She and Julia always spoke quietly when they were taking their bath. They shared the bathroom with the family who lived in the basement of their house; they all had regular bath-times, so there was not much danger of being caught out; but the tiles on the walls seemed to magnify sound, and Julia had the idea that their voices, the splashing, the rub of their limbs in the tub, might be heard in the rooms downstairs.
‘Look how dark your skin is, compared to mine,’ Helen went on. ‘Really, you’re as swarthy as a Greek.’
‘The water makes me seem darker, I suppose,’ answered Julia.
‘It doesn’t make me seem dark,’ said Helen. She prodded the pink and yellowish flesh of her own stomach. ‘It makes me look like pressed meat.’
Julia opened her eyes and gazed briefly at Helen’s thighs. ‘You look like a girl in a painting by Ingres,’ she said comfortably.
She was full of ambiguous compliments like this. ‘You look like a woman in a Soviet mural,’ she had said recently, when Helen had returned from a shopping trip with two bulging string bags; and Helen had pictured muscles, a square jaw, a shadowy lip. Now she thought of odalisques with spreading bottoms. She put a hand to Julia’s leg. The leg was rough with little hairs, interesting to the palm; the shin was slender and pleasant to grip. On the bone of the ankle a single vein stood out, swollen with heat. She studied it, pressed it, and saw it yield; she thought of the blood gushing inside it, and gave a little shudder. She slid her hand from Julia’s ankle to her foot, and began to rub it. Julia smiled. ‘That’s nice.’
Julia’s feet were broad and unhandsome—an Englishwoman’s feet, Helen thought, and the only really unlovely part of Julia’s whole body; and she held them in a special sort of regard, for that reason. She tugged slowly, now, at the toes, then worked her fingers between them; she put her palm against them and gently pressed them back. Julia sighed with pleasure. A strand of her hair had fallen again, and again clung to her throat—dark, flat, and lustrous as a piece of seaweed, or a lock from a mermaid’s head. Why, Helen wondered, were the mermaids’ heads that you saw in books and films always coloured gold? She was sure that a real mermaid would certainly be dark, like Julia. A real mermaid would be strange, alarming—nothing like an actress or a glamour girl at all.
‘I’m glad you’ve got feet, Julia, rather than a tail,’ she said, working with her thumb at the arch of Julia’s foot.
‘Are you, darling? So am I.’
‘Your breasts would look handsome, though, in a brassière made of shells.’ She smiled. She’d remembered a joke. ‘What,’ she asked Julia, ‘did the brassière say to the hat?’
Julia thought about it. ‘I don’t know. What?’
‘“You go on ahead, and I’ll give these two a lift.”’
They laughed—not so much at the joke, as at the silliness of Helen’s having told it. Julia still had her head put back: her laughter, caught in her throat, was bubbling, childish, nice—not at all like her conventional ‘society’ laugh, which always struck Helen as rather brittle. She put a hand across her mouth to stifle the sound. Her stomach quivered as she shook, her navel narrowing.
‘Your navel’s winking at me,’ said Helen, still laughing. ‘It looks awfully saucy. The Saucy Navel: that sounds like a seaside pub, doesn’t it?’ She moved her legs, yawning. She was rather tired, now, of stroking Julia’s foot; she let it fall. ‘Do you love me, Julia?’ she whispered, as she changed her pose.
Julia closed her eyes again. ‘Of course I do,’ she said.
They lay for a time, then, not speaking. The water-pipes creaked, cooling down. From some hidden part of the plumbing there came a steady drip-drip. In the basement there were thumps, as the man who lived there walked heavily from room to room; soon they heard him shouting at his wife or his daughter: ‘No, you great daft bitch!’
Julia tutted. ‘That revolting man.’ Then she opened her eyes and, ‘Helen,’ she cried softly, ‘how can you?’ For Helen had tilted her head over the side of the bath and was trying to listen. She waved her hand for Julia to be silent. ‘Work it up your arse!’ they heard the man say: a phrase he liked, and used often. Next came the gnat-like whining that was all that ever reached them of his wife’s replies.
‘Really, Helen,’ said Julia, disapprovingly. Helen moved meekly back into the bath-tub. Sometimes, if the shouting started up and she was alone, she’d go so far as to kneel on the carpet, draw back her hair, put her ear to the floor. ‘You’ll end up like those fucking eunuchs upstairs!’ she had heard the man shout one day, by doing this. She’d never told Julia.
