Silent Noon (24 page)

Once Swift had reported to the headmaster that Robin Littlejohn wasn’t accounted for, the entire school cleared to the lower pitch. Now only Pleming remained to consider
the smouldering ruins: the unseated stone rider face down in the green water, its outstretched arm flung over the fountain’s edge as if grasping after his mount, which had fled. A monstrous
crater opened up to the corridor that had once linked the main building to the old kitchens. Picking up a piece of metal casing that was still warm to the touch, he considered the surviving
ironwork grilles that braced shattered windows, the contorted drainpipes and flooded gutters. It did not match any of these, either in colour or weight. The tragedy seemed to point to the explosion
of a UXB.

By the time the ambulance arrived, Barney had already regained consciousness beneath a dusting of broken glass. He had fallen from the bed and was staring in bewilderment at the sparkling floor,
unaware of the blood that trickled from his nose and wondering how to stop the ringing in his ears.

He was quickly transferred to a bed against the opposite wall, away from the window, and an hour later he lay beneath a fresh sheet that Matron had tucked tightly beneath his hips, so that at
first it appeared to his housemaster that there was only half a boy there, severed at the abdomen.

“Well, Holland.” Runcie seated himself in the chair next to the bed. “You’ve had a lucky escape.”

Barney cast his eyes downwards. He was fiddling with something in one hand, and the housemaster gently prised his fingers open to see what it was.

“Is this yours?” he asked. Barney shook his head.

“It’s Robin’s,” he said.

“What were you doing with it?”

Barney opened his mouth and shut it again.

“I was going to give it back to him,” he said at last. “It had fallen into the river.”

A shaft of sunlight widened through the window, cutting into his eyes. Runcie stood up and lowered the blind. When had they become such suspicious creatures, he wondered. From the kitchens below
wafted a smell of tripe and boiled meat: a smell from his boyhood, an odour that took him back to swimming lessons in the black tank on frosty mornings, to knee baths in a communal tub and socks
hardened to the shape of the wearer’s foot – the scent of an institution larger than himself. These lads today had nothing in common with the bonny little men of his youth.

“The funny thing is that Morrell wasn’t at the house match when it happened. I don’t suppose you’d know where else he might have been?”

“No, sir.”

The Head’s cat had been preening by the fountain, warmed by the hazy noontime sun. In the second before the blast, it was as if someone had flipped a switch and shut off all the sound. The
last thing he remembered was the cat opening its mouth to release a furious wail – though to Barney it appeared only as a soundless yawn. He had never expected Ivor to pull off an explosion
of such immensity.

There was a knock, and Mr Pleming stuck his head around the door. “I’m sorry to interrupt…” He regarded the boy, who was staring out beyond the blinded window, and the
housemaster. “Holland.”

“Sir.”

“Nasty business. Brave lad.” Pleming hesitated. He sensed that his smile was over-zealous, but he was not a man confident at relinquishing a concentrated smile.

“Headmaster?”

“Mr Runcie. Mr Swift has caught up with the pupils who weren’t accounted for.”

Runcie nodded and rose slowly to his feet.

“It came out of the ground, sir,” said Barney.

Runcie sensed the Head shift impatiently behind him. “What do you mean by that?”

Mr Pleming eased the door open at a wider angle and stopped it with his toe.

“It exploded
up
, sir.”

“Well, it didn’t fall from the sky, now, did it?” said Runcie, forcing a smile as he stepped across the threshold past the Head, who did not appear to see the funny side.

Scrums and penalties and picnic baskets, skinned knees gleaming pink through mud, striped socks and the captain’s coin toss, reedy voices raised in cheers and middle-aged
faces set in grim satisfaction – all this was a world away, on another island in another sea. Here, there was only the little house, the open door… and the girl and the wolf inside,
together.

Always, he had witnessed and done nothing. He had maintained his composure where others would have tried to rescue the innocents being locked in churches and burnt alive. He had filed reports,
infiltrated meetings, gained and betrayed trust. When it was all over, he had come home – to a position in the school where his name was engraved in gilded letters on the Captain of Games
roll, where even today there were those who could remember the time he had kicked a rugby ball clear over the roof and where he had continued to witness and turn a blind eye to those petty
cruelties that he knew made men of boys.

