‘Helen, why don’t we put some food together and take it as a picnic to the park?’

‘All right,’ said Helen.

They packed bread, cheese, apples and lettuce in a check tea towel; Julia fished out an old madras tablecloth they had used as a dust sheet when painting the flat; they put it all in a canvas bag. In one of the streets which ran from their square was a Polish delicatessen: there they bought slices of sausage, more cheese, and two bottles of wheat beer.

‘I feel like the leader of a Brownie troop,’ said Helen, shouldering the canvas bag.

‘You look more glorious than that,’ said Julia. ‘Like a girl in a Soviet mural.’

Helen imagined herself: square-faced, large-limbed, rather hairy; but she said nothing. They began the walk across Marylebone. The bottles of beer rocked together in the bag. The streets had a bleached, exhausted feel, not unpleasant; they were dusty as a cat’s coat is dusty, when it has lain all day in the sun. The cars were so few, one could hear the cries of individual children, the slap and bounce of balls, the sound of wirelesses and gramophones from open windows, the ringing of telephones. Soon, too—swelling and sinking on impalpable gusts of air, like washing on a line—there came music from the Regent’s Park band. Julia caught Helen’s wrist, grew childish, pretending to tug.

‘Come on! Come quick! We will miss the parade!’ Her fingers slid down to Helen’s, then she drew them away. ‘It makes one feel like that, doesn’t it?’

‘Doesn’t it.’

‘What tune is it, d’y ou think?’

They stopped to listen. Helen shook her head. ‘I simply can’t imagine,’ she said—a phrase of Julia’s, though she did not notice. ‘Something modern and discordant?’

‘Surely not.’

The music rose. ‘Quick, quick!’ said Julia again. They smiled, grown-up; but walked on, faster than before. The park was very close, after all. They went in at the gate at Baker Street, stood on the little bridge that spans the boating lake, deciding where they should sit. The music, here, had lost its raggedness, but also something of its charm. They walked again, and the tune revealed itself at last.

‘Oh!’ said Helen, and they laughed; for it was only ‘Yes! We Have No Bananas’.

The park was filled with people. Old ladies and elderly men had taken the deckchairs that had been set about the bandstand. The women had their skirts drawn tight across their spread-out knees, like skeins of wool about fists; the men had twitched at their trouser legs, exposing socks and ivory shins. They sang to the music, unselfconsciously; they bounced babies, or beat out the rhythm of the tune upon the backs of sleeping children held in their laps. Further away, the park grew livelier. Dogs ran, panting, after sticks and balls, saliva flying from their mouths. Boys charged about with footballs, cricket bats, aeroplanes.

‘How well-behaved we all are!’ said Julia, as she and Helen spread out their cloth. ‘I mean, how well we know what we should do. Like figures in a picture book for children.’

‘Or for students of English.’

‘Yes! As if everything should have a label. Even the trees and flowers, look. The sycamore, the rose.’

‘The cloud,’ said Helen. ‘The pigeon.’

‘The bread. The salad. The knife. May I cut you some cheese?’

‘Will you?’ Helen’s blouse was clinging to her back, where the canvas bag had drawn the perspiration from her. She pulled the cotton free, then kicked off her sandals. She took out the bottles of beer. They were cold, and slid in her hand, deliriously. She set them down.

‘Julia, we forgot a bottle opener,’ she said.

‘Oh, hell. I do so want a beer, as well. Don’t you know some terribly clever way of getting the tops off?’

‘With my teeth, do you mean?’

‘I don’t know…’

They turned the bottles in their hands.

‘Look, it’s hopeless,’ said Helen. ‘Run and ask those boys over there if they have a knife or something.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Go on. They are sure to.’

‘You do it.’

‘I carried the bag. Go on, Julia.’

