Archive of Our Own

home - 1952

The tap was coughing out cold water in the middle of the night again. Millie was woken by the rusty shriek it made as it was being turned, the sound of water against the metal of the kitchen sink, and the cold clench in her stomach which came because she knew Lucy was washing her hair again.

When this had happened before, she’d held her breath and pretended she was asleep, feeling horribly guilty, as if she were intruding upon some sort of secret, unseen ritual—Lucy, in the dark just two feet away from her, scrubbing at her hair and scalp with all the soap she could lather between her hands, shivering in the blackness. She’d heard Lucy’s slip whispering against her skin, the scratching of her nails on her scalp, the cacophony of water; she’d heard her breathing shake like it was stumbling out of her lips. After the third time, she’d turned on the light, catching Lucy red-handed, and had said, “Oh, darling,” or some other nonsense meant to convey the fact that she would break her own heart if it meant Lucy could crawl inside it and get some relief there.

By now she had stopped counting, although she knew that if she asked, Lucy would be able to tell her the exact number of times she’d done it. She never asked.

Lucy must have heard her scrabbling at her lamp before she managed to turn it on, because all the noise not stemming from the emphysemic tap stilled, ceased—and then dim yellow light flooded the room. Lucy, shivering in her slip and with her hair sticking to her face and to her neck, gave a look of apology so desperate and so unnecessary Millie wanted to clutch her and never let go. She was still half bent over the sink, almost cringing away from Millie's eyes.

“You’ll freeze,” Millie said.

“Sorry,” Lucy replied.

By now they were used to the routine. Millie stood up and ignored the shock of chilly floorboards against bed-warm toes in order to take up arms and square herself to the enemy; or at least she picked up a comb, and combed out Lucy’s hair. Lucy’s hair, of course, was not the enemy. It was something inside Lucy which Millie was fending off—not something which had grown there naturally, but something which was there, and part of her, and therefore had to be dealt with. Combing couldn’t really stop it, this night-time washing, scrubbing and scratching which happened when Lucy remembered too much too late at night, but Millie wanted to tend to her. It meant something, or at least she hoped so.

Lucy still didn’t straighten up completely, pinching her shoulders together and gripping her own upper arms. “What’s inside that head of yours?” Millie sighed, wrapping her arms around Lucy’s waist from behind, her comb clasped in her hand like a talisman.

“A lot of train times,” Lucy said, and Millie made her laugh sound like a tut, her mouth against Lucy’s cold damp hair, even though it meant tasting soap.

Eventually, they stumbled out of their shivering, clasped pose in front of the kitchen sink and staggered, not quite letting go of each other, to Millie’s bed, Lucy’s being too narrow for two people. There, Millie draped Lucy in blankets and told her she wasn’t to worry about getting the pillows wet, or else. Lucy was slumped against her, the apple-curve of Millie’s bony shoulder fitting nicely against the hollow of Lucy’s cheek, their angles all wrong but managing to fit. Neither of them were shivering any longer. The lamp was still on.

“Ready to sleep?”

Lucy’s laugh was a flash of warmth against Millie’s skin, making her nightie flutter against her collarbone. “You haven’t any idea how ready to sleep I am,” Lucy said, smiling exhaustedly up at Millie, who suddenly felt ashamed of herself for being able to occasionally forget everything that had happened, when Lucy’s monstrous, beautiful brain catalogued and categorised and kept her sleepless, constantly replaying the tiny details of huge horrors behind her eyes. And then there was, of course, the familiar misery of wanting to kiss her.

“I shan’t let go of you, you know,” Millie promised her, well used to fixing a smile by now. Love thrummed, thick and aching, in her chest. “If I even suspect you’re remembering anything dreadful, I’ll talk your ear off about my personal life and embarrass you to death, how’s that?”

Lucy smiled, already embarrassed, and turned her cheek against Millie’s shoulder. “Effective,” she admitted. “But the fact that I’ve been up for twenty eight hours now is—probably more effective.”

“Oh, Luce. Come on. Time to sleep.”

Lucy was wriggling down into the pillows, not—Millie was distinctly pleased to see—at all worried about getting them wet. “I could survive your stories.”

“They aren’t wholesome.”

“Well,” said Lucy, tucked up to her chin in blankets, a nest of warmth. When there didn’t seem to be anything more coming, Millie slid down beside her. She rolled over for a moment to turn off the light then turned back to face her bedfellow, their breath mingling between them, warm and damp, limbs bumping together as they got comfortable, locating each other by heat. “I’m not really that wholesome,” Lucy finally pointed out.

“What?”

“I left him,” Lucy said, her voice non-committal in its quietness.

Millie shot up in bed, fire in her throat and her voice husky. “You mustn’t say that,” she said fiercely. “You mustn’t say that was wrong, or sinful, or anything but the bravest thing I have ever seen.”

