Silent Noon (28 page)

“Waiting for someone, Holland?” said a voice from across the hallway. Mr Flood stood in the doorway of the masters’ common room with an armful of mark books clutched to his
chest, crumpling the canary-yellow tie that looked as if it might be a gift from his wife. “Otherwise I’d have to ask what business brings you indoors when there’s setting-up
still to be done…”

“It’s just that Rowe said we needed the flag, sir.”

“Ah, yes.” Flood had kept the door propped ajar: now he pushed against it, executing a ballroom manoeuvre into the common room and indicating that Holland should follow him.
“It’s on top of the bookcase,” he said, peering over the rims of his spectacles. “Do you see there? You might need to use a chair.”

This was a rare incursion into a sacred domain, and Barney suddenly felt that he must make a special effort to take in as much as possible in the short time he would be allowed access to its
secrets. The masters’ common room was laid out in an L-shape, with the approach through the shorter section furnished sparsely with pigeonholes and shelves and two occasional tables. It was
hazy with pipe smoke; newspapers were left draped over armchairs on which broad backsides had left their imprint and piles of marking teetered beneath chipped teacups.

“Don’t dawdle, lad. Here’s a stool you can use.” Barney mounted the chair and steadied himself against the bookshelf. “Do you know what day it is?”

“Wednesday, sir, the twenty-sixth of May.”

“It’s the same day that Hunt’s chaps got to within 300 feet of the summit of Everest before having to turn back. Not enough oxygen, you know.”

“No, sir.”

The boy eased himself down to the floor with the flag draped in one arm. There had been a disturbance of dust atop the bookcase, and the boy stifled a sneeze. When, years later, he would read of
the master’s sudden death on holiday in France (a history of high blood pressure, a day of record temperatures in the Cévennes), it was that moment of dust motes dancing in the pipe
smoke and a canvas flag pressed heavily into the crook of his arm that would come rushing back to him.

“Running tomorrow, I see, Holland?” He glanced at Barney over the top of his spectacles, and not for the first time Barney wondered why he bothered to wear them at all, if not to
look through them.

“Yes, sir.”

“Good for you, lad. Endurance sport and all that. How the war was won.”

“Sir.”

Now Barney saw the meekness in the master’s eyes, behind the wire spectacles.
He will never know
, thought Barney.
He was never a collaborator, or an adulterer. He has probably
never broken a rule in his life, and so he can be happy.

“Of you go, then, Holland. And good luck tomorrow, if I don’t see you.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Flood waited for the boy to disappear ahead of him down the corridor and into the daylight before making his own way through the archway, towards home. Pleming had hosted a drinks party the
previous night to celebrate the housemaster’s birthday, and his head still throbbed with a faint ache behind the eyes. Against his wishes Mollie had brought along her husband’s violin,
and under pressure from his colleagues and their wives Flood had finally been convinced to play two short pieces: some Corelli and a silly little study by Kreutzer. His palms had slipped along the
neck of the instrument and his fingers had squeaked and slid over the strings in a way that had made him annoyed and embarrassed, though if anyone else had noticed they hadn’t let on. The
wine had been flowing for just long enough to dull the edges of formality with which the masters normally interacted before the boys, and their wives had been understandably eager to make the most
of this opportunity to relax. All night, Mollie had laughed with the other women in a way that expressed a strange kind of relief – and at the evening’s end she had slipped one arm
through Swift’s and with her free hand pinched his chin in a fond, maternal manner. He had noticed the way Runcie watched for his reaction, like a dog seeking permission from a herdsman to
nip at the heels of an errant sheep. “Time for our Mikey to find himself a companion his own age,” he had sniffed to Flood, who thought it a strange thing to say.

But all that was not the cause of what he felt now: this gnawing hollowness insulted by the bells and smugly glaring sun, the gloating beauty of a day designed for the enjoyment of the young. As
he made his way across the green, pursuing a line amid the bustle of boys and masters ferrying chairs and tables and bunting and assorted sporting equipment, it was the shaded window that held his
attention, gazing out beyond the tree line and across the sea to another school many miles away.

