Pat Barker - Noonday

Leading the way up to his studio, he remembered the stairs to Bertha Mason’s room, the moment when he’d realized he couldn’t move, that in all probability he was going to die there, without dignity, without purpose, like a fox in a stopped earth, and the minute he unlocked the door he turned and caught Sandra in his arms, his mouth groping for hers. They fell onto the rumpled divan and there the long night ended, in kisses and cries and, finally, at last, at long last, sleep.

He couldn’t get her out of his head.

Not Sandra; he’d loved every minute of their time together, but after she’d put on her clothes and gone home, he scarcely thought of her. No, it was Bertha Mason he couldn’t forget. Bertha, on the table, blank-eyed, fag end stuck to her bottom lip; Bertha, on the platform, whirling black silk bloomers around above her head; Bertha, in his arms, piss dripping down her legs and forming a puddle on the floor. And that voice: the voice in the darkness that couldn’t have been hers, and couldn’t not have been hers. There she was: old, fat, mad, quite possibly dying — utterly repulsive — and he couldn’t forget her.

You know what the Chinese say, don’t you?

Perhaps Charlie’s remark about becoming responsible for the life you save was preying on his mind. Whatever the reason, he knew he had to see her again. She might, of course, be dead by now, or she could have been discharged from hospital, sent to some hostel for people made homeless by the bombing, but on the whole he didn’t think so. She’d been in too bad a state for that. No, with any luck she’d still be in Guy’s. If she was alive.

Arriving at the hospital in the late afternoon, he was directed to the third floor. Grim corridors, no natural light, though great efforts were being made to cheer things up: there was even a vase of flowers on a table at the center of the ward. A nurse pointed to a screened-off bed at the far end. Pushing the screen slightly to one side, he saw Bertha sitting up in bed with her head bandaged, looking like a huge, abandoned baby.

“Hello, Mrs. Mason. How are you?”

He’d brought some flowers from the garden of his ruined home: bronze and yellow chrysanthemums, past their best. He couldn’t see a vase to put them in, so simply laid them at the foot of her bed, where their graveyard smell quickly spread and filled the small space inside the screens.

At first glance, he thought she looked better than he’d expected: she’d lost that lard-white color; but when he looked more closely, he realized the redness of her cheeks and chin was anything but healthy. He touched her hand — shaking it seemed too formal — and found her flesh hot and clammy. He said, “I don’t know if you remember me, I was one of the—”

“Yes, hello.”

He could tell she wasn’t sure. “I was in the room with you the other night. After the bomb.”

Her eyes widened. “So you were. You asked me what I was frightened of.”

He couldn’t remember asking her that. In fact, he was sure he hadn’t. It wasn’t the kind of thing you said to injured people in an air raid.

“People think, oh, she knows a lot about the afterlife, she believes in it, so what’s she got to be frightened of? If they knew what it’s like down there at the moment they’d be bloody frightened. Bedlam, bloody bedlam. People running round in circles, half of ’em don’t even know they’ve passed.”

She’d said that the first time he’d met her, only now it made more of an impression. She must’ve received a Christian education — of some kind — and yet she’d ended up with a view of the afterlife hardly distinguishable from Homer’s. Shades, shadows; people who’d rather have life on any terms than endure the insubstantial misery of the underworld.

“They haven’t been,” she said.

“Who haven’t?”

“Mr. and Mrs. Lowe. You know, from the Temple?”

The Temple, he supposed, must be the pawnbroker’s. “They probably don’t know where you are.”

“They didn’t come to see me when I was in the nick either, they knew where I was then.” She was making curious mumbling motions with her lips: chewing a vile and bitter cud. “Howard didn’t come either, said he was ill, I knew he wasn’t, he was with his fancy woman.”

“Howard’s your husband?”

“I wasn’t supposed to know about her, but I did, of course, there’s always some kind person’ll tell you.” She looked at him, and her eyes were suddenly sharp. “Won’t be long before somebody tells your wife about you.”

“Is there anything I can get you?”

“No, I’ve got everything I want, thank you. Peace and quiet, that’s all any of us really want, isn’t it?”

Paul stood up at once.

“No, not you. Him. ”

He glanced round. “Who?”

She was looking at the chair on the other side of the bed, although her eyes seemed to be focused not on the chair itself but on its occupant. Only there was nobody there.

“Is it Howard?”

“ ’Course it bloody isn’t. Bugger never bloody come when he was alive, he’s not gunna show up now, is he? No, it’s that fella, he keeps coming round, Payne, whatever he calls himself. Telling me what I should and shouldn’t say — only it’s not me saying it — it’s Albert — and I just can’t get him to see. ” She was staring at the chair, pleading, justifying herself.

“Why don’t you get Albert to talk to him? Well, he’d understand then, wouldn’t he?” She didn’t seem to have heard. “Is he here now? Albert?”

“God only knows, he’s a law unto himself. I’m fed up with it.” She lay back against the pillows and closed her eyes.

Paul glanced round again, thinking: I should go, but somehow he couldn’t just walk out and leave her here like this. He looked again and saw her face was changing: the jaw becoming firmer, the brow ridges more prominent. How could she do that? She couldn’t, of course. Nobody could. But then how did she change the way he saw her?

Albert’s voice: “I’m here all the time, it just doesn’t register; to be honest, not a lot does register, these days. You should see the amount of gin she gets through.”

“She’s not well, is she?” Paul wondered if he was doing the right thing, going along with the pretense — if pretense it was. But he didn’t know what else to do. “She’s not a good color.”

“She’s a goner, if you ask me.”

“Is she really that bad?”

“You’ve only got to look at her.”

Paul nodded towards the empty chair. “Does he really exist?”

“Oh God yes, he’s the one got her put inside — and he’s been nosing around again. Told her she could be tried as a witch, scared the shit out of her. She couldn’t face prison again, nearly killed her last time.”

In the seance a great deal had been made of Albert’s long service on the Western Front, his officer status, but this was a music-hall version of an upper-class accent, and even that was slipping fast. “You know, I met her in Russell Square once.”

“I remember. We’re not all sozzled on gin.”

“She told me there was a boy standing behind me.”

“Well, there is, isn’t there?” Albert sounded bored. “I mean, it’s not as if you don’t know he’s there.”

His voice had begun to slur, vowel sounds elongating until the words became incomprehensible. Paul watched Bertha’s face become puddingy again, a doughy, undifferentiated mass in which once-pretty features were submerged in fat. It had never struck him before, but now he thought that in her youth she must have been beautiful. Was she asleep? She was breathing noisily through her open mouth, her eyes half closed, the whites unnervingly visible.