Noonday

by Pat Barker

  The door opened as he was turning the painting round to face the wall. Elinor came into the room. “Here you are.” She handed him a cup. “Shall we sit through there?”

  “Actually, I think I’d better be going.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, I’m fine, I just think I…”

  He didn’t know what he just thought, but he and Elinor were of one mind. They both wanted him to leave. And when, a scant five minutes later, he did, the memory he carried with him down the stairs and out onto the street was not Elinor’s naked body on the bed, but Paul’s painted eyes staring out of a canvas. That, and the sense of him standing, silent, on the other side of the bedroom door.

  THIRTY-ONE

  He’d have known the sound of Neville’s breathing anywhere, even on the other side of a bedroom door: that unmistakable rasp. No, it couldn’t have been anybody else.

  But it seemed so improbable. He knew of course that they’d been great friends in their student days—perhaps even a bit more than that—but Neville’s behavior after Toby’s death had caused an inevitable breach. Never absolute—they’d met from time to time, but it had always been slightly awkward. In fact sometimes it was a struggle to get Elinor to be polite to him.

  No, it made no sense. And yet there it was: the breathing. And he knew he hadn’t imagined it.

  —

  THAT NIGHT, on duty, he walked up and down Gower Street as often as he could, always stopping to look at Elinor’s windows. He knew she wouldn’t be there—nobody with any sense stayed on the top floor of a house during a raid—but still he looked. He knew it wasn’t his business. His own actions had made it not his business. But images of Elinor and Neville naked in a bed drifted about in front of him constantly, like floaters in his eye, distracting him from the outside world. And his imagination busied itself supplying the details…Creased and rumpled sheets, pillows tossed aside, clothes scattered over the floor…He kept reminding himself he had no right to be angry, but all the time his skin felt tighter. And tighter. Like a membrane stretched over a swelling boil.

  When, late the following day, he encountered Neville again, it was at the National Gallery, at an exhibition of war artists’ work. Paul hadn’t wanted to go, but really he had no choice. Two of his recent paintings—the “vapid” ones, as Neville would undoubtedly have said—were on display. But he left it as late as he could to set off and arrived to find the gallery already crowded. Any event offering free drinks and nibbles attracted a crowd these days, though to be fair many of these people were hungry for culture as well. The gallery’s paintings had been removed to safety and you were aware, somehow, of the blank walls and echoing emptiness all around. This one brightly lit room, lined with paintings and drawings, seemed to be floating like a bubble on a dark tide.

  He got himself a glass of wine from a trestle table near the door and looked around. Clark’s extravagantly domed forehead he recognized at once, and Henry Moore’s stocky, no-nonsense, I-come-from-Yorkshire build and demeanor. Piper was here, and Featherstone, and—Oh my God, everybody. One quick circuit, he promised himself, a chat with Clark to make sure his presence had been noted, and then he would leave.

  Laura Knight appeared in front of him. Good grief, what was she wearing? He liked Laura, he enjoyed her scurrilous views on agents and galleries and advisory committees—she had something of Neville’s bite, but without his venom—so he stayed and talked to her, before moving on to Clark, who was so distracted by the pretty blonde topping up their glasses that he replied to Paul’s remarks almost at random before setting off in blatant pursuit. It was all very much as usual.

  He was just beginning to think he’d done enough and could go, when he saw Neville. He was on the other side of the room, standing well back from a painting—not, thank God, one of Paul’s—and almost imperceptibly shaking his head. After a few minutes, he moved on. Paul retreated to a corner and watched his progress round the room, noticing how he created a ring of silence around him wherever he went. People were afraid of Neville. Everybody cringed before that vitriolic pen, though they all repeated—sometimes with glee—his contemptuous dismissals of other artists. They all took a vicarious pleasure in the pain inflicted, never quite knowing whether to hope that they themselves would be pilloried or ignored. Neville’s reviews were long, prominent and read. So although pilloried was bad, arguably being ignored was worse.

