Noonday

SEVENTEEN

Left alone in London, Paul felt increasingly restless. Partly this was because of his constant involuntary searching for Kenny. He scanned the faces of children he passed in the streets, and somehow, despite the raids, London seemed to be full of children. He watched them during the day, playing in the parks — the schools were still closed — or queuing outside the Underground stations. Children were often sent on ahead to claim the family’s favorite spot; you would see them, laden with sleeping bags and blankets, sometimes laughing and messing about, but waiting for hours.

Paul’s studio was only ten minutes’ walk from his station, so on the nights when he was on duty he went straight to the School of Tropical Medicine basement after finishing work, and played cards or darts till the sirens went and it was time to go out on patrol.

The evenings when he was not on duty were more of a problem, because he found it quite impossible to stay indoors during a raid. He could remember feeling exactly like this during the last war. Very often at night he’d shunned the comparative safety of the dugout for walks between sentry posts. Anything was better than the dank, grave-smelling murk of life underground, where a single candle, guttering in the blast from an exploding shell, would send panic-stricken shadows fleeing across the walls. The dugout was safer, yes, but it never felt safe. Now, he felt the same way about the public shelters. On the nights when he wasn’t on duty, he walked miles through the blacked-out city, sometimes not getting home till two or even three in the morning, by which time he was too exhausted not to sleep.

The darkness turned London into a palimpsest. That knot of boisterous young men by the crush barriers, they were probably soldiers home from Dunkirk, or just possibly stragglers from Boudicca’s army. After all, from the perspective of the poor bloody infantry, one cock-up’s pretty much like another. You had a sense on these nights of long-buried bones working their way to the surface: London’s dead gurgling up through the drains. Perhaps in these thronging shadows the living and the dead met in fleeting, unconscious encounters. Why not? How would you know?

On one of these walks, he found himself in a side street near Coram’s Fields. On the corner there was a pawnshop, its three brass balls suspended over the pavement, a symbol so evocative of his youth he had to cross the road for a closer look. In the window, as he’d expected, were rows and rows of little white cards offering rings — most poignantly, wedding rings — for sale. Probably they’d been pawned over and over again until some worsening of an already desperate situation meant they couldn’t be redeemed. Ah, redeemed. The religious language of pawnbroking had always fascinated him.

When he was a boy, his grandmother had owned a pawnshop, conducting business with her usual rapacity. Many of her clients were pawning goods in order to pay the rent on the ramshackle properties she owned. Yet Gran hadn’t been the bloated capitalist of socialist theory, but a half-literate working-class woman who’d got many a black eye from her handsome, philandering husband until she stopped loving him and learned to hit back — or rather, since she was a tiny, birdlike woman, to wait till he was too pissed to know what he was drinking and then jollop him till his arse bled.

Paul’s first job had been behind the counter of her shop: he’d done his homework in between customers. When he leaned forward, he could see his reflection in wood that had been polished to a hard conker-shine by the weight of human misery that passed over it. But it was a job, a proper job, and he had been proud of it.

God, how it all came flooding back. He was about to move on when he saw a notice in the bottom-right-hand corner of the window. Bertha Mason, materialization medium, would be giving a seance at eight o’clock this evening. The accompanying photograph was creased and grainy — obviously cut from a newspaper — but there could be no mistaking the woman. It was the Witch of Endor, no less. He bent down to make sure, but, yes, it had to be. There couldn’t be two women in London who looked like that. Eight o’clock — just time for a pint of beer and a sandwich. He thought he might as well give it a go, as much from nostalgia as anything else, though he was curious about the woman who had made a disagreeable but powerful impression on him. He wasn’t finding her easy to forget.

