Noonday

by Pat Barker

  Hilde looked up as he came into the room. Bertram’s empty desk had been pushed against the wall, so they had slightly more space to move around. Bertram hadn’t appeared for three weeks now. Was that significant? Probably not. Suddenly, he thought: Perhaps there’s an oubliette in the basement? Somewhere they put people whom they want to forget? Perhaps Bertram and all kinds of other people were down there, still vainly protesting their innocence, as their long, white beards grew and grew until they reached the floor…

  “I’m glad you find it amusing,” Hilde said.

  Oh God, he was supposed to be editing her draft translation of Women Under the Nazis, the latest pamphlet in the series they were working on together.

  “Bowling along,” he said, having not taken in a word. All those women under the Nazis. What a waste. Why couldn’t at least one of them be under him? He glanced at the clock: Oh God, another two hours of this. I’m going to leave, he thought. I really am going to leave.

  He was tempted to begin clearing his desk there and then. Well, why not? What was stopping him? He lifted his briefcase onto the desk and began filling it with odds and ends. There wasn’t much: he hadn’t been here long enough to accumulate a load of stuff. Hilde watched him without comment for a time, then, seeing him trying to stick some papers into a file that was slightly too small, came across and held it open for him. Then she cleared her throat in that way she had. “Have they asked you to leave?”

  “Sacked me, you mean? No, quite the opposite, in fact. They’ve offered me a job.” Lies, all lies.

  “Here?”

  “No, somewhere near Oxford.”

  “Will you take it?”

  He paused in the act of taking his hat from the peg. “Do you know, I have absolutely no idea.”

  They shook hands. For some reason she blushed and on impulse he leaned forward and kissed her thin cheek.

  Then he was off, down the corridor, past the Gents—no, on second thoughts, into the Gents. He splashed his face and hands—that hour in Dodsworth’s room had made him feel dirty—then he glanced over his shoulder to check the cubicles were empty, twined his fingers round one of the chains that fastened the plastic nailbrushes to the wall, and pulled. He’d always loathed them. Tightening his grip, he pulled again and this time succeeded in wrenching it off the wall. It hurt like hell; the chain had actually left a weal on the side of his hand. But it was worth it. Then, raising his eyes, he confronted the stranger in the glass.

  Would he have done it? The nailbrush rested in the palm of his hand, rough against the skin, rectangular, brick-shaped. Would he have killed Tarrant if that air-raid warden hadn’t showed up and started flashing his torch? Ninety-nine percent of the time, his answer to this question was a resounding no, of course not, never in a million years. But, at other times, when he was fully absorbed in something that needed concentration, not thinking about Tarrant at all, he was aware of a belief taking shape in the shadows of his mind, not that he might have done it, but that he had done it. In dreams he relived those moments after the bomb fell, and woke knowing, not with satisfaction but with almost unbearable sorrow, that Tarrant was dead.

  He looked down at the brush. A very nice little souvenir, he thought. He’d put it on the mantelpiece, he decided, and then remembered that he didn’t have a mantelpiece. The house was boarded up; he was living at his club. A stultifyingly boring place, he was buggered if he was going back there, not until he’d anesthetized himself in the nearest bar.

  Though, walking away from the building—for the last time, the last time—he thought he wouldn’t go to the pub after all, he’d go to see Elinor, at least see if she was in. She was back in London—he knew that from Dana, who’d had lunch with her—but she hadn’t been in touch. He sensed, ringing the bell, and ringing it again, that she was there, but not answering the door. It was starting to look as if their time together, which had meant so much to him, had meant little, or nothing, to her.

  Drink. He walked away down the street and knew that he was being watched, that she was at the window behind him. Though he reminded himself sharply that he couldn’t know; perhaps he was just being paranoid. God knows, there was enough paranoia about. He turned into the nearest pub; he thought he’d once had a drink with Tarrant in there, but couldn’t be sure. There was nobody he knew at the bar. Almost, he missed his evenings with the terrapin, which was now, presumably, dead. Another link with the past broken. But then he wondered: how long did terrapins live? Perhaps his parents, for some extraordinary reason, had kept replacing the terrapin and not told him.

