Silent Noon (5 page)

Running both thumbs around the inside of his belt, he said, “Holland, is it?”

“Sir.”

“Let’s put you where I can keep an eye on you, what?”

The giant indicated a seat in the front row. As Barney sat, there was a hush of anticipation and delight: the girl from the stairwell had appeared in the doorway. The tips of her ears had turned
a brilliant red.

“There’s a spot behind Holland,” said Dower. “You’ll have no difficulty keeping up with this lot. Still making a hash of linear equations, aren’t we,
gentlemen?”

No sooner had Barney copied down the first sum than a crumpled ball of paper landed on his desk. Shields was glaring at him, shooting out his lip and indicating with jerks of the head that the
message had been intended for Cowper. Barney balled the paper in his fist and let it fall at his feet. When he was sure that Dower’s attention was focused on the boy at the board, he gave the
paper a kick. After a while, another scrunched-up ball landed on his desk.

Barney squashed the paper in his fist and propped his head on his knuckles, pretending to be lost in thought while twisting to steal a glance at the desk behind him. The girl
was sitting with one elbow propped on her open book, chewing the end of a pencil, which she held between two fingers like a cigarette holder. Scrubbed and scentless, she was an anomaly among bodies
that smelt of sweat, grass clots and burnt porridge skin; her stillness rankled.

Barney’s gaze drifted across the tops of heads clipped short and parted smartly to the side to where Hiram and Robin sat in the back row. The smaller boy was hunched over his book, tongue
poking out of the side of his mouth. Robin was staring out of the window at the pampas grass that bowed and swung in the late-summer breeze, idly tapping a pencil against his teeth.

“Eyes front, Holland. Have you finished?”

“Sir.”

Doc Dower rose from his desk and wandered over to look at Barney’s work.

“That’s a vertical line, Holland. It has an undefined slope, what?”

“Sir.” Now he had a closer view of grey hairs bristling from the master’s large, drooping ears; of his pockmarked nose and magnified, watery eyes – and Barney wondered
what it was that made him so popular among the boys. Maybe it was his cultivated brusqueness, or the knowledge that this fearsome giant was partial to Gracie Fields and Lam-Dong tea.

“It’s straight, boy, straight up and down. Like a telegraph pole, what? Erect.”

Behind him, Shields muffled a snort of laughter which quickly developed into a protracted coughing spell.

“So what’s that
m
doing in here? A
x
plus B
y
makes…”

“
Stultior quam asinus
,” muttered Shields.

“Anybody?”

“C, sir.”

“Quite right, Cowper.” Doc Dower straightened, tugging at his belt again. “I’d suggest you complete the questions in Chapter Two for Friday, Holland. Cowper will help you
in prep. What, Cowper?”

“Sir.”

The master returned to his desk, and Cowper shot Barney a poisonous look.

“Books away, gentlemen. I can tell the grey matter is in need of a good stretch after a summer of inertia. Hands on desks.” Doc Dower began to pace up and down the rows, leaving a
trail of musk – a sour smell edged with tobacco. “A thousand rabbits inhabit two hundred acres of land. In January, twenty-five rabbits die of myxomatosis. Thereafter, one in every five
rabbits is infected each month. At the end of the year, how many rabbits might I expect to find on a fifty-acre area?”

A boy in the middle of the room raised his hand.

“What is it, Fairborough? Sit up when you ask a question, boy.”

“Do all the infected rabbits die, sir?”

“So they do, the unfortunate beggars.”

“And don’t they ever reproduce, sir? Isn’t that what rabbits are known for, sir?”

Glances were thrown at the girl in the corner. Doc Dower removed his spectacles and used the end of his tie to remove a smudge from one of the lenses. “Littlejohn! What about
you?”

A bell rang, and there was a sudden scuffle of twenty bodies jostling to unpack desks. Over the din the housemaster barked, “Will you be joining us at morning notices, Miss
Flood?”

The room fell quiet again. Cowper, who had already reached the door, began to whistle ‘She Wears Red Feathers’, while Shields mimed a hula behind Doc’s back.

“Mr Pleming told me to see his secretary first,” answered the girl, in a voice so small Barney had to hold his breath to make out the words.

“Quite right. If you come with me we might avoid getting tangled up with this lot, what?”

There was not time to tell whether her smile expressed relief or disappointment. She rose and, pressing her books to her chest, followed Doc Dower into the corridor.

“Fancy that,” said Robin, as they joined the tide of bodies flooding towards the atrium. “A VIP. Just you watch the special treatment she’ll get.”

Barney thought he sounded just like Spike, who never made any bones about the fact that Mum had always behaved as though she deserved better than she got. It had been wicked to say that the
bombing had been exciting: watching the sky light up and swarm with planes, waiting for death to rain from the air. Mum used to boast about the night she left Barney in a dustbin, when there
hadn’t been time to run for the shelter. She’d been disappointed, years later, when she asked him if he could remember any of it, and he was forced to admit that he couldn’t. And
because the war was the one thing that they should have been able to share, his mother had resented this, just as she had resented the boredom and indignity of being poor in peacetime.

Watching the girl’s moss-green tunic disappear into a sea of grey wool, Barney wondered what it was that she had left behind, and whether she, too, resented her place here, among them.

“Who’s Spike?”

Barney shoved the letter into its envelope, wondering how long Robin had been reading over his shoulder.

“My dad.”

“You call him Spike?”

“That’s his name.” Robin grunted, but Barney could tell he was impressed. “He’s my stepdad, actually.”

