Then she caught sight of herself in the hall mirror: saw her flushed, contorted face; and felt filled with disgust. The disgust was worse than anything. She put up a hand to cover her eyes, and went back into the sitting-room. She didn't think of going up to Julia. It seemed natural to her, now, that Julia should loathe her, should want to turn away from her; she loathed herself, she wished she could turn away from her own skin. She felt utterly trapped, suffocated. She stood for a moment not knowing what to do with herself, then went to the window and put back the curtain. She looked at the the street, the garden, the houses with their peeling stucco façades. She saw a world of devious things out to trick and mock her. A man and a woman walked by, hand in hand, smiling: it seemed to her that they must have a secret, to safety and ease and trust, that she had lost.
She sat, and switched off the lamp. Down in the basement the man, the woman and their daughter called out, from room to room; the girl started playing a recorder, going over and over the same halting nursery tune. There was no sound from the rooms upstairs until, at ten o'clock or so, Julia's door was opened and she went quietly down to the kitchen. Helen followed her movements with horrible distinctness: heard her pass back and forth from the kitchen to the bedroom; saw her come down to use the lavatory, go to the bathroom, wash her face; saw her go up again to the bedroom, switching off the lights behind her as she went; heard her moving across the creaking bedroom floor as she took off her clothes and got into bed… She didn't attempt to speak to Helen, or come to the sitting-room at all, and Helen didn't call out. The bedroom door was pushed to, but not closed: the light from the reading-lamp showed in the stair-well for a quarter of an hour, and then was extinguished.
The house was perfectly dark after that, and the darkness, and the silence, made Helen feel worse than ever. She only had to reach for the switch of the lamp, the dial of the wireless, to change the mood of the place; but she couldn't 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 down 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 realise the extremity of the feeling by which she, 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 your 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'd 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'd 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 be there, on 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 didn't allow herself to think what a very poor secret such a thing would be. She went quietly up to the kitchen and got her sponge-bag from the cupboard; came back down to the bathroom, softly closed and locked the door, and turned on the light; and at once felt better. The light was bright, like the lights you saw in hospital operating-rooms in films; the bare white surfaces of the bath and basin 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'd planned the entire operation in advance. She opened the neck of the sponge-bag and drew out the slim chromium case which held the safety razor she and Julia used for shaving their legs. She took the razor out, unwound its screw, lifted off the little hub of metal and eased out the blade. 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, wondered about tucking it into her knickers, 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 bath-tub-and seemed huge beneath her hands. She'd 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'd hardly know it as a functioning piece of limb. She didn't think she would even recognise it as hers.
She put a hand upon the leg, to stretch the flesh tight between her fingers and her thumb; she listened once, to be sure that there was no-one out in the hall, able to hear her; 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'd 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 already closing: 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 around the cuts, to make the blood flow again; then she rubbed the leg clean, as best she could, with a dampened handkerchief.
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 down on the edge of the bath. The shock of cutting, she thought, had produced some change in her, some almost chemical change: she felt quite unnaturally clear-headed-alive, and chastened. She'd 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 embarassment! And yet- She kept looking at the crimson lines, in a half-perplexed, half-admiring way. You perfect fool, she thought; but she thought it almost jauntily. At last she took up the blade again, washed it, screwed it back beneath its metal hub, and put the razor back in its case. She switched off the light, allowed her eyes to grow used to the darkness, then let herself into the hall and went up to the bedroom.