—

RETURNING AN HOUR later, he stepped into a shop whose smells stripped away the intervening years till he was fourteen years old again. A single bulb cast a pallid light over the detritus of hopeless lives: musty-smelling clothes hung from racks, some, with pink tickets, waiting to be redeemed; others, with blue tickets, up for sale. Racks of shoes pressed out of shape by other people’s bunions, dresses with other people’s sweat stains under the arms, a hatstand from which hung a solitary bowler hat, shiny with age. Despite the downtrodden, shabby air of it all, he kept experiencing exquisitely painful tweaks of nostalgia. Not for when he was a child serving in the shop for the first time — no; for a year or so later, when he was a pimply adolescent with hairs on the palms of his hands. The hairs hadn’t been real hairs, of course — they were what you were threatened with if you didn’t stop doing it—and try as he might he never could stop. There were some mornings when he could virtually have combed those hairs.

There’d been a girl called Gemma Martin who’d come in every Monday morning on her way to work to pawn her father’s Sunday suit. Long blond hair, the greenish color of unripe wheat, and slightly prominent blue eyes. Gran didn’t like the Martins. “I knew her mam when her knickers were that raggy she was ashamed to hang them on the line. And as for her nan — she used to sew bacon fat in her vest and bloomers every December, didn’t take them off till March. I’ve seen dogs follow her down the street.” The Martins, he gathered, gave themselves airs: a worse crime than murder in Gran’s book.

What with Gran’s beady eyes and vitriolic tongue, it had taken him nearly six months to summon up the courage to ask Gemma out. Oh, but it was worth it. And the reason he found all these smells erotic was that one evening, hours after the shop had closed, he’d managed to persuade Gemma to go nearly all the way, on a pile of unredeemed coats.

It was five to eight; he ought to be taking his seat. A thin man with round spectacles appeared and guided him past the racks of clothes and up a rickety staircase. At the top was a small landing packed with people waiting to buy tickets. More people were coming up the stairs behind him. Since that basement in Agate Street he’d hated overcrowded spaces and might have left, only at that moment the couple in front moved on, and he was level with the table. A woman with mournful brown eyes was taking the money, attempting to look deeply spiritual while counting notes with the help of spit on a well-practiced thumb. He handed over a ten-shilling note, was given a ticket and asked to surrender his blackout torch.

“Why?”

She looked at him. “When the medium’s in a trance, her eyes are very sensitive to light.”

“But there’s hardly any light.” Blackout torches were notoriously dim.

Rolling the notes into a wad, she snapped an elastic band tight around them. “Very sensitive.” He gave her the torch.

The seance room was cramped and stuffy, lit only by three small, red-shaded lamps set at intervals along the far wall. An usher guided him to a seat near the back, though he noticed there was a whole row of vacant seats at the front. It was so dark he could hardly see to get to his seat and had to apologize constantly for trampling on people’s toes. When, finally, he was settled, he took a deep breath and looked around. Eight rows of chairs faced a stage on which stood some kind of cabinet, not unlike a nightwatchman’s box. Black curtains had been pulled back to reveal a wooden chair with arms. He noticed another chair near the front of the stage, which seemed to have black clothes draped over the back. The room was about two thirds full, and it was well past eight o’clock, but for a long time nothing happened, except whispers and coughing and more muttered apologies as late arrivals tripped over people’s feet. He could see slightly better now. In the third row, he noticed a middle-aged shelter warden, Angela Langdale, very jolly-hockey-sticks, but rather nice, with a lot of mousey-fair down on her upper lip and a genius for organization. When he was on patrol, he often called in at her shelter for a cup of tea and a cigarette. Next to her was Sandra Jobling. Now that was a surprise. He didn’t think of Sandra as the sort of person who went to seances, but then he didn’t think of himself as that sort of person either.

The thought of a cigarette, once planted, quickly blossomed into a craving, though when he looked around he saw that nobody else was smoking. Perhaps the organizers were so wedded to darkness that even the striking of a match seemed threatening? He tried to ignore the craving, but it wouldn’t go away, so he repeated the stumbling and apologizing, receiving in return some decidedly disgruntled looks.

