‘Not those beastly black-market boys?’ said Binkie, taking the ivory holder from her mouth. ‘Oh Kay, how could you?’
‘I know,’ said Kay, raising her hands. ‘I know. I know. It’s perfectly lousy. But I’ve been getting whisky from them for months.’
‘Whisky doesn’t count. Whisky’s practically medicinal in a job like ours. Anything else—’
‘But Bink, it’s for Helen. It’s her birthday at the end of the month. Have you looked in the shops lately? They’re worse than ever. I wanted to get her—I don’t know, something handsome. A bit of glamour. This filthy war’s knocked all the glamour out of life for women like her. It’s all right for us, we can just kick about in the muck and pretty well like it—’
‘But stolen goods, Kay! Stolen goods!’
‘Cole says the insurers take care of all that. Anyway, most of it’s stuff from before the war—left over, lying useless. Not actually looted. Good God, I’d never touch looted stuff.’
‘I’m glad to hear it! But you can hardly expect me to approve. And if Headquarters should find out—’
‘I don’t approve, either,’ said Kay. ‘You know I don’t. It’s just—’ She grew self-conscious. ‘Well, I’m sick of gazing into Helen’s face and seeing it look more and more tired and worn. If I were her husband I’d be off fighting; there wouldn’t be a thing I could do about it. But the fact is, I’m here—’
Binkie put up a hand. ‘Save the hearts and flowers,’ she said, ‘for your tribunal. God knows it’ll be my tribunal, too, if it gets out that I’ve been a party to something like this.’
‘You haven’t been a party to anything, yet!’ said Mickey impatiently. ‘What did you get, Kay? What was it like?’
Kay described the place she had been to, a room in the basement of a ruined shop in Bethnal Green.
‘They were perfectly polite,’ she said, ‘once they knew I was a friend of Cole’s and not a lady detective. And oh! if you could see the things they have there! Crates and crates of cigarettes! Soaps! Razor blades! Coffee!’
‘Coffee!’
‘And stockings. I was tempted by the stockings, I must admit. But you see, I had in mind a nightdress. Helen’s nightdress is absolutely falling to bits, it breaks my heart. They picked through all the things they had—cotton bedjackets, flannel pyjamas…And then, I saw this.’
She had picked up her bag, and opened it now to bring out a flat, rectangular box. The box was pink, with a silk bow across it. ‘Look at it,’ she said, as Binkie and Mickey leant in to see. ‘It looks like the kind of thing—doesn’t it?—that a fellow in an American picture would be carrying under his arm, when he calls on a chorus-girl, backstage.’
She set the box flat upon her lap—paused a moment, for effect—then carefully lifted off the lid. Inside were layers of silver paper. She put them back, and revealed a satin pyjama-suit, the colour of pearls.
‘Wow,’ said Mickey.
‘Wow, and how,’ said Kay. She lifted up the jacket and shook it out. It was as heavy, in her hands, as a girl’s full head of hair; and though it was cold, from having been carried about in its box, she felt it warming even as she held it. Something about it—the smoothness of it, the lustre of it—had made her think of Helen. She thought of Helen again, now, as she shook it again to watch it ripple.
‘Look at its shine!’ she said. ‘Look at the buttons!’ For the buttons were bone, fine as wafers, and amazingly pleasing to the finger and the eye.
Binkie moved her cigarette-holder from one hand to the other, so that she could lift up the jacket’s cuff and run her thumb over the satin. She said, ‘It’s damn fine stuff, I’ll give you that.’
‘D’you see the label? It’s French, look.’
‘French?’ said Mickey. ‘There you are, then. Helen’ll be doing her bit for the Resistance, just by wearing it.’
‘Dear girl,’ said Binkie. ‘She won’t be putting up any resistance once she’s in this.’
They laughed. Kay turned the jacket about, to marvel at it a little longer; she even stood, and held it and the trousers against herself: ‘They look absurd on me, of course, but you get the idea.’
‘They’re lovely,’ said Mickey, sitting back. ‘I bet they cost a fortune, though, didn’t they? Come on, tell us the truth: how much did you give for them?’
Kay had started to fold the suit up, and felt herself colour. ‘Oh,’ she said, without lifting her head. ‘You know.’
‘No,’ said Mickey, watching her. ‘Not really.’
