Silent Noon, page 20
“I see.” Pleming closed the file. “The irony, of course, is that if it hadn’t been for that damned UXB, none of this would have come to light.”
“Either way, we’d be sitting on a time bomb.”
“Then we are decided.”
Later that same day Ivor, high-shouldered and looking surprisingly small in his brother’s army coat and wide-brimmed fedora, climbed into Krawiec’s van to be taken to Port Grenen. Watching the vehicle draw an arc around the cordoned-off rubble of the old kitchens, Barney wondered if memory was something that could be unlearnt. Before, he had yearned for some recollection of his mother’s war. Now, he wished he might tear from his mind’s eye the burnt-on image of that leaping flame, that bolt of light, the clouds of choking dust.
Not for the first time he knelt upon an empty bed, observing the vapour trail of one life drifting out of his own. The night before she left, his mother had crept in next to Barney on the mattress he shared with Jake and slept, curled around him like a cat, until the small hours. Only in the blue light of dawn had he been aware of her slipping away, and through sleep-crusted eyes he had traced her outline against the light in the hallway before watching the door shut.
~
Heading up the coast road with her arms weighed down by shopping on the one hand, and by Lucia’s insistent toddler pull on the other, Mollie recalled the tipsy acrobat that had balanced upon her bookshelf as a child: a slender figure on a bicycle that dipped at the slightest touch before righting himself, balancing by an invisible law of physics explained to her many times by her father yet to this day never fully understood. At Lucia’s stop-start infant pace the walk had taken twice as long as usual, and Mollie’s thoughts had diffused into bleary fog. There was the sound of her daughter’s voice, and the vast silence of the sky – the silence was louder, reducing Lucia’s babble to distant chirping – and her own feet slapping on the pavement. A melody looping at the back of her mind – a violin study her husband had been practising the previous evening – and words, unfocused and unrecalled, like text pressed through blotting paper.
So the sound of the horn came as a rude invasion – and as she blinked at the tank-grey lorry powering towards her, the sight of his outline through the windshield woke her from the reverie with a jolt. The pavement had run out a hundred yards back, so she tugged the child onto the verge and pretended to fumble with the shopping as the lorry slowed to pass. There was someone in the passenger seat next to the Pole – a figure in a grey coat whose face was obscured by the long rim of a hat – and a trunk rattling in the open trailer behind them.
There was room for just one vehicle at this point in the road, and no turning space. It was only civil of the Pole to slow down as he passed the woman with her child. It was not necessary for him to stop. To switch off the engine. Staring at her.
“Come, Lucia.”
They edged sideways past the vehicle, and as they passed behind it Mollie looked back, waiting to hear the engine start up again. Neither head moved, and she sensed that he was still waiting. She did not know for what. Not bread: those days were past. An acknowledgement? She commanded the muscles of her mouth to form a smile. Almost instantly, a hand was raised in the rear-view mirror – Good day, proszę pani – and the lorry shuddered on, sinking down the coast road until it disappeared between the horizon and the sea.
~
Swift had overheard himself being described with grudging respect as one who had “done his bit”. He had headed straight for France when others had retreated to England to train the next generation of heroes. His schoolmates remembered him as a romancer, though this reputation had faded as one by one they left for mediocre jobs and degrees at provincial universities, or died on battlefields thousands of miles away. Thankfully, it did not have the staying power to be passed on to the next generation, which was ready to choose its own myths. Among the masters there were better targets for schoolboy gossip that was idle and salacious, cruel through the laughter.
An afternoon five years ago: an afternoon of watery, early summer sun. Cow parsley like wedding confetti in her hair. He had kissed the strawberry stains from her fingers. Even then, in that most perfect of moments, his thoughts had thrust forward to the future, when their time would be over. One way or another, everything ended up in the past: the things he wanted to, and those he didn’t.
When the worst thing happened – not the pregnancy, but the news five months in that she had lost it – he had asked her what they should do. That was when she’d replied that they didn’t have to do anything. It had looked after itself. She had barely begun to show – she was slight of build, and her husband was not attuned to these things – and she had buried it in a quiet spot where it would not be disturbed. Mollie had been strong for just long enough before the fever took hold – before she found it too hard to feel Belinda’s gaze peeping around the bedroom door and she had told her husband that she thought it was time the girl went to school, learnt some independence.
She had been strong, but he had not. He had only heard her voice repeating to him the words she had recited at the grave site – Plant thou no roses at my head, Nor shady cypress tree – and felt despair.
He had got as far as the rock pools. Standing barefoot in the shallows, he had stared out to St Just and thought how easy it would be to join his child. The island was a fine line separating the impending sea and boundless sky. In poor light it would disappear altogether, like a mirage. He could dream himself walking out to it.
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.
He chose the stones carefully, weighing each one in his hand, feeling its smoothness, judging its colour. Some he threw back into the water immediately, but a few he put in his pockets, testing their pull. He supposed it would be better to be pulled down by the shoulders, head first, to make quick and sure work of it, and so he filled his jacket – inside and out – before beginning the search for flattish rocks to fit his trouser pockets. But most of the flat ones he chose were light: better suited to skipping, not death. Instead, he collected handfuls of small stones and stuffed his pockets until they bulged.
