Silent Noon (15 page)

“Do you know how to calculate per-cent slope?” he asked his host when she returned to the kitchen.

“Per-cent what?”

“Never mind.”

At nine o’clock, they went to bed – but not before she suggested that Barney might like to visit his friend in the San that weekend.

“You could bring him back here for tea,” she said. “If he’s feeling up to it.”

This was not one of the older journals: he knew instinctively that it did not belong in the box of archives. A folded shopping list had been left between the pages allocated to
the first week in July; a receipt for a car service was the only marker in the month of August. As the pages slipped through his fingers, he spied another note, written in blue ink on fine paper
and folded in four, tucked into the diary’s corner pocket.

He refolded the paper with fingers that might as easily have been stung by a flame, but still the backwards writing stared through, ugly and insistent. He shoved the note into
the corner pocket in time to hear the door open.

“How are you getting on?” Miss Duchâtel steadied herself in the doorway as she dragged her boots against the mud scrape. Barney returned the diary to the pile and reached for
another book. “It must be easier with materials unfamiliar to you. I stop to read everything – that slows me down.” She stepped inside and reached for the coffee pot.
“Perhaps when you are done there you would like to come with me to collect dinner? Maurice has put aside some coalfish for us at the kiosk.”

It was the closest Barney had been to the sea. When she saw the way his eyes lit up at the sight of the water playing upon the sand, she threw off her boots and rolled her trousers up to the
knee. “You’re not going to let an old woman go in alone, are you?”

“Isn’t it freezing?”

“What a silly question!”

They left their shoes and stumbled across the sand towards the water. The white moon was already beginning to emerge, like a circle of tracing paper pressed against the arc of blue. The waves
rolled and receded upon themselves, tugged between two moons: the great spyhole in the sky and its watery reflection. The sea was so cold that it took several seconds for Barney to register the
pain of it: the hint of heat first, then numbness, and then a piercing ache that made him wonder how long it would take to turn the blood in his feet to ice. Miss Duchâtel laughed and made
for the far end of the shore, lunging at the water like a child. Barney’s feet felt like stumps in the water, but still he followed.

By the time he had caught up with her, his host was sitting on a knoll of long grass, pulling on her socks and boots. “This part of the island isn’t so different from the south shore
on St Just,” she said. “They could fit together like pieces of a puzzle. If the grass here could speak to the rocks there, it would say: ‘I remember you.’”

“Places can’t remember,” said Barney.

“Can’t they?” She sniffed. “Maybe not.”

“Robin says that’s where POWs were sent. And Yids.”

“There were only two Jewish families who lived here. The first fled to England in a fishing boat. Chances are they are now lying at the bottom of the sea. The second family was deported to
Germany – who knows where after that. Nobody put up any protest. I don’t think they went to St Just.”

“Robin says there were secret massacres. They could have tested the bomb there, and no one would have known.”

“He sounds like a silly boy, your friend.”

They continued along the shore to where the cockle huts began, Barney thinking all the while that in just a few months, perhaps, he might be with Mum, walking along a beach like this, only one
that was properly sandy and hot.

Miss Duchâtel had stopped to nudge at something with her toe. There, among the nacreous stones peeking out of the sand, it looked like a piece of membrane, a yellow and withered skin that
was somehow at once dead and part of something alive and out of sight. “A mermaid’s purse,” she said to him, picking it up. “Some of the old islanders call it a
widow’s purse, but I think mermaids are nicer.”

“What is it?”

She handed it to him. “A catshark shell. It’s the egg case that’s shed when the shark is born. Would you like to take it home with you?”

Barney stared at the thing in his hands, feeling that it was repulsive and yet too fragile to be thrown back on the sand. It was almost weightless: a shining packet three inches long, shaped
like a fish – pointed at one end, fanning into a tail at the other – with tendrils curling in imitation of purse strings. He nodded, and she gave him her handkerchief to bundle it
in.

