Silent Noon (4 page)

He lay down on the bed and closed his eyes, but the muscles in his face would not relax and his eyes trembled against his eyelids. Downstairs, a door opened and slammed shut. Footsteps crunched
on the drive; someone yelled on the upper pitch. Swift rolled onto his side, torn between admitting defeat and getting up for a blanket and waiting out the draught until he was asleep and
wouldn’t care. It was to no avail. His meeting with Morrell had made him restless.

He undressed and put on shorts and a vest and a jumper. His plimsolls waited by the door.

He told himself that he wouldn’t bother planning a route; his runs with the boys always followed roughly the same course, and today he intended to indulge in the luxury of venturing off
school grounds. By the time he reached the lower pitch, there were no boys or masters in sight. He followed the towpath past the pumping station and over the footbridge into the adjoining field,
where cows trundled halfheartedly after him, knowing deep in their bovine hearts that he would not stop to feed them. He was officially on another man’s property now, though who that might be
and whether he was likely to mind remained as much a mystery to Swift today as five years, ten years, fifteen years ago. It did not matter terribly.

Pausing to clamber over the stile at the far end of the meadow, he felt the sudden chill of being observed. Something on his blind side – not a movement so much as a presence.
If I
don’t look, I won’t have to see who it is
, he thought.
Then I can carry on
.

He looked, and at first he saw nothing. The spaces between the trees at the other end of the meadow were dark and still. Only the uppermost branches moved, the leaves at the top flimsy against
the leaden sky. Down below, the cows had moved off, leaving a space where only moments ago he had been, his footsteps leaving impressions in the flattened grass. There, now, stood a grey figure,
watching him.

Swift blinked, and still the figure remained. Then he turned, and Swift saw that he was holding something long and bladed. Some kind of farm implement.

Krawiec had not been the school groundsman in Swift’s student days. One of the other masters had told him that the taciturn Pole had spent the months after the war wandering the island,
taking housewives by surprise when he pressed his face against their front windows to ask for food. Swift could not imagine why Mr Pleming should have offered Krawiec a job – perhaps out of
guilt.

Now he was working his way across the field, using the long blade to slice the flattened grass, exposing layers of rock and rubble. Five years ago, he had found Swift in almost this precise
spot.

Swift completed his climb over the stile, intent on resuming his run. Perspiration had turned cold against his skin; his heartbeat scooped into his stomach. Still Krawiec worked towards him,
swinging his blade to and fro, looking up from time to time to regard Swift with an unchanging expression.

Swift waited until the groundsman stood within speaking distance.

“Picking up some extra work,” he said. It was a statement from which the Pole was supposed to infer a question.

“High time too,” continued Swift. “Whoever owns this bit left it far too long.”

“Car needs a service.”

“Expensive business.” Swift swallowed. “Of course. I don’t suppose the Head’s been terribly forthcoming.” He felt his pockets: sixpence. An insult.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “This afternoon. I’ll drop by this afternoon, shall I?”

Krawiec did not reply. Swift watched him turn and lever the blade high over his head, swinging it through the long grass with a grunt. He waited until the groundsman had worked his way down half
the length of the meadow before clambering back over the stile and reeling back towards the school.

Robin had warned him that he’d better be on his guard, and sure enough on Monday morning Barney was woken by four boys grabbing his wrists and ankles and hauling him out
of bed. It was Shields and Cowper on his legs, and twins from the adjoining dormitory on his arms. They must have woken early, as they were already dressed. Together they bundled him downstairs and
outside to the bin sheds, where Hughes was waiting with the lid of a compost box. The stench of rot – powdered eggs, potato peelings and fish heads – made the boys gasp as they lifted
him in.

“The medicine, Hughes.”

While Cowper held his head back, Shields squeezed Barney’s cheeks, forcing his mouth open. Hughes was holding what appeared to be a handful of small grey shells, and out of these he prised
slippery white globs that he forced into Barney’s mouth.

