Noonday

FOURTEEN

Paul hated the Underground stations that had been turned into shelters. For a long time, the authorities had resisted using the Underground in this way, but after the destruction of the school in Agate Street, people took things into their own hands: they forced their way in. And so at night the Underground became almost indistinguishable from the underworld, with hundreds of people asleep or inert under their blankets. You had to clamber over them. And always, for Paul, there were memories of other tunnels: humped bodies in half-darkness, sleeping or dead. Increasingly, the two worlds — France, then; London, now — met and merged. It was a relief to escape the fetid darkness of the shelters into the tumult of the upper air.

Darkness was falling, a hot, clammy darkness that made it hard to breathe. He still didn’t feel well, though the dizziness had gone; and he was constantly afraid. He quickened his steps. The only solution to fear was other people. A few jokes, a game of cards, and things didn’t look quite so bad.

At the corner of Guilford Street, he bumped into Walter Harris, who was just going out on patrol.

“What’s happening?”

“Nothing much,” Walter said. “Very quiet.”

Incendiaries were drifting down like huge yellow peonies. The two of them stood at the center of a web of shadows, reluctant to part. People clung to each other these days, as if the mere fact of being known, recognized, addressed by name could protect you from the random destruction of bombs and blast. But after a few minutes, Walter ground his fag out, said, “So long”—nobody these days risked saying “Good-bye”—and set off in the direction of Russell Square.

As Paul turned the corner, he saw a stick of bombs come tumbling down the beam of a searchlight onto a building fifty yards ahead, an extraordinary sight, like a worm’s-eye view of somebody shitting. He was close enough to feel the blast wave suck at his eyeballs, but already he’d started to run, arriving on the scene in a smog of black smoke. Charlie Web was there and Brian Temple and shortly afterwards Nick Hendry came shambling up.

As Paul turned to greet him, there was another explosion farther down the street. The windows behind them shattered and they crouched down, shielding their faces and arms from a shower of broken glass. “Bloody hell,” Charlie said. “You all right, lad?” This was directed at Nick, who was looking more dazed than frightened.

Cautiously, Paul straightened up. The road was filling with civilians, swarming out of the burning buildings, many of them barefoot, treading on broken glass, impervious to pain. There must’ve been a shelter in one of the basements. Sandra Jobling, bent double, was leading a group out, waving at them to come on. Come on. There was another shelter not far away in Gray’s Inn Road, but it was going to be a terribly long walk for some of those people.

Within half an hour, Sandra was back. “All right, love?” Charlie asked. She nodded, without speaking. It was difficult to tell how she was, or how anybody was. They were all white with plaster dust, their eyelids crusted and inflamed. Nick was in a bad way. Charlie pointed to the basement of a nearby house. “There’s an old man lives down there, I think we ought to check on him.”

“No, he’s in hospital,” Brian Temple said.

“Nope, came out yesterday.”

Nobody questioned it: Charlie knew everything and everybody on his patch.

“Won’t he have gone to a shelter?” Paul asked.

“Can’t walk.”

“Bloody hell.”

They found him in the living room. Plaster had fallen from the ceiling and lay in clumps all over the floor, but the old man didn’t seem to be injured. He was sitting on the edge of a sofa bed, stick-thin, rodent-faced, a plastic bag full of urine dangling from his side, but as they helped him to the door he was positively cackling with triumph. Apparently, they’d told him in the hospital he might never walk again. “And look at me now.” He paused for breath, hanging on to Charlie’s arm. “Shows how much the fuckers know.”

“Oi, you, language.” Charlie jabbed his finger at Sandra. “Lady.”

“Sorry, love. Didn’t see you.”

Sandra smiled. “ ’S’all right.”

“Thought she was a lad,” they heard him say, as Charlie pushed his skinny arse up the stairs. “They all wear trousers these days, you can’t tell hes from shes.”

They got him into one of the ambulances that had drawn up on the other side of the road and were just turning away when somebody said there was a man trapped on the second floor of a building farther down the street. “Why the fuck wasn’t he in a shelter?” Brian asked. It didn’t matter why; they still had to go in. Inside, there was total devastation, illuminated at intervals by flares that shone through the broken windows. A crater, twenty feet deep, had opened up at the center of the building and they were having to edge around its rim. “Like that school in Agate Street,” Brian said. Twenty yards farther on, they heard a slithering thump, exactly like snow falling off a roof in a rapid thaw. They looked at each other, as the seconds ticked past. Charlie had stopped, mid-stride, one hand raised. He seemed to be on the point of turning back, but then he lowered his hand and they started to move forward again.

