The Night Watch (29 page)

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-'