Pat Barker - Noonday

Instantly, Elinor felt smaller, less competent, as dependent on Paul as a small child might have been. “Where shall we go?”

“Oh, there’s plenty of B&Bs around. Look, why don’t I put you in a café while I go and book us in somewhere? At least then we’ll know where we’re going to be. Or …” He turned to face her. “I could take you to the station and you could stay with Rachel, just for a few nights, then you can move into the cottage. Have your own place.”

“What about you?”

“I’m all right, I can sleep in the studio.”

“But I don’t want to leave you.”

“Well, yes, all right. First thing is, to find a room. And there’s clothes…You know, you’ve still got a few things at Rachel’s…”

“No, absolutely not.”

“All right.”

He sighed, the slump of his shoulders telling her she’d become a problem, something he had to worry about, a distraction from other, arguably more important, matters. That sigh weakened her, undermined her, as almost nothing else could have done.

“Come on,” she said. “We’ll find somewhere together.”

—

THE ROOM THEY FOUND, in one of the side roads off Oxford Street, was small with yellowish-brown paper on the walls. The one window looked out into a basement yard so at all times of the day they were in semidarkness. Their faces loomed pale in the brown-spotted mirror, like fish in a badly maintained tank.

By day, Elinor had nowhere to go — it was almost impossible to stay in the room — so she spent a lot of time just wandering around, always drawn back to the square where she’d spent so many years of her life. It was still cordoned off; she stood, with other lost souls, looking across the tape at the bulge in the road, and the wrecked houses. Apparently quite a few of them would have to be demolished, including, Paul seemed to think, their own.

She couldn’t face going on duty from the B&B or leaving it to go to one of the public shelters. So when Paul was on duty, she simply lay on the bed and waited for him to return. But then, on the fourth night, she gave herself a good talking-to and reported to the ambulance depot, as usual. Dana and Violet welcomed her with open arms, and other people too — people who in normal circumstances she would probably never have met — went out of their way to be kind. They seemed to care about her — as she did about them.

Next morning, exhausted, but determined to spend the day looking for more permanent accommodation, she went back to Oxford Street and found the B&B had been bombed. So there they were, for the second time in a week, homeless.

Or rather, she was. Paul could always move into his studio, which — as he never tired of pointing out — wasn’t big enough for two.

They stood in a doorway on Oxford Street surrounded by yet another group of shocked, disorientated people. The newly risen sun glinted on the silver barrage balloons and silhouetted the broken outline of bombed and partially demolished buildings. The usual smell of charred timber and burning bricks. On the other side of the tape was sunlit emptiness. A man, standing halfway up the road, shimmered in the heat from a still-smoldering building. He seemed almost to be walking on water. The woman standing next to Elinor had long, Rapunzel-like hair, loosely plaited, reaching to her waist, though it was iron-gray. Elinor noticed these things, but blankly, unable to attach any meaning to what she saw.

Paul stood beside Elinor, his elbow lightly touching hers. She realized, without the need for speech, that this second bomb had settled the argument. She would go to Rachel’s and then to the cottage, not because she thought it was the right thing to do, but because her tired mind couldn’t come up with an alternative. In front of them, closer to the tape, a young girl was brushing her long black hair, trying to get rid of the dust, but soothing herself too, perhaps. As she bent and swayed, her whole body followed the movement of her arm. How slender and supple her waist was. Elinor was aware of Paul following the girl’s every movement, and she’d never felt more distant from him than she did at that moment.

“I want to go back to the house.”

“Is that a good idea?”

“I’ll go to the cottage, but I want to see the house first.”

“All right, I’ll see if I can find a taxi.”

—

EVEN IN A few days, her memory of the square had started to fade. She struggled now to remember what number 35 had looked like, what color its front door had been. Next year she supposed buddleia and rosebay willow herb would throng the empty spaces where people had once lived. She closed her eyes. Everywhere — every step she took, every step anybody took — was the crunch of broken glass.

The time bombs’ detonation had inflicted further damage on their house, but at least they were allowed access to the square. They could see at first hand the extent of the damage by climbing cautiously over the outer fringes of the rubble. She could even see into her kitchen. The dresser had somehow become jammed at an angle to the wall. She caught a glint of knives and forks, the blue-and-white fragments of a serving dish. They would be able to get a few things out, but it wasn’t pots and pans she wanted, it was the paintings from her attic studio, the portraits of her father and Toby. All gone. And, with them, so much of her past.

She and Paul picked their way around the ruin separately. At one point, she saw him straighten up and look around, and the expression on his face was, unmistakably, one of relief.

She slid down the last slope of rubble and waited for him in the road.

“Well,” he said, coming across to join her. “Worse than you thought?”

She couldn’t look at him. “I don’t think I can face another B&B. I think I’d be better off in the country.”

A hint of satisfaction. “I’m sure that’s right.”

Straggling apart, they walked away from their house, past the crater where two nights ago one of the time bombs had exploded. Trudging along with her eyes on the road, Elinor was startled by an unexpected flash of light, and looked up to see sunshine streaming through a gap in the terrace. The light gilded the tops of trees and bushes that only a week ago had been struggling to survive in deep shade. Oh, yes, all kinds of opportunities for new growth. Only not for her.

She stopped and looked around her, wanting to remember the moment. Then, needing reassurance, she glanced at Paul, but against that dazzling shaft of light he’d become merely a silhouette, featureless.

It might have been anybody standing there.

Left alone in London, Paul felt increasingly restless. Partly this was because of his constant involuntary searching for Kenny. He scanned the faces of children he passed in the streets, and somehow, despite the raids, London seemed to be full of children. He watched them during the day, playing in the parks — the schools were still closed — or queuing outside the Underground stations. Children were often sent on ahead to claim the family’s favorite spot; you would see them, laden with sleeping bags and blankets, sometimes laughing and messing about, but waiting for hours.

Paul’s studio was only ten minutes’ walk from his station, so on the nights when he was on duty he went straight to the School of Tropical Medicine basement after finishing work, and played cards or darts till the sirens went and it was time to go out on patrol.

The evenings when he was not on duty were more of a problem, because he found it quite impossible to stay indoors during a raid. He could remember feeling exactly like this during the last war. Very often at night he’d shunned the comparative safety of the dugout for walks between sentry posts. Anything was better than the dank, grave-smelling murk of life underground, where a single candle, guttering in the blast from an exploding shell, would send panic-stricken shadows fleeing across the walls. The dugout was safer, yes, but it never felt safe. Now, he felt the same way about the public shelters. On the nights when he wasn’t on duty, he walked miles through the blacked-out city, sometimes not getting home till two or even three in the morning, by which time he was too exhausted not to sleep.