Noonday

ELEVEN

Neville answered the door half naked and slightly drunk. The former was a surprise.

“Tarrant!” He sounded startled, even a little put out, although it was he who’d suggested the meeting.

“I’m not early, am I?”

“No, sorry. Fell asleep in the bath.”

He led the way across the hall, Paul following a trail of wet footprints, averting his gaze from the gyrations of Neville’s arse under the damp towel. The hall was lit by a small window, taped against blast, letting in only a dim, stripy light, through which Neville padded like a huge, pink tiger.

Opening a door on the left, he showed Paul into the drawing room, before continuing up the stairs, in search — Paul devoutly hoped — of clothes.

Left alone, Paul looked around the room, his gaze as always drawn first to the paintings. Several good landscapes: the one above the mantelpiece—Dunstanburgh Castle at Sunset—was particularly fine. He thought he could identify the exact spot the painter had been standing on. In 1920, a war artist without a war, he’d spent a month in Northumberland scratting and scraping about for inspiration — and not finding it, in Dunstanburgh or anywhere else, not for a long, long time. Meanwhile, Neville, the minute he was released from hospital, left for America in a blaze of publicity. No hesitation, no groping about for inspiration there. Within a couple of years, every boardroom in Chicago and New York seemed to have one or other of Neville’s “vibrant,” “challenging,” “futuristic” cityscapes hanging on the wall. Mind, he hadn’t been doing so well recently. Of course, his Great War paintings still hung in galleries alongside Paul’s own, but he wasn’t getting much critical attention these days. In fact, he was probably better known to the younger generation as a critic than an artist. Paul’s reputation as a painter was higher than Neville’s now, though they did share a problem: their best work — at least their best-known work — was behind them. It was a strange predicament, to be remembered for what everybody else was trying to forget.

“We should’ve got ourselves killed,” Neville had said, bitterly, more than once. “They’d be all over us then.”

On the mantelpiece, there was a framed photograph of a little girl, five or six years old: Neville’s daughter, presumably. Anne, was it? No resemblance to Neville, or none that he could see, but then he’d almost forgotten what Neville looked like. Used to look like. No photograph of Catherine, and he thought he remembered somebody saying they were separated. Where had he heard that?

Feeling suddenly that he was prying, he turned his back on the fireplace and looked around. A pleasant, slightly old-fashioned room, comfortable chairs and sofas: nothing wrong with any of it. Though he couldn’t see much trace of Neville’s own taste. The one discordant note was a broken blind, which drooped like a half-shut eyelid, making the room look as if it had suffered a stroke.

Footsteps on the landing. A second later, Neville appeared in the doorway, more or less dressed, though still without a tie and bringing with him a swimming-baths smell of damp skinfolds and wet hair.

“Sorry about that. Just nodded off.”

“Bad night?”

“Busy.” He went straight to the drinks table. “Whisky?”

Paul nodded. “I’ve just been admiring your paintings.”

“Job lot, I’m afraid. Dad used to collect them.”

Job lot? Unless he was very much mistaken the one above the fireplace was a Turner. “I painted Dunstanburgh Castle once.”

“Any good?”

“Not really.”

“I keep meaning to get rid of them, but nothing goes for anything these days; I’d be giving them away.” He handed Paul a glass. “Same with the house, I wouldn’t mind selling it, but…”

Paul looked at the ceiling. “You must rattle around a bit.”

“I do.”

“Catherine not coming over?”

“No, she’ll stay in America.”

“You must miss them.”

“I miss Anne.”

Ah.

A slightly awkward pause. Then Neville said: “Tell you what I’ve got that might interest you.”

He led the way across the hall into a small study. Above the desk hung a framed pastel portrait of Neville himself, though not Neville as he was now — as he had been when he returned from France in 1917. Striving for some kind of objectivity, Paul looked at the drawing.

An eye like a dying sun sank beneath the rim of a shattered cheekbone, the lips were pulled back to reveal teeth like stumps of dead trees, and right at the center, where the nose should have been, a crater gaped wide. This was less a face than a landscape: a landscape Paul knew very well.

Neville stood, four-square, nursing his glass. “Best thing Tonks ever did, those portraits.”

“How did you get it?”

“From Tonks, he gave it to me. I don’t think it was his to give, actually; I think it belongs to the War Office. But…” He shrugged. “I suppose he just stretched the rules.”

“Kind of him.”

“Yes, very. Normally all you got was a couple of photographs. Fact, I think I’ve still got mine somewhere…”

The vagueness was a pretense. He went straight to the top-left-hand drawer of the desk, took two photographs out of a brown envelope and handed them across. Paul looked down. One profile, one full face — both utterly shocking. He looked up and found Neville watching him. Keeping his face carefully expressionless, he handed them back. “This was a parting present?”

“Yes, I think they’re meant for if you go in a pub and some silly cow chokes on her drink, you know? You’re supposed to whip them out of your pocket, point at your face and say: ‘You think this is bad, love? Well, just look what they started with.’ ”

“It is remarkable, you know, what they did.”

