The Night Watch (5 page)

She had to go back into the parlour and finish her cigarette there, on her own.

But there wasn't any point in getting worked-up about it. It would wear her out, just as it had worn out her father. And she had other things to think about. Duncan made more tea, and they listened to a programme on the wireless; and at quarter past nine she put her coat on. She left at the same time every week. Duncan and Mr Mundy stood at the front door to watch her go, like an old married couple.

'You don't want your brother to walk you to the station?' Mr Mundy would ask her; and Duncan would answer before she could, in a negligent sort of way, 'Oh, she's all right. Aren't you, Viv?'

But tonight he kissed her, too, as if aware that he'd annoyed her. 'Thanks for the haircut,' he said quietly. 'Thanks for the ham. I was only teasing, before.'

She looked back twice as she went off, and they were still there, watching; the next time she looked, the door was closed. She imagined Mr Mundy with his hand on Duncan 's shoulder; she pictured them going slowly back into the parlour-Duncan to one armchair, Mr Mundy to the other. She felt again the airless, flannel-like atmosphere of the house on her skin, and walked more briskly-growing excited, suddenly; liking the chill of the evening air and the crispness of the sound of her heels on the pavement.

Walking quickly, however, meant that she arrived too soon at the station. She had to stand about in the ticket-hall while trains came and went, feeling horribly exposed in the harsh, dead light. A boy tried to catch her eye. 'Hey, Beauty,' he kept saying. He kept going past her, singing. To put herself out of his way she went to the book-stall; and it was only as she was looking over the rack of magazines that she remembered what Helen had said, that afternoon, about the
Radio Times
. She took down a copy and opened it up, and almost at once found an article headed:

“Dangerous Glances”

URSULA WARING introduces Julia Standing's thrilling new novel
The Bright Eyes of Danger,
featured on “Armchair Detective” at 10.10 on Friday evening (Light Prog.).

The article was several columns long, and gave an account of the novel in very glowing terms. Above it was a photograph of Julia herself: her face tilted, her eyes downcast, her hands raised and pressed together at the side of her jaw.

Viv looked at the photo with a touch of dislike: for she'd met Julia once, in the street outside the office, and had not taken to her. She'd seemed too clever-shaking Viv's hand when Helen introduced them, but not saying, 'How do you do?' or 'Pleased to meet you,' or anything like that; saying coolly instead, as if she'd known Viv for years: 'Successful day? Have you got heaps of people married?' 'More fool them if we have,' Viv had answered; and at that she'd laughed, as if at a joke of her own, and said, 'Yes, indeed…' Her voice was very well-to-do, and yet she'd talked slangily: 'louse up your plans', 'go dotty'. What Helen, who was so nice, saw in her to like so much, Viv couldn't imagine.-But then, that was their own business. Viv closed her mind to it.

She put the magazine back in the rack and moved away. There was no sign, now, of the boy who'd sung at her. The clock showed two minutes to half-past ten. She went across the ticket hall-not towards the platforms, but back to the station entrance. She stood close to a pillar, looking out into the street: drawing her coat more tightly around her because, with so much standing about, she'd got chilled.

A moment later a car drew slowly up to the kerb; it came to a stop a few yards on, away from the worst glare of the station. She could see its driver as it passed, dipping his head, trying to spot her. He looked anxious, handsome, hopeless: she found herself feeling towards him much what she'd felt towards Duncan, earlier on; the same mix of love and exasperation. But there was still that edge of excitement there, too: it rose again now, and grew sharper. She glanced up and down the street, then more or less ran to the passenger door. Reggie leaned across and opened it; and as she climbed inside he reached for her face, and kissed her.

Back at Lavender Hill, Kay was walking. She'd been walking, more or less, all afternoon and evening. She'd walked in a great, rough sort of circle, from Wandsworth Bridge up to Kensington, across to Chiswick, over the river to Mortlake and Putney, and now she was heading back to Mr Leonard's; she was two or three streets from home. In the last few minutes she'd fallen into step, and into conversation, with a fair-haired girl. The girl, however, wasn't much good.

'I wonder you can go so fast, in heels so high,' Kay was saying.

