Pat Barker - Noonday

“There’s nobody there,” he said.

She went back to watching the children. After a while, she said, “Skinny, white face, freckles, red hair?”

“That’s a description of the boy you’re looking at.” The next words seemed to be dragged out of him. “What does he want?”

She looked, and shrugged. “Gone now.”

At that, he seemed to lose patience; stood up, walked a few paces, then stopped. Every bit of color had drained from his face.

“Here, sit down,” she said. “You’re not well.”

She got a hand under his elbow and helped him to sit down, but he was no sooner down than he was up again. “I think I’ll be better walking it off.”

Couldn’t wait to get away, although, to be fair, he did smile and thank her as he left. He stumbled several times before he reached the end of the path — he certainly wasn’t walking in a straight line — but he kept on going. At the gate he turned and looked back. “You take care now,” she called out, but he was too far away to hear. A second later he disappeared into the press of people rushing past.

She thought: I’ll be seeing you again.

No reason to suppose so, in this vast, overcrowded city, but she knew absolutely — no question at all — that she’d see him again.

Neville answered the door half naked and slightly drunk. The former was a surprise.

“Tarrant!” He sounded startled, even a little put out, although it was he who’d suggested the meeting.

“I’m not early, am I?”

“No, sorry. Fell asleep in the bath.”

He led the way across the hall, Paul following a trail of wet footprints, averting his gaze from the gyrations of Neville’s arse under the damp towel. The hall was lit by a small window, taped against blast, letting in only a dim, stripy light, through which Neville padded like a huge, pink tiger.

Opening a door on the left, he showed Paul into the drawing room, before continuing up the stairs, in search — Paul devoutly hoped — of clothes.

Left alone, Paul looked around the room, his gaze as always drawn first to the paintings. Several good landscapes: the one above the mantelpiece— Dunstanburgh Castle at Sunset —was particularly fine. He thought he could identify the exact spot the painter had been standing on. In 1920, a war artist without a war, he’d spent a month in Northumberland scratting and scraping about for inspiration — and not finding it, in Dunstanburgh or anywhere else, not for a long, long time. Meanwhile, Neville, the minute he was released from hospital, left for America in a blaze of publicity. No hesitation, no groping about for inspiration there. Within a couple of years, every boardroom in Chicago and New York seemed to have one or other of Neville’s “vibrant,” “challenging,” “futuristic” cityscapes hanging on the wall. Mind, he hadn’t been doing so well recently. Of course, his Great War paintings still hung in galleries alongside Paul’s own, but he wasn’t getting much critical attention these days. In fact, he was probably better known to the younger generation as a critic than an artist. Paul’s reputation as a painter was higher than Neville’s now, though they did share a problem: their best work — at least their best-known work — was behind them. It was a strange predicament, to be remembered for what everybody else was trying to forget.

“We should’ve got ourselves killed,” Neville had said, bitterly, more than once. “They’d be all over us then.”

On the mantelpiece, there was a framed photograph of a little girl, five or six years old: Neville’s daughter, presumably. Anne, was it? No resemblance to Neville, or none that he could see, but then he’d almost forgotten what Neville looked like. Used to look like. No photograph of Catherine, and he thought he remembered somebody saying they were separated. Where had he heard that?

Feeling suddenly that he was prying, he turned his back on the fireplace and looked around. A pleasant, slightly old-fashioned room, comfortable chairs and sofas: nothing wrong with any of it. Though he couldn’t see much trace of Neville’s own taste. The one discordant note was a broken blind, which drooped like a half-shut eyelid, making the room look as if it had suffered a stroke.

Footsteps on the landing. A second later, Neville appeared in the doorway, more or less dressed, though still without a tie and bringing with him a swimming-baths smell of damp skinfolds and wet hair.

“Sorry about that. Just nodded off.”

“Bad night?”

“Busy.” He went straight to the drinks table. “Whisky?”

Paul nodded. “I’ve just been admiring your paintings.”

“Job lot, I’m afraid. Dad used to collect them.”

Job lot? Unless he was very much mistaken the one above the fireplace was a Turner. “I painted Dunstanburgh Castle once.”

“Any good?”

“Not really.”

“I keep meaning to get rid of them, but nothing goes for anything these days; I’d be giving them away.” He handed Paul a glass. “Same with the house, I wouldn’t mind selling it, but…”

Paul looked at the ceiling. “You must rattle around a bit.”

“I do.”

“Catherine not coming over?”

“No, she’ll stay in America.”

“You must miss them.”

“I miss Anne.”

Ah.

A slightly awkward pause. Then Neville said: “Tell you what I’ve got that might interest you.”

He led the way across the hall into a small study. Above the desk hung a framed pastel portrait of Neville himself, though not Neville as he was now — as he had been when he returned from France in 1917. Striving for some kind of objectivity, Paul looked at the drawing.

An eye like a dying sun sank beneath the rim of a shattered cheekbone, the lips were pulled back to reveal teeth like stumps of dead trees, and right at the center, where the nose should have been, a crater gaped wide. This was less a face than a landscape: a landscape Paul knew very well.

Neville stood, four-square, nursing his glass. “Best thing Tonks ever did, those portraits.”

“How did you get it?”

“From Tonks, he gave it to me. I don’t think it was his to give, actually; I think it belongs to the War Office. But…” He shrugged. “I suppose he just stretched the rules.”

“Kind of him.”

“Yes, very. Normally all you got was a couple of photographs. Fact, I think I’ve still got mine somewhere…”

The vagueness was a pretense. He went straight to the top-left-hand drawer of the desk, took two photographs out of a brown envelope and handed them across. Paul looked down. One profile, one full face — both utterly shocking. He looked up and found Neville watching him. Keeping his face carefully expressionless, he handed them back. “This was a parting present?”

“Yes, I think they’re meant for if you go in a pub and some silly cow chokes on her drink, you know? You’re supposed to whip them out of your pocket, point at your face and say: ‘You think this is bad, love? Well, just look what they started with.’ ”

“It is remarkable, you know, what they did.”

The surgeons, he meant. Was that the right thing to say? Well, if the pursing of Neville’s lips was anything to go by — no, it most certainly was not. Paul handed the photographs back. This had been a rather disconcerting episode. It was a relief when Neville led the way back into the drawing room.

“So, what have you been up to?” Neville asked, settling himself into an armchair.

“Oh, you know…Working quite hard.”

“Painting?”

“Aeroplanes, you know, dogfights, that sort of thing.”

“Yes, I believe I’ve seen some of your recent stuff. Vapor trails?”