The surgeons, he meant. Was that the right thing to say? Well, if the pursing of Neville’s lips was anything to go by — no, it most certainly was not. Paul handed the photographs back. This had been a rather disconcerting episode. It was a relief when Neville led the way back into the drawing room.

“So, what have you been up to?” Neville asked, settling himself into an armchair.

“Oh, you know…Working quite hard.”

“Painting?”

“Aeroplanes, you know, dogfights, that sort of thing.”

“Yes, I believe I’ve seen some of your recent stuff. Vapor trails?”

Why was it, when Neville said “vapor,” Paul heard “vapid”? Because Neville bloody well meant him to, that’s why.

A silver clock on the mantelpiece began to chime. Immediately, Neville put his glass down. “Blackout.”

He crossed to the windows and began pulling down blinds, each tug of the cords contributing to a premature descent of night until finally only a sliver of sunlight remained. Paul felt a small stab of grief as that, too, was extinguished.

Neville was now merely a moving column of deeper shadow. There was a rasp to his breathing, a side effect of surgery, perhaps; you noticed it more in the dark. He was going from table to table, switching on lamps. As he bent over a side table near Paul’s chair every scar and suture line showed. And yet what Paul had just said was true: the surgeons had done a remarkable job.

Only it was not his face, just as this was not his room.

“So…” Neville picked up his glass. “Where were we?”

Starting to needle each other, Paul thought. Painting wasn’t a safe area. Yes, it was what they had in common, but it was also what divided them. Time for a change of subject. “I had a rather strange experience this afternoon. I think I met the Witch of Endor…”

Quickly, he told Neville about his meeting with the fat woman in Russell Square, emphasizing the absurdity of the occasion, recounting it, more or less, as a joke against himself.

Neville was amused, but he was also good at detecting pain. “Well,” he said, when Paul had finished, “she certainly got you rattled.”

“No—”

“Oh, come on.”

“No, really; actually, I felt quite sorry for her.”

“I don’t see why. I mean, you say yourself she was describing the boy you were looking at. She just picked up on it, that’s all. She was obviously having you on.”

“But that’s just it, you see, I’m not sure she was. Oh, I’m not saying she actually saw anything but…Oh, I don’t know. She was…she was…doing something—and I’m not quite sure what it was.”

“I suppose the real question is, why have you suddenly got interested in boys?”

Paul didn’t want to talk about Kenny but he could see an explanation was required, and once he’d started it was surprisingly easy to go on. When, at last, he stopped, Neville said, “There’s no doubt he’s dead?”

“None at all. Nobody got out.”

“Still, you mustn’t let that woman get to you.”

“I don’t think she was trying to, to be fair.”

“Oh, of course she was! If you’d gone along with it she’d have been asking for money in no time at all. I can’t stand the way these people crawl out of the woodwork whenever there’s a war on, battening on people’s grief — it’s horrible. Do you know, my mother used to hold seances in the last war — in the dining room just along there. And I mean she was a highly intelligent woman, very forward-thinking in all kinds of ways, and yet she couldn’t seem to see through it. I actually went to one of them—” He shuddered. “Appalling stuff. ‘Auntie Maud likes your curtains.’ I’m glad I didn’t die, it would’ve been me coming back to say I liked the curtains. You don’t seriously think—?” He threw up his hands in disgust. “It’s all fraud.”

He came over to refill Paul’s glass. As he bent down, the lamp threw his shadow across the far wall. Bull neck, massive shoulders, a whiff of the Minotaur’s stable. The beast in the brain. But it wasn’t just his physical bulk. It was that impression of baffled pain. An animal’s pain. That invitation to go and see the Tonks portrait had been decidedly odd. It was almost as if he’d been reaching out, trying to get past the rivalry that had always prevented them from being, in any simple or uncomplicated way, friends.

No sooner had he finished pouring than the siren set up its nightly wail.

“What do you do in a raid?” Neville asked. “You know, if you’re not on duty?”

“I walk.”

“Not all night?”

“You might be surprised.”

“What does Elinor think about that?”

“Well, I don’t do it when she’s here.”

“We haven’t seen much of her recently.”

“No, she’s still in the country, helping her sister sort things out.”

The siren had stopped wailing. In its absence the silence of the deserted streets began to ooze through cracks in doors and window frames, a silence so deep the whisper of blood in your ears became more and more difficult to ignore. And then they heard it: that awful, desperate, edge-of-darkness buzzing, the sound a kettle makes when it’s about to boil dry.

“Ours,” Neville said.

“No, it’s not.”

And immediately, from Hampstead Heath close by, came the hysterical yapping of the guns. A thud, followed by another, closer, the end of the next street, perhaps. Above their heads, the chandelier gave out a soft, silvery chime.

Paul said, “You need to get that bloody thing bagged up.”

“Spoken like a true air-raid warden.” Neville got to his feet. “Well, unless you want to stay inside…?”

“I never want to stay in.”

In the hall, there was a brief hiatus as Neville fumbled for his keys. Paul was starting to feel dizzy again. He’d been suffering from episodes of vertigo ever since a particularly nasty bout of flu in January. Inflammation of the labyrinth, the doctor said. Nothing to worry about, he’d said, most people get over it quite quickly; only an unlucky few get stuck. It was beginning to look as if Paul was one of the few. The walls spun round him; Neville’s breath grated in his ears. He put a hand out to steady himself. Neville had switched the light out before he opened the door and, for some reason, the dizziness was always worse in the dark.

