Silent Noon (9 page)

Rain bulleted against the window high above Barney’s head. The glass was frosted and cobwebbed, so it let in just enough light to read by if he stood on the toilet. Barney had learnt by
now not to turn on the electric light – it was only an invitation to Shields and Cowper to start drumming on the cubicle doors or climbing onto the bogs in the adjoining cubicle and dropping
spitballs in his hair – and in the evenings the light from Runcie’s study, directly below the washrooms, was just strong enough to penetrate the window glass.

A Land For All Seasons!
blared the yellow text on the front of the leaflet, which contained four pages, each headed with words in the same elongated, hand-lettered font:
Sun
,
Sand
,
Savannah
,
Society
. On the first page was a picture of a man and woman drinking orange juice on a patio; on the second, a family building a sandcastle at the beach.
A rhino charged towards the viewer from the third page, flanked by an elephant and a lion; and on the reverse, two women chatted as they walked down a city street, shopping bags jostling between
them.

Spike talked a load of bollocks. Seasons were all well and good at the other end of the world, but they didn’t count for much in the middle of the North Sea. Time had slowed to a crawl on
Lindsey Island, where even the sunlight seemed to slouch. Nothing happened in the right order here, or back home. Everyone was always saying that things were about to get better – they were
bound to, weren’t they, with the war won and a new government? – and still they managed to get worse. No wonder his stepfather was so obsessed with songs by dead people, revived by
blokes like him who dwelt in times gone by because they didn’t have a future to look forward to. That was why four generations of the Copper Family kept droning on the way they did: to fill
the silence, the horrible spectre that was the future, with the noises from the past.

Mum’s plan had always been to become an air hostess, flying with SAA between Johannesburg and Bulawayo before returning to the family home in the shadow of Table Mountain. She had
described this plan to Barney a hundred times while they waited in long bread queues and at bus stops in the mean London drizzle, and afterwards while she luxuriated in the bath for hours at a time
– baths so hot it shocked him to watch her skin turn red: the only way she could satisfy her longing for heat. Now it seemed as distant a dream as the one he’d nurtured as a little boy,
when he had watched the porters at Euston station and longed to wear a uniform with red piping and provide the answers to all the questions that travellers would ask, such as “When is the
next train to Liverpool?” and “At what time does the tea room open?” Now the uniforms had changed so there was no red piping, and a sign in the tea room showed its opening hours
for everybody to see.

Although he knew his mother’s dream by heart, Barney still struggled to imagine the whitewashed house she described to him, with its curling gables and dark-wood panelling, the grand
chandelier in the hallway and the gardens in the back that sloped all the way down to Hout Bay, the swimming pool with its inflatable ring in the shape of a swan and the staff quarters in the
corrugated box behind the work sheds.

The pamphlet’s corners had turned white where the paper had been bent, dog-eared in bed late at night, perhaps, or folded in his mother’s vinyl pocketbook as she queued for ration
cards. Barney had found it in the wastepaper basket the morning that he had woken to find her side of the mattress empty.

“Got it!”

Barney stumbled against the cubicle door as the pamphlet leapt through his fingers. The scuffle of feet alerted him to Cowper’s presence in the next cubicle. Shields was crammed in with
him, along with a boy from the other dormitory, Sanger – at this early stage in his school career distinguished for little more than being the only Jewish pupil at Carding House – who
was balanced on Shields’s shoulders. Cowper stood on top of the toilet, the pamphlet in his hands.

“Planning a holiday?” He tore off one page and dropped it in the toilet bowl. “That’s
mine
.”

“And there we were, thinking you were a proper socialist scab. Do you hear that? Holland’s got
property
.” Cowper tore another page from the pamphlet and let it drift
into the grey water.

Barney charged, but Shields blocked him and Sanger pulled at his hair. Cowper tore the third page and crumpled it into a ball before dropping it into the bowl and pulling hard on the chain. The
roar of water drowned out Barney’s shouts.

“Come on, you lot.” Cowper slipped the remaining leaf between the buttons of Barney’s shirt and gave his chest an impertinent pat. He let the cubicle door slam as he followed
the other two out.