Downstairs, he found the front door locked, but there’d be a back entrance and almost certainly a yard. He pushed between the racks of clothes, releasing a smell of mothballs which made him want to sneeze, and found himself in another much smaller room, hardly more than a passage really, with three doors opening off. The first door led into a broom cupboard containing an ironing board, a bucket and a mop. The next door opened onto a room where at last, at last, there was enough light to see by, though what he saw defied belief. He stood, rooted to the ground, jaw unhinged, gawping like an idiot.

Bertha Mason sat, naked, on a table, facing him, surrounded by three middle-aged women, all dressed in black, but he had eyes for nobody but her. The sheer size of her: chins, neck, breasts, belly — all pendulous — the sagging, wrinkled abdomen hanging so low it almost hid the fuzz of black hair beneath. Like a huge, white, half-melted candle she sat, eyes glazed, a fag end glued to her bottom lip. She made no move to cover herself, just sat there, breathing noisily through her open mouth. He stared, he couldn’t stop himself, until one of the women darted forward and slammed the door in his face.

Dazed, he opened the third door and blundered out into a small yard where he lit a cigarette, dragging smoke into his lungs like oxygen. What he felt was neither pity nor revulsion, but something altogether more complex. An image was taking shape in his mind: the Willendorf Venus. That featureless face beneath elaborately styled hair, vestigial arms, roll upon roll of fat, each roll resting on the one below, vestigial legs, no feet. But it’s not negative: she has no eyes because she contains the world; she has no feet because everything comes to her. It’s an image of power.

At least Bertha Mason had a face, though it had been completely blank. Was she in a trance? Had to be, something like that. He crushed the remains of the cigarette beneath his foot, taking his time, grinding it away to nothing, then went back upstairs to the crowded room, where a buzz of expectation was running along the rows.

His seat had been taken. The back rows were full so he crept down the aisle and took a seat on the end of the front row. Nobody challenged him, though he saw that all these seats were marked “Reserved.” Evidently only known supporters were allowed as close to the platform as this.

The lady of the ten-shilling notes mounted the stairs and announced in a markedly nasal voice that she would now invite a member of the audience—“chosen at random”—to step up and examine the medium’s clothes. The randomly chosen one, who’d been sitting in one of the reserved seats on the front row, shook the clothes, turned them inside out, ran her fingers ostentatiously along every seam, and then, with a brisk nod, handed them back. The garments were ceremoniously carried out and returned, shortly afterwards, with Mrs. Mason inside them, wheezing from the climb upstairs. Her breathing was so bad Paul was inclined to shout: Oh for God’s sake, stop messing about, call a doctor! She had to be helped onto the platform. Once there, she took a moment to get her breath, then entered the cabinet, where she lowered herself into the chair and let her head fall back, shortly afterwards emitting a succession of grunts and snorts as the curtains, with a great rattling of brass rings, were pulled across. Raggedly at first, then with more conviction, the audience began to sing “Abide with Me.”

Paul didn’t know what to expect. Fraud, yes, of course: only he’d thought it would be subtle. Skilled. What followed was fraud, all right, but blatant, crude, embarrassingly unconvincing fraud. He didn’t understand how anybody could possibly be taken in by it, but people were. One woman looked positively radiant as she recognized the face of her dead son, though, to Paul, the returning spirit was very obviously a papier-mâché head stuck on the end of a broomstick and draped in cheesecloth; cheesecloth which smelled strongly of fish.

Mrs. Mason had two spirit guides. The one who appeared most frequently, who acted as a kind of impresario, was Albert, who’d apparently seen service on the Western Front, and had passed over, as he put it, on the first day of the Somme. Albert’s voice was convincingly masculine; his public-school accent much less so. This was no more than a music-hall imitation of a toff and even that was starting to slip a bit. The other guide, who popped up from time to time, was a little girl of truly awful sweetness who would keep bursting into song: Shirley Temple, but without the talent. Paul was sickened by it. No, quite literally: he felt sick. Probably he should have walked out, but the memory of that naked figure, the wheeze of her labored breathing, held him back. Instead he closed his eyes, determined to detach himself from the proceedings.