“Oh. No, don’t do that…” Robin reached out and Barney froze, the tip of his tongue grazing the dry envelope glue. “Runcie seals them. You put it on the pile up at
the front.”

Barney considered the letter in his hand.

“You go on – I just need another minute,” he told Robin.

But Robin showed no sign of leaving. Instead, he propped himself against the corner of the desk as Barney blacked out some bits. “So your mum remarried?”

There wasn’t much point in admitting that there had never been a ceremony. “After the war.”

“What happened to your old man?”

“He died in Burma.”

“Hard luck.”

“It’s all right.” Barney eyed the letter in Robin’s hand. He was turning it along the edges against his knee, the corners pressing white spots in the skin. Outside, a
thin rain had begun to hiss on the gravel drive.

“My dad was at Dunkirk,” said Robin. “Well, almost. He got out just before. Supposedly, they stuck him in a desk job for the war, but really it was Intelligence –
he’s just not allowed to say so. He knew someone who won a Victoria Cross.”

“That’s not bad.”

“So why’d you address it just to him? Do you write to them separately?”

“My mum’s in South Africa at the moment.”

“What, on safari?”

“No, you drip. In Cape Town.” Robin continued turning the letter on his knee. “She’s gone away for the air. She’ll be back for the holidays.”

“Long way to go for the air. My mum says Thorpeness has the best air anywhere. It’s expensive, though. My uncle’s friend has a house there. It’s a lot closer than
Africa.”

“She has family there.” Barney pushed his chair out from the desk, sensing that Robin wanted to be impressed. “The air in London kills people, you know.” Back home, the
soot from coal fires mingled with bus exhaust and tobacco fumes to stain the buildings grey. Pigeons with stumps for feet where their toes had been burnt off on electric wires primped at wings made
black and greasy by the filth.

“I’ve heard everyone eats snoek there,” said Robin. “Fresh, though. Have you been to Africa, then?”

“I’m going soon. Next year, perhaps.”

“But you haven’t been before?”

“No.”

They wandered up to the front and deposited their letters on the pile that had begun to accumulate on Runcie’s desk. The housemaster smiled at Barney.

“Going for any teams, are we, Holland?”

“I don’t think so, sir. Not unless there’s football, sir.”

“Shame, that. I suppose it will have to be cross-country, then. Mr Swift takes the runners. I’ll let him know to expect you on Tuesday, shall I?”

“Swift’s a slave driver,” said Robin as soon as they were outside. “He leads runs right down to the sea and back up across the chalk ridge. Four miles, sometimes five at
a go. You only have to look at that chest to know he has a horse’s lungs. Are you fit?”

“I can handle it all right.”

“It’s harder for smokers,” continued Robin. “Here’s a tip: the first circuit starts outside Tern. They cut through a footpath in the woods towards the main road. If
you’re anything like me, you’ll be shagged out pretty fast. Swift will hang back to make sure none of the stragglers try to duck off. The trick is to keep yourself slightly ahead of the
slowest ones, but not so far ahead that everyone’s watching you. That way, no one will notice if you slip off to the bunker. You can’t miss it – big concrete thing with a metal
roof.” Robin slung his arm through Barney’s. “Morrell used to do it all the time. You hang around for half an hour or so, then you rejoin the group on the way back.”

He had already been warned about the horrors that awaited him on the chalk ridge – biting insects and tall grass that left razor marks on the boys’ bare legs –
but it was the pain in his chest which made Barney pay attention to opportunities for escape. On the approach to the woods, exactly as Robin had predicted, Swift fell back to bark at a cluster of
first-formers beginning to wheeze and complain of cramp. Three Medes had already taken off into the distance. Staggering his position towards the back of the main group, Barney saw that Swift and
the younger ones were still a good fifty yards behind. By then, he had already spotted the glint of corrugated steel through the trees.

The bunker was larger than an Anderson shelter and roofed with galvanized panelling that sloped to shoulder height. Barney dropped to his knees and waited, pressing his hands against the cool
concrete wall as he listened to the patter of feet squelching through wet leaves. There was a silence as the middle group disappeared over the hill – then fresh footfall as the younger boys
shuffled past.

“Jocelyn! Vickers! West!” Swift bellowed. “You have until the count of three to get to the top of that hill, or else you’ll be doing circuits tonight…”

Within moments, they had gone too. The bunker’s outer door had been left on the latch and swung to with very little effort. Inside, just a few feet on, was another, heavier door.

“You can’t get in that way.”

Behind him stood one of the Medes who’d left the rest of the group behind earlier in the run. He had black hair combed to a dovetail and a crooked mouth. He was picking at his teeth with a
twig. Barney tried not to stare. Robin had told him that younger boys were not supposed to smile at seniors.

“You have to use the other door,” the older boy said. “This one’s sealed shut.”

“Right. Sorry.”

“You don’t need to apologize.” He stepped onto a log and held his balance, gripping with plimsolled feet. “So why’d you bunk off the run?”

“I was getting tired.”

“Course you were.”

Barney bristled. “What about you?”

The other boy slid off the log and wandered around the side of the bunker. “I don’t give a damn,” he said. “Swift’s a twat. Anyone who comes back to teach at the
school where he was a student is a twat, if you ask me. Want to see inside?”

The air within the shelter was cool and dank. Because the entrances were built at right angles to the main chamber, even with one door fully open the farthest reaches remained in darkness.
Floorboards creaked as the two made their way inside. After a moment, Barney heard the switch of a match being struck. He turned to see the older boy holding a cigarette between his lips.