Noonday

FIFTEEN

Over the last few weeks, Neville’s dislike of the Ministry of Information had become an almost hysterical loathing. He dated the change to one apparently endless afternoon when it first occurred to him that the ministry was alive; that its corridors were the intestines of some flabby, flatulent beast farting memos, reports and minutes that always had to be initialed and passed on, though as far as he could tell no action was ever taken.

Once you started thinking the building might be alive, the evidence for it rapidly accumulated. It was always on the move, always changing shape. Literally, from one Friday afternoon to the following Monday morning, whole corridors would appear or disappear. His own room, which was hardly big enough for one — though he shared it with two other people — had been carved out of another, much larger, room. The half-window let in scarcely any light, and the partition kept out no noise at all. So he was privy to the conversation of half a dozen shorthand typists, listening in — involuntarily, if not reluctantly — as they talked about their boyfriends, nightclubs they were going to, which dresses they were going to wear…How far they were going to go. “Who is it tonight?” he heard one girl say. “Somebody nice?” Giggles all round. “Is it somebody you want to die with?”

That shook him. It made him think: Who would I want to die with? Nobody; but even as he said, or rather thought, “nobody,” he was back in the dining room with Elinor, holding out his hand, inviting her to dance with him. Totally unexpected, that evening they’d spent together. At first, he’d experienced no more than a slight awkwardness, a few tweaks of nostalgia perhaps, and yet by midnight it had been far more than that. When she smiled and turned away, he was immediately back on a dusty road with his head in her lap, seeing, as she bent over him, how her nipples formed two dark circles against the thin white lawn of her blouse, as unexpected and mysterious as fish rising to break the smooth surface of a lake.

Hilde sat next to him: a sad Austrian woman. He’d have liked to practice his German on her, but, except when discussing the finer points of a translation, she stuck resolutely to English. The only other inhabitant of the room was an old man with the streaming white hair of an Old Testament prophet, Bertram Somebody-or-other, but he appeared less and less frequently. They were supposed to be translating a series of pamphlets collectively entitled Life Under the Nazis, but progress was slow, and the material unpromising. Hilde, he suspected, knew far more about life under the Nazis than any of the authors did.

Every morning, as he entered the building, along with hundreds of other identically dressed men carrying identical briefcases, his spirits sank. By midafternoon, he was desperate, his eyes full of grit, his mouth dry, every muscle aching. As the golden light crept across the parquet floor, he daren’t think about sleep. To try to keep himself awake, he went along the corridor to the Gents, where he splashed his face with cold water. There was a mirror behind the washbasin, but he avoided looking at his reflection. He’d long ago mastered the art of washing, combing his hair and even shaving by touch alone. Each basin had a cheap plastic nailbrush chained to the wall behind the taps, for all the world as if they were priceless medieval Bibles. The irritation this caused him was out of all proportion; he wanted to wrench the bloody things off the wall, but of course he didn’t. Though as he walked back to the stuffy little room, he was nursing fantasies of escape. After all, he wasn’t obliged to stay here. He could leave — leave London, for that matter — go somewhere else, anywhere else, and paint. Accident had made him a journalist and a critic — and a good one, too — but it was not who he was.

Hilde hardly looked up when he came back into the room. She wore her hair pinned up in a rather untidy bun; as he squeezed past he looked down at the nape of her neck and wondered why it should be that exhaustion increased the desire to fuck. Logically, it should have had the opposite effect, but it never did, not with him anyway. In fact, a lot of his time in this room was spent weaving fantasies about Hilde or the typists next door or…Well, anybody really. There was nothing to take his mind off it. When talking to Tarrant he’d emphasized the importance of his work, but really anybody with fluent German could have done it. Yes, he dealt with classified information, but only because all information here was classified. The lowest classification was “Secret” and that was applied to the requisitioning of toilet rolls. Sighing, he sat down, pulled a stack of files towards him and began to sort through it.

The clock ticked towards six. The Indian-summer afternoon was slipping away and that mattered so much these days, when people lay in the parks and squares basking in the sun like lizards, or stood in doorways and windows, raising their eyes to the light, storing it up against the blackout. Nobody dared think about the coming winter, when days would be shorter and air raids longer. As he crouched over the files, he could hear Hilde’s stocking-clad legs — where did she get them? — whispering to each other as she walked across to the filing cabinet. She bent to pull out the lower drawer and he gazed hungrily at her backside. A minute later, she found the file she was looking for and straightened up. As she turned, their eyes met and he saw her flinch as she registered the full force of his melancholy lust. Quickly, not looking at him, she returned to her desk.

