Noonday Read online

  They found a man on the first-floor landing, his head and shoulders sticking out of the rubble, eyes glazed, that unmistakable look of nobody at home. But was this the man they’d been told about, or was there somebody else? No way of knowing. Charlie decided to press on. Paul swept the torch from side to side, training the light on their feet, as they crept up the stairs, each tread complaining under their combined weight. At any moment, now, you felt the whole bloody staircase was coming down. Paul opened his mouth to say they ought to think about going back, but at that moment Charlie raised his hand again.

  A man was lying across the top of the stairs, unconscious, barely breathing, short, middle-aged, with a paunch that strained his shirt buttons, and cheeks like a hamster’s full of nuts. Brian blew his whistle, and the sound carried Paul back to the trenches. Stretcher-bearers! Trying to fix himself in the present, he swung the torch over gilt picture frames and velvet curtains. “Keep it steady, mate,” Charlie said. “Can’t see what I’m doing here.”

  No stretcher-bearers appeared in response to Brian’s whistle; nobody had seriously thought they would. “All right then?” Charlie said, and they positioned themselves at the unconscious man’s head and feet.

  It took them an hour to get him out. Paul helped the woman ambulance driver lift him onto the top bunk. The bunk below was already occupied, by a terrified man who kept whimpering that he’d broken his arm and it was a disgrace—an absolute bloody disgrace—that he hadn’t been taken to the hospital straight away. “There’s plenty worse than you,” the driver said, in a ferociously clipped accent. “If you don’t keep quiet I’ll dump you in the road.”

  “I’d do as I was told if I were you,” Paul said. “I think she means it.”

  The driver slipped off her right gauntlet and held out her hand. Automatically, Paul took it, though it seemed an odd gesture in the circumstances.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Bit of a dead weight, wasn’t he?”

  Or just dead. “It’s Miss Tempest, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, Violet, please. I trained with Elinor.”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  He was just about to jump down into the road when she took hold of his sleeve. Puzzled, he glanced down and saw the cloth was stiff with blood. “Oh, it’s all right,” he said. “It’s not mine.”

  She pulled the edges of the tear apart and peered inside. “I think you’ll find it is.”

  Immediately, his arm began to throb, though up to that moment he’d felt no pain. “I’d no idea.”

  “No, I’m serious now, you go and get that seen to.”

  He looked at her. A painfully thin, wiry, indestructible woman in late middle age. Far too old to be driving an ambulance, but nobody had the nerve to tell her that. Before the war she’d taught—classics, was it? At Cambridge. Very ivory-tower, the sort of woman whom normally he might not have taken seriously, but in the confusion of the moment any sufficiently firm suggestion acquired the force of a command. He sketched a salute. “Yes, ma’am.”

  He thought he might as well get the cut seen to, though he didn’t think it was anything serious and felt a bit of a fraud, crunching along Gower Street over a river of broken glass. This same route he’d taken every morning as a student at the Slade. Now, shocked people huddled in doorways or wandered around in the middle of the road, purgatorial shadows with their white, dust-covered faces and dark clothes. Some, in pajamas and dressing gowns, limped along on bloodied feet.

  Reaching his station at the School of Tropical Medicine, he staggered down into the basement, where he found Nick Hendry being treated for a cut to his forehead. Lucky lad—another inch and it would’ve been his eye.

  When Paul’s turn came, he rolled up his shirtsleeve and discovered, as he’d rather expected, that the cut, though still oozing blood, was not deep. “Looks worse than it is,” the first-aid worker said. “Go and have a cup of tea.”

  He retreated to one of the two battered sofas that lined the walls. Nick Hendry was stretched out on the other and was snoring softly, his upper lip vibrating with every breath. Paul tried to read a newspaper, but couldn’t concentrate. He forced down a cup of orange tea, and though his stomach rose in revolt, immediately began to feel better.

  After a brief respite, he started to feel he was shirking and forced himself to go out on patrol again. One good thing, he hadn’t suffered any spells of dizziness all night and that was reassuring because this was his first night back on duty, and he’d been half expecting it to return.

