Silent Noon (8 page)

“My old man says you can always tell a Pole by his cheekbones,” Robin was saying.

Drowned out by the gulls, his voice evaporated into the moist air. Barney imagined the words being carried up into the sky in tiny droplets and wondered if the prisoners interned on St Just had
noticed the unusual sharpness of sounds out here, in the middle of a grey sea.

As the Headmaster often reminded his pupils, space was a precious commodity at the Carding House School, just as it was on the island and, increasingly, across the face of the
Earth itself. There was no better illustration of this than the library, which doubled as a detention hall and room for play rehearsals and communion lessons. Five rolling bookshelves were all that
distinguished it from the other classrooms. It was here that Barney discovered the red-jacketed history of St Just.

The pamphlet appeared to be the work of a local historian, privately published and donated to the school by the author himself. No one had bothered to paste a borrowing list to the inside cover.
It contained a poorly referenced yet painstakingly detailed account of the island’s history from the late Bronze Age to the turn of the twentieth century, recording the lost whistling
language of its prehistoric inhabitants, Norse invasion, occupation by the Danes, annexation to the Spanish Netherlands and eventual handover to the British – as well as various pirate
attacks, bootlegging exploits and mysterious disappearances. Drawings of the lost indigenous people – flaxen-haired, with sunken eyes and tugboat jawlines – accompanied diagrams of
long-term coastal erosion and maps describing two penal settlements that had been established and then abandoned on its shores.

The pamphlet had been published in 1936, and so did not offer any information on the labour camps to which Robin had referred during their walk.

“I didn’t have you down as a swot, Holland,” said a voice. Barney poked his head around the shelf to find Ivor Morrell moving a leather-bound tome onto a nearby desk. He left
it open before joining Barney behind the stacks. “It’s rare to see a Lydian with his nose in anything but the latest Dan Dare. What have you got there?” Not waiting for a response
he took the pamphlet, sliding a finger between the pages that Barney had marked with his thumb. He lighted on the picture of a witches’ coven. “Smutty. The one on the left looks like
old Baggage.”

He flipped through the pages, but his attention seemed elsewhere. “How is she?” he asked.

“Who?”

“Flood Junior.” He looked at Barney. “It’s not every day a girl discovers a dead baby on school grounds, is it?”

“Do you think the police will tell us, when they find out whose it is?”

“I doubt it. I should tell your friends in the Second that they might as well forget about the whole thing.” He returned the pamphlet to the stacks without checking the shelf number,
then went back to the book waiting on the desk.

“
The Secret History
,” he said. “Despite having a bear tamer for a father and a mother who was hardly better than a prostitute, Theodora managed to become Empress of
Byzantium by the time she was twenty. Women’s charms and all that.” A look of distaste. “Procopius saw through it all, of course. Without power she’d have just been a whore.
Here, read this.”

The text was dense, the paper almost translucent.

Barney looked up to find the older boy waiting for a reaction. “What’s a calyx?”

Ivor snapped the book shut. “I shouldn’t be keeping you like this. Junior prep ends soon, if I’m not mistaken.”

“At eight.”

Ivor was tracing lines scratched into the desk with his fingernail.

“I’m going to follow her tonight,” he said. “I thought you might be interested.”

“Why should I be interested?”

“I didn’t say you should. I said you might. To judge by the way everyone’s been going on about the mummy, I’d have thought you’d be up for a little
sleuthing.” He sounded irritated. “Apparently, I misjudged.”

Barney swallowed. “Let me come with you.”

“I don’t know,” Ivor said. “You’ve made me think that I’ll probably come to regret it.”

“I won’t tell anyone.”

“Not even Littlejohn?”

Barney nodded. Ivor scooped his book under one arm and wandered over to the window. “It might be useful to have an extra pair of hands,” he said. “And no one ever suspects the
unpopular lad – do they, Camden Town? That’s what they call you, isn’t it?” Barney didn’t reply. “Meet me at Tern,” he continued. “Do you know where
the bins are kept, under the stone hutch? Don’t bother with a torch – she always brings one. Come at eleven.”