Barney ripped the page from his shirt and considered the sandcastle family with sudden, vicious contempt. While the others were still within earshot, he added it to the toilet bowl and gave the
chain another hard yank.

He had not intended to set out alone – the boys were not allowed on solitary walks past the boathouse – and it was only as he reached the lower pitch that Barney
felt uncomfortably conspicuous. It was a grey afternoon, and as he picked his way along the sticky towpath, he imagined that his school coat might help him fade into the forest gloom.

No such luck. The figure digging at the far corner of the pitch had spotted him: straightened from his work to watch what he did next. If Barney turned around, it would be obvious that he knew
he should not have been out alone; so he continued to walk, hands in pockets, down the edge of the pitch.

He had assumed that the figure was Krawiec, but as he approached it became obvious that this man was significantly larger than the Pole. He carried himself straighter too, and wore
spectacles.

“Holland, what?” Doc Dower plunged the spade into the yielding turf.

“Sir.”

“Out on your own? No one’s told you the rule about that?”

“No, sir.”

“There’s a rule. No unaccompanied walks past the boathouse. Now what will you do?”

“I’ll go inside, sir.”

“Quite right.” He turned back to his digging, grunting as he heaved his shovel against a hump of turf stretching like a worm along the border. The fringe of his wool cap was damp on
his forehead; his spectacles misted with his breath.

“What are you doing, sir?”

“What does it look like, Holland? I’m giving a tea party, that’s what.”

“No you aren’t, sir.”

“Impudence!” Doc Dower tested the hump with his boot. “Independent thinking, what? They won’t like the sound of that.”

Barney surveyed the field, which appeared to be sinking under the weight of an expansive mud pit. “Are you draining it, sir?”

“My intention is that it shall drain itself in future.”

“Clay holds the wet in, doesn’t it, sir?” Doc Dower paused. “My father used to pump mud out of the Thames, sir. Mum said the clay was the only enemy he ever
had.”

“Is that so?”

“That and the Japs, sir.” Barney watched Doc Dower return to his digging. “Morrell says you weren’t in Asia, sir. Only Italy.”

“Do you play rugby, Holland?”

“No, sir.”

“Messy business, rugby. Cricket: now that’s a gentleman’s sport.”

“My dad supported Sussex, sir.”

“He did, what? I had an aunt who lived in Liphook.”

Barney hopped across the barrier, his feet sinking into the wet ground. For once, he didn’t care.

“Don’t you have proper boots, Holland?”

“No, sir.”

“Keep to the flat there, then.”

“Can I help, sir?”

“I thought you were going back indoors?”

Barney bit his lip, glanced back at the school ruefully.

“So you weren’t in Asia after all, sir.”

“Morrell is quite wrong on that point, Holland. Italy, ’43–’44. South-East Asia Command ’44–’46.”

Barney’s heart leapt. “Burma, sir?”

“Indochina.”

“No bamboo shoots then, sir?” Barney thought perhaps Doc Dower suppressed a smile – but when he turned to wipe his glasses on his cuff there was only the usual distracted
frown. “My dad built roads in Burma, sir. He died there. Up in hill country, sir.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Holland.”

Barney waited for a war story – or, at the very least, questions about his father: which company? Did they have people in common? – but none was forthcoming.

He watched Doc Dower pause morosely over the sinking pile, buffing it with his boot before heaving a tired sigh.

“Terrible trouble with mice, as I remember,” he said. “Finger food for pythons, what?”

“Only pythons don’t have fingers, sir.”

“Quite right.” Doc Dower joined Barney on his side of the ridge. “What we need here, Holland, is a two-per-cent slope. I’d thought one per cent should do the trick, but
the water still won’t drain.”

“Sir.”

“How do we calculate slope, Holland?”

“With height, sir. And distance.”

“Too vague. Wouldn’t pass in the jungle.” Doc Dower clicked his tongue. “You try and build a road on fuzzy logic like that, and watch what happens.”

“Sir.”

“We calculate slope by dividing the
change
in height by the
change
in distance, Holland. The larger the result, the steeper the line. A horizontal line is –
what?”

“Nought, sir.”

