Noonday

by Pat Barker

  They walked as fast as they could away from the burning building, their shadows fleeing across the ground ahead of them. She felt like a mouse creeping along the floor of a great canyon, dwarfed by the four- or five-story buildings on either side. At the end of the court, they turned and looked back. The scene was fitfully lit by the flames leaping from the windows of the burning building, and it was unchanged. That solid-looking pole of white water the firemen were directing at the blaze seemed to be making no difference at all.

  She looked at Kit.

  “You could get a stretcher past.” His voice was hoarse with shouting. “That’s if we can get to the hostel.”

  To their right was another court which seemed at first to be empty, but then they saw two figures walking towards them: an elderly woman, in a pink candlewick dressing gown, and another, much younger, woman, who was hobbling along, grimacing with pain at every step. Elinor shone her torch. “Oh my God, Kit, look.” The girl’s feet were burned black. How on earth had she managed to walk this far?

  “I’ll take her,” Kit said.

  No point arguing: it was obvious the girl had to be carried and only Kit could do that. But Elinor was determined to go on and look for more survivors. If these two had got through, there were likely to be others. “You go with him too,” Elinor said to the older woman.

  “Oh, I don’t think so, dear.” A reedy, but authoritative, Edinburgh accent. “I’ll be much more use back there.”

  Kit had lifted the girl and was looking at Elinor, obviously expecting her to follow, but she shook her head. He nodded, or she thought he did—the shadows leaping and flickering all around him made it difficult to be sure. But he turned, and his bulky, burdened shape disappeared rapidly into the murk.

  —

  THE GIRL WAS mercifully light; just as well too, because he was finding it difficult to keep his footing. Even in the few minutes since he’d last walked along here, the pool of black water around the blocked drain had deepened, and he was splodging through it. He hated leaving Elinor, but this girl was suffering from shock. The burns looked pretty bad; she needed to be in hospital as soon as possible. Which meant he’d have to drive her straight there, then come back for Elinor. He didn’t like the idea. They should’ve stayed together, but Elinor was never going to come trotting meekly along behind him. He was level with the firemen now, and they shuffled forward a few paces to give him room.

  The upper stories were still blazing, the flames inside leaping and dancing as tauntingly as ever, though the white pole of water was now being directed at another window. And there was a kind of clicking noise. He couldn’t think at first where it was coming from, then realized it was the building. It was very like the sound a car makes on a hot day when you’ve just switched off the engine: the tick of cooling metal. But nothing round here was cooling. He wondered if the firemen had heard it—they must’ve done, but they were looking at each other and laughing, so evidently it was nothing to worry about. All the same, he tried to walk faster and was glad when the shaking and rattling of the pump drowned out the roar of the flames behind him.

  As he emerged from the court, he saw another ambulance had drawn up at the curb. Bill Morris and Ian Jenkins came towards him.

  “Would you mind taking her?” he asked. “She needs a doctor but I don’t want to go and leave Elinor stranded.”

  He carried the girl the few yards to their ambulance, and saw her safely stowed inside, wrapped in a blanket, with Ian by her side. Bill said he’d try Bart’s first. Apparently, they were still taking people in, though there was some talk of an evacuation. My God, it must be bad.

  Neville watched the ambulance bump slowly away towards Fleet Street, then he went back and looked along Wine Office Court. The scene hadn’t changed at all; the two firemen might have been carved in bronze. What to do? His first impulse was to follow Elinor, but then suppose she came back by another route and found him gone? If she could get through at all that was quite likely. He lit a cigarette. That was one good thing about tonight: there’d be no officious little pipsqueak of an air-raid warden shouting, “Put that bloody fag out!” Any leaking gas mains round here had long since exploded. He dragged deeply on the cigarette and then, rather belatedly, offered the packet to the fireman at the pump, who just shook his head and pointed to the cascading water. Poor bugger was drenched. And now, to make things worse, there seemed to be a wind getting up. He could feel it blowing along the court towards him, hot as a dog’s breath on his face. At first, he was puzzled because there’d been no wind, no wind all day, and then the truth hit him: he was witnessing the birth of a firestorm.