‘Oh, hell.’ Julia rose, not graciously, took up the bottles, one in each hand; began to walk across the scorched and beaten grass, to a group of three or four lounging youths. She walked stiffly, rather bowed, perhaps only self-conscious, but Helen watched her and thought in surprise, ‘She is looking her age. Why, she is almost matronly!’ For it was true: Julia, who had always been so slender—who had been, in Helen’s mind, almost defined by slenderness, or had herself defined it—had about her now, somehow, something of the angular, wide-hipped, narrow-breasted English figure she would have in earnest in eight or ten years’ time… The boys put up their hands to their eyes, against the sun, when they saw her come; they rose lazily from their places, reached into their pockets; one held a bottle against his abdomen 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. Helen felt filled with tenderness for her. She wished she might take her head between her hands, and kiss her.

‘Well done,’ she said.

‘They only used keys, after all. We might have done that.’

‘Never mind.’

They had brought china cups to drink from. The beer was chill, bitter, marvellous. Helen put back her head and closed her eyes. It was five o’clock, but the sun was still fantastically hot upon her face. She said, ‘Julia, this is wonderful. Why don’t we come here every day?’

‘I don’t know. We will, from now on.’

‘We will, every day, until winter comes. I can meet you, on my way home from work. We can have a picnic every evening, in exactly this spot. We could even have one when it gets cold, if we only dress warmly enough. We can bring our books. You could write here.’

‘Yes! It will be lovely.’

‘Lovely…’

‘That band!’ said Julia. The band had finished one tune and started another. ‘Tinkling and farting,’ she said, idly.

‘Tinkling and—!’ The phrase was such an improbable one for Julia to have used, it struck them both, suddenly, as hilarious; they lay for quite a minute, convulsed by laughter. Helen thought, ‘I’m drunk. I’m drunk, on three gulps of beer!’ She looked at Julia and wished again that she might kiss her. ‘How I’d like to kiss you, Julia!’ she almost said; but she bit back the words, for there seemed something embarrassing about revealing to Julia the fact that she had been made amorous, by beer… Then she thought back to their dreary lovemaking of three nights before and grew ashamed of the fact, herself.

Their fit of laughter left them. Helen wiped her eyes. They turned to the food they had brought, broke the bread, cut the cheese, put back the wax paper wrapper from the slices of sausage; Julia took an apple and rubbed it on her hip, turning it as she rubbed it, dextrously, distractedly. The apple was half pale yellow, half red. ‘Snow White’s apple,’ she said, showing Helen, biting into the red half.

‘You always say that.’

Helen lifted a piece of lettuce. There were beads of water still caught in its whorls, from where she had held it beneath the kitchen tap. The green of it was astonishing. It was quite tasteless, however.

‘When I was a child we ate lettuce served with sugar,’ she said.

Julia laughed. ‘You ate everything with sugar. Yorkshire pudding, for instance, with syrup on it. And Christmas pudding you ate with eggs!’

‘That was a favourite of my father’s… And Yorkshire pudding is jolly tasty with syrup on it. It’s only another form of pancake, after all. Isn’t it?’ She waited. ‘Julia?’

‘What?’

‘Must you look away like that, when we are talking?’

‘I didn’t know I had.’

‘It is like you, to start some idiotic conversation and then to look away.’

‘Something caught my eye. I’m sorry, darling. What were you saying?’

‘I was saying, that Yorkshire pudding is only another form of pancake.’

Julia blinked. ‘Well, I suppose it is, if you look at it like that…’

‘How I must bore her!’ Helen thought. The thought had sadness in it, but also something that was awfully close to rage; for it was like Julia to leave one saying these idiotic things—like leading one into marshy ground, leaping nimbly away before the muddy water rose about her own shoes. Helen had been on country walks with her, on which that had actually happened…

They ate in silence. A little boy dressed only in a pair of shorts came running close to them, closer than an adult would have come. He did a sort of capering dance for a minute or two, then threw himself upon his hands, trying handstands. Every time he fell back, they felt the thud of his feet, and grimaced and winced.

‘What self-absorbed little creatures small boys are,’ said Julia at last. ‘More than girls, don’t you think? It’s almost enviable, really.’

‘Poor Julia. Should you like to throw handstands and cartwheels? Do you feel held back?’

‘I might, for all you know.’