'One gets into the habit, I suppose,' the girl answered carelessly. 'There's not much to it. You'd be surprised.' She wasn't looking at Kay, she was looking ahead, along the street. She was meeting a friend, she said.

'I've heard it's as good an exercise,' Kay persisted, 'as riding a horse. That it's good for the shape of the legs.'

'I couldn't really say.'

'Well, perhaps your boyfriend could.'

'I might ask him.'

'I wonder he hasn't told you so already.'

The girl laughed. 'Like to wonder, don't you?'

'It makes one think, looking at you, that's all.'

'Does it?'

The girl turned to Kay and met her gaze for a second-frowning, not understanding, not understanding at all… Then, 'There's my friend!' she said, and she raised her arm to another girl across the street. She went on faster, to the edge of the kerb, looked quickly to left and to right, then ran across the road. Her high-heeled shoes were pale at the instep; they showed, Kay thought, like the whitish flashes of fur you saw on the behinds of hopping rabbits.

She hadn't said 'Goodbye', 'So long', or anything like that; and she didn't, now, look back. She had forgotten Kay already. She took the other girl's arm, and they turned down a street and were lost.

2

'Where's your best girl?' Len asked Duncan across the bench, at the candle factory at Shepherd's Bush. He meant Mrs Alexander, the factory's owner. 'She's late today. Have you had a tiff?'

Duncan smiled and shook his head, as if to say,
Don't be silly
.

But Len ignored him. He nudged the woman who sat next to him and said, 'Duncan and Mrs Alexander have had a row. Mrs Alexander caught Duncan making eyes at another girl!'

' Duncan 's a real heart-breaker,' said the woman good-humouredly.

Duncan shook his head again, and got on with his work.

It was a Saturday morning. There were twelve of them at the bench, and they were all making night lights, threading wicks and metal sustainers into little stubs of wax, then putting the stubs in flame-proof cases ready for the packers. In the centre of the bench there ran a belt, which carried the finished lights away to a waiting cart. The belt moved with a trundling sound and a regular squeak-not very noisily but, when combined with the hiss and clatter from the candle-making machines in the other half of the room, just noisily enough so that, if you wanted to speak to your neighbour, you had to raise your voice a little louder than was really comfortable. Duncan found it easier to smile and gesture. Often he'd go for hours without speaking at all.

Len, on the other hand, could not be silent. Getting no fun out of Duncan now, he started to gather up spare bits of wax; Duncan watched him begin to press them all together, moulding and shaping them into what emerged, in another minute, as the figure of a woman. He worked quite cleverly-frowning in concentration, his brow coming down and his lower lip jutting. The figure grew smoother and rounder in his hands. He gave it over-sized breasts and hips, and waving hair. He showed it to Duncan first, saying, 'It's Mrs Alexander!' Then he changed his mind. He called down the bench to one of the girls: 'Winnie! This is you, look!' He held the figure out and made it walk and wiggle its hips.

Winnie screamed. She was a girl with a deformity of the face, a squashed-in nose and a pinched-up mouth, and a pinched-up nasal voice to match. 'Look what he's done!' she said to her friends. The other girls saw and started laughing.

Len added more wax to the figure, to its breasts and bottom. He made it move more mincingly. '
Oh, baby! Oh, baby!
' he said, in a silly feminine way. Then, 'That's how you go,' he called to Winnie, 'when you're with Mr Champion!' Mr Champion was the factory foreman, a mild-mannered man whom the girls rather terrorised. 'That's how you go. I heard you! And this is what Mr Champion does.' He held the figure in the crook of his arm and passionately kissed it; finally he put his fingernail to the fork of its legs and pretended to tickle it.

Winnie screamed again. Len went on tickling the little figure, and laughing, until one of the older women told him sharply to stop. His laugh, then, became more of a snigger. He gave Duncan a wink. 'She wishes it was her, that's all,' he said, too low for the woman to catch. He pressed the wax figure back into formlessness and threw it into the scrap-cart.

