Pat Barker - Noonday

A hundred yards from the hospital entrance, the driver slowed to a crawl. Ambulances were queuing bumper to bumper all along the road. At first, Paul thought they might be delivering casualties, but then he saw that most of them were empty. They were here to evacuate the hospital. He reached for the door handle.

“Hang on,” the driver said. “I’ll try and get you a bit closer…”

“No, it’s OK, I’ll be all right.” Paul jumped into the road and raised his hand. “Thanks, mate.”

As he started running along the line of ambulances, the wind caught him, flattening his trousers against his legs. Looking down the hill, he saw a wall of fire advancing on the hospital — he couldn’t understand why it hadn’t been evacuated already. The hot wind was snatching up bits of flaming debris and hurling them from one building to the next. At any moment, you felt, the hospital would be engulfed. Elinor. He had to find her and get her out, take her miles and miles away from here.

Inside the entrance, he stared wildly around him, until a passing nurse pointed towards the stairs. No lifts: the doors were all half open, frozen at the point the electricity had failed. He ran upstairs. No lights on the stairs, no lights in the corridor either, except for a couple of smoking oil lamps that signally failed to penetrate the gloom. He groped his way along, a hand on the wall. Nobody seemed to be trying to bring patients down, so evidently the evacuation hadn’t started yet.

Bursting through swing doors onto a ward, he was dazzled by the sudden blaze of light. Emergency generator? His brain had time to form the thought, before he realized the truth. The staff had simply thrown open the blinds to let in the light of the blazing City. Doctors, nurses, even surgeons were working in the glare of the firestorm that was roaring up the hill towards them.

Paul ran from bed to bed, thinking: No, this is wrong, it’s all wrong, she can’t be here. These patients had all been admitted, and he knew there wouldn’t have been time for that, but he couldn’t get anybody to answer his questions, they were all so busy, so intent, but then at last he stopped a porter who told him, “You want to be downstairs, mate. Casualty’s in the basement.”

So he skidded down two flights of stairs, along another corridor, and burst into a huge room, lit by dozens of oil lamps whose coils of brown smoke hung heavy on the air. Doors opened off to the left into smaller rooms; he could see beds, wheelchairs, tables, chairs, and torches held in gloved hands casting circles of light onto other gloved hands that were stitching wounds or applying dressings to burns.

Along one side of the main room, the injured were queuing for attention: white-faced, babbling, mute, shaking uncontrollably. The more seriously injured lay on trolleys in a corridor farther along, many still and silent, a few writhing with the pain of burns. One — an elderly woman with wispy gray hair and an open mouth — unmistakably dead.

He saw a warden he knew slightly near the back of the queue and asked him if he’d seen Elinor, but the man was too dazed to answer. Paul abandoned him, and began walking up the line, scanning every face, but there was no Elinor — and nobody else he knew to ask. At the head of the queue, he saw there was another smaller room: rows of benches crowded with people. He started walking along the rows, looking at face after face, panicked that when he saw her— if he saw her — he wouldn’t recognize her. He kept seeing the old woman on the trolley: the open mouth, the staring eyes. Part of him was convinced the corpse was Elinor. It had been nothing like her, and yet he had to stop himself running back to make sure.

Still another room opened off this one. Here, three rows of benches faced a blank wall; people sat staring vacantly into space, waiting for somebody to come and claim them. He heard his voice calling “Elinor?” over and over again. Perhaps there was an echo, because the walls seemed to bounce the name back at him: Elinor, Elinor.

And then he saw her, sitting at the end of a bench, looking straight ahead. “Elinor?” She seemed to have trouble focusing on him. “It’s me. Paul.” He knelt down and reached for her hands, but she pulled them back. “Are you all right?”

The question seemed to plop into a deep well. She glanced from side to side and moistened her lips. “They say I can go.”

Her face was gray; she had the hunched shoulders and anxious expression of smoke inhalation. She wasn’t fit to be turned out. He looked round, angrily, but so many of the injuries he saw were worse than hers. And of course with an evacuation imminent they’d be clearing out anybody who could walk. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get you home.”

“Where’s Kit?”

“Were you working with him?”

She nodded.

“He’s fine. Queuing up outside, I think.”

He was thinking he might beg a lift from the ambulance driver who’d brought him here, if he could find him, but in the event he didn’t need to. A crowd of frustrated ambulance drivers had gathered outside the hospital entrance, and among them were Dana and Derek, who detached themselves from the group and came towards him. “Is she all right?” Dana asked.

“She’s alive.”

Until he heard himself say the word, he hadn’t known it was true, and immediately he was flooded with relief, but he still had to get her home.

“Don’t worry,” Dana said. “We’ll take you. If we can get out, that is.”

Paul helped Elinor into the back of the ambulance, then turned to look at Dana, who was waiting to close the door. He mouthed: Neville? Dana shrugged, but Derek, who was standing a few feet behind her, shook his head.

It took a great deal of reversing, and not a little shouting, before they were able to get out of the queue. Paul tried to persuade Elinor to lie on the bunk, but she said she couldn’t lie flat and so they sat, side by side, jolting and swaying as Dana swerved to avoid obstacles in the road. Lights flashed in the small windows and, once, there was a great clattering on the roof as more incendiaries fell — or perhaps it was just shrapnel from the ack-ack guns that seemed to have started up again, though Paul couldn’t remember hearing the sirens.

Nearer home, the orange glow in the windows faded to black, and he was glad of it. Not long after, the jolting and bumping stopped. Footsteps sounded along the side of the ambulance, then Dana opened the door and pulled down the steps. Paul helped Elinor down onto the black, glistening pavement. She looked around her, then up to the windows of her flat. Dana kissed her good-bye, Derek slapped Paul on the shoulder, and then the two of them set off to rejoin the queue outside Bart’s. Paul watched the red taillight diminishing into the dark, and the street seemed suddenly very quiet. The guns seemed to have stopped again, so probably it had been a false alarm.

Elinor was still looking up at the windows of her flat. There must have been times in the last few hours when she’d thought she wouldn’t see it again. Her hands were so cut and bruised he had to fish the keys out of her pockets while she stood holding her arms away from her body, as helpless as a small child.

He thought she might find the stairs difficult and got behind her to push, but she snapped: “It’s my hands, Paul. Not my feet. ” A brief glimpse of the old Elinor that came as an enormous relief.

Once inside the flat he settled her onto the sofa, then went into the kitchen and filled the kettle for tea. He kept glancing through the open door. She was sitting hunched forward, though more upright perhaps than she had been in the hospital. Her hands were held straight out in front of her. When the kettle boiled, he added a generous dollop of brandy to the tea, and carried the mug through to her.