“Swallow,” ordered Cowper, as Barney sputtered and gagged on the horrible living jellies. “You’ll do five minutes in here before we let you out.”

There was no point in fighting them. Better to play possum. Barney closed his eyes against the darkness and covered his face with his hands while trying to breathe through his mouth. The limpets
had left a salty aftertaste, and he scraped his tongue with his fingernails to erase their slimy trail.

It was hot inside the bin, as if all that decaying waste was oozing life, and his back soon turned wet with something that dripped down the sides. Outside, the others were standing guard,
pretending to play at a ball game while chanting a playground rhyme loud enough for him to hear.

Mr Runcie’s voice summoned them to line up for breakfast, and there was a scuffle of feet. When he had begun to think that he must have been forgotten, Barney felt the bin
rock as someone wrestled with the lid. It was Robin.

“Hurry up,” he hissed. “They’ve had their fun. You’ve got about a minute to get dressed before Runcie notices you’re not there.”

Cowper was straightening his tie and smirking as Shields and Hughes play-fought their way into line. They were standing in front of the large bay window, where a movement behind the glass caught
Barney’s eye. It was the French master, Mr Swift, standing with his hands in his pockets, staring straight at him. He must have seen the others too – must have made the connection
between the boy picking the fish bones from his blazer and the crew of lads rough-housing not twenty yards away. He had seen and done nothing.

Barney knew that there was still a nasty whiff trailing him as he fell in behind the others. Filing into breakfast, he tried to ignore the other boys’ delight at his humiliation and
deflected with a shrug the pitying looks from the masters.

Eating a sandwich at the Formica table, Belinda watched the last of the Medlar boys tumble into school. The mullioned kitchen window was closed, and their voices were muffled as
they crossed the drive, the larger ones shoving their way through the doors ahead of the smaller lads when the masters weren’t looking. Boys, she thought. Where did all that energy come from?
And why did they expend it so stupidly?

She prised her sandwich apart and drizzled a slow trickle of syrup until tiny rivulets slid from the crusts. When the trickle had slowed to a drip, she squeezed the bread between her fingers and
then took another bite.

Belinda’s mother appeared in the kitchen doorway, head bristling with Toni perm curlers, just in time for
Woman’s Hour
. The air was so close in here – why hadn’t
she opened the window? Before Belinda could object, the sounds and smells of the school drive flooded the room. It made her think of those days when the tall grass outside was whipped flat by the
wind, when Miss Gallo would stop in the middle of the lesson to rush across the room and throw open the windows, so that in the dormitories at night the girls would giggle that she must have
started the Change.

She watched her mother twist the ring from her finger, which had swollen in the late-summer humidity, and place it in a saucer on the window sill. The soap squeaked a complaint in her hands.
Lather, rinse and re-lather – and then attacking herself with the nail brush as well, scrubbing so aggressively that it was a wonder she had any fingers left at all.

“Syrup sandwiches again,” she was saying. “Was breakfast not enough?”

Belinda reddened.

Thankfully, her mother didn’t expect an answer: she was too preoccupied with her own impenetrable tics to launch a thorough investigation into her daughter’s. In particular, tidying.
Or rather, rearranging things – the sugar bowl, some letters, Mr Flood’s cufflinks – into neat clusters, or columns, or piles. It was an infuriating habit, tinged with tragedy.
Sisyphean
, Miss Gallo would have called it. But Belinda was not at the age to wonder at the cause of her mother’s unhappiness: only to be irritated by it.

Now there was the usual barrage of comments about crumbs and posture. Questions about the day’s lessons and what time she would be home for lunch; a nudge between the shoulder blades,
encouragements to work hard and smile when introduced to the masters. The same encouragements had been made five years ago, when Belinda started at St Mary’s: only then her mother had been
confined to her bed, pale and red-eyed with stomach flu so severe the doctor had wanted to send her to hospital for investigations. But Belinda’s mother didn’t believe in making a fuss
– she had driven ambulances in the war, hadn’t she?