Swift had heard the voices, low and conspiratorial, and detected the shuffle of bodies through the concrete wall. The girl had been the first to notice him peering around the corner, and her
hand had shot to her mouth in fright.

How much she had looked like her mother then, he thought.

The boy he sent directly to the headmaster. He took Belinda by the shoulder and steered her firmly towards her father’s house.

“Don’t,” she said, shrugging him of. “Or I shall tell Mother.”

He felt a rush of panic. “Tell her what?”

“About that day after the tea, when you followed me there.”

When the earth had shifted beneath their feet – when the ground had cracked open to reveal a terrible secret.

“I did no such thing.”

“Didn’t you?” She looked at him, and he noticed how her irises reflected the same glassy colour that bewilders the eye when the sun hits the sea.

“This is ridiculous.”

“I don’t suppose the school could do with another scandal.”

“A boy
died
today.”

Belinda paled. “Barney—” she said.

“No, but it was a damned close thing for him,” said Swift.

“Who, then?”

At last, the balance of power had shifted. “There will be plenty of time for questions later,” he said. “Right now, if I were you, I’d take the position that the less
said the better.”

He felt her scowling ahead of him, and he pitied her father: befuddled and perhaps frightened by his daughter’s impending maturity. The girl harboured a quiet, bitter fury at her impotence
as a child and a female: that much was clear. Perhaps that was what had attracted her to Morrell, who shared her anger and who could be charming as well as cruel. Swift had heard the news of the
boating accident that spring – two girls and a schoolmistress very nearly drowned at sea – but had never considered the possibility that Mollie’s daughter could have been
involved. It was what she
hadn’t
done that was the problem – and then Swift remembered Mollie’s words: “We don’t
have
to do anything.”

Five years ago.

They had both been younger, of course: Mollie particularly, with only the one daughter and island life still a relative novelty. Flood had married late, and there was a
significant age gap between them. She was not lonely – at the drinks party where they first met she had dared the young French master to suggest as much – and she was not, strictly
speaking, bored. She had the little girl to look after, and letters to write to her family in Norfolk. And books – so many books. Poetry, she had told him. Anyone in particular? Christina
Rossetti, she had said.

“
This close-companioned inarticulate hour
,” he quoted.

That wasn’t Christina, she told him. That was her brother.

He couldn’t think of one of her poems, he admitted.

Not even ‘Goblin Market’? she asked. About the little girl lured to eat fruit from the goblins – “
But when the noon waxed bright, Her hair grew thin and
grey
…”

Children’s poems, he said.

It’s not really a poem for children, she told him. And then she had asked him what he intended to do in his spare time on the island.

“I should like to see you,” he replied. In hindsight, it had been a ridiculous thing to say: but it had not sounded so bold at the time. It couldn’t have, because she had
laughed.

In the interview, Ivor insisted that he’d only intended to protect her – that when they had heard the explosion their first thought had been to take cover.
He’d seen something as they headed for the shelter – a man in a long coat, not one of the masters, hurrying across the field towards the fence – and he’d sensed then that
there was an emergency at the school, and that the main building was the last place they should go.

The dreadful irony had been that the alarm which was set off by the blast hadn’t been the air-raid siren but the thin, plangent all-clear. As for the clothes she had been wearing,
“borrowed” from the lost-and-found chest – they were simply part of a theatrical game they’d devised. A pantomime, was all. “It wasn’t what you think,” he
said, more than once, until at last Pleming placed his hands on the desk and said: “What do you suppose we think?”

The Courvoisier bottles told their own story, of course. There was enough in Ivor Morrell’s record to paint a picture of the category of boy he fell into. Boys who made heroes of their
victims, who took equal delight in torturing and rescuing the objects of their desire.

