Noonday Read online

  But Kenny was wide awake, both hands resting on the seat, surreptitiously stroking the leather. Of course, he wouldn’t have been in a car very often, if at all. Even in these circumstances it was a treat to be savored. He leaned against the glass, peering at passing trees and fields. Once or twice, Paul thought he might have nodded off, but no. Kenny’s eyes were strained wide with excitement. No hope of sleep there.

  He didn’t seem to want to talk, which was probably just as well: Paul needed to concentrate on the road. So far, he’d managed to avoid blackout driving altogether. In London, if he had to be out late, he took a taxi or walked. Now, he drove slowly, his headlights casting narrow beams of bluish light in which moths and insects constantly danced. On either side of the lane, hedges and ditches shelved steeply into darkness. He crouched over the wheel, straining his eyes to see into the gloom. So far the blackout had killed more people than the raids; and no wonder: you couldn’t see people until you were right on top of them. But the trouble with staring into darkness, if you do it long enough, is that you start seeing things. Like looking into no-man’s-land in the last war: in the end, you could imagine anything lurking out there. Don’t look straight at it, he used to tell sentries, the young, inexperienced ones who were almost too terrified to blink. You’ll see more if you look slightly to one side. Unfortunately, looking slightly to one side of the road wasn’t an option. Though there was this to be said for it: the need to concentrate stopped him thinking about the possible idiocy of what he was doing. Possible? Elinor might have asked. And he had to admit it: this did feel like driving into a trap.

  He looked at Kenny. Ha, eyelids drooping, and about time too. He went on driving as smoothly as he could until, at the next bend, the boy slid sideways and slumped against his arm. Asleep, at last.

  —

  CENTRAL LONDON WAS reassuring. The streets, though quiet, seemed almost normal, or what passed for normal these days. The few cars he saw had little, piggy, red eyes; they puttered cautiously along, while taxis careered past, as if they owned the entire city—as indeed they did. Petrol rationed for private cars, buses scarce. This was what you saw everywhere. The change was in the sky: beyond the black ridges of the rooftops, a red, sullen glare was growing and spreading, lit at intervals by the orange flashes of exploding bombs. Searchlights everywhere, but no fighter planes that he could see; and no guns.

  He parked the car and persuaded Kenny to get out. At first the boy was groggy with sleep, but Paul knew he’d need to keep an eye on him. Kenny was wound up to such a pitch of excitement he was quite capable of slipping away and trying to reach home tonight. He’d have no trouble finding the docks; all he’d have to do was walk straight towards that red glow. But into what kind of hell?

  Paul tried several times to turn the front-door key, but it no longer quite fitted. Perhaps the wood had warped, something like that; you couldn’t get a locksmith for love nor money. He sucked the key, pursing his lips against the sourness of the metal, but when he tried again, it turned. A breath of cool, stale air. The house had been empty only a few days and yet already it had started to forget them. Letters and newspapers littered the mat. Stooping, he picked them up and put them, unopened, on the hall table. Kenny stepped over the threshold as cautiously as a cat. Now the drive was behind him, Paul felt suddenly very tired.

  Closing the door on the merciless moonlight, he went round the drawing room checking the blackout curtains were in position and switching on the lamps. Then he turned to look at Kenny, who was staring blankly around the strange room. Now what? What on earth am I supposed to do with him? The sirens were sounding for the second time that night. They ought, really, to go to one of the public shelters, but he couldn’t face going out again and he didn’t think Kenny could either.

  “We’ll sleep in the hall,” he said. “We’ll be safe enough there.” A few weeks ago, when the nuisance raids started, he and Elinor had dragged a double mattress downstairs. They’d lined the walls with other mattresses and cushions from the sofa and he’d made sure all the windows were taped against blast. Of course, none of this would protect them from a direct hit, but then neither would most of the shelters. “Why don’t you settle yourself down? I’ll see if I can find us something to eat.” And drink.

  In the kitchen, he opened and shut cupboards, found half a loaf of bread (stale, but it would have to do), a couple of wizened apples, a slab of Cheddar just beginning to sweat and a bottle of orange juice. Then he poured himself a large whisky and carried the tray into the hall.