Lights-out was at half-nine. After that, there would usually be somebody who had forgotten to brush his teeth, and tonight it was Percy fumbling through the darkness towards the
basins. One boy was always left to listen at the corridor in case of a raid from one of the other dormitories. This week that boy was Opie, who had moved his pillow to the foot of his bed to catch
any movement in the sliver of light under the door.

Fortunately there would be no questions from Robin, who was in the San with a sore throat. After the last of the whispering between the beds had died down, Barney sensed the others slowly
retreating from consciousness until the only sound was of water churning through an outdoor pipe and, beyond it, the steady trickle of rain pressed by the wind into rivulets against the windows. At
half-ten the last rustlings came from Opie, who was chewing at his fingernails and spitting the parings at the basin opposite his bed. By the time the clock struck a quarter to eleven, Barney could
make out the still shape of his head lolling against the iron bed frame, his breath whistling through his nose.

Wincing at the creak of bedsprings, Barney pulled a jumper over his pyjama top and slipped his feet into his plimsolls. He crossed the drugget in three strides and managed to release the catch
on the door without making any sound at all.

“All right, Holland?”

Opie stared up at him through the ribbon of light from the corridor.

“All right. Just going to the bog.”

This appeared to satisfy the sentry, who gave a gentle grunt as he rolled onto his side. “To the bog,” he mumbled. “Foggy boggy. Dog in a bog…”

Within seconds Barney descended the staircase and had his hand on the iron latch on the front door. Only then did he remember the housemaster turning the key in the lock on his first night.

The clock chimed eleven as he tested the windows in the common room. Two were painted shut; the third was locked and took several moments to release. Dreading the telling-off he’d get from
Morrell if he were late even more than the thought of being caught breaking out of the boarding house, Barney shoved himself head first through the window and landed with a thump on the cold
ground. The rain had stopped, at least. Brushing the dirt from his elbows, he turned to confront the darkness.

Normally, to get to Tern the boys would cut across the drive and pass over the green. Worried that he might be heard crunching on the gravel or spotted by some solitary master working late in
the library, Barney decided instead to go the other way, around the deserted east wing.

He had just reached the bin hutch behind Tern when the rumble of an engine stopped him in his tracks. A car had braked outside the old kitchens, headlights dimmed so that the shadows only
reached halfway up the stone walls, thrusting the top half of the building into darkness. There was a distant beeping and the crackle of a radio signal. Perhaps it was the police. Maybe
they’d received a tip-off that there were other bodies buried here: not just babies but full-grown people too.

He slid himself inside the hutch, a trickle of sweat beading up around the elastic of his pyjama bottoms. The only sound was the clattering of beetles he’d disturbed by shifting the bins:
flat, shiny bodies that rustled through the pile of dead leaves clogging the corners of the hutch. The stench was a blend of residual baked beans and lindane mousse. Something sharp struck the back
of his head.

“Get a move on,” hissed Ivor, flicking his finger against Barney’s ear.

“Did you see it?” whispered Barney. Ivor was wearing mufti, and immediately he felt ridiculous in his pyjamas and plimsolls. “The car…” He scrambled out from
behind the bins to follow Ivor, who was already making a beeline for the forest.

“Never mind them. They’re not here for us.”

By the time Barney caught up with him they had reached a part of the forest that was unfamiliar to him even in daylight. He followed Ivor blindly with arms outstretched. A steep mist hung in the
spaces between the trees, and the air was wet and cool on his fingers.

“What took you so long?” demanded Ivor, when the school lights were no longer visible through the thicket. He remained focused on some point in the distance. Barney wondered if Ivor
could see something which he didn’t.

“I had to wait until everyone was asleep. And Runcie had locked the front door—”

“Luckily for you our little friend was also running late.”

A branch snagged Barney’s jumper, and he winced at the thorns that caught his fingers as he pulled himself free. “You saw her?”

“She made a dash for it when she heard the car.”

They marched on in silence for several moments, and Barney began to wonder what Ivor had meant about needing an extra pair of hands.

“I thought you said she’d bring a torch,” he said, trying not to sound petulant.

