Silent Noon (12 page)

She smiled wanly. “I’ll be fine, Daddy. I just need some water and a little quiet.”

He watched her trudge up the slope towards the drive, arms hugged across her chest, skirting a crowd of juniors. There was Hughes, who had boils lanced every half-term, and the inseparable
Shields and Cowper. Behind them was sloe-eyed Littlejohn and the new lad, Holland. Both were leaning back on the cold grass, not speaking, their fingers almost touching. Flood took a step forward.
Was it Holland’s hand that was searching out Littlejohn’s? Hard to say, in this light.
So that’s how it is
, he thought. Just as well that Runcie wasn’t on to them,
or he’d make a bloody show of it in front of the entire Second Form. Still, it wasn’t the sort of thing he could ignore – and so he wandered along the edge of the pitch until he
was within shouting distance of the two.

“Holland!” he barked. “What’s happened to your jacket, boy?”

The lad turned with a start, tucking both hands beneath his knees. “It’s inside, sir,” he replied.

“Well, go and get it, then,” ordered Flood. “What were you thinking, coming out in shirtsleeves at this time of year?”

“Sir,” said the boy, scrambling to his feet. He said something to Littlejohn, who laughed, before scuttling up the slope towards the drive.

As he disappeared into the crowd, the first of the fireworks cut a tear through the starless sky.

On the drive, Belinda passed Matron and two maids carrying trays of rum cocoa to the masters on the lower pitch. It would take them at least ten minutes to reach the field, and
another ten to return, and in between no doubt they would pause to admire the fireworks and partake of a drink to warm up. The kitchens would still be open, and empty.

She did not begin to suspect that she was being followed until she was halfway down the basement staircase. Hers were the only footsteps on the stone floor, but a shuffling noise, the sound of
breath nervously restricted, made her pause. Then she remembered what her father had said about the kitchen mice – a couple of them had multiplied to entire tribes of rodents, too many even
for Doc Dower to eradicate with his cricket bat – and forced herself to carry on. She was not afraid of mice.

It was only as she leant upon the heavy kitchen door that something spun her hard against the wall so that for a moment she was winded, incapable of making a sound. The corridor was unlit, the
figure before her shrouded in submarine shadows, and before Belinda could protest she was shoved into an adjoining room. By the powdery smell she knew it must be the laundry – she felt with
blind fingers the slats of the airing cupboard – but whereas the kitchen had been alight with electric lamps, this room was quite dark. Her knees were knocked from behind and buckled –
she fell forward, landing on a pile of sheets.

“You can hit me properly this time,” said Cowper. “Or is it not as much fun without an audience?”

Using her own movement against her as she twisted against his grasp, he flipped her so that her face was pressed into the sheets. As if by instinct she knew that if she went limp, rather than
rigid, she would feel like a corpse to him, numb. The smell of her own breath hit her through the linen. She gripped his wrists, but did not try to push him away. Frustrated by this refusal to
struggle, he used his lower half to pin her down. Then he pressed his mouth against her neck and whispered, “But you’re not half a mutt.”

He released her. She waited for another blow, but all she could hear was the sound of his footsteps on the stone slabs and the door closing.

She lay in the darkness for several minutes, waiting for her heart to stop thumping, and then crept to the door. He would have been a fool to lock her in – but still, it was a relief to
feel the handle yield under her hand, to step into the corridor and see the lights on in the kitchen.

Morrell brought lemonade, a chocolate cake and something in a flask; Barney a canister of Van Houten’s Cocoa nicked from Shields’s stash and half a box of stick-jaw
Robin hadn’t wanted. They had been sharing a cigarette as they waited, hungrily filling their cheeks and breathing clouds at each other through the frosty air. The girl was late.

When at last she emerged from the antechamber into the candle-lit bunker, she seemed to have arrived empty-handed. She registered the boys from the doorway before ducking out and returning with
a basket.

“It’s a bit of a jumble,” she said, without a hint of apology. “I had to pinch a few things from the kitchen.”

Barney reached for the basket: pilchards in oil, liver paste, jellied ham, tinned pineapple. He hesitated, feeling Ivor’s gaze.