‘Look at his little chest, how like a bird’s it is. I bet it breaks his mother’s heart. I bet she pegs out his vests and weeps.’ Helen imagined a woman, small as a bird herself, drying her eyes at a clothes line. Absurdly, she felt tears rising in her own throat at the thought. She drank again from her beer.

‘That’s the way!’ called Julia suddenly, clapping. ‘Bravo!’ The boy had got his feet in the air. He turned his head at Julia’s cry, startled to find himself observed; the action threw him off balance, and he fell. He kept dramatically still for a moment, spreadeagled and panting, as he perhaps imagined wounded soldiers lay; then he turned his back to them, pulled madly at daisies, drove his fingers into the ground, making small battle noises. His shoulder blades worked as if furious—as if frustrated by flesh, like the unformed wings of a bird. His hair had been razored at the nape of his neck. Presently his mother called him. She had been sitting quite near, after all. She was not sad and slight as Helen had pictured her. She knocked the blades of grass from his arms and sides as if she might be hitting dust from a carpet, then held out a shirt for him to put on and buttoned it briskly, her chin drawn in. Beside her sat a lumpish girl of about sixteen. She had her foot upon the axle of a pram and was pushing and drawing it back and forth, while a baby wailed thinly from inside it.

Julia rolled on to her back and yawned. ‘Thank God I don’t have children.’

‘I should like it if you did,’ said Helen.

‘Should you?’ Julia raised her head. ‘Why?’

Helen blushed. ‘I don’t know. I don’t suppose I would, really.’

Julia watched her for another moment, then lay back down. ‘What funny things you say.’

Helen lay back, too, and closed her eyes. The baby cried, caught its breath, cried again. A dog, nearby, barked agitatedly, on and on. From the boating lake there came the creak and splash of oars, the larking about of boys and girls; in another direction, farther off, was the hum of some sort of motor. Concentrating, she heard the scene as, earlier, with Julia, she had observed it: as if the parts had been recorded separately, then put together, perhaps for an educational broadcast upon the wireless…

The band had changed its tune again. She knew the words, and began to sing.

‘There’s something about a soldier! Something about a soldier! Something about a soldier that is fine!—fine!—fine!’

The canvas bag was close to her side. She reached into it, and brought out a packet of cigarettes, and matches. She never smoked outdoors without a feeling of boldness, of recklessness; now, putting the cigarette to her lip, and lighting it, all without raising herself from her idle position on the grass, she felt more reckless than ever.

‘There’s something about his bearing! Something to what he’s wearing! Something about his buttons all a-shine!—shine!—shine!’

‘Give me a cigarette, will you?’ said Julia, across the words.

‘No,’ said Helen, not moving.

‘Please, Helen.’

‘No. You smoke too much, it makes you cough.’

‘What’s it to you, how much I cough?’

Helen didn’t answer. Julia pushed herself up, and reached, in a rather irritated way, to get a cigarette for herself.

Helen sang on. ‘There’s something about a soldier! Something about a soldier! Something about a—’

‘Must you?’ said Julia.

Helen stopped singing at once. The song went on in her head, however, and as it did there rose up again in her that feeling, that was so like rage, that she had earlier suppressed. ‘Why shouldn’t I sing?’ she thought to herself. ‘She sings all the time. Why shouldn’t I? Who am I harming? I’m not like her. She does what she wants, and doesn’t care who it hurts…’

The rage grew bleaker. Now she could feel the figure of Ursula Manning, braced, like the demon king in the pantomimes, against the spring that would send her hurtling through the trapdoor on to the stage of Helen’s thoughts… ‘Don’t let me think of any of that, now,’ she said to herself, in panic. ‘Let me think only about this moment, here. Quickly, quickly. This madras cloth beneath my hand, with the spots of distemper upon it. The prickle of grass against my heels, the cup at my side, the cigarette between my fingers. The sun, how absurdly hot it is. How every small, insignificant thing must burn to ashes, that touches it…’

The sun had sunk, however, was not quite so warm as it had been before. The cup was empty; the beer moved inside her, as if in all her veins: cloudy and sluggish and sour. The dog still barked. The baby still choked and cried. She drew on her cigarette, and rolled to one side, to grind the stub of it into the grass. As she turned from Julia, Julia spoke.

