Silent Noon (14 page)

It was a relief not to have to talk any more, not to have to listen, but he wasn’t tired enough to go to sleep. He was also dreading the moment when he would have to turn down the lamp on
the dresser by the door and cross the room in the darkness to get to his bed. Every few minutes, the house would creak as if he was in the belly of a ship. He pulled back the blanket, which felt
damp and released a whiff of something grey and musty, and began to undress, positioning himself near the door, because it had no lock. Then he practised his route to the bed – he could keep
one hand on the wall, so it would be easy to find his way back to the lamp just in case – before sliding under the covers to stare at the cobwebbed ceiling.

He tried not to think about the lady with the horn growing out of her hand. Instead, he thought about the other boys on their way to homes in England: Percy in his room with the garish
wallpaper; Cowper eating a five-course dinner surrounded by millefiori bowls and other
objets
his parents brought home with them from Murano; Shields taking stock of his Airfix parts and
Eagle
magazines. He struggled to imagine families and homes for Robin and Hiram and Ivor. Belinda would have a proper girl’s room, he supposed, with stockings and ribbons draped over
a pouffe, a bed cluttered with satin pastilles and posters of matinee idols pinned to the walls.

There was nothing much to look at here: the dresser drawers were empty, lined with faded violet paper, and the only pictures on the walls were two framed collages of pressed flowers. There was
the lamp, and the curtains, and a small bedside table.

Idly, and without expectation, Holland reached for the handle of the table drawer, only for it to come loose in his fingers. He sat up and edged across the bed to reattach it. But the spindle
had fallen inside the drawer as soon as the handle had come off. There was nothing to be done but try to work the drawer free with his fingernails – and this he did, for several minutes,
until at last it gave way with a pained whine.

This drawer, like the others, was lined with violet crêpe. Unlike the others, it was not empty: a few blue glass beads rolled down one side, hitting the edge with a clatter –
although it was not these that gave Barney pause. Something long and black had been shoved to the farthest corner; if he hadn’t reached his fingers in to grab the spindle, he might not have
noticed it. But before he had decided to see what it was, it was there, in his palm: a lock of hair, coarse like a horse’s tail, with just one grey strand running through it, tied with a
piece of string. After a moment, the hair began to feel unnatural in Holland’s hand, grotesque, and he bundled it back in the drawer with a shudder. He switched off the lamp and tumbled
beneath the covers before he could lose his nerve, and soon he slept.

When Barney arrived in the kitchen that first morning there was a plate of fried sausages with onion and apples and eggs and white bread with butter waiting for him on the stove
top, and next to it a note that said, “Feeding the girls, back soon. This is for you”. There was coffee in the pot too, and he helped himself with only the slightest twinge of guilt
that Jake was probably having to make do with powdered milk and fried potatoes as usual. He polished off every morsel and then he washed his cup and dish in the sink, before pausing to consider
what he should do next. It felt wrong to be alone in a stranger’s house, even with permission.

The boxes Miss Duchâtel had shown him the previous night remained in the sitting room, open and waiting. She might not have liked it if he’d started nosing through them without her,
so he sat in the straight-backed chair and studied the photograph that had been left on the top of one pile.

It was a group portrait of an infants’ school: seventeen boys and girls arranged into three crooked rows in front of a severe-looking brick building with shuttered windows. The little boys
sitting cross-legged on a rug in the front row hugged their arms to their chests in a pose of stubborn resistance. They wore wool tights under short trousers and identical grey smocks, and they
squinted at the camera like shrunken old men. The girls wore dresses beneath grey pinafores: one or two had begun to outgrow these, and the square edges of too-long bloomers peeked out over patched
stockings and rolled socks. Two had linked arms and were the only ones attempting smiles: the one dark, shy and gap-toothed, the other taller, fair and coquettish. Several wore beaded bracelets
that might have been rosaries. All were strapped into stiff, heavy boots, as if in readiness for some gruelling mountain hike. They also all shared the same short bowl cuts, although one pin-faced
girl had managed to work a twist of ribbon into her hair to set herself apart from the boys.