Ah, well. She wasn’t even noticeably attractive, though to him at the moment almost all women were attractive, at least to some degree. On his last free night, he’d gone out walking. It was one of the paradoxes of his present exhausted state that on the nights when he wasn’t on duty, he sometimes found it difficult to sleep. After tossing and turning for an hour, he thought: To hell with it, and went out. Though he was London born and bred, he found the blacked-out streets not only startling, but confusing. More than once he got lost. Piccadilly, after dark, felt particularly strange, because in peacetime it had always been so brightly lit. He stopped to light a cigarette and heard the tapping of a prostitute’s heels on the pavement. High heels, on these lightless nights, always sounded erotic, but a prostitute’s especially so because they hammered tacks into the heels and toes, to make them stand out. And stand out they certainly did, beating an urgent, unmistakable tattoo. This wasn’t the only way prostitutes defeated the blackout. Another was to lurk in shop doorways and, whenever a man approached, shine their blackout torches on exposed breasts or the triangle of darkness at the apex of their thighs. He found these spotlit body parts disturbing: they reminded him of an incident he’d attended near King’s Cross where a railway arch, being used as an unofficial shelter, had suffered a direct hit. When the ambulances got there, heavy rescue squads were pulling arms, legs, heads, hands, feet from the rubble, lining them up on the pavement. Somebody had flashed a torch along the line and it was exactly like this. Revulsion and a kind of excitement. The girl whose tap-tapping footsteps he’d heard — he could see her now, walking towards him, or at least he could see the shape of her, which was all he needed or wanted to see. As he came closer, she shone her torch down onto her slim legs — the ankles almost feverishly thin. They found each other in a shop doorway. He pushed up her skirt, his fingers snagging on her stocking tops, slipping across her bare thighs into the warm, moist darkness between, moaning now, gasping for breath, over in seconds, laughing shakily as he withdrew. From beginning to end, he hadn’t seen her face.

Promptly at six, Neville closed the file he was working on and reached for his hat. Hilde was already putting on her jacket. They walked to the lift together, or if not together then at least not ostentatiously apart, but then she met one of the secretaries from the room next door and stopped to chat so he waved and went on alone.

The lift took ages to arrive; it always did at this time of day. He killed time by looking at the paintings on the wall, which were quite possibly, for all he knew, selected by Kenneth Clark himself. His office was farther down the corridor. One, in particular, Neville objected to: a landscape, a beauty spot somewhere in the Lake District, precisely the sort of painting that had no reason to exist. A bit like some of Tarrant’s early stuff. Oh my God, it might even be a Tarrant. He peered at the signature, but it was illegible, and then stood back, determined to give the painting a fair chance. No, nothing there at all, just a picture-postcard view of a lake. Couldn’t even tell which one. Ullswater? Wet, anyway.

The sight of that scrawled, illegible signature—was that a “T”?—reminded him he was having supper with the Tarrants that night. Probably not a good idea. The continued silence from Kenneth Clark had begun to prey on his mind. Of course it shouldn’t matter that he — Neville — was being continually passed over. Every night when on duty he saw lives ended prematurely, people injured, mutilated, in terrible pain. What possible importance could personal ambition have in such a context? Oh, but it did, it did. It hurt that Tarrant’s reputation had overtaken his. And yet somehow the friendship survived, though it was an odd relationship. Sometimes it hardly seemed like friendship at all.

Whatever it was, he was in for a whole evening of it. The original invitation — when they finally managed to hit on a date when nobody was on duty — had been for dinner at their house, but then Elinor had telephoned to say the house had been damaged by blast — kitchen window blown in, something like that — so now they were going to a restaurant in Dean Street instead.

Elinor was already at the bar when he arrived. She raised her cheek for him to kiss and then they settled down to wait for Tarrant, who’d been unavoidably delayed. No sirens yet.

“So you’ve been bombed?” he asked.

“Just blast. Kitchen window came in, I’ve been running round all day trying to find a glazier…”

“Still, you’ve got it boarded up all right?”

“Oh, yes, no problems there, it’s secure.”

“Well, that’s the main thing.”

“The clocks have stopped. And the electric went off for a time but it’s back on now.”

She was looking tired, he thought. Understandably. “Shall we have a drink while we wait?”

“Oh, yes, please.”

While the barman poured, she sat clasping and unclasping her hands. “You know, I was expecting Paul to be upset. About the clocks, I mean. He’s very fond of them, he’s always polishing them and winding them up, and he wasn’t at all. In fact, he was rather excited. ‘We’re outside time,’ he said.”

“Is that why he’s late?”

“No, he’ll be painting.”

“How has he been?”

“Not too bad, he’s not falling over or anything, but he does seem very unsettled. You know that woman he met—?”

“The Witch of Endor, yes.”

“He keeps talking about her.”

“I’m surprised he doesn’t see through it.”

“It’s Kenny; he blames himself. I don’t know what to say anymore, he’s got me at my wits’ end.”

Tarrant arrived a few minutes later, wearing an open-necked blue shirt and a shabby, expensive jacket. “Sorry.” He settled into the chair beside Elinor. “I lost track of time.”

Oh dear me. The artist at work.

“You still have an outside studio?”

“God, yes, I couldn’t work at home, never could.”

“I’ve got a room in the attic,” Elinor said.