Today he grumbled on for a minute or two, then gave it up. A door was slammed. The things that Helen and Julia had brought down to the bathroom—the scissors and tweezers, the safety-razor in its case—gave a jump.
It was half-past eleven. They planned an idle sort of day, with books and a picnic, in Regent’s Park; they lived quite near it, in one of the streets just to the east of the Edgware Road. Helen lay a little longer, until the water began to cool; then she sat up and washed herself—turning awkwardly around, so that Julia could soap her back and rinse it; and doing the same for Julia herself, when Julia had turned. But when she’d risen and stepped out of the tub Julia sank back down again, stretching out into the extra space and smiling like a cat.
Helen studied her for a second, then bent and kissed her—liking the look and the feel of Julia’s slick, warm, soap-scented mouth.
She put on her dressing-gown and opened the door—listening first, to be sure there was no one in the hall. Then she ran lightly towards the stairs. Their sitting-room was on this floor, beside the bathroom. Their kitchen and bedroom were one floor up.
She had just finished dressing, and was combing her hair at the bedroom mirror, when Julia joined her: Helen watched her through the glass, carelessly dusting herself with talcum powder, then tugging the handkerchief from her head and going naked about the room, picking out knickers, stockings, suspenders, and a bra. Her towel she added to a pile of garments on the cushions that made a little window-seat; almost at once it slid to the floor, taking a sock and a petticoat with it.
The window-seat was one of the things that had attracted them to the house when they’d first viewed it. ‘We’ll be able to sit there together in the long summer evenings,’ they had said. Now Helen looked at the mess of clothes that obscured the sill; she looked at the unmade bed; and then at the cups and mugs, and the piles of read and unread books, which lay on every surface. She said, ‘This room’s impossible. Here we are, two middle-aged women, and we live like sluts. I can’t believe it. When I was young, and used to think about the house I’d have when I was grown up, I always pictured it as terribly neat and tidy—just like my mother’s. I always imagined that neat houses came to one, like—I don’t know.’
‘Like wisdom teeth?’
‘Yes,’ said Helen, ‘just like that.’ She passed her sleeve across the surface of the mirror; it came away grey with dust.
Other people of their age and class, of course, had chars. They couldn’t do that, because of the business of sharing a bed. There was another little room on the floor above this, which got presented to neighbours and visitors as ‘Helen’s room’; it had an old-fashioned divan in it, and a severe Victorian wardrobe where they kept their overcoats and jerseys and wellington boots. But it would be too much fuss, they thought, to have to pretend to a daily woman that Helen slept there every single night; they’d be sure to forget. And weren’t char-ladies, anyway, awfully knowing about that sort of thing? Now that Julia’s books were doing so well they had to be more careful than ever.
Julia came to the mirror. She had put on a creased dark linen dress and run her fingers roughly through her hair; but she could step out of any kind of chaos, Helen thought, and look, as she did now, absurdly well groomed and handsome. She moved closer to the glass, to dash on lipstick. Her mouth was a full, rather crowded one. But she had one of those faces, so regular and even, it was exactly the same in reflection
as it was in life. Helen’s face, by contrast, looked rather queer and lopsided when studied in a mirror. You look like a lovely onion, Julia had told her once.
They finished putting on their make-up, then went out to the kitchen to gather food. They found bread, lettuce, apples, a nub of cheese, and two bottles of beer. Helen dug out an old madras square they’d used as a dust-sheet when decorating; they put it all in a canvas bag, then added their books, their purses and keys. Julia ran upstairs to her study for her cigarettes and matches. Helen stood at the kitchen window, looking out into the backyard. She could just see the bad-tempered man, moving and stooping. He kept table-rabbits down there, in a little home-made hutch: he was giving them water or food, or perhaps checking the plumpness of them. It always bothered her, imagining them all crushed together like that. She moved away, and shouldered the bag. The bottles clinked against the keys. ‘Julia,’ she called, ‘are you ready?’
They went down, and out to the street.
Their house was part of an early nineteenth-century terrace, facing a garden. The terrace was white—that London white, more properly a streaked and greyish yellow; the grooves and sockets of its stucco façade had been darkened by fogs, by soot, and—more recently—by brick-dust. The houses all had great front doors and porches—must once, in fact, have been grand residences: home, perhaps, to minor Regency strumpets, girls called Fanny, Sophia, Skittles. Julia and Helen liked to imagine them tripping down the steps in their Empire-line dresses and soft-soled shoes, taking their mounts, going riding in Rotten Row.
