Pat Barker - Noonday

“I’ve just realized something,” he said, as the banshee howl wound down into silence. “You’re the only person who still calls me ‘Kit.’ ”

“Really?” How impossibly self-centered men were. No, she corrected herself: not “men.” This man.

“Since my mother died, yes.”

“How extraordinary. What does Catherine call you?”

“ ‘You.’ If Anne’s there, ‘Daddy’—or, if I’m really in the doghouse: ‘Your father.’ ”

Elinor didn’t know how to respond to that and was glad when it was time to go through into the dining room to eat. Cold cuts on the sideboard, a surprising amount of meat. Apparently his housekeeper knew somebody. Oh, yes, Elinor thought, restored to something of her original dislike: Kit’s housekeeper would know somebody. Over the meal, he talked about his time in Germany. Catherine hadn’t wanted to leave, though she seemed perfectly happy in America. In fact, she was probably more American than he was. Perhaps that was why the marriage had broken down? Elinor wasn’t sure she believed in all this “drifting apart” nonsense. There was always a reason.

Outside the raid went on, various thuds and bumps, none very close. Her glass seemed to be emptying itself rather quickly. The clock ticked towards midnight. She thought it had been an altogether strange evening, full of emotional undercurrents, things said, things left unsaid, she didn’t know what to make of it. But at least it ended in laughter. They’d been reminiscing about the dances they used to go to when they were students, when — it was a shock to remember — they’d been, actually for quite a long time, each other’s best friend. They’d spent virtually every evening together, in fact: going to exhibitions, theaters, music halls…But, above all, dancing.

“Do you remember the turkey trot?” Kit asked. “We used to go in for competitions.”

She put her hands over her eyes. “Oh my God, yes. The turkey trot. What were we thinking?”

Kit stood up, spread his legs — more frog than turkey — and hopped a few paces to the left…Then, tucking his thumbs into his braces, a few paces to the right. He looked so ridiculous she burst out laughing. He joined in, but then stopped and looked at her.

“Do you think we could still do it?”

“No, of course we couldn’t.”

“Bet you we could.”

He was holding out his hand and, for a second, anything seemed possible — she was on the verge of getting up — but then she smiled and shook her head, and turned away.

Paul hated the Underground stations that had been turned into shelters. For a long time, the authorities had resisted using the Underground in this way, but after the destruction of the school in Agate Street, people took things into their own hands: they forced their way in. And so at night the Underground became almost indistinguishable from the underworld, with hundreds of people asleep or inert under their blankets. You had to clamber over them. And always, for Paul, there were memories of other tunnels: humped bodies in half-darkness, sleeping or dead. Increasingly, the two worlds — France, then; London, now — met and merged. It was a relief to escape the fetid darkness of the shelters into the tumult of the upper air.

Darkness was falling, a hot, clammy darkness that made it hard to breathe. He still didn’t feel well, though the dizziness had gone; and he was constantly afraid. He quickened his steps. The only solution to fear was other people. A few jokes, a game of cards, and things didn’t look quite so bad.

At the corner of Guilford Street, he bumped into Walter Harris, who was just going out on patrol.

“What’s happening?”

“Nothing much,” Walter said. “Very quiet.”

Incendiaries were drifting down like huge yellow peonies. The two of them stood at the center of a web of shadows, reluctant to part. People clung to each other these days, as if the mere fact of being known, recognized, addressed by name could protect you from the random destruction of bombs and blast. But after a few minutes, Walter ground his fag out, said, “So long”—nobody these days risked saying “Good-bye”—and set off in the direction of Russell Square.

As Paul turned the corner, he saw a stick of bombs come tumbling down the beam of a searchlight onto a building fifty yards ahead, an extraordinary sight, like a worm’s-eye view of somebody shitting. He was close enough to feel the blast wave suck at his eyeballs, but already he’d started to run, arriving on the scene in a smog of black smoke. Charlie Web was there and Brian Temple and shortly afterwards Nick Hendry came shambling up.

As Paul turned to greet him, there was another explosion farther down the street. The windows behind them shattered and they crouched down, shielding their faces and arms from a shower of broken glass. “Bloody hell,” Charlie said. “You all right, lad?” This was directed at Nick, who was looking more dazed than frightened.

Cautiously, Paul straightened up. The road was filling with civilians, swarming out of the burning buildings, many of them barefoot, treading on broken glass, impervious to pain. There must’ve been a shelter in one of the basements. Sandra Jobling, bent double, was leading a group out, waving at them to come on. Come on. There was another shelter not far away in Gray’s Inn Road, but it was going to be a terribly long walk for some of those people.

Within half an hour, Sandra was back. “All right, love?” Charlie asked. She nodded, without speaking. It was difficult to tell how she was, or how anybody was. They were all white with plaster dust, their eyelids crusted and inflamed. Nick was in a bad way. Charlie pointed to the basement of a nearby house. “There’s an old man lives down there, I think we ought to check on him.”

“No, he’s in hospital,” Brian Temple said.

“Nope, came out yesterday.”

Nobody questioned it: Charlie knew everything and everybody on his patch.

“Won’t he have gone to a shelter?” Paul asked.

“Can’t walk.”

“ Bloody hell.”

They found him in the living room. Plaster had fallen from the ceiling and lay in clumps all over the floor, but the old man didn’t seem to be injured. He was sitting on the edge of a sofa bed, stick-thin, rodent-faced, a plastic bag full of urine dangling from his side, but as they helped him to the door he was positively cackling with triumph. Apparently, they’d told him in the hospital he might never walk again. “And look at me now.” He paused for breath, hanging on to Charlie’s arm. “Shows how much the fuckers know.”

“ Oi, you, language.” Charlie jabbed his finger at Sandra. “Lady.”

“Sorry, love. Didn’t see you.”

Sandra smiled. “ ’S’all right.”

“Thought she was a lad,” they heard him say, as Charlie pushed his skinny arse up the stairs. “They all wear trousers these days, you can’t tell hes from shes.”

They got him into one of the ambulances that had drawn up on the other side of the road and were just turning away when somebody said there was a man trapped on the second floor of a building farther down the street. “Why the fuck wasn’t he in a shelter?” Brian asked. It didn’t matter why; they still had to go in. Inside, there was total devastation, illuminated at intervals by flares that shone through the broken windows. A crater, twenty feet deep, had opened up at the center of the building and they were having to edge around its rim. “Like that school in Agate Street,” Brian said. Twenty yards farther on, they heard a slithering thump, exactly like snow falling off a roof in a rapid thaw. They looked at each other, as the seconds ticked past. Charlie had stopped, mid-stride, one hand raised. He seemed to be on the point of turning back, but then he lowered his hand and they started to move forward again.