“Have you found me yet?” asked a voice over Barney’s shoulder, and he started. It was Miss Duchâtel, red-cheeked from the cold, standing in a lumpy cable-knit jumper and
a pair of men’s trousers that bulged over the tops of rubber boots. “There,” she said, pointing to the fair girl. “And that’s my sister.”

They agreed a method for Barney to sort the papers in the first box, and then Miss Duchâtel got up to put on another pot of coffee.

“I’m afraid I don’t have a wireless,” she said. “It’s bound to seem a little quiet here. You must be so used to the noise of other children. And music, yes?
You said your father was a musician.”

Every so often she would come out with something like that, something vaguely apologetic, perhaps in an attempt to draw him out of his silence, which he realized made her nervous. Finally he
asked her if she had ever been to St Just.

“A long time ago,” she replied, setting the mugs on top of a book before kneeling in front of one of the unopened boxes. “Not that there’s much to see: it was barren
before the Germans came, and just as barren when they left. The Todt took over the quarries for a while. Those poor people. The water was muddy and undrinkable, and the workers were treated like
slaves.”

“Inbreds, Robin said.”

“Who?”

“The people on the other island. Oh, sorry – my friend, Robin. From school.”

The woman opened her mouth, closed it again and turned to look at the clock on the mantelpiece.

“Would you like to see the girls?” she said.

The poultry were muddy and garrulous. “You didn’t expect so much noise, did you?” said Miss Duchâtel. “They are better than watchdogs.” Barney nodded. He
preferred the geese to the chickens, whose throaty grumblings had woken him in the early hours and whose scaly feet gave them the appearance of feathered reptiles.

“The fellow who lived here before was a photographer,” said Miss Duchâtel, as she lifted the feed bucket from behind the door. “He poured all his chemicals out here in
the yard, so now nothing can grow. The girls don’t mind. But every so often I think of that stupid man and wonder if his pictures were any good.”

She showed Barney how to change the water troughs. “They never usually get fed twice in the same morning,” she said, as the geese jostled against his legs, considering him with
unblinking, orange-ringed eyes. The wind pressed her jumper to the sharp angles of her body, and for the first time he noticed how spare she was. She cuffed one of the taller geese gently about the
head, separating it from the flock. “Shall we show the young man what we can do, Mildred?”

She led the bird to an empty corner of the yard, and in a voice so serious as to be almost stern commanded it to dance. The goose blinked, then ducked its head and flat-footed in two precise
circles. She fed it a few sunflower seeds before backing away to sit on the step. “Now: tell me a secret.”

With a resigned air the goose waddled towards its mistress, who had turned her head sideways and tucked her hair back with her fingers, presenting her ear. At this sign the bird began to nibble
at her ear with its beak.

“Is her name really Mildred?”

“Why would I call her Mildred if that wasn’t her name?” Miss Duchâtel heaved herself to her feet, waving away Barney’s offer of a hand. “If you visit her
every day, perhaps in a little while she’ll do it for you too.”

They moved to return indoors, and as he passed one of the geese Barney brushed its head with his hand. Immediately the bird snapped down on his finger, making him cry out.

“Euphemia!” Miss Duchâtel smacked the bird. “That’s it: you shall be Christmas dinner this year.”

“It’s all right,” said Barney, embarrassed. He squeezed his finger and was surprised to feel a warm wetness in his palm.

“There will be blood on the rug, and that is most definitely not all right,” said Miss Duchâtel, sitting him on the stoop. “Wait there – I will find a
plaster.”

After several minutes, she returned with a plaster strip and ball of cotton wool. Barney watched the top of her head as she dabbed at the bite mark, transfixed by the whiteness of her scalp
against the chemical red of her hair. She pressed the plaster to his finger heavily, not like a mother. “I’m sorry,” she said. “That one has always been
unpredictable.”

They returned indoors to the waiting boxes. “Was it your school?” Barney asked, keen to divert attention from himself. He picked up the photograph from the top of the stack.