‘One doesn’t expect a quality thing like this to come cheaply. Not in wartime—’
‘How much? Kay, you’re blushing!’
‘It’s warm, that’s all. It’s that damn stove!’
‘Five pounds? Six?’
‘Well, I’ve got to squander the Langrish family fortune on something! And what the hell else is there, these days, to spend one’s money on? There’s no liquor in the pubs, no tobacco in the tobacconists’.’
‘Seven pounds? Eight?’ Mickey stared at her. ‘Kay, not more?’
Kay said quickly, but rather vaguely, ‘No. About eight.’
In fact she’d paid ten for the pyjamas, and another five pounds for a bag of coffee beans and a couple of bottles of whisky; but didn’t want to admit it.
‘Eight pounds!’ Mickey cried. ‘Are you barmy?’
‘But think how happy it’ll make Helen!’
‘Not half as happy as you made those spivs.’
‘Oh, so what!’ said Kay, feeling the effect of the gin suddenly, and growing belligerent. ‘All’s fair in love and war, isn’t it? Especially this war; and more especially’—she lowered her voice—‘more especially, our sort of love. Christ! I’ve done my bit, haven’t I? It’s not even as if Helen would get any kind of pension if I were killed.’
‘The trouble with you, Langrish,’ said Binkie, ‘is you have a gallantry complex.’
‘So? Why shouldn’t I? We have to be gallant, people like us. No one else is bloody well going to be gallant on our behalf.’
‘Well, but don’t take it too far. There’s more to love than grand gestures.’
‘Oh, spare me,’ said Kay.
She had folded the pyjamas away, and now checked her watch again, suddenly afraid that Helen, who was due to join the three of them here for a drink, after work, might turn up early and spoil the surprise. She held the box out to Mickey. ‘Look after this for me, will you? Just until the beginning of next month? If I keep it at home, Helen might find it.’
Mickey carried it down to the other end of the cabin, and stowed it away under her bed.
When she came back, she mixed more drinks. Binkie took a fresh glassful but sat swirling the gin, gazing down into it, looking suddenly gloomy. After a minute or so she said, ‘All this stuff about gallantry, girls, has rather depressed me.’
‘Oh, Bink!’ said Mickey. ‘Don’t say that.’
‘But I’m afraid it has. It’s all very well, Kay, for you to set yourself up as some kind of champion—the Queers’ Best Friend—you, with your dear little Helen, your silk pyjamas, all of that. But your sort of story is awfully rare. Most of us—Well, take Mickey and me. What do we have?’
‘Speak for yourself!’ said Mickey, coughing.
‘The gin’s made you maudlin,’ said Kay. ‘I knew cocktails before six was a bad idea.’
‘It’s not the gin. I’m quite serious. Tell me truly: doesn’t the life we lead ever get you down? It’s all right when one is young. It’s positively thrilling when one is twenty! The secrecy, the intensity—being keyed up, like a harp. Girls were fabulous things to me, once—all that flying into rages over bits of nonsense; threatening to slash their wrists in the lavatories at parties, that sort of thing. Men were like shadows, like paper puppets, like little boys! compared with that. But one gets to an age where one sees the truth of it. One gets to an age where one is simply exhausted. And one realises one has finished with the whole damn game…Men begin to seem almost attractive
after that. Sometimes I think quite seriously of finding some nice little chap to settle down with—some quiet little Liberal MP, someone like that. It would be so restful.’
Kay had once felt something similar, as it happened. But that was before the war, and before she’d met Helen. Now she said drily, ‘The deep, deep peace of the marital bed, after the hurly-burly of the Sapphic chaise longue.’
‘Precisely.’
‘What rubbish.’
‘I mean it!’ said Binkie. ‘You wait till you’re my age’—she was forty-six—‘and wake every morning to gaze on the vast tract of uncreased linen that is the other side of the divan. Try being gallant to that…We shan’t even have children, don’t forget, to look after us in our old age.’
‘God!’ said Mickey. ‘Why don’t we just cut our throats right now and get it over with?’
‘If I had the spunk,’ said Binkie, ‘I might do just that. It’s only the station I keep going for. Thank God for the war, is what I say! The thought of peace starting up again, I don’t mind telling you, fills me with horror.’
