Pat Barker - Noonday

After a while, she seemed to grow calmer. She would get undressed, she said, but only if the men left the room.

The three men who’d been crowding her looked at each other, but made no move. A few others, Paul included, retreated a few paces, though nobody moved very far. Mrs. Mason squatted down and pulled her dress and petticoat over her head. Tangled up in the folds was the doll’s head, which fell and rolled across the floor, its china-blue eyes startling in the bristling light. Mrs. Mason tried to kick it behind the cabinet, but was too slow. The tall woman pounced, scooped up the doll’s head and held it up for all to see. “There.”

The sight seemed to enrage Mrs. Mason, who began tearing at her clothes. One enormous breast, the size of a savoy cabbage, escaped her camisole and, despite swearing no man on earth should ever see her knickers, she was now whirling them about above her head, looking, Paul thought, like a corpulent version of Liberty leading the people.

“I’m keeping this.” The tall woman waved the doll’s head at her. “It’s evidence.”

“You give that here, it’s mine.” And, seizing the chair again, Mrs. Mason launched another attack.

Paul tried to restrain her, but she was so beside herself he was beginning to think the whole farcical episode might end in murder.

A short, stocky man with a military mustache said: “Why doesn’t somebody ring the police?”

“No,” Mrs. Mason said. “There’s no need for that.”

Slowly, she put down the chair and, after a minute or so, began to get dressed. Her lips were blue. Then, just as everybody started to relax, she charged again, seized the doll’s head and ran out of the room.

Paul followed her and found her in the downstairs room, with a group of supporters gathered round her, like drones round a termite queen. One woman pressed a cup of tea into her hands; another fanned her with a copy of Spiritualist News, while the randomly chosen one held out a dress for her to put on.

There was a stir in the shop. The forces of law and order had arrived in the form of one bewildered police constable with a fresh, young, freckly face. There wasn’t a great deal he could do. Nobody wanted to press charges, though the one man she’d caught a glancing blow with the chair was still bleeding. The tall woman introduced herself as Miss Pole, which amused Paul, though no one else seemed to think it was funny. Fraud was mentioned. Mrs. Mason turned her eyes to the ceiling. “As God is my witness, I know nothing about it.”

“What do you mean, you know nothing about it?” Miss Pole demanded. “You had a doll’s head in your knickers.”

Wisely, Mrs. Mason burst into tears. One of the attendant women touched Paul’s arm. “Eh, dear God, that poor woman, she’s a martyr, she is. She’s been to prison, you know.”

Paul could quite believe it.

People were starting to leave. Nobody asked for their money back, perhaps feeling that one way or another they’d had a good show. The policeman left. Somehow, in all the turmoil, the doll’s head had vanished, no doubt safely ensconced in somebody else’s knickers. And not only the doll; cheesecloth, broomsticks, papier-mâché heads: all spirited away. Miss Pole glared at Mrs. Mason; Mrs. Mason smirked. She’d got away with it, not for the first time, nor probably the last.

Paul looked around for Angela and Sandra, but they’d gone, so he set off to walk alone. A raid had started, so there was no question of going back to the studio just yet. He was alternately amused and nauseated by the events of the evening, or so at first he told himself, but then as he walked, he realized he was once more separating himself from the experience, which at times he’d found deeply disturbing. Albert’s voice, the young man dying on the beach at Dunkirk, stood out from what would otherwise have been blatant fraud, and nothing else but fraud. Papier-mâché heads on broomsticks, fishy cheesecloth — fishy in every sense of the word — but was that the whole truth? He didn’t think so. He thought she’d been doing something else, though he didn’t believe the something else had much to do with contacting the dead.

He’d been afraid she’d tell him about Kenny, describe his last moments in the basement of the school. How could he be so frightened of something he didn’t believe was possible? How could that woman, who was in so many ways pathetic — and also, it had to be said, repulsive — have such power? He remembered seeing her in the downstairs room, naked, eyes glazed, fag end stuck to her bottom lip, an image by turns embarrassing, pitiable and nightmarish. He tried to erase it from his mind, but it drew strength from darkness. As he walked from street to street, he found it easy to believe they were leading him to a secret chamber, right at the heart of the blacked-out city, where a white, bloated figure sat enthroned, a grotesque Persephone, claiming to speak for millions of the mouthless dead.

You weren’t supposed to talk to the patients. The one time they’d caught her at it, Sister Matthews had come down on her like a ton of bricks. “ You are a ward maid. ” Lips pursed like a cat’s arse. “The patients are nothing to do with you.”

Aye, right. But when there’d been a rush on, after Dunkirk, she’d done all sorts, changed beds, emptied bedpans, pushed trolleys full of filthy sheets down to the laundry in the basement — and none of that was her job. Oh, and in between times, yes, she’d talked to the lads, and nobody pulled her up over it. Poor sods, they’d nowt to do all day except watch shadows moving on the walls, check the time to see how long it still was till visiting, strain to hear familiar footsteps coming up the ward.

Once things had settled down a bit, they played cards, talking through lips that hardly moved about stuff that had happened, some of the things they’d seen. Guardsmen forced to shave in seawater before they’d been allowed to get on a boat. “Only in England,” one lad said. And then on the train coming back how people had thrown cigarettes in at the windows, treated them like conquering heroes, but they weren’t heroes, not in their own estimation. Bloody cock-up — that was the general verdict. She’d never seen so many men so angry.

This poor lad here. Babbling away, but not making a lot of sense, poor soul. God knows what was going on in his head — and his breathing. And she thought hers was bad. First time she clapped eyes on him, she thought: You’re not long for this world, son. But he had, he’d hung on. And he’d talked, my God he had, how they’d lain in the open under the hot sun, no water, not a British plane in sight. Chap next to him showed him a silk scarf he’d bought for his fancy bit—“bought, my eye, bloody nicked it”—and then he’d died, lying there in the sand. “And I took the scarf. Wasn’t stealing, was it?” “ ’Course it wasn’t, love. It was no good to him.”

And that’s when Sister Matthews had pounced. Things were back to normal now, apparently. She was just the maid.

So now, though he went on babbling, she turned her back on him, kept herself busy polishing the taps, only then he said the one word that would have made any woman turn round. “Mam.”

He was staring round him, wild-eyed, not a clue where he was, poor lad. “Mam?”

She put her hand over his. “It’s all right, son. You go off to sleep, now, it’s all right.”

He closed his eyes. A few minutes later the fluttering behind his lids stopped, and his mouth fell slightly open. Had he gone? Still touching his hand, she watched his chest, saw the almost-imperceptible rise. No, not yet, but it wouldn’t be long.