Silent Noon (25 page)

“She’s been a different child since all of the horridness last year,” Mollie said at last. It was the English mistress at the root of that, she knew: Miss Gallo, who had chosen
to die a heroine, to be loved and mourned by generations of loyal students. Belinda may have seen the damage to the side of the schooner as it set off from the shore – she knew she had been
wrong not to mention it to anyone; knew it well enough as to have almost drowned herself running away from school – but for how long must she be eaten by this guilt? “Enormous appetite,
compulsive washing – two baths a day, sometimes three. And then to have found… that awful thing. From the war, wasn’t it?”

He regarded her and made no sound. She waited for him to confirm what she had said, but he did not so much as tilt his head in either direction. She swallowed, folded and refolded her hands
– still watching him, always watching him, not blinking. When the silence grew too long she filled it, breathing out the words so that her voice would not crack. “I’d thought that
things had started to improve since half-term…”

It occurred to Swift then that although Mollie was the sort of woman others should have described as a model wife, he had never heard anyone refer to her in this way. When they first met, she
had already realized the futility of basing her life around her daughter. But what had this left her? The restrictions of a boarding-school environment, sharpened by the memory of who she had been
before, in the heady days of the war. Neither one of them had anticipated this disappointment at the future: this ennui with what had been won and what no longer remained to fight for. The first
time he met her he had known that that was something they shared.

“This Morrell boy,” Mollie said. “Tell me about him.”

“He has a rather curious moral framework. He’s very keen on the ancients. I get the sense he’d rather like to be able to live his life according to their rules, rather than to
ours.”

“I see.”

“He’s a slave to his own rhetoric, that’s all. I imagine some of it might have rubbed off on the younger ones.”

“And why do you suppose he should have had any interest in her?”

“He enjoys looking out for the friendless.” The dregs were bitter, puckering the inside of his mouth: he didn’t know why he was still going through the charade of drinking.
“I imagine he thought he was a comfort to her. That’s a normal schoolboy fantasy, isn’t it? Saving the girl in distress.”

“Is it?”

Swift could bear it no longer: the porcelain slippery in his sweating palms, the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hallway. He stood up. “I’m sorry to have kept you,” he
said.

“Michael,” she began – but there was something half-hearted in her voice. “Tell my husband not to worry about us, if you see him?”

“Of course. Please, there’s no need to see me out.”

As he passed the fountain, the French master paused to consider the felled horse and the rider severed from its back, trying to imagine the fire and the hundred small gods to which it had given
birth. The bombed-out wing might have passed for a Gothic ruin now: the surviving corner with its blown-out window like a blinded eye, the brickwork silhouetted against the blue glow of moonlight
reflecting up from the sea.

“Do sit,” said Pleming, indicating the chair. He liked Swift, approved of his manicured hands and mobile nostrils, derived personal satisfaction from the fact that
his name was written in gold letters on the games board. No wonder he’d never rubbed along particularly well with Morrell. “So. You’re here to inform me of what we both already
know.” He tapped the open file. “Mrs Morrell.”

“Psychologically, I gather she’s rather fragile.”

Pleming flipped the file closed. “I have found, Swift, through long years of experience, that nearly all behavioural disorders can be traced to psychological fragility on the
mother’s side.” He peered over the rims of his spectacles and lowered his voice. “Between you and me, Flood’s girl is a prime example. You’ve seen what she’s
done to her hair. There is something agitated about her mother – it’s no secret, you needn’t look so embarrassed – and this, I feel sure, has affected the child
considerably.”

“I couldn’t begin to comment.”

“Of course not. And that’s not what we’re here to discuss, is it?” Pleming considered the deputy housemaster gravely. “Mrs Morrell requested a change of personal
tutor for her son at the end of his first year. I declined the request. You were not informed of it.”

Swift waited with mounting impatience.
Have it out and let’s be done with it
, he wanted to say. “Was there a complaint?”

“Nothing specific, no. Can you recall anything that might have upset him at the time?”

