Silent Noon (16 page)

“I hope that you had a nice time,” said Miss Duchâtel to Barney, as they watched the two figures heading up the ridge.

“Oh, yes. Thank you.”

It was cold, standing there on the stoop, and after a minute he excused himself to return indoors. The woman made to follow him, but then she stopped, enchanted by the sight of two dark heads
bobbing along the horizon. Alone in front of the farmhouse, she watched them leave as one might a pair of ghosts.

Miss Duchâtel went to bed early that evening, saying that the headache still hadn’t quite left her. “You must do as you please now. Have you brought any books
with you?”

“One or two,” said Barney. Robin had loaned him last year’s
Boy’s Own Annual
, but he didn’t suppose this was the sort of thing she’d had in mind.

He followed her upstairs and retreated behind his own bedroom door. He hadn’t had any intention of reading the annual – he had been put off by the large pages covered in dense lines
of text; some of the stories only had one or two illustrations, and the puzzles were all too clever – but the clock on the bedside table showed that it was only just past eight, and he did
not yet feel like going to sleep.

The first piece was called ‘’Twixt School and College’ and was followed by a column on caring for golden hamsters. Barney turned the pages, hoping for something on football or
dogs. At last he landed on an adventure story called ‘Heroes of El Alamein’
.
The title was obscured by a piece of card that had been inserted as a placeholder. Barney turned it
over, recognizing the feel of its soft corners. On the one side was an illustration of a dark-haired youth, naked but for a fluttering loincloth, surrounded by shrieking, bare-breasted women. The
youth’s hands were pressed to his ears, and his eyes were bugged and frantic.

The reverse revealed it to be a postcard – blank.
ORESTES PURSUED BY THE FURIES
was written in small, square print at the bottom corner, followed by the single
word:
BOUGUEREAU
.

He fell asleep soon after, the annual still open on the bed and the postcard tilting between his fingers. That night, for the first time since arriving on the island, Barney slept solidly until
dawn.

“I once read a story in a history book about a young English girl who was to be sent to Australia on a convict transport. She was a prostitute, yes?” Barney stirred
more sugar into his porridge and nodded vaguely; he didn’t want to hear an old woman talk about things like that. Miss Duchâtel was in an energetic mood and did not seem to notice his
discomfort. “Well, the ship sank and she washed up on shore somewhere in Namibia. Or perhaps it was Mozambique; I don’t know. She was found by a local hunter who took her back to his
house, and from then on she lived as a local queen. A white woman on the edge of the world.”

She poured the last of the coffee into his cup and watched him reach for the milk jug with a disapproving eye. “You English, always ruining your tea and your coffee like that. You make a
beautiful drink into nursery food.”

“Did she never go back, then?”

“I don’t think so. England was her childhood. You can’t go back to a place that no longer exists.”

“Of course it still
existed
.”

“Perhaps she did not think so, after many years as an African queen.” Miss Duchâtel rose and took the plates to the sink.

“Is that why you never went back to France?”

“Perhaps. It wouldn’t be the same now. Sometimes it’s better not to try to force the things you dream about onto real places, real people.” She ran the water. “At
the orphanage, a few days before Christmas one year, I discovered a box at the top of the dormitory wardrobe, hidden beneath some blankets. As it was wrapped in gold tissue I boasted to a friend
that it must be for me, because gold was my favourite colour and the box was just the right size for the bisque doll that I coveted. But on Christmas morning the Mother Superior gave the box to
another girl – no more than a baby, whose father was wealthy but lived very far away – while the rest of us had to make do with bags of glacé cherries.” She placed the
dishes on the draining board, wiped her hands on a cloth.

“That’s a sad story.”

“It’s only a story now.” She looked at her watch. “I have some shopping to collect in town. Would you like to come along for the drive?”

The car was parked on the verge at the top of the driveway, close to the main road. Miss Duchâtel told him that the door on the passenger side didn’t open, so he would have to climb
in across the driver’s seat. The leatherwork was worn and gave off a neglected smell; the dashboard was furry with dust. But the engine made a good rumble, and as Miss Duchâtel slammed
her door shut Barney felt the exhilaration of freedom through movement.

