Silent Noon (17 page)

“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.

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.

Barney’s hand was on the gate when Ivor touched his shoulder and placed a finger to his lips. “Let’s surprise her,” he said. So they crept around the back of the house
instead.

Soon they heard her footsteps, and through the slats in the fence they saw her emerge holding a chicken under one arm. With a deft move she took it by the legs and swung it upside down, so
quickly that by the time they had realized what was about to happen the bird was hanging in mid-air with glazed-over eyes, and the long knife was already in her hand.

There was not time to look away as Miss Duchâtel sliced the head off – backhanded, as if performing a tennis stroke – and the sight of it dropping to the ground with a thud,
and all that blood pouring from the neck, made Belinda scream.

That was the surprise ruined. Miss Duchâtel told Ivor off for letting the girl watch, and tried to reassure her that the chicken had felt no pain – but Belinda shrank from the
woman’s arms and ran, sobbing, from the yard.

“What a display,” Ivor said. “A child of her age.”

“Shut up,” said Barney, and followed her.

He found her at the front of the poultry yard, leaning against the fence and digging a groove into the earth with her toe. Something about her posture made him hesitate – if she ran away a
second time it would be his fault – but when she heard him shoo away a couple of the hens she turned and said in a flat voice, “Leave them alone.”

“I wasn’t doing anything.”

She leant her head upon her arms and sighed deeply.

“You all right?” he said.

“It doesn’t matter.”

They stood there for a while, watching the shadows brush the landscape, until Barney said. “Why don’t we go inside?”

“You can. I hate her.”

Perhaps she sensed it too, thought Barney. “She lied about Switzerland,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“I don’t. But I think she came over with the Krauts. Someone’s threatened her. She’s hiding something. Maybe the baby. Maybe she killed it, even.”

Belinda stared at the ground, surprisingly unmoved.

“Do you want to go into town?” he said. “We’re halfway there already, and I have sixpence.”

That seemed a good idea – until they were standing in a queue at the café. Noticing a pair of goose-pimpled calves like two small hams before them, Belinda tugged at Barney’s
sleeve.

“Never mind this,” she said. “Let’s go somewhere else.”

But Gloria had already turned around. Belinda would have recognized the pushed-up bosom in its mossy brown gym slip at a hundred yards.

“I say, Miss Haugherty,” Gloria said, with a look of malicious delight. “Look.”

The woman in the queue next to Gloria turned and regarded Belinda with a little lopsided smile.

“Belinda, dear. How lovely to see you again.”

Gloria’s prune-coloured eyes slid back and forth in their deep sockets, from Barney to Belinda and back again.

“This is Barney Holland,” Belinda said.

“A pleasure to meet you, Barney,” said Miss Haugherty. “Gloria, was it the plain scones or the fruit that Miss Horne asked for?”

“The plain ones, Miss.” Gloria again fixed her stare on the pair. “Fitting in nicely, are you?”

“I am, thanks.”

“Come along, Gloria. Do send my regards to your parents, Belinda.”

When they were gone, Barney bought two iced buns and suggested that they eat them by the sea wall.

“Friend of yours?” he said. For the first time, it occurred to him that perhaps being the only girl among boys wasn’t what made her different: perhaps she had always been that
way.

“I skivvied for her last year.” Kneeling over a square of newspaper to dig clumps of grass from Gloria’s hockey boots while the sixth-former sat cross-legged on her bed and an
American voice crooned ‘Kiss of Fire’ from the gramophone – making toast or restringing a lacrosse stick while Gloria pulled a brush through her dull hair, willing it to shine
like Millicent Grady’s, the head girl, rumoured to be at least a quarter Spanish. Everyone had to tiptoe around Gloria because she was fat. This hadn’t bothered Belinda so much as the
way Gloria would snap her ruler against the backs of her legs as she knelt to lay the fire or grill her as to the whereabouts of a missing hairpin that Belinda knew full well wasn’t
Gloria’s at all, but was pinched from her roommate.