They found a man on the first-floor landing, his head and shoulders sticking out of the rubble, eyes glazed, that unmistakable look of nobody at home. But was this the man they’d been told about, or was there somebody else? No way of knowing. Charlie decided to press on. Paul swept the torch from side to side, training the light on their feet, as they crept up the stairs, each tread complaining under their combined weight. At any moment, now, you felt the whole bloody staircase was coming down. Paul opened his mouth to say they ought to think about going back, but at that moment Charlie raised his hand again.

A man was lying across the top of the stairs, unconscious, barely breathing, short, middle-aged, with a paunch that strained his shirt buttons, and cheeks like a hamster’s full of nuts. Brian blew his whistle, and the sound carried Paul back to the trenches. Stretcher-bearers! Trying to fix himself in the present, he swung the torch over gilt picture frames and velvet curtains. “Keep it steady, mate,” Charlie said. “Can’t see what I’m doing here.”

No stretcher-bearers appeared in response to Brian’s whistle; nobody had seriously thought they would. “All right then?” Charlie said, and they positioned themselves at the unconscious man’s head and feet.

It took them an hour to get him out. Paul helped the woman ambulance driver lift him onto the top bunk. The bunk below was already occupied, by a terrified man who kept whimpering that he’d broken his arm and it was a disgrace — an absolute bloody disgrace — that he hadn’t been taken to the hospital straight away. “There’s plenty worse than you,” the driver said, in a ferociously clipped accent. “If you don’t keep quiet I’ll dump you in the road.”

“I’d do as I was told if I were you,” Paul said. “I think she means it.”

The driver slipped off her right gauntlet and held out her hand. Automatically, Paul took it, though it seemed an odd gesture in the circumstances.

“Thank you,” she said. “Bit of a dead weight, wasn’t he?”

Or just dead. “It’s Miss Tempest, isn’t it?”

“Oh, Violet, please. I trained with Elinor.”

“Yes, I remember.”

He was just about to jump down into the road when she took hold of his sleeve. Puzzled, he glanced down and saw the cloth was stiff with blood. “Oh, it’s all right,” he said. “It’s not mine.”

She pulled the edges of the tear apart and peered inside. “I think you’ll find it is.”

Immediately, his arm began to throb, though up to that moment he’d felt no pain. “I’d no idea.”

“No, I’m serious now, you go and get that seen to.”

He looked at her. A painfully thin, wiry, indestructible woman in late middle age. Far too old to be driving an ambulance, but nobody had the nerve to tell her that. Before the war she’d taught — classics, was it? At Cambridge. Very ivory-tower, the sort of woman whom normally he might not have taken seriously, but in the confusion of the moment any sufficiently firm suggestion acquired the force of a command. He sketched a salute. “Yes, ma’am.”

He thought he might as well get the cut seen to, though he didn’t think it was anything serious and felt a bit of a fraud, crunching along Gower Street over a river of broken glass. This same route he’d taken every morning as a student at the Slade. Now, shocked people huddled in doorways or wandered around in the middle of the road, purgatorial shadows with their white, dust-covered faces and dark clothes. Some, in pajamas and dressing gowns, limped along on bloodied feet.

Reaching his station at the School of Tropical Medicine, he staggered down into the basement, where he found Nick Hendry being treated for a cut to his forehead. Lucky lad — another inch and it would’ve been his eye.

When Paul’s turn came, he rolled up his shirtsleeve and discovered, as he’d rather expected, that the cut, though still oozing blood, was not deep. “Looks worse than it is,” the first-aid worker said. “Go and have a cup of tea.”

He retreated to one of the two battered sofas that lined the walls. Nick Hendry was stretched out on the other and was snoring softly, his upper lip vibrating with every breath. Paul tried to read a newspaper, but couldn’t concentrate. He forced down a cup of orange tea, and though his stomach rose in revolt, immediately began to feel better.

After a brief respite, he started to feel he was shirking and forced himself to go out on patrol again. One good thing, he hadn’t suffered any spells of dizziness all night and that was reassuring because this was his first night back on duty, and he’d been half expecting it to return.