  Kenny had tipped the toy soldiers out of the bag and was arranging them on a strip of wooden floor between the mattress and the drawing-room door. He looked up, white-faced, on the verge of tears again but blinking them back hard. “Why can’t we go tonight?”

  “Because it’ll be absolute chaos and we’ll only get in the way.”

  “We could help.”

  “I don’t think so. Anyway, I doubt they’d let us anywhere near.” Thumps and bangs in the distance. “Look, I’ll take you first thing in the morning, soon as it’s light. Sorry, Kenny, best I can do.” A nearer thud shook the door. “Come on, have something to eat, it’ll make you feel better.”

  Kenny was tearing off a chunk of bread with his teeth. “We could play.”

  “Play?”

  Kenny nodded towards the soldiers. Well, why not? It would take his mind off it. So they munched apples, cheese and bread, drank whisky and orange juice, moved cohorts of little figures here and there until, eventually, even Paul became absorbed in the game. The background clumps and thuds blended in really rather well. Kenny was the officer, of course. Paul was a not-very-bright NCO. Now and then, an explosion rattled the window frames—and, yes, he was afraid. Nothing like the fear he’d experienced in the trenches; though, in one way, it was worse: he was experiencing this fear in the safety of his own home, and that meant nowhere was safe. More than once, he was tempted to go out and try to see what was happening, but he didn’t want to interrupt the game—it was so obviously helping take Kenny’s mind off the bombs—and so they played on, metal armies advancing across strips of parquet floor, rather more quickly than they’d done in life; Passchendaele and the Somme played out on the floor of a house in Bloomsbury. “Yes, sir!” Drifting clouds of smoke obscured the salient. “Right you are, sir!” A shell landing in a flooded crater sent sheets of muddy water thirty feet into the air. “Going out to take a look, now, sir!”

  Kenny would have to sleep soon, his eyes were rolling back in his head, but my God he fought it. Finished his orange juice, asked for more…This time, Paul tipped a little whisky into the glass and, although Kenny wrinkled his nose at the funny taste, he drank it all down and shortly afterwards curled up on the mattress and went to sleep.

  Paul began to clear the soldiers away, then stopped, selected two and looked at them, lying side by side on the palm of his hand. Somehow, last time he’d seen them, he hadn’t quite realized what it meant. My God, he thought. We’ve become toys. He wanted to share the moment, the shock of it, but there was nobody who’d understand.

  He slipped the little figures into his pocket, lay down beside Kenny and went to sleep.

  In the middle of the night, Kenny woke up and shook Paul’s arm. “You hear that?”

  Paul struggled to wake up; he must’ve gone very deep, he could hardly force his eyes open. They lay listening to the thuds until one blast louder than the rest made Kenny cry out. He was too big to ask for reassurance, too young not to need it. Paul touched his arm. “Don’t worry, it’s all right.”

  “Is it true, you don’t hear the one that hits you?”

  “Yes.” Said very firmly indeed, though he’d certainly heard the shell that had hit him; he’d heard it shrieking all the way down. Still did.

  Kenny was sitting up, wide-eyed, quivering like a whippet at the start of a race. “Can we go now?”

  “Soon as it’s light.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Three thirty. Com
e on, go back to sleep.”

  “I can’t sleep.”

  Nor could Paul.

  “You know, we mightn’t be able to get there. There won’t be any buses or taxis. And I’m not driving through that.”

  “We can walk.”

  No point arguing. And anyway he didn’t know. No more than Kenny could he guess what they would have to face. “Well, I’m going back to sleep,” he said. “And if you’ve got any sense at all you’ll do the same.”

  He turned on his side and lay in darkness, waiting for the change in Kenny’s breathing. Only when he was sure Kenny was asleep did he let his own eyes close.

  —

  THE ALL CLEAR went at four thirty. Kenny woke instantly, alert and wary, more like an animal than a child. Paul fetched the last of the orange juice for Kenny and two cups of black tea, one for each of them. “Here, drink this. No, I know it doesn’t taste very nice but you need something hot.”

  Paul stepped across the mattress and opened the front door; his eyes, gritty with tiredness, flinched from the sudden light. Yet another monotonously blue sky, but over there above the docks, the red glow lingered, mixed in with plumes of billowing black smoke. Even at this distance he could smell burning.