By now the last of the boys had disappeared inside. Belinda waited for the siren’s cry before heaving herself in silence from her chair and tugging her satchel from the hook by the
door.

The laundry was at the end of the basement corridor. Robin had told him that the passage had once joined up to a network of German bunker tunnels: a concrete underworld now all
but forgotten, sealed off from the things that grew and lived and died on the island. The walls were painted pea-green from the floor to shoulder height and whitewashed up to the ceiling. At the
far end was a plastered-over doorway where the whitewash was a lighter shade than the walls. From the laundry there seeped a clammy smell of steam rising through hot linen. Human noises were
muffled by machine ones: the roll and thump of pumping cylinders, the agitated whirl of spinning drums. Robin said that it became a lawless zone in the evenings, after the cooks and laundresses
went home, so that the youngest pupils preferred to walk outside through the dark after prep.

It turned out that he had been summoned because Matron wanted to know why he hadn’t registered a games shirt.

“If you think I’m going to spend half a day scrubbing grass stains out of a perfectly good school shirt, you’ve another think coming,” she said.

Then she asked how many handkerchiefs he’d brought with him, and Barney told her just the one: it had been a leaving present from Miss Lynch in the flat across the hall.

“Just the one,” repeated Matron in a tutting voice. Barney could tell it wasn’t a proper telling-off, but he made sure to look chastened.

Duly dismissed, he continued down the basement corridor with a dull dread of what awaited him upstairs. The morning’s lessons stretched before him as no man’s land stretches before a
soldier in the trenches. He slackened his pace, concentrating on the flagstones and going out of his way to avoid the cracks, and began to whistle a favourite of Spike’s from Friday nights at
The Bull and Gate.

At the top of the stairs stood a girl in a crumpled green gym tunic and T-strap sandals, her school tie twisted in a tight, angry knot. When she turned to face him, he saw that
she was very young: all little-girl elbows and bony knees and black hair tied in a ponytail. She had a short fringe and a nose that sloped a little too severely. Was she ugly? She looked taken by
surprise, as if caught out at some mischief.

“Do you know which one is Oakshott?” she asked. She didn’t move aside to make room for him to pass.

“Who?”

“Oakshott,” she repeated. “It’s a room.”

There were two doors on one side of the corridor, three on the other. Boys he recognized from his form were traipsing into the room nearest. A bell rang, and Barney forced himself past.

“Sorry. I’ll be late.”

In the classroom where he joined his set, someone bumped Barney in the shoulder, pushing him towards the fray of ricocheting pencil stubs and India rubbers: detritus that plummeted into the
waiting jaws of upturned desktops. The best places had already been colonized. Robin had paired off with Hiram in the back row. Hughes was sitting next to Shields, who was busy taking stock of his
fountain-pen cartridges, and Cowper had left his satchel on the desk next to his in a way that suggested he didn’t want the new boy anywhere near him. Barney decided to insert himself next to
Percy the bed-wetter, who at least had found a neutral spot in the middle of the room, when a voice behind him sent everyone scattering to the empty benches.

“Preston, the windows.”

Barney turned to find his nose three inches removed from a silver tie clip. He stumbled backwards and nearly sat on Shields’s fountain pen.

“Buzz off, new scum.”

“New boy, what?” The master’s massive, pockmarked head teetered upon the collops of his neck as he considered Barney through thick spectacle lenses.

According to Robin, Doc Dower had worked in intelligence in Asia during the War, decoding telegraph messages in a dimly lit bunker. He’d been captured by the Japs and escaped into the
jungle only to be caught again a few days later. After that, they’d given him a complete torture treatment: bamboo shoots, starvation, water suffocation. If they’d been anywhere near
the ocean they’d have trailed him behind a boat as shark bait – but luckily for Doc, the prison camp was up in the mountains, far from the coast.