‘Well,’ said Kay, ‘you’d better get used to the idea. Now we’re only seventeen miles from Rome—or whatever it is—it’s surely only a matter of time.’
They discussed the state of things in Italy for the next ten minutes or so, then got on—as people did get on, these days—to the subject of Hitler’s secret weapons.
‘You know there are absolutely gigantic guns,’ said Binkie, ‘being put in place in France? The government’s trying to keep it hush-hush, but Collins, at Berkeley Square, knows a chap in one of the Ministries. He says the shells from those guns will make it as far as north London. They’ll take out entire streets, apparently.’
‘I heard the Germans,’ said Mickey, ‘are putting together a kind of ray—’
The boat tilted, as someone stepped on to it from the tow-path. Kay, who’d been listening out for footsteps, leant forward to put down her glass. She said in a whisper, ‘That’ll be Helen. Remember, now: not a word about pyjamas, birthdays, or anything like that.’
There was a knock, the doors were opened, and Helen appeared. Kay rose to take her hand and help her down the couple of steps into the cabin, and to kiss her cheek.
‘Hello, darling.’
‘Hello, Kay,’ said Helen, smiling. Her cheek was cold, curved, soft and smooth as a child’s. Her lips were dry beneath their lipstick, slightly roughened by the wind. She looked around, at the clouds of smoke. ‘Goodness! It’s like a Turkish harem in here. Not that I’ve ever been in a Turkish harem.’
‘Dear girl, I have,’ said Binkie. ‘I can tell you, they’re awfully overrated.’
Helen laughed. ‘Hello, Binkie. Hello, Mickey. How are you both?’
‘All right.’
‘Fighting fit, dear girl. And you?’
Helen nodded to the glasses that were sitting about. ‘I shall be fine, with something like that inside me.’
‘We’re drinking gimlets—sound all right?’
‘Right now I’d drink powdered glass if it had a splash of alcohol in it.’
She took off her coat and hat, and glanced about for a mirror. ‘Do I look awful?’ she said, not finding one, and trying to tidy her hair.
‘You look wonderful,’ said Kay. ‘Come and sit down.’
She slipped an arm around Helen’s waist, and they sat. Binkie and Mickey leant forward to make a fresh round of cocktails. They were still debating secret weapons. ‘I don’t believe it for a second,’ Binkie was saying. ‘Invisible rays—?’
‘All right, darling?’ murmured Kay, touching her lips to Helen’s cheek again. ‘Did you have a lousy day?’
‘Not really,’ said Helen. ‘How was yours? What have you been doing?’
‘Nothing at all. Thinking of you.’
Helen smiled. ‘You always say that.’
‘That’s because I’m always doing it. I’m doing it now.’
‘Are you? What are you thinking?’
‘Ah,’ said Kay.
She was thinking, of course, of the satin pyjamas. She was imagining buttoning up the pyjama jacket over Helen’s bare breasts. She was thinking of the look and the feel of Helen’s bottom and thighs, in the pearl-coloured silk. She moved her hand to Helen’s hip, and began to stroke it—enchanted, suddenly, by the lovely swell and spring of it; remembering what Binkie had said, and feeling the force of her own good fortune; marvelling that Helen was here, right here, in this funny little clog-shaped boat, warm and pink and rounded and alive, in the curve of her arm.
Helen turned her head, and met her look. She said, ‘You’re tight.’
‘I believe I am. Here’s a thought. Get tight, too.’
‘Get tight, for forty-five minutes with you? Then have to sleep it off all by myself?’
‘Come over to the station with us when we go,’ said Kay. She raised and lowered her eyebrows. ‘I’ll show you the back of my ambulance.’
‘You nit,’ said Helen, laughing. ‘What on earth’s the matter with you?’
‘I’m in love, that’s all.’
‘I say, you two,’ said Binkie loudly, handing Helen a glass. ‘If I’d known this was going to turn into a petting-session, I might not have come. Stop making wallflowers of Mickey and me, will you?’
‘We were just being friendly,’ said Kay. ‘I might get my head blown off later on. I’ve got to make the most of my lips while I still have them.’
‘I’ve got to make the most of mine, then,’ said Binkie, raising her glass. ‘Here’s how.’
