Pat Barker - Noonday

Every afternoon, around about five o’clock, she packed up and went home, sometimes stopping at one of the barrows at the corner of Store Street to buy vegetables for dinner. There wasn’t much choice, but the cauliflowers and carrots were usually all right. And the apples, though wizened and rather small, hardly bigger than crab apples, were good enough for apple pie. Tonight, she was cooking for two, which these days was quite a pleasant experience. Paul was coming to supper. They saw each other regularly, met for drinks or tea and buns, even went on outings to Kew Gardens or Richmond Park, often accompanied by that wretched little dog he’d bought, a brown-and-white Jack Russell terrier, rather unimaginatively called Jack — not even Russell, which might have been marginally better. She knew Paul would have liked more than occasional outings with her. He’d more than once hinted they should start thinking about living together again, but she’d grown to value her independence. Living alone is a skill, and she seemed to have reacquired it. She actually enjoyed having nobody but herself to consult. And yes, of course there were times when loneliness crept up and bit her on the backside, but she had plenty of teeth — and she was learning to bite back.

The barrow boys — always “boys” though some of them were old men — were mainly market gardeners from Kent. She’d got to know a few of them, though these, today, were new. Two men, one elderly, the other middle-aged — their profiles so similar they could only be father and son — and a ginger-haired boy, white-faced and gangly, with surprisingly big, raw hands. She watched him weighing potatoes, dropping one very small one into the pan to make up the weight. Then he poured them into a paper bag, twisting it briskly to produce two nice, neat ears, and handed it across to the customer. As he did so, he half turned towards her, and she saw that it was Kenny.

It couldn’t be.

But it was.

At last it was her turn to be served. She asked for a cabbage and a pound of apples. “Oh, and carrots,” she said, all the time staring at him, thinking: No. He’d grown, my God, he’d grown, and the shape of his face had changed, but he was at the age when boys do change — sometimes almost beyond recognition. He hadn’t noticed her yet. He was so busy scooping and weighing and pouring into bags and then giving the bags that final, expert twist. You could see the pride he took in his own skills. There he was: doing a proper job, earning money. In his own estimation, at least: a man among men.

When she came to pay, he looked her in the face for the first time, and suddenly blushed, shedding, in the process, several months of growth.

“Hello, Kenny.”

What to say next? We thought you were dead? Well, why not — it was true. Glancing over his shoulder — evidently chatting to the customers was not encouraged — he said, “Me mam couldn’t stick it in there, she couldn’t breathe, she got herself into a right old panic, we had to come out…”

She whispered, “Do you know how many people died?”

“Yes, I heard.”

“So what did you do?”

“Walked all the way to me nanna’s in Bermondsey. Then she got bombed and we got on the back of a lorry and went to Kent.” He kept looking over his shoulder. “And I got this job.”

“You’re busy.” She handed the money over. “I’m glad you’re all right.”

“Glad” wasn’t the word. She could have burst out singing.

At the corner, she stopped and looked back, watching him move on to the next customer, and the next. Then, smiling, she turned into Gower Street and began walking home, burdened by drawing pads and pencil cases and shopping bags, but still quickening her pace until she was almost running. She couldn’t wait to get home and tell Paul.

Pat Barker is most recently the author of Toby’s Room and Life Class, as well as the highly acclaimed Regeneration Trilogy: Regeneration; The Eye in the Door, winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize; and The Ghost Road, winner of the Booker Prize. She lives in the north of England.