Pat Barker - Noonday

Walter lowered himself into a chair. “Thanks, love.”

“Well,” Paul said, deliberately including both of them. “I’d better be off. See you tomorrow.”

“You not on tonight, then?” Walter said. “Jammy bugger.”

Paul waited for Sandra to say something, but she was busy at the sink. “See you?”

She looked over her shoulder. “Yeah, right.”

Outside on the pavement, breathing the tainted air, he relived the kiss. Had there been a second’s yielding before she pulled away? Nah, wishful thinking. No fool like an old fool, et-bloody-cetera. He began to walk home, but slowly, in no hurry to get there, noticing cordoned-off streets, gaps in terraces, some new, some already familiar. Relief at having survived the night fizzed in every vein.

But it was Sandra he thought about, as he walked along. Sandra, with her long, coarse, dark hair, the fringe that was always getting into her eyes, so she had to keep pushing it back. What with that and her short, stocky, little legs, she reminded him of a Shetland pony. Oh, she wasn’t pretty, but he thought she had something better than prettiness: it was almost impossible to look at her without smiling. He wanted — oh, very badly, he wanted — to lie naked with her in a bed, to feel her young, strong, firm body under his. And, at first, he thought, sheer exhaustion might make lovemaking difficult, but then, in small touches and movements, the heat between them would grow, until at last sex became not merely possible, but urgent, necessary, unavoidable.

He was close to home now, but walking more slowly all the time, until at last, turning into the square, he was forced to acknowledge the truth: that he didn’t want to go home at all.

Over the last few weeks, Neville’s dislike of the Ministry of Information had become an almost hysterical loathing. He dated the change to one apparently endless afternoon when it first occurred to him that the ministry was alive; that its corridors were the intestines of some flabby, flatulent beast farting memos, reports and minutes that always had to be initialed and passed on, though as far as he could tell no action was ever taken.

Once you started thinking the building might be alive, the evidence for it rapidly accumulated. It was always on the move, always changing shape. Literally, from one Friday afternoon to the following Monday morning, whole corridors would appear or disappear. His own room, which was hardly big enough for one — though he shared it with two other people — had been carved out of another, much larger, room. The half-window let in scarcely any light, and the partition kept out no noise at all. So he was privy to the conversation of half a dozen shorthand typists, listening in — involuntarily, if not reluctantly — as they talked about their boyfriends, nightclubs they were going to, which dresses they were going to wear…How far they were going to go. “Who is it tonight?” he heard one girl say. “Somebody nice?” Giggles all round. “Is it somebody you want to die with?”

That shook him. It made him think: Who would I want to die with? Nobody; but even as he said, or rather thought, “nobody,” he was back in the dining room with Elinor, holding out his hand, inviting her to dance with him. Totally unexpected, that evening they’d spent together. At first, he’d experienced no more than a slight awkwardness, a few tweaks of nostalgia perhaps, and yet by midnight it had been far more than that. When she smiled and turned away, he was immediately back on a dusty road with his head in her lap, seeing, as she bent over him, how her nipples formed two dark circles against the thin white lawn of her blouse, as unexpected and mysterious as fish rising to break the smooth surface of a lake.

Hilde sat next to him: a sad Austrian woman. He’d have liked to practice his German on her, but, except when discussing the finer points of a translation, she stuck resolutely to English. The only other inhabitant of the room was an old man with the streaming white hair of an Old Testament prophet, Bertram Somebody-or-other, but he appeared less and less frequently. They were supposed to be translating a series of pamphlets collectively entitled Life Under the Nazis, but progress was slow, and the material unpromising. Hilde, he suspected, knew far more about life under the Nazis than any of the authors did.

