Silent Noon (23 page)

“Bit late for that – and anyway, Cowper will believe what he wants to believe.”

“I’m sorry, Barney.”

He considered the almost imperceptible quivering of her irises, the tufts of black hair that had begun to grow back feathery and untamed about the tops of her small, white ears. For some reason
at that moment she reminded him of a baby bird.

“You don’t have to come. It’s probably better if you don’t. But don’t go back to him.”

He continued towards the kiosk, his satchel banging heavily with tins of condensed milk and a few apples they had stopped to collect from the wrong side of the garden wall. There was a bottle
opener with which he’d make a harpoon to spear fish, and some matches to start a campfire. Doc Dower’s
piastre
, wrapped in his balled sock, was there too – a reminder,
should he need it, that he was more than capable of building anything else he might require on the island. A moment later, he felt a hand on his arm.

“There,” she said, pointing. “We won’t have to drag it far.”

It made a terrible noise, the splintered wood shrieking against the pebbles. Barney tossed the satchel in beneath one of the benches and knelt to soothe his palms in the cold water while Belinda
peered out across the sulphur-coloured sea.

“There’s a fog coming in,” she said.

Barney squinted at the horizon, willing the hump of land to reveal itself against the pale winter sky. “It will change in a minute,” she added, sensing his impatience.

Last year, there had been talk of delaying the St Mary’s boating trip to St Just because of high winds reported on the north side of the island. In the end, the morning had dawned warm and
fair and there was no suggestion of any problem until much later, when the supper that had been laid out in the dining hall was discovered, still untouched, at a quarter past midnight by the last
member of staff to secure the building.

“Let’s have one of those apples,” said Belinda.

“They’re meant for later,” said Barney, who nevertheless tossed her one of the smaller ones. She polished it against her tunic before biting in with a loud, satisfying
crunch.

There had been talk of a storm, which another student, who had a ham radio, was able to infer from the shipping forecast. The late ferry had arrived as scheduled, which sparked off whispers that
its wake might have forced the lightweight schooner to capsize. The owner, rumoured to have been found with the stink of alcohol on his breath, had been asleep below deck at the time, where the
horrified cries of the girls on the shore failed to reach him.

“It’s starting to move, do you see?” said Belinda, tipping her head at the yellow haze.

“Hadn’t we better get started?” said Barney.

“Let me finish this.” She took another bite and tossed the core into the long grass. “We’ll have to aim for the north side,” she said. “The harbour still
hasn’t been cleaned up from the floods, and there’s nowhere to dock on the south shore.”

Barney shunted the boat forward another foot. St Just was almost visible now: an eerie grey line on the horizon, surrounded by a strange, thermal haze. Elsewhere in the world, there were islands
used as graveyards for broken ships, as quarantines for people with polio or tuberculosis. Islands for displaced tribes: places that turned out not to be safe but poisonous. The water in those
lagoons could burn your skin right off.

He had started to heave at the resisting vessel when a voice called out from the bluffs.

“Well.
Fancy that
.”

There was barely time to scramble into the boat before Ivor had caught on to the stern with both hands.

“Let go,” Barney said.

“And be the last one to watch you two paddle off to your deaths? Get out of there.”

“Leave us alone.”

“Preston said he saw you skulking off together before the second bell. You stopped for apples at the garden wall, he said. Fine way to treat a friend.”

“We’re not friends,” said Barney.

Ivor turned to the girl. “Is that what you think?” he said. But before she could answer the bells of St Arras began to sound, making her hesitate. “So, you’re going to
live in blissful nature, like Paul and Virginie?” continued Ivor. He stepped towards her. “You little tart,” he said. “You ought to be ashamed.”

“Don’t talk to her like that,” said Barney.

Ivor laughed – an awkward, sneering laugh – and said, “What a pair you are.”

He grabbed the satchel from Barney and pulled it open.

“At least you remembered the tin opener this time,” he said. He took out the matchbox and threw it into the water. “Shame those got wet, though.”

Barney lunged for the bag but Ivor pulled out of reach. “Catch,” he said, tossing one of the apples far over Belinda’s head. “No? Try again.” He lobbed another
apple into the long grass, followed by a volley of three, four, five more.

“Stop it,” said Belinda, even now clambering out of the boat to chase after the apples that skittered across the pebble beach.

“Never mind them,” called Barney after her – but she wasn’t listening.

Ivor smirked, waiting until she had disappeared from view before rounding the rowing boat.

“How many’d they give you?” said Barney.

“Twelve of the best, my boy.” Ivor sat himself on the edge of the boat and pulled a cigarette from his pocket. “Listen, Holland…” He stared straight ahead to light
the cigarette, which he didn’t offer to Barney. “You do know it didn’t mean anything, don’t you?”

“You might have told Runcie that.”

“Runcie knows it just as well as I do. You make things worse by going about looking so damned shifty about it all.” He blew a mouthful of smoke towards the sea, so that the wind
lifted it like a piece of grey gossamer. “You’re not to know, I suppose, never having been away to school before: so you’ll have to take my word for it. Or ask Littlejohn. He
knows more about it than he’s willing to let on. It’s
faute de mieux.
”

“Screw you.”

“Only you wouldn’t be able to keep yourself from thinking about the old geezers sitting round the pub in Camden Town – about what they’d say if they found out.
There’s no such trouble for a toff like me.” Belinda had returned, apples gathered in the pouch of her tunic. “At least she’s not dead inside.” A nervous laugh.
“She’s not dead, full stop…”

What an idiot he had been not to see it at the time. The girl, gamine and shorn-headed, as a substitute for the boys who had come before her: Henry Cray and Robin, and God knows how many others.
He had redirected his love for his family’s sacked footman onto Henry Cray – and then, onto the fallen child, Belinda Flood.