  He knocked back the first whisky so fast his eyes watered—and that was saying a lot. Then he ordered the second straight away and sat morosely in a corner. Everything seemed to be conspiring against him. Dodsworth—that was unaccountable. Tarrant’s success, his own…Well, “neglect” was hardly the right word, more like a bloody conspiracy. No wonder he couldn’t paint. Everybody needs a context, an echo coming back to them—and he didn’t have that. He seemed to be living in a vacuum, a glass tank that cut him off from the outside world. There was only Anne, really, to attach him to life. He lived and breathed in the memory of her. The way, when she was a tiny child, just a toddler, she used to come into his bed in the mornings, bouncing up and down, waving her favorite toy, a blue rabbit: I love Babbit! I love Babbit! It had been a small grief for him when, finally, she’d learned to say “rabbit.”

  Lost in his memories, he resurfaced to hear the sirens wailing. Several people immediately left, though he thought the pub had been emptying for the past hour. How many drinks had he had? There seemed to be an impressive array of glasses in front of him, unless of course he was seeing double. He got to his feet easily enough, but found it unexpectedly difficult to weave his way between the tables to the bar.

  “Shame again.”

  Was that a fractional hesitation? He met the barman’s eye.

  “Right you are, sir.”

  By the time he left, he was…numb. Absolutely clear mentally, though: he did honestly believe there was such a thing as drinking yourself sober. The anger was still there, bubbling away under the surface, but he felt agreeably numbed as he stood swaying on the pavement, buffeted by waves of noise. He might have one last go at seeing Elinor. She wouldn’t be in, of course. She’d have taken refuge in one of the shelters, but it was at least worth a try.

  Several fires were blazing, the worst of them out of control. Black water lay around in puddles; he sloshed through them, finding it quite difficult to keep a straight line. A fireman was standing in the road holding on to a hose, his eyes glazed with the tedium of what he was doing. By far the worst job, the fire service: equal parts boredom and terror.

  Elinor’s house was completely blacked out, of course: no way of telling whether she was in or not, but he rang the doorbell anyway. Rather to his surprise it was answered immediately by a young woman wearing a nurse’s cap and cape. She was going on duty and had come to the door almost by accident, but that didn’t matter—he was in. He thought he might as well go up and see if Elinor was in. If not, fair enough, he’d just go back home, a friendly tap on the terrapin’s tank and straight upstairs to bed. Only then he remembered that he couldn’t do that. No terrapin, no tank, no home.

  He knocked. No answer, as he’d expected, but then he heard a movement inside the room. “Elinor?”

  A second later, the door opened. She was pulling her silk wrap together over her nightdress.

  “You should be in a shelter,” he said, accusingly.

  “It’s late, Kit. What do you want?”

  “Just to talk. Please?”

  “All right, but not long.” She stepped back. “Have you been drinking?”

  He slumped onto the sofa. “ ’Course I’ve been bloody drinking, I’ve had that little pipsqueak Dodsworth on to me again.” He couldn’t remember whether he’d told her about Dodsworth—absolutely no idea. Told her again anyway. He was about to explain about Clark and Featherstone and Tarrant’s—
possibly Tarrant’s—bloody boring landscape on the wall, and how utterly ludicrous it was that talentless Tarrant and fucking useless Featherstone should have been commissioned as war artists while he, Kit Neville, had been passed over—but he managed to stop himself in time. He was drunk, but not quite as drunk as that.

  “I’m sorry about Dodsworth,” she said. “It is awful.”

  He jabbed his index fingers at his face. “What right does he have to question my loyalty?”

  She said, carefully, “Are you sure you’re getting it right? You’re sure it’s not an interview?”

  “I don’t see how it can be, he keeps going over and over the same ground, doubling back, asking the same questions…No, it’s got to be an interrogation—can’t be anything else.”

  She had come across and sat on the sofa, but at the other end. Three feet of dark blue velvet lay between them. No-man’s-land. Well, it had taken four fucking years to get across that, and he didn’t have that kind of time.

  “Elinor, can I stay the night?”

  Deep breath. “No, Kit.”