Finally they stopped at the last hut, where an old man was waiting for them, a tartan blanket laid out across his knees. Greeting Miss Duchâtel with a nod, he lifted something wrapped in
paper that had turned pink and soggy and dropped it on the wooden countertop. The juices from the paper package seeped into the cracks in the counter. Barney watched as a fly landed on a puddle
that had begun to collect in a knot in the wood and began rubbing its legs together, anticipating the feast.

“You are too good, Maurice,” she said.

The old man studied Barney. “From the school?”

“That’s right. He’s being a great help to me.”

“Bad business,” said the old man. He leant upon his elbows so that his shoulders peaked about his ears. “I heard it said this morning.” He drew a hand about his face,
stretching the leathered skin that bristled with white whiskers right up to his cheekbones.

“We have so much to do,” said Miss Duchâtel. “Barney is having a friend around tomorrow for tea.”

The old man remained silent, watching.

“Goodbye, Maurice,” said Miss Duchâtel, as she placed the fish into her net bag and started back up the slope towards the coast path. Trailing her, Barney stopped to squint at
the grey strip hovering over the horizon and thought how easy it would be to pretend that it didn’t exist at all.

Miss Duchâtel made
choux amandine
and arranged them on a china plate with a dusting of icing sugar. “I so rarely have the chance to entertain guests,”
she said. She did not seem to mind that Ivor had brought Belinda with him, and she did not ask if her parents knew.

She had laid the table with a yellow cloth and scattered lavender sprigs about the bone china settings. She personalized the bowls of soup with their initials swirled in cream. She opened a
bottle of wine and poured it into crystal glasses, which she handed over with a warning to sip around the chips.

Ivor looked well for an invalid, Miss Duchâtel observed, when Barney introduced them. She hoped that his illness would not affect his appetite. This made Ivor blush – a sight new to
Barney, and gratifying – and he tried to change the subject by saying that he’d heard she kept geese.

“You must take some eggs back with you.” Miss Duchâtel indicated that they should sit. “When I was a girl, at the orphanage on Rue des Hospitalières, there were
several blind children who came to stay with us while their school was being renovated. Their teacher kept eggs in a little incubator so that when they were about to hatch the children could gather
round and feel the little chicks coming through the shell. How do you describe that to a little child of six or seven who has never even seen a chicken? The children spent a little time every day
feeling the eggs in their hands, raising them to their ears, smelling them and even trying to taste them, waiting for this magic event that they had been told would happen any day.” She set
the pot on the table and nudged the water jug toward Barney. “I will never forget the morning the eggs started to hatch. We were allowed to come and watch, but not to touch them: that
privilege was for the blind children only. The sight of that first tiny chick struggling against the shell – and the face of the little boy when he felt his finger pricked by the beak –
well, I’d never seen anything like it. How often do we get to see the world so new like that? Once or twice in our lives, if we are lucky.”

“And you came here after you left the orphanage?” said Ivor.

“No, no. I worked in Paris. In the ’30s I spent some time in Switzerland, publicizing a cabaret show.
Die Pfefermühle
, it was called:
The Pepper Mill
. Perhaps
you have heard of it?” Both boys shook their heads. “It was produced by Erika Mann. Her father, Thomas, you might know from his books.”

Ivor was listening carefully. Barney was counting the number of bread slices they’d each had and wondering if it would seem greedy to take the last one.

“So how did you end up here?”

Miss Duchâtel blew a thin stream of smoke over one shoulder, tapped her cigarette on her saucer. “One morning, I spotted a newspaper advertisement for a goose farm that was up for
sale on Lindsey – I had never even heard of the place until that point – and I decided that I would take it. It was the beginning of the happiest five years of my life.”

“Until the war?”

“Oh, even with the war.” She squashed her cigarette on the edge of her plate and swept a few imaginary crumbs off the table into her palm.