‘Helen,’ she said. Her tone was rushed and not quite natural. ‘Helen, I forgot to tell you. Ursula says she knows a man who might like to write a piece on me—something on the new book—for one of the literary magazines. I’ve fixed to have lunch with him, on Tuesday.’

‘Oh, yes?’ said Helen.

‘Yes.’

‘One of the literary magazines?’

‘Yes.’

‘Marvellous… Where are you seeing him? Somewhere with Ursula?’

Whoosh! went the trapdoor. ‘Yes,’ said Julia.

Helen laughed, and turned back. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘won’t that be nice for you.’

Julia looked away. ‘I thought you might be pleased,’ she said quietly, ‘that the man wants to write about me.’

‘I suppose he’s some great friend of hers?’

‘Not especially, I think. Does it matter?’

‘It just strikes me as odd, that she should go to so much trouble on your behalf.’

‘You think someone must go to extraordinary lengths, to get an article written about me?’

Helen did not answer. Her mind, like a diabolical engine, was lurching into life. She did not know what the worst of it was: that this had come; or that it had come while she was unready. She looked at Julia through narrowed eyes, as if vastly knowing.

‘So,’ she said, ‘I suppose you planned to bring me here and make me tipsy, before telling me?’

Julia blushed, in embarrassment or anger. ‘Don’t be an idiot.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me sooner, then?’

‘I don’t know. I forgot. It didn’t seem important. It isn’t important, is it?’

‘Apparently it is, if you have to tell me in this elaborate way—bring me here and make me tipsy. “Show the old girl a bit of a treat, then it won’t seem half so bad.”‘

‘What are you talking about?’

Helen sounded absurd, even to herself. But it was too late, now, to be anything else. She lay quite rigid for a moment. Then she sat up, and began to put on her sandals.

‘I’m going home,’ she said.

‘Helen, don’t.’

‘I don’t want to stay. You’ve spoiled it. It’s all quite spoiled.’

‘You’re being ridiculous.’ Julia hesitated, then reached for her own shoes.

‘You don’t have to come,’ said Helen, seeing her move. ‘Really, I’d rather you didn’t. Stay here, and plan your lunch. In fact, why don’t you find some telephone box and call up Ursula Manning, and ask her to join you?’

‘For God’s sake,’ said Julia. She said it sharply. The woman with the little boy looked over, and watched them, puzzled. ‘She’ll decide we’re two bickering spinsters,’ Helen thought, as she tugged the strap of her sandal through its buckle. ‘Two spiteful, bickering spinsters. “Women shouldn’t be so much together,” she’ll think, complacently. Christ, she’s right…’

She put the remains of their picnic in the tea towel, shook the last drops of beer from the bottles and cups, pulled savagely at the madras cloth.

‘Move, will you?’

Julia was working at the buckle of her own shoe. ‘Let me take the bag,’ she said, as she rose.

‘I’ve got it.’

‘You carried it here.’

‘It doesn’t matter, does it?’ Helen slung the bag over her shoulder, began to walk briskly away. She heard Julia follow. The woman still watched them; the lumpish girl beside her looked blankly at them, too; even the little boy looked. ‘This is terrible!’ thought Helen. ‘Oh God, this is agony!’ She would have liked to fling herself down, beat her fists upon the ground. She only walked; and when Julia did not catch her up, her misery increased. She thought, ‘Now I’ve made her hate me… Oh, if only she would come and make me stop! If only she would come and tell me not to be such a fool!’

But even as she thought it, she walked more quickly; and Julia did not come: Helen felt her following, at an absurd little distance. They passed about the deckchairs and the bandstand, over the little bridge, into Baker Street; when Helen crossed a road, she ran—she was pleased if there were cars to dodge between, for that meant Julia would be stranded, behind her, at the kerb… They walked like this, all the way to their square. When Helen reached the house, its door was open: she saw with a sinking heart that the man who lived in the flat downstairs from them was sitting on the step, drinking tea from his jam jar, working at something—some small piece of machinery, she thought—in his lap. His daughter was sitting beside him, with one of her rabbits.

