Silent Noon (2 page)

“You’re allowed five things on your side table,” he was saying – and Barney noticed how the other boys had already put out alarm clocks, comic books, Airfix models,
family photographs. When Robin saw that he wasn’t going to place anything on his table, he nodded in the direction of two boys on the other side of the room. “That’s Cowper and
Shields,” he said. One boy was almost as large as Barney, with a downy shadow beginning to show over his long upper lip: he was the one who had interrogated him on the ferry. He had the other
one in a headlock and was trying to stuff a sock in his captive’s mouth.

“Percy.” Robin summoned a baby-faced boy. “This is Holland. Holland, Percy. ‘Weeps’ to you and me. Brought his rabbit with him to school last year, and didn’t
we have waterworks for a month of Sundays after some owls got it one night… Did your mum remember to pack nappies this time, Weeps?”

“Shut up, Littlejohn,” mumbled Percy, casting a dark look at Barney before sloping back to his corner.

“Bed-wetter,” said Robin. “Cowper spent last half-term at his place. Turns out Weeps is a bit of a Wild West fanatic. Has that wallpaper in his room covered in cowboys and
Indians – the kind that looks like cat sick if you squint at it, you know?”

“Jesus.”

“That’s what I said,” agreed Robin.

“No, it’s my fags. I can’t find them.”

Robin peered over Barney’s shoulder, eyeing the muddle of grey pants, socks and shirts spewing from his battered suitcase. “Was it locked when they brought it up?” he
asked.

“There isn’t a lock.”

“Well, that’s your problem, then. Swift’s probably been in and nicked them. You’ll be in for it if he’s found smokes in your case.”

He perched on the end of the bed to watch the new boy organize the contents of his suitcase into two drawers. Barney was the only one to have arrived without a proper trunk or tuck box. The
school uniform he laid out on the chair was secondhand; the piping on the blazer was loose at the cuffs and there were holes picked in the flannel where the previous owner had sported athletics
badges.

“So it’s London you’re from?”

Barney nodded.

“What’s that like, then?”

“All right. Where do we put our towels?”

“End of the bed’s usually best. If you leave yours in the showers it’ll get nicked.” Robin leant back on his hands. “Poor old Cray was from London too.” He
pretended to lift a piece of grit from under one fingernail.

“What sort of accident was it?”

“Plane crash, I heard – coming back from holiday. That’s why you got his place, I imagine. Best not to think about it.” Robin heaved himself abruptly from the bed and
consulted the clock that hung over the doorway. “Ten minutes until lights out. Hey, do you want to hear a joke?”

“Go on, then.”

“All right, so there’s this meeting between the Yanks and the North Koreans. They get together for a banquet, and during the meal this American general says to this Korean general,
‘What are you planning to do after the war ends?’ And the Korean chappie, he says, ‘I will ride my bicycle all around my country, with my head held high!’ And the American
says, ‘Well, that’ll be just swell. And what will you do in the afternoon?’”

Barney drew breath to say something but was cut off by a loud guffaw from Hiram. The boy with the elfin face clutched his sides and rolled onto the bed, his shrieks obliterating every other
sound in the room. Barney and Robin watched him with mounting embarrassment, until at last Robin shoved him off the bed and snapped, “You’re messing up the sheet,
retardus
.”

A knock at the door: the cue for lights out.

“The bell goes at quarter to seven,” said Robin. “It’s still the old air-raid siren, by the way. Takes some chaps a while to get used to, so don’t be surprised if
you wake up with a bit of a jump.”

Later, pinned beneath sheets that smelt of peppermint and lye, Barney reflected that the bed-wetter – he couldn’t remember his name now – had watched him pull back the covers
with wide, terrified eyes. And then he felt his insides churn: this had been the dead boy’s bed. Robin had wanted him to take it so he wouldn’t have to sleep next to an empty space
– the kind of space where a ghost might turn up in the middle of the night, bloated and discoloured, with rotting eyes and bits of seaweed dangling from his fingers. Barney shaped his mouth
around the name: Henry Cray. It felt like a cry in the darkness.

In this way he came to realize how he would be viewed from now on, as a visiting spirit from the future, an intruder resented for creating unseemly collisions with the past. And at that moment
he began to feel himself becoming almost invisible – less real than the boy he imagined drifting in a sea of flotsam, in an ocean on the other side of the world.

