Pat Barker - Noonday

At last, sounds of movement from the other side of the door. For one horrible moment, he thought he heard footsteps coming towards him. They were. He put his hands flat on the door, feeling Paul on the other side, inches away, but then Elinor said something, a floorboard creaked, and Paul moved away.

A few seconds later, Elinor’s voice called “Good-bye” from the top of the stairs. Neville could breathe normally at last, though it took a while for his heart to slow down. He wiped his palms on the front of his trousers.

Elinor came into the room, pale but composed.

“What did he want?”

“Oh, nothing, he just brought me these.” She was holding a brown envelope from which she pulled out a sheaf of photographs. The top one had been taken on a picnic, one of the annual outings the Slade had arranged for its students; he saw himself sitting beside Elinor, surrounded by faces he recognized, Henry Tonks’s skeletal form visible in the back row. He had no memory of the occasion, but there they all were.

He wished he hadn’t seen it. Elinor grimaced and put the envelope down on her dressing table. “He keeps bringing me things; it’s very good of him, really — it can’t be easy — but…Oh, I don’t know, sometimes I think he’s returning our married life to me in installments.” She smiled, as if to soften the bitterness. “I don’t think we should go on drinking, do you? I’ll put the kettle on.”

While she was busy in the kitchen, he combed his hair, straightened his tie, looked around for something to do, something to postpone the moment when he would have to think. He noticed a couple of paintings stacked against the wall — presumably another of Paul’s “installments.” Kneeling down, he turned the nearer painting round to face him.

Paul. A full-length nude study; shocking, as nude portraits tend to be. How very much too thin he was, that was Neville’s first reaction. The elongated arms and legs hardly seemed to belong with the slightly rounded, middle-aged belly and the scrotum’s sweaty sag. Kit’s gaze roamed all over the body before settling on the face, the eyes. He forgot, sometimes, how good Elinor was, but he was reminded of it now. Paul was here in the room. And had been all along, staring out of the canvas while they thrashed and heaved on the bed. Nonsense, of course. Absolute nonsense, of course he hadn’t. But the sense of Paul’s presence in the room with them remained. He couldn’t talk himself out of it and it disturbed him so deeply and at so many different levels that in the end he just wanted to get away and be alone.

The door opened as he was turning the painting round to face the wall. Elinor came into the room. “Here you are.” She handed him a cup. “Shall we sit through there?”

“Actually, I think I’d better be going.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes, I’m fine, I just think I…”

He didn’t know what he just thought, but he and Elinor were of one mind. They both wanted him to leave. And when, a scant five minutes later, he did, the memory he carried with him down the stairs and out onto the street was not Elinor’s naked body on the bed, but Paul’s painted eyes staring out of a canvas. That, and the sense of him standing, silent, on the other side of the bedroom door.

He’d have known the sound of Neville’s breathing anywhere, even on the other side of a bedroom door: that unmistakable rasp. No, it couldn’t have been anybody else.

But it seemed so improbable. He knew of course that they’d been great friends in their student days — perhaps even a bit more than that — but Neville’s behavior after Toby’s death had caused an inevitable breach. Never absolute — they’d met from time to time, but it had always been slightly awkward. In fact sometimes it was a struggle to get Elinor to be polite to him.

No, it made no sense. And yet there it was: the breathing. And he knew he hadn’t imagined it.

—

THAT NIGHT, on duty, he walked up and down Gower Street as often as he could, always stopping to look at Elinor’s windows. He knew she wouldn’t be there — nobody with any sense stayed on the top floor of a house during a raid — but still he looked. He knew it wasn’t his business. His own actions had made it not his business. But images of Elinor and Neville naked in a bed drifted about in front of him constantly, like floaters in his eye, distracting him from the outside world. And his imagination busied itself supplying the details…Creased and rumpled sheets, pillows tossed aside, clothes scattered over the floor…He kept reminding himself he had no right to be angry, but all the time his skin felt tighter. And tighter. Like a membrane stretched over a swelling boil.

When, late the following day, he encountered Neville again, it was at the National Gallery, at an exhibition of war artists’ work. Paul hadn’t wanted to go, but really he had no choice. Two of his recent paintings — the “vapid” ones, as Neville would undoubtedly have said — were on display. But he left it as late as he could to set off and arrived to find the gallery already crowded. Any event offering free drinks and nibbles attracted a crowd these days, though to be fair many of these people were hungry for culture as well. The gallery’s paintings had been removed to safety and you were aware, somehow, of the blank walls and echoing emptiness all around. This one brightly lit room, lined with paintings and drawings, seemed to be floating like a bubble on a dark tide.

He got himself a glass of wine from a trestle table near the door and looked around. Clark’s extravagantly domed forehead he recognized at once, and Henry Moore’s stocky, no-nonsense, I-come-from-Yorkshire build and demeanor. Piper was here, and Featherstone, and — Oh my God, everybody. One quick circuit, he promised himself, a chat with Clark to make sure his presence had been noted, and then he would leave.

Laura Knight appeared in front of him. Good grief, what was she wearing? He liked Laura, he enjoyed her scurrilous views on agents and galleries and advisory committees — she had something of Neville’s bite, but without his venom — so he stayed and talked to her, before moving on to Clark, who was so distracted by the pretty blonde topping up their glasses that he replied to Paul’s remarks almost at random before setting off in blatant pursuit. It was all very much as usual.

He was just beginning to think he’d done enough and could go, when he saw Neville. He was on the other side of the room, standing well back from a painting — not, thank God, one of Paul’s — and almost imperceptibly shaking his head. After a few minutes, he moved on. Paul retreated to a corner and watched his progress round the room, noticing how he created a ring of silence around him wherever he went. People were afraid of Neville. Everybody cringed before that vitriolic pen, though they all repeated — sometimes with glee — his contemptuous dismissals of other artists. They all took a vicarious pleasure in the pain inflicted, never quite knowing whether to hope that they themselves would be pilloried or ignored. Neville’s reviews were long, prominent and read. So although pilloried was bad, arguably being ignored was worse.

Neville moved from painting to painting, pausing now and then to jot down notes or peer short-sightedly at some detail of a composition. He wasn’t short-sighted: the whole thing was a performance. Now and then, somebody would come up to him, generally the artist whose work he was currently scrutinizing, but they invariably retreated after a few minutes’ exposure to that basilisk stare. Oh, he was powerful, all right. Only Paul, who knew him better, probably, than anybody else in the room, understood that what would matter to Neville, at this moment, more than anything else, was that he hadn’t a single painting on these walls.