“Those children were all orphans,” the woman replied. “Either their fathers had been killed in the Great War and their mothers couldn’t afford to keep them, or they had
been abandoned as babies at the convent’s weeping gate. We were taught together until the age of twelve. After that, the girls were sent into service and the boys had to learn a trade. That
one, Francine, was a real bully,” she said, pressing her thumb in the face of a sad-looking child in the second row. “She and I used to fight like street dogs. And he” –
pointing at a boy with gossamer hair parted flatly down the middle of his head – “he kept a cockroach as a pet. In a matchbox, you know. The cockroach was called Arnaud. I don’t
remember the lad’s name.”

As Barney prepared a fresh journal with the date – Miss Duchâtel had said that dates were imperative – she began to tell him about the year the picture was taken. All through
the winter, the children looked forward to their visit to the summer house, a convent in Normandy where they spent two weeks learning to swim and to build fires and lean-tos. A month after the
photograph was developed, they had set off as usual for the summer house with no reason to suspect that they would return to Paris at the end of July short of one child.

“It was an accident,” said Miss Duchâtel, pulling papers from the box and sorting them into piles. “One of our favourite things was the flying fox. It ran all the way
from a ledge on the lawn down a hill right to the edge of the pond. It wasn’t that high off the ground – the taller boys couldn’t use it, it was no good for them – but the
little boys loved it, and some of the braver girls too. My sister saw me ride it a few times and wanted to try, but the nuns said she wasn’t strong enough: she’d only fall off, and the
hill was steep, so it could have been dangerous. Well, the minute we had all gone inside for our supper, what did she do? Only she was wearing one of those silly coats, the type with the little
hood, and as soon as she reached for the handlebars the drawstring must have become tangled in the mechanism.” Miss Duchâtel was talking quickly now, not looking at him. “When we
took our places for dinner, we noticed that Simone wasn’t there, so we all went out to search for her. We looked in the stables and the sheds where the jumping ropes were kept, and in the
lean-to we’d built the day before. We checked the well and the root cellar, and a servant was sent into the village to see if perhaps she hadn’t gone there to buy sweets. Then someone
noticed that the cable car wasn’t at the top of the hill where we always left it – and the boys ran down to the pond, but it was too late.”

The woman gave a little convulsive gesture and fixed him with a sideways look. “But you didn’t ask to hear all of that,” she said.

They continued to work in silence.

“Were you here during the war?” asked Barney, turning over a sun-bleached photograph of a woman on a beach. The sky behind her was white. The corner of a picnic blanket jutted in at
the bottom of the image, and on it were two champagne flutes.

She picked up a book and flipped through the pages, only to toss it back on the floor. “I couldn’t go to England when the island was evacuated, because I’m not a British
citizen. But I wasn’t going back to France, either. So I stayed here.”

“Some of the boys believe in a German ghost. The commandant used the school as his headquarters.”

“The commandant was not a bad man. His second-in-command, now – Botho Driesch.” She shook her head. “I have things to do in town. You can come, if you
like…”

“It’s all right,” he said. “I’ll get on with this.”

“
Bon
.” As she pulled on her coat, she added over one shoulder: “If you want to smoke, be sure to use a saucer. The floor will catch fire otherwise.” She smiled
at his surprise. “I saw your fingers. You’re too young to smoke that much. During the war, we used Bible paper wrapped around coltsfoot, because the Germans bought up all the proper
cigarettes – it was better, cleared out the lungs. Do you take Gauloises?”

“Woodbines, usually.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

When his host returned an hour later, he had finished sorting through the first box. He let her talk in her disjointed way, resisting the temptation to ask more questions. She seemed to prefer
to speak about the distant past – about the cutting attack in the alley behind the orphanage that left a J-like scar on her cheek when she was six – about the
femme galante
who
taught her to play the accordion when she was fourteen – about the dance halls and cabarets of Montmartre – but as she spoke he took care to listen to what she did not say: there was no
mention of friends or, indeed, of any other islanders.

At three o’clock she suggested that they go for a walk, and when they got back Miss Duchâtel made an early supper of cheese and saucisson followed by hot chocolate served in bowls,
then excused herself while Barney worked on the maths problem Doc Dower had set him. He had neglected it until now – not because he hadn’t wanted the
piastre
that had been
promised to him, and not because he thought Doc would forget their conversation at the bottom of the muddy lower pitch – but because the thought of being unable to work it out was too
disheartening. To attempt a solution felt akin to exposing himself to disappointment.