Silent Noon (27 page)

They paused at the summit of the chalk ridge the next morning so that Barney could refasten his shoelaces. From here, it felt as though they should have been able to survey the whole island,
like an equation solved and laid bare on a blackboard at the front of the classroom. It frustrated Barney that he couldn’t. The main road wended out of sight where the land curved –
real, but invisible.

High up on the far plateau, a figure stalked towards the Chimney, a dog circling about his legs. Now and then the dog would break away and tear ahead along the ridge, stopping at the edge to
bark at the waves as if to fend off the encroaching tide. A whistle from its owner brought it looping round. Barney thought how nice it would be to have a dog and wondered if Mum would allow
it.

He was surprised to have made it this far without his chest tightening under the exertion: his breath had settled into a rhythm that reflected the pitch and roll of the sea. On the ferry at the
beginning of term, Barney had watched the thin hump of land rise out of the water with a shiver and a sense that something remained there still. For an instant his thoughts drifted to the vessel
that had spent the winter stranded many miles to the north – the carcass had been retrieved in the spring, regurgitated ashore in some dreary Swedish village; the captain and his sole
passenger long since disappeared – but it was hard to detect its spectre here today. The laughing waves did not frighten him: day by day, summer was muffling the undrownable voices that had
haunted the winter ice.

“This must be the hardest bit, sir. The slope, I mean.”

“It gets steeper.”

“That’s gradient, sir. You could calculate it if you timed the run. You’d have to have someone measure it, though, sir.”

“Paying attention in maths, now, are we, Holland?”

“It’s more common sense than anything, sir. Like evening out the lower pitch.”

“Doc Dower’s project, you mean.” Swift smiled with something resembling condescension.

“What’s funny, sir?”

“Nothing, Holland. It’s just I can think of more productive uses of precious time than adjusting the gradient of the landscape. Particularly when it’s only going to be trodden
over by boys scrumming over a rugby ball.”

“You say that, sir…”

The air buzzed with the metallic hum of crickets, like so many rattling electric wires, and it carried a sweet scent: a lusty smell of the earth bursting to crack. Through the whispering
grasses, over and around the ancient screes, they carried on along the island’s north face.

“We’ll cut inland at the next turning,” said Swift. Rivulets of perspiration illuminated his pink skin, and his eyes seemed bright as the spangled waves far below. Out here
among the kittiwakes and the cowering gorse, they were like masters of a wild planet: blood thinned by North Sea winds, their hearts drumming to the sound of their own steady footfall. “Past
the barn with the red roof. The road comes out by that farmhouse.”

Even from here Barney could make out the grey dots of the Frenchwoman’s geese muddling through the waterlogged run, the languid curve of their necks flexing to and fro as they pecked after
seeds sunk into the mud. There was the stile near which they had played keepy-uppy.

They gathered pace when the land became flat, and Barney sensed Swift pulling ahead at a heady speed. The island was flush with light now, only a short half-hour from when they had set off in
the gloom of a forest dawn, and as the main road came within view he sensed the beginning of a slow transformation back into their ordained roles: master and pupil, ruler and oppressed.

“Have you seen the plaque, sir?”

Clusters of boys had been drawn to it all week: a shining brass plate screwed to the chapel wall next to the list of glorious war dead.
In memory of Robin Littlejohn
, it read. And
beneath this, a quotation from Job: ‘
For inquire, please, of bygone ages, and consider what the fathers have searched out. For we are but of yesterday and know nothing, for our days on
earth are a shadow.
’

“I have. It’s very dignified.”

“Cray didn’t get one, sir.”

“Cray didn’t die at school, Holland. Or at war.”

They continued in silence for several minutes, reflecting on this.

“Morrell could have been a hero, sir,” Barney said, as they rounded the bend past Miss Duchâtel’s farmhouse. The blackout curtains were drawn, and the feed bucket rolled
empty on the step, clattering on its handle. “If only things were different.”

“What things are those, Holland?”

“If there’d been a war he’d have been a brilliant spy.”

“The secret service doesn’t recruit loose cannons, Holland.”

“Well, you would know, sir.” Barney scrambled to match Swift’s long stride as the master began to pull ahead. “That’s what you did, wasn’t it, sir? Hughes
said so, sir.”

“Did he.”

“It’s only clever chaps who get to do things like that, sir. The not-so-clever ones get put in the army.”

“That doesn’t make them any less brave,” said Swift.

He had not fought, he had not saved a single life. While others had fought bravely and died, others like him had enjoyed an uneventful war. That was a thing surely worse than death. Despite the
dormitory rumours which he pretended not to hear, the only weapon Swift had ever carried had been an Enfield – and even that he had fired just once, taking pity on a fox which had been hit by
a vehicle and which he later found lying in the middle of the road with its long, flat jaw hinging open and closed in the desperate trance that precedes a slow and painful death.

He had caught up with young Morrell that day at the rock pools: shaken him so hard as he made him promise not to breathe a word of what he’d seen that he feared the boy’s neck might
snap. For five years Swift had forced silence upon him. Wasn’t that what schools everywhere taught? That membership to the group depends on an agreement of selective silence? The Headmaster
had instructed his staff not to be drawn into discussions about the ferry that had become stranded in the ice that winter: the school had wiped its hands of Morrell now.

Shadows raced across the darkening screes, and Swift found himself thinking how much the island resembled the modern-day young: sulking and dwelling and guarding its secrets jealously. He
consulted his watch. “You’ll have five minutes to get changed before breakfast, Holland,” he said. “We’ve made slow time today. We’ll aim to do better on
Thursday, shall we? Less talking might do the trick.”

Barney arrived at breakfast to discover a letter propped against his plate.