He pushed through the kitchen door, which had been left on the latch, and called upstairs to Lucia so that he might swing her in his arms and never let her go.

The story was that Shields had put Cowper up to it. A month’s supply of Crunch bars from his tuck and bragging rights in perpetuity: that was the agreement, if things
worked out exactly as planned.

The caper was not an original one, but it had been so rarely pulled off that there was still a promising sense of challenge about it. As the school assembled in a semicircle in front of Ormer
House, Cowper took pains to arrange himself at the far end of the standing Lydian row. The first form sat on the ground in front of the second, which perched on benches flanking the masters; the
overspill had to stand behind them with the third. Behind them, Medes and Sagartians stood atop benches which creaked and tipped under their weight, hovering over the smaller boys below with
relish.

In the middle of the semicircle, the photographer had set up his camera. He pointed it to face the far end of the group, then stepped back as it began its slow rotation. Once the shutter had
fallen, Cowper waited for the photographer to consult his watch before ducking behind the teetering back row and running as fast as he could to the other end of the group. Only the boys who were
privy to the plan detected the
thump-thump-thump
of his footsteps, but they continued staring straight at the camera’s wandering eye as if by keeping still themselves they might
hasten his progress. Time seemed suspended in the moments it took for him to emerge at the far end of the Lydian row, next to Holland. By now, the camera had almost finished its slow sweep of the
group, and the boys at the end where the picture had started began to shift and fidget. Another second passed, and another, in which each one imagined his moment in history between one flash of
light and another yet to come.

When the rolled-up prints arrived for collection, they were greeted with yelps of glee: for there was Cowper glowering in concentration at the far left of the image, and there he was again
– grinning, only slightly blurred – at the far right. Like a mischievous spirit nagging at the fringes of the group, at once here and elsewhere: a memory that would not be shaken
off.

The starting pistol had misfired, and the Medes on either side of Barney had both set off at the click and muffled
pfft!
of the cap scuttling back into the barrel. The
others, bewildered by the delay, followed a second later. There had been no attempt to arrange a restart, as it was the slower two who launched off seconds ahead of the rest – and sure
enough, by the time Barney reached the forest outskirts he had already overtaken them both.

He’d had every intention of running to win that morning. Winning would mean proving Swift wrong – it would mean a medal to show to Jake and to give to Mum – it would be his
farewell to the island, which at last he was about to leave for good. He had nothing against the other runners – the Sagartians were solitary boys, aloof but not haughty, and one of the Medes
had even stooped to offering him running tips (lengthen your stride downhill; do press-ups to improve lung capacity; never watch the feet of the runner in front) – but it wasn’t them
that he’d be defeating.

Most of the crowd had drifted away within seconds of the race: there was nothing to watch unless they intended to sprint alongside the runners. Prefects had been recruited to keep posts at four
points spread over the course, the first of which would be waiting at the main road on the other side of the forest. By then the Medes were far enough behind him not to notice Holland duck off the
path.

Initially he had stayed away out of a sense of guilt, then it had simply become habit. There had been no point in bunking off runs since Barney had announced his desire to compete, and most of
his free time was now spent with Cowper and Shields, smoking at the pumping station. It was only the thought of Belinda’s four shillings and sixpence that lured him there. There was plenty of
time to duck in and collect his fee: there was no rule against it.

Sure enough, there was the money in a coin purse under the bench. Tucking it into his shorts, Barney glanced around the shelter and considered how much smaller it seemed now, even though it
should have felt more spacious without the other two there. Deprived of emperor and muse, it was now neither a palace nor a shrine. The matches left on the upturned crate were too damp to strike,
so the only light there was filtered at strange angles through the Judas window. Although the materials for Ivor’s sea-fire experiment had been removed, it looked as though no one had been
here since to tidy up after them: the jam jars and detritus from their last feast still cluttered the space between the packing crates, and a bottle stuffed with cigarette stubs glinted in the dim
light like an apothecary’s vial. Barney sat on the bench and rested his head against the cool wall beneath the rash of plague spots, listening to the clatter of leaves and clicking of beetles
through the mulch. There was a funny odour that must have been trapped in here for months, which reminded him of old Brillo pads and putty, only stronger. Belinda had thought it might have been a
ghost, because it was murky and rotten. But Barney didn’t believe in ghosts – particularly not ones in grey coats who vanished hurrying across misty fields.

