Pat Barker: Noonday

Throwing back the bedclothes, she went to the window and looked out, feeling the morning air cool on her sleep-swollen face. Five or six jackdaws were strutting across the lawn — little storm troopers — rapacious beaks jab-jabbing at the soil in search of worms. Drops of dew glinted in the grass. It was still only half light.

Something had woken her. She listened. Footsteps on the landing? No, no, it was much too early for anybody to be about. But then, the front door opened and Alex came out, carrying a suitcase, followed by Tim. She looked down at the tops of their heads, Alex’s thick blond hair, Tim’s pink scalp showing through carefully combed mouse-brown. They got into the car, moving heavily, not speaking, gray shapes in the gray light. Doors clunked, the engine coughed and choked before settling down to a steady hum, spinning wheels scattered gravel and away they went. She wondered if her mother was awake to hear it, and whether if she heard it she’d realize that Alex had gone.

—

BY LATE AFTERNOON the heat had become intolerable. Taking a break from the sickroom, Elinor went into the garden and watered the plants. Unlike Rachel — and their mother too, for that matter — she was no gardener, but watering was one job she did enjoy. She took off her shoes and let her white London feet explore the crumbly, moist soil. By the time she’d finished, all the paths were shining wet, and yet, even before she’d coiled the hose and restored it to its place by the tap, they were starting to dry. Steam rising from them, here and there.

Before dinner she went back to her mother’s room, to the sour smell from the commode that no amount of bleach seemed able to remove. And so it ends. She’d been thinking things like that all day: vague, trite little phrases, trying to nudge herself into feeling the appropriate emotions, and never quite succeeding. The truth was that, like Rachel, she was too tired to feel anything very much. During the evening, Nurse Wiggins took over for a few hours; the sisters sat on the terrace in the breathy, moth-haunted darkness, smoking and talking — about nothing very much. Everything was subsumed in waiting.

Elinor was going to sit with their mother for the first half of the night. Neither of the sisters wanted her to be with a stranger when she died. At bedtime they went upstairs together, but outside their mother’s door, Rachel lingered. “You will wake me, won’t you?”

“Of course I will. Go on now, shoo. Shoo. ”

Sitting beside the bed, Elinor read for an hour, taking nothing in, listening to her mother’s uneven breaths. Without realizing, she started to match her own breathing to her mother’s, becoming in the process slightly light-headed. After a while, she gave up pretending to read and switched off the lamp. At least, now, she could open the blackout curtains and lean out of the window into the hot, still night.

Even flowers and grass no longer smelled fresh; it was as if everything had been singed. Searchlights fingered the underbelly of clouds, coming together sometimes to form a pyramid of light over the church tower. They seemed, in their constant, quivering, hypersensitive movement, to be living things, like the antennae on a moth.

A rustle behind her. Quickly, she pulled the blackout curtains across and groped her way back to her chair.

“Is that you, Elinor?”

“Yes.” Elinor put her hand over her mother’s eyes to shield them before switching on the lamp. “Would you like me to call Rachel?”

“No, let her sleep.”

Another breath. And another. After each dragging pause, the skeletal chest expanded again. Let go, just let go. Elinor almost said it aloud, only she was too ashamed, knowing it was her own deliverance she was pleading for.

The old woman looked around the room, bewildered. “I thought Toby was here.”

“When?”

“Just now.”

“That was Alex, Mother. Yesterday.”

“ No, just now.” The old woman’s eyes focused on the empty space beyond the foot of the bed. “He was standing just there.”

She’s wandering, Elinor thought, resisting the temptation to turn round and check there was nobody there. But then her mother surprised her by turning towards her a gaze that was sharp, alert, even slightly malicious: a glimpse of the woman she’d once been. The thick, white tongue came out and moistened her cracked lips. Elinor bent forward to hear.

“I knew.”

Humor her. “What did you know?”

“You and Toby.” Her chest rattled — she might even have been trying to laugh. “Bed creaking, night after night, you must’ve thought I was stupid, I knew whose room it was coming from.”

Elinor daren’t acknowledge that she’d heard, still less that she’d understood. Instead, she asked, “Would you like some water?”

A reluctant nod. Elinor held the glass to her lips and watched the wasted throat working as she drank. After a while she waved it away. “Did you really think I didn’t know?”

“We used to play, that’s all.”

“Play.”

Elinor dabbed her mother’s mouth with a folded handkerchief and settled the gray head back onto the pillow. She said, brightly, “Alex is coming again at the weekend.”

“Alex?”

So Alex had stopped existing, which seemed rather hard on Alex, whose whole childhood had been warped by his supposed resemblance to Toby. How many other families were like this? The chair at the dining-room table that nobody ever sat in, the bedroom kept as it had always been: school books, toys…On the mantelpiece or the piano, photographs of a face that didn’t age. Other people’s lives molding themselves around the gap.

Another pause in her mother’s breathing. Longer? “I’ll get Rachel.”

This time there was no protest. Blindly, Elinor stumbled across the landing and tapped on Rachel’s door. After waiting a few moments, she pushed it open and peered into the darkness. That familiar married smell, male and female scents combined. “Rachel?”

A hump under the bedclothes heaved and muttered. Then Rachel, still half asleep, staggered to the door, struggling to get her arms into the sleeves of her wrap. “What’s the matter? Is she worse?”

“No, I don’t think so, she’s awake, that’s all. I thought you’d want to be there.”

“Yes, of course. Oh God, I didn’t think I’d get to sleep at all and I must’ve gone really deep.”

Elinor continued along the landing to the bathroom.

“You are coming back?” Rachel sounded frightened.

“Yes, I just want to splash my face, I was starting to nod off in there.”

In the bathroom, she stood for a moment with her back against the door, then went to the basin and turned on the cold water. Cupping her hands, she threw water over her face, neck, chest, before finally filling the bowl to the brim and pushing her head underneath the surface. Water slopped onto the floor, but no matter. She looked at her dripping face in the mirror, coils of wet hair stuck to her forehead, haunted eyes. Her nightdress was soaked. Her nipples showed through the white cotton like a second pair of eyes. I look mad, she thought.

Now, when it was too late, she wanted to argue. Once. It had happened once. It was all nonsense saying the bed creaked “night after night.” As children, she and Toby had often crept along the passage to each other’s rooms. The only way to stop them was to lock them in, and even then Toby had crawled along the ledge outside their bedrooms, careless of the forty-foot drop onto the terrace below. Only after his death had she looked down at that ledge and realized the risk he’d run. As a child, ten, eleven years old. Why? Why that need? It hadn’t been sexual then, couldn’t have been; he was too young. All that came later. And it happened once. Though, of course, saying you’d slept with your brother only once was a bit like saying you’d committed murder only once. It wasn’t really much of an excuse.