Noonday

SIXTEEN

Elinor came off duty, her hair gray with dust and her trousers sticking uncomfortably to the backs of her thighs. She’d tried shampooing her hair in the showers, but it didn’t work. If you weren’t careful you risked turning the plaster dust into a paste. People were aged by it, the dust in their hair, that and the rings of exhaustion under their eyes. Women who, before the war, had worn no makeup plastered themselves with it now. Even Violet had been seen dabbing girlishly pink lipstick on her mouth. Dana, like Elinor, went the whole hog: vanishing cream, powder, rouge, eye shadow, the lot.

Elinor walked quickly. She wanted to get home, make tea, have a bath, fall into bed and snatch a couple of hours’ sleep before starting on the shopping and cooking and the hundred and one other things that had to be fitted in as if everything were normal. Painting? Ah, well. Somehow, in these changed circumstances, Paul went on painting. She didn’t.

The sun was only just rising over the rooftops of the still-intact buildings, casting a cruel light on ruins that had already become familiar, no longer novelties to be gawped at. There was a gap on the corner, and it was an effort to remember which shop used to be there, though it couldn’t be more than a week since that bomb fell. Everywhere, there was the crunch of glass under tramping feet as people came up out of the shelters, blinked, took deep breaths, tried to decide between heading home or going straight to work. The streets glittered, hurting her eyes.

Farther along, she stopped, then almost ran the rest of the way, because now she could see yellow tape stretched across the entrance to the square. Somebody’s house must’ve been hit, and though really it was no more than a nameless, mouth-parching fear, the conviction grew on her that this time her luck had run out, this time it was her house that had gone.

A group of people, among them many of her neighbors, was standing at the tape. An old man with white hair tried to duck under it, but a warden yelled at him to get back. There was a time bomb at the center of the square, under the grass, and another in the middle of the road. She could see a sort of boil under the tarmac. Until those bombs were dealt with, nobody was going home.

From this angle, she couldn’t quite see her house, though she could see that a house three doors farther up had been virtually demolished — that must be where the bomb had fallen. So her house — hers and Paul’s — had to be badly damaged. It couldn’t not be.

Everybody stood looking into the familiar square, which seemed as strange now as the cratered surface of the moon. People whispered. Why? There was no reason for it, and yet not one person spoke at a normal pitch. A deadly silence emanated from the broken houses, the piles of rubble, that menacing blister in the surface of the road. Men clambered across the ruins like black beetles. A woman lit a cigarette and a warden shouted at her to put it out. Gas mains had burst, did she want the whole bloody street to go up? The woman blushed, pinched the cigarette between thumb and forefinger and replaced the tab end in the packet.

Elinor looked round for Paul and saw him approaching, with that distinctive loping stride of his. He hadn’t seen her yet, hadn’t seen the yellow tape. When he did, he stamped out his cigarette and broke into a run. They met and embraced and she started crying, which surprised her because she hadn’t known till then how close she was to tears.

Paul pulled on her elbow, indicating they should walk round to the back of the square: they might be able to see their house more clearly from there. She followed him, stumbling over bricks, hardly able to keep up with him: he was striding ahead as if his life depended on it. Now she could get a closer look at the house that had received the direct hit. It had been sliced in half with almost surgical precision. On the first floor, a green brocade armchair cocked one elegant cabriole leg over the abyss. There was a bathroom with a washbasin and toilet, looking somehow vulnerable, touching even, like a fleeting, accidental glimpse of somebody’s backside. You wanted to cover it up, restore its dignity, but there was no way of doing that.

She knew the three girls who lived in the basement flat — they didn’t go to any of the public shelters. They were all young nurses working at University College Hospital. She remembered their laughter on summer evenings, the parties that used to go on half the night, how irritated she’d been. Now she felt her additional years, the years they wouldn’t have, as a sagging of the skin, a weight pulling her down, and she was ashamed.

“Can you see what’s happened?” she asked.

“No, but I’m going to find out.”

Of course, Paul knew all the local wardens. He simply put his tin hat on and ducked under the tape. She watched him stride across to the man who seemed to be in charge, heard a mutter of conversation, then saw Paul walk on a few steps and peer up the street. He stood staring for a minute, then turned and came back to her.

“There’s no hope of getting back in tonight. We’re going to have to find somewhere to sleep.”

“Could you see the house?”

He pulled a face. “Not good. The roof’s caved in. I don’t think they’re going to let us live there, even after they’ve dealt with the bombs.”

“But it’s still standing?”

“Well, just about. Basically, it’s collapsed in a V shape.” His hands were making the shape as he spoke. “We might be able to get something out, depends how stable it is. But it’s not looking good.”

Instantly, Elinor felt smaller, less competent, as dependent on Paul as a small child might have been. “Where shall we go?”

“Oh, there’s plenty of B&Bs around. Look, why don’t I put you in a café while I go and book us in somewhere? At least then we’ll know where we’re going to be. Or…” He turned to face her. “I could take you to the station and you could stay with Rachel, just for a few nights, then you can move into the cottage. Have your own place.”

