Pat Barker - Noonday

He knocked. No answer, as he’d expected, but then he heard a movement inside the room. “Elinor?”

A second later, the door opened. She was pulling her silk wrap together over her nightdress.

“You should be in a shelter,” he said, accusingly.

“It’s late, Kit. What do you want?”

“Just to talk. Please?”

“All right, but not long.” She stepped back. “Have you been drinking?”

He slumped onto the sofa. “ ’Course I’ve been bloody drinking, I’ve had that little pipsqueak Dodsworth on to me again.” He couldn’t remember whether he’d told her about Dodsworth — absolutely no idea. Told her again anyway. He was about to explain about Clark and Featherstone and Tarrant’s— possibly Tarrant’s — bloody boring landscape on the wall, and how utterly ludicrous it was that talentless Tarrant and fucking useless Featherstone should have been commissioned as war artists while he, Kit Neville, had been passed over — but he managed to stop himself in time. He was drunk, but not quite as drunk as that.

“I’m sorry about Dodsworth,” she said. “It is awful.”

He jabbed his index fingers at his face. “What right does he have to question my loyalty?”

She said, carefully, “Are you sure you’re getting it right? You’re sure it’s not an interview?”

“I don’t see how it can be, he keeps going over and over the same ground, doubling back, asking the same questions…No, it’s got to be an interrogation — can’t be anything else.”

She had come across and sat on the sofa, but at the other end. Three feet of dark blue velvet lay between them. No-man’s-land. Well, it had taken four fucking years to get across that, and he didn’t have that kind of time.

“Elinor, can I stay the night?”

Deep breath. “No, Kit.”

“Please?”

The sound of his own voice, pleading, released his anger. “Do you know, I haven’t had a squeak out of you for…Oh, I don’t know. Since you left, anyway.”

“I’ve been thinking.”

“Huh. Not your strong suit.”

“What?” When he didn’t reply, she said, “Kit, it’s late and I’m tired.”

“So that’s it, then?”

“You know, that day, when it happened, we were neither of us in a particularly good state. I’m not blaming you, I’m not blaming anybody — I’m just saying I’m not ready. I think I need to be on my own for a while.”

He didn’t believe a word of this. In fact, he felt quite insulted; she was just spouting a load of Ladies’ Home Journal tripe instead of coming right out and saying what she really felt. At the back of his mind was the fear that she found him as repulsive as he sometimes feared he was.

She wanted him to go — that, at least, was obvious — but he couldn’t accept it. People had been saying no to him all his life, taking things away: his marriage, his daughter, his reputation, his house, his FACE, for Christ’s sake! Well, no more. As she stood up, he lunged sideways, caught her round the wrist and pulled her down on top of him. She fell across his face. It was easy, so easy, to push the wrap aside, pull her nightdress off her shoulders; he was full of the scent of her, her voice in his ears sounding very far away on the other side of a red mist that rose and covered everything. They were on the floor, he didn’t know how they’d got there, but his right knee was between her legs, didn’t matter now what she did with her hands, she could flail away with her arms as much as she liked, once he’d got her legs apart his weight did the rest.

After a time, a long time it seemed, but it might have been only minutes, she rolled from under him. Ripped nightdress. White face. Scrabbling to get her wrap closed, she crawled onto the sofa. He should go, go now, before she started screaming. But she didn’t seem to think screaming was the appropriate response. She was rocking herself backwards and forwards, but otherwise seemed remarkably composed.

He got up, turned away, fumbled with buttons, retreated to a chair, where he sat looking down at his hands. How big they were. “I seem to have become…” He was articulating the words very carefully. “A bit of a monster.”

“Oh, Kit. You always were.”

The clock on the mantelpiece ticked.

“I should go.”

A brief, hard laugh, indicating, he supposed, agreement. She stood up and let him out.

On the landing, he stopped and looked back at her slim shape silhouetted against the light from the room behind her, then turned and went on, feeling his way down the dark staircase and out into the night.

Afterwards, it was the horses she remembered, galloping towards them out of the orange-streaked darkness, their manes and tails on fire. One huge black shire horse with frantically rolling eyes came straight at them. Elinor wrenched the steering wheel violently to the left and, a few yards farther on, pulled into the curb. In the rear-view mirror, she saw the horses galloping away, their great, bright, battering hooves striking sparks from the road. She remembered a thud against the side of the ambulance and thought she might have caught one a glancing blow on the shoulder as it careered past.

She sat, breathing heavily, looking at her orange hands on the wheel. Even her skin didn’t look like skin.

Beside her, in the co-driver’s seat, Neville cleared his throat. “Would you like me to take over for a bit?”

“No, thank you,” she said, with another glance in the rear-view mirror, preparing to move off. She might have taken that from Dana or Violet, but certainly not from him. “Actually, Kit, if you want to know what it feels like to have your testicles skewered and roasted over a slow fire while you watch, you could try saying that again.”

“Fair enough.”

She risked a sideways glance. His face in the light of the fires was an expressionless mask. Beaten bronze.

For so long she’d contrived to avoid working with Kit. But then, over the Christmas and New Year period, single people like Elinor — and, of course, Kit — had signed up for extra duties so that married people and parents could spend time with their families. Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day had all been quiet — she’d never played so many games of cards in her life — but the unofficial cease-fire was now unmistakably over. Hundreds, if not thousands, of incendiaries must have fallen that night and they were still clattering down. Yes, she’d had a moment of dismay when she’d looked at the duty roster and seen her name and Kit’s bracketed together, but she could hardly protest.

As she turned into Gunpowder Court, incendiaries clattered onto the ambulance roof like giant hailstones, and when she looked out of the side window she saw dozens more fizzing and popping all along the pavement. A squad of heavy rescue workers were shouting and jostling each other, like footballers fighting for possession of the ball, as they competed to stamp them out. As she watched, the man nearest to her dived and put his helmet over one of the skittering devices. “Gotcha, y’ little sod!”

Farther along the court, two fire engines were parked, taking up almost all the space. Half a dozen hoses snaked across the road, some gray and flaccid, but others very much alive — and she daren’t risk driving over those because, for the fireman at the branch, that interruption in the water supply could be dangerous, and the sudden return of water pressure almost equally so. She’d seen firemen injured by a branch writhing and spinning out of control. So: the way ahead was blocked.

She looked at Kit. “You could try Wine Office Court,” he said. “Try to get at it from the other side.”