They were halfway to St Arras before the car shuddered and Barney felt his side begin to sink. “Something’s not right,” he said.

Miss Duchâtel had already decided this for herself. She braked, turned off the engine, and stepped out onto the road. “Stay there,” she said.

He watched her inspect the front right tyre, and then the left. As she disappeared around the back of the car Barney watched the condensation from his breath form clouds in the window. Outside,
the land and sky divided into two fat stripes: the frosty, dead-green of the empty field and the motionless grey of the sky. Inside, the air had turned still and cold, and Barney twisted in his
seat to see what had become of Miss Duchâtel.

She had rounded the vehicle and now stood in the middle of the road, staring, horrified, at something he could not see. When she noticed him watching her she waved both hands at him. “Stay
there,” she said. “It’s only a puncture.”

But he was not to be fooled. Before she could prevent him from opening the driver’s side door, he was out; and then, ignoring her admonishments, he went onto the road.

He did not register the slashed tyres, nor even the awkward tilt of the car. He only saw the word, daubed in red paint along the passenger side in letters twelve inches high – and the ugly
line scraped from fender to hub underlining them.

Instinctively, he looked around, though he might have known there would be no one there: this was not a place where people walked or stopped to take in the view, for there was no view to be
taken. They were alone: grimly, awfully alone. The wind blew, a seabird shrieked – and then there was a gulping noise from Miss Duchâtel.

“Get back inside,” she said. “I can get us home.”

“Who did this?”

“If I drive carefully we will make it.”

“What about the shopping?”

“The shopping doesn’t matter.”

They did make it back to the farm, just. Miss Duchâtel asked if Barney had finished his maths prep, which he interpreted the way it was meant; he went upstairs to his room and closed the
door. A little while later, he heard the front door open and footsteps on the path. At the top of the drive, Miss Duchâtel brandished a paintbrush at the offending letters, replacing them
with broad strokes the colour of wet sand.

On the morning that Barney was due to return to school, Miss Duchâtel surveyed the stack of boxes in the corner of her living room and ran a finger down the margin of a
workbook he had filled with dates and names. Her reading glasses rested on the table. “Your eyes aren’t so poor,” he observed.

“It’s just as well you printed,” she said. “I couldn’t read cursive.”

“You could always get someone to type it for you.”

“Do you type?”

Barney shook his head. “Morrell probably could.”

“Well, ask him if he wants the work one afternoon. It would be nice to see him again. And, of course, you must visit me too.”

As far as Barney was concerned, that was to be the end of it. The week had gone by quickly, and with two pound notes folded in his pocket he was the richest he’d ever been. Now he could
look forward to seeing the others again and going back to a school where he was no longer the new boy.

Wandering up the drive that afternoon, he even thought he’d spotted the latest recruit: a child younger and scrawnier than him, wearing a thin jumper rolled up to show white elbows.
He’ll be mincemeat by lights out
, thought Barney. “You there!” he called after the newcomer.

Belinda turned round and flashed him a smile. After she’d lopped off her hair with some kitchen scissors, her horrified mother had taken her to reduce the damage at a salon in town –
but she still looked like a prison-camp inmate. Now, for the first time, Barney saw how a plain girl could be transformed into a rather beautiful boy.

“It’s meant to be like Erika Mann,” she explained, as they continued up the drive together. “I finished what Cowper started. Do you like it?” He’d nodded yes,
although really he didn’t know what to think.

They met in the fallout shelter that evening after supper, and Ivor told him about the idea they’d had for a secret society – a “dining club”, he called it, because every
week they would pool their resources for a proper feast, replete with contraband foodstuffs, cigarettes and finest spirits. Then he and Belinda started spitting apple pips at each other, which
seemed to Barney like an excuse to blow kisses. When Belinda rushed at Ivor for sending a pip down her front, he caught her in a gentle rugby tackle, pushing her onto the bench and making Barney
edge away.

