Silent Noon, page 13
He did not register the slashed tyres, nor even the awkward tilt of the car. He only saw the word, daubed in red paint along the passenger side in letters twelve inches high – and the ugly line scraped from fender to hub underlining them.
Instinctively, he looked around, though he might have known there would be no one there: this was not a place where people walked or stopped to take in the view, for there was no view to be taken. They were alone: grimly, awfully alone. The wind blew, a seabird shrieked – and then there was a gulping noise from Miss Duchâtel.
“Get back inside,” she said. “I can get us home.”
“Who did this?”
“If I drive carefully we will make it.”
“What about the shopping?”
“The shopping doesn’t matter.”
They did make it back to the farm, just. Miss Duchâtel asked if Barney had finished his maths prep, which he interpreted the way it was meant; he went upstairs to his room and closed the door. A little while later, he heard the front door open and footsteps on the path. At the top of the drive, Miss Duchâtel brandished a paintbrush at the offending letters, replacing them with broad strokes the colour of wet sand.
~
On the morning that Barney was due to return to school, Miss Duchâtel surveyed the stack of boxes in the corner of her living room and ran a finger down the margin of a workbook he had filled with dates and names. Her reading glasses rested on the table. “Your eyes aren’t so poor,” he observed.
“It’s just as well you printed,” she said. “I couldn’t read cursive.”
“You could always get someone to type it for you.”
“Do you type?”
Barney shook his head. “Morrell probably could.”
“Well, ask him if he wants the work one afternoon. It would be nice to see him again. And, of course, you must visit me too.”
As far as Barney was concerned, that was to be the end of it. The week had gone by quickly, and with two pound notes folded in his pocket he was the richest he’d ever been. Now he could look forward to seeing the others again and going back to a school where he was no longer the new boy.
Wandering up the drive that afternoon, he even thought he’d spotted the latest recruit: a child younger and scrawnier than him, wearing a thin jumper rolled up to show white elbows. He’ll be mincemeat by lights out, thought Barney. “You there!” he called after the newcomer.
Belinda turned round and flashed him a smile. After she’d lopped off her hair with some kitchen scissors, her horrified mother had taken her to reduce the damage at a salon in town – but she still looked like a prison-camp inmate. Now, for the first time, Barney saw how a plain girl could be transformed into a rather beautiful boy.
“It’s meant to be like Erika Mann,” she explained, as they continued up the drive together. “I finished what Cowper started. Do you like it?” He’d nodded yes, although really he didn’t know what to think.
They met in the fallout shelter that evening after supper, and Ivor told him about the idea they’d had for a secret society – a “dining club”, he called it, because every week they would pool their resources for a proper feast, replete with contraband foodstuffs, cigarettes and finest spirits. Then he and Belinda started spitting apple pips at each other, which seemed to Barney like an excuse to blow kisses. When Belinda rushed at Ivor for sending a pip down her front, he caught her in a gentle rugby tackle, pushing her onto the bench and making Barney edge away.
It wasn’t clear when the girl had fallen in love with Ivor’s taunts – the way he mocked them when he spoke, daring them not to understand.
“Adult moths can’t take food, which is why they live for just a few days,” he was saying now. “It only goes to show that we should enjoy ourselves while we can. I propose a bacchanal tonight. The masters aren’t fussy about bed checks out of term, and most of the school won’t be back until the morning.”
This was only partly true: Barney arrived at Medlar House that evening to find the dormitory already half full. Robin and Hughes were talking about the new lorry that had replaced the battered one Krawiec normally used to transport stones for wall repairs.
“Too smart for a groundskeeper, if you ask me,” Hughes was saying.
“Perhaps old Cray bequeathed his estate to the school,” Robin said.
“Nonsense. He’d have to have a will to do that.”
“So?”
“And Cray didn’t have an estate. He had a stack of postcards under his mattress and the same evil-smelling fruitcake in his tuck every half-term.”
Barney reached for the Boy’s Own in his suitcase and left it on Robin’s bed without bothering to interrupt them. If he wasn’t to turn up to the feast empty-handed, he would have to get to the kitchens before they were locked at eight.
He was halfway to the shelter when he noticed the car parked outside the old kitchens. At the sound of his footsteps a door opened, and Belinda beckoned him. She sat with Ivor in the large back seat. Behind the wheel was Miss Duchâtel.
“Look who I found,” she said.
“What are you doing here?”
“That’s no way to talk, Holland,” said Ivor.
Somehow, she must have found the money to replace the tyres. It was too dark to see the haphazard paint strokes concealing the offending word. “Why are you here?”
“Inside that old building is the biggest horseshoe-bat colony on the island,” she said, pointing up at the roof. There was a box of recording equipment on the passenger seat, and Barney asked her to let him look at it, which she did. They each had a go at talking into the microphone, until Miss Duchâtel spotted the first bats spilling out from the eaves and told them that they’d have to be quiet while she recorded them.
When they still hadn’t left, she asked if it wasn’t time they were in bed. But Ivor had spotted the thermos in the back seat and said he rather fancied some coffee instead.
“Well,” said Miss Duchâtel, “you can have a drink, if you like, but I don’t have any cups.”