  “Please?”

  The sound of his own voice, pleading, released his anger. “Do you know, I haven’t had a squeak out of you for…Oh, I don’t know. Since you left, anyway.”

  “I’ve been thinking.”

  “Huh. Not your strong suit.”

  “What?” When he didn’t reply, she said, “Kit, it’s late and I’m tired.”

  “So that’s it, then?”

  “You know, that day, when it happened, we were neither of us in a particularly good state. I’m not blaming you, I’m not blaming anybody—I’m just saying I’m not ready. I think I need to be on my own for a while.”

  He didn’t believe a word of this. In fact, he felt quite insulted; she was just spouting a load of Ladies’ Home Journal tripe instead of coming right out and saying what she really felt. At the back of his mind was the fear that she found him as repulsive as he sometimes feared he was.

  She wanted him to go—that, at least, was obvious—but he couldn’t accept it. People had been saying no to him all his life, taking things away: his marriage, his daughter, his reputation, his house, his FACE, for Christ’s sake! Well, no more. As she stood up, he lunged sideways, caught her round the wrist and pulled her down on top of him. She fell across his face. It was easy, so easy, to push the wrap aside, pull her nightdress off her shoulders; he was full of the scent of her, her voice in his ears sounding very far away on the other side of a red mist that rose and covered everything. They were on the floor, he didn’t know how they’d got there, but his right knee was between her legs, didn’t matter now what she did with her hands, she could flail away with her arms as much as she liked, once he’d got her legs apart his weight did the rest.

  After a time, a long time it seemed, but it might have been only minutes, she rolled from under him. Ripped nightdress. White face. Scrabbling to get her wrap closed, she crawled onto the sofa. He should go, go now, before she started screaming. But she didn’t seem to think screaming was the appropriate response. She was rocking herself backwards and forwards, but otherwise seemed remarkably composed.

  He got up, turned away, fumbled with buttons, retreated to a chair, where he sat looking down at his hands. How big they were. “I seem to have become…” He was articulating the words very carefully. “A bit of a monster.”

  “Oh, Kit. You always were.”

  The clock on the mantelpiece ticked.

  “I should go.”

  A brief, hard laugh, indicating, he supposed, agreement. She stood up and let him out.

  On the landing, he stopped and looked back at her slim shape silhouetted against the light from the room behind her, then turned and went on, feeling his way down the dark staircase and out into the night.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Afterwards, it was the horses she remembered, galloping towards them out of the orange-streaked darkness, their manes and tails on fire. One huge black shire horse with frantically rolling eyes came straight at them. Elinor wrenched the steering wheel violently to the left and, a few yards farther on, pulled into the curb. In the rear-view mirror, she saw the horses galloping away, their great, bright, battering hooves striking sparks from the road. She remembered a thud against the side of the ambulance and thought she might have caught one a glancing blow on the shoulder as it careered past.

  She sat, breathing heavily, looking at her orange hands on the wheel. Even her skin didn’t look like skin.

  Beside her, in the co-driver’s seat, Neville cleared his throat. “Would you like me to take over for a bit?”

  “No, thank you,” she said, with another glance in the rear-view mirror, preparing to move off. She might have taken that from Dana or Violet, but certainly not from him. “Actually, Kit, if you want to know what it feels like to have your testicles skewered and roasted over a slow fire while you watch, you could try saying that again.”

  “Fair enough.”

  She risked a sideways glance. His face in the light of the fires was an expressionless mask. Beaten bronze.

  For so long she’d contrived to avoid working with Kit. But then, over the Christmas and New Year period, single people like Elinor—and, of course, Kit—had signed up for extra duties so that married people and parents could spend time with their families. Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day had all been quiet—she’d never played so many games of cards in her life—but the unofficial cease-fire was now unmistakably over. Hundreds, if not thousands, of incendiaries must have fallen that night and they were still clattering down. Yes, she’d had a moment of dismay when she’d looked at the duty roster and seen her name and Kit’s bracketed together, but she could hardly protest.

