Silent Noon (21 page)

“Barney?”

“I’m coming.” As he straightened, Barney felt a hand tighten around his arm.

“Try that sort of thing again and you’ll be sorry, Holland.”

Six boys emerged from the boarding house with the slightly crazed look of prisoners let out on day release – fists balled, tightly coiled, ready to fight the world –
and at Opie’s cry of “Bundle!” Cowper and Littlejohn made a beeline for the Audley family vault. They argued loudly over the rules as they went. No props, and once a man was down
he was out. Using the wall was fair play, but no more than one rush and no ganging. It went without saying that Shields and Cowper would be partners. Robin claimed Barney before he had a chance to
object, leaving Percy and Opie to pair off together.

“You’re bigger than me, so I’ll be the rider,” said Robin to Barney when they reached the vault, which was like a little yellow chapel built of stone with windows that
were caged behind wire guards. Barney’s face lit with the wary if delighted look of an explorer among savages: his ears pinked as Littlejohn pushed him towards the ground.

There was no clear start to the fight, only a sudden scuffle and a few shrill cries from the crowd of onlookers that had gathered behind the vault – around the far side, away from
masters’ prying eyes, where the yellow paint had begun to flake and the concrete underneath was turning green – before Opie and Percy were thrust towards the wall, sending a shudder
through the stone down to the generations of Audley family members resting below. As they fought, the crowd started up a chant, snatches of which Barney recognized, even though he could not
remember having heard it before:

It was Barney who stumbled first, and Robin who lost his grip. All Shields had to do was stick out his foot, and Barney was sent flying at the wall. Robin had farther to fall,
and it was a spectacular dethroning: Barney saw the flush of fury and humiliation in his friend’s cheeks as he dragged himself from underfoot to shelter by the stone steps that led to the
vault’s only door, which had been bricked up long ago.

“All right?” he asked, once the others had retreated.

“You let go too soon,” snapped Robin. He pulled up his shirt to examine his chest. Barney tried not to stare, wiping the blood from his nose with the back of one hand before offering
to help him up, but the gesture was silently refused.

Pushing through the crowd on his way back to the boarding house – there was just enough time to clean himself up before the next lesson – Barney came face to face with Belinda,
fighting to stand her ground against the dispersing crowd. She took something out of her tunic pocket and handed it to him. It was a silver Buren.

“Where’d you find this?” he asked.

“In the stream that comes off the towpath. Ivor was looking for a watch with a timer – perhaps you’d give it to him.”

“It’s Robin’s.”

She blinked, then took Barney’s hand and closed his fingers around the watch. “Never mind Ivor,” she said. “You have it.”

She had drawn the inner door closed but left the other ajar in order to hear them approach. She waited for ten minutes, listening to the foxes’ screams, and then poked her
head outside, wondering why the other two were late. When she began to get cold, she returned to the bunker. She lit a candle and warmed her hands over the flame, thinking all the time of the
delights promised for the feast: hard-boiled eggs and a box of sticky dates, which the Frenchwoman had sent to Barney that week.

She didn’t hear him approaching through the trees and stopping before the shelter. She didn’t hear him testing the hatch, pressing his ear to the concrete wall. She sat very still,
watching the shadows flicker on the ceiling, feeling suddenly and strangely nostalgic for this moment.

Leaving the house that evening, her mother had asked where she was going – defensively, and also with a hint of something Belinda might have recognized as envy, if only she had been
attuned to it. The woods, she’d replied. And her mother had said she didn’t want her playing there after dark, and not out of sight of the house. Why not, Belinda had said, even though
a voice in her head told her to stop. Because I say so, her mother had replied. Belinda could tell that she was ready to be angry: primed to slap the girl for rudeness, impatient to shout and send
her to her bedroom without tea. Belinda had toyed with her mother’s anger, relishing the prospect of a scene in which, as always, her mother should be the first to snap. In the end, though,
she had opted for peace: she did not wish to miss tonight’s feast. She felt that her mother could not love her, and she basked in a feeling of martyrdom because of this.

Filled with a delicious melancholy, she pulled her coat more tightly around her and drew her knees to her chin. Soon the others would arrive, filling the cavernous space with their schoolboy
smell of gravy and boiled greens and gruff whispers, and Ivor would toss sugared almonds for her to catch in her mouth while Holland busied himself with the brandy, pretending not to watch
them.

There was a slam, and a sudden draught that extinguished the candle.

It was the silence more than the darkness that frightened her as she followed the wall to the inner door. It swung to easily, but there was no rush of sweet forest air. The outer door would not
open.

“Ivor! I know it’s you. Open the door.”

She pulled harder at the handle, expecting to hear laughter, a scuffle of feet.

“Barney, tell him to open the door.”

She waited until it became frighteningly clear that her eyes would never adjust to this darkness.

“Barney! It’s not funny—”

She stumbled back to the inner chamber, feeling the bench for the box of matches. But what if the candle were to fall over – what if a fire were to start? Suddenly she was clinging to a
cave wall as waves flooded in from the sea. The same waves that had swallowed up the strip of beach which only minutes earlier had charted a safe course to the coast road. The water was creeping
up, up the rock face, and she saw too clearly how it would end…

She crumpled against the door and buried her head in her arms.

“Mind out!”

She was toppled by the opening door, stunned by two bright lights. Torches.

“What a stupid place to sit. What were you playing at?”

They pressed into the main chamber together. Candles were lit, satchels unloaded. She wiped the damp from her cheeks. They were not laughing at her: they had not detected her terror.

But Ivor must have noticed that something was amiss, as he chucked her under the chin with a reassuring grin. “Buck up, little one! I’ve brought chocolate.”