It was at that point that he had heard the sound of a foot slipping on the chalky ground of the cliff edge, and a scuffle as a body righted itself. He had turned and peered up in time to see a boy, petrified, looking down at him with a look of peculiar recognition. A junior lad, new that year: Jonty Morrell’s brother. The sun had been high in the sky, and Swift shielded his eyes against the glare, gesturing with his free hand as a clutch of stones scattered to the ground. With that motion, the boy had turned and fled.
He had felt ridiculous, then, standing barefoot in the rock pools, and his sagging pockets had struck him suddenly as something rather shameful: he might as easily have been caught parading in women’s clothing. Stirred by a rush of self-loathing, he had tipped the stones back into the water and watched them settle to the shallow sea floor, jostling their reunion with a muted clatter.
~
Barney had been working the crown on the silver Buren with his fingernail for what seemed hours, and still it wouldn’t budge. The ticking grated in the silent San, where any sound besides the trickle of water in a basin or the occasional turning of a page in a book felt somehow profane. An hour earlier, as Mr Runcie had retreated behind Matron’s starched bulk, through the door and down the stairs to the house – to the others, Cowper and Shields and Percy, Opie and Hughes but not Robin – the ticking had become more than irritating. It hadn’t even had the decency to freeze: wasn’t that what was supposed to happen when the owner died? You rotter, Robin, Barney thought, fumbling with the seal behind the watch face, desperate only to make it stop.
Now there would never be a burst of flame that was theirs and only theirs, their one chance at beautiful destruction. The explosion, contrary to first appearances, had had nothing to do with Ivor: the bomb had lain beneath the drive for years, waiting for its moment– and it had taken Robin with it, to spite them.
Why this sickening guilt – why now? Memory is nothing but ashes and dust, he told himself, banishing the memory of the blaze. Trolley lights through the smoke, the silhouette of a fire engine ladder, an ARP warden’s helmet like a cymbal hitting the ground. Since earliest childhood he had had a waking dream: running through a house pursued by flames and chasing after a woman’s voice, driven by the urgent need to get to her before the fire.
Ashes and dust. And nothing after that.
The watch slipped, warm and slick in his clumsy fingers, and for an instant Barney was tempted to hurl it through the window. He thought that he should like to smash it through the glass of the Audley family vault. No one had been able to tell him whether or not anyone was actually buried there, and if there wasn’t what the point of it was, besides it being a place to play Bundle. Dad had no gravestone, nor had Robin – blown to smithereens so that there were bits of him floating in the very air Barney breathed.
~
“There is a seed cake and that horrible ginger beer you like so much,” said Miss Duchâtel, setting a basket on the stand next to his bed. “For you to share with the other boys if you wish” – she cast a glance around the empty San – “or with Belinda, perhaps.”
Matron’s expression betrayed judgement: she recognized the Frenchwoman, though she had never spoken to her. What had the housemaster been thinking, sending the boy to stay with a pariah? Had it been his idea of a joke? Or had he not known? Anyone who had spent more than a few evenings in the Three Kings knew the stories: that there had been two women on the farm – sisters, or possibly lovers – and the one had betrayed the other as a Jew when she became jealous of a love affair. That the commandant had fathered a child; that the farm had been a gift to a favoured mistress. That they had taken a picnic to a beach on St Just, not a five-minute drive to the pits where prisoners laboured and starved...
But perhaps the housemaster did not drink at the Three Kings.
To have said that Miss Duchâtel had no friends on the island would have been untrue: there was old Maurice at the fisherman’s kiosk, as well as a lady from the Nonconformist church who sometimes made an exchange of home-brewed rum for fresh eggs and her famously boozy fruitcakes. She was also known to have offered work to Krawiec, the school groundsman, whom most of the islanders avoided as much as possible because he reminded them of the past. But that did not require the Frenchwoman to leave her farm. Her visits to St Arras were always restricted to a prompt tour of the shops, where she placed her orders in advance for collection.
The laundress pouring sheets in a rolling bin hovered at the far end of the San, watching. But Matron was determinedly civil. Most people treated the Frenchwoman with polite coolness. There were exceptions: the butcher, who refused to serve her himself and would call for his wife to take her money, or the postal warden, who always made her complete a customs form for letters to France, even though these had not been required since the war. “She made her bed,” said Matron’s glance at the hesitating laundress. “The war wasn’t easy on anyone, but at least we kept our noses clean,” the girl’s silence seemed to imply.
“We’ll put the ginger beer in the tuck locker,” said Matron, taking the basket without waiting for either one of them to object. When she had gone, Miss Duchâtel sat down.
“Did they tell you about Morrell?” said Barney.
“No.” She followed Matron with her eyes, down the corridor between the beds to where a roster hung on the wall by a little roll-top desk. “Why? How is Ivor?”
“They sent him away. For good.”
“For what reason?”
“It doesn’t matter. We weren’t friends any more.”
“Why ever not?” Barney looked away until it became clear that she would not press the point. “Well, that is a shame.”