  As she turned into Gunpowder Court, incendiaries clattered onto the ambulance roof like giant hailstones, and when she looked out of the side window she saw dozens more fizzing and popping all along the pavement. A squad of heavy rescue workers were shouting and jostling each other, like footballers fighting for possession of the ball, as they competed to stamp them out. As she watched, the man nearest to her dived and put his helmet over one of the skittering devices. “Gotcha, y’ little sod!”

  Farther along the court, two fire engines were parked, taking up almost all the space. Half a dozen hoses snaked across the road, some gray and flaccid, but others very much alive—and she daren’t risk driving over those because, for the fireman at the branch, that interruption in the water supply could be dangerous, and the sudden return of water pressure almost equally so. She’d seen firemen injured by a branch writhing and spinning out of control. So: the way ahead was blocked.

  She looked at Kit. “You could try Wine Office Court,” he said. “Try to get at it from the other side.”

  “Is there a way through?”

  He shrugged. “They all lead into one another.”

  That was the trouble. They’d both have claimed to know London well, but neither of them was familiar with this particular area: the network of narrow alleys and courts off Fleet Street. Where was Derek when you needed him? Or any one of the other taxi drivers? Still, she wasn’t going to give up. They couldn’t. They’d been sent to a direct hit on a nurses’ hostel and that meant, potentially, dozens of casualties. Unless, of course, they’d all been on duty, or in a shelter as they bloody well ought to have been, but you couldn’t rely on that. Increasingly, exhausted people risked everything for the comfort and (spurious) safety of their own beds.

  “All right, let’s give it a go.”

  She reversed fifty yards or so, then pulled over near the entrance to Wine Office Court and stopped again.

  They climbed stiffly down from the cab and walked across the narrow road. Elinor felt suddenly sick with tiredness, and cold; she was shivering inside her thick coat. Even the adrenaline rush of fear would have been welcome now, but she felt no fear; she felt nothing. Nothing, after the horses.

  Just inside the entrance to the court was a fireman tending a pump, which roared
and shook and pulsed gray water down its gray sides, deepening the pool of black water at his feet. He looked glazed, cold, wet, exhausted, bored, but he managed a wave. Kit tried to ask whether there was a way through, but he couldn’t make himself heard. They were communicating with the huge pantomimic gestures of people guiding aeroplanes into their hangars. Turning to Elinor, Kit pointed to himself and then along the court, signing that he was going to see if he could find a way through. Elinor shook her head, and made a sharp, dismissive gesture with her hands indicating the court was too narrow. She meant for the ambulance.

  Kit mouthed: Stretcher. She nodded: Yes, that might be possible; then pointed to her chest, meaning: I’m coming too. He shook his head, but she ignored him. They began walking along the court, keeping up a brisk pace because speed seemed to offer safety: a moving target, you felt, must be harder to hit. The road was black and gleaming wet, flooded for a stretch where a drain had been blocked by a great wad of charred and sodden newspaper. At first, the roar of the pump was enough to blot out all other noises, but then gradually, as they splashed through the black water, it started to fade, to be replaced by the crackle of burning brick and timber from the building straight ahead. Probably, the blazing building was a printing works or a newspaper office. Scraps of burnt paper whirled down from the glassless windows above their heads. Elinor could see flames and shadows leaping across the inside walls, making it look, unnervingly, as if there were people trapped inside. The two firemen looked dazed with boredom. They’d have been there hours, hands gripping ice-cold metal, doused from head to foot in ice-cold water. One man’s lips were moving; she thought he might be trying to say something, but then realized he was singing.

  The other man nodded, saw she was a woman, and grinned. “All right, love?”

  She smiled, raising her hand, as she and Kit started to edge along the wall behind them. She felt heat from the blaze scorch her face and neck, though she was still shivering. The branch seemed to be producing a fine, cold spray that blew back into the firemen’s faces and soaked everything. She was wet herself now, icy trickles running down under the collar of her coat. Normally, you wouldn’t be allowed to get as close to a fire as this. All the other emergency services were supposed to hold back until the fire service declared an area safe, but there could be no question of declaring anywhere safe tonight. She’d just seen the pillars inside St. Bride’s Church burning like torches. The whole City was on fire.