There was a long stretch of still, dark silence, interrupted by their mismatched breathing. Then, a raw little sound which Millie first thought, with a cold shock of horror, was a sob, but which was in fact Lucy giving an embarrassed laugh. “I was running away.”

“Running away is brave.”

“Maybe,” Lucy said, in her high, soft little voice. “But I can’t imagine you running away from anything.”

A little while after, Millie whispered, “Lucy?”, having finally gotten up the courage to answer her, but by then Lucy was asleep.

liverpool lime street railway station - 1950

Millie had a headache, and it was getting harder and harder to read in the dim orange glow of the railway platform. It was astonishing how travelling tired her out, she always found, though she had done nothing but sit all day and read or watch the world go by. She desperately didn’t want to chat, because if she chatted she’d have to be charming—she owed it to herself—and that would tire her out further.

“Sorry, do you have a light?”

If it had been a man who had spoken, Millie wouldn’t even have looked up from her much finger-smudged book to deliver a disinterested and technically untruthful ‘no’, because men always expected her to stretch her charm even thinner than usual. But the voice was a woman’s, so she looked up, ready to at least say ‘no’ politely. She was running out of matches.

The word failed in her mouth.

The woman standing in front of her was wearing a starched shirt and trousers and a tie. She wasn’t even in a bar or a club; she was just standing there, lit up by in the greasy railway light, casually opposing the whole world. Her hair was short, her hands incongruously delicate.

“Yes, of course,” Millie said, in a desperate rush, opening up her bag and plucking her nearly-empty box of matches from the shadowy depths, holding them out in her red-nailed fingers. Trembling. The other woman’s hand brushed hers as she took them, and Millie immediately scrambled for her own cigarettes, stashing one between her lips. Her heart was vibrating hummingbird-fast in her chest.

The stranger filled her lungs with a great gulp of smoke before saying, “You lifesaver, thank you.” And then she lowered the match down to the end of Millie’s cigarette. Millie recalled the only decent advice her mother had ever given her, which was ‘never look down when a man is lighting your cigarette; you don’t want to set your eyelashes on fire’.

She altered the dictum minutely, and kept her eyes on the woman bending towards her, whose brow was creased as if the matter of lighting Millie’s cigarette was one of national importance. Millie, for her part, simply concentrated on not gaping, because she didn’t want her cigarette to fall out of her mouth. Then, satisfied with her work, the stranger threw the match on the ground and (Millie nearly gave an audible little whine) stamped it down into ashes.

After a second of composing herself, Millie breathed out, “Oh, don’t think of it,” in a wave of smoke, her voice fluttering like a moth in the evening air. The stranger’s mouth just curved gently upwards.

Seventeen words between them, not including oh. The woman in the shirt and tie held out the matches. Millie almost told her to keep them just to up the total. Seventeen words and an oh. She couldn’t let her get away with just seventeen words and an oh.

“Are you travelling on your own?” Millie asked.

The woman’s laugh was crackling and chocolatey. “I am, yes.”

“Oh,” there it was again, startled and groping for words to make her stay, “oh, me too.”

“Really? I would have thought you’d have a boyfriend somewhere around here.”

“Heavens, no,” Millie said. “No boyfriend.” They pulled their cigarettes away from their mouths at the same time, and smiled at each other, Millie on her uncomfortable metal seat with her book open in her lap and her lipstick staining the end of her cigarette and the woman whose name she didn’t yet know standing up, still bent slightly towards her. Whirls of smoke between them, stained orange by the light.

“I’m Brigid.”

“Like the saint?”

“Not much like the saint, no.”

“That’s lucky. I’m Millie; it’s such a pleasure.”

“Likewise.”

“Where are you headed?”

“London. In search of work, God help me.” Brigid glanced up with a laughing smile for a second and added, with a grim wryness, “Liverpool Street. For the irony.”

“Oh,” warbled Millie, whose ticket would only take her as far as Warrington and who would later have to work out how to deal with her sudden impulsive lie, but that was later. “Oh, me too.”

home - 1952

Of course, in the daylight, there were cups of tea to be made and jobs to be found, and the sunlight came streaming in through the window and stretching across the floor in such clean, lovely streaks that it was hard to imagine ever having nightmares. In the mirror, Millie’s smile was full of freshly-applied lipstick and anxious love.

“Do I look alright?” Lucy asked.

Her long brown hair was getting brittle and thin with all her midnight scrubbing. Bits had broken off in Millie’s hairbrush. But when Millie said, “You look wonderful,” she wasn’t lying. Despite her dry hair and the slight twist of nervousness to her mouth, Lucy looked as luminously steady as she always did, a calm contrast to Millie’s dark red hair and urgent crimson lips.