Nevertheless the silence felt heavy, resonating with something at once there and not there, and he was overcome with the visceral awareness of a presence. It was the same feeling he’d had
once or twice in the basement corridor, where bodies stirred and voices whispered long after the laundresses had gone home. It was a tangible stillness – a visible silence.

“Robin?”

But Barney knew that it wasn’t a ghost. The thing that haunted the corridor and the field opposite the pumping station, that lurked in the darkest corner of the fallout shelter, had
nothing to do with what had happened ten years earlier, but everything to do with what had been happening all along, in front of their own eyes.

For so long he had unconsciously thought of this place as Ivor’s. The Mede’s rule here had been absolute – not least at those times when he became cruel, said cruel things and
they thought him ugly and hated themselves for being his pets. Was that why they had kept returning to him, because there was no other escape?

He began to run again. He hardly noticed the prefects cheering them on from the checkpoints, or the razor grass that sliced at his bare legs – he did not hear the toot of a horn as a car
overtook him on the main road or register a flock of bull-necked fulmars fouling a vehicle abandoned in the lay-by. At one point he pulled ahead of the two Medes, and for some time he ran abreast
one of the Sagartians, though he too must have fallen behind at some stage above the chalk ridge. Beyond that, Barney did not notice his fellow racers. There was the taste of salt on his lips and
rawness in his throat as he charged up the incline of the school drive towards the fluttering bunting and the crowds – and then, at last, there was the whisper of ribbon streaming across his
chest and the clap of palms against his back, the cheers of the Second Form.

Two hours later, hair slicked flat against his head from the shower, smart in the new civvies his mother had sent him, which he would wear when they disembarked from the ship at Cape Town,
Holland heard his name announced over rising applause. The bailif’s wife made her slow voyage across the stage towards the trophy table draped with a billowing Union Jack, swinging fat,
sunburnt hands like paddles. This was one of the moments Spike had warned him about: Doc Dower’s enormous head nodding at him in approval; the upturned faces of his classmates as he
approached the stage – smiling for him, at last.

How many years before they would brush shoulders over a tray of canapés at the school reunion, greet each other by their surnames? Some of those Old Boys would come to seek out what had
been lost or changed, some wouldn’t have stopped thinking of their schooldays since the prize-giving on the lower pitch: the elation and anxiety of freedom amid the glorious hopefulness of
high summer, and a terrible sense of time passing and lost, of an ending that wasn’t, a sense that perhaps this was as good as things were ever going to be, on this tiny island that both was
and wasn’t England, on a summer’s day in 1954. Even now, Barney knew that a part of him would be forever nostalgic for that moment.

Time held still just long enough for him to grieve its passing, dispelled by scattering clouds and cheers from the front benches. The bailif’s wife’s hand was clammy, and he had to
take care not to let the trophy slip through his fingers as he stepped gingerly from the stage. Still the school was clapping: they would continue to do so until he reached his row, and then even
in the hush that followed there were whispered congratulations from Shields and Cowper, Percy and Hughes and Sanger, friendly smacks on the back, fingers ruffling through his hair.

Forty years on, what would they talk about? One of them might bring up the death of a French tutor – an overdose of sleeping pills, it would be rumoured.
No doubt something to do with
the war: must have seen a few things.
Or the time a UXB took out half the drive and part of the east wing. Then someone might also remember the boy who vanished from the ice-stranded ferry,
never to be heard from again. They would not mention the noises in the basement corridor, which for so long were passed off as the flutterings of a ghost.