  Kenny joined him on the step. “Look,” Paul started to say, wanting to warn him again that it mightn’t be possible to get anywhere near his house, but the words dribbled into vacancy before the boy’s fixed, hard stare. He was going, no question; no hope of deflecting him either.

  “Come on,” Paul said. “Let’s get your case.”

  —

  A CABBIE AGREED to take them part of the way. When a warden waved at them to turn back, Paul and Kenny got out and walked for a while before Paul begged a lift in an ambulance from Derek James, one of the drivers Elinor worked with.

  Oily black smoke drifted across the wet roads. Many of the warehouses were still on fire, dwarfing the exhausted crews who still, hour after hour, directed white poles of water into the heart of the blaze. Other buildings had been reduced to charred and smoldering ruins in which, at any moment, you felt a fire could break out again. So many streets lay in ruins he couldn’t understand how Kenny was finding his way, and yet he rarely hesitated. Bodies lay by the side of the roads, lifeless, sodden heaps of rags. No child should be seeing this, but then, some of the bodies were children.

  Once, he tried to persuade Kenny to turn back, but the boy just shook his head. “No, no, it’s just along here.” He grabbed Paul’s sleeve and started dragging him along. He had such a strange, haunted look on his face that Paul was frightened for him, though at least the intensity of his drive to get home seemed to prevent his taking in the horrors on either side. They were walking along the river now, or as close to it as they could get. On the opposite bank, a wall of flame half a mile long leapt into the lowering sky. In mid-stream, burning barges, loose from their moorings, drifted hither and thither with the shifting of the tide.

  Ahead of them a cluster of little terraces, still apparently more or less intact, ran up to the dock gates, like a row of piglets suckling a sow’s teats. As they got closer, they saw that most of the houses were badly damaged and a few had collapsed altogether, leaving gaps through which further destruction showed. “Kenny…”

  “No, it’s not far. Just along there.”

  As they turned into the first street Paul heard Kenny’s intake of breath. It seemed, at first sight, as though all the houses had been hit. Kenny began to run, weaving his way around piles of rubble until at last he stopped in front of one of the houses. The windows had been blown in, a mattress hung out of an upstairs room, most of the roof had gone. Paul tried to push the front door open. It was a struggle—the door was jammed shut by debris from a fallen ceiling—but he managed it at last.

  Kenny pushed past him and was clambering across the mess of bricks and plaster in the passage.

  “Don’t,” Paul called out. “It’s not—”

  Safe, he had been going to say, but the word meant nothing here. He followed Kenny into the devastated sitting room, through the almost-untouched kitchen and out into the yard at the back. Fleeting glimpses along the way of where and how Kenny had lived.

  “Mam?” Kenny was calling. “Mam?”

  A body was lying outside the coalhouse door, a woman’s body, facedown, and for a moment Paul thought: Oh God it’s her, but Kenny paid it no attention. Farther along, by the yard door, a man’s head rested on the concrete, severed neatly at the neck, one eye closed. Kenny pushed it to one side with his foot and opened the door into the alley. A big jump down and he was on the cobbles, staring up and down a row of washing lines, from some of which, incredibly, shirts and pillowcases still hung. Dazed-looking people were wandering up and down, lost, waiting for somebody to get hold of them and tell them where to go. A few, braver or harder than the rest, were rescuing their possessions from ruined houses, carrying tables and chairs into the alley and setting them down, with sheets and blankets and pots and pans, small heaps of possessions fiercely guarded. Somebody had stuck a Union Jack on a pile of rubble, but most of these people were too exhausted and shocked for gestures of that kind.

  Kenny looked around him. “It’s all gone.”

  Paul opened his mouth, but had no idea what to say. He was about to suggest that Kenny should come back inside the house, when, at the far end of the street, they saw a woman walking towards them with a baby in her arms. Kenny ran towards her shouting, “Mam! Mam!” She stopped, but then came on more quickly. Her clothes were black and torn, her face blackened too. She might even be burnt, Paul thought. At any rate she’d lost her eyebrows. She looked dully at Kenny. “Oh, it’s you.”

