Noonday

TWENTY-TWO

He couldn’t get her out of his head.

Not Sandra; he’d loved every minute of their time together, but after she’d put on her clothes and gone home, he scarcely thought of her. No, it was Bertha Mason he couldn’t forget. Bertha, on the table, blank-eyed, fag end stuck to her bottom lip; Bertha, on the platform, whirling black silk bloomers around above her head; Bertha, in his arms, piss dripping down her legs and forming a puddle on the floor. And that voice: the voice in the darkness that couldn’t have been hers, and couldn’t not have been hers. There she was: old, fat, mad, quite possibly dying — utterly repulsive — and he couldn’t forget her.

You know what the Chinese say, don’t you?

Perhaps Charlie’s remark about becoming responsible for the life you save was preying on his mind. Whatever the reason, he knew he had to see her again. She might, of course, be dead by now, or she could have been discharged from hospital, sent to some hostel for people made homeless by the bombing, but on the whole he didn’t think so. She’d been in too bad a state for that. No, with any luck she’d still be in Guy’s. If she was alive.

Arriving at the hospital in the late afternoon, he was directed to the third floor. Grim corridors, no natural light, though great efforts were being made to cheer things up: there was even a vase of flowers on a table at the center of the ward. A nurse pointed to a screened-off bed at the far end. Pushing the screen slightly to one side, he saw Bertha sitting up in bed with her head bandaged, looking like a huge, abandoned baby.

“Hello, Mrs. Mason. How are you?”

He’d brought some flowers from the garden of his ruined home: bronze and yellow chrysanthemums, past their best. He couldn’t see a vase to put them in, so simply laid them at the foot of her bed, where their graveyard smell quickly spread and filled the small space inside the screens.

At first glance, he thought she looked better than he’d expected: she’d lost that lard-white color; but when he looked more closely, he realized the redness of her cheeks and chin was anything but healthy. He touched her hand — shaking it seemed too formal — and found her flesh hot and clammy. He said, “I don’t know if you remember me, I was one of the—”

“Yes, hello.”

He could tell she wasn’t sure. “I was in the room with you the other night. After the bomb.”

Her eyes widened. “So you were. You asked me what I was frightened of.”

He couldn’t remember asking her that. In fact, he was sure he hadn’t. It wasn’t the kind of thing you said to injured people in an air raid.

“People think, oh, she knows a lot about the afterlife, she believes in it, so what’s she got to be frightened of? If they knew what it’s like down there at the moment they’d be bloody frightened. Bedlam, bloody bedlam. People running round in circles, half of ’em don’t even know they’ve passed.”

She’d said that the first time he’d met her, only now it made more of an impression. She must’ve received a Christian education — of some kind — and yet she’d ended up with a view of the afterlife hardly distinguishable from Homer’s. Shades, shadows; people who’d rather have life on any terms than endure the insubstantial misery of the underworld.

“They haven’t been,” she said.

“Who haven’t?”

“Mr. and Mrs. Lowe. You know, from the Temple?”

The Temple, he supposed, must be the pawnbroker’s. “They probably don’t know where you are.”

“They didn’t come to see me when I was in the nick either, they knew where I was then.” She was making curious mumbling motions with her lips: chewing a vile and bitter cud. “Howard didn’t come either, said he was ill, I knew he wasn’t, he was with his fancy woman.”

“Howard’s your husband?”

“I wasn’t supposed to know about her, but I did, of course, there’s always some kind person’ll tell you.” She looked at him, and her eyes were suddenly sharp. “Won’t be long before somebody tells your wife about you.”

“Is there anything I can get you?”

“No, I’ve got everything I want, thank you. Peace and quiet, that’s all any of us really want, isn’t it?”

Paul stood up at once.

“No, not you. Him.”

He glanced round. “Who?”

She was looking at the chair on the other side of the bed, although her eyes seemed to be focused not on the chair itself but on its occupant. Only there was nobody there.

“Is it Howard?”

“ ’Course it bloody isn’t. Bugger never bloody come when he was alive, he’s not gunna show up now, is he? No, it’s that fella, he keeps coming round, Payne, whatever he calls himself. Telling me what I should and shouldn’t say — only it’s not me saying it — it’s Albert — and I just can’t get him to see.” She was staring at the chair, pleading, justifying herself.

“Why don’t you get Albert to talk to him? Well, he’d understand then, wouldn’t he?” She didn’t seem to have heard. “Is he here now? Albert?”

“God only knows, he’s a law unto himself. I’m fed up with it.” She lay back against the pillows and closed her eyes.

Paul glanced round again, thinking: I should go, but somehow he couldn’t just walk out and leave her here like this. He looked again and saw her face was changing: the jaw becoming firmer, the brow ridges more prominent. How could she do that? She couldn’t, of course. Nobody could. But then how did she change the way he saw her?

Albert’s voice: “I’m here all the time, it just doesn’t register; to be honest, not a lot does register, these days. You should see the amount of gin she gets through.”

“She’s not well, is she?” Paul wondered if he was doing the right thing, going along with the pretense — if pretense it was. But he didn’t know what else to do. “She’s not a good color.”

“She’s a goner, if you ask me.”

“Is she really that bad?”

“You’ve only got to look at her.”

Paul nodded towards the empty chair. “Does he really exist?”

“Oh God yes, he’s the one got her put inside — and he