Silent Noon (3 page)

All of this was explained to Barney by Robin after breakfast. As they climbed the staircase from the dining room to the headmaster’s quarters, the discussion moved on to the student caste
system.

“Percy and Cowper are middle-class duffers, like me,” Robin said. “Too thick to pass the common entrance, so our people tell their bourgeois friends they prefer to send us
somewhere
progressive
.” He spoke briskly, bored by the fact of knowing everything. “Shields and Opie are military. They get locked up here because their people are always
shuttling between Blighty and Malaysia, or Singapore, or Hong Kong – not like in the old days, where you’d actually get to live somewhere hot if your old man was posted there.
You’re scholarship, aren’t you?”

“And Cray?”

Robin snorted. “He’d have you think he was military because his hundred-times-great-granddad copped it at Waterloo. Cray was always a blowhard, though.” They had stopped
outside a panelled door. “Ratty’s in there. Do you want me to wait for you?”

“It’s all right.”

“Godspeed, Holland.” Robin rapped sharply on the door – more loudly than Barney would have done – before shoving both hands in his pockets and sloping off across the
atrium. A voice from inside the office said something that Barney couldn’t make out. He waited for several seconds, wondering if he should knock again or wait to be called.

“Come in!”

Barney put his shoulder to the brass panel already patterned with fingerprints and leant his full weight against it.

This was not the first time that Mr Pleming had watched a new boy struggle like a dung beetle scrambling against a cowpat. He waited just long enough to be sure the lad wouldn’t forget the
indignity of this moment before crossing the room to pull the door open with a swift, hearty motion.

“Years of practice,” he said to Barney, who did not return his grin.

The Headmaster’s office was all polished wood and thick-pile rugs and a ceiling like a wedding cake. There was a green baize-covered table in the centre of the room, flanked by
bookshelves. Mr Pleming reached for the cues propped up on an umbrella stand.

“Do you play?” he asked Barney.

“Sir,” said the boy. “In London the balls are different colours.”

“In London you must have played snooker. This is a billiards table.”

Barney chewed his lip and nodded.

“Sit,” said the Headmaster, indicating a chair in front of the desk and seating himself opposite the new boy. “Holland.”

“Sir.”

“You came in with the last of the Medlar lads last night, did you?”

“Sir.”

“The crossing wasn’t too rough, I hope?”

“No, sir.”

“Very good. And someone’s shown you about?”

“Sir.”

“Excellent. You might have noticed, Holland, that unlike other schools our houses are separated by age. We find boys learn best when fraternization between older and younger chaps is kept
to a minimum.” Mr Pleming tweaked his ear, shifting in the chair. “A good house, Medlar. Mr Runcie never has any problems with them. You’re not to worry about being a bit older
than the lads in your form.”

“Sir,” said Barney, who felt that Mr Pleming didn’t like him much, to judge by the way he had begun to shuffle his papers to and fro.

Mr Pleming set the file down on his desk and beamed at Barney.

“Have you any questions for me?” he asked.

Barney shook his head.

“Excellent,” said the Headmaster. He stood up and offered his hand across the desk. “It’s been good meeting you, Holland. I hope you’ll be very happy
here.”

“And then, just as I was about to go, he asked me if I’d misplaced a pack of Woodbines,” Barney told Robin later that afternoon, as they trundled towards the
river path on their way to an induction at the boat house.

“What did you say?”

“I told him I’d never smoked in my life.”

Robin grinned at him and squeezed Barney by the shoulder.

“Cut out the tarting, Littlejohn,” barked the sixth-former in charge, catching the new boy’s eye. Robin pulled a face before setting off at a jog to overtake the boys leading
them on the rocky path. Exhilarated by the warm pressure of Robin’s hand on his shoulder, Barney followed.

According to Robin, the island was like a sponge soaking up the ocean: saltwater rose through the ground so that one day the weight of it would drag the woods and everything
else – school, masters, boys – into the sea. What was left of the pumping station, a mighty Victorian project designed to drain the surrounding fields, had already been mostly flooded
by the river and its tributaries. A string of wire had been pegged along the opposite bank to prevent cows from wandering into the stream.

“You cross that line and you’re trespassing for the next two miles,” warned Robin. “If you keep walking, you’ll reach St Arras.”