  Neville moved from painting to painting, pausing now and then to jot down notes or peer short-sightedly at some detail of a composition. He wasn’t short-sighted: the whole thing was a performance. Now and then, somebody would come up to him, generally the artist whose work he was currently scrutinizing, but they invariably retreated after a few minutes’ exposure to that basilisk stare. Oh, he was powerful, all right. Only Paul, who knew him better, probably, than anybody else in the room, understood that what would matter to Neville, at this moment, more than anything else, was that he hadn’t a single painting on these walls.

  Watching him, Paul felt something akin to hate: an intimate hatred, as physical as desire. Neville was at the other end of the gallery, much too far away for Paul to see the smear of shaving soap in the crease of his left ear, but see it he did. And he could smell him too: soap, shaving cream, cologne, whisky, tobacco; and under it all, the musky odor of his body.

  Paul knew he was overreacting, wildly overreacting, but he couldn’t seem to stop himself. Gradually, he began to work his way towards Neville, but he was always edging away, confirming what Paul had already begun to suspect: that Neville had seen him and was actively avoiding him. People were still arriving. It was becoming difficult to move around, let alone see the paintings, unless of course you were Neville and your reputation created its own space. As gently as possible, Paul threaded his way between the groups. He needed to confront Neville, to see his eyes as they came face-to-face, but then, just when he was almost within reach, a whole crowd of newcomers obscured his view, and, when he could see clearly again, Neville was gone.

  Craning his neck, Paul checked to see if Neville was anywhere in the room, then caught sight of him standing in the hall. He was being detained, obviously against his will, by an angular young man, Clive Somebody-or-other, with a thrusting jaw and a reputation to make, not battle-scarred yet, not yet understanding what reason he had to be afraid. Keep him talking, Paul pleaded silently, pushing his way to the door, but by the time he’d got there Neville had disappeared.

  He went outside and looked around. People were coming up the steps towards him and there was a queue of taxis at the curb. No Neville, though. But it was raining, and Paul couldn’t remember if Neville had been wearing a coat, so he went inside to check the cloakroom. Not there either, but suddenly he saw him, saw somebody, a bulky figure slipping through the doors on the far side of the hall into the darkness of an empty gallery.

  Paul followed him. No lights: probably the bulbs had been removed. No paintings either. They’d been shared out to stately homes across the country or, some people said, stored at the bottom of mine shafts in Wales. He stood just inside the door, listening, and thought he caught the sound of footsteps in the next gallery, but the absence of paintings changed the acoustics and it was hard to locate the sound.

  He began to walk across the unlit gallery, directing the thin beam of his blackout torch at the walls, where dust squares and rectangles delineated the shapes of vanished masterpieces. He felt the absence of the paintings as a positive force. A strange sensation—he couldn’t put his finger on it. His footsteps echoed round the hall, but the echo was weirdly mismatched so that when he stopped—as he did frequently, to listen—there was always another step. Always one more step than there should have been, so he no longer knew whether he was pursuing or being pursued. The sound of his breathing slithered all over the gallery, little worms of sound chasing each other round the walls. And, abruptly, it was back: the vertigo that had plagued him, on and off, for most of the year. The darkness spun. He groped his way
to the nearest wall and let himself slide down it.

  At least, now, sitting with his back to the wall, he felt safe from falling. He directed his torch at a particular point on the floor and tried to focus on that, but the beam quivered with the beating of his heart. He trained the light onto his left hand, where there was a minute scar, a half-moon of whiter flesh, on the ball of his thumb, the memento of some childish scrape. He stared unblinkingly at it, and gradually the spinning stopped. After a while, he was able to stand and retrace his steps, the pencil beam wavering over the floor ahead of him.

  He should have left it there, but he couldn’t. He hadn’t gone to the gallery searching for Neville, but the pursuit, once started, acquired a momentum of its own, beyond reason. He had no idea what he would say, or do, when they met, but he knew the meeting had to happen. It was—an odd word came to mind—“obligatory.” The meeting had become obligatory.