And then, as Barney ducked outside to bring in the last of the blankets, he told her what he’d learnt that day, and how easy it would be after all to do that thing they’d discussed
over the half-term. There was a tub of weed-killer in the gardener’s lodge; sugar could be bought in town. All that remained to be found was a fuse.

It was Miss Duchâtel who told them about the sabotage attempts during the war: carefully engineered explosions and acts of vandalism – slashing car tyres, cutting
cables, bricks through windows – that made the islanders feel less complicit in the occupation. “It gave us something to do, to remind ourselves what it was to be free,” she said.
“We scattered leaflets under the banner ‘Lindsey Island Freedom Front’, and we circulated newsletters ‘to all our loyal readers’, even though there were only a few
subscribers and they were the editors!”

That day she had begun by offering fried whitebait and mayonnaise, which Ivor tucked into with relish: biting off the heads with their staring eyes and giving great grunts of pleasure just to
see the younger girl squirm. She followed this with boiled eggs dipped in salt, which she made a show of tipping over one shoulder to ward off witches.

Barney said nothing. Now all he could ever think of when he came back here was the message that he should not have seen, the word painted on the side of the car. “They cut her hair,”
Krawiec had said. Barney barely heard the Frenchwoman recall the long nights during the Occupation when there was no radio and the only films playing at the cinema were German ones.
“René Christiansen would make a show with his magic lantern – we had to stuff the gaps under the doors with newspaper so no light would show – and old Mrs Klausen devised
some interesting delicacies out of lavender and kelp, no doubt just as the Stone Agers did, once upon a time. We had forgotten how to survive off the land for too long – we who are supposed
to be so advanced, with our televisions and our atom bombs…”

By the disparaging things she said about the islanders being abandoned to their usual life after the war, Barney wondered if it wasn’t actually his sort, and not the Germans at all, whom
she really hated. Was he part of a new invasion, of holidaymakers and boarding students? She had lived here long enough to consider herself a native: had earned this right by enduring the
Occupation. “You only have to look at the islander diet to see how soft we have become,” she said. “Forget the fish and the sea birds. Now everything is imported: boxes of tea,
packet biscuits, meat in tins…”

Then she and Ivor began discussing the fate of families like his after the war: grand dynasties who had lost their properties and staff while unscrupulous young businessmen watched their profits
soar. England was no longer a land of heroes, Ivor said, no matter how many empty memorials were erected to the shades of past triumphs; no matter how many attempts to freeze time in the silent
noon of their finest hour. Out with the colonies, where once men had proved their worth, and in with the welfare state. Not that the poor didn’t deserve every opportunity to help themselves
– a glance in Barney’s direction – but the new order was squeezing out any room for those with true ambition. “‘
The future’s not what it used to
be
’…” he concluded. “All we have to look forward to now are free spectacles in our dotage.”

Barney suggested that perhaps he should go to America – or one day, when it was possible, outer space. “Shields says there will be colonies on the moon,” he said. “Like
India.”

“Colonies on the moon,” mused Ivor, “would be the final insult to poetry.”

“Or you could dispense with civilization altogether,” said Miss Duchâtel. “And move into that little house of yours in the forest. Living the utopian dream.”

“The only people who believe in utopia any more are Reds,” said Ivor.

Curled on the sofa, their stomachs full of
pot-au-feu
and farmer’s loaf, it wasn’t long before the sound of the rain outside and the crackling of the fire lulled Barney and
Belinda to sleep. As always, Miss Duchâtel had served watered-down wine with the meal, and neither had yet developed the ability to drink without dozing off straight after. Miss
Duchâtel sent Ivor to bring the blankets from the bedroom, and these they arranged about the shoulders of the drowsy pair by the fire.

How much Barney dreamt that afternoon and how much he absorbed from the conversation at the kitchen table, where the other two continued to speak in low voices, was difficult to say. There
appeared before him a narrow underground shaft and two great points of stone. Beyond these was a vertical drop and the sound of water crashing against rock hundreds of feet below. The tunnel became
filled with voices, and he saw that between the two points of stone was a man. Around his body was a belay line. He had been trying to drop through the vertical section, perhaps to clear a route
for others. But he was stuck –
It’s the locking device
, he was saying,
it’s jammed against the rock
– and even though he struggled, it was clear from his
expression that he knew there was no use.

There had been too many voices in such a small space, too much urgency in the press of bodies, the cool walls becoming wet with condensation. In the end the handsome young man fell asleep, his
head tipping to one side just as if he had nodded off – it did not look as though he had suffocated, even though that is exactly what happened – and immediately the others recognized
that if they did not retreat back up to the open air they too would die in the tunnel. There was a scramble of feet, a murmur of voices.

A little while later came the distant, muted sludge of cement being poured down the shaft, creeping under the young man’s fingernails and soaking through the fibres in his uniform –
a British uniform, always meticulous: a master at his school had always commented on the pride he took in his appearance, even as a boy – and soon the cement grew cold, hardened in the spaces
between the rock and the darkness below. It was the only way he could be buried, by filling him in like this. More importantly, it was the only way the tunnel would never be discovered by the
enemy.

When Barney woke, he looked without turning his head to where Miss Duchâtel had dragged her chair around the kitchen table to draw an arm around Ivor’s shoulders.

Barney squeezed his eyes shut, counted to sixty and rolled over.

“Sorry,” he said. “Must have nodded off.”

Ivor did not turn around.

“Don’t apologize,” said Miss Duchâtel. “We have been having a good talk. And Belinda has been reading.”

Ivor did not turn around. Barney saw that Belinda had sequestered herself in the horsehair chair with a brightly coloured tome she had found on one of the shelves,
Mediterranean Food
.
Now she stood up to show Barney a picture of a skinned hare. As she passed the book across the sofa, her sleeve pulled back to reveal a fine, white wrist, circled by a bracelet of blue glass
beads.