Pat Barker: Noonday

“What about him?”

Rachel peered at the boy. She was short-sighted and too vain to wear glasses. “Well, at least there’s only one of him…Yes, all right, I’ll see what she says.”

Rachel went off to speak to the billeting officer, Miss Beatrice Marsh, who regularly made a mess of the church flower-arranging roster. They seemed to be having an extremely animated discussion. The boy showed no interest in the outcome. His gas-mask case was on a long string: Elinor noticed a sore patch on the side of his knee where the case had chafed against the skin. He had placed a battered brown suitcase between his legs and was gripping it tight, so at least he’d have something, a change of clothes, a favorite toy. But he’d lost his luggage label.

“Which school are you with?”

He shook his head.

You did it on purpose, she thought. You threw it away. Not that there was anything sinister in that. There were many reasons why a child might choose to slip off the end of one school crocodile and attach himself to a different one entirely. A teacher he didn’t like, a gang of bigger boys bullying in the playground…Whatever the reason, he’d arrived in the village with no name, no history. Something about that appealed to Elinor. Bundled up, parceled off…and in the middle of it all, the chaos, the confusion, he’d taken off his label and thrown it away.

Only of course it couldn’t go on like that. He had to give Rachel his name, his address, because he wanted his mother to be able to find him. He wanted her a good deal more than she appeared to want him.

Elinor tapped on the nursery door. Kenny was playing with his toy soldiers — Alex’s, originally, now his — hundreds of tiny gray and khaki figures spread across a vast battlefield, many of them lying on their backs, already wounded or killed. He looked up from the game, but didn’t smile or speak.

“It’s dinnertime. Have you washed your hands?”

He shook his head.

“Well, will you go and do it now, please?”

Still silent, he got up and left. Now and then it was brought home to her that Kenny hardly spoke — except, oddly enough, to Paul. And in the past year he’d scarcely grown at all. She looked round the chaotic room, decided to leave the toy soldiers undisturbed, but knelt to close the dolls’ house.

Officially, Kenny despised the house and the dolls — wouldn’t have been seen dead playing with them — and yet whenever she came into the room the dolls were in different positions and the furniture had been rearranged. She both loved and hated this house, which had once been hers. Her eighth-birthday present. She could still remember the mixture of delight and uneasiness she’d felt when the wrapping paper fell away and she saw that the dolls weren’t just ordinary dolls: they were Father and Mother and Rachel and Toby and her. And the toy house was an exact copy of the house they lived in, right down to the piano in the drawing room and the pattern of wallpaper on the bedroom walls. It had always had pride of place in her bedroom, but she hadn’t played with it much. She picked up the Toby doll, held it between her thumb and forefinger, and felt a pang of grief so intense it squeezed her heart. She remained kneeling there, on the cold lino, waiting for the pain to pass, then laid the little figure on its bed.

Rachel came in. “Ken—” She stopped when she saw Elinor. “Still playing with dolls?”

“I never did, if you remember.”

“No, you didn’t, did you? You were always out with Toby. I think I played with that more than you did.”

Elinor went on putting the dolls to bed. One moment, she was looking through a tiny window, the next, she saw her own face peering in: huge, piggy nostrils, open-pored, grotesque. Then, immediately, she was back in the nursery, looking down at the last doll in her hand: Mother.

“Are you all right?” Rachel asked.

“Fine.”

“Only you’ve gone quite pale.”

“No, I’m fine.” She fastened the front of the house and stood up. “Kenny’s getting washed; at least I think he is. What about Mother, is she awake?”

“No, and anyway the Wiggins is there. Come on, I need a drink.”

As they were going downstairs the telephone in the hall started to ring, and Rachel went to answer it. When she came into the drawing room a few minutes later, she was glowing with excitement. “That was Alex; he’s coming home tomorrow. I’ll go and tell Tim.”

Left alone, Elinor thought: Yes, good news. But she couldn’t stop thinking about her mother lying upstairs, dying, but clinging onto life so she could see Alex again, one last time. This was what they’d all been waiting for: Alex’s arrival; the end.

Alex arrived the following afternoon, straight out of hospital with the smell of it still on his skin. Elinor witnessed his meeting with his father. Tim stuck out his hand and then, realizing too late that Alex was unable to take it, blushed from the neck up and let the hand drop. She sensed a great tension in Alex: something coiled up hard and tight. His face softened when Rachel came into the room, but otherwise he seemed merely impatient, anxious to get this visit over and move on.

Thinking he would like time alone with his parents, Elinor fetched a drawing pad from her room and went into the garden. She sat under the birch tree, her back pressed hard against its scaly bark, staring up through the branches at yet another flawlessly blue sky. The aeroplanes were active today, little, glinting, silver minnows darting here and there. Earlier, she’d started trying to draw a cabbage and it was sitting on a low stone wall, waiting for her, yellower and flabbier than she remembered. She gazed at it without enthusiasm, then forced herself to begin. Draw something every single day, Professor Tonks used to say. Doesn’t matter what it is: just draw.

All the upstairs windows were open. Behind that one on the far left her mother lay dying, attended, at the moment, by Nurse Wiggins, a great, galumphing, raw-boned creature with a jolly, professional laugh and downy, peach-perfect skin. Her laugh, so obviously designed to keep fear and pain at bay, grated on Elinor. And yes, she did hover. But she was good at her job, you had to give her that, though her presence added to the tension in the house. Rachel, in particular, seemed to find it difficult to relax.

Elinor held the drawing at arm’s length. Not good. Cabbages are shocking if you get them right, especially those thick-veined outer leaves: positively scrotal. Only she couldn’t draw them like that, not here, surrounded by her family. She was unconsciously censoring herself, and it wasn’t just what she drew, either. It was what she let herself see. This was one of the reasons she’d left home early, and refused, even after Toby’s death, to go back. Her mother needed care and company: it had been obvious to everybody that Elinor, the then unmarried daughter, should stay at home and provide it.

Obvious to everybody except Elinor, who’d refused, and gone on refusing. It was Rachel, in the end, who’d found their mother a cottage within walking distance of her own home.

The caterpillar on the leaf

Repeats to thee thy mother’s grief.

What the hell was that about? It was true, though. She’d have liked to do the drawing that would be the equivalent of those lines.

Voices from an upstairs window: Rachel and Alex. She’d be taking him up to his room. Elinor looked at the brown lawn, the wilting shrubs and flowers; everything seemed to be suspended. Was that the war? Possibly. Even the roses, this summer, looked as if they were expecting to be bombed. But no, it was more than that: closer. She was waiting: for something to happen or, more likely, for something to be said; but though Mother’s thick, white tongue came out at intervals to moisten her cracked lips she stayed silent, drifting in and out of sleep.