  That wind would carry sparks from building to building faster than a man could run. He was suddenly terribly afraid, and not ashamed of it either. A man who tells you he’s not afraid of fire is either a fool or a liar. He lit another cigarette from the stub of the first. There was a strange smell, very sweet. He couldn’t think what it was. If he’d had to guess, he’d have said: incense. It didn’t smell like war. He thought it might be wood, centuries old, seasoned wood from burning churches. He thought he’d caught a whiff of it just now as they were driving past St. Bride’s. He tried again to peer into the flame-lit darkness of the court. Where was she? The conviction that something terrible had happened to her was growing on him by the minute. He shouldn’t have let her set off like that, with only the old woman as a guide, but then what else could he have done? Who’d ever made Elinor do anything she didn’t want to do? And then the memory of that evening resurfaced, bobbed up like a turd in a sewer. He had—he’d made her do something she hadn’t wanted to do. Oh, given enough time he knew he’d remember the events of that evening differently, smooth over the raw edges, but at the moment he couldn’t bear it. At least, it goaded him into action. He’d leave the ambulance, he decided. Go and look for her.

  He tried to speak to the fireman by the pump, so he’d be able to tell Elinor what had happened if she returned by another route, but he was signaling to the two men holding the branch. They’d backed away from the wall and seemed to be arguing about what to do. And then, with a great rush of relief, Neville saw her, standing at the other end of the court, waving to him. He started towards her. As the roar of the pump faded, he became aware of yet another sound coming from the burning building. Almost a groan. It sounded so human he thought somebody must be trapped. Was that what the firemen were arguing about? Trying to decide if it was safe to go in? But then he saw them look at each other, laughing, so he knew it was all right, and Elinor was still waving. Jumping up and down now, shouting, but he couldn’t hear anything above the roar of flames. She’d been joined by a young man in army uniform, who looked vaguely familiar, but couldn’t be, of course; it was just somebody Elinor had roped in to help carry the stretchers. Well, good girl. The more young, male muscle there was around, the better.

  Whoever it was, he was waving too, or beckoning: Come on, come on. Hey, he wanted to say, I’m coming as fast as I can, but then, just as he drew level with the firemen, he heard the most stupendous crack, and the whole wall of the building bulged and loomed over him, hung motionless, and then, slowly it seemed, began to fall. He saw everything, in detail, without fear or emotion: the dark mass above him cutting slices out of the sky until only a sliver remained. He couldn’t move; he couldn’t speak. He heard silence, but then the roar came crashing back and red-hot bricks fell on his face and neck and dashed him to the ground. A cry struggled to his lips, but it was already too late—his mouth was full of dust. He thought: I won’t get to Elinor. And then he forgot Elinor. What finally crushed his heart, as the avalanche of bricks and mortar engulfed him, was the knowledge that he would never see Anne again, he would never again see his daughter, in this world or any other.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  In Bloomsbury, Paul was having a quiet night. He’d played a game of darts, flipped through yesterday’s newspapers and then set out on patrol with Charlie. At the corner of Guilford Street, Charlie stopped to light
a cigarette. Shaking the match, he gazed open-mouthed in the direction of the City. Billowing clouds of black smoke, showers of sparks whirled upwards, a broken skyline of buildings stark against furnace red. “By heck, they aren’t half copping it.”

  Paul felt the first premonitory tweak of fear. Elinor could be in that. Would be, if she was on duty. Charlie threw away the match and they walked on, their footsteps echoing in the eerie silence. No guns now, no drone of bombers. The All Clear had sounded an hour ago, unusually early. “Don’t worry,” Brian had said. “They’ll be back.”

  But they hadn’t been. Not yet. And all the time, over the City, that extravagant, melodramatic, stage-sunset grew and spread, and, with it, Paul’s fear.