“She did. She won’t need it now, though.”

“I can’t see a bloody thing.”

Ivor grabbed him by the arm and pulled him to the ground. “Look.”

Just a few feet from where they crouched, the forest floor fell away to reveal an inlet needling into the shore. Black water stretched before them and, high overhead, a crescent moon obscured by
gauzy clouds shone in a sky the colour of dark-blue ink. The beach was bare of any foliage; the trees hung behind them at the top of the precipice.

A figure was working its way down one side of the inlet towards the rock pools. It looked as if she was wearing a robe, but it soon became clear that this was actually an unfastened gym tunic.
Her sandals clattered on the rocks, and twice she had to steady herself as she slipped on the slick. When she paused, there was a grey noise: the crackle of the tide dragging at the pebble
beach.

“There’s just the one route down to the water, and that’s the one she’s taking.” Ivor shimmied forward on his stomach. “Let’s see what our little
Melusine does next.”

The girl had removed her sandals and was pulling the tunic over her head. Underneath she wore a bathing costume of knitted wool. In water it would grow heavy and coarse. As she stepped into one
of the rock pools her arms and legs seemed almost too long for her body, bony and vulnerable as a bird’s, and in the sea glow they gleamed whiter than the moon. Her shoulder blades spiked and
flattened as she rinsed herself with cupped hands. When she had finished, she stood waist-deep in the water with palms flattened on the surface, as if feeling the sea for something lost.

“If she was going to top herself she’d have done it by now,” said Ivor.

Sure enough, the girl had begun her retreat from the water. She shivered as she wrapped her gym tunic around her shoulders and slipped her feet back into her sandals. A coil of black hair stuck
to her cheek as she bent to fasten the buckles.

“Hurry up – before she sees us,” whispered Ivor, jabbing Barney in the ribs. Pressing themselves onto all fours, the boys scuttled towards the forest. They waited for the sound
of the girl’s sandals on the rocks; when it came, they slipped back towards the footpath.

Weaving past the slender trunks of trees connecting sky and earth, Barney felt a rush of elation, as if he and Ivor and the girl were the only people on the entire island. The ground was soft
beneath his feet, and as he ran he remembered the picture in the book on St Just depicting the underwater streams: invisible, unmappable Lethes forging tunnels through the limestone. It was only
when he caught up with Ivor behind the bin hutch, as the other boy grabbed him by the shoulders and pressed him against the wall, that he remembered to be afraid.

“Breathe one word to anyone about this and I’ll tell them you wanted to jump her,” said Ivor.

Barney was so surprised he bit his tongue. A metallic taste filled his mouth as he nodded his agreement with watering eyes.

Ivor pushed him to his knees, ducking at the sound of footsteps drawing near. They waited in silence until the sound of a door closing on a latch prompted him to release his grip on
Barney’s jumper.

“You have one minute to get back to your dormitory without anyone noticing. If I see your name on the Head’s List in the morning you’ll be sorry.”

As Barney made to leave, he was overcome by the sensation that he had been implicated in something not only secret, but shameful. The car that had stopped outside the old kitchens was no longer
there, but the rutted tracks survived as confirmation that he had not dreamt it.
They’re not here for us
, Ivor had said – as if he had known everything all along. Barney told
himself they had done nothing wrong; indeed, if anything had happened to the girl, if she had been swept out to sea or hurt herself on the rocks, it would have been thanks to him and Ivor that she
might have been saved.

Spike had often told him that things happened in their right order. Spike believed in cycles and spirals and figures of eight: the rhythms of the tides and time recorded in tree
rings. According to him, there was very little about life that was linear. He hadn’t cried at his own mother’s funeral, he once told Barney, because human emotions don’t work like
that: you feel things at all the wrong times and that’s all right. You remember things out of order, too, but that just means you’re finding a way to make sense of it all. So, when in
August the letter had arrived confirming that the school would be delighted to welcome Barney into the Second Form – and would his guardian please see to it that the vaccination checklist was
completed as soon as possible – his stepfather had tapped the paper with one finger and said, “You see, Barn?
To everything there is a season
.”