That was how they ended up back in the fallout shelter with a flask of coffee that they divided into four jam jars. Finally, perhaps because Ivor added a little brandy to her flask, Miss Duchâtel began to relax enough to admit that she’d dined there during the war, when the Germans had used the old kitchens as entertaining quarters. Because the British government was too proud to admit that the islanders had been abandoned, they didn’t drop food packages here as in other parts of Europe. The only food that came onto Lindsey arrived with the invading army – and even that stopped after D-Day, when islanders were reduced to killing stray dogs and cats to eat.
She said she’d been invited there to make up for the fact that a group of soldiers had stolen some of her geese. The commandant had heard about a Frenchwoman living on the farm, and because he had spent many childhood summers in the Auvergne he thought it would be nice to pass an evening reliving those times and practising his French. There was no point refusing, so the commandant got his candlelit evening confusing his tenses and reminiscing about his Breton nanny, through mouthfuls of pâté and dauphinoise potatoes.
He was a handsome man, and impeccably well-mannered. But he spoke too much, seemed to want too much to be liked, and she was embarrassed by this. His lieutenant Driesch, on the other hand, was surly and breathed heavily through his nose as he ate. He had a drinker’s face, Miss Duchâtel said. At the end of the evening, as she was escorted through the shadows to a car that would take her back to her farm, she heard him call after her – “Madame”, as if after three hours he still couldn’t remember her name – but she had pretended not to hear. It was only when she arrived home that she realized she had left her purse behind. “But by then the child was awake and it was long past curfew—”
“What child?” interjected Belinda.
For a moment the only sound was the hush of summer stalks brushing against the bunker door. Cowper was right, thought Barney. It was a Jerrybag baby – and she killed it.
“I looked after a neighbour’s daughter,” she said. “A very sickly baby. Infantile tetanus.” She downed the last of her coffee, and then she reached for the brandy bottle at Ivor’s feet.
“You didn’t tell us this before,” said Ivor.
“It was a long time ago. You know what happened to Lot’s wife for dwelling too much on the past…”
That’s why she used us to pretend, thought Barney. The tea party. Dinner. The commandant and Driesch and her together…
“It’s so late,” she said. “What am I doing here, still? In this hole in the ground…”
“We can take you back to the car, if you like.”
“Yes, that would be best.”
They waited until the headlights had disappeared over the ridge before returning to the bunker. On the way, they spotted a colony of land crabs digging up through the ground on the first stage of their migration towards the sea. The crabs would lay their eggs in the water, and once these had hatched, the forest floor would tremble with the bodies of tiny brown newborns scrabbling their way back inland.
~
The question came unexpectedly, during prep.
“So what do you lot do in there?”
Robin hadn’t bothered to look up from his French conjugations, and so Barney continued to draw lines in his geometry book, feigning nonchalance. Still, a solution to the problem Doc Dower had set that afternoon on the muddy pitch evaded him. It occurred to Barney that perhaps drawing lines was not the answer; perhaps he ought to write down the figures as he remembered Doc noting them…
“Where?”
“In the shelter. When you meet up in the middle of the night.”
Barney set down his compass, then picked it up again. “Nothing,” he said.
“Rubbish.” Robin sniffed. “Well, don’t worry. I haven’t told anyone.”
One hundred feet. One foot. Two-per-cent slope. Two over a hundred…
“You do know you’ll get the sack if they catch you. Two chaps alone is one thing. Two chaps with a girl is another. Especially if one of them’s a Mede. You can imagine how it looks.”
“It’s not like that.”
Robin snatched the compass from Barney’s desk and pressed the point against his bare thigh. “What’s he told you?” Robin held the compass in a fist, pressing harder against his leg. If it hurt, he didn’t show it.
“Stop that. You’ll cut yourself.”
“What do you care?”
“Idiot.”
Robin pressed the compass down so that the point buried into his skin. He let go, and it hung at a strange angle against his leg.
“Stop that. Take it out.”
“You do it.”
Robin twisted the point and levered the compass left and right. A moment later, a bubble of blood rose from the wound.
“Cowper says some of the girls at the fireworks display had stories to tell about her.”
“Stop doing that.” Barney reached for the compass, but Robin stopped him. “Cowper talks nonsense. You know that he doesn’t like her.”
Robin eased the point from under his skin, drawing a line in the blood. “So, does she talk about the baby?”
“No. She’s heard the thing in the basement corridor, though.”
“There is no thing, you fool.” Robin rolled his eyes. “Not there, anyway.”
“Give me that.”
Robin handed over the compass with a bored look and pressed one finger against the cut in his leg. Barney watched as he drew the finger across his lips.
“If there’s a thing anywhere, it’s out there,” said Robin. “Cray saw it last year from the pumping station: a man in a grey coat. Cray watched him cross the field, but he vanished before he reached the fence.”
“Do you have a handkerchief?”
“No.”
Barney wiped the compass on his knee and tried to rub out the stain between his fingers. Robin watched wearily before turning back to his conjugations.
“So much fuss over a little blood,” he said.