“Upheaval at home – the family was forced to let go of staff that year. I imagine things must have been difficult with his father’s return, and Jonty…”

“Potts and Coatsworth and de Bock also lost brothers in the war. Several lost fathers. None of them have conspired to detonate a bomb on school grounds. He said it was to destroy silence.
What do you suppose he meant by that?”

“I haven’t a clue.”

“Might he have been keeping any secrets?”

“Headmaster, Morrell is a deeply unpleasant boy. A quiet bully. No one would wish to sully his brother’s memory, but—”

“I see.” Pleming closed the file. “The irony, of course, is that if it hadn’t been for that damned UXB, none of this would have come to light.”

“Either way, we’d be sitting on a time bomb.”

“Then we are decided.”

Later that same day Ivor, high-shouldered and looking surprisingly small in his brother’s army coat and wide-brimmed fedora, climbed into Krawiec’s van to be taken to Port Grenen.
Watching the vehicle draw an arc around the cordoned-off rubble of the old kitchens, Barney wondered if memory was something that could be unlearnt. Before, he had yearned for some recollection of
his mother’s war. Now, he wished he might tear from his mind’s eye the burnt-on image of that leaping flame, that bolt of light, the clouds of choking dust.

Not for the first time he knelt upon an empty bed, observing the vapour trail of one life drifting out of his own. The night before she left, his mother had crept in next to Barney on the
mattress he shared with Jake and slept, curled around him like a cat, until the small hours. Only in the blue light of dawn had he been aware of her slipping away, and through sleep-crusted eyes he
had traced her outline against the light in the hallway before watching the door shut.

Heading up the coast road with her arms weighed down by shopping on the one hand, and by Lucia’s insistent toddler pull on the other, Mollie recalled the tipsy acrobat
that had balanced upon her bookshelf as a child: a slender figure on a bicycle that dipped at the slightest touch before righting himself, balancing by an invisible law of physics explained to her
many times by her father yet to this day never fully understood. At Lucia’s stop-start infant pace the walk had taken twice as long as usual, and Mollie’s thoughts had diffused into
bleary fog. There was the sound of her daughter’s voice, and the vast silence of the sky – the silence was louder, reducing Lucia’s babble to distant chirping – and her own
feet slapping on the pavement. A melody looping at the back of her mind – a violin study her husband had been practising the previous evening – and words, unfocused and unrecalled, like
text pressed through blotting paper.

So the sound of the horn came as a rude invasion – and as she blinked at the tank-grey lorry powering towards her, the sight of his outline through the windshield woke her from the reverie
with a jolt. The pavement had run out a hundred yards back, so she tugged the child onto the verge and pretended to fumble with the shopping as the lorry slowed to pass. There was someone in the
passenger seat next to the Pole – a figure in a grey coat whose face was obscured by the long rim of a hat – and a trunk rattling in the open trailer behind them.

There was room for just one vehicle at this point in the road, and no turning space. It was only civil of the Pole to slow down as he passed the woman with her child. It was not necessary for
him to stop. To switch off the engine. Staring at her.

“Come, Lucia.”

They edged sideways past the vehicle, and as they passed behind it Mollie looked back, waiting to hear the engine start up again. Neither head moved, and she sensed that he was still waiting.
She did not know for what. Not bread: those days were past. An acknowledgement? She commanded the muscles of her mouth to form a smile. Almost instantly, a hand was raised in the rear-view mirror
–
Good day, prosz
ę
pani
– and the lorry shuddered on, sinking down the coast road until it disappeared between the horizon and the sea.

Swift had overheard himself being described with grudging respect as one who had “done his bit”. He had headed straight for France when others had retreated to
England to train the next generation of heroes. His schoolmates remembered him as a romancer, though this reputation had faded as one by one they left for mediocre jobs and degrees at provincial
universities, or died on battlefields thousands of miles away. Thankfully, it did not have the staying power to be passed on to the next generation, which was ready to choose its own myths. Among
the masters there were better targets for schoolboy gossip that was idle and salacious, cruel through the laughter.

