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 thumbnail 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 satchel, 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.’
‘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 wash-cloths.
‘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 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 from 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 swooning 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 night watchman’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, in 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 embarrassed. 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; 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?’