Silent Noon (26 page)
Authors: Trilby Kent
Ashes and dust. And nothing after that.
The watch slipped, warm and slick in his clumsy fingers, and for an instant Barney was tempted to hurl it through the window. He thought that he should like to smash it through the glass of the
Audley family vault. No one had been able to tell him whether or not anyone was actually buried there, and if there wasn’t what the point of it was, besides it being a place to play Bundle.
Dad had no gravestone, nor had Robin – blown to smithereens so that there were bits of him floating in the very air Barney breathed.
~
“There is a seed cake and that horrible ginger beer you like so much,” said Miss Duchâtel, setting a basket on the stand next to his bed. “For you to
share with the other boys if you wish” – she cast a glance around the empty San – “or with Belinda, perhaps.”
Matron’s expression betrayed judgement: she recognized the Frenchwoman, though she had never spoken to her. What had the housemaster been thinking, sending the boy to stay with a pariah?
Had it been his idea of a joke? Or had he not known? Anyone who had spent more than a few evenings in the Three Kings knew the stories: that there had been two women on the farm – sisters, or
possibly lovers – and the one had betrayed the other as a Jew when she became jealous of a love affair. That the commandant had fathered a child; that the farm had been a gift to a favoured
mistress. That they had taken a picnic to a beach on St Just, not a five-minute drive to the pits where prisoners laboured and starved...
But perhaps the housemaster did not drink at the Three Kings.
To have said that Miss Duchâtel had no friends on the island would have been untrue: there was old Maurice at the fisherman’s kiosk, as well as a lady from the Nonconformist church
who sometimes made an exchange of home-brewed rum for fresh eggs and her famously boozy fruitcakes. She was also known to have offered work to Krawiec, the school groundsman, whom most of the
islanders avoided as much as possible because he reminded them of the past. But that did not require the Frenchwoman to leave her farm. Her visits to St Arras were always restricted to a prompt
tour of the shops, where she placed her orders in advance for collection.
The laundress pouring sheets in a rolling bin hovered at the far end of the San, watching. But Matron was determinedly civil. Most people treated the Frenchwoman with polite coolness. There were
exceptions: the butcher, who refused to serve her himself and would call for his wife to take her money, or the postal warden, who always made her complete a customs form for letters to France,
even though these had not been required since the war. “She made her bed,” said Matron’s glance at the hesitating laundress. “The war wasn’t easy on anyone, but at
least we kept our noses clean,” the girl’s silence seemed to imply.
“We’ll put the ginger beer in the tuck locker,” said Matron, taking the basket without waiting for either one of them to object. When she had gone, Miss Duchâtel sat
down.
“Did they tell you about Morrell?” said Barney.
“No.” She followed Matron with her eyes, down the corridor between the beds to where a roster hung on the wall by a little roll-top desk. “Why? How is Ivor?”
“They sent him away. For good.”
“For what reason?”
“It doesn’t matter. We weren’t friends any more.”
“Why ever not?” Barney looked away until it became clear that she would not press the point. “Well, that is a shame.”
“The police told Pleming it was a German bomb that didn’t go off when it was supposed to.” A red arrow that began at the top of his neck, behind the ears, flushed down towards
his clavicle. “Which means that it was no one’s fault. Ivor’s not going to rat you out now.”
Miss Duchâtel stood up abruptly, gaze trained on Matron’s back as if to avoid looking at Barney would somehow quieten him. “You are tired, and still upset,” she said in a
low voice. “I understand. You want to be left alone, yes?”
“Not especially.”
“I must go now. I didn’t realize it was so late—”
“Do the police know as well?”
“Know what?”
“About you and the commandant. The painting was a gift from him. There were two glasses in the photograph of the picnic – the other one was his. And the baby didn’t belong to a
neighbour, it was yours. You killed it—”
“She died—”
“You never fought in any Resistance. You were an orphan – a model in Paris. Poor. You came over with the Germans. That’s why the islanders cut your hair off after they’d
left.”
“Stop this, Barney.”