Belinda did not speak for the first part of the meal, observing with cautious eyes and sampling successive courses only once she’d watched Barney and Ivor taste a bit of everything on
their plates. Every now and then Miss Duchâtel would issue a pre-emptive correction or command – “I will pour the drinks. Ivor, as the senior gentleman, will carve the
roast” – in the manner of someone raised in an institution where you learnt to fight for what you wanted. It made them feel that they were part of a meal being staged from some other
time in her life – that they were playing the roles of other guests. When she wasn’t busy giving orders, she filled the silences with talk of the work she did for the Island Bat
Ordnance Survey, counting colonies by night in barns up and down Lindsey.

“Batting,” said Barney.

“That’s right,” she said, looking only slightly surprised.

Finally, Belinda started to eat what was left of the mint jelly on her plate. For several moments, the
tink
of her fork against china was the only sound in the room.

“Holland said you knew about the school ghost,” said Ivor.

“I don’t know about ghosts,” said Miss Duchâtel. “People like ghost stories because they are easier to believe than the crimes committed by the living.”

That was when Barney mentioned the baby that had been found behind the old kitchens. “The police came, so it must have been a murder,” he said. Scarcely were the words out of his
mouth than he knew that it had been a mistake.

“Why must you talk of such things?” she said, with a hard look. “Boys – so fascinated by suffering. No—” She waved away Ivor’s attempt to help her clear
the table. “Thank you, I will do it.” She set her glass down too hard, and the last of the wine went splashing across the counter. “Oh, hell.” Both boys offered their
napkins; she used a dishcloth to mop up the mess. “I’m sorry, I’m not feeling very well. You won’t think me rude if I lie down for half an hour? Barney, perhaps you would
like to show the others the mermaid’s purse we found?”

“Widow’s purse,” corrected Barney, worried that Ivor and Belinda would laugh.

Upstairs, Ivor was the first to comment that his room smelt odd.

“It’s not my fault,” said Barney, crossing to the chest of drawers. The shell had shrunk since he’d brought it inside, but still retained its shape. “Here. This one
was a shark, apparently.”

“What are you going to do with it?” asked Belinda.

“I don’t know. She thought I’d want to keep it.”

“Selkies shed their skins, don’t they?” Ivor tested the membrane between his fingers. “When they go from being seals to being human.”

“My gran says they’re lost spirits of drowned people,” said Belinda.

They decided to go outside, to sit on the stile at the far end of the yard where the geese had gathered in search of feed. Beyond the farm grounds the land sloped down to the salt marsh, and
from there to the beach dotted with cockle sheds. A cleft ran down the middle of a cliff rising from the water, and Ivor said that this was known as “The Chimney”, where men used to
risk their lives lowering themselves on pulleys down the shaft to collect seabirds’ eggs from the nests in the rock.

The wind was heavy with damp, so that the sea seemed everywhere: not just lapping at the shore, but in the small rain hanging in the air itself, seeping up through the ground, glistening in
perfect droplets on the birds’ beaks. Miss Duchâtel had told Barney that after January’s floods they had been inundated with rats fleeing the salt marsh. They’d killed six
of her chickens in a single week, leaving the yard strewn with feathers and entrails.

They made a game of keepy-uppy with a ball of wool that had become snagged on the wire tied to the gatepost. As they kicked it back and forth, Barney whispered a rhyme that Jake’s friends
used in counting games:

Only it was hard to control this ball that wasn’t a ball, and they only ever got as far as the third line. After several attempts, Barney kicked the knot into a puddle,
scattering the geese, and the game ended. They were getting cold, so they decided to go back indoors.

Miss Duchâtel had appeared in the doorway and leant against the outside wall where the paint had started to blister. “Before you come in, perhaps you would like to see Mildred
dance?” she said with a sweet smile, winking at Barney. “You have told your friends about the tricks she can perform, I expect?”

They smiled and clapped exactly as she wanted them to, so that by the time she looked at her watch and said she had promised that Ivor should return to school before nightfall they were all in
good spirits. They waved goodbye soon after, Belinda clutching a bouquet of goose feathers and Ivor concealing some dandelion wine under his duffel coat.