The Night Watch

Duncan began to lift himself up, as if about to start physical jerks. 'I'm training her.'

'What for?'

'The circus.'

'She'll snag your shirt.'

'I don't mind. Watch.'

The cat worked on as if demented while Duncan raised himself higher. He began to straighten up. He tried to do it in such a way that the cat could keep her place on his back-even, could walk right up his body. All the time he tried it, he kept laughing. Mr Mundy called encouragement… At last though, the cat had had enough, and sprang to the floor. Duncan brushed at his trousers.

'Sometimes,' he said to Viv, 'she gets on my shoulders. I walk about-don't I, Uncle Horace?-with her draped around my neck. Quite like your collar, in fact.'

Viv had a little false-fur collar on her coat. He came and touched it. She said, 'She's snagged your shirt after all.'

He twisted to look. 'It's only a shirt. I don't have to be smart like you. Doesn't Viv look smart, Uncle Horace? A smart lady secretary.'

He gave her one of his charming smiles, then let her hug him and kiss his cheek. His clothes had a faintly perfumed smell-that, she knew, was from the candle factory-but beneath the scent he smelt like a boy; and when she lifted her hands to him his shoulders seemed ridiculously narrow and full of slender bones. She thought of the story she'd told Helen that afternoon, about the box of magic tricks; and remembered him vividly, again, when he was little-how he'd used to come into her and Pamela's bed, and lie between them. She could still feel his thin arms and legs, and his forehead, that would get hot, the dark hair sticking to it, fine as silk… She wished for a moment that they were all children again. It still seemed extraordinary to her, that everything had turned out the way it had.

She took off her coat and her hat, and they sat down. Mr Mundy had gone back out to the kitchen. There came the sounds of him, after a minute, preparing tea.

'I ought to go and give a hand,' she said. She said this every time she came. And Duncan always answered, as he did now, 'He prefers it on his own. He'll start up singing in a minute. He had his treatment this afternoon; he's a little bit better. Anyway, I'll do the washing up. Tell me how you are.'

They exchanged their little pieces of news.

'Dad sends his love,' she said.

'Does he?' He wasn't interested. He'd only been seated for a moment, but now he got up excitedly and brought something down to her from a shelf. 'Look at this,' he said. It was a little copperish jug, with a dent in its side. 'I got it on Sunday, for three and six. The man asked seven shillings, and I knocked him down. I think it must be eighteenth-century. Imagine ladies, V, taking tea, pouring cream from this! It would have been silvered then, of course. Do you see where the plating's come off?' He showed her the traces of silver, at the join of the handle. 'Isn't it lovely? Three and six! That bit of damage is nothing. I could knock that out if I wanted.'

He turned the jug in his hands, delighted with it. It looked like a piece of rubbish to Viv. But he had some new object to show her every time she came: a broken cup, a chipped enamel box, a cushion of napless velvet. She could never help thinking of the mouths that had touched the china, the grubby hands and sweating heads that had rubbed the cushions bald. Mr Mundy's house, itself, rather gave her the creeps: an old person's house, it was, its little rooms crowded with great dark furniture, its walls swarming with pictures. On the mantelpiece were flowers of wax, and pieces of coral, under spotted glass domes. The lamps were gas ones still, with fish-tail flames. There were yellow, exhausted photographs: of Mr Mundy as a slim young man; another of him as a boy, with his sister and mother, his mother in a stiff black dress like Queen Victoria. It was all dead, dead, dead; and yet here was Duncan, with his quick dark eyes, his clear boy's laugh, quite at home amongst it all.

She picked up her bag. 'I've brought you something.'

It was a tin of ham. He saw it and said, 'I say!' He said it in the affectionate, faintly teasing way he'd said smart lady secretary, before; and when Mr Mundy came limping in with the tea-tray, he held the tin up extravagantly.

'Look here, Uncle Horace! Look what Viv has brought us.'

There was corned beef on the tray, already. She had brought that last time. Mr Mundy said, 'By golly, we are well set up now, aren't we?'

They pulled out the leaves of the table and put out the plates and cups, the tomato sandwiches, the lettuce-hearts and cream crackers. They drew up their chairs, shook out their napkins, and began to help themselves to the food.

'How is your father, Vivien?' Mr Mundy asked politely. 'And your sister? How's that fat little chap?' He meant Pamela's baby, Graham. 'Such a fat little chap, isn't he? Fat as butter! Quite like the kids you used to see about when I was a boy. Seemed to go out of fashion.'

He was opening the tin of ham as he spoke: turning its key over and over with his great, blunt fingers, producing a line of exposed meat like a thin pink wound. Viv saw Duncan watching; she saw him blink and look away. He said, as if with a show of brightness, 'Are there fashions in babies, then, like in skirts?'

'I'll tell you one thing,' said Mr Mundy, shaking out the ham, scooping out the jelly. 'What you never used to see, that was wheeled perambulators. You saw a wheeled perambulator round here, that was something marvellous. That was what you used to call, top-drawer. We used to cart my cousins about in a wagon meant for coal. Kids walked sooner then, though. Kids earned their living in those days.'

'Were you ever sent up a chimney, Uncle Horace?' asked Duncan.

'A chimney?' Mr Mundy blinked.

'By a great big brute of a man, setting fire to your toes to make you go faster?'

'Get away with you!'

They laughed. The empty ham tin was set aside. Mr Mundy took out his handkerchief and blew his nose-blew it short and hard like a trumpet-then shook the handkerchief back into its folds and put it neatly back in his pocket. His sandwiches and lettuce-hearts he cut into fussy little pieces before he ate them. When Viv left the lid of the mustard-pot up, he tipped it down. But the slivers of meat and jelly that were left on his plate at the end of the meal he held to the cat: he let her lick them from his hand-lick all about his knuckles and nails.

When the cat had finished, she mewed for more. Her mew was thin, high-pitched.

'She sounds like pins,' said Duncan.

'Pins?'

'I feel as though she's pricking me.'

Mr Mundy didn't understand. He reached to touch the cat's head. 'She'll scratch you, mind, when her dander's up. Won't you Catty?'

There was cake to be eaten, after that; but as soon as the cake was finished, Mr Mundy and Duncan got up and cleared the cups and plates away. Viv sat there rather tensely, watching them carrying things about; soon they went out to the kitchen together and left her alone. The doors in the house were heavy and cut off sound; the room seemed quiet and dreadfully airless, the gas-lamps hissing, a grandfather clock in the corner giving a steady tick-tick. It sounded laboured, she thought-as though its works had got stiff, like Mr Mundy's; or else, as if it felt weighted down by the old-fashioned atmosphere, like her. She checked the face of it against her wristwatch. Twenty to eight… How slowly the time ran here. As slowly as at work. How unfair it was! For she knew that later-when she would want it-it would seem to rush.

Tonight, at least, there was a distraction. Mr Mundy came in and sat down in his armchair beside the fire, as he always did after di