“Well, would you look at that: Camden Town’s got post,” said Cowper. “From your girlfriend, is it, boyo?”

“Kissy-kissy,” said Shields.

“‘To my dearest, darlingest Barnaby, I dream of you day and night. How do I love thine ickle Barnaby toes and ickle Barnaby nose? Let me count the ways…’”

It didn’t take much to tell that the letter was indeed from a girl: the envelope was printed with a decorative border and the seal illustrated with a pig and a turkey in a vicar’s
collar squatting atop a hill. Four lines of curlicued text were printed at the bottom corner.

The seal had been deftly split by Runcie’s letter opener, the pages returned to the envelope as good as undisturbed. At the top of the first page were four more lines of
script.

“What does she say?” said Opie.

“‘My best-beloved Barnaby-boo…’”

Pretending not to watch them from the other end of the table, Swift monitored the taunts and Barney’s failure to rise to them. Those boys fussed over concocted gossip like carrion birds
pecking vainly at pieces of driftwood. All the time on this island, people talked about the wrong things.

“Be that way,” huffed Cowper finally, and the others followed him, rising from the table.

The letter was brief, the first page limited to bland greetings.
I hope you are well and that you will send my best wishes to the others. My new school is very nice and the girls are
friendly.
On the second page she had drawn a picture of the pony that she was learning to ride and a floor plan of her dormitory. It was signed
from B.
The postscript added simply
that she thought she might have forgotten to stamp a borrowing card for the book about the bear tamer’s daughter, and would he mind doing this for her so that Mr Nunn’s library records
were up to date?

The card he found between the pages of the chapter on the early campaigns of the general Belisarius – and with it, two pieces of paper, folded in thirds. The handwriting here was the same,
only slightly larger and more carefully executed.

And on a separate sheet of paper:

He shut the book and returned it to its place, pocketing the note with the resignation of a spy who has just been given his arsenic pill. Was this what she had been practising
for all along, those nights in the rock pools? Was keeping her mother’s secret so corrosive? Of course she was not about to die. The will was nothing but a piece of wishful thinking. At the
end of term a bottle of Pentazine tablets would be found in her bedside drawer and confiscated. She had attempted only one tablet before penning the letter, and it was so large it had made her
gag.

It must have seemed a terrible insult to her. Never mind that the lesson she ought to have learnt from all this should have been the wonder and unlikely miracle of existence: life, against
terrible odds. The thing that those two small souls buried on this island had never known. Before the UXB carried off Robin, Belinda probably would have said that they’d been spared a double
disappointment: the guilt of living through war, and being the shame that would scar the peace. Best to die young. He wondered if she still believed this. Once, she had told Barney that in the
Narnia books Susan didn’t die as her siblings did, because she finally lost faith in that other world: instead of death, she progressed to adulthood. She had said then that she should be
ashamed of such a fate, so mundane as to be almost offensive.

On the first day to feel like summer, the bells of St Arras and Port Grenen pealed back and forth across the high plateau. While the boys of the Carding House School were busy
helping to set up the tables and chairs for the Sports Day tea, Barney found himself between assignments and idle in the shade of a blossoming apple tree. His pocket was stretched to contain a
stiff, square shape that pointed at the corners, and now he pressed his thumb into the uppermost point with a warm sensation. It was his release form, his ticket out of here – this school,
this island sinking under its own memories. In one week he would return to London to collect Jake and to say goodbye to Spike (the tired linoleum, the chattering gas metre, the Jamaican family with
those offensive parcels shoved through the letterbox), and a few days after that they would take the train to Portsmouth, and from there board a ship to Cape Town. There would be a swimming pool
for dunking the uninitiated, and parties after supper and a cabin with twin berths that he and Jake would fight over – there would be deck games and no masters. And then, at the end of it,
there would be Africa, and Mum.

“Buck up, Holland!” A passing Mede whose arm was slung with four metal hurdles bumped him. “Get the flag from the masters’ common room, will you? Dolly’ll know
someone’s coming for it.”

“Buck up, buck up!” chanted Hiram Opie from behind the flapping canvas hoarding, where he steadied a stake that two older boys were struggling to force into the ground.

“Shut up, Opie,” grunted Barney, heaving himself reluctantly into action. In recent weeks he had begun bullying Hiram as the others did: what had begun as a means of confirming his
membership in a group now came by second nature.

He had already become a curiosity for escaping death and being judged to have grieved Littlejohn discreetly, without pretence or affectation. The drama with Ivor, the white scar that cupped his
cheekbone, had further gilded his reputation by his association with rebellion. It seemed a shame, on the eve of a happier year, to have to give up all that he’d endured for: the respect of
his peers won when, over the heads of a group of boys huddled around the noticeboard, his name had been called out as the only Lydian to make the cut for Swift’s elite runners. Tomorrow he
would race against three Sagartians and two Medes in the long-distance meet: five miles up the spine of the island and five miles back, to be greeted at the finish line by the entire school –
everyone, at least, who wouldn’t be playing in or watching the cricket match on the upper pitch – and, if he won, to be awarded a plaque with his name on it for the crosscountry
register that hung in the atrium. Many times already, he had attempted to render the words in Copperplate Gothic letters on the back of his English jotter – Barnaby Holland, 1954 – but
it was still difficult to imagine just how the thing might look, immortalized behind glass. Whistling to himself as he passed through the headmaster’s corridor, he paused by the registers to
count the names on the cross-country list. Twenty-four in total, and none at all between 1940 and 1946. Opposite was the Games Captains’ roll of honour, and he spotted Swift’s name in
the middle: Michael Swift, 1937. The letters had been etched in the pewter and painted over in dark ink that showed the dust.