But then the curtains were drawn back. Mrs. Mason, looking decidedly the worse for wear, announced she would give a few individual messages. The audience leaned forward: this was the moment they’d been waiting for. Their turn.

It was the usual trite, banal rubbish. At one point she looked directly at Paul, and he tensed, afraid she was going to give him one of her messages, afraid, irrationally afraid, of what the message might be. At that moment he realized this visit of his was not curiosity about Mrs. Mason, or a trip down memory lane, but something more driven, less rational: part of the endless, exhausting search for Kenny, which still went on even though he knew there was no hope of finding him. He wasn’t detached from this: he was just like all the other people here.

He was afraid of her. It was a relief when she turned her attention to the back row, to yet another middle-aged woman with a missing son. A voice began to speak, every bit as convincing as Albert, but offering no banal message of comfort: no reassuring platitudes. The beach at Dunkirk, dunes being sprayed with bullets, sand kicked up into the air, cracked lips, no water, his friend dead in the sand beside him — not a British plane in sight. Where were they? Where were the British planes? The words dwindled to an angry mutter before finally winding down into silence. Seconds later, along came Shirley Temple and “The Good Ship Lollipop.”

But now, suddenly, a commotion broke out near the back of the room. People started turning round, trying to peer into the darkness, one or two of them even stood on their chairs. A tall woman, wearing mannish tweeds, strode down the aisle, shining a forbidden torch on the stage — and not a blackout torch either: a proper prewar flashlight. Mrs. Mason ran back into the cabinet and, with a rattle of brass rings, pulled the curtains across. No sooner had she disappeared than the tall woman leapt onto the platform, pulled the curtains apart and revealed an empty chair. Mrs. Mason was on her knees, waving a doll with some kind of vest or camisole attached, and still prattling away in that awful cutesy-pie voice as if unable to grasp what was happening.

The tall woman grabbed the doll, Mrs. Mason refused to let go, and an ugly tug of war ensued in which the doll’s head came off. Everybody was on their feet now, riveted by the squalid battle. At last, Mrs. Mason managed to wrench herself free and again ran back into the cabinet, where she could be seen trying to stuff the doll’s head up her skirt. At that moment the overhead lights came on, dazzling everybody. Transfixed by the sudden glare, Mrs. Mason was still for a moment, then leapt out of the cabinet, roaring with anger.

The tall woman took a step back, but persisted. “Come on, give it to me, I know you’ve got it. Come on, I want to see what you’ve got up there.”

“What, and show everybody me knickers? I will not. There’s men in here, case you haven’t noticed.”

The tall woman had been joined on the platform by three men, who crowded round Mrs. Mason, demanding to see the doll. Turning swiftly, she picked up the chair and began wielding it as a battering ram. “I’ll brain the whole bloody lot of you, bloody buggering bastards!” And then she simply yelled, a great battle cry that seemed to require neither words nor intake of breath.

Paul was pushing his way up the steps onto the platform. Perhaps he should have been pleased to see such cynical fraud exposed, but three men jostling one woman was altogether too much like bullying for his taste. Surprising himself, he fought his way to her side. “Mrs. Mason.” Her eyes stared at him without recognition. So she had been in a trance — there was no other way she could have forgotten that encounter downstairs. “Calm down, now. Deep breaths.” He turned. “And you lot, back off. Can’t you see the state she’s in?”

After a while, she seemed to grow calmer. She would get undressed, she said, but only if the men left the room.

The three men who’d been crowding her looked at each other, but made no move. A few others, Paul included, retreated a few paces, though nobody moved very far. Mrs. Mason squatted down and pulled her dress and petticoat over her head. Tangled up in the folds was the doll’s head, which fell and rolled across the floor, its china-blue eyes startling in the bristling light. Mrs. Mason tried to kick it behind the cabinet, but was too slow. The tall woman pounced, scooped up the doll’s head and held it up for all to see. “There.”