  Two hours later, he returned to the station, eyelids gritty with tiredness, yawning and scratching his neck. Nick was still on the sofa, face averted, though Paul could tell from his breathing he wasn’t asleep. A few minutes later, Sandra Jobling came in and took off her helmet, bending forward to run her fingers through her sweaty hair. Her face was still covered in plaster dust, but at some time during the night she must have reapplied her lipstick without the aid of a mirror, because she now had two huge, glossy, smiling red lips, with smears of lipstick all over her cheeks and chin. She waved to Paul, then went straight through to the cloakroom next door.

  Charlie Web and Brian Temple came in not long after. Charlie put his mug of tea on the table and pulled up a chair. “Gone quiet.”

  “Not long now,” Paul said.

  They waited for the All Clear with hardly less tension than they’d waited for the warning sirens the night before. Charlie jerked his head in Nick’s direction. “He’s making the most of it.” He slurped a mouthful of tea. “What about that old geezer, then, the one with the plastic bag? Bloody thing burst, you know. I was lifting him onto the top bunk and…Pish. All over me. Could’ve done with a bloody umbrella.”

  Nick sat up, ostentatiously rubbing his eyes.

  “Hey up,” Charlie said. “Sleeping Beauty’s back. How are you, mate?”

  He carried his mug across to the sofa and sat down. Nick had seemed very jittery all night; Charlie had been virtually carrying him. Their voices sank to a low murmur. Paul was already nodding off to sleep when a hand on his shoulder jerked him awake.

  Charlie: “I’m taking Nick round the corner for a pasty. You coming?”

  Brian stood up at once, but Paul shook his head. “No thanks, I think I’ll be getting off home.”

  But it was hard to make himself get going. He’d only just levered himself to his feet when Sandra came back into the room, her face pink and shining, forehead plastered with tendrils of wet hair. She came straight over to him. “I don’t know. Men.”

  “What have we done now?”

  “How could you let me walk round like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “Lipstick plastered all over me face.”

  He smiled. “I thought you looked amazing.”

  “I looked like a clown.”

  It seemed the easiest, most natural thing in the world to grab her by the shoulders and kiss her. Only when it was too late, when she’d taken a step back and was gawping at him, did he realize what he’d done. My God. He tried to come up with something to say, something that would shrink the kiss, turn it into a friendly, casual, comradely gesture, the sort of thing he might have done to Charlie or Brian, but the words wouldn’t come. To his relief, he saw she was looking amused rather than offended. “I’m—”

  Sorry, he was going to say, but at that moment a voice at the door said, “Is there any tea left in that pot?”

  Walter Harris, gray-faced, ready to drop.

  Sandra felt the curve of the pot. “Past its best, I’m afraid. Yeah, no, you can’t have that. I’ll put the kettle on.”

  Walter lowered himself into a chair. “Thanks, love.”

  “Well,” Paul said, deliberately including both of them. “I’d better be off. See you tomorrow.”

  “You not on tonight, then?” Walter said. “Jammy bugger.”

  Paul waited for Sandra to say something, but she was busy at the sink. “See you?”

  She looked over her shoulder. “Yeah, ri
ght.”

  Outside on the pavement, breathing the tainted air, he relived the kiss. Had there been a second’s yielding before she pulled away? Nah, wishful thinking. No fool like an old fool, et-bloody-cetera. He began to walk home, but slowly, in no hurry to get there, noticing cordoned-off streets, gaps in terraces, some new, some already familiar. Relief at having survived the night fizzed in every vein.

  But it was Sandra he thought about, as he walked along. Sandra, with her long, coarse, dark hair, the fringe that was always getting into her eyes, so she had to keep pushing it back. What with that and her short, stocky, little legs, she reminded him of a Shetland pony. Oh, she wasn’t pretty, but he thought she had something better than prettiness: it was almost impossible to look at her without smiling. He wanted—oh, very badly, he wanted—to lie naked with her in a bed, to feel her young, strong, firm body under his. And, at first, he thought, sheer exhaustion might make lovemaking difficult, but then, in small touches and movements, the heat between them would grow, until at last sex became not merely possible, but urgent, necessary, unavoidable.