“Don’t be silly. Alright is good enough.”

“Is it?”

“Yes.”

“But you don’t look alright,” Millie insisted. “I said you look wonderful and I meant it. Now you will smile, won’t you?”

“Of course I’ll smile,” Lucy said, the corners of her mouth trembling almost slyly, as if teasing Millie with the possibility of letting loose the sort of smile she didn’t often shine. Millie felt her heart flip in her chest, cracking open and saying yes, yes, anything.

“Marvellous,” she said instead, squeezing Lucy’s shoulders, feeling the deceptive frailty of her bones beneath her thin grey cardigan. “You’ll make sure to impress them with your memory, too?”

Lucy shrugs. Her face is calm and grave, and she’s carefully inspecting the earrings Millie has furnished her with—simple, small things, but Millie can see the doubt on her face. “I don’t know. It’s a secretarial position. I don’t really need to have a perfect memory.”

“But they must want a secretary who can remember everything!” Millie said, hearing her voice too loud and hollow, emptily gay. Lucy raised her serious eyes to her reflection.

“They don’t,” she said. “Not everything-everything.”

Millie softened, dimmed down. She was gripping Lucy’s shoulders too tightly, she realised. “Alright, darling,” she said, her voice sounding fluttery and ineffectual now. She licked her lips. Lucy was fiddling with one of the earrings. “What else? ...Oh, take them out if you don’t like them. You’ll make yourself self-conscious.”

Lucy flushed; she dropped her hand, earring catching the light of the sun and flashing in the mirror. “Oh, I’m not, really—it’s so kind of you to lend them to me—”

“And I’d be rather unkind to say you had to wear them.”

Lucy hesitated, and then smiled awkwardly, taking them out with delicate little movements and then cupping them in her palm. “They are pretty. But I’m not sure they’re for me. Thanks for all your help, though.”

“Oh, stuff and nonsense. Ready to go?”

“Yes,” Lucy said firmly, putting the earrings back on Millie’s dresser—trying, at first, to find where their rightful place was, before apparently giving up on the idea that anything of Millie’s had a rightful place.

“And you won’t tell them you live with me, will you?” Millie reminded her.

“What?” Lucy’s brow creased, like it did too often. She was standing up, reaching for her coat by the door. “Why not?”

Sometimes, Millie forgot that Lucy didn’t see the world in shades of danger of discovery. Her smile struggled and stumbled on her face, but she fixed it there. “It just makes you seem more independent. Not that you should lie, but perhaps don’t volunteer the information that you live above a cafe with a blowsy ne’er-do-well.”

“I’ve seen you do well,” Lucy said mildly and not quite wryly enough for Millie’s comfort, her face turned away as she buttoned up her coat. “And I don’t forget things. Remember? Right, I’m off. I’ll see you later.”

“Oh—such good luck.”

When Lucy left, the room was bright and quiet and lacking.

a house - 1934

How she hated this townhouse—and this woman, puffing elegantly on her cigarette, posed in her chair with her face turned away from Millie, with her glossy dark hair swept up into lacquered, shining loops and curls, with her pearls shining dully around her neck, this woman who was supposed to be her mother.

“Tea, Millicent?”

Millie shifted miserably in the grip of her armchair at the sound of her full name. “No thanks, Mother,” she said, looking away, out of the big windows, but the street wasn’t visible from this angle. Millie suspected her mother liked that particular isolationist quality of the house. It was like floating above the world. It made Millie feel nervous, but her mother hated to see people bustling about their lives. It made her feel unpleasantly involved with them, she said; grimy. She hated fuss. In fact, she hated most things. Lately, her opinions had churned and soured; she liked to spit out smoothly elegant vitriol about the Jews and the Blacks and the Future of Britain, filling her mouth with significant capitals and flicking them delicately off her tongue.

Millie craned her neck to try to catch sight of something which would promise her that there was a world off this prim, nose-in-the-air street which reeked of tea and British Fascism, but all she could see was the upper part of the houses opposite. She thought, very suddenly and very viciously, that if the Jews and the Blacks really were plotting like her mother so desperately wanted them to be, then jolly good for them, and Millie wished them every success and a good time to boot.

“If you’re sure,” said her mother.

“I’m very sure.”

“Well, good.” If only Mother didn’t always sound so patient, Millie would know what to do. If they could just get into a screaming match, just once, oh, she’d show her. No one could snarl like Millie could. And God knew she was always angry, especially in this house. But there was never anything to do with it, so it just festered in her throat and made her almost want to cry. As usual, her mother just sat back and spoke in her usual low, delicate tones, sweet and grave. “Now you know what I want to discuss with you, darling.”