  A dark-haired, cadaverous man with yellow skin and deep furrows in his cheeks followed along behind, holding a tiny red-haired girl by the hand. “What you doing here?”

  Kenny ignored this and went on tugging at the woman’s sleeve, but she shook him off. It’s the shock, Paul thought, she’ll be all right in a minute, and indeed, a few seconds later, she pressed the boy’s head against her side and ran her fingers distractedly through his hair. But then, immediately, she looked accusingly at Paul. “What you brought him back for? I can’t have him—you can see for yourself there’s nothing left.”

  “Kenny.” Paul put his hand on the boy’s shoulder but he squirmed away and burrowed his head deeper into his mother’s side. “Your mam’s right. I think you’d better come back with me, just till your mam gets a bit more settled.”

  “I’m not going.” He looked up at his mother. “You can’t make me go with him, he’s been mucking me about.”

  It took Paul a moment to realize what he meant. “You little toad. You know bloody well that’s not true.”

  “Mam, it is, Mam. He’s been putting whisky in me orange juice and all sorts. Ask him. No, go on, ask him. And we slept in the same bed last night.”

  “Kenny? No-o, Kenny, look at me, look me in the eye and say it, go on.” When there was no response, Paul looked directly at the mother. “It’s not true.”

  “No, I know, it’s all right, he’s always making things up.” She leaned in closer. With a slight shock he saw the moist, puckered anemone of the baby’s mouth tugging at a huge brown nipple. Almost whispering, she said, “The thing is, he doesn’t get on with his stepdad.” She glanced over her shoulder, then made a sharp, sideways gesture with her free hand: hopeless.

  The cadaverous man was starting to take an interest in the conversation—perhaps thinking there might be a fiver in it for him, if he played his cards right. And why not? Plenty of girls, and not a few boys, changed hands for a lot less than that. This was not quite the family reunion Paul had been expecting.

  “Where are they taking you?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.” She looked helplessly at a small crowd that was gathering a few feet away at the end of the alley.

  “School on Agate Street!” somebody shouted.

  “Is it far?” Paul called back.

  “�
�’Bout a mile.”

  A hell of a distance for these shattered people—some injured, some with minor burns, many in pajamas and dressing gowns—to walk. He looked down at their feet. Not all of them had shoes; some limped over the cobbles, blood-shod.

  He turned back to Kenny’s mother. “Look, I’ll help you carry.” He was desperate to do something, anything.

  “I’ve got a suitcase packed,” she said.

  So Paul followed her into the house and dragged it out of its hiding place under the stairs. God knows what she’d got in there. Lifting it almost wrenched his arm out of the socket, but he wasn’t going to give in. If they could bear this, so could he.

  Air-raid wardens, white-faced with plaster dust, had already started shepherding the crowd along.

  So they walked. And what a rabble they were. Red eyes stared out of gray faces; some ranted and raved, others were hysterical or mute with shock. He’d witnessed all these reactions in casualty clearing stations in France and Belgium, only he’d never thought to see them here. London’s burning, London’s burning…Bloody tune skittered round and round his brain as he lugged and tramped, try as he might he couldn’t get rid of it, so he made himself look outwards, to notice and remember.

  They walked along rubble-strewn roads, through puddles of water filmed with oil, over fire hoses that lay across the black and glistening pavements as gray and flaccid as drowned worms. On their right, buildings blazed out of control; others, black and skeletal, wavered in the heat. Once, looking ahead, he saw the tarmac come to life and move. He thought it must be a trick of the light then realized it was a colony of rats, thousands of them, fleeing a burning warehouse. Sometimes the ground underfoot was hot and the people whose feet were lacerated or burned cried out as they limped across it. The really terrifying thing, the one he knew he’d never forget, was when the road behind them suddenly ignited in a long, slow, leisurely lick of flame.

  The things people carried. An old lady’s wrinkled forearms covered in claw marks, beaded with blood. A tabby cat, its pupils wildly dilated, peered out from the neck of her dressing gown. A clock. Photographs—yes, of course you’d try to save those, but a black hand grasping a bunch of plastic lilies of the valley? Or an elephant’s tusk in a brown leather sling?