Pat Barker - Noonday

Why was it, when Neville said “vapor,” Paul heard “vapid”? Because Neville bloody well meant him to, that’s why.

A silver clock on the mantelpiece began to chime. Immediately, Neville put his glass down. “Blackout.”

He crossed to the windows and began pulling down blinds, each tug of the cords contributing to a premature descent of night until finally only a sliver of sunlight remained. Paul felt a small stab of grief as that, too, was extinguished.

Neville was now merely a moving column of deeper shadow. There was a rasp to his breathing, a side effect of surgery, perhaps; you noticed it more in the dark. He was going from table to table, switching on lamps. As he bent over a side table near Paul’s chair every scar and suture line showed. And yet what Paul had just said was true: the surgeons had done a remarkable job.

Only it was not his face, just as this was not his room.

“So…” Neville picked up his glass. “Where were we?”

Starting to needle each other, Paul thought. Painting wasn’t a safe area. Yes, it was what they had in common, but it was also what divided them. Time for a change of subject. “I had a rather strange experience this afternoon. I think I met the Witch of Endor…”

Quickly, he told Neville about his meeting with the fat woman in Russell Square, emphasizing the absurdity of the occasion, recounting it, more or less, as a joke against himself.

Neville was amused, but he was also good at detecting pain. “Well,” he said, when Paul had finished, “she certainly got you rattled.”

“No—”

“Oh, come on. ”

“No, really; actually, I felt quite sorry for her.”

“I don’t see why. I mean, you say yourself she was describing the boy you were looking at. She just picked up on it, that’s all. She was obviously having you on.”

“But that’s just it, you see, I’m not sure she was. Oh, I’m not saying she actually saw anything but…Oh, I don’t know. She was…she was…doing something —and I’m not quite sure what it was.”

“I suppose the real question is, why have you suddenly got interested in boys?”

Paul didn’t want to talk about Kenny but he could see an explanation was required, and once he’d started it was surprisingly easy to go on. When, at last, he stopped, Neville said, “There’s no doubt he’s dead?”

“None at all. Nobody got out.”

“Still, you mustn’t let that woman get to you.”

“I don’t think she was trying to, to be fair.”

“Oh, of course she was! If you’d gone along with it she’d have been asking for money in no time at all. I can’t stand the way these people crawl out of the woodwork whenever there’s a war on, battening on people’s grief — it’s horrible. Do you know, my mother used to hold seances in the last war — in the dining room just along there. And I mean she was a highly intelligent woman, very forward-thinking in all kinds of ways, and yet she couldn’t seem to see through it. I actually went to one of them—” He shuddered. “Appalling stuff. ‘Auntie Maud likes your curtains.’ I’m glad I didn’t die, it would’ve been me coming back to say I liked the curtains. You don’t seriously think—?” He threw up his hands in disgust. “It’s all fraud. ”

He came over to refill Paul’s glass. As he bent down, the lamp threw his shadow across the far wall. Bull neck, massive shoulders, a whiff of the Minotaur’s stable. The beast in the brain. But it wasn’t just his physical bulk. It was that impression of baffled pain. An animal’s pain. That invitation to go and see the Tonks portrait had been decidedly odd. It was almost as if he’d been reaching out, trying to get past the rivalry that had always prevented them from being, in any simple or uncomplicated way, friends.

No sooner had he finished pouring than the siren set up its nightly wail.

“What do you do in a raid?” Neville asked. “You know, if you’re not on duty?”

“I walk.”

“Not all night?”

“You might be surprised.”

“What does Elinor think about that?”

“Well, I don’t do it when she’s here.”

“We haven’t seen much of her recently.”

“No, she’s still in the country, helping her sister sort things out.”

The siren had stopped wailing. In its absence the silence of the deserted streets began to ooze through cracks in doors and window frames, a silence so deep the whisper of blood in your ears became more and more difficult to ignore. And then they heard it: that awful, desperate, edge-of-darkness buzzing, the sound a kettle makes when it’s about to boil dry.

“Ours,” Neville said.

“No, it’s not.”

And immediately, from Hampstead Heath close by, came the hysterical yapping of the guns. A thud, followed by another, closer, the end of the next street, perhaps. Above their heads, the chandelier gave out a soft, silvery chime.

Paul said, “You need to get that bloody thing bagged up.”

“Spoken like a true air-raid warden.” Neville got to his feet. “Well, unless you want to stay inside…?”

“I never want to stay in.”

In the hall, there was a brief hiatus as Neville fumbled for his keys. Paul was starting to feel dizzy again. He’d been suffering from episodes of vertigo ever since a particularly nasty bout of flu in January. Inflammation of the labyrinth, the doctor said. Nothing to worry about, he’d said, most people get over it quite quickly; only an unlucky few get stuck. It was beginning to look as if Paul was one of the few. The walls spun round him; Neville’s breath grated in his ears. He put a hand out to steady himself. Neville had switched the light out before he opened the door and, for some reason, the dizziness was always worse in the dark.

“Bloody key.”

He got the door open at last. They collected hats and gas masks from the hall table and stepped out into the noisy night.

—

THEY WERE SHOWN to a quiet table in the corner of the restaurant. Menus were produced, a bottle of wine ordered. It was all really rather pleasant, except Paul’s appetite seemed to have deserted him. The soup went down easily enough, but he struggled with the game pie, refused a pudding and merely picked at the cheese, content to let Neville do most of the talking. He could be very amusing, when he chose: scurrilous gossip about other painters, bizarre goings-on at the Ministry of Information…“Complete loony bin.”

“For God’s sake, keep your voice down.”

Neville looked round the room and shrugged. Nobody was paying them any attention, and actually, to be fair, he’d said virtually nothing about his work — while contriving to imply his contribution to the war effort was second only to Winston Churchill’s. But then — he was well into the second bottle by now — he embarked on a great rant about Kenneth Clark and the War Artists Advisory Committee. None of the commissioned artists had any talent whatsoever, not a glimmer. Moore, Sutherland, Piper: all rubbish. Clark was the problem, of course — Clark and his coterie of arse-licking toadies.

“He’s commissioned one or two women as well,” Paul said, hoping to divert the flow of bile.

“Elinor?”

“No, not yet, though—”

“Then she should think herself lucky. It’s an insult to be commissioned by that man.”

Paul was one of the people “that man” had insulted, but obviously it suited Neville to forget that. “Laura Knight, she’s—”

“Poisonous old bat.”

Paul gave up. Let him rant, if it made him feel better, but Neville seemed to have finished with Kenneth Clark, for the time being, at least. He glanced at Paul’s plate. “You’re not eating your cheese.”