“School, is it?” How she longed to snatch that cigarette right out of her mother’s spindly, snatching fingers and take a deep hungry drag. Of course, she didn’t move. Mother blew smoke in the faces of people who thought smoking was unladylike, but Millie knew that in her, it would be another flaw, a particular type of flaw, paradoxically both mannish and sluttish depending on her mother’s mood.

“Well, yes and no.”

“Oh?” Millie said, jiggling her knee desperately. Her hands were sweating. She knotted them together.

“Don’t fidget.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s about a young lady in your year named Charlotte Holloway, with whom I believe you’re quite close.”

“Oh,” Millie said, too brightly, suddenly cold with dread, “is it really?”

home - 1952

“It’s the smell.”

“Sorry?”

“The smell of the perfume those girls were all wearing. The one, you know, that you used to get in the war—the one I was wearing when that man on the train tried to...funny, really, that’s the worst bit of it. I remember how it smelt, at night, and I think I smell it. And then, I have to...”

Millie stared at Lucy, who seemed to be talking to the mug of tea Millie had made for her. Her interview hadn’t gone well, her whole day hadn’t gone well, and so Millie had commenced an overbearing fussing so loud and silly that she had felt faintly repulsed by herself. After she’d finally stopped herself, they had both resigned themselves to an evening full of tired silence.

“Then you have to wash your hair?”

“It’s a bit mad, isn’t it.”

“No.”

“It is, though.”

“No,” Millie insisted, “it’s not. You saw some horrible things, Lucy. We all did, but not like you. You with your massive, photographic brain—” She leant over suddenly and put her hands on each side of Lucy’s face, staring anxiously into her eyes. “It’s, it’s marvellous, darling, it’s incredible what you can do, but it does such things to you. And that’s not your fault. It’s just how you are.”

The sunset was coming in through the window and turning Lucy auburn. Her hair was caught between her cheeks and Millie’s hands. She looked very tired, and a little lost. “Yes,” she said. “But I wish, sometimes, that I wasn’t—like this.”

“Yes,” said Millie. “No. Oh, darling, no, don’t ever feel that way.”

brigid’s flat - 1950

“I just can’t believe the horrible old bitch is dead,” said Millie, stabbing out her cigarette in Brigid’s ashtray and trying to feel something more meaningful than flat, sick disappointment in the whole bloody, barbaric world.

“Do you want me to say sorry?” Brigid asked.

“No,” Millie sniffled, rubbing her face. It was one in the morning, and they were drunk on something strong and black market. Bridget’s arm was around her waist, and Millie’s stockinged feet were curled up underneath her. They were sitting on Bridget’s bed, because Bridget didn’t have a sofa and they were both too tall to fit on the armchair properly; in fact, Millie was taller than Brigid, which made them both laugh a little when they danced in public, or what passed as public for women like them.

Earlier that day, summoned by a nervous neighbour, the police had found Millie’s mother dead with a cigarette burned out between her fingers, exactly as cold and quiet as she’d been since the war finished.

“I wish you could have met her,” Millie said, her voice dull and confused.

“Really?”

“Yes. You wouldn’t have been as cowardly as me.”

“I don’t know,” Brigid said simply. “I think you’re brave.”

“What have I ever done that’s brave?”

“This,” Brigid said, tipping Millie’s face up, rubbing her cheeks inexpertly with her cuff, though Millie hadn’t cried much. “You’ve done this. This, here. Me. And you.”

home - 1952

“Can you cut hair?” Lucy asked.

Millie frowned, looking up from where she was trying to work out how to make her rations last the week. She’d never got the hang of the blasted things. “Yes, of course. But so can you.”

“I can trim my hair,” Lucy corrected, “and I can cut other people’s. But I’ve never properly cut mine. It’s always been long, since I can remember.”

“And you want it short?” Millie asked, nonplussed, tucking her own curls behind her ear.

“I think so.”

“Like mine?”

“Shorter,” said Lucy, with a firm sort of nervousness.

Really, she should try to talk her out of it. Lucy’s hair was brittle now but it wouldn’t always be that way; eventually, Millie trusted, she’d stop trying to scrub that sickly-sweet smell out of it when it wasn’t even there and it would be as baby-soft as ever it was, falling in gentle straight lines and ending just at the tops of her breasts—which would be just barely discernible under her layers of well-washed cotton and wool. Soft hair on soft old cardigan. Everything would go back to normal.

But normal had been so horrible to Lucy. “Alright,” Millie said. “Alright, if you’re sure.”

Lucy’s grin split her face. “I thought you were going to tell me it was an awful idea.”

“Well! You know I love awful ideas. Do you—now?”

Lucy licked her lips and nodded. “Now. Or I’ll never do it.”

