The Night Watch by Sarah Waters Page B

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 sea-side 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, unembarassed, 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