  Their patrol over, they decided to get a cup of tea and a pasty from the van in Malet Street. God only knew what was in the pasties—no substance previously known to mankind—but at least they were warm. Paul and Charlie joined the back of the queue, stamping their feet and blowing on their fingers in a vain attempt to keep warm. Three or four places ahead of them, a woman was talking about an ambulance driver who’d been injured. “Weren’t there two of them?” another woman asked. And then a third voice: “Are you sure they were just injured? I heard they were dead.”

  Elbowing people aside, Paul seized her arm. “Who?” He was shaking her. “Who?”

  She stared at him, her mouth a scarlet gash in the drained pallor of her face. He tried to calm down. “It’s just, my wife’s an ambulance driver.” For some reason the word “wife” stuck in his throat; it sounded like the sort of thing somebody else would say, and that strangeness, the sudden unfamiliarity of the word, ratcheted up his fear.

  “They didn’t say. Just two ambulance drivers had been injured, one of them a woman, that’s all I heard.”

  She was lying—he’d just heard her say they were dead. Of course, it might be another woman—Dana or Violet—but somehow, from the very first moment, he knew it was Elinor.

  Tearing himself out of Charlie’s restraining grip, he ran all the way to the depot in Tottenham Court Road and down two flights of stairs to the basement, which was deserted, except for three telephonists who fell silent as he entered. They looked nervously at each other. A middle-aged woman, who seemed to be the supervisor, came out of the office and stood in front of them. If he had any doubt, that dispelled it. He’d become somebody to be frightened of, as the bereaved always are.

  “We can’t be certain, we really don’t know who it is.”

  He could tell from the way her gaze slithered down his face that she did. “Where?”

  “Wine Office Court, but it’s no use going there,” she called after him. “They’ll have taken them to Bart’s.”

  She followed him into the corridor, shouting something about an ambulance in the yard, so he veered abruptly to the left, burst through the swing doors into the parking area at the back. Sure enough, there was an ambulance about to leave. He ran along beside it, banging with his clenched fist on the door. The vehicle slowed and an elderly man with pouches under his eyes peered down at him.

  “Can you give me a lift? My wife works here. Elinor? They’ve taken her to Bart’s.”

  To his own ears, he was gobbling, gabbling, not making any sense at all, but the man nodded. “Oh, yes, I know Elinor. Hop in.” As Paul settled into the co-driver’s seat, the man added, “I’m off to Bart’s anyway. They’re evacuating. We’ve all got to go.”

  The journey was a blur. Paul leaned forward, willing the driver to go faster, as they bumped slowly along, occasionally swerving to avoid craters in the road. With every mile, after the first, the orange glare grew until the sky was every bit as bright as noon. Everywhere, fires were raging, many of them out of control. Paul couldn’t take it in, street after street burning. Only the details registered. Once, he looked down and saw a pigeon flapping about in the gutter with its wings on fire.

  A hundred yards from the hospital entrance, the driver slowed to a crawl. Ambulances were queuing bumper to bumper all along the road. At first, Paul thought they might be delivering casualties, but then he saw that most of them were empty. They were here to evacuate the hospital. He reached for the door handle.

  “Hang on,” the driver said. “I’ll try and get you a bit closer…”

  “No, it’s OK, I’ll be all right.” Paul jumped into the road and raised his hand. “Thanks, mate.”

  As he started running along the line of ambulances, the wind caught him, flattening his trousers against his legs. Looking down the hill, he saw a wall of fire advancing on the hospital—he couldn’t understand why it hadn’t been evacuated already. The hot wind was snatching up bits of flaming debris and hurling them from one building to the next. At any moment, you felt, the hospital would be engulfed. Elinor. He had to find her and get her out, take her miles and miles away from here.