“The one thing I don’t understand is why the bracelet you said belonged to her was down in the rock pools. That’s where Belinda found it.”
A strange look passed over Miss Duchâtel’s face: almost a smile.
“It’s where she was buried,” she said.
“Then how did she turn up behind the old kitchens?”
“Lower your voice, Holland,” barked Matron, having reappeared from her trip to the linen hanger, as Barney and Miss Duchâtel turned on her with pale faces. “I’m
sorry, Miss Duchâtel. Perhaps the morning would be a better time to visit. The boys get too excited when they’re tired.”
“Yes, of course.” She collected her purse from under the chair and slung her coat over one arm. “That was another woman’s shame, Barney, not mine.”
He expected that she would return – if not the next day, then surely the day after that. But by the time Matron agreed that he could move into Wool House with the others there had been no
more baskets of cakes and ginger beer, no invitation to tea at the farmhouse. It was not until the following week that his housemaster approached Barney with a card in a red envelope.
“It’s from Miss Duchâtel,” Mr Runcie said. He waited until the housemaster had turned away before tearing it open and devouring the words in a few quick glances.
M
y dear Barney,
Still I have no word from Ivor, who I suppose has forgotten all about us now that he is back in England. That ferry ride is so convenient for some people: the way the
sea eats up the past. While the earth remembers everything, the land and the trees and the things we leave on it, the sea remembers nothing. I have decided that I owe you the truth about
those things of which you accused me. You were right about many things, but not about her death: there was nothing I could have done to prevent that. Funerals were prohibited on the island
– the enemy considered large gatherings too risky – and so we had a choice: either to hand her over for “disposal”, or to lay her to rest ourselves. The ground on my
farm was too hard, and toxic because of that photographer’s chemicals. So I turned to the sea.
When I get to the end, I will tear this up
, thought Barney.
The person to ask about the body that was discovered by the old kitchens is called Swallow, or something like that – I’m sorry I can’t remember. I
don’t know whether he is a master or a student at the school, perhaps neither. Mr Krawiec once mentioned the name to me in confidence. I was one of the few people who offered him work
in exchange for food after the war; he came to trust me, I suppose, despite my reputation.
Believe me when I say that I am sorry for all that has happened. My heart aches for that poor boy and his family – and for you, Barney, because I know that he was your
friend.
At the bottom of the page was a signature that resembled a hair fallen across the paper, formless as breath.
~
In all likelihood she had not known, when she wrote to Barney, that that week’s ferry had been delayed by high winds and thick fog. By the time the alarm was raised, the
vessel carrying Ivor Morrell was already out of radio call.
Gales would often hold things up by an hour or more: if there was fog, then the captain would be relying on signals from the mainland. Perhaps he was being overly cautious, explained the porter
to waiting passengers, but better safe than sorry.
The search boats’ lanterns were no use in such fog. A call was put in to the Skagerrak coastguard to be on the lookout. Almost immediately, the reply came through: a fifteen-mile ice sheet
had made the coast there quite inaccessible for several weeks.
Repeated radio requests to the vessel itself resulted only in static silence. The next day an ice-breaker was summoned from Esbjerg, but after six hours on the water no sign of the Lindsey
Island ferry, its captain or sole passenger, had been detected.
It took several days for the news to filter back to school. Even then it did not become common knowledge among the masters until a day or two before the end of term, when the last ferry before
Christmas looked likely to be delayed by similar conditions. Ominous mutterings about wayward gales and heavy pack ice trapping the vessel – freezing the motor and luring panicked passengers
onto the foes in the mistaken belief that it was safer on the sheet – did not seem to hint at tragedy until, halfway across the strait, Barney asked Mr Runcie if Morrell’s ferry had
also been delayed for very long. At that point, Mr Runcie became suddenly very concerned about Percy, who had started a nosebleed, so that Barney’s question was left to hang in the air,
crushed by the creaking of frost-bitten chains and the motor’s tormented groan.
The island of St Just is little more than two miles long and a mile wide. Its deep pits and valleys are frequently flooded by rain and tidewater that seeps through the loam
and trickles through burrowing streams that worm through the rock. If the climate were ten degrees warmer, the air itchy with tiny buzzing creatures, there might be something of the bayou to
its weird, floating aspect.