And that was how Lucy ended up sitting at the kitchen table, sitting sideways on her chair so that the back wouldn’t knock against Millie’s elbows as she snipped away at Lucy’s hair. Lucy held Millie’s hand mirror up in front of her face and Millie kept having to remind her to keep looking forwards rather than try to inspect Millie’s work so far, turning her head this way and that.

“Don’t try to look around, I’ll take your ear off.”

“Sorry,” Lucy said, putting down the hand mirror. “I shouldn’t look. I can’t look.”

“Don’t you like it so far?”

“I’ll know when it’s finished.”

But Lucy didn’t seem to waver once. In fact, something in her cleared as more and more brittle brown locks dropped to the floor, little centimeters of hair littering her shoulders, falling onto her nose and making her wrinkle it and shake her head to get them off. Millie hovered around her, brow furrowed and her mouth an anxious red rosette, snipping and clipping and sometimes hacking, but being as careful as she could. She flicked an orphaned snippet of hair away from Lucy’s cheek. “How do you want it?”

“Short.”

“Yes, but what kind of short?”

“Just whatever you think will look best,” Lucy said decisively. Millie almost groaned at the amount of trust Lucy was putting in her hairdressing skills, but she couldn’t abandon her now. She tightened her lips and snipped onwards.

Eventually, she lowered her scissors and bit her bottom lip. Lucy looked even more delicate with her hair so close to her head. “You’re going to have to learn how to curl it,” Millie warned, lowering the scissors and feeling distinctly nervous.

“You can teach me,” said Lucy, finally lifting up the hand mirror again.

Millie held her breath.

It probably wasn’t a good haircut. She had no idea how Lucy wanted to wear it, and really they should have washed her hair beforehand and cut it wet, but Lucy had seemed to crackle with urgency and Millie hadn’t wasn’t to douse her enthusiasm. She looked young, when Millie caught a glimpse of her in the hand mirror. She looked nervous but steady.

“Oh,” she said, and Millie prepared to feel guilty, but, “oh, it’s perfect,” Lucy continued, and Millie, whose hands had drifted mysteriously to Lucy’s shoulders, laughed out of pure relief.

“It won’t come anywhere near to perfect until I’ve taught you how to do curls,” Millie said, squeezing her shoulders, and on impulse kissing the top of Lucy’s head, then frowning and trying to blow bits of cut hair off her lips, though the cuttings stuck insistently to her lipstick. “Ugh.”

“We’re both covered in bits of hair,” Lucy giggled, as if just now realising. “I must look a sight.”

“Curls. Now,” Millie said, mock-sternly.

They swept up all the cuttings and Millie washed Lucy’s hair was all the tenderness she could possibly muster, and then set curls all about her face. When it was done, Lucy was beautiful.

Not that that had ever been news; not that Lucy was ever anything else in her quiet, clear way. Hard and bright as morning sunlight and completely unstoppable.

Sometimes, Millie thought, smiling as Lucy examined herself with great satisfaction in the mirror, there was absolutely no need to be so unhappy with love for her. Lucy didn’t love her; and so what? That was Lucy’s right. And now Lucy was beautiful and happy in their kitchen. It was good enough.

a house - 1934

“It isn’t anything like that,” Millie said to her mother, shameful tears brimming hotly in her eyes and her throat full of something wretched and unnamable. “Charlie and me, it’s not anything like that. It’s not anything like you’d understand. Just because you’ve never felt anything in your dried-up life but misery!”

“I’m taking you out of that school,” her mother said blithely, stubbing out one cigarette and lighting another. It was as if she hadn’t heard Millie; as if nothing Millie did would ever puncture her perfect bubble of superiority; as if in fact she wasn’t really screaming and crying at all, as if she weren’t real. “It’s made a little fishwife out of you. And that’s not the worst thing.”

“You can’t,” Millie sobbed, “you can’t, you awful old bitch—it’s not like that!”

And the worst thing, the worst thing of all, was that it really wasn’t like that, no matter how much Millie wanted it to be.

st catherine’s school for girls - 1933

All the other girls were at the dance, of course. Charlie had had absolutely no interest in all the fussing and the frippery, and the fizzing excitement which had distracted the entire school in the weeks building up to the dance had left her irritable and impatient. Her apathy was fascinating and infectious—though, Millie had confessed to her, although she did agree that it was an absurd idea and she didn’t know why the other girls were salivating over it so, she would have liked to get dressed up.

“You could just dress up for me,” Charlie had said mischievously, and Millie had all but wriggled with excitement, pressing her thighs tightly together under her uniform skirt.

“Well, you would have to give me admiration enough for an entire ballroom.”

“It’s not going to be in a ballroom. It’s going to be in a poky little hall.”

“Alright, but I don’t want a poky little hall’s worth of compliments.”