  He was close to home now, but walking more slowly all the time, until at last, turning into the square, he was forced to acknowledge the truth: that he didn’t want to go home at all.

  FIFTEEN

  Over the last few weeks, Neville’s dislike of the Ministry of Information had become an almost hysterical loathing. He dated the change to one apparently endless afternoon when it first occurred to him that the ministry was alive; that its corridors were the intestines of some flabby, flatulent beast farting memos, reports and minutes that always had to be initialed and passed on, though as far as he could tell no action was ever taken.

  Once you started thinking the building might be alive, the evidence for it rapidly accumulated. It was always on the move, always changing shape. Literally, from one Friday afternoon to the following Monday morning, whole corridors would appear or disappear. His own room, which was hardly big enough for one—though he shared it with two other people—had been carved out of another, much larger, room. The half-window let in scarcely any light, and the partition kept out no noise at all. So he was privy to the conversation of half a dozen shorthand typists, listening in—involuntarily, if not reluctantly—as they talked about their boyfriends, nightclubs they were going to, which dresses they were going to wear…How far they were going to go. “Who is it tonight?” he heard one girl say. “Somebody nice?” Giggles all round. “Is it somebody you want to die with?”

  That shook him. It made him think: Who would I want to die with? Nobody; but even as he said, or rather thought, “nobody,” he was back in the dining room with Elinor, holding out his hand, inviting her to dance with him. Totally unexpected, that evening they’d spent together. At first, he’d experienced no more than a slight awkwardness, a few tweaks of nostalgia perhaps, and yet by midnight it had been far more than that. When she smiled and turned away, he was immediately back on a dusty road with his head in her lap, seeing, as she bent over him, how her nipples formed two dark circles against the thin white lawn of her blouse, as unexpected and mysterious as fish rising to break the smooth surface of a lake.

  Hilde sat next to him: a sad Austrian woman. He’d have liked to practice his German on her, but, except when discussing the finer points of a translation, she stuck resolutely to English. The only other inhabitant of the room was an old man with the streaming white hair of an Old Testament prophet, Bertram Somebody-or-other, but he appeared less and less frequently. They were supposed to be translating a series of pamphlets collectively entitled Life Under the Nazis, but progress was slow, and the material unpromising. Hilde, he suspected, knew far more about life under the Nazis than any of the authors did.

  Every morning, as he entered the building, along with hundreds of other identically dressed men carrying identical briefcases, his spirits sank. By midafternoon, he was desperate, his eyes full of grit, his mouth dry, every muscle aching. As the golden light crept across the parquet floor, he daren’t think about sleep. To try to keep himself awake, he went along the corridor to the Gents, where he splashed his face with cold water. There was a mirror behind the washbasin, but he avoided looking at his reflection. He’d long ago mastered the art of washing, combing his hair and even shaving by touch alone. Each basin had a cheap plastic nailbrush chained to the wall behind the taps, for all the world as if they were priceless medieval Bibles. The irritation this caused him was out of all proportion; he wanted to wrench the bloody things off the wall, but of course he didn’t. Though as he walked back to the stuffy little room, he was nursing fantasies of escape. After all, he wasn’t obliged to stay here. He could leave—leave London, for that matter—go somewhere else, anywhere else, and paint. Accident had made him a journalist and a critic—and a good one, too—but it was not who he was.

  Hilde hardly looked up when he came back into the room. She wore her hair pinned up in a rather untidy bun; as he squeezed past he looked down at the nape of her neck and wondered why it should be that exhaustion increased the desire to fuck. Logically, it should have had the opposite effect, but it never did, not with him anyway. In fact, a lot of his time in this room was spent weaving fantasies about Hilde or the typists next door or…Well, anybody really. There was nothing to take his mind off it. When talking to Tarrant he’d emphasized the importance of his work, but really anybody with fluent German could have done it. Yes, he dealt with classified information, but only because all information here was classified. The lowest classification was “Secret” and that was applied to the requisitioning of toilet rolls. Sighing, he sat down, pulled a stack of files towards him and began to sort through it.