At six o’clock they heard the wireless starting up on the barge next door: they opened the doors, to listen to the news. Then a programme of dance-music came on; it was too cold to keep the doors open, but Mickey slid back a window so that they could still hear the music a little, mixed up with the buzz and splutter of passing engines, the bumping of the boats. The song was a slow one. Kay kept her arm around Helen’s waist, still lightly stroking and smoothing it, while Mickey and Binkie chatted on. The heat from the stove, and the gin in her cocktail, had made her dozy.
Then Helen moved forward, to reach for her drink again; and when she sat back, she turned and caught Kay’s eye, a little awkwardly.
‘Who do you think I saw today?’ she said.
‘I don’t know. Who?’
‘A friend of yours. Julia.’
Kay stared at her. ‘Julia?’ she said. ‘Julia Standing?’
‘Yes.’
‘You mean, you saw her in the street?’
‘No,’ said Helen. ‘That is, yes. But then we had a cup of tea together, from a van near my office. She’d been to a house nearby—you know, that job she has, with her father?’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Kay slowly.
She was trying to push away the mix of feelings that the sound of Julia’s name always conjured up in her. She said to herself, as she always did, Don’t be silly. It was nothing. It was too long ago. But it wasn’t nothing, she knew that. She tried to picture Helen and Julia together: she saw Helen, with her round child’s face, her untidy hair and chapped lips; and Julia, smooth and self-possessed as a cool dark gem…She said, ‘Was it all right?’
Helen laughed, self-conscious. ‘Yes. Why shouldn’t it have been?’
‘I don’t know.’
But Binkie had heard. She knew Julia, too, but only very slightly. ‘Is that Julia Standing you’re talking about?’
‘Yes,’ said Kay, reluctantly. ‘Helen saw her today.’
‘Did you, Helen? How is she? Still looking as though she’s spent the entire war eating steak tartare and drinking glasses and glasses of milk?’
Helen blinked. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I suppose so.’
‘She’s so frightfully handsome, isn’t she? But—I don’t know. I’ve always found looks like hers rather chilling, somehow. What do you think, Mickey?’
‘She’s all right,’ said Mickey shortly, glancing at Kay; knowing more than Binkie.
But Binkie went on. ‘
Is she still doing that thing of hers, Helen, going over bombed houses?’
‘Yes,’ said Helen.
Mickey picked up her drink and narrowed her eyes. ‘She ought,’ she murmured, ‘to try pulling somebody out from underneath one, some time.’
Kay laughed. Helen lifted her own drink again, as if not trusting herself to answer. Binkie said to Mickey, ‘Dear girl, talking of pulling out bodies—did you hear what happened to the crew over at Station 89? Jerry struck a cemetery and hit the graves. Half of the coffins were blown wide open.’
Kay drew Helen close again. ‘I don’t know, I’m sure,’ she said very quietly, ‘why one’s chums should like each other, just because they are one’s chums; and yet one expects them to, somehow.’
Helen said, without looking up, ‘Julia’s the vivid kind of person people either like or don’t like, I suppose. And Mickey’s loyal to you, of course.’
‘Yes, perhaps that’s it.’
‘It was only a cup of tea. Julia was perfectly nice about it.’
‘Well, good,’ said Kay, smiling.
‘I don’t expect we’ll do it again.’
Kay kissed her cheek. She said, ‘I hope you do.’
Helen looked at her. ‘Do you?’
‘Of course,’ said Kay—thinking, actually, that she rather hoped they wouldn’t, since the whole idiotic situation clearly made Helen so uneasy.
But Helen laughed, and kissed her back—not uneasy, suddenly, at all.
‘You darling,’ she said.
THREE
Miss Giniver,’ said Miss Chisholm, putting her head around Helen’s door, ‘there’s a lady to see you.’
It was a week or so later. Helen was fastening papers together with a clip, and didn’t look up. ‘Does she have an appointment?’
‘She asked in particular for you.’
‘Did she? Blast.’ This was what came of giving out your name too freely. ‘Where is she?’
‘She said she wouldn’t come in, as she’s rather shabby.’
‘Well, she can hardly be too shabby to come in here. Tell her we’re not fussy. She must make an appointment, though.’
Miss Chisholm came further into the room and held out a folded piece of paper. ‘She wanted me to give you this,’ she said, with a hint of disapproval. ‘I told her we weren’t in the habit of accepting personal post.’