again, to Soho Square. Another road-block; but a less well-manned one. She stopped the van and put on the hand-brake; then got out, ran, and simply vaulted over the trestles.

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

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

'Hey! Come back!'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'The shelter, too?'

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

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

'Quite sure. I'm so sorry.'

'And nobody was saved?'

'No-one.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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