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 leant 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, which 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 were 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, which 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 tale
s, 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 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, and Helen felt exposed in it.
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.