  Leaving the gallery, he took a taxi straight to Neville’s house. The sirens sounded just as he was walking up the path, but he had no inclination to seek shelter. The bell clanged loud and deep, but brought no sound of footsteps coming to the door. He banged with his clenched fists, put his ear to the letter box and listened, but he had no sense of Neville, or anyone else, hearing the ringing or knocking and deciding not to answer. No, wherever Neville was, he hadn’t come home. On duty? Well, yes, it was possible. In which case he’d be out all night. But he could be anywhere. He could be with Elinor now. In her flat.

  That sent all the floaters into a manic dance: dented pillows, stained sheets, Neville’s arse bobbing up and down between Elinor’s spread thighs…For a moment, he thought he’d have to go there, but he managed to talk himself out of it. He’d no real reason to suppose Neville was there. Whereas, sooner or later, he would have to come home.

  And so he settled down to wait. Total darkness, no moon, no stars, just searchlights on the heath and the roar of ack-ack guns. Perhaps it was a long time he waited, perhaps short, he had no sense of time passing. He might even have dropped off to sleep. Like everybody else, he was permanently exhausted; he could sleep anywhere. He probably had dropped off because he didn’t hear the taxi draw up, or Neville’s voice as he paid the driver; he didn’t hear his footsteps coming up the drive, or his key turning in the lock. He heard his breathing, though.

  Paul made no sound, didn’t move or speak, but somehow Neville became aware of his presence.

  “Tarrant?” Peering into the shadows. “What are you doing here?” He sounded nervous, even alarmed, but he disguised it well. “Come in.”

  Paul followed him inside. Neville slammed the door shut and then, for a moment, they simply stood together, in the darkness of the hall, Paul listening to Neville’s labored breaths. Then Neville switched the light on. Chairs, table, hatstand, door, walls bristled into life.

  “Come through.”

  Very much the jolly, welcoming host. Once in the drawing room, he took off his coat and threw it over the back of a chair. Underneath, he was wearing a dinner jacket.

  “Good night?” Paul asked.

  “Not bad. Well, you know, the Savoy…” Vaguely, he looked around. “Would you like a drink?”

  “Whisky, if you’ve got it.”

  If he’d got it. Like asking Dracula if he had blood. Paul unbuttoned his coat and sat down, still feeling slightly dazed with sleep.

  Neville had obviously been drinking, but he handed Paul a generous glass before pouring at least the equivalent for himself. “I must say, I can’t stand the Savoy. All that standing on the balcony, watching the raids. It’s ghoulish.”

  He was attempting to treat Paul’s arrival on his doorstep as a normal social call, though it was past midnight and they’d never been in the habit of dropping in on each other unannounced. And yet it seemed, for a time, that the pretense would be maintained. Neither of them could think of anything else to do. So they talked about the Savoy. Paul was thinking how typical of Neville to say he hated the place, while spending, Paul suspected, quite a lot of time there. He’d had exactly the same love-hate relationship with the Café Royal in the last war.

  At last the conversation dribbled into silence. Neville said: “Is anything the matter?”

  “You tell me.”

  The clock ticked. Neville cleared his throat.

  “Do you know,” Paul said. “Just now, in the garden, I couldn’t see a thing, but I knew it was you. Because I heard you breathing. You see, Neville, I’d know your breathing anywhere.”

  “Well, yes, I—”

  “Even through a bedroom door.”

  “Ah.”

  Paul asked, on a note of dispassionate curiosity, as if he were only moderately interested in the answer: “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Fucking my wife?”

  “Well. Just that, I suppose.”

  If he’d been anywhere near Neville at that moment he’d have hit him, but Neville had retreated to the far side of the fireplace. And even in his present state of mind Paul thought he might have found it difficult to punch Neville in the face. Kicking him in the balls might feel good though.

  “You don’t deny it?”

  “No, of course I don’t, why should I? Aren’t you forgetting something? Sandra?”

  “Oh, don’t worry, I know I’ve lost the high ground a bit.”