‘Hullo,’ she said, when she saw Helen. The rabbit was white, with eyes of a dreadful pinkness. She lifted it up.

‘I say,’ said Helen brightly, stepping past. ‘Isn’t he smart?’

‘It’s a lady-rabbit, not a boy,’ said the girl.

‘Soft as shit,’ said the man, not raising his eyes. Helen saw then what he had in his lap: a pistol, some soldier’s pistol from the war. He was cleaning the barrel, with rags and oil.

The rabbit kicked its legs. ‘Can I bring him upstairs?’ said the girl.

Helen smiled. ‘Not today. We’re a little tired, today.’

‘Been out on a spree?’ said the man, gazing into the workings of his gun.

‘Something like that.’

He caught her eye. ‘Had your jollies?’

Helen’s smile grew rigid. She passed inside, unlocked the door to the flat, left it open behind her. As she began to climb the stairs she heard the girl addressing Julia; and then came Julia herself, exclaiming over the rabbit with the same false brightness with which Helen had: ‘My goodness. What a beauty…’ She sounded like her mother.

They had left the windows closed. The flat smelled faintly sour. Two or three late flies buzzed drearily between the rooms. Helen took the canvas bag to the kitchen, but did not unpack it. She visited the lavatory, and washed her hands. Then she went into the sitting room, installed herself in a chair next to the window, took up a book. The book was one of hers—an anthology of Victorian verse. She enjoyed poetry, but liked it to rhyme. She read at random: some section of Tennyson. The reading calmed her. When Julia appeared and stood in the doorway of the room, Helen felt blank, hard, cool as marble. It was Julia who shook. She said, ‘How could you make us do that?’

‘I didn’t make us do anything.’

‘I can’t stand this, Helen.’

‘It’s in your power to stop it then, I think.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘You can’t mean, Ursula. My God! If every time I tell you I’m to have lunch with her—’

‘If it’s so ordinary a thing,’ said Helen quickly, ‘why do you have to tell me in such a sneaking sort of way?’

‘Why do you think? Because I know you’ll behave like this! You twist everything so. You expect me to be guilty. It makes me appear to be guilty, even—Christ! even to myself!’

Helen knew that this was true. But it was beyond her, to admit such a thing, at such a stage. The argument went on. She countered every sensible comment of Julia’s with some fresh absurdity of her own; and she spoke coolly, reasonably—now and then laughing, in her hideous knowing way—while Julia grew ever more agitated and upset. At last Julia’s voice quite broke. She began to cry. She put her hand upon the door frame and leaned her face upon her knuckles. ‘Oh, God!’ she said. ‘Oh, God, I can’t bear it!’ The tears spilled from her eyes: Helen saw them fall and strike the leather of her shoe.

She saw them, with horror. It was like the breaking of a spell. For Julia cried often, at moments like this, and Helen—who wept only at nonsense—responded, every time, with the same sort of miserable fright she had felt at the sight of her mother weeping when she was a child. She thought, in a panic: ‘Now she will leave me.’ She saw herself, alone. ‘I will have made her leave me.’

‘Julia, I’m sorry,’ she said, standing up. Her words were flat, however, though her fear was so great. Julia turned, went into her study, sharply closed the door; Helen heard her sobbing. She put her hands to her stomach: she was sick, at her stomach and her heart. She thought: ‘That’s it.’ She thought: ‘I’ve lost her.’