It wasn’t clear when the girl had fallen in love with Ivor’s taunts – the way he mocked them when he spoke, daring them not to understand.

“Adult moths can’t take food, which is why they live for just a few days,” he was saying now. “It only goes to show that we should enjoy ourselves while we can. I propose
a bacchanal tonight. The masters aren’t fussy about bed checks out of term, and most of the school won’t be back until the morning.”

This was only partly true: Barney arrived at Medlar House that evening to find the dormitory already half full. Robin and Hughes were talking about the new lorry that had replaced the battered
one Krawiec normally used to transport stones for wall repairs.

“Too smart for a groundskeeper, if you ask me,” Hughes was saying.

“Perhaps old Cray bequeathed his estate to the school,” Robin said.

“Nonsense. He’d have to have a will to do that.”

“So?”

“And Cray didn’t have an estate. He had a stack of postcards under his mattress and the same evil-smelling fruitcake in his tuck every half-term.”

Barney reached for the
Boy’s Own
in his suitcase and left it on Robin’s bed without bothering to interrupt them. If he wasn’t to turn up to the feast empty-handed, he
would have to get to the kitchens before they were locked at eight.

He was halfway to the shelter when he noticed the car parked outside the old kitchens. At the sound of his footsteps a door opened, and Belinda beckoned him. She sat with Ivor in the large back
seat. Behind the wheel was Miss Duchâtel.

“Look who I found,” she said.

“What are you doing here?”

“That’s no way to talk, Holland,” said Ivor.

Somehow, she must have found the money to replace the tyres. It was too dark to see the haphazard paint strokes concealing the offending word. “Why are you here?”

“Inside that old building is the biggest horseshoe-bat colony on the island,” she said, pointing up at the roof. There was a box of recording equipment on the passenger seat, and
Barney asked her to let him look at it, which she did. They each had a go at talking into the microphone, until Miss Duchâtel spotted the first bats spilling out from the eaves and told them
that they’d have to be quiet while she recorded them.

When they still hadn’t left, she asked if it wasn’t time they were in bed. But Ivor had spotted the thermos in the back seat and said he rather fancied some coffee instead.

“Well,” said Miss Duchâtel, “you can have a drink, if you like, but I don’t have any cups.”

That was how they ended up back in the fallout shelter with a flask of coffee that they divided into four jam jars. Finally, perhaps because Ivor added a little brandy to her flask, Miss
Duchâtel began to relax enough to admit that she’d dined there during the war, when the Germans had used the old kitchens as entertaining quarters. Because the British government was
too proud to admit that the islanders had been abandoned, they didn’t drop food packages here as in other parts of Europe. The only food that came onto Lindsey arrived with the invading army
– and even that stopped after D-Day, when islanders were reduced to killing stray dogs and cats to eat.

She said she’d been invited there to make up for the fact that a group of soldiers had stolen some of her geese. The commandant had heard about a Frenchwoman living on the farm, and
because he had spent many childhood summers in the Auvergne he thought it would be nice to pass an evening reliving those times and practising his French. There was no point refusing, so the
commandant got his candlelit evening confusing his tenses and reminiscing about his Breton nanny, through mouthfuls of pâté and dauphinoise potatoes.

He was a handsome man, and impeccably well-mannered. But he spoke too much, seemed to want too much to be liked, and she was embarrassed by this. His lieutenant Driesch, on the other hand, was
surly and breathed heavily through his nose as he ate. He had a drinker’s face, Miss Duchâtel said. At the end of the evening, as she was escorted through the shadows to a car that
would take her back to her farm, she heard him call after her – “Madame”, as if after three hours he still couldn’t remember her name – but she had pretended not to
hear. It was only when she arrived home that she realized she had left her purse behind. “But by then the child was awake and it was long past curfew—”

“What child?” interjected Belinda.

For a moment the only sound was the hush of summer stalks brushing against the bunker door.
Cowper was right
, thought Barney
. It was a Jerrybag baby – and she killed
it
.