Pat Barker - Noonday

“Cheerful sod, aren’t you?” Another handful went into the box. “Some people think we already have been.” He glanced cautiously from side to side and whispered: “Nuns.”

Oh, yes. Nuns on buses paying the fare with surprisingly masculine hands. “I shouldn’t worry about that, Kenny. It’s just a story. Newspapers’ll print anything.”

“You could kill one of them if you had a pitchfork.”

“I suppose you could, though you’d need to make sure it wasn’t a real nun first.”

“S’easy, you just put your hand up his skirt and see if he’s got a willy.”

Mental note: Keep Kenny away from nuns. Suddenly tired of the whole business, Paul heaved himself to his feet. His stiff knee meant he had to get up like a toddler, pushing himself up with his hands, and he didn’t like to be watched doing it. Looking down, he saw a neat parting in the orange hair revealing the dead white of the scalp, and felt a stab of pain, for the boy, for himself, for the whole bloody stupid business. “Come on, now. Dinnertime.”

“I’ve got to wash me hands.” He held them up as proof.

“All right, but hurry up. ”

Paul went slowly downstairs. Crossing the hall, he stopped in front of Toby Brooke’s portrait. Nigel Featherstone, no less. Now why on earth was he so successful? He’d never done anything that wasn’t completely bland. Perhaps that was why. Who wants disturbing truths in the portrait of a loved one? Elinor’s portrait of Toby, though not, in her own view, a complete success, was better than this. It caught something of the reality, the power, of that slim, voracious ghost.

Paul became aware of Kenny standing by his side. “Now he was brave.” Toby, he knew from several accounts, had been a whole lot of things, but brave was certainly one. “See that?” Paul pointed to the canvas. “That’s the MC, the Military Cross.” He looked down at Kenny, who was staring intently at the medal. “Come on, they’re all in there waiting. You must be hungry; I know I am.”

Putting his hand on the boy’s shoulder, he steered him towards the dining room.

Next day was a Saturday. At eleven o’clock, the vicar came to offer condolences and talk about hymns and readings. Then there were wreaths to be ordered, flowers for the church, cars to be booked — but how many cars? Rooms to be got ready for those who’d need to stay over. And they hadn’t even started thinking about food and drink. By midafternoon, Rachel was exhausted. The rest would just have to wait, she said. “You forget how much work there is.”

They decided to have tea on the lawn. All the leaves were limp, folded in on themselves in a desperate attempt to conserve moisture. There was a sweet, sickly smell of rotten apples lying in the grass. Drunken bees toppled from flower to flower.

“Where’s Kenny?” Elinor said, resigned to another search.

He’d gone out early with a catapult, a slice of veal and ham pie wrapped in a table napkin, and a bottle of warm, flat lemonade. Nobody had seen him since.

Tim, Elinor and Paul perched on uncomfortable iron chairs and watched the shadows lengthen on the grass. Unmentioned by anybody, but dominating all their thoughts, was the stripped bed that had lately and for so many months held the dying woman. Mrs. Murchison carried out the teapot and plates of sandwiches but nobody felt able to start eating. Rachel was still indoors talking to Nurse Wiggins, who’d packed her suitcase and was preparing to depart. They were straining their ears for the sound of her car driving away, which somehow, they all felt, would mark the end of the whole long-drawn-out, miserable episode.

What a small part we play in other people’s lives, Paul thought. How quickly the water closes over us. And almost immediately realized he didn’t believe that at all. He’d been thinking about his mother a lot in the last few months, more than he’d done for years. He was haunted by images of her, some of actual events — the moment in the hospital, when he’d pushed her away — others imagined. Above all, he saw her walking across the mudflats to a tidal river, leaving a trail of footprints behind her. There were other markings too: rats’ tails trailing across the mud, leaving lines and curves as indecipherable as the hieroglyphs on an ancient tomb, but carrying, he felt, some urgent hidden meaning, if only they could be understood. No, his mother was certainly not slipping away into oblivion; if anything, his relationship with her had gone on changing. He was older now than she’d ever been, and that realization brought with it a kind of tenderness, as if he were the adult now and she the child. Nothing to be gained by thinking like this. He closed his eyes and let his thoughts dissolve into the orange glow behind his lids.

When he opened them again, Kenny was walking towards him across the lawn.

“Thought so,” Tim said, in that jocular, avuncular way of his. “Thought his belly would bring him back.”

Kenny flicked a glance at him. Like most of Kenny’s glances it seemed exclusively designed to establish that he was not about to be hit, and then he sat down, cross-legged, at Paul’s feet. Why me? Paul thought, in equal measure flattered and exasperated. Above the creased shirt, the nape of the boy’s neck stuck out — a dingy white, and far too thin for the size of his head. He reminded Paul of a baby blackbird: “gollies,” they used to call them. The word brought back bird-nesting trips when he was a boy, Kenny’s age or even younger, in the mythic golden summers before the last war.

At that moment they heard Nurse Wiggins’s little car puttering away down the drive and Rachel appeared round the corner of the house, puffing her lips out in a pantomime of relief. “I thought she’d never go.”

“She was all right,” Tim said.

“Oh, I know you liked her,” Rachel said.

Elinor shook her head. “She was all right, but it’s never comfortable, is it, having strangers in your house.”

“Servants are strangers,” Tim said.

“Ye-es,” Rachel said, “but you don’t have to treat them as family. The trouble with Wiggins was she was here all the time.”

Paul looked down at the top of Kenny’s head, wondering how much of this he was taking in. He was such an obvious cuckoo in the nest himself, but fortunately he didn’t seem to be listening.

Rachel and Elinor passed round plates of sandwiches. Tim said: “Shall I be Mother?” and poured the tea. Wasps kept up their priggish, bad-tempered whine around the jam and sugar bowls. One settled on Rachel’s shoulder, causing a huge commotion until Tim picked up a napkin and flicked it away.

Elinor took another napkin and spread it over the gooseberry tart. “Trouble is they get sleepy. It’s nearly always autumn when people get stung.”

Rachel looked surprised. “It’s not autumn.”

“It’s September,” Paul said.

For a moment, Rachel looked completely bewildered, and they understood how, for her, the whole summer had been swallowed up in her mother’s dying. And immediately the shadows creeping towards them over the grass seemed longer and darker.

“Gooseberry tart,” Rachel said. “Elinor, could you help Mrs. Murchison with the plates?”

The gooseberry tart, cut into huge slabs and drizzled with cream, was amazing: Mrs. Murchison had surpassed herself. The wasps certainly thought so. Paul was waiting for somebody to suggest they do the obvious common-sense thing and move indoors; he might have suggested it himself, only at that moment he heard a different kind of buzzing, and, almost simultaneously, the sirens set up their disconsolate wail.