But after a minute, Julia’s sobs died. Helen heard the click—she thought—of the telephone receiver being lifted from its cradle. And even in the midst of her misery and terror, she began to be afraid—she began to be sure—that Julia must be telephoning Ursula Manning, making some fresh arrangement… She took her hands from her stomach and went stealthily—very stealthily—to the study door; held her breath and listened; but heard nothing…

So the evening wore on. Helen sat with the book of Victorian verse, until the light at the window grew too dim to read by; then she put down the book and sat in darkness. In the flat downstairs the man, the woman and their daughter called out, from room to room; the girl played her recorder—played, endlessly, the same halting nursery tune. At nine o’clock or so, Julia’s door opened, and light spilled into the hall: Helen saw her go to the kitchen, heard the sound of her putting water into a pan, making a drink; then she spent some time in the bathroom, then went to bed. She did not speak to Helen, or come to the room at all, and Helen did not call out. The bedroom door was pushed to, but not closed: the light from the reading lamp showed, for a quarter of an hour, and then was extinguished.

After that, the flat seemed darker than before; and the darkness, and the silence, made Helen feel worse, feel choked and defeated and powerless. She had only to reach for the switch of a lamp, the dial of the wireless, to change the mood of the place; but she could not do it, she was quite cut off from ordinary habits and things. She sat a little longer, then got up and began to pace. The pacing was like something an actress might do in a play, to communicate a state of despair or dementedness, and didn’t feel real. She got down on the floor, drew up her legs, put her arms before her face: this pose didn’t feel real, either, but she held it, for almost twenty minutes. ‘Perhaps Julia will come, and see me lying on the floor,’ she thought, as she lay there; she thought, that if Julia did that, then she would at least realize the extremity of the feeling by which Helen was gripped… Then she saw at last that she would only look absurd. She got up. She was chilled, and cramped. She went to the mirror. It was unnerving, gazing at one’s face in a mirror in a darkened room; there was a little light from a street lamp, however, and she could see by this that her cheek and bare arm were marked red and white, as if in little weals, from where she had lain upon the carpet. The marks were satisfying, at least. She had often longed, in fact, for her jealousy to take some physical form; she had sometimes thought, in moments like this, ‘I’ll burn myself,’ or ‘I’ll cut myself.’ For a burn or a cut might be shown, might be nursed, might scar or heal, would be a miserable kind of emblem; would anyway indubitably be there, upon the surface of her body, rather than corroding it from within… Now the thought came to her again, that she might scar herself in some way. It came, like the solution to a problem. ‘I won’t be doing it,’ she said to herself, ‘like some hysterical girl. I won’t be doing it for Julia, hoping she’ll come and catch me at it. It won’t be like lying on the sitting room floor. I’ll be doing it for myself, as a secret…’

She did not allow herself to think what a very poor secret such a thing would be. She went quietly to the bathroom, closed and locked the door, pulled gently at the string which turned on the bathroom light; and at once felt better. The light was bright, like the lights one saw in hospital operating rooms, in films; the bare white surfaces of the bath and basin and lavatory contributed, too, a certain clinical feeling, a sense of efficiency, even of duty. She was not in the least like some hysterical girl. She saw her face in the mirror again and the scarlet had faded from her cheek, she looked perfectly reasonable and calm.

She proceeded, now, as if she had planned the entire operation in advance. She opened the bathroom cabinet and took out the little silver safety razor she and Julia used for shaving their legs. She unwound the screw, lifted off the little hub of metal, carefully took out the blade and held it. How thin it was, how flexible! It was like holding nothing—a wafer, a counter in a game, a postage stamp… Her only concern was, where she might cut. She looked at her arms; she thought perhaps the inside of the arm, where the flesh was softer and might be supposed to yield more easily. She considered her stomach, for a similar reason. She didn’t think of her wrists, ankles or shins, or any hard part like that. Finally she settled on her inner thigh. She put up a foot to the cold rounded lip of the bath; found the pose too cramped; lengthened her stride and braced her foot against the farther wall. She drew back her skirt, thought of tucking it into her drawers, thought of taking it off entirely. For, suppose she should bleed on it? She had no idea how much blood to expect… Her thigh was pale—creamy-pale, against the white of the bathtub—and seemed huge beneath her hands. She had never contemplated it in just this way before, and she was struck now by how perfectly featureless it was. If she were to see it, in isolation, she would hardly know it as a functioning piece of limb. She didn’t think she would even recognize it as hers.