Everyone had agreed that it would be better if the girl didn’t return to school that term. There hadn’t been time to register her for a place at Whitemoor
Ladies’ College, and the only other option had been to ask the Head if it would be possible for Belinda to attend classes with the Second Form at CHS, where her father Mr Flood was a
housemaster. Belinda should have been in the First, really, but she was a precocious child, and the curriculum at St Mary’s was known for its rigour.

“It would be unconventional,” observed Mr Pleming, when the request was put to him after the first housemasters’ meeting of the year, just before the boys started to
arrive.

“This is an unconventional place,” Mr Flood replied.

“You have a point,” said Mr Pleming, stroking his moustache.

Had the suggestion appealed to his competitive spirit – an attitude sharpened by the fact that St Mary’s had not been requisitioned during the war? Fears of reprisals against
English-born staff and boys had forced his institution’s temporary relocation to Lincolnshire, while the girls’ school had managed to maintain three mistresses and a student body of
twenty native islanders throughout the Occupation years. Even today the girls lorded their pluck over his pupils, recalling tales of chemistry lessons undertaken covertly at night and the secret
practice of using pages torn from
Juncker’s German-English Dictionary
as kindling.

“It might even do the boys good,” ventured Mr Flood, who felt that he might have lost the Head’s attention.

“Quite right. Something to distract them from the Cray business.”

“That wasn’t what I had in mind, exactly.”

The Head checked himself.
It is with very great sadness that we announce the passing of a student
, a last-minute addendum to his summer letter to parents had begun.
Although many
members of the school community will remember those years when we mourned such losses with bitter frequency, in peacetime it is an exceptional occurrence and perhaps all the more shocking for
this…

“A civilizing influence, then?” he asked. “But are you sure Belinda wouldn’t feel slightly out of her depth?”

“She’s had a difficult few months, Headmaster. She’s grown up a lot this year.”

That spring, an illicit smog had floated over the high walls that surrounded the St Mary’s estate and left its residue on the tennis courts and hacking trails. It had been carried indoors
by girls fresh off the hockey pitch and infected their clothes and hair and the mugs of steaming cocoa that they carried upstairs at bedtime. Parents had once believed that the strong female
example set by the Head and her retinue of bluestocking spinsters would constitute a solid barrier against attacks on their daughters’ ignorance. But the pernicious cloud had penetrated even
their best defences.

It was no secret that, in the absence of boys, some girls were more likely to make idols of their teachers. The staff encouraged it, to an extent, as a means of fostering loyalty to the
institution. Most would agree it was far preferable for a girl to spend several weeks mooning over a mistress or one of the prefects than to become entangled in mature liaisons with members of the
opposite sex, of which, at St Mary’s, there were next to none. A surly groundskeeper and the director of accounts – myopic and prone to spitting his sibilants – were the only
men.

This had all been very well before the capsized boat and the rumours that subsequently began to circulate about a particular member of staff, the English mistress, Miss Gallo. The lot of it
fuelled by adolescent hysteria, thought Mr Flood, who had been shocked to learn that his daughter was one of the girls being questioned over the affair. Of course, the questioning led to nothing
– only tears from the other students and stubborn, stoical silence from Belinda. The child who had closed herself in her room for the duration of the summer was a stranger to him, a
ghost.

But the fact remained that she needed an education, a point repeatedly stressed to him by his wife until he had finally capitulated and taken it up with Mr Pleming.

“Obviously, she would live at home,” said Mr Flood, following the Head out of the common room into the corridor. The smell of beeswax floor polish and long-neglected flowers gave the
wood-panelled passage a distinctive pre-term odour, unsullied by boys’ sweaty bodies, rubber shavings and adolescent experiments with pomade. “She’d attend chapel, of course, and
lessons. Not games, naturally.”

They had stopped outside the Headmaster’s office, and Mr Pleming’s hand was already on the brass doorknob. He stared at Mr Flood, taking in the droll mouth and hair combed, fine as a
baby’s, over his perfectly round head. Still not sure whether an agreement had been reached, Mr Flood extended one hand.

