The Night Watch (27 page)

'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.