He was always boasting privately to Duncan about girls. It was all he ever talked about. 'I could have that Winnie Mason if I wanted to,' he'd said, more than once. 'What do you think it would be like, though, kissing her mouth? I think it'd be like kissing a dog's arse.' He claimed he often took girls into Holland Park and made love to them there at night. He described it all, with tremendous grimaces and winks. He always talked to Duncan as if he, Len, were the older of the two. He was only sixteen. He had a freckled brown gipsy face, and a pink, plump, satiny mouth. When he smiled, his teeth looked very white and even inside that mouth, against the tan and speckle of his cheek.

Now he sat back with his hands behind his head, rocking on the two back legs of his stool. He looked lazily around the Candle Room, going from one thing to another in search of some kind of distraction. After a minute he moved forward as if excited. He called down the bench: 'Here's Mrs A, look, coming in. She's got two blokes with her!'

Still working at the night lights, the women turned their heads to see. They were grateful for any sort of break in the day's routine. The week before, a pigeon had got into the building and they had gone round the room shrieking, for almost an hour-making the most of the excitement. Now a couple of them actually stood up, to get a better look at the men with Mrs Alexander.

Duncan watched them peer until their curiosity became irresistible. He turned on his stool to look too. He saw Mrs Alexander heading for the biggest of the candle-making machines, leading a tall, fair-haired man, and one who was shorter and darker. The fair-haired man stood with his back to Duncan, nodding. Every so often he made notes in a little book. The other man had a camera: he wasn't interested in how the machine worked; he kept moving about, looking for the best shot of it and the man who ran it. He took a picture, and then another. The camera flashed like bombs.

'Time and Motion,' said Len authoritatively. 'I bet they're Time and- Look out, they're coming!'

He sat forward again, took up a stub of wax and a length of wick and started to fit them together with an air of tremendous industry and concentration. The girls all down the bench fell silent, and worked on as nimbly as before. But when they saw the photographer coming, well ahead of Mrs Alexander and the other man, they began to lift their heads, boldly, one by one. The photographer was lighting a cigarette, his camera swinging from his shoulder on its strap.

Winnie called to him, 'Aren't you going to take our picture?'

The photographer looked her over. He looked at the girls who sat beside her-one of whom had a burnt face and hands, shiny with scars, another of whom was almost blind. But, 'All right,' he said. He waited for them to draw together and smile, then held up his camera and put his eye to it. But he only pretended to release the shutter. He pressed the button half-way and made a clicking sound with his tongue.

The girls complained. 'The bulb didn't flash!'

The photographer said, 'It flashed all right. It's a special, invisible one. It's an x-ray kind. It sees through clothes.'

This was so obviously something he had come up with to flatter plain girls who pestered him to take their picture, Duncan was almost embarassed. But Winnie herself, and the other girls, all shrieked with laughter. Even the older women laughed. They were still laughing when Mrs Alexander came over with the fair-haired man.

'Well, ladies,' she said indulgently, in her well-bred Edwardian voice, 'what's all this?'

The girls tittered. 'Nothing, Mrs Alexander.' Then the photographer must have winked or made some gesture, because they all burst out laughing again.

Mrs Alexander waited, but could see at last that she wasn't going to be let in on the joke. She turned her attention, instead, to Duncan. 'How are you, Duncan?'

Duncan wiped his hands on his apron and got slowly to his feet. He was well-known, throughout the factory, as one of Mrs Alexander's favourites. People would say to each other, in his hearing, 'Mrs Alexander's going to leave Duncan all her money! You'be better be nice to Duncan Pearce, he's going to be your boss one day!' Sometimes he made the most of it, hamming it up, raising a laugh. But he always felt a sort of pressure when Mrs Alexander singled him out; and he felt that pressure even more today, because she had brought her visitors with her, and was very obviously about to introduce him to them as if he was her 'star worker'.

She turned her head, looking for the fair-haired man, who was still putting notes in his book about the candle-making machine. She reached, and just touched his arm. 'May I show you-?' Along the bench, the girls had stopped tittering and were all looking up, expectant. The man drew nearer and raised his head. 'Here's our little night light department,' Mrs Alexander said to him. 'Perhaps Duncan could explain the process to you? Duncan, this is-'

The man, however, had stopped in his tracks and was gazing at Duncan as if he couldn't believe his eyes. He started grinning. 'Pearce!' he said, before Mrs Alexander could go on. And then, at Duncan 's blank stare: 'Don't you know me?'