“We’re very grateful, Headmaster. I’ll make sure Belinda comes to see you first thing on Monday to express her thanks in person.”

“That won’t be necessary.” They shook, and he opened the door. “Now you go and enjoy what’s left of the peace and quiet before the little rotters start to
arrive.”

Returning to Ormer that evening, Flood had paused on the green to watch a nightjar cruise, silhouetted against an orange sky. The breeze that ran through the treetops felt like a long, slow
letting-out of breath.

He let himself in through the side door and headed straight for the kitchen to tell his wife the good news.

Belinda worried at a string of costume pearls between her fingers, twisting the necklace in coils around one slender arm. It was a restless, unthinking motion, and after a few
minutes her mother set down the tub of cold cream with a jerk.

“Do stop that, darling,” she said.

Belinda scowled and threw herself back onto the bed, dark hair fanning against the pink chenille. When this achieved no response, she pushed herself onto her elbows and studied her
mother’s bare back. The cotton nightdress had the narrowest of shoulder straps and scooped down low, revealing a single brown birthmark on her mother’s shoulder blade. It made Belinda
think of Miss Gallo’s kimono, which the English mistress had worn to the beach like a child playing dress-up: a thick-heeled polymath in a concubine’s nightie. Miss Gallo was not at all
like the woman sitting at the vanity before her.

In the mornings, before she’d put on her face, her mother’s naked eyelashes were brittle and her lips slightly too thin. There were two tiny scars and crinkling of skin under one
arm, where she had cut herself falling into a shallow pond as a child, and a permanent bruise high up on one thigh, acquired in an adolescent riding accident. These marks were embarrassing to
Belinda, because they hinted at places on her own body which she felt to be ugly and beyond her control. The neat, inward-turning navel and the black, square-topped bristles that peeped high up her
thighs, around the pleats of her bathing costume – Belinda had grown inside that same body – were unintelligible and revolting to her.

There was a knock on the bedroom door. Lucia appeared, dressed in a pink bathrobe, her hair twisted into rag curlers.

“Is it true, Linda-Lou?” The child’s eyebrows inched up into her golden fringe. “Are you really staying? Will you come to school with me now?”

“Your sister goes to big school,” said their mother, rising. “You know that, Lucia.”

The younger child was ushered from the room with promises of one last chapter before bed, and so Belinda turned towards the dresser to examine the clutter of face creams, tonics and powders left
in the wake of her mother’s night-time regimen. Brushes, pencils and blotting pads; a jar of tablets labelled “Pentazine”. Belinda picked up one pot and raised it to her nose.
This was her mother’s smell, she told herself, considering the label. Only then did she realize that, if this were so, it must also be the smell of countless other women.

For no obvious reason, the thought distempered Belinda.
A disruptive presence
, her headmistress had written. Suddenly it was all she could do to prevent herself from hurling the tub of
cream at the nasty, frightened little face in the mirror.

Despite its pretensions to originality, The Carding House School was one of a breed of liberal institutions that had been forced to admit financial defeat after the Crash. The
only thing that made CHS exceptional was the fact of its survival. That, and its remote location: on this austere island it was possible to keep costs low, while the ferry journey and fickle tides
meant fewer visits from inspectors. The grounds had been bought outright after the Great War, death duties rendering it impossible for the Audley family to maintain the two-hundred-acre estate. The
reception rooms were converted into the school’s administrative centre, while the atrium doubled as a hall for concerts and assemblies and the larger kitchen served as a dining room.
Classrooms had been adapted from the library, saloon and gun room, which were connected to the main building by the old servants’ corridor.

At first there had been just three boarding houses – Ormer, renovated from the huntsman’s lodge; Medlar, the stables; and Wool, so named for the carding house built early in the
previous century for the first Lady Audley’s amusement – but later a fourth was added. Tern House incorporated a set of German barracks erected during the war years. Unrelenting North
Sea winds and rain had left rust trails running down the corrugated roof. Its advantage, as the senior boys’ boarding house, was that it overlooked both the forest and the green. On the other
side of the main building the grounds became poorly lit and neglected, a smaller field here having been used as a timber store during the war. The Audley family vault and the disused old kitchens
had remained under lock and key for as long as anyone could remember.