  Inside the entrance, he stared wildly around him, until a passing nurse pointed towards the stairs. No lifts: the doors were all half open, frozen at the point the electricity had failed. He ran upstairs. No lights on the stairs, no lights in the corridor either, except for a couple of smoking oil lamps that signally failed to penetrate the gloom. He groped his way along, a hand on the wall. Nobody seemed to be trying to bring patients down, so evidently the evacuation hadn’t started yet.

  Bursting through swing doors onto a ward, he was dazzled by the sudden blaze of light. Emergency generator? His brain had time to form the thought, before he realized the truth. The staff had simply thrown open the blinds to let in the light of the blazing City. Doctors, nurses, even surgeons were working in the glare of the firestorm that was roaring up the hill towards them.

  Paul ran from bed to bed, thinking: No, this is wrong, it’s all wrong, she can’t be here. These patients had all been admitted, and he knew there wouldn’t have been time for that, but he couldn’t get anybody to answer his questions, they were all so busy, so intent, but then at last he stopped a porter who told him, “You want to be downstairs, mate. Casualty’s in the basement.”

  So he skidded down two flights of stairs, along another corridor, and burst into a huge room, lit by dozens of oil lamps whose coils of brown smoke hung heavy on the air. Doors opened off to the left into smaller rooms; he could see beds, wheelchairs, tables, chairs, and torches held in gloved hands casting circles of light onto other gloved hands that were stitching wounds or applying dressings to burns.

  Along one side of the main room, the injured were queuing for attention: white-faced, babbling, mute, shaking uncontrollably. The more seriously injured lay on trolleys in a corridor farther along, many still and silent, a few writhing with the pain of burns. One—an elderly woman with wispy gray hair and an open mouth—unmistakably dead.

  He saw a warden he knew slightly near the back of the queue and asked him if he’d seen Elinor, but the man was too dazed to answer. Paul abandoned him, and began walking up the line, scanning every face, but there was no Elinor—and nobody else he knew to ask. At the head of the queue, he saw there was another smaller room: rows of benches crowded with people. He started walking along the rows, looking at face after face, panicked that when he saw her—if he saw her—he wouldn’t recognize her. He kept seeing the old woman on the trolley: the open mouth, the staring eyes. Part of him was convinced the corpse was Elinor. It had been nothing like her, and yet he had to stop himself running back to make sure.

  Still another room opened off this one. Here, three rows of benches faced a blank wall; people sat staring vacantly into space, waiting for somebody to come and claim them. He heard his voice calling “Elinor?” over and over again. Perhaps there was an echo, because the walls seemed to bounce the name back at him: Elinor, Elinor.

  And then he saw her, sitting at the end of a bench, looking straight ahead. “Elinor?” She seemed to have trouble focusing on him. “It’s me. Paul.” He knelt down and reached for her hands, but she pulled them back. “Are you all right?”

  The question seemed to plop into a deep well. S
he glanced from side to side and moistened her lips. “They say I can go.”

  Her face was gray; she had the hunched shoulders and anxious expression of smoke inhalation. She wasn’t fit to be turned out. He looked round, angrily, but so many of the injuries he saw were worse than hers. And of course with an evacuation imminent they’d be clearing out anybody who could walk. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get you home.”

  “Where’s Kit?”

  “Were you working with him?”

  She nodded.

  “He’s fine. Queuing up outside, I think.”

  He was thinking he might beg a lift from the ambulance driver who’d brought him here, if he could find him, but in the event he didn’t need to. A crowd of frustrated ambulance drivers had gathered outside the hospital entrance, and among them were Dana and Derek, who detached themselves from the group and came towards him. “Is she all right?” Dana asked.

  “She’s alive.”

  Until he heard himself say the word, he hadn’t known it was true, and immediately he was flooded with relief, but he still had to get her home.

  “Don’t worry,” Dana said. “We’ll take you. If we can get out, that is.”

  Paul helped Elinor into the back of the ambulance, then turned to look at Dana, who was waiting to close the door. He mouthed: Neville? Dana shrugged, but Derek, who was standing a few feet behind her, shook his head.