The sight seemed to enrage Mrs. Mason, who began tearing at her clothes. One enormous breast, the size of a savoy cabbage, escaped her camisole and, despite swearing no man on earth should ever see her knickers, she was now whirling them about above her head, looking, Paul thought, like a corpulent version of Liberty leading the people.

“I’m keeping this.” The tall woman waved the doll’s head at her. “It’s evidence.”

“You give that here, it’s mine.” And, seizing the chair again, Mrs. Mason launched another attack.

Paul tried to restrain her, but she was so beside herself he was beginning to think the whole farcical episode might end in murder.

A short, stocky man with a military mustache said: “Why doesn’t somebody ring the police?”

“No,” Mrs. Mason said. “There’s no need for that.”

Slowly, she put down the chair and, after a minute or so, began to get dressed. Her lips were blue. Then, just as everybody started to relax, she charged again, seized the doll’s head and ran out of the room.

Paul followed her and found her in the downstairs room, with a group of supporters gathered round her, like drones round a termite queen. One woman pressed a cup of tea into her hands; another fanned her with a copy of Spiritualist News, while the randomly chosen one held out a dress for her to put on.

There was a stir in the shop. The forces of law and order had arrived in the form of one bewildered police constable with a fresh, young, freckly face. There wasn’t a great deal he could do. Nobody wanted to press charges, though the one man she’d caught a glancing blow with the chair was still bleeding. The tall woman introduced herself as Miss Pole, which amused Paul, though no one else seemed to think it was funny. Fraud was mentioned. Mrs. Mason turned her eyes to the ceiling. “As God is my witness, I know nothing about it.”

“What do you mean, you know nothing about it?” Miss Pole demanded. “You had a doll’s head in your knickers.”

Wisely, Mrs. Mason burst into tears. One of the attendant women touched Paul’s arm. “Eh, dear God, that poor woman, she’s a martyr, she is. She’s been to prison, you know.”

Paul could quite believe it.

People were starting to leave. Nobody asked for their money back, perhaps feeling that one way or another they’d had a good show. The policeman left. Somehow, in all the turmoil, the doll’s head had vanished, no doubt safely ensconced in somebody else’s knickers. And not only the doll; cheesecloth, broomsticks, papier-mâché heads: all spirited away. Miss Pole glared at Mrs. Mason; Mrs. Mason smirked. She’d got away with it, not for the first time, nor probably the last.

Paul looked around for Angela and Sandra, but they’d gone, so he set off to walk alone. A raid had started, so there was no question of going back to the studio just yet. He was alternately amused and nauseated by the events of the evening, or so at first he told himself, but then as he walked, he realized he was once more separating himself from the experience, which at times he’d found deeply disturbing. Albert’s voice, the young man dying on the beach at Dunkirk, stood out from what would otherwise have been blatant fraud, and nothing else but fraud. Papier-mâché heads on broomsticks, fishy cheesecloth — fishy in every sense of the word — but was that the whole truth? He didn’t think so. He thought she’d been doing something else, though he didn’t believe the something else had much to do with contacting the dead.

He’d been afraid she’d tell him about Kenny, describe his last moments in the basement of the school. How could he be so frightened of something he didn’t believe was possible? How could that woman, who was in so many ways pathetic — and also, it had to be said, repulsive — have such power? He remembered seeing her in the downstairs room, naked, eyes glazed, fag end stuck to her bottom lip, an image by turns embarrassing, pitiable and nightmarish. He tried to erase it from his mind, but it drew strength from darkness. As he walked from street to street, he found it easy to believe they were leading him to a secret chamber, right at the heart of the blacked-out city, where a white, bloated figure sat enthroned, a grotesque Persephone, claiming to speak for millions of the mouthless dead.