Two hours later, he returned to the station, eyelids gritty with tiredness, yawning and scratching his neck. Nick was still on the sofa, face averted, though Paul could tell from his breathing he wasn’t asleep. A few minutes later, Sandra Jobling came in and took off her helmet, bending forward to run her fingers through her sweaty hair. Her face was still covered in plaster dust, but at some time during the night she must have reapplied her lipstick without the aid of a mirror, because she now had two huge, glossy, smiling red lips, with smears of lipstick all over her cheeks and chin. She waved to Paul, then went straight through to the cloakroom next door.

Charlie Web and Brian Temple came in not long after. Charlie put his mug of tea on the table and pulled up a chair. “Gone quiet.”

“Not long now,” Paul said.

They waited for the All Clear with hardly less tension than they’d waited for the warning sirens the night before. Charlie jerked his head in Nick’s direction. “He’s making the most of it.” He slurped a mouthful of tea. “What about that old geezer, then, the one with the plastic bag? Bloody thing burst, you know. I was lifting him onto the top bunk and…Pish. All over me. Could’ve done with a bloody umbrella.”

Nick sat up, ostentatiously rubbing his eyes.

“Hey up,” Charlie said. “Sleeping Beauty’s back. How are you, mate?”

He carried his mug across to the sofa and sat down. Nick had seemed very jittery all night; Charlie had been virtually carrying him. Their voices sank to a low murmur. Paul was already nodding off to sleep when a hand on his shoulder jerked him awake.

Charlie: “I’m taking Nick round the corner for a pasty. You coming?”

Brian stood up at once, but Paul shook his head. “No thanks, I think I’ll be getting off home.”

But it was hard to make himself get going. He’d only just levered himself to his feet when Sandra came back into the room, her face pink and shining, forehead plastered with tendrils of wet hair. She came straight over to him. “I don’t know. Men.”

“What have we done now?”

“How could you let me walk round like that?”

“Like what?”

“Lipstick plastered all over me face.”

He smiled. “I thought you looked amazing.”

“I looked like a clown.”

It seemed the easiest, most natural thing in the world to grab her by the shoulders and kiss her. Only when it was too late, when she’d taken a step back and was gawping at him, did he realize what he’d done. My God. He tried to come up with something to say, something that would shrink the kiss, turn it into a friendly, casual, comradely gesture, the sort of thing he might have done to Charlie or Brian, but the words wouldn’t come. To his relief, he saw she was looking amused rather than offended. “I’m—”

Sorry, he was going to say, but at that moment a voice at the door said, “Is there any tea left in that pot?”

Walter Harris, gray-faced, ready to drop.

Sandra felt the curve of the pot. “Past its best, I’m afraid. Yeah, no, you can’t have that. I’ll put the kettle on.”

Walter lowered himself into a chair. “Thanks, love.”

“Well,” Paul said, deliberately including both of them. “I’d better be off. See you tomorrow.”

“You not on tonight, then?” Walter said. “Jammy bugger.”

Paul waited for Sandra to say something, but she was busy at the sink. “See you?”

She looked over her shoulder. “Yeah, right.”

Outside on the pavement, breathing the tainted air, he relived the kiss. Had there been a second’s yielding before she pulled away? Nah, wishful thinking. No fool like an old fool, et-bloody-cetera. He began to walk home, but slowly, in no hurry to get there, noticing cordoned-off streets, gaps in terraces, some new, some already familiar. Relief at having survived the night fizzed in every vein.

But it was Sandra he thought about, as he walked along. Sandra, with her long, coarse, dark hair, the fringe that was always getting into her eyes, so she had to keep pushing it back. What with that and her short, stocky, little legs, she reminded him of a Shetland pony. Oh, she wasn’t pretty, but he thought she had something better than prettiness: it was almost impossible to look at her without smiling. He wanted — oh, very badly, he wanted — to lie naked with her in a bed, to feel her young, strong, firm body under his. And, at first, he thought, sheer exhaustion might make lovemaking difficult, but then, in small touches and movements, the heat between them would grow, until at last sex became not merely possible, but urgent, necessary, unavoidable.

He was close to home now, but walking more slowly all the time, until at last, turning into the square, he was forced to acknowledge the truth: that he didn’t want to go home at all.