And they had danced. Charlie had knocked on Millie’s dorm room door in a pair of dark trousers and a white blouse so that with her hair pulled up she looked almost like a boy. She had adopted a sombre, serious expression of priggish masculinity, blathering on in her best deep voice about being down from Oxford for the long vacation. Millie had burst out laughing and mockingly fluttered about how Oxford must be such a lot of work, and then Charlie had said yes, between buggering the new boys and drinking a bottle of whiskey each night she could never keep track of the days, and then the joke had whirled away as she had waltzed Millie around the empty room to no music.

It had been better, so much better, than any stupid dance for boring people who weren’t anything like them and had no idea how wonderful their secret lives were.

A little later, rumpled and giggly, they snuck cigarettes leaning out of the window, shoulder to bare shoulder, Millie shivering in the clingy red dress her mother had told made her look like a kept woman. She had taken off her shoes. “Charlie,” she said suddenly, pressing tight in against the other girl’s shoulder and grinning, “do you love me?”

Charlie started, and looked around at her. “We’re girls, Millie,” she said.

“But we—”

“We were just dancing.”

“Were we?”

“Don’t...”

“What?”

“Don’t spoil things. Of course I love you. You’re my best friend. And you’re a terror, Millie. Of course I love you. But we’re girls.”

home - 1952

“We did something really wonderful,” Lucy said suddenly, almost defiantly. Millie looked up from the pages she’d been covering in her untidy handwriting with surprise.

“Yes,” Millie said, taking her cigarette away from her mouth so that she could smile properly. “We did, didn’t we?”

It was late evening, a few days after Millie had cut Lucy’s hair for her. Earlier that day, Lucy had been circling possibilities in the paper again, lips pressed together sternly. Millie had been distracted by the line between Lucy’s eyebrows. Not in a bad way.

Now, Millie was switching between nibbling on her pencil and her cigarette with her notebooks and scrapbooks out on the table which they called the kitchen table, though their flat consisted of one room and a bathroom out on the landing which was shared with the owner of the cafe downstairs and all his family. Lucy sat on her bed with a cardigan over her nightie, an open book ignored on her lap. Her cardie had fallen off her shoulder, and her new short hair was curled inexpertly around her features, and Millie loved her almost too much to speak.

“I sort of thought that at the end of it I’d want recognition,” Lucy said. “But I don’t, really. I think it’s enough that we know.”

“Well, I’d like to be a celebrated war hero, thank you very much.”

“And detective.”

“And detective. And travel writer.”

“Is that what you’re writing, then?”

“That’s what I’m writing,” Millie said. “The most absolutely full of lies autobiography the world has ever seen.”

Lucy gave a loud, clear laugh. “Can I read it?”

“Yes, when it’s finished, if you buy it like everyone else has to.” Lucy tsk’ed, and Millie beckoned her over. “Come on. It’s nothing very special, just a lot of silly memories. I’m half way through France at the moment.”

“And what are you doing there?” Lucy asked, dropping her book back on her narrow bed and getting to her feet, pulling her cardigan up over her bird-like shoulders.

“Well, I’m remembering that I'm no good at French, for a start...”

“Quelle dommage,” Lucy murmured, almost purred, as she wedged her hip against the table and Millie just caught herself on the verge of reaching up and putting a hand to her waist and tugging her closer. It would be so easy to nuzzle against her side and inhale the smell of her worn-out cardigan. To feel Lucy’s hand dropping to her shoulder, fingers tickling up her neck.

Millie wet her lips and smiled. “Mais oui. Do you speak French, Luce?”

“Oh, no. I remember bits of it, that’s all. Things you hear, you know. It’s just repetition.”

Not for the first time, Millie wondered what Lucy would have been able to do with an expensive education. Millie couldn’t remember half the things she learnt in school, but she was sure if she could she’d be a genius. There were women who went to Cambridge and Oxford, women academics. Some of them had worked at Bletchley; Millie had even had ten minutes of garbled conversation with one. She’d been nervous at the idea of meeting a woman like that. But Lucy could have been...

Well, she couldn’t have, of course, because Lucy’s father had been a postman when he hadn’t been a drunk, and even Lucy going to work at the Foreign Office during the war had been a controversy worthy of a reddened cheek and a cut below her eye where he hadn’t taken his wedding ring off. Lucy had told Millie as much in calm murmurs in the middle of the night, and Millie hadn’t understood how she could talk about it so easily when it made Millie want to cry and tear the city apart, no, the world, tear it apart to find somewhere where Lucy could thrive. And where she, Millie, could thrive too, perhaps with her, because damn it all; she wanted to thrive so very badly, rather than manage.

“What is it?” Lucy asked, leaning her hip against the table and peering down at Millie’s notebook.

“I’m just remembering France.”

“I wish I’d gone.”