  “Totally, I’d say. You dump Elinor in the country—No-o, listen. You could perfectly well have found a flat and gone on living together—you chose not to.”

  “I wanted her to be safe.”

  “You wanted her out of the way.”

  “That’s not quite true.”

  “Oh, of course it is. And why? So you could make a complete bloody fool of yourself sniffing round a girl young enough to be your daughter. Do you really think everybody isn’t sniggering about it? Because, let’s face it, you weren’t particularly discreet, were you? Elinor’s friends all knew before she did. The people she works with. How do you think that made her feel?”

  “Oh, and you rushed round to console her? How very kind.”

  “I did, actually. Though not about you.”

  “How many times?”

  “Do you know, I might be wrong—but I really don’t think that’s any of your business.”

  They stared at each other. There’d been several times already when Paul had felt like hitting Neville, but he hadn’t done it. And now, somehow, they’d got past it. Though not into safer territory. It came to him that he had no idea at all how the night would end.

  He said, sounding to his own ears rather pathetic, “I thought we were friends.”

  “Did you?”

  None of this was true. So far neither of them had said a single true word. Somehow, he had to find the anger again, because at least that wasn’t false. It was there, he could feel it, hear it almost, a drone at the back of his head. It was only when he saw Neville glance at the ceiling that he realized the droning was a real sound in the real world.

  “They don’t usually fly this low,” Neville said. “The guns on the heath force them up.”

  This one was very low indeed. There was that awful drone, as intolerable as the sound of a dentist’s drill, in the end so insistent he and Neville simply sat and listened. After a while, it seemed to go farther away, and they relaxed.

  Neville looked at his empty glass. “Is she all right?”

  “You mean you don’t know?”

  “I haven’t seen her. She’s at the cottage, I think. I thought you might have gone down there.”

  “No.”

  “So, anyway, Sandra’s a thing of the past, is she?”

  “Joined the Wrens.”

  “You ditched her.”

  “I didn’t, actually, it was never meant to be permanent. She was engaged—sort of.”

  “Fair enough; you were married—sort of.”

  “You can talk.”

  “I’m divorced.”

  “So what do you think’s going to happen now?”

  “I don’t kno
w. I can tell you one thing though: if you force Elinor to choose between us, she’ll choose herself.”

  “Well, obviously, it’s her choice.”

  “No, I mean she’ll choose her self. Don’t you see?” Out of nowhere, an immense burst of anger: “IT’S WHAT SHE DOES!”

  From somewhere uncomfortably close came the sound of a long, shrieking descent and the chandelier above their heads rocked and jangled.

  “I see you still haven’t got that bl-oo-dy th-in—”

  The words elongated and vanished into air as the walls buckled and rushed towards them. Then, nothing.

  —

  SOMEWHERE NEARBY, a tap was dripping. He could feel random drops plopping onto his face and trickling down his neck. Something had fallen across his legs. He tried to bring his arms up to push whatever it was away, but they seemed to be trapped too. After a while, by arching his back and heaving himself off the floor, he managed to shift the weight a little. Another nightmare; he was fed up with them. The ones where you knew you were asleep, you knew you were dreaming, and you still couldn’t wake up were the worst of the lot. This one was particularly vivid. He seemed to be in a kitchen. There were fragments of blue-and-white pottery scattered over the floor. He couldn’t see much because his head was pinned down; he could only look sideways. Dunstanburgh Castle at Sunset was propped against a chair. Turner. Seeing it like that, it was very obviously a Turner. Why would anybody want to hang a Turner in a kitchen? The steam…

  He couldn’t make out where the light was coming from. Twisting his neck a painful inch to the right, he saw trees and branches wave. If he could only get out there…He tried wriggling his fingers, then his toes, and found he could move both. The pain, the pressure, was mainly in his chest. Something he couldn’t even see was pinning him down. Flares blossomed and trembled. He was lying out in no-man’s-land, waiting for the flares to die so he could scramble back into the lines. It made sense, more sense than lying squashed like a cockroach on the floor of a basement kitchen.