Pat Barker - Noonday

They found a man on the first-floor landing, his head and shoulders sticking out of the rubble, eyes glazed, that unmistakable look of nobody at home. But was this the man they’d been told about, or was there somebody else? No way of knowing. Charlie decided to press on. Paul swept the torch from side to side, training the light on their feet, as they crept up the stairs, each tread complaining under their combined weight. At any moment, now, you felt the whole bloody staircase was coming down. Paul opened his mouth to say they ought to think about going back, but at that moment Charlie raised his hand again.

A man was lying across the top of the stairs, unconscious, barely breathing, short, middle-aged, with a paunch that strained his shirt buttons, and cheeks like a hamster’s full of nuts. Brian blew his whistle, and the sound carried Paul back to the trenches. Stretcher-bearers! Trying to fix himself in the present, he swung the torch over gilt picture frames and velvet curtains. “Keep it steady, mate,” Charlie said. “Can’t see what I’m doing here.”

No stretcher-bearers appeared in response to Brian’s whistle; nobody had seriously thought they would. “All right then?” Charlie said, and they positioned themselves at the unconscious man’s head and feet.

It took them an hour to get him out. Paul helped the woman ambulance driver lift him onto the top bunk. The bunk below was already occupied, by a terrified man who kept whimpering that he’d broken his arm and it was a disgrace — an absolute bloody disgrace — that he hadn’t been taken to the hospital straight away. “There’s plenty worse than you,” the driver said, in a ferociously clipped accent. “If you don’t keep quiet I’ll dump you in the road.”

“I’d do as I was told if I were you,” Paul said. “I think she means it.”

The driver slipped off her right gauntlet and held out her hand. Automatically, Paul took it, though it seemed an odd gesture in the circumstances.

“Thank you,” she said. “Bit of a dead weight, wasn’t he?”

Or just dead. “It’s Miss Tempest, isn’t it?”

“Oh, Violet, please. I trained with Elinor.”

“Yes, I remember.”

He was just about to jump down into the road when she took hold of his sleeve. Puzzled, he glanced down and saw the cloth was stiff with blood. “Oh, it’s all right,” he said. “It’s not mine.”

She pulled the edges of the tear apart and peered inside. “I think you’ll find it is.”

Immediately, his arm began to throb, though up to that moment he’d felt no pain. “I’d no idea.”

“No, I’m serious now, you go and get that seen to.”

He looked at her. A painfully thin, wiry, indestructible woman in late middle age. Far too old to be driving an ambulance, but nobody had the nerve to tell her that. Before the war she’d taught — classics, was it? At Cambridge. Very ivory-tower, the sort of woman whom normally he might not have taken seriously, but in the confusion of the moment any sufficiently firm suggestion acquired the force of a command. He sketched a salute. “Yes, ma’am.”

He thought he might as well get the cut seen to, though he didn’t think it was anything serious and felt a bit of a fraud, crunching along Gower Street over a river of broken glass. This same route he’d taken every morning as a student at the Slade. Now, shocked people huddled in doorways or wandered around in the middle of the road, purgatorial shadows with their white, dust-covered faces and dark clothes. Some, in pajamas and dressing gowns, limped along on bloodied feet.

Reaching his station at the School of Tropical Medicine, he staggered down into the basement, where he found Nick Hendry being treated for a cut to his forehead. Lucky lad — another inch and it would’ve been his eye.

When Paul’s turn came, he rolled up his shirtsleeve and discovered, as he’d rather expected, that the cut, though still oozing blood, was not deep. “Looks worse than it is,” the first-aid worker said. “Go and have a cup of tea.”

He retreated to one of the two battered sofas that lined the walls. Nick Hendry was stretched out on the other and was snoring softly, his upper lip vibrating with every breath. Paul tried to read a newspaper, but couldn’t concentrate. He forced down a cup of orange tea, and though his stomach rose in revolt, immediately began to feel better.

After a brief respite, he started to feel he was shirking and forced himself to go out on patrol again. One good thing, he hadn’t suffered any spells of dizziness all night and that was reassuring because this was his first night back on duty, and he’d been half expecting it to return.

Two hours later, he returned to the station, eyelids gritty with tiredness, yawning and scratching his neck. Nick was still on the sofa, face averted, though Paul could tell from his breathing he wasn’t asleep. A few minutes later, Sandra Jobling came in and took off her helmet, bending forward to run her fingers through her sweaty hair. Her face was still covered in plaster dust, but at some time during the night she must have reapplied her lipstick without the aid of a mirror, because she now had two huge, glossy, smiling red lips, with smears of lipstick all over her cheeks and chin. She waved to Paul, then went straight through to the cloakroom next door.

Charlie Web and Brian Temple came in not long after. Charlie put his mug of tea on the table and pulled up a chair. “Gone quiet.”

“Not long now,” Paul said.

They waited for the All Clear with hardly less tension than they’d waited for the warning sirens the night before. Charlie jerked his head in Nick’s direction. “He’s making the most of it.” He slurped a mouthful of tea. “What about that old geezer, then, the one with the plastic bag? Bloody thing burst, you know. I was lifting him onto the top bunk and… Pish. All over me. Could’ve done with a bloody umbrella.”

Nick sat up, ostentatiously rubbing his eyes.

“Hey up,” Charlie said. “Sleeping Beauty’s back. How are you, mate?”

He carried his mug across to the sofa and sat down. Nick had seemed very jittery all night; Charlie had been virtually carrying him. Their voices sank to a low murmur. Paul was already nodding off to sleep when a hand on his shoulder jerked him awake.

Charlie: “I’m taking Nick round the corner for a pasty. You coming?”

Brian stood up at once, but Paul shook his head. “No thanks, I think I’ll be getting off home.”

But it was hard to make himself get going. He’d only just levered himself to his feet when Sandra came back into the room, her face pink and shining, forehead plastered with tendrils of wet hair. She came straight over to him. “I don’t know. Men. ”

“What have we done now?”

“How could you let me walk round like that?”

“Like what?”

“Lipstick plastered all over me face.”

He smiled. “I thought you looked amazing.”

“I looked like a clown.”

It seemed the easiest, most natural thing in the world to grab her by the shoulders and kiss her. Only when it was too late, when she’d taken a step back and was gawping at him, did he realize what he’d done. My God. He tried to come up with something to say, something that would shrink the kiss, turn it into a friendly, casual, comradely gesture, the sort of thing he might have done to Charlie or Brian, but the words wouldn’t come. To his relief, he saw she was looking amused rather than offended. “I’m—”

Sorry, he was going to say, but at that moment a voice at the door said, “Is there any tea left in that pot?”

Walter Harris, gray-faced, ready to drop.

Sandra felt the curve of the pot. “Past its best, I’m afraid. Yeah, no, you can’t have that. I’ll put the kettle on.”