“She was panicking,” Ivor said. “She kept saying that she’d felt something. There was a smell – a rotting smell – right after we heard the explosion. She said
she’d smelt it before, in the basements.”

“She took fright at a smell?”

“Not just a smell. Something pungent. Sick. I felt it too.”

“Do you normally
feel
smells, Morrell?”

“Not usually. That’s why it seemed so… unorthodox.”

“Perhaps you’d like to tell me about the unorthodox materials found in the shelter,” Pleming said. “Weed-killer, tin canisters, petroleum. The police are going to want to
ask you about this.”

“It was an experiment, that’s all. Just a bit of fun.”

“And was Barney Holland involved in this bit of fun?” Pleming frowned. “For boys like you, school may seem just a diversion. For the Flood girl, I imagine it’s mostly an
irrelevance. But for Barney Holland, it may just be his only chance at a better life. Thanks to his little escapade with her last week, he may have lost that opportunity. I don’t suppose your
brother would have made much of this sort of thing,” the Head continued. “Playing dress-up and experimenting with explosives.”

“No, sir.”

Pleming settled himself behind the desk and opened the green folder that lay between them.

“Well, then. Shall we begin at the beginning?”

Perched on the armchair beneath a framed reproduction of
Madame Monet
, Mollie Flood worried at her wedding ring around a finger that was already red and swollen.

“Honestly, Belinda, if this is another lie—”

“I tell you, it’s not a lie.”

It was just the same as before, thought the girl: the disbelieving adults and the terrible pictures in her head… Miss Gallo in the dark water with seaweed swirling about her arms,
flooding her mouth, tickling the soles of her feet, sinking like a boulder to the bottom of the sea –
oh it was sad, so sad
– and the beautiful Millicent Grady floating calmly
on the water’s surface, like Ophelia, with her hair fanning out in a magnificent black halo. The North Sea waters were so cold you’d die of shock. Mary Compton had said so. Your heart
would freeze before your brain knew it, and then you’d be asleep and never know the difference.

“Morrell also mentioned seeing a man on the far field shortly after the blast.” Swift remained in the doorway. “No doubt the police will look into it.”

“Forgive me, Michael. Please, do sit.”

The three-piece suite was arranged around a coffee table still draped with a plastic cloth from the younger child’s tea. Swift seated himself at the far end of the sofa near the radiogram,
facing Mollie and leaving Belinda no option but to continue to stand awkwardly in the middle of the room.

“Who gave you these things to wear? Was it that Holland boy again?”

“It wasn’t Barney’s fault,” she said. And then, in a small voice, “I wanted to be like the others.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Go up to your room and change into something appropriate.”

The adults sat in an uneasy silence as the girl’s footsteps retreated up the staircase, along the corridor to the far end of the house. A door slammed.

“I’m sorry about this. Would you like a coffee?”

“Thank you.”

It was his first time sitting in this room since he had arrived as a teacher at the school. He found the Flood family’s home particularly oppressive. He had visited many houses like this
to report the deaths of sons on battlefields half a world away: houses kept too tidy, fusty with ambition and self-regard, OMO box on the window sill. The curtains here had been replaced with
fabric printed in diagrammatic patterns, and a new pink lampshade had been bought for the standing light. The mud-room, leading to the kitchen, had been recovered in a garishly red wallpaper. But
the clock remained on the mantelpiece, flanked by a framed photograph of Belinda – and there on the side table was the cut-glass ashtray where once he had stubbed out her cigarette.

“Is it true, then? That one of the boys…”

“He almost certainly wouldn’t have known what hit him.”

“My God, how ghastly.” A terrible realization. “It could have been any one of us. At any moment – ”

“It could have been much worse.”

“Is that what Mr Pleming will tell his parents?”

Swift picked up his cup and set it down again. “Belinda is safe, Mollie. You have nothing to worry about now.”

“No, of course not. Apart from running away to sea in a clapped-out rowing boat. And hiding in a shelter in the woods with a boy old enough to be called up for service.” She sipped
her coffee, and Swift wondered if she was also remembering a moment’s indiscretion five years ago.