“The police told Pleming it was a German bomb that didn’t go off when it was supposed to.” A red arrow that began at the top of his neck, behind the ears, flushed down towards his clavicle. “Which means that it was no one’s fault. Ivor’s not going to rat you out now.”
Miss Duchâtel stood up abruptly, gaze trained on Matron’s back as if to avoid looking at Barney would somehow quieten him. “You are tired, and still upset,” she said in a low voice. “I understand. You want to be left alone, yes?”
“Not especially.”
“I must go now. I didn’t realize it was so late—”
“Do the police know as well?”
“Know what?”
“About you and the commandant. The painting was a gift from him. There were two glasses in the photograph of the picnic – the other one was his. And the baby didn’t belong to a neighbour, it was yours. You killed it—”
“She died—”
“You never fought in any Resistance. You were an orphan – a model in Paris. Poor. You came over with the Germans. That’s why the islanders cut your hair off after they’d left.”
“Stop this, Barney.”
“The one thing I don’t understand is why the bracelet you said belonged to her was down in the rock pools. That’s where Belinda found it.”
A strange look passed over Miss Duchâtel’s face: almost a smile.
“It’s where she was buried,” she said.
“Then how did she turn up behind the old kitchens?”
“Lower your voice, Holland,” barked Matron, having reappeared from her trip to the linen hanger, as Barney and Miss Duchâtel turned on her with pale faces. “I’m sorry, Miss Duchâtel. Perhaps the morning would be a better time to visit. The boys get too excited when they’re tired.”
“Yes, of course.” She collected her purse from under the chair and slung her coat over one arm. “That was another woman’s shame, Barney, not mine.”
He expected that she would return – if not the next day, then surely the day after that. But by the time Matron agreed that he could move into Wool House with the others there had been no more baskets of cakes and ginger beer, no invitation to tea at the farmhouse. It was not until the following week that his housemaster approached Barney with a card in a red envelope.
“It’s from Miss Duchâtel,” Mr Runcie said. He waited until the housemaster had turned away before tearing it open and devouring the words in a few quick glances.
My dear Barney,
Still I have no word from Ivor, who I suppose has forgotten all about us now that he is back in England. That ferry ride is so convenient for some people: the way the sea eats up the past. While the earth remembers everything, the land and the trees and the things we leave on it, the sea remembers nothing. I have decided that I owe you the truth about those things of which you accused me. You were right about many things, but not about her death: there was nothing I could have done to prevent that. Funerals were prohibited on the island – the enemy considered large gatherings too risky – and so we had a choice: either to hand her over for “disposal”, or to lay her to rest ourselves. The ground on my farm was too hard, and toxic because of that photographer’s chemicals. So I turned to the sea.
When I get to the end, I will tear this up, thought Barney.
The person to ask about the body that was discovered by the old kitchens is called Swallow, or something like that – I’m sorry I can’t remember. I don’t know whether he is a master or a student at the school, perhaps neither. Mr Krawiec once mentioned the name to me in confidence. I was one of the few people who offered him work in exchange for food after the war; he came to trust me, I suppose, despite my reputation.
Believe me when I say that I am sorry for all that has happened. My heart aches for that poor boy and his family – and for you, Barney, because I know that he was your friend.
At the bottom of the page was a signature that resembled a hair fallen across the paper, formless as breath.
~
In all likelihood she had not known, when she wrote to Barney, that that week’s ferry had been delayed by high winds and thick fog. By the time the alarm was raised, the vessel carrying Ivor Morrell was already out of radio call.
Gales would often hold things up by an hour or more: if there was fog, then the captain would be relying on signals from the mainland. Perhaps he was being overly cautious, explained the porter to waiting passengers, but better safe than sorry.
The search boats’ lanterns were no use in such fog. A call was put in to the Skagerrak coastguard to be on the lookout. Almost immediately, the reply came through: a fifteen-mile ice sheet had made the coast there quite inaccessible for several weeks.
Repeated radio requests to the vessel itself resulted only in static silence. The next day an ice-breaker was summoned from Esbjerg, but after six hours on the water no sign of the Lindsey Island ferry, its captain or sole passenger, had been detected.
It took several days for the news to filter back to school. Even then it did not become common knowledge among the masters until a day or two before the end of term, when the last ferry before Christmas looked likely to be delayed by similar conditions. Ominous mutterings about wayward gales and heavy pack ice trapping the vessel – freezing the motor and luring panicked passengers onto the foes in the mistaken belief that it was safer on the sheet – did not seem to hint at tragedy until, halfway across the strait, Barney asked Mr Runcie if Morrell’s ferry had also been delayed for very long. At that point, Mr Runcie became suddenly very concerned about Percy, who had started a nosebleed, so that Barney’s question was left to hang in the air, crushed by the creaking of frost-bitten chains and the motor’s tormented groan.
III
The island of St Just is little more than two miles long and a mile wide. Its deep pits and valleys are frequently flooded by rain and tidewater that seeps through the loam and trickles through burrowing streams that worm through the rock. If the climate were ten degrees warmer, the air itchy with tiny buzzing creatures, there might be something of the bayou to its weird, floating aspect.