In miserable weather the discoloured stucco could look dreary. Today the street was filled with light, and the house fronts seemed bleached as bones against the blue of the sky. London looked all right, Helen thought. The pavements were dusty—but dusty in the way, say, that a cat’s coat is dusty, when it has lain for hours in the sun. Doors were open, sashes raised. The cars were so few that, as Helen and Julia walked, they could make out the cries of individual children, the mutter of radios, the ringing of telephones in empty rooms. And as they drew closer to Baker Street they began to hear music from the Regent’s Park Band, a faint sort of clash and parp-parp-parp—swelling and sinking on impalpable gusts of air, like washing on a line.
Julia caught Helen’s wrist, grew childish, pretending to tug. ‘Come on! Come quick! We’ll miss the parade!’ Her fingers moved against Helen’s palm, then slid away. ‘It makes one feel like that, doesn’t it? What tune is it, d’you think?’
They slowed their steps and listened more carefully. Helen shook her head. ‘I can’t imagine. Something modern and discordant?’
‘Surely not.’
The music rose. ‘Quick!’ said Julia again. They smiled, grown-up; but walked on, faster than before. They went into the park at Clarence Gate, then followed the path beside the boating lake. They approached the bandstand and the music grew louder and less ragged. They walked further, and the tune revealed itself at last.
‘Oh!’ said Helen, and they laughed; for it was only ‘Yes! We Have No Bananas’.
They left the path and found a spot they liked the look of, half in sunlight, half in shade. The ground was hard, the grass very yellow. Helen put down the bag and unpacked the cloth; they spread it out and kicked off their shoes, then laid out the food. The beer was still cold from the frigidaire, the bottles sliding deliciously in Helen’s warm hand. But she went back to the bag and, after a moment’s searching, looked up.
‘We forgot a bottle-opener, Julia.’
Julia closed her eyes. ‘Hell. I’m dying for a drink, as well. What can we do?’ She took a bottle and started picking at its lid. ‘Don’t you know some terribly bright way of getting the tops off?’
‘With my teeth, do you mean?’
‘You were in the Brownies, weren’t you?’
‘Well, they rather jibbed, you know, at Pale Ale, in my pack.’
They turned the bottles in their hands.
‘Look, it’s hopeless,’ said Helen at last. She looked around. ‘There are boys over there. Run and ask them if they have a knife or something.’
‘I can’t!’
‘Go on. All boys have knives.’
‘You do it.’
‘I carried the bag. Go on, Julia.’
‘God,’ said Julia. She rose, not graciously, took up the bottles, one in each hand, and began to walk across the grass to a group of lounging youths. She walked stiffly, rather bowed, perhaps only self-conscious, but Helen saw her, for a second, as a stranger might: saw how handsome she was, but also how grown-up, how almost matronly; for you could catch in her something of the angular, wide-hipped, narrow-breasted figure she’d have in earnest in ten years’ time. The youths, by contrast, were practically schoolboys. They put up their hands to their eyes, against the sun, when they saw her coming; they rose lazily from their places, reached into their pockets; one held a bottle against his stomach as he worked with something at the top. Julia stood with folded arms, more self-conscious than ever, smiling unnaturally; when she came back with the opened bottles her face and throat were pink.
‘They only used keys, after all,’ she said. ‘We might have done that.’
‘We’ll know next time.’
‘They told me to “take it easy, missus.”’
‘Never mind,’ said Helen.
They had brought china cups to drink from. The beer foamed madly to the curving porcelain lips. Beneath the froth it was chill, bitter, marvellous. Helen closed her eyes, savouring the heat of the sun on her face; liking the reckless, holidayish feel of drinking beer in so public a place. But she hid the bottles, too, in a fold of the canvas bag.
‘Suppose one of my clients should see me?’
‘Oh, bugger your clients,’ said Julia.
They turned to the food they’d brought, broke the bread, made little slices of the cheese. Julia stretched out with the bunched-up canvas bag behind her head as a pillow. Helen lay flat and closed her eyes. The band had started on another tune. She knew the words to it, and began quietly to sing.