“Honestly,” Ivor said. He flipped a penknife from his coat pocket. “Go on – you can serve me some of that armoured cow.”

“Serve yourself,” said Belinda. “Is that stick-jaw?”

Seeing Ivor’s surprise at this bald impudence, Barney braced himself for a reaction.

“We’ll toss for it,” said Ivor. “Heads I have it, tails you don’t.”

“I’m not stupid.”

“Halves, then.”

“It’s Holland’s, isn’t it? Let him decide.”

“You two go halves,” Barney said.

Belinda took the box from Ivor and broke off a piece while the other two watched. She tested the gold toffee with her teeth, the pink tip of her tongue curling around it, eyes screwed shut. Then
she popped the whole piece in her mouth and sucked down hard. In that moment, the atmosphere in the shelter transformed. Even Ivor’s authority seemed suddenly equivocal.

“We were waiting for you for ages,” he said, watching her reach for the cake.

The girl kissed chocolate crumbs from one finger.

“Half expected you wouldn’t turn up,” Ivor continued.

Belinda looked at him. “I ran into the ghost coming out of the kitchen,” she said.

Both boys laughed, although Barney found he had to think about it first. Ivor took the penknife from him and stabbed at the tinned pineapple.

“Did you, now?” he said, turning the tin in one hand. “Seems to me you have a knack for things with a whiff of death about them.”

The girl’s face closed into a hard look. “What’s that supposed to mean?” she said.

Ivor set the tin down. “Digging up school skeletons,” he said. Barney held his breath, but Belinda only looked frightened for an instant.

“Oh, that,” she said, hardly moving, even though their knees were now touching and Ivor had pinned a corner of her dress to the bench with the heel of his hand. “You can get
into the old kitchens through the cellar door. Mrs Kenney told my mother that her dad had buried some fish knives there, so I thought I’d see if I could find them.”

“Must have been some surprise.”

“Mother says plenty of tiny babies died during the war because there wasn’t enough milk and their mothers were all half starved. It was horrible. It looked like an alien.”

“More horrible than seeing a ghost?”

“Of course.” She shifted, tugging her dress out from under him, and took another bite of cake. “The ghost is harmless. It’s only the boys who are frightened of
him.”

“What did he say?” asked Barney, unscrewing the cap on a thermos for the cocoa.

“He doesn’t say anything. He flutters.” She watched them sternly. “He’s trapped in the walls where the doorway’s been filled in.”

For a moment they were silent, listening to the distant crump of fireworks and the rustle of dry leaves against the outside door. One of the candles had started to gutter, spitting wax as it
melted in on itself, and Ivor squeezed the flame out with his moistened fingertips. There were now just two candles left on the table they had set up in the centre of the shelter. The corner by the
sealed door remained dark.

“Robin told me rotten stuff goes on down there,” said Barney at last. “In the laundries.”

“One time,” started Belinda, “the other girls tried a seance. It was a bit like this, with the candles, only it was in our dormitory, so it wasn’t terribly frightening.
My friend Joyce told us we could raise the Devil by saying the Lord’s Prayer backwards.
Amen, ever and ever for, evil from us deliver
—”

“That’s stupid,” said Barney.

Belinda nodded. “I know,” she said. “They tried to levitate one girl, but she was so fat they only manage to shift her leg a bit. It was obvious she was bluffing,
anyway.”

“Girls,” said Ivor.

“They liked scaring each other,” said Belinda. “Passing around a peeled grape after lights-out and saying it was a dead man’s eye. There was one mistress, Miss Albert,
who was supposed to have seen a ghost once, and if she thought you were trustworthy she’d tell you about it, but only once you were in the Sixth. But Miss Albert was always making things up.
She wrote a filthy book, too, once.” She tossed her head. “The ghost story was just for attention, of course. None of it was real.”

“But you believe in ghosts?” asked Ivor.

“I’ve heard the fluttering in the basement corridor. Once I felt something poke me in the back, like a thorn.”

“The Cruel Mother felt a thorn in her back,” said Barney. “In the song. She murders the baby with a knife. When she gets home she sees his ghost and he sends her to
hell.”

Ivor turned to Belinda. “Does that sound like the ghost you heard?”

“The ghost in the basement corridor is a man,” she said. “Haven’t you been down there yourself?”