“I wish I’d had someone with me,” Millie admitted.

There was a warmth and a weight on her shoulder. She looked up, surprised, and then put her hand over Lucy’s. “Maybe next time you go,” Lucy suggested.

“Oh, Lucy,” Millie said. “I’m stuck. I don’t have any money.”

“I know. I’m not being innocent,” Lucy said. “But I just—it’s not all behind you, you know. Don’t give up.”

“I’ve had my dancing days.”

“No, you haven’t. Oh, is this someone you knew in France?”

Millie’s eyes snapped down to the table, to where, frozen in camera flash, Brigid was grinning next to a bar, brazen and unafraid in her tie and starched shirt.

Oh, Millie thought, oh, how could she have been so stupid as to leave that out; but no, it would be fine, Brigid looked bulky and rakish as a young man, and Lucy would never for a second realise the truth; but if she did Millie could always run, find some way of setting Lucy up here and apologise fervently for everything before finding a new flat for herself, so that Lucy wouldn’t have to feel like she was being, being seduced or hunted or any such thing, so that Lucy would always feel safe; always, and forever.

“She’s very handsome,” Lucy said, and Millie stared at her, dread and hope and relief all washing about inside of her and making her heart throw up its hands and go I simply don’t know. Lucy smiled. When Millie said nothing, Lucy said, “I think there’s teabags left? Let’s have a cuppa.”

Lucy had gotten that off her, Millie thought numbly as she watched Lucy make tea; that particular intonation let’s have a cuppa, jolly, informal words that Millie rounded out with well-fed snobbishness, making herself sound rather like a hockey mistress. In Lucy’s voice, they sounded almost wry.

“Thanks awfully,” Millie said, taking her cup.

“No problem,” said Lucy. She sat down on the chair beside Millie and with one hand reached up to scrunch her new, short curls, rubbing her hand through them.

“They still look awfully pretty,” Millie said, to interrupt the silence. Awfully, awfully, she thought, and realised that her tea was shaking in her cup. No, her hand was shaking. She put her mug down with a nervous clink. Her heart was tearing itself to shreds inside her chest, almost like it had been when she had first met Brigid and she had thought oh I can’t let you go! except this was tinged with a sick, horrible certainty that she had gone too far. “Why do people do that, say things are awfully, terribly, dreadfully good?” she said abruptly, pushing back her own hair and trying to smile.

“Maybe because,” Lucy put her own tea down and looked thoughtfully at nothing, “because sometimes we feel things, even good things, so deeply that—they’re awful and terrible and dreadful.” Her eyes drifted back to Millie, and she smiled, looking tired. “They cut too deep.” Millie’s heart welled up, and she wondered desperately, what Lucy was trying to tell her; so much so that she almost missed it when Lucy said it outright. “Were you—in love with her?”

“We were both girls,” Millie said, her voice cracking.

“Yes,” said Lucy. “But were you in love with her?”

brigid and millie’s flat - 1951

“But they can’t do that.”

“They have.”

“They can’t fire you for living with another woman. I mean, girls live together all the time, single girls—for heaven’s sake, it’s absurd! I’d like to go in there and give them a piece of my mind—”

“For God’s sake, Millie, it wouldn’t do anything.”

“I said I’d like to. Not that I think I could.”

“They didn’t give that as the reason they’re getting shot of me. I’m just not appropriate for their workforce, apparently. They want to focus on people who better reflect the image of—of—they want girls who aren’t Irish dykes.”

“Oh, Brigid.”

“Christ, Millie, what are we going to do?”

Even though Brigid’s voice cracked on it, Millie cherished that last sentence and kept it burning deep down in her heart for years after. What are we going to do?

In the end, Millie got herself a job waiting on tables. And Brigid, unable to look at Millie without seeing evidence of her own unsuitability for any kind of normal society, went back to Liverpool while there were still good memories to hold onto.

home - 1952

Millie was supposed to be the strong one. Millie was supposed to be brave and bold and brazen. Millie wore red lipstick to signal that she was wild and free and happy, and red dye in her hair to signal that she would never be mousy ever again in her life.

But as it turned out, when Lucy said that—yes, but were you in love with her?—it was Millie who burst into tears.

“Oh—” Lucy was enveloping her before Millie could tell her not to, wrapping her up in her soapy softness, and Millie couldn’t help it; she cried awfully, terribly, dreadfully, and soaked Lucy’s cardigan. It was exactly what Millie had been dreaming of not five minutes earlier—wrapping her arms around Lucy’s waist while she sat and Lucy stood—but all wrong. “Oh, it’s alright, really,” Lucy said, sounding panicked, and Millie laughed hideously through her tears; because of course, poor Luce was never much better at comforting people than Millie was, and Millie was dreadful. But who else did they have?