Neville raised his hand to summon the waiter. “What’ll you drink, Tarrant?”

“I think I’ll stick to wine.”

“Well, make the most of it. I drink whisky all the time now. No chance of that running out. Unless he invades Scotland first.”

“Oh, don’t talk about invasion,” Elinor said. “Do you know Violet’s got a cyanide capsule? She has, she showed me.”

Bloody hell. It had come to something when middle-aged, dried-up old spinsters took to carrying cyanide capsules. What did she think was going to happen to her, for Christ’s sake?

“She’s a Communist. Was, anyway.”

“Violet?”

Elinor bristled. “Why not?”

“You never really know people, do you?”

The waiter brought them a menu, which showed a surprising range of choice. “They’re good here,” Tarrant said.

Elinor began reminiscing about food in Spain. “It’s so easy, you know, you go to the market every day, everything’s so fresh.”

“It’s becoming a bit of a legend, our time out there,” Tarrant said.

“Yes,” Elinor said. “It is a bit; it’s our Land of Lost Content. Well, mine, anyway.”

“When did you come back?”

“We gave the place up in ’36,” Tarrant said. “A man we knew very well — he used to keep an eye on the house when we were in England — was shot in the marketplace and nobody was charged though everybody knew who’d done it — so we thought: Right, that’s it, time to go.”

“I still think about sitting out on the terrace in the early morning, having coffee; the sun used to catch the top of the church and everywhere else was still dark.” She seemed to be on the verge of tears.

Tarrant said, quite sharply, “I think we can be just as happy here.” No response. “Elinor’s inherited her mother’s cottage and it’s…Well, it’s really rather nice.”

“Roses round the door.”

Tarrant put his glass down. “I think you’d like it if you’d only give it a chance.”

Elinor seemed to become aware that Neville was being virtually excluded from the conversation — excluded, but also used as an audience. She said lightly, or with an attempt at lightness, “Paul wants to pack me off to the country, away from all the nasty bombs.”

“Yes. I do — and I’m not ashamed of it either.” He looked directly at Neville. “I’d just find everything so much easier if I knew she was safe.”

“She? I am still here, you know.”

Tarrant was looking increasingly exasperated. “People didn’t take their wives into the trenches with them.”

“No, but the trenches didn’t run through the family living room.”

“And now they do?”

“Paul, the kitchen window was blown in last night! Anyway, I’m not going and that’s that.”

A tense silence.

“You’d be missed,” Neville said. Not perhaps the most tactful thing he could have said, but true all the same.

She looked at him and smiled, and immediately he was back in the country lane, seeing her nipples, hearing a loud plop as a frog, affronted by the invasion of his territory, leapt to safety in a ditch…And for all the hope he had of kissing the princess, he might as well have been the fucking frog. All the same, this marriage was in trouble. Oh, they’d both deny it, but all the same it was. He knew the signs.

Fortunately, at that moment, the waiter arrived to tell them their table was ready, and over the meal the talk took a less abrasive turn.

—

GOING HOME in the taxi, Elinor said, “I wish you hadn’t mentioned the cottage.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want him telling the other drivers and them thinking I’m suddenly going to not show up or something.”

“I don’t think he’ll do that.”

“He’s a gossip.”

“No, he’s not. He’s not interested enough in other people to be a gossip.” He gave her a sidelong glance. “Tell you one thing, though, he’s a bit in love with you.”

A yelp of disbelief. When she saw he was serious, she said: “Actually, I used to think he was a bit in love with you.”

“What, Neville? No, he’s not like that.”

She shrugged and stared out of the window, though there was little to be seen except a circle of blue warning lights around a crater in the road.

While Paul paid the driver, Elinor opened the front door and went through into the drawing room, where she was immediately confronted by the carriage clock on the mantelpiece, its hands stopped at twenty past three. Oddly enough, the grandfather clock on the upstairs landing disagreed, putting the time of the explosion at twenty-five to four.

She remembered how strange Paul had been, how almost…elated. She’d watched him bending over the clock, shaking it gently to see if it would start, getting out the key, trying to wind it up. She’d been so sure he’d be upset, even perhaps disproportionately upset, but when he turned to face her his eyes were shining. We’re outside time, he’d said.

She heard the taxi pull away and a moment later Paul came into the room. “Do you fancy another drink or…?”

“No, I think I’ll go up now.”

Undressed, stretched about between the sheets, she waited for him to join her, worrying about the broken window and where, in this city of broken glass, she was going to find a glazier willing to take on a small domestic job. Paul got undressed quickly, and as soon as he got into bed turned on his side away from her. Cautiously, not sure if she’d be welcome or not, she rested her cheek between his shoulder blades, feeling a raised mole pressing into her skin. She could have drawn, from memory, the position of every mole on his back. She rested her hand on his hip, then let it slide across his stomach until she was gently cupping his balls. His breath quickened, but he didn’t turn to face her, or, in any other way, respond, and after a while she took her hand away.