Pat Barker - Noonday

It was a mistake to go to the house — or perhaps not — perhaps I needed that final brutality to be able to stop feeling. Because I did stop. I went to a Lyons Corner House and sat over a pot of tea and gradually the numbness spread. I remembered the first weeks after Toby died, how unfeeling I was, how ruthlessly efficient. I don’t think I’ve ever been as efficient as that in my entire life. Well — until now.

I drank the tea, paid the bill, checked to see how much money I had in my purse and set off. Two hours later, I’d found a flat on the top floor of a house in Gower Street, two doors down from where I used to live as a student. Huge rooms; one of them, at the back, has wonderful light. I can imagine myself painting in there. Then there’s a living room, a bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom, all good-sized — and it’s unbelievably cheap. Of course it’s cheap because it’s lethal, right at the top of the house, in an area that’s seen a lot of bombing, but I don’t care about that.

I’m quite clear. This is about survival now. This has the power to destroy me and I’m not going to let it.

But I keep replaying that scene. Paul and the girl kissing, the pretended tug of war, his mock surrender, them going back into the house together. Oh, and then I follow them up the stairs…It’s like a film I’m being forced to watch, but there’s no emotion. I seem to have run out of that.

It’s a strange feeling. Rather like the cordoned-off roads and squares where a time bomb’s fallen. You look across the tape at sunlit emptiness, but you’re not allowed in. And you know there are other quiet, roped-off places, all over London, but you also know the life of London goes on, the people, the traffic, all that roar and bustle forcing itself down side streets and alleys, finding new channels, new ways through. And I think my life’s going to be like that. I’m not going to be roped off.

It would have been so easy after seeing Paul and that girl to creep back to the cottage, try to pretend it hadn’t happened, convert my mother’s bedroom into a studio and paint there. Happy children removed to safety, playing on the village green. Do what Paul wants. Do what Clark wants. Hide. And I think: No. This is my place, my city, and I’m not going to let anybody force me out of it.

He thought perhaps it was the third incident of the night, but could never afterwards be sure. A pub had been hit — he remembered that. They’d got it roped off and were waiting for a heavy rescue squad to arrive. Three houses adjoining the pub had collapsed and there was minor damage to several others farther up the road. The people who lived in these houses were safe in shelters, presumably; though in for quite a nasty shock when they came out.

Then somebody called from across the street to say there was an old couple living in one of the damaged houses. They turned to see a stout, middle-aged woman with her hair in neat rows of curlers, the metal glinting in the light of flares, as aggressive as shark’s teeth.

“She’s got arthritis, walks with a stick.”

Charlie said: “We’d better just have a look.” She was so obviously the sort of woman who knows everybody’s business they couldn’t afford to ignore it.

Stopping outside the house, Charlie bent and shouted through the letter box. No answer.

“They’ll be in there.” The woman had followed them and was still watching from the other side of the road.

“You get yourself under cover, Missis!” Charlie shouted back. He turned to Paul. “What do you think?”

Paul shrugged. “She’ll know.”

Charlie nodded, blew out his lips hard, then wrapped his hand in his coat and smashed the window. He reached through and fiddled with the catch. Often they were jammed under layers of paint, but this one opened. They climbed in, and found themselves in a neat front room. A vase of red plastic roses stood on a sideboard between photographs of children, a boy and a girl, in school uniform. Flashing his torch, Charlie led the way into the passage and opened the door into the back room.

Charlie went in, Paul followed. And there they were, lying side by side on a bed, the counterpane pulled up to their chins; not curled up, as people normally are when they sleep, nor lying chest to back, spoon-fashion, as so many married couples do. No, they lay on their backs, stretched out, an oddly formal position. Stiff. They might have been lying in a double grave. As indeed they were. They’d have woken by now, if this was sleep.

Paul and Charlie looked at each other, Charlie still breathless after scrabbling through the window. Brian followed them in, grumbling as always, though the words died on his lips as he sensed the intensity of their silence. The three of them moved closer to the bed. The old couple lay there, so married, so ordinary — the woman’s stick had been hooked over the bedpost so she could reach it easily during the night — and yet infinitely remote, like a medieval knight and lady on a tomb, their blank eyes staring at the vaulted ceiling, unmoving, unchanging, as the slow, murderous centuries pass. Paul felt something like reverence and he thought the others did too. Even Charlie was silenced, and nothing ever stopped Charlie cracking jokes.

Automatically, Paul touched their necks, felt for a pulse, shook his head. What had killed them? There were no obvious wounds. Gently, feeling he was invading their privacy, he pulled the bedclothes back and saw, with a stab of pity, that they were holding hands.

“Shock?” Charlie said. He had to clear his throat to produce the word.

Paul shrugged. “Suppose so.”

He’d seen people die of shock before: healthy young men lying at the bottom of a trench with not a mark on them anywhere. Charlie, who he knew had served in France, must have seen it too. Had the old couple heard the bomb come shrieking down? Had he reached out and held her hand to comfort her in the last seconds before it fell? So peaceful, they were. So quiet. Their silence was a force spreading out around them, trivializing the yapping of the guns and the thud of exploding bombs.

Nick had come in through the window and was pushing to the front, eager to see.

“I’d stay back if I were you,” Paul said.

He was tense, expecting Nick to say something utterly crass, but instead he stooped, picked up a cardigan that had slipped onto the floor and, for some reason, draped it carefully over the back of a chair. The others, turning their heads to witness this strange ritual, caught themselves reflected in a mirror, and stood like that, motionless, as if the stillness of the couple on the bed had reached and enfolded everybody in the room.

How long they might have stayed like that Paul never knew. The silence was broken by a whimper that seemed, for one horrific moment, to be coming from the couple on the bed. They looked at each other. The sound did seem to be coming from the bed. Paul shuffled along the wall and felt along the floor. Almost immediately his exploring fingers encountered something disgustingly warm and moist, and he snatched his hand back. Nick, meanwhile, was on his knees peering under the bed. “Come on, boy. Come on.” He slapped his thighs, and a small, white-and-brown Jack Russell terrier, ears flattened against its head, crept towards him on its belly. It must have been there all the time, hiding between the bed and the wall, reaching up to lick a still-warm hand.

“Oh, you’ve got a friend there all right,” Charlie said, as the dog leapt up and tried to lick Nick’s mouth.

“Gerroff.” Nick shoved the dog inside his coat and looked at Charlie, obviously expecting disagreement. “Well, we can’t leave it here.”