“Quite right.” He squatted to judge the depth of the trench. “I’d call that a foot. What would you call the length of the pitch?”

“A hundred yards, sir.”

“I think you’re being generous, Holland, but we’ll agree on a hundred, what? In feet?”

“Three hundred, sir.”

“You’re not as dim as you look, are you Holland?”

“No, sir.”

“Good. Decide what depth this needs to be to make a two-per-cent slope, and you can have a
piastre
. Do you know what that is?”

“No, sir.”

“Currency, Holland. Lucre. A coin from Indochina. Wouldn’t buy you a crumpet in town, but I’ll wager Cowper hasn’t got one.” He did not look at Barney – there
was no wink, no conspiratorial smile – and when Barney blinked, wondering what the master had meant by that, he coughed. “Well, Holland?”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Don’t thank me yet. Thank me when you’ve come up with an answer.”

“No, sir.”

“Well. I thought you said you were going indoors?”

“I was, sir. I am.”

“Hop to it, then, Holland.”

While the class waited for the gale to blow over, Hiram Opie set up a game of Captive Queens at the end of one of the long workshop tables. At the other end, a pot of glue
bubbled on a hot plate in readiness for the next lesson. For more than half an hour they had been hoping for permission to return to the house, and a fractious spirit had begun to build in the
interval between organized activities. The air inside was warm and the rain seemed to sweat through the walls, flushing out colonies of centipedes that scuttled along the skirting boards.

“You build the castle around them,” Opie was explaining, placing the queens in the middle of the table and proceeding to surround them with cards selected, solitaire-style, from the
deck. “You have to save the kings and jacks for the top, to watch the queens. To protect them.”

“It’s to keep them from escaping,” interjected Shields. “That’s why they’re
captive
.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Captive Queens my arse,” snorted Cowper. “Idiot’s Delight, more like.”

“Lay off him,” snapped Robin, from behind his book.

“Don’t be such a prig, Littlejohn.”

A rush of wind and sea rain pressed against the windows, making the glass buckle and creak, sharpening the classroom smell of chalk and glue.

Barney wandered round to the other side of the table to sit next to Robin. “What’s that?” he asked in a low voice. Robin tilted the book so that his friend could see.

“Nasty, eh?” he said.

On the left-hand page was a photograph of a bulbous statue of a woman with enormous breasts, gourdish thighs and no feet. To the right was a paragraph describing the Venus of Willendorf.

Robin pulled a face. “
Pig-woman
of Willendorf, more like. I found it on the shelf by Nunn’s desk. You think he fancies fat birds?”

Barney scanned Robin’s face for any sign of the ferocity he’d read in Ivor’s eyes the night at the shore, and was relieved to see only fascinated revulsion. In the same moment,
Robin glanced at the girl sitting at the end of the workshop table.

“It wouldn’t kill her to make an effort,” he said.

Belinda’s legs were crossed at the ankles beneath her chair; her fingers toyed with a pencil over a blank sheet of paper. Every now and then she would shift her weight, sliding one hand
beneath her legs to smooth the pleats of her tunic. She looked up when someone banged a desk or burst into raucous laughter, but otherwise remained indifferent.

“She’s probably still upset about the mummy,” said Barney.

“I doubt it.” Robin continued leafing through the book. “She thinks she’s better than us because she discovered something important and got to be interviewed by the
police. Not to mention the fact that she knows she won’t be here for long.”

“She’s stuck in here like the rest of us.”

“That’s different. If she went outdoors right now the wind would sweep her clear to Denmark.”

From her seat by the creaking windows, Belinda heard nothing of this conversation. Although to everyone else she looked to be doing nothing but staring into space, she was in fact deep in
concentration. Only that morning, she had begged her parents to let her give up the cello so that she could play the piano instead, like Joan Fontaine’s character in
September
Affair.
Every evening she would practise the autograph, copied from a
Modern Woman
photo essay, and devise new signatures combining their names.
Belinda Cotten
, or
Mrs
Joseph Cotten
? She had seen
The Third Man
three times already, scrutinizing his breath through the cigarette smoke as he waited for Harry Lime under the ferris wheel.