An afternoon five years ago: an afternoon of watery, early summer sun. Cow parsley like wedding confetti in her hair. He had kissed the strawberry stains from her fingers. Even then, in that
most perfect of moments, his thoughts had thrust forward to the future, when their time would be over. One way or another, everything ended up in the past: the things he wanted to, and those he
didn’t.

When the worst thing happened – not the pregnancy, but the news five months in that she had lost it – he had asked her what they should do. That was when she’d replied that
they didn’t have to do anything. It had looked after itself. She had barely begun to show – she was slight of build, and her husband was not attuned to these things – and she had
buried it in a quiet spot where it would not be disturbed. Mollie had been strong for just long enough before the fever took hold – before she found it too hard to feel Belinda’s gaze
peeping around the bedroom door and she had told her husband that she thought it was time the girl went to school, learnt some independence.

She had been strong, but he had not. He had only heard her voice repeating to him the words she had recited at the grave site –
Plant thou no roses at my head, Nor shady cypress tree
–
and felt despair.

He had got as far as the rock pools. Standing barefoot in the shallows, he had stared out to St Just and thought how easy it would be to join his child. The island was a fine line separating the
impending sea and boundless sky. In poor light it would disappear altogether, like a mirage. He could dream himself walking out to it.

He chose the stones carefully, weighing each one in his hand, feeling its smoothness, judging its colour. Some he threw back into the water immediately, but a few he put in his
pockets, testing their pull. He supposed it would be better to be pulled down by the shoulders, head first, to make quick and sure work of it, and so he filled his jacket – inside and out
– before beginning the search for flattish rocks to fit his trouser pockets. But most of the flat ones he chose were light: better suited to skipping, not death. Instead, he collected
handfuls of small stones and stuffed his pockets until they bulged.

It was at that point that he had heard the sound of a foot slipping on the chalky ground of the cliff edge, and a scuffle as a body righted itself. He had turned and peered up in time to see a
boy, petrified, looking down at him with a look of peculiar recognition. A junior lad, new that year: Jonty Morrell’s brother. The sun had been high in the sky, and Swift shielded his eyes
against the glare, gesturing with his free hand as a clutch of stones scattered to the ground. With that motion, the boy had turned and fled.

He had felt ridiculous, then, standing barefoot in the rock pools, and his sagging pockets had struck him suddenly as something rather shameful: he might as easily have been caught parading in
women’s clothing. Stirred by a rush of self-loathing, he had tipped the stones back into the water and watched them settle to the shallow sea floor, jostling their reunion with a muted
clatter.

Barney had been working the crown on the silver Buren with his fingernail for what seemed hours, and still it wouldn’t budge. The ticking grated in the silent San, where
any sound besides the trickle of water in a basin or the occasional turning of a page in a book felt somehow profane. An hour earlier, as Mr Runcie had retreated behind Matron’s starched
bulk, through the door and down the stairs to the house – to the others, Cowper and Shields and Percy, Opie and Hughes but not Robin – the ticking had become more than irritating. It
hadn’t even had the decency to freeze: wasn’t that what was supposed to happen when the owner died?
You rotter, Robin
, Barney thought, fumbling with the seal behind the watch
face, desperate only to make it stop.

Now there would never be a burst of flame that was theirs and only theirs, their one chance at beautiful destruction. The explosion, contrary to first appearances, had had nothing to do with
Ivor: the bomb had lain beneath the drive for years, waiting for its moment– and it had taken Robin with it, to spite them.

Why this sickening guilt – why now? Memory is nothing but ashes and dust, he told himself, banishing the memory of the blaze. Trolley lights through the smoke, the silhouette of a fire
engine ladder, an ARP warden’s helmet like a cymbal hitting the ground. Since earliest childhood he had had a waking dream: running through a house pursued by flames and chasing after a
woman’s voice, driven by the urgent need to get to her before the fire.