“Robin has,” began Barney. “Robin says—”

“Shut up, Holland,” snapped Ivor. He passed the tinned pineapple to Belinda, who dug out a piece with her fingers. “And you weren’t frightened?” he said.

“Should I have been?” she asked – and for an instant Barney heard a flicker of coyness in her voice, something older than her years.

Ivor unscrewed the cap from the flask and used it as a cup for a splash of the brownish liquid inside.

“Is that brandy?” she asked.

“How did you guess?”

“My mum keeps a bottle of cognac in our kitchen cupboard, behind the spice rack.”

Barney watched Ivor sip the excess from the brim of the cap and offer it to the girl, who shook her head. “It smells horrible.”

“It’s a very fine brandy, this. Holland?”

Barney took the cap, feeling he’d be in trouble if he didn’t. The liquid made his tongue burn, but he handed the emptied cap back to the other boy with an appreciative grunt.

“Lady Flood’s fond of a tipple, then?” asked Ivor. “Bored, is she? Lonely? That’s what women are always saying.”

“Mainly when Daddy’s not about. She hates this place.”

“The school?”

“The whole island. She cries when she thinks no one is around. I caught her just the other day, coming out of the loo. She wishes we’d stayed in England after the war. She used to
drive ambulances, you know.”

The pineapple was finished now, and there was only a corner of cake left. Barney looked at the empty toffee box with pride, feeling that he’d pulled his weight. No one seemed interested in
the pilchards, so Ivor passed another capful of the brandy around. This time Belinda took a sip, pulling a face and declaring it vile as soon as she could speak.

“Tell us about your school,” said Ivor. “Do you miss it much?”

“Hardly.”

“You must have had friends.”

Seating companions, dormitory buddies, tennis partners, agents to collect birthday donations in a pillowcase after lights-out. In an environment where friendship was too often reduced to
expressions of loyalty, her only ally had been a muckle-mouthed girl who wasn’t allowed to attend dance lessons because of a heart condition – one of those children who always seemed to
be suffering from some kind of affliction: a sprained ankle or ingrown toenail or earache brought on by damp. Joyce had irritated Belinda, because she acted young for her age – she still read
Girl
magazines and could be reduced to tears by someone stirring the jam into her rice pudding so that the milk turned pink.

“Not really.”

“Pashes, then? What about the older ones?”

“Don’t be stupid. Most of the girls were horrible,” Belinda said.

“Well, then, what about you?”

“A m I in trouble here too?”

“Certainly not,” Ivor said. He made a show of collecting the empty tins, fitting one inside the other, and Barney wondered if he was thinking of a way to ask her about her midnight
trip to the rock pools. Before he could, she spoke again.

“Your brother liberated one of the concentration camps, didn’t he?” she said. “I heard he shot a captured German just for looking at him.”

“He didn’t make it to the camps,” said Ivor.

“In that case, someone should tell the First Form.” Unrepentant, Belinda fixed him with a knowing look. “My dad says you can’t decide what to do with your brains, so you
do nothing.”

“Does he?” Ivor looked pleased. “Well, you might cut Holland some slack. He’s come to take Henry Cray’s place.”

“I think it’s best to die young,” said Belinda. “Not that young, though.”

“Anyone who wants to die young is bound to live for a very long time,” said Morrell. “You’ll live to a grand old age. I predict at least three children and a brood of
grandchildren, if you’re terribly unlucky.”

“I can think of at least one person I wouldn’t mind disappearing,” said Belinda to Barney. “That brute in our year.”

“Cowper? He was just messing about the other day. I don’t think he meant to cut your hair. It wasn’t that much, anyway.”

“That’s easy for you to say. At least you’ve made friends here. The funny one—”

“Opie,” said Barney.

“—and what’s-his-name. Little—”

“Littlejohn.”

Belinda nodded. “You were watching him in maths this morning,” she said.

Barney felt his neck grow hot. She began to speak, and then seemed to think better of it. “Is that a poem?” she asked, pointing to the words on the wall behind Barney’s
head.

The lines followed the concrete bulge, appearing to have emerged through the plaster by mysterious alchemy. Belinda moved closer, holding one of the candles to the wall.