Pat Barker - Noonday

It was imperative to thank him. “No, well, it’s lovely to have these. Thank you.”

The words stuck in her throat. An awkward silence fell. So far there’d been no mention of why they were here, in this strange room.

He cleared his throat. “So you decided you couldn’t stand the cottage after all?” The cough was a nervous tic; he was inching his way forward.

“I need a London base.”

Innocuous enough, on the surface, but “I need” was the language of separation and they both knew it. A few days ago this would have been a joint decision. He looked at the fireplace, at the empty grate. “I hear you’ve been commissioned.”

“Yes, I went to see Clark.”

“Congratulations.”

“Who told you?”

“Neville.”

“I don’t know how he knew.”

“He always knows; he’s eaten up with jealousy.”

He was inviting her to gang up against Kit, which at some points in the past she would have been very ready to do. But not anymore. “I saw you,” she said. “With that girl.”

“Ah.”

After waiting a few seconds, she let out an incredulous laugh, only just not a yelp. “Is that it?”

“I don’t see what else I can say.”

“You could — oh, I don’t know… Explain? ”

“It just happened.”

“It just happened?”

He spread his hands.

“Oh, I see. The war, the nasty bombs — everybody jumping into bed with everybody else. So you thought you had to jump too?”

“I’m not saying I’m proud of it.”

“Hallelujah!”

Silence. His almost-unnaturally long, slim fingers were beating a tattoo on the arm of the chair.

“So what happens now?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, are you going to live together? Do you want a divorce?”

He looked startled. “No, of course not, it’s over. She’s gone.”

“Well, that’s convenient.”

“It didn’t…Well, frankly, it wasn’t all that important. Not to me.”

“And you think that makes it better?”

He clearly didn’t know what to say.

“Do you know, Paul, I’d actually rather you were breaking your heart over her. I wish you were in love with her; I wish you were suffering the torments of the damned, because then it would mean something. Better that than an itch in the groin you couldn’t resist scratching.”

The clock on the mantelpiece ticked, stitching the silence. The sound seemed to penetrate his brain, at last. “You bought a clock.”

“Yes.” She turned to look at it. “Which reminds me, I’m due on duty in a few minutes.”

“Do you have anywhere you can paint?”

“Through there.”

“North facing?”

She stood up. What did one say in these circumstances? It was hardly a normal parting: twelve hours from now one or other of them might be dead. She felt a tide of desolation sweep over her for the lostness of the one who would be left; never again to have the opportunity of saying what needed to be said. Well, here was the opportunity. Here. Now. And yet she couldn’t speak.

He stood up. “There’s no need to see me out.”

She shook her head. Going down the stairs, they didn’t speak at all. As she opened the front door onto the steps, she tried to think of something to say, but her mind had gone blank.

On the pavement he turned and looked at her. “Take care.”

She nodded. “And you.”

It wasn’t much, but it would have to do.

The first call came just before one in the morning. Elinor had been lying on one of the sofas reading grubby, tattered magazines, unable to sleep, thinking about Paul, the look on his face, the way he’d walked off down the street. She’d known he’d stop at the corner and look back and she’d gone inside so he wouldn’t see her standing there. A petty power-play, a means of hurting, of establishing control: she and Paul had never carried on like that, and now they did. Sad. Her mouth was dry and stale; she was too tired to think straight. It was almost a relief when the telephones started to ring.

She was working with Dana Kresberg tonight. She liked Dana, and was rather intrigued by her. As an American, Dana could so easily have sat out these nights very comfortably in the Savoy; she could have gone out onto the balcony after dinner, with a number of American journalists, watching the night’s raid almost as if it were a firework display. And why not? This was not, after all, their war: or not yet. But Dana had chosen, instead, to become involved, to risk life and limb night after night, driving an ambulance through bombed and burning streets, and Elinor had never asked her why. Hatred of fascism? A love of adventure? Compassion for trapped and suffering people? An addiction to danger, perhaps? Everybody’s motives were a great mixture, but, unlike Londoners, Dana didn’t have the most basic motivation: defending your home. And that made her stand out in the team of drivers working out of the depot in Tottenham Court Road.

Dana’s great advantage was that she was outside the English class system. Elinor watched, with some amusement, as Dana negotiated its various ravines and rapids with the assurance of a sleepwalker. She even got on with Derek James, whose years as a taxi driver had given him an encyclopedic knowledge of London’s back streets, which was invaluable. But he had a chip on his shoulder. Well, it was more like a log, really. “Timber yard,” said Kit, whose public-school accent made him the preferred butt of Derek’s not-always-funny jokes. But Derek accepted Dana totally; was, in fact, almost mesmerized by her.

Tonight, though, Elinor and Dana were working together. Around about 12:45 a.m., their turn came. They grabbed their tin hats — very useful for shielding exposed wounds from plaster dust or putting out an incendiary, but almost certainly useless at protecting the brain from falling bricks — and pulled on the black greatcoats that reached to their ankles and impeded their movements much as a suit of cardboard armor might have done. It was Elinor’s turn to drive and that pleased her. She and Dana each thought the other drove like a lunatic, and possibly they were both right. But then, perhaps, in these conditions there was no other way to drive. Oncoming vehicles were mere pinpricks of light, little, piggy, red eyes looming out of the night. Crashes were frequent in the early part of the evening, before burning fires illuminated the streets. Dana kept ringing the bell, its clang-clang adding to the baying and yapping of antiaircraft guns. Elinor crouched over the wheel, peering through the windscreen for new craters that had not yet been marked by blue warning lights. Dust sifted in through the open windows and settled on their shoulders. More seriously, it formed a film over the windscreen, blurring what little vision they had. But even in this darkness, Elinor recognized the familiar streets. She was driving along the route she’d walked three hours before, turning the corner, now, into Bedford Square.

“This is it,” Dana said.

Elinor pulled up at the curb. They clambered down onto the road and started walking towards the scene of the incident. Two blue lights stood on the rubble-strewn pavement and the usual crowd had gathered. One house had been badly hit. The houses on either side were damaged, but they’d been empty, a warden told them. One belonged to an old couple who’d gone to stay with their married daughter in the country; the other to a middle-aged couple, but they definitely wouldn’t be in there, he knew for a fact they always went to the shelter. “It’s an old lady lives in that one. Two daughters and a—”

“Yes, I know,” Elinor said.

It was Dorothea Stanhope’s house. She knew the names of the younger women and the child, but in the stress of the moment they escaped her.