Pat Barker: Noonday

Mrs. Murchison turned to Nurse Wiggins. “You’ll have a cup, Joan?”

“No, I’ll be getting back.”

In the turmoil of the last few minutes, the dying woman had been completely forgotten. Only now, conscience-stricken, Rachel remembered and ran upstairs.

Elinor heard her mother wanting to know what was going on. She sounded wide awake, no doubt wrenched into full consciousness by the roar of the plane. A second later, there were footsteps on the landing and Rachel appeared, leaning over the bannisters. “You can come up now.”

She was speaking to Alex, who grimaced and put down his glass. Elinor smiled, tried to look encouraging. She wondered what it was like to be Alex, to have seen so many men his own age and even younger killed, and then to come back into this other world, where an old woman dying in her own bed, surrounded by people who loved her, was treated as a tragedy. They never really come back, she thought, looking at Alex, thinking of Toby. Wondering if the same might not be true of Paul.

“You too, Elinor.”

She didn’t want to go; she thought Alex would want time alone with his grandmother — they’d been so close — but evidently Rachel thought otherwise. For whatever reason, she’d decided the whole family should all be there together.

Alex was sitting with his back to the door when she entered the room, his left hand resting on his grandmother’s wrinkled arm, her dead-white skin and his brown hand shockingly contrasted against the pale blue coverlet. It imprinted itself on her mind, that image; she knew she would always remember it. Mother was smiling, though she could only smile with one side of her face; the other was twisted into a permanent droop or sneer. And she was struggling to speak.

“It’s all right, Gran.” Alex obviously meant don’t bother, don’t try to speak, but the old woman’s mouth worked and worked at the words that wouldn’t come. Then: “Toby,” she said. “I knew you’d come.”

Elinor saw Alex flinch. Rachel, who was standing on the other side of the bed, leaned forward as if to protect her son. Too late for that, Elinor thought. You should have been doing that years ago.

Shortly afterwards, Mother drifted off to sleep again. She seemed contented; happy, even. They listened to her breathing, waiting, and perhaps — some of them — longing, for a change in the rhythm, but, though the gaps between one breath and the next seemed sometimes impossibly long, her chest still rose and fell with the same remorseless regularity. This might go on for days.

I can’t bear it, Elinor thought. And then: Don’t be stupid, of course you can.

In the end the prolonged silence became too revealing. “I’ll get Nurse Wiggins,” Elinor said. She didn’t know what Nurse Wiggins could do, but she felt the family atmosphere needed diluting. She ran quickly upstairs and tapped on the door at the end of the corridor. Nurse Wiggins appeared, bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, all that fresh, jolly hardness gone. “Yes, of course I’ll come.” She stifled a yawn, then yawned again. Moist, pink, catlike interior; huge tonsils.

Beginning to relax slightly, Elinor went first to her own room to splash her face with tepid water — no water was really cold this summer — was tempted to lie down for half an hour, but decided she ought to go downstairs. When she reached the bottom step she saw Alex and Rachel standing under Toby’s portrait in the hall. Something about their attitude suggested the talk was private, so she retreated a few steps and settled down to wait.

Rachel was saying in a low, urgent voice, “You will stay, won’t you?”

“Tonight? Yes.”

“Only one night? I hoped you…”

“Yes?”

“Well, I hoped you’d stay till the end.”

“Don’t you think I’ve done enough?”

“You’ve only been here a couple of hours.”

“I don’t mean now. ”

“Look, it’ll only be a day or two. If that.”

“I’ve got things to do in town.”

“Can’t they wait?”

“I’ve got a life.”

“She loved you more than anybody.”

“Me?”

He jerked his head at the portrait, then walked out into the garden, the front door banging shut behind him. Rachel stood for a moment, looking after him, and then, head down, crossed the hall into the drawing room.

Elinor lingered on the stairs for a minute, then went to stand where they’d been standing. Killed in action, she read, looking at the plaque, and even that wasn’t true. She was remembering an incident when Alex had been five or six years old. He’d come running in from the garden, had stopped under the portrait, and pulled his sweater over his head. “Christ, it’s hot!” She remembered him saying it, she’d thought it so funny at the time, his chubby red face struggling out of the neck hole, first one ear, then the other, almost as if the sweater were giving birth to him. Then, suddenly, he stopped, one arm still in the sleeve, and stared at the portrait. “It wasn’t my fault!” Yelling, right at the top of his voice. Then, freeing his arm, he threw the sweater at the painting. There’d been something disturbing about the little boy shouting at the painted face of a man he couldn’t remember. She’d wanted to…intervene, protect him somehow — but from what? It wasn’t my fault. She hadn’t known what it meant, then, and she wasn’t sure she knew now. Of course, it might have been a reference to some childish game he was in the middle of, perhaps he’d been accused of breaking the rules, something like that, but no, it had been very definitely directed at the portrait. At Toby. So what was it? A repudiation of the grief that hung over the house like a pall of black smoke and wouldn’t go away? A refusal to feel guilt — and how guilty they all felt, then and now. Especially now, when another generation of young men was dying. We dropped the catch, she thought. Our generation. Wondering why she’d suddenly strayed into cricket: the memory of Alex’s white sweater, perhaps. And Alex’s generation is paying the price.

She looked across the hall and saw him still standing there, the angry little boy. And then he turned and ran out into the garden, where the dazzling light swallowed him, like the skin on a sunlit sea.

Crossing the hall, she was about to follow that flitting shadow into the garden, when she stopped, for there, pacing up and down the lawn, smoking furiously, was the adult Alex. As she watched, he turned towards the house and stared straight at her. She raised a hand to wave, then realized that he couldn’t see her. From where he stood, the hall would be in darkness.

She couldn’t imagine what he felt, now the old woman who’d loved him and used him as a substitute for her dead son was herself dying. Loss? Relief? Or did he perhaps no longer care much either way? His face really had aged; she’d noticed it earlier, but it struck her again, now, with renewed force. When he was talking, the play of expression on his face softened the lines around his eyes and mouth, but now, in repose, they looked as if they’d been scored in with a knife. She remembered the identical transformation in Toby; how, suddenly, from being two years older, he was five, ten, fifteen years older. Out of reach.

As Alex was. He was his own man now. The war that had taken so much away from him, had given him that, at least.

Elinor woke early from confused dreams of Paul. She’d telephoned twice the previous night, had listened to the phone ring in their empty house, walked in memory through the familiar rooms, seeing the dented cushions, hearing the affronted silence. What on earth could he be doing? He couldn’t be on duty every night, but he certainly wasn’t at home. Working late in his studio, she guessed, perhaps even sleeping there — he did that sometimes when she was away from home — but there was no telephone in the studio so she had no way of contacting him.