~
When the post was distributed in the common room the following afternoon, Barney was aware of Cowper noting with interest the envelope handed to him by Mr Runcie – of the sort that sold for a penny at the post office. The paper inside had been torn from a notebook.
“First one this term?” said Cowper. Barney ignored him. “Remind you of anyone?” Cowper said to Shields in a stage whisper, angling an open book so that Barney, too, could see the picture. The novel featured illustrations in the Victorian style: broad-shouldered women with thick necks and small heads, and men with handlebar moustaches in tartan knickerbockers or canvas puttees. The picture Cowper meant Barney to see showed a giant hag being consumed by a pillar of flames, black hair fanning about her head, eyes rolling in torment, fingers splayed. The quotation at the bottom read “I will come again”.
Shields stole a glance over one shoulder at the girl sitting in the corner. “Do you think she’ll stick us in a hotpot?” he said.
“She’d have to transfix us with her beauty first,” came the reply. “An unlikely prospect, with a nose like that. Rather too Semitic, don’t you think?”
“Bog off,” hissed Barney.
“You’d better be careful, Holland, or she’ll turn you into a pig with her voodoo magic.” Cowper closed the book. “So, aren’t you going to read it? Who’s it from?”
“Mind your own business,” said Barney, tucking the envelope into his blazer pocket.
It wouldn’t be safe to read in the house that night: Cowper would be waiting to grab the letter as he had grabbed the pamphlet in the toilets. So Barney asked Mr Runcie if he might be excused to go to the library. To his surprise, the housemaster nodded without asking any questions.
The library was locked. At the sound of the headmaster’s door opening down the corridor, Barney ducked into the stairwell leading to the laundries, then descended the narrow staircase to the dark bowels of the building, following the curve of the wall with one hand. All of the lights but one had been shut off, and that one flickered outside the main laundry. Barney unfolded the letter and tilted the paper away from him so that the shadows seemed to slide off the page.
Barn, old man
I’m sorry, I really am. Clive Brightly offered us the gig at the eleventh hour and I couldn’t say no – you know how it is. You must have been gutted. Jake took it special hard, poor chap. He’s all right now, but he asks about you every day. He’d love it if you sent him a letter some time – one just for him, you know. I’d read it to him, natch.
We enjoyed your last letter. Nice to hear you’ve made a few friends. Some of them will be your mates for life. I met George Mellow when we were nippers in Miss Knightly’s class, you know. That makes me feel like an old man. He cut us a good deal at the Black Cap last week. You should have heard the skiffle and the Irish fiddles, it was a class act.
Mrs Metz had her record player going the other day, which made me think of you. Remember when she had it set up in the window for the victory celebrations and you went out in the courtyard with the other kids to dance to ‘Bless ’Em All’? And the miserable old what’s-it had the nerve to shut the window because the music was for her people, not the likes of us. She’s not much improved with age – but then I say there’s something nice about certain things staying the same year in year out.
I hope you’re giving the masters a good account of yourself and not messing about too much in lessons. We are proud of you, Barn – your mum too. Has she written to you yet?
Love from Spike, Jake and the lads
Spike should have known that Mum hadn’t written. Perhaps he’d asked because he was worried that he was starting to forget them – in case London was starting to feel a lifetime away. Well, it did. Trust Spike to ruin it.
The wall had turned cold against Barney’s back, so much so that it felt almost wet. Moving to one side, he felt his shirt catch on an object like a nail. He pulled away and was aware of his shirt clinging to his skin. There was no nail: the wall was smooth and dry.
The sound of flushing water rumbled overhead, followed by a trickle like laughter. Barney glanced up at the main pipe, which was flanked by two narrow ones that dripped at the join, where they veered to travel around the laundry door. Etched into the unpainted wood of the jamb, just above his head, were two sets of initials: IM HC. And on the opposite side, in the same hand, the words hic fuimus.
Noticing for the first time the depth of the darkness in the corridor – the kind of darkness that seemed to move, the kind of darkness that might have been alive – Barney shoved the paper into his pocket, not hearing the envelope drift to the floor.
~
They set off to Miss Duchâtel’s straight after chapel, Belinda a few steps ahead and the other two trailing behind her. The girl pretended not to notice when Ivor kicked at a stone so that it skipped up against the back of her leg. Instead, she concentrated on the sea: the green flashes darkening to grey, flattening to a colder shade of blue. Whenever the sea changed colour before the sky, it was a sign that a storm would arrive quickly, with violence.
A movement to the side of the road made her stop. It was a moment before Barney perceived what she had seen, as the creature scuttling towards them weaved in and out of sight between the fencing. It had an arched, rust-coloured body, and between its jaws hung something pale and feathered, and limp.
“Is it one of hers?” whispered Belinda.
“It could be from anywhere,” said Ivor. “But it’s his now.”
He knelt, watching the fox, which had paused on the other side of the fence. Its spine bristled, and through its stuffed mouth came a low growl. For several seconds they remained like that – staring at each other – until Ivor lunged forward with a loud hiss that sent the fox loping into the undergrowth. He turned around, grinning.
“Eat or be eaten,” he said.
They could hear the Frenchwoman in the poultry yard as they approached from the road. She was chatting to the geese and occasionally snapping at the chickens.
