Pat Barker - Noonday

When, finally, Paul struggled out of the playground into the street he held on to the railings and watched the stream of the shocked and homeless going through the gates. It wasn’t all bad. That basement was deep enough to withstand even a direct hit. But then, just as he was about to leave, he noticed the building was already bomb-damaged. One wall had a crack running from the roof down to the ground. Immediately, he wanted to go back and get them out, but it was impossible and anyway they’d be all right, the buses would be here in another hour, the wardens would get everybody organized and they’d be off to Kent, and safety. And Kenny was back with his mother, where he’d wanted, and needed, to be.

Back at the house he picked his way across the mattress in the hall, remembering Kenny’s outrageous accusation: And we slept in the same bed last night. It was difficult not to feel a certain reluctant admiration for the boy’s single-minded and utterly unscrupulous determination to get what he wanted. Little toad.

He ought really now to go straight to his studio and start work but he was finding it unusually difficult. That walk with the suitcase had taken a lot out of him. So he went out, bought milk and bread and made himself a pot of tea and toast. He was just finishing the last mouthful when he heard the front door open.

“Elinor?”

It had to be: the only other person who had a key was the housekeeper, who’d gone to stay with her sister in Dorset and God alone knew when she’d be back. He went upstairs to the ground floor and found Elinor in front of the hall mirror, unpinning her hat. She raised her cheek for him to kiss.

“This is a surprise.”

“Yes, Tim gave me a lift; I thought it was too good an opportunity to miss. And I need some more clothes anyway.”

“Oh, you’re going back?”

She pulled a face. “Well, I’ve got to, really. I can’t leave Rachel to do it all.”

“I thought Gabriella was supposed to be coming?”

“Yes, but she’s eight months pregnant. She’s not going to be doing a lot of running around. Where’s Kenny?”

Paul looked surprised. “With his mother.”

“So you took him back?”

“Well, yes, of course. That was the point.”

“Are they all right?”

“So-so. The house was bombed, but they’re being evacuated this afternoon.”

“Was she pleased to see him?”

That was not a comfortable question. It forced him to weigh his impressions. “No, not very. I don’t think he gets on with his stepfather and she’s got two younger children.”

“And she kept them with her?”

“Well, yes, obviously.”

“I wonder what Kenny thinks about that.”

“He doesn’t seem to fit in, but on the other hand, he obviously loves them.”

“I don’t think you should’ve taken him back.”

“He wanted to go.”

“He’s a child. Anyway, it wasn’t your decision.”

“No, it was Rachel’s. And Tim’s. Tim said bugger-all and Rachel couldn’t wait to see the back of him.”

She turned back to the mirror and started fluffing up her hair where the hat had flattened it.

“You think it was about me, don’t you? My mother?”

She met his eyes in the glass. “Wasn’t it?”

The conversation disturbed Paul. Kenny had wanted more than anything to be back with his mother. Wasn’t that justification enough? He remembered the way her soot-blackened arm had come round to press his head into her side. No, absolutely, he didn’t regret it. A lot of this uneasiness was no more than the shapeless anxiety that comes from extreme tiredness, and he couldn’t afford to give in to it. He was on duty tonight, and the next night. And the next. No, he’d taken the decision, and now he just had to forget about it and move on.

—

BY THE END of the second night on duty tiredness had become another dimension. He snatched an hour or two of dozing on the bed between coming off duty and walking round to his studio, but during the long, golden, sludgy afternoon he had to force himself to go on painting; it was dangerous even to think about sleep.

On the morning after his third night, he was standing in the kitchen, drinking a cup of hot sweet tea and idly flicking through the newspapers. There was a certain grim fascination in seeing how officialdom packaged the destruction of the night before. He was about to turn a page when a headline about a direct hit on a school in the East End caught his eye. Seventy-three people dead. Well, there must be hundreds of schools in the East End. Under the headline there was a grainy photograph of the ruined building with a heap of rubble breaking through iron railings onto the pavement. Was that Agate Street? Well, even if it was, Kenny and his family would have long since moved on.

He opened the door, intending to walk round to his studio as he did every morning. Another fine day, though the smell of burnt brick dust tainted the bright air. Farther along the street, an old man was sweeping up the first of the autumn’s fallen leaves, a sight you saw every year around this time, only this September the familiar rustle was sharpened by the scratching of broken glass. If you closed your eyes, it sounded exactly like waves seething between the pebbles of a shingle beach. Only he daren’t close his eyes. Even the action of blinking brought with it the strong, dark undertow of sleep.

A crowd had gathered at the entrance to a side street, people who’d spent the night in shelters returning to find access to their homes denied. He looked across the road. From where he stood, the tape cordoning off the street was invisible, so the people seemed to be pressed against a glass wall — like insects splatted across a windscreen. Lured by the attraction of that forbidden space, he crossed the road and stared up the empty street. At first nobody spoke, and then a few whispers began to break the cathedral hush. There was a time bomb in the street. Nobody was allowed to go home and, after the long night in a cramped, foul-smelling shelter, that was hard. Some of the group were in pajamas and dressing gowns; one of the women had thrown a mackintosh over her nightdress. An old lady with her hair in thin, gray plaits was trembling with shock, or perhaps it was just the general frailty of age, and yet she seemed positively cheerful; defiant, even. She touched his sleeve — her hand as skeletal as a dead leaf on a bonfire, but God how she crackled and sparked as the flames licked round her. “That’s my house,” she said, pointing. “The one with the blue door.”

It was odd; when he’d crossed the road to join the little group staring into the sunlit silence of the cordoned-off street, he’d fully intended going to his studio to do a normal day’s work, and yet, minutes later, as he turned away, he knew he had to go to Agate Street. At the corner of the road, he turned and looked back. There they still were, haloed in light, as if the air had somehow solidified in front of them. How would you paint them — convey that sense of suspended motion — or of an infinitely slow, noiseless collision — when there was nothing visible to account for it?

He took a taxi as far as he could, then walked. All around were signs of last night’s destruction. A burst water main with a group of boys egging each other on to run through it, their shrieks, sharp as seagulls’ cries, slicing the crisp air. Farther along, he passed a broken shopwindow with mannequins inside, all prudishly shrouded in brown paper, one leaning out into the street, arm and wrist elegantly posed, smirking at devastation. All the time, now, you noticed these oddities. What survived; what didn’t. And that first feeling of indecency at peering into other people’s lives — their bedrooms, their bathrooms, their toilets — had already begun to fade.