“Bloody key.”

He got the door open at last. They collected hats and gas masks from the hall table and stepped out into the noisy night.

—

THEY WERE SHOWN to a quiet table in the corner of the restaurant. Menus were produced, a bottle of wine ordered. It was all really rather pleasant, except Paul’s appetite seemed to have deserted him. The soup went down easily enough, but he struggled with the game pie, refused a pudding and merely picked at the cheese, content to let Neville do most of the talking. He could be very amusing, when he chose: scurrilous gossip about other painters, bizarre goings-on at the Ministry of Information…“Complete loony bin.”

“For God’s sake, keep your voice down.”

Neville looked round the room and shrugged. Nobody was paying them any attention, and actually, to be fair, he’d said virtually nothing about his work — while contriving to imply his contribution to the war effort was second only to Winston Churchill’s. But then — he was well into the second bottle by now — he embarked on a great rant about Kenneth Clark and the War Artists Advisory Committee. None of the commissioned artists had any talent whatsoever, not a glimmer. Moore, Sutherland, Piper: all rubbish. Clark was the problem, of course — Clark and his coterie of arse-licking toadies.

“He’s commissioned one or two women as well,” Paul said, hoping to divert the flow of bile.

“Elinor?”

“No, not yet, though—”

“Then she should think herself lucky. It’s an insult to be commissioned by that man.”

Paul was one of the people “that man” had insulted, but obviously it suited Neville to forget that. “Laura Knight, she’s—”

“Poisonous old bat.”

Paul gave up. Let him rant, if it made him feel better, but Neville seemed to have finished with Kenneth Clark, for the time being, at least. He glanced at Paul’s plate. “You’re not eating your cheese.”

“No, I’ve had enough.”

Immediately, a predatory fork descended and impaled the Cheddar. Neville munched in silence for a while.

Paul’s vertigo was getting worse. Fresh air, that’s what he needed, he’d be all right once he was outside, but the bill was a long time coming. When, finally, he staggered out into the street, the buildings started revolving around his head. He’d gone only a few paces when he found himself sitting on the pavement, trying not to be sick.

Neville stood over him. “You can’t be drunk.”

“Vertigo.”

Even the effort of saying the word made it worse. If only things would keep still. He fixed his gaze on a crack in the pavement and, for a moment, the spinning did slow down.

“Can you stand?” Neville offered Paul his hand and then, when that didn’t work, went behind and levered him to his feet. “Come on, my place. You need to get to bed.”

Slowly, with Neville’s help, Paul managed to take a few steps. He could walk, though he seemed to have only two paces: so slow he was threatening to sink into the ground, or so fast he was almost running. “Whoa!” Neville kept saying, as if to a skittish horse. Now he was drunk.

Blotched into a single shadow, they staggered from side to side in the road. Once, the wavering beam of a blackout torch came towards them, nothing of the man behind it visible except the hand holding the torch. An old man’s hand, with thick, raised, bluish-gray veins. “Good night!” he said. Seconds later, the murk swallowed him.

Not long after, they arrived back at the house. Neville lowered Paul into an armchair. “Well. That was a surprise.”

Unable to speak, Paul gripped the arms of the chair and willed the room to stop spinning. Neville stood looking down at him. “Who was the Witch of Endor anyway?”

“Saul,” he tried to say, but it came out as “sore.”

Immediately Neville’s fingers were round his throat. “Yes, it will be, your glands are up. Is there anything I can get you?”

“No, I’m all right, thanks.”

“Has it happened before?”

“Off and on since January. I had the flu and this started a few days later. But, you know, I’ve seen a doctor and he says it’s nothing to worry about. It’s just the room keeps spinning every time I move my head.”

“That’d worry me. Wouldn’t you be better off in bed?”

During the time he’d been sitting in the chair the spinning had slowed down, though he knew it would start again the moment he moved. It was tempting to stay where he was, even to sleep in the chair, but he knew Neville wouldn’t be happy leaving him downstairs on his own. “Yes, probably.”

With Neville behind him, pushing him every step of the way, he managed to get upstairs and across the landing into a guest room, where he immediately collapsed onto the bed. Neville’s voice came and went, now booming, now barely audible: the effect you can get by pressing your hands rhythmically against your ears. He remembered doing that in the hall at school, a small boy, lost and frightened, dumbfounded by the noise. In, out, loud, soft — and suddenly it was all right, everything was under control.

This wasn’t. He just prayed he wasn’t going to vomit all over the counterpane. Neville was pulling his shoes off now. Clunk: one of them hit the floor. And again: clunk. A blurry face bent over him. “You all right?”

This had gone on quite long enough. “Yes, thank you.” He enunciated the words with great precision, and immediately, as if in response to his efforts, Neville’s face swam into focus, though his voice still boomed and vanished. “I’ll be…door…don’t…if you…thing.”

Then he switched off the light, and Paul was left alone.