“What about you?”

“I’m all right, I can sleep in the studio.”

“But I don’t want to leave you.”

“Well, yes, all right. First thing is, to find a room. And there’s clothes…You know, you’ve still got a few things at Rachel’s…”

“No, absolutely not.”

“All right.”

He sighed, the slump of his shoulders telling her she’d become a problem, something he had to worry about, a distraction from other, arguably more important, matters. That sigh weakened her, undermined her, as almost nothing else could have done.

“Come on,” she said. “We’ll find somewhere together.”

—

THE ROOM THEY FOUND, in one of the side roads off Oxford Street, was small with yellowish-brown paper on the walls. The one window looked out into a basement yard so at all times of the day they were in semidarkness. Their faces loomed pale in the brown-spotted mirror, like fish in a badly maintained tank.

By day, Elinor had nowhere to go — it was almost impossible to stay in the room — so she spent a lot of time just wandering around, always drawn back to the square where she’d spent so many years of her life. It was still cordoned off; she stood, with other lost souls, looking across the tape at the bulge in the road, and the wrecked houses. Apparently quite a few of them would have to be demolished, including, Paul seemed to think, their own.

She couldn’t face going on duty from the B&B or leaving it to go to one of the public shelters. So when Paul was on duty, she simply lay on the bed and waited for him to return. But then, on the fourth night, she gave herself a good talking-to and reported to the ambulance depot, as usual. Dana and Violet welcomed her with open arms, and other people too — people who in normal circumstances she would probably never have met — went out of their way to be kind. They seemed to care about her — as she did about them.

Next morning, exhausted, but determined to spend the day looking for more permanent accommodation, she went back to Oxford Street and found the B&B had been bombed. So there they were, for the second time in a week, homeless.

Or rather, she was. Paul could always move into his studio, which — as he never tired of pointing out — wasn’t big enough for two.

They stood in a doorway on Oxford Street surrounded by yet another group of shocked, disorientated people. The newly risen sun glinted on the silver barrage balloons and silhouetted the broken outline of bombed and partially demolished buildings. The usual smell of charred timber and burning bricks. On the other side of the tape was sunlit emptiness. A man, standing halfway up the road, shimmered in the heat from a still-smoldering building. He seemed almost to be walking on water. The woman standing next to Elinor had long, Rapunzel-like hair, loosely plaited, reaching to her waist, though it was iron-gray. Elinor noticed these things, but blankly, unable to attach any meaning to what she saw.

Paul stood beside Elinor, his elbow lightly touching hers. She realized, without the need for speech, that this second bomb had settled the argument. She would go to Rachel’s and then to the cottage, not because she thought it was the right thing to do, but because her tired mind couldn’t come up with an alternative. In front of them, closer to the tape, a young girl was brushing her long black hair, trying to get rid of the dust, but soothing herself too, perhaps. As she bent and swayed, her whole body followed the movement of her arm. How slender and supple her waist was. Elinor was aware of Paul following the girl’s every movement, and she’d never felt more distant from him than she did at that moment.

“I want to go back to the house.”

“Is that a good idea?”

“I’ll go to the cottage, but I want to see the house first.”

“All right, I’ll see if I can find a taxi.”

—

EVEN IN A few days, her memory of the square had started to fade. She struggled now to remember what number 35 had looked like, what color its front door had been. Next year she supposed buddleia and rosebay willow herb would throng the empty spaces where people had once lived. She closed her eyes. Everywhere — every step she took, every step anybody took — was the crunch of broken glass.

The time bombs’ detonation had inflicted further damage on their house, but at least they were allowed access to the square. They could see at first hand the extent of the damage by climbing cautiously over the outer fringes of the rubble. She could even see into her kitchen. The dresser had somehow become jammed at an angle to the wall. She caught a glint of knives and forks, the blue-and-white fragments of a serving dish. They would be able to get a few things out, but it wasn’t pots and pans she wanted, it was the paintings from her attic studio, the portraits of her father and Toby. All gone. And, with them, so much of her past.

She and Paul picked their way around the ruin separately. At one point, she saw him straighten up and look around, and the expression on his face was, unmistakably, one of relief.

She slid down the last slope of rubble and waited for him in the road.

“Well,” he said, coming across to join her. “Worse than you thought?”

She couldn’t look at him. “I don’t think I can face another B&B. I think I’d be better off in the country.”

A hint of satisfaction. “I’m sure that’s right.”

Straggling apart, they walked away from their house, past the crater where two nights ago one of the time bombs had exploded. Trudging along with her eyes on the road, Elinor was startled by an unexpected flash of light, and looked up to see sunshine streaming through a gap in the terrace. The light gilded the tops of trees and bushes that only a week ago had been struggling to survive in deep shade. Oh, yes, all kinds of opportunities for new growth. Only not for her.

She stopped and looked around her, wanting to remember the moment. Then, needing reassurance, she glanced at Paul, but against that dazzling shaft of light he’d become merely a silhouette, featureless.

It might have been anybody standing there.