  The clock ticked towards six. The Indian-summer afternoon was slipping away and that mattered so much these days, when people lay in the parks and squares basking in the sun like lizards, or stood in doorways and windows, raising their eyes to the light, storing it up against the blackout. Nobody dared think about the coming winter, when days would be shorter and air raids longer. As he crouched over the files, he could hear Hilde’s stocking-clad legs—where did she get them?—whispering to each other as she walked across to the filing cabinet. She bent to pull out the lower drawer and he gazed hungrily at her backside. A minute later, she found the file she was looking for and straightened up. As she turned, their eyes met and he saw her flinch as she registered the full force of his melancholy lust. Quickly, not looking at him, she returned to her desk.

  Ah, well. She wasn’t even noticeably attractive, though to him at the moment almost all women were attractive, at least to some degree. On his last free night, he’d gone out walking. It was one of the paradoxes of his present exhausted state that on the nights when he wasn’t on duty, he sometimes found it difficult to sleep. After tossing and turning for an hour, he thought: To hell with it, and went out. Though he was London born and bred, he found the blacked-out streets not only startling, but confusing. More than once he got lost. Piccadilly, after dark, felt particularly strange, because in peacetime it had always been so brightly lit. He stopped to light a cigarette and heard the tapping of a prostitute’s heels on the pavement. High heels, on these lightless nights, always sounded erotic, but a prostitute’s especially so because they hammered tacks into the heels and toes, to make them stand out. And stand out they certainly did, beating an urgent, unmistakable tattoo. This wasn’t the only way prostitutes defeated the blackout. Another was to lurk in shop doorways and, whenever a man approached, shine their blackout torches on exposed breasts or the triangle of darkness at the apex of their thighs. He found these spotlit body parts disturbing: they reminded him of an incident he’d attended near King’s Cross where a railway arch, being used as an unofficial shelter, had suffered a direct hit. When the ambulances got there, heavy rescue squads were pulling arms, legs, heads, hands, feet from the rubble, lining them up on the pavement. Somebody had flashed a torch along the line and it was exactly like this. Revulsion and a kind of excitement. The girl whose tap-ta
pping footsteps he’d heard—he could see her now, walking towards him, or at least he could see the shape of her, which was all he needed or wanted to see. As he came closer, she shone her torch down onto her slim legs—the ankles almost feverishly thin. They found each other in a shop doorway. He pushed up her skirt, his fingers snagging on her stocking tops, slipping across her bare thighs into the warm, moist darkness between, moaning now, gasping for breath, over in seconds, laughing shakily as he withdrew. From beginning to end, he hadn’t seen her face.

  Promptly at six, Neville closed the file he was working on and reached for his hat. Hilde was already putting on her jacket. They walked to the lift together, or if not together then at least not ostentatiously apart, but then she met one of the secretaries from the room next door and stopped to chat so he waved and went on alone.

  The lift took ages to arrive; it always did at this time of day. He killed time by looking at the paintings on the wall, which were quite possibly, for all he knew, selected by Kenneth Clark himself. His office was farther down the corridor. One, in particular, Neville objected to: a landscape, a beauty spot somewhere in the Lake District, precisely the sort of painting that had no reason to exist. A bit like some of Tarrant’s early stuff. Oh my God, it might even be a Tarrant. He peered at the signature, but it was illegible, and then stood back, determined to give the painting a fair chance. No, nothing there at all, just a picture-postcard view of a lake. Couldn’t even tell which one. Ullswater? Wet, anyway.

  The sight of that scrawled, illegible signature—was that a “T”?—reminded him he was having supper with the Tarrants that night. Probably not a good idea. The continued silence from Kenneth Clark had begun to prey on his mind. Of course it shouldn’t matter that he—Neville—was being continually passed over. Every night when on duty he saw lives ended prematurely, people injured, mutilated, in terrible pain. What possible importance could personal ambition have in such a context? Oh, but it did, it did. It hurt that Tarrant’s reputation had overtaken his. And yet somehow the friendship survived, though it was an odd relationship. Sometimes it hardly seemed like friendship at all.