Pat Barker - Noonday

I used to feel sorry for her, especially in the heat. It can’t be much fun. And the latrine bucket was harder for her than for most. Her knees wouldn’t take the weight, she had a terrible time of it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody quite as fat. I think you can always tell if somebody’s always been fat. And she hadn’t. There was a thin girl in there. I thought, when she looks in a mirror she doesn’t see herself. A bit like Kit, in a way.

Anyway, she wasn’t there last night — Bertha, that’s her name — and apparently she hasn’t been for quite a while. I asked Angela if she knew what had happened to her. She looked round and lowered her voice. “She got bombed, they took her to hospital, but she died a few days later. Poor woman, she was in no state to stand up to anything.” I think of her lying upstairs in a pokey little room somewhere, frightened but too tired or too breathless to get to the shelter. Or too embarrassed. I hope she didn’t die because she couldn’t use the bucket, but it’s only too probable. If I’d known where she was I’d’ve gone to see her.

Our other notable personality is Dorothea Stanhope, who’s using the shelter at the moment because she’s having the cellar plastered, and a new floor laid. It’s going to be wonderful when it’s finished, only she can’t get the workmen so it’s taking longer than she thought. There she sits, with her jewelry case clasped in skeletal hands, diamonds worth an absolute fortune dangling from long, leathery earlobes. She has two daughters. Actually, I think it’s an unmarried daughter and a daughter-in-law. The daughter, fresh-faced but no longer young — what can one say? A complete doormat — having failed in what, I suspect, for Dorothea, is the sole business of a girl’s life: getting a rich husband. “Gel,” as Dorothea says. I don’t know if she says “Injun” because I’ve never managed to bring the conversation round to the Wild West, but I’d bet quite a bit of money she does.

Dorothea’s favorite is her granddaughter. Six years old, and very good, she’s no bother, a lot less trouble than some of the adults. There was one particularly bad raid when she screamed — but then the rest of us nearly screamed too. The door was shaking with every blast; we thought it was coming in. Dorothea remained totally calm. There’s a whiff of the Raj about Dorothea; she’s very grand, but also a couple of decades out of date. Anyway, the cellar’s finally finished, according to Angela, so we won’t be seeing her again.

I slept in this morning, tried to work but couldn’t seem to get started, and then the afternoon was so warm I just couldn’t bear to stay indoors. So I went and sat in the garden of my old house on a kitchen chair I pulled out of the rubble, no doubt looking very eccentric and rather pathetic but I don’t care.

I love my garden. I’m no use at gardening, unlike Mother — or Rachel, for that matter — but some things seem to grow in spite of me. I have Michaelmas daisies and sunflowers peering over the fence into the next garden, almost as if nothing had happened, even though there’s ruin all around them. Paul went through a phase of painting sunflowers. He used to say they were absolutely extraordinary, different from any other flower, because they’re as tall as a man, you look them in the face — or they look you in the face — and they move. Measurably, in the course of a single day, following the sun. And then they age in the same way as people. They develop a stoop, a sort of dowager’s hump, and the seed heads fold in on themselves, like an old man’s mouth without teeth.

Paul, Paul, bloody Paul. Just as I was getting thoroughly exasperated with myself, I felt a shadow falling across me. Looked up and there he was. He was holding the notice with my new address on it. “I hope you’re going to put that back,” I said.

“Well,” he said.

I wasn’t going to help him out, but eventually he did manage to get going, all by himself. It was very sudden, he said. It really was rather a shock, he said. Was I sure I was doing the right thing? Had I really thought it through?

What I heard, loud and clear, was the one question he didn’t ask: WHY? He didn’t dare ask, because then I might have told him. And then the whole business about the girl would be dragged into the open and he’s probably fooling himself it needn’t be. Not now, and possibly not ever. I suppose I could have forced the issue, but really I couldn’t be bothered.

He hung about. There was only the one chair, so after a while he sat in the grass at my feet, but that put him at a disadvantage so he stood up again, muttering something about if I wasn’t happy I should have said. Meaning the cottage, I suppose. I did say; he wasn’t listening. Anyway, it’s not about the cottage. It was awful. Really, really awful. I was glad when he gave up and went away.

I just sat there, after he’d gone, looking at the ruin of our life together. Love affairs don’t need much — you can manage the whole thing on moonlight and roses, if you have to. But a marriage needs things, routines, a framework, habits, and all of ours were ripped away. I could forgive him the girl — well, no, not yet, but one day perhaps. What I can’t forgive, what I’m afraid I may never be able to forgive, is the look of relief on his face when all this was destroyed.

Neville walked as far as Russell Square before stopping to look back at the Ministry of Information: a brutal gray mass dominating the skyline. Then he selected a bench where he could sit with his back to it and began enjoying the last warmth of the sun as best he could through his heavy clothes. A few feet away, a pigeon crooned and preened, puffed out its neck feathers, gave its inane, throaty chuckle. He aimed a kick at the bird. “Why don’t you do something useful? Piss off up there and shit on it?” The pigeon lifted off, flapped a few yards farther away, and settled contemptuously on the grass.

“Kicking pigeons now, are we?”

He spun round to see Elinor sitting on the grass. She was looking up at him, so amused, so, in a way, accepting, that he had to get up and go to her. Then, feeling he couldn’t conduct even a brief conversation looking down on her like this, lowered himself onto the prickly grass. “Sorry.”

“What for? Wasn’t me you kicked.”

“Language.”

“Shouldn’t worry, I don’t suppose it understood.”

All around, people were sitting or lying in couples or singly on the grass, the girls still in their summer dresses. The brilliant summer had given way to a golden and apparently endless autumn, almost as if the bombs that stopped the clocks had power to stop the seasons as well.

Elinor was stretched out, her eyes closed. It pleased him that she didn’t feel the need to sit up, to make conversation. Slowly, he lay back himself, enjoying the warmth of the sun on his lids. Lying here like this, they had no past — or none that had the power to hurt them now — and, quite possibly, no future; but that didn’t seem to matter. He knew from gossip at the depot that she was living alone. And he knew about Paul and Sandra. Some men would have seized the opportunity, but he’d always been held back by diffidence, the knowledge that he wasn’t attractive. Long before the injury to his face, he’d felt that. Years of reconstructive surgery had merely confirmed what he already knew: that his place was in the dark, listening to the tap-tap of approaching feet, a muffled voice, a face he couldn’t see, and didn’t want to see.

After a while, though, he felt he ought to say something. “How’s Paul?”