The six of them had broken off from the group after the meeting at the boat house and drifted downstream for their clandestine smoke.

“I lost my watch around here last term,” Robin told Barney. “A silver Buren. You never know: it might turn up one day.”

Shields and Cowper were lighting cigarettes with a boy from another dormitory, Hughes, whose cheeks were blotched with rosacea. They didn’t offer one to Barney, whose pride kept him from
asking for a draw. Getting dressed in the dormitory that morning, he had discovered too late that someone had tied one of his trouser legs in a knot. As he struggled to push his foot through,
Shields and Cowper had bundled him into the corridor and locked the door behind him.

“Nice one, Camden Town,” he’d heard them snort on the other side of the door, as he tried to untie the knot before one of the masters passed by. Even now he felt the panic of
hearing the lavatory door open, and Percy’s startled expression at the sight of him, red-faced and shirtless, with one trouser leg on and the other contorted in a stubborn lump.

Hiram had joined Robin on the low bridge to chuck pebbles into the murky water. Before long, they had worked their way up from pebbles to stones and from stones to broken pieces of brick and
concrete. They accompanied their attacks with ridiculous sound effects, the rat-a-tat-a-tat of machine-gun fire, the whistle of rockets and the hollow hum of V2s. Each successful strike was greeted
with cackles and a scuffle after fresh ammunition.

“Look, Holland,” called Hiram, after a while. “Look.”

Robin had clambered onto the highest ledge of the remaining wall and was brandishing a rock at the water.

“This is your captain calling,” he said through his other hand, which cupped an invisible loudspeaker to his mouth. “We have reported failure in both engines. Repeat: failure
in both engines…”

“That’s not funny,” said Hiram. “He’s going to kill Henry Cray.”

“Mayday! Mayday!”

“Cut it out, Littlejohn,” said Shields.

“
Che barba
,” groaned Cowper, who had been to Venice in the summer and now peppered his conversation with Italian to make the others feel small. Hughes belched loudly.

“It’s too late,” said Robin. “We’re done for. All hands on deck…”

The splash was disappointing. The others laughed as they turned their backs on the scene and began to wander up towards the towpath.

“Wait up, you lot,” cried Hiram, as he scrambled down from the bridge.

Barney wasn’t invited, and following them would have meant leaving Robin, who was now staring with a deflated look at the rippling water. The sound of leaves twisting on their branches
accentuated the silence.

“They’re hypocrites, the lot of them,” said Robin. He still hadn’t moved from his position on the ledge. “You only get taken seriously here once you’re dead.
Everyone wants a piece of him now – everyone wants to be his best friend-in-mourning. If you ask me, it’s sick.”

He dropped from the ledge onto the little bridge and walked across the brick walkway to Barney’s end of the pumping station.

“This place will always be a shit-hole,” Robin said. “The Krauts used Ormer as a brothel, you know. They diced up the bodies of their slave workers and used them to thicken the
concrete for the walls.” He crouched by the stream and cupped his hands in the water. “They’re all a bunch of rotters. Cowper’s a know-it-all prat who keeps Shields as a
hanger-on because it’s the only way he’ll get Shields to share from his tuck. Weeps is as wet as a full nappy. Opie’s thick as a plank. Hughes is downright revolting.” He
sighed. “Sometimes I wish that the Russians would just get it over with and bomb us out of history. There’s a fallout shelter in the woods, but it’s not half big enough for the
entire school. Sometimes I make a list in my head of the people I’d save, and the people I’d lock out.”

“Who’d you save?”

“Opie, I suppose. He’s so pathetic it would be cruel not to, and he’s got a heart murmur. And Morrell, because he’s the cleverest boy in the school. He’d be good to
have later on, once we’d survived the bomb.”

Barney nodded.

“Morrell’s in Tern, two years up,” said Robin. “Jonty – his brother – was there on D-Day. He stormed a German pillbox all on his own and took out four Krauts,
just like that. The whole company would have died if it hadn’t been for him.”

“So he came back? Jonty.”

“Do you think he’d have a plaque in the chapel if he had?”

“Oh.” Barney bent to tie his shoelaces. “I’ll bet your watch is here somewhere. If it’s heavy enough it would just sink to the bottom.”

A siren’s wail startled the cows from their spot of sunshine.

“Come on – Runcie will get testy if he sees the others back before us,” Robin said. “We’re not supposed to be out in groups smaller than three.”

