Pat Barker - Noonday

Behind his back, he heard Clark and Featherstone laughing, then the lift doors rattled open. They exchanged a few more words — he was too far away to hear — and then, thank God, they were gone. He was free to move again.

Hilde looked up as he came into the room. Bertram’s empty desk had been pushed against the wall, so they had slightly more space to move around. Bertram hadn’t appeared for three weeks now. Was that significant? Probably not. Suddenly, he thought: Perhaps there’s an oubliette in the basement? Somewhere they put people whom they want to forget? Perhaps Bertram and all kinds of other people were down there, still vainly protesting their innocence, as their long, white beards grew and grew until they reached the floor…

“I’m glad you find it amusing,” Hilde said.

Oh God, he was supposed to be editing her draft translation of Women Under the Nazis, the latest pamphlet in the series they were working on together.

“Bowling along,” he said, having not taken in a word. All those women under the Nazis. What a waste. Why couldn’t at least one of them be under him? He glanced at the clock: Oh God, another two hours of this. I’m going to leave, he thought. I really am going to leave.

He was tempted to begin clearing his desk there and then. Well, why not? What was stopping him? He lifted his briefcase onto the desk and began filling it with odds and ends. There wasn’t much: he hadn’t been here long enough to accumulate a load of stuff. Hilde watched him without comment for a time, then, seeing him trying to stick some papers into a file that was slightly too small, came across and held it open for him. Then she cleared her throat in that way she had. “Have they asked you to leave?”

“Sacked me, you mean? No, quite the opposite, in fact. They’ve offered me a job.” Lies, all lies.

“Here?”

“No, somewhere near Oxford.”

“Will you take it?”

He paused in the act of taking his hat from the peg. “Do you know, I have absolutely no idea.”

They shook hands. For some reason she blushed and on impulse he leaned forward and kissed her thin cheek.

Then he was off, down the corridor, past the Gents — no, on second thoughts, into the Gents. He splashed his face and hands — that hour in Dodsworth’s room had made him feel dirty — then he glanced over his shoulder to check the cubicles were empty, twined his fingers round one of the chains that fastened the plastic nailbrushes to the wall, and pulled. He’d always loathed them. Tightening his grip, he pulled again and this time succeeded in wrenching it off the wall. It hurt like hell; the chain had actually left a weal on the side of his hand. But it was worth it. Then, raising his eyes, he confronted the stranger in the glass.

Would he have done it? The nailbrush rested in the palm of his hand, rough against the skin, rectangular, brick-shaped. Would he have killed Tarrant if that air-raid warden hadn’t showed up and started flashing his torch? Ninety-nine percent of the time, his answer to this question was a resounding no, of course not, never in a million years. But, at other times, when he was fully absorbed in something that needed concentration, not thinking about Tarrant at all, he was aware of a belief taking shape in the shadows of his mind, not that he might have done it, but that he had done it. In dreams he relived those moments after the bomb fell, and woke knowing, not with satisfaction but with almost unbearable sorrow, that Tarrant was dead.

He looked down at the brush. A very nice little souvenir, he thought. He’d put it on the mantelpiece, he decided, and then remembered that he didn’t have a mantelpiece. The house was boarded up; he was living at his club. A stultifyingly boring place, he was buggered if he was going back there, not until he’d anesthetized himself in the nearest bar.

Though, walking away from the building — for the last time, the last time —he thought he wouldn’t go to the pub after all, he’d go to see Elinor, at least see if she was in. She was back in London — he knew that from Dana, who’d had lunch with her — but she hadn’t been in touch. He sensed, ringing the bell, and ringing it again, that she was there, but not answering the door. It was starting to look as if their time together, which had meant so much to him, had meant little, or nothing, to her.

Drink. He walked away down the street and knew that he was being watched, that she was at the window behind him. Though he reminded himself sharply that he couldn’t know; perhaps he was just being paranoid. God knows, there was enough paranoia about. He turned into the nearest pub; he thought he’d once had a drink with Tarrant in there, but couldn’t be sure. There was nobody he knew at the bar. Almost, he missed his evenings with the terrapin, which was now, presumably, dead. Another link with the past broken. But then he wondered: how long did terrapins live? Perhaps his parents, for some extraordinary reason, had kept replacing the terrapin and not told him.

He knocked back the first whisky so fast his eyes watered — and that was saying a lot. Then he ordered the second straight away and sat morosely in a corner. Everything seemed to be conspiring against him. Dodsworth — that was unaccountable. Tarrant’s success, his own…Well, “neglect” was hardly the right word, more like a bloody conspiracy. No wonder he couldn’t paint. Everybody needs a context, an echo coming back to them — and he didn’t have that. He seemed to be living in a vacuum, a glass tank that cut him off from the outside world. There was only Anne, really, to attach him to life. He lived and breathed in the memory of her. The way, when she was a tiny child, just a toddler, she used to come into his bed in the mornings, bouncing up and down, waving her favorite toy, a blue rabbit: I love Babbit! I love Babbit! It had been a small grief for him when, finally, she’d learned to say “rabbit.”

Lost in his memories, he resurfaced to hear the sirens wailing. Several people immediately left, though he thought the pub had been emptying for the past hour. How many drinks had he had? There seemed to be an impressive array of glasses in front of him, unless of course he was seeing double. He got to his feet easily enough, but found it unexpectedly difficult to weave his way between the tables to the bar.

“Shame again.”

Was that a fractional hesitation? He met the barman’s eye.

“Right you are, sir.”

By the time he left, he was…numb. Absolutely clear mentally, though: he did honestly believe there was such a thing as drinking yourself sober. The anger was still there, bubbling away under the surface, but he felt agreeably numbed as he stood swaying on the pavement, buffeted by waves of noise. He might have one last go at seeing Elinor. She wouldn’t be in, of course. She’d have taken refuge in one of the shelters, but it was at least worth a try.

Several fires were blazing, the worst of them out of control. Black water lay around in puddles; he sloshed through them, finding it quite difficult to keep a straight line. A fireman was standing in the road holding on to a hose, his eyes glazed with the tedium of what he was doing. By far the worst job, the fire service: equal parts boredom and terror.

Elinor’s house was completely blacked out, of course: no way of telling whether she was in or not, but he rang the doorbell anyway. Rather to his surprise it was answered immediately by a young woman wearing a nurse’s cap and cape. She was going on duty and had come to the door almost by accident, but that didn’t matter — he was in. He thought he might as well go up and see if Elinor was in. If not, fair enough, he’d just go back home, a friendly tap on the terrapin’s tank and straight upstairs to bed. Only then he remembered that he couldn’t do that. No terrapin, no tank, no home.