‘There’s something about a soldier! Something about a soldier! Something about a soldier that is fine!—fine!—fine!’
Somewhere a baby was crying from a pram; she heard it stumbling over its breath. A dog was barking, as its owner teased it with a stick. From the boating-lake there came the creak and splash of oars, the larking about of boys and girls; and from the streets at the edges of the park, of course, came the steady snarl of motors. Concentrating, she seemed to hear the scene in all its individual parts: as if each might have been recorded separately, then put with the others to make a slightly artificial whole: A September Afternoon, Regent’s Park.
Then a couple of teenage girls walked past. They had a newspaper, and were talking over one of the cases in it. ‘Mustn’t it be awful to be strangled?’ Helen heard one of them say. ‘Should you rather be strangled, or have an atomic bomb fall on you? They say at least with an atomic bomb it’s quick…’
Their voices faded, drowned out by another gust of music.
‘There’s something about his bearing! Something in what he’s wearing! Something about his buttons all a-shine!—shine!—shine!’
Helen opened her eyes and gazed into the luminous blue of the sky. Was it crazy, she wondered, to be as grateful as she felt now, for moments like this, in a world that had atomic bombs in it—and concentration camps, and gas chambers? People were still tearing each other into pieces. There was still murder, starvation, unrest, in Poland, Palestine, India—God knew where else. Britain itself was sliding into bankruptcy and decay. Was it a kind of idiocy or selfishness, to want to be able to give yourself over to trifles: to the parp of the Regent’s Park Band; to the sun on your face, the prickle of grass beneath your heels, the movement of cloudy beer in your veins, the secret closeness of your lover? Or were those trifles all you had? Oughtn’t you, precisely, to preserve them? To make little crystal drops of them, that you could keep, like charms on a bracelet, to tell against danger wh
en next it came?
She moved her hand, thinking this—just touched her knuckles to Julia’s thigh, where no one could see.
‘Isn’t this lovely, Julia?’ she said quietly. ‘Why don’t we come here all the time? The summer’s nearly over now, and what have we done with it? We might have come here every evening.’
‘We’ll do that next year,’ answered Julia.
‘We will,’ said Helen. ‘We’ll remember, and do it then. Won’t we? Julia?’
But Julia wasn’t listening now. She had raised her head to talk to Helen, and her attention had been caught by something else. She was looking across the park. She lifted a hand to shade her eyes and, as Helen watched, her gaze grew fixed and she started to smile. She said, ‘I think that’s—Yes, it is. How funny!’ She raised the hand higher, and waved. ‘Ursula!’ she called—so loudly, the word jarred against Helen’s ear. ‘Over here!’
Helen propped herself up and peered in the direction in which Julia was waving. She saw a slim, smart-looking woman making her way across the grass towards them, beginning to laugh.
‘Good Lord,’ the woman said, as she drew closer. ‘Fancy seeing you, Julia!’
Julia had got to her feet and was brushing down her linen dress. She was laughing, too. She said, ‘Where are you off to?’
‘I’ve been lunching with a friend,’ said the woman, ‘up at St John’s Wood. I’m on my way to Broadcasting House. We don’t have time for picnics and so on, at the BBC. What a charming spread you’ve made here, though! Perfectly bucolic!’
She looked at Helen. Her eyes were dark, slightly mischievous.
Julia turned, made introductions. ‘This is Ursula Waring, Helen. Ursula, this is Helen Giniver—’
‘Helen, of course!’ said Ursula. ‘Now, you won’t mind my calling you Helen? I’ve heard such a lot about you. No need to look nervous! It was all of it good.’
She leant to shake Helen’s hand, and Helen half rose, to meet it. She felt at a disadvantage, sitting down while Julia and Ursula were standing up; but she was very conscious, too, of her Saturday-morning appearance—of her blouse, which she’d once unpicked and refashioned in an attempt at ‘make-do and mend’, and her old tweed skirt, rather seated at the back. Ursula, by contrast, looked neat, moneyed, tailored. Her hair was put up in a chic, rather masculine little hat. Her leather gloves were soft and unscuffed, and her low-heeled shoes had flat fringed tongues to them—the kind of shoes you expected to see on a golf-course, or a Scottish highland, somewhere expensively hearty like that. She was not at all as Helen had pictured her from the things that Julia had said about her over the past few weeks. Julia had made her sound older and almost dowdy. Why would Julia have done that?