Emerging from the forest gloom, they followed the path as it bent away from the river. They did not notice the housemaster’s eldest daughter, now standing ankle-deep in one of the rock
pools, poking at something in the water with a long, bent stick.

Swift dropped the spoon into the saucer and leant back in his chair, reaching for the stack of papers he’d brought with him. They were sitting in the atrium beneath the
inglenook fireplace. Recognizing the contrived camaraderie of a master sharing a pot of tea with his student, a pair of boys heading towards the dining hall exchanged grimaces. Already the
institutional smell of cream-of-tomato soup had begun to waft up the kitchen stairs.

“
Les Peintures murales de Çatal Höyük
,” read Swift, withdrawing a single page from the stack. “By Ivor Morrell, Esq.” He dumped it on the low
table by the teapot. A handful of words, pencilled in angular, schoolboy cursive, showed through the thicket of red lines. Ivor opened his mouth to say something when the crash of books on floor
tiles made them both look up. A junior boy was standing in the middle of the atrium, staring dejectedly at a pile of Latin primers strewn about his feet.

“Buck up, Tooley,” said Ivor. “What a dreadful butterfingers you are.”

Blushing, the boy began to collect the books.

“Morrell,” said Swift. “That’s enough.”

“You were saying, sir? About my paper.”

“Frankly, Morrell, I found it rather
déplaisant
.” Swift reached for his tea, sipped and returned the cup to its saucer. “You need to watch your use of the
pluperfect. Particularly in the section about the
déesse des volcans.
Who, I might add, sounds rather less like Graves’s poetic muse and rather more like something out of a
penny dreadful.”

“Sir.” Ivor stirred his tea.

“Well, then,” Swift continued, leaning back in his chair and smoothing his hair with the palm of one hand. “I take it from your reflection paper that you enjoyed
des bonnes
vacances
…”

An explosion of laughter sounded down the hallway, followed by a patter of footsteps. Two laundresses wheeled a linen trunk across the atrium, stifling giggles when they noticed they had
attracted glances from the French master and his pupil.

Ivor continued stirring his tea, concentrating on building a riptide against the current with his spoon. The laundresses were plain-faced girls, their features already taking on the same pasty
cast as their mothers and grandmothers. None of the island girls who came to work at the school had yet managed to snare a sixth-former, although that wasn’t to say it would never happen.
Right now these two had contrived a reason to stop the trunk and fiddle with one of the wheels, which had turned askew. The younger one couldn’t have been older than Ivor himself, and she
threw quick, ostensibly surreptitious glances in his direction from where she knelt behind the trunk. Her companion widened her eyes and snorted back a fresh eruption of laughter.

The boy must have been aware that he was attractive to them. Shyness was not the problem, noted Swift. There was disdain in his posture; distaste in the grim line of his mouth.

“
Et ta mère?
She is well, I hope?”

At last the laundresses moved off, and Ivor leant back in his chair. “
Beaucoup mieux
.
”
He swallowed. “Apart from the seizures and the melancholy, sir. And the
drink.”

Swift leant forward and said in a low voice, “Morrell. That kind of talk doesn’t do anyone any good, now, does it?”

“No, sir, it doesn’t.”

They drank studiously, ignoring the dinner bell as though to acknowledge it might betray some kind of weakness. At last, Swift said, “
Ça suffit
, Morrell.”

“Thank you, sir.” He set about collecting the tea things onto a tray to return to the kitchen – languidly, to show that he didn’t mind missing out on the freshest rolls
or bagging a seat nearest to the buttery. Such concerns were for junior boys, not for Medes.

“Oh, and Morrell: see Matron about a haircut, would you? Before chapel tomorrow.”

When he had gone, Swift bundled the stack of holiday papers under one arm and returned to his attic set in Medlar House. As a student, he had boarded at Ormer, and he had been
relieved to be assigned to a different boarding house when he returned as a master. His rooms were above the dormitories, so he was not bothered by the noise of pillow fights and scuffles over
toothpaste and undeclared tuck; he could choose not to hear raids between neighbouring dormitories unless there was sufficient commotion to risk disturbing Mr Runcie, whose rooms were on the ground
floor. In his little attic empire with the dormer windows framing two squares of sky, he might have been anywhere, far from here.