No one else. That was it. Millie gave a sniff, but didn’t pull away.

“I’m sorry,” she said, pressed against Lucy’s side. “I’m so very sorry. I suppose, I suppose that rather—well. Now you know what I’ve, what I’ve been known to run away from.”

“Did you run away from her?”

“Sort of. In a sense. We both, we both—” How to even talk about this? How to put it into words? “We both fled the other. Oh, Luce, there’s no need for you to look after me, I—”

“You look after me,” Lucy said, with a sudden quiet ferocity. “I won’t let you look after me unless I can do the same for you. I don’t—I don’t think I can stand things being unbalanced. I want things to be perfectly, perfectly equal, always, or I won’t—I just won’t be able to stand it.”

Millie frowned against Lucy’s side, and slowly looked up at her, sure that her face was pink and desperately, anxiously crumpled. Lucy looked down at her and licked her lips. “What do you mean?” Millie croaked. “No, I mean—aren’t you awfully—”

“Millie,” said Lucy, “Millie, I’m not—I see a lot of things, and I remember them all. I’m not...I’m not very innocent.”

“But aren’t you afraid, darling?”

“Of you?” Lucy said, and pushed Millie’s hair back from her face. Millie was clinging with shameful urgency to her cardigan. “Millie, no.”

“I don’t see,” Millie said, feeling hysterical, not sure what was coming out of her mouth, “I don’t see why the world won’t just leave you alone, Luce. Your awful father and Harry, and that murdering madman, and now me—”

“Don’t!” Lucy snapped. “Don’t you dare! You’re nothing like them!”

Millie tightened her grip, and realised, with a sudden fresh, salty wave of tears struggling to escape her, that no one had ever made her feel good before Lucy; not good like a saint but good like someone who deserved to have a flat and a job and a life; and deserved not to have nightmares or feel guilty; and deserved to be happy. She took a deep breath, and stilled. Lucy's voice was calmer now.

“I don’t want the world to leave me alone, don’t you see? I want—I want other things. And if you were in love with a girl, that’s fine, that’s absolutely fine, and if you were in love with me it would still be fine, because—”

For a moment, the whole world turned on the axis of Lucy’s because. Millie couldn't breathe, and couldn't look away.

“Because,” Millie said, her voice cracking, and Lucy bent to kiss her, a tearful and un-lipsticked kiss. They kept their mouths closed, nuzzled at each other, Millie feeling like she had stumbled into another world. “Oh,” she said, when they had parted; “oh,” again, “oh,” because there was nothing else in the world that would come out of her mouth. Lucy’s lips had been warm, dry. “Oh.”

home - 1954

They had briefly considered selling Lucy’s bed; it was smaller, after all, and now only really used as a sofa. But then Millie had pointed out that, well, with Lucy getting on nicely as WPC Lucy Jones in the Women’s Branch of the London Met—and Millie’s heart went wild, almost bursting with pride, every time she thought of it—and Millie doing alright with her little column in the paper, they were fine. It was nice to have somewhere to sit that wasn’t the kitchen table, after all.

Lucy had said, in her innocent deadpan, that they might need it for when the children came along, and Millie had first not known what she was talking about and then spluttered with laughter into her tea.

Neither of them mentioned the obvious—that they would have to justify having only one bed to whoever came around—but that was alright. There was no need, Millie thought, to regret reality all the time; one couldn’t do it. Reality, after all, included not just the grim fact of Lucy’s bed being necessary, but Lucy herself, and the nape of her neck and the smooth curve of her belly and the way she gripped the sheets tight, and made tea, and pinned her hair, and breathed, and was safe and daring in one breath, and beautiful.

These days, Lucy’s hair was shorter than ever, skirting the bounds of what was looked upon favourably at the Met, and she washed it every week—in the bath, with Millie, when they contrived to share the tub. In the night, the taps were silent, and Lucy stayed by Millie’s side. At first, Millie had wondered, rather guiltily, whether her short hair was because of Brigid, and because Lucy wanted to do things properly. Then, when Lucy had run her hands through it, and said, I’ve never felt so light, she had understood. Lucy still wore skirts, and blouses, and worn-through cardigans; she wore trousers, too, sometimes. And once Millie’s lipstick, though only playfully, and with some embarrassment.

Millie didn’t know what to make of her but that she adored her, which was all she needed to know.

“What are you thinking?” Lucy asked one evening, shining her work shoes while Millie watched her from the kitchen table, her notebooks spread out in front of her but her pen dangling impotently between her fingers.

“Oh, nothing,” Millie said, smiling and shrugging. “Just that I always thought it was necessary to run away to be happy, is all.”

“Well,” Lucy said, straightening up and holding a shoe up to the light, frowning critically at it. “It was. That’s how we ended up here, after all.”