She put a hand upon the leg, to stretch the flesh tight between fingers and thumb; then she brought the edge of the blade to the skin and made a cut. The cut was shallow, but impossibly painful: she felt it, like stepping in icy water, as a hideous shock to the heart. She recoiled for a moment, then tried a second time. The sensation was the same. She literally gasped. ‘Do it again, more swiftly,’ she said to herself; but the thinness and flexibility of the metal, that had seemed almost attractive before, now struck her, in relation to the springing fatness of her thigh, as repulsive. The slicing was too precise. The cuts she had made were filling with blood; the blood rose slowly, however—as if grudgingly—and seemed to darken and congeal at once. The edges of flesh were closing, already: she put the razor blade down, and pulled them apart. That made the blood come a little faster—at last it spilled from the skin and grew smeary. She watched, for a minute; two or three times more worked the flesh about the cuts, to make the blood flow again; then she rubbed the leg clean with a square of damp lavatory paper.

She was left with two short crimson lines, such as might have been made by a hard but playful swipe from the paw of a cat.

She sat upon the edge of the bath. The shock of cutting, she thought, had produced some sort of chemical change in her: she felt quite unnaturally clear-headed—alive, and chastened. She had lost the certainty that the cutting of her leg was a sane and reasonable thing to do; she would have hated, for example, for Julia, or any of their friends, to have come upon her as she was doing it. She would have died of embarrassment! And yet—She kept looking at the crimson lines, in a half perplexed, half admiring way. ‘You perfect fool,’ she thought; she thought it, however, almost jauntily… At last she took up the blade again, washed it, screwed it back beneath its little silver hub; put the razor back in the cabinet. She turned off the light, allowed her eyes to grow used to the darkness, then let herself into the hall. She went to the bedroom, pushed at the door, stepped, very softly, to the bed. Julia lay on her side, her face in darkness, her hair very black against her pillow. It was impossible to say whether she were sleeping or awake.

‘Julia,’ said Helen, quietly.

‘What?’

‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Do you hate me?’

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t hate me as much as I hate myself.’

Julia rolled on to her back. ‘Do you say that as some sort of consolation?’

‘I don’t know.’ She went closer, put her fingers to Julia’s hair. Julia flinched.

‘Your hand’s freezing. Don’t touch me!’ She took Helen’s hand. ‘For God’s sake, why are you so cold? Where have you been?’

‘In the bathroom. Nowhere.’

‘Get into bed, can’t you?’

Helen moved away, to take off her clothes, unpin her hair, draw on her nightdress. She did it all in a creeping, craven sort of way. ‘You’re so cold!’ Julia said again, when she had got into the bed beside her.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Helen. She had not felt chilled, before; but now she felt the warmth of Julia’s body, she began to shake. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again. Her teeth chattered in her head. She tried to make herself rigid; the trembling grew worse.

‘God!’ said Julia; but she put her arm about Helen and drew her close. She smelled of sleep, of unmade beds, of unwashed hair—but pleasantly, deliciously. Helen lay against her and shut her eyes. She felt exhausted, emptied out; she thought of the day that had passed—it was astonishing to her, that a single set of hours could contain so many separate states of violent feeling.

Perhaps Julia thought the same. Her shoulder rose, then sank, as she sighed. ‘What a ridiculous day!’ she said.

Helen bent her head, as if abjectly, until it rested on Julia’s breast. She said, ‘I thought you might leave.’

‘I ought to,’ said Julia. ‘It would serve you right.’

‘I felt like Othello—like the base Indian, who threw a pearl away, richer than all his tribe.’

‘Idiot.’

‘I love you.’

‘Idiot. Go to sleep.’

‘Don’t leave me,’ thought Helen. She heard the beat of Julia’s heart: steady, secret, out of reach. ‘Don’t leave me.’

Next morning she bathed and dressed after Julia had risen and started work. She did the same thing in the days which followed. The cuts upon her leg were shallow, and fine, and healed quickly: when Julia noticed them at last, they were very faint. Helen said she had scratched herself on the clasp of a suspender, and Julia believed her.

 

Image © Ronelle