It is a primordial landscape in which human visitors are made immediately aware that they are the aliens. Three doomed settlement attempts have been verified on the record. Pottery artefacts
suspected to date to the Viking era have been found in two caves on the island’s northern face. The Domesday Book records that a Templar Order gave the island a name and established
itself here for a number of years. In the early 1600s, Danish settlers attempted to appropriate the island, along with Lindsey, though the mission was poorly planned and haphazardly executed.
Their expulsion a decade later was said to have been swift and merciless.
Vast colonies of rare seabirds are known to nest here, along with a particular breed of Scandinavian seal, small and heavily whiskered, that can be spotted sunbathing on the flats in summer.
A small freshwater fish known as the Tollis Pink is said to thrive in the pools and gullies in the centre of the island, although parties of visiting schoolchildren rarely manage to return with
any in their nets, even after long days of searching.
Scant reminders of human visitation only add to the island’s mystique: stone circles left in several of the caves conform to remains from Continental witchcraft ceremonials. A triangle
carved into the bark of the tallest tree on the rocky South Slope is assumed to represent some form of distress signal – though its precise cause remains unclear.
A clapboard house no larger than a beach hut, buttressed with rocks in the island fashion, once stood high atop the South Slope. A photograph, reproduced here, exists in the Lindsey archives
of an unidentified woman in front of this house. Undated and unsigned, it is said to have been contributed to the collection by a German official.
The clapboard house, alas, no longer stands. Found to obstruct the German line of fire across the sea from St Arras, it was demolished some time in 1942. Now its foundations provide a haven
for hermit crabs and a popular picnic spot for day tourists.
Having pasted a borrowing card over the flyleaf, Swift found the
Angler’s Guide to St Just
its place on the shelf. He wondered if anyone would seek out this book
when the list of acquired titles was posted on the Library door the next day. Spy novels were all the rage, now: stories about Englishmen philandering their way through the most perilous corners of
the world, notching up romantic conquests in the same way that small boys collected bottle tops.
A shuffle of feet made him turn to find Barney Holland standing awkwardly to attention by the desk. Now that the pale days of the summer term were upon them, he saw that something about the boy
had changed – a growth spurt, perhaps. He could not have been standing there long, and had probably been trying to think of a way to alert the master to his presence without having to raise
his voice.
“What is it, Holland? You know the library’s not open now.”
The boy made as if to advance, then stopped. All along the window ledge books were piled in balusters, and his gaze had lighted on a stack left for sorting at the end.
Swift noted his embarrassment and followed his gaze to the book at the top of the pile. “Ancients,” he said brusquely. “Romans.”
“Byzantines, sir.”
“What is it you wanted, Holland?” Swift said. His tone made the boy straighten instantly, his expression tinted with a look of surprise and – could it be? – hurt.
“It’s about the cross-country team, sir. I wanted to know if I could join, sir – properly, I mean.”
“‘Properly’?”
“Not just in games, sir. I’d like to train properly. Enter in for races and things, you know.”
“I see.” This was unexpected. “And why the sudden interest in running, Holland? You’ve always brought up the rear, from what I recall of your efforts last
term.”
“Yes, sir. I want to get fit. All the others have something they’re good at, sir – Shields with maths, and Cowper at rugby…” He swallowed. “I know I’m
not the brightest, but I’ve got two legs and I’m not half as fat as Hughes, sir.”
“Very well. I’ll see you at six o’clock tomorrow morning, warmed up and ready to go. We’ll take the route along the chalk ridge. Do you think you’ll be up to
that?”
Of course he didn’t. “Thank you, sir. Six o’clock, sir.”
Swift watched him leave the room. The silence now seemed changed. For several weeks last term the sea had gone strangely quiet, as though the frosty air had frozen out all possibility of sound.
Since the thaw – since the breaking-up of the ice sheets, the lifting of the grey-green mist – it was as if the water had found its voice again.