Every morning, as he entered the building, along with hundreds of other identically dressed men carrying identical briefcases, his spirits sank. By midafternoon, he was desperate, his eyes full of grit, his mouth dry, every muscle aching. As the golden light crept across the parquet floor, he daren’t think about sleep. To try to keep himself awake, he went along the corridor to the Gents, where he splashed his face with cold water. There was a mirror behind the washbasin, but he avoided looking at his reflection. He’d long ago mastered the art of washing, combing his hair and even shaving by touch alone. Each basin had a cheap plastic nailbrush chained to the wall behind the taps, for all the world as if they were priceless medieval Bibles. The irritation this caused him was out of all proportion; he wanted to wrench the bloody things off the wall, but of course he didn’t. Though as he walked back to the stuffy little room, he was nursing fantasies of escape. After all, he wasn’t obliged to stay here. He could leave — leave London, for that matter — go somewhere else, anywhere else, and paint. Accident had made him a journalist and a critic — and a good one, too — but it was not who he was.

Hilde hardly looked up when he came back into the room. She wore her hair pinned up in a rather untidy bun; as he squeezed past he looked down at the nape of her neck and wondered why it should be that exhaustion increased the desire to fuck. Logically, it should have had the opposite effect, but it never did, not with him anyway. In fact, a lot of his time in this room was spent weaving fantasies about Hilde or the typists next door or…Well, anybody really. There was nothing to take his mind off it. When talking to Tarrant he’d emphasized the importance of his work, but really anybody with fluent German could have done it. Yes, he dealt with classified information, but only because all information here was classified. The lowest classification was “Secret” and that was applied to the requisitioning of toilet rolls. Sighing, he sat down, pulled a stack of files towards him and began to sort through it.

The clock ticked towards six. The Indian-summer afternoon was slipping away and that mattered so much these days, when people lay in the parks and squares basking in the sun like lizards, or stood in doorways and windows, raising their eyes to the light, storing it up against the blackout. Nobody dared think about the coming winter, when days would be shorter and air raids longer. As he crouched over the files, he could hear Hilde’s stocking-clad legs — where did she get them? — whispering to each other as she walked across to the filing cabinet. She bent to pull out the lower drawer and he gazed hungrily at her backside. A minute later, she found the file she was looking for and straightened up. As she turned, their eyes met and he saw her flinch as she registered the full force of his melancholy lust. Quickly, not looking at him, she returned to her desk.

Ah, well. She wasn’t even noticeably attractive, though to him at the moment almost all women were attractive, at least to some degree. On his last free night, he’d gone out walking. It was one of the paradoxes of his present exhausted state that on the nights when he wasn’t on duty, he sometimes found it difficult to sleep. After tossing and turning for an hour, he thought: To hell with it, and went out. Though he was London born and bred, he found the blacked-out streets not only startling, but confusing. More than once he got lost. Piccadilly, after dark, felt particularly strange, because in peacetime it had always been so brightly lit. He stopped to light a cigarette and heard the tapping of a prostitute’s heels on the pavement. High heels, on these lightless nights, always sounded erotic, but a prostitute’s especially so because they hammered tacks into the heels and toes, to make them stand out. And stand out they certainly did, beating an urgent, unmistakable tattoo. This wasn’t the only way prostitutes defeated the blackout. Another was to lurk in shop doorways and, whenever a man approached, shine their blackout torches on exposed breasts or the triangle of darkness at the apex of their thighs. He found these spotlit body parts disturbing: they reminded him of an incident he’d attended near King’s Cross where a railway arch, being used as an unofficial shelter, had suffered a direct hit. When the ambulances got there, heavy rescue squads were pulling arms, legs, heads, hands, feet from the rubble, lining them up on the pavement. Somebody had flashed a torch along the line and it was exactly like this. Revulsion and a kind of excitement. The girl whose tap-tapping footsteps he’d heard — he could see her now, walking towards him, or at least he could see the shape of her, which was all he needed or wanted to see. As he came closer, she shone her torch down onto her slim legs — the ankles almost feverishly thin. They found each other in a shop doorway. He pushed up her skirt, his fingers snagging on her stocking tops, slipping across her bare thighs into the warm, moist darkness between, moaning now, gasping for breath, over in seconds, laughing shakily as he withdrew. From beginning to end, he hadn’t seen her face.