The Night Watch (30 page)

'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.