“And to think, if I’d arrived here a minute later you’d never get to see this,” Ivor continued in a loud voice, pulling something from his satchel: a wind-up alarm clock
with a couple of wires sticking out of one end. “You set the time as the alarm, and when the minute hand strikes an electrical signal is sent to the speaker, jumps onto the other wire and
– provided there’s a spark – ignites it. Rather clever, don’t you think?”

“Let me see,” said Barney, grabbing the clock from Ivor before the older boy had the wit to resist. Instead he inched closer, looming over Barney like a protective shadow, while
Belinda craned her neck from across the boat like some small animal sniffing curiously at the air.

Barney felt the weight of it in his hand, rolled the wires between his fingers. He turned from Ivor, resisting his overbearing hulk, his hot breath and salty musk. The wet sand beneath their
feet had darkened: the wind nipped at Barney’s bare fingers, wrapped around the metal timepiece. There was a toxic, fishy smell, and he looked up to see that the yellow haze had not drifted
but spread.

He did not know how many seconds passed before he hurled the timepiece at the water so hard that the mist swallowed it before it broke the surface. No sooner had he done that than something hit
the pit of his stomach, and then he felt the sudden shock of cold. He was lying face up in the shallow water before he saw the older boy come after him again, and behind him Belinda with the
paddle…

And then there were fingers around his throat and salt water pouring into his mouth, and all the while it was freezing.
So this is how death starts
, he thought.
Will it feel like
this until it’s over, or is there worse to come?

What happened next did not seem real – perhaps because they were both under water, perhaps because he was struggling for breath. But even if he had imagined Ivor’s teeth sinking into
his cheek with the clarity of a sewing needle drawing stitches through flesh, there was no denying the plume of blood that spread about him in the moments that followed, or the ripping noise that
made his insides heave.

He did not know what made Ivor detach himself so suddenly, but by then there was such terrible pain that he didn’t care. It was only seconds later that he perceived an outline against the
setting sun, shouting and waving its arms.

Already the rowing boat had started to drift, teased along the shore by the uneven waves, and meanwhile Ivor had pulled Belinda away from it and was guiding her quickly up the slope towards the
shouting man.

“She’s safe,” the Mede was saying, in a clear, loud voice. “It’s all right. I’ve got her now.”

Barney rushed to his feet, only to be pulled back by the waves: he struggled, righted himself, stood again, clutching his cheek with one hand as blood ran through his fingers. The figure was
still shouting, pointing at the boat which continued to drift farther down the beach. Ivor had flung his school blazer around Belinda’s shoulders and held her by the elbow, shielding the back
of her head with his other arm as if to protect her from the soaked and shivering thing on the beach: a fayed spectre in dripping shrouds, blood spilling into his mouth, naked legs whipped raw by
the wind, feet sinking deeper into the rushing sand.

He was put in isolation in the San and instructed not to touch the stitches. That was what came of playing in the water, Matron told him: the beach might look sandy, but the
rocks beneath the surface were sharp. If it hadn’t been for Morrell, one shuddered to think what might have become of the poor girl.

There was only one other boy in the San at the time, in a bay on the other side of a curtained partition: Sanger, who was laid up with a throat infection. On his second morning Barney heard
Matron tell him that he would be sent back to lessons that afternoon. Immediately he tore a page from the primer on his bedside table and scribbled a few lines in the margins. Once Matron had left
the room, he tiptoed to the curtain and poked his head into Sanger’s bay.

“Give this to Littlejohn, will you?” he said.

Sanger stared up at Barney with eyes still ringed pink from all the hacking and wheezing of the last six days. He wet his lips and straightened himself beneath the covers. “What’s it
worth?” he said.

“Next week’s tuck.”

“Two weeks.”

“Fine. But you have to give it to him straight away.”

The trick would be to laugh it off. If he played his cards right, Robin might ask to touch the scar, his war wound, and then Barney could take the watch out of his pocket and press it into his
hand…

As a starting whistle shrilled from the games pitch that afternoon, he wondered if Robin had chosen to ignore him. Perhaps Sanger had never even delivered the message. Barney thought of Ivor in
his set, revelling in the fact of being a hero, and Belinda recovering in her child’s bedroom, doubly scarred and never likely to trust him again – neither sparing a thought for Robin
Littlejohn, who had only that minute excused himself from the sidelines complaining of a stomach ache.

He must have cut back to Medlar behind the old kitchens, which is why Barney didn’t see him as he watched the drive from the San window. Now as on every other day of the year, the horseman
and his mount were emerging from the fountain’s green water: the rider still pointing at the moon, which wasn’t a moon now, but a brilliant white sun.

As Barney waited, he noticed how the water brightened as the noontime sun emerged from behind the clouds. The change filled him with hope. In a few weeks it would be Christmas and he would get
to see Spike and Jake again. By the time the new term started, everyone would have forgotten the fuss with Ivor.

He felt the silver watch through his pocket, this thing that had lived against the other boy’s skin and marked the seconds to the rhythm of his quick, adolescent pulse. In
that moment he decided that he would return it to Littlejohn as soon as he arrived. Not as an apology, nor even as a gift. It was his, after all.

A bird shot out from the treetops seconds before the explosion, as if it had detected the first ripples of a collapsing star, sensed the death tremors before the final, violent
event – and in the same moment, Barney heard the window shatter, felt his mouth filling with the taste of ash. On the lower playing field, boys and masters raised their eyes to the clouds,
believing the sound to have been the roar of approaching thunder. But the sun was shining more brightly than ever before, and for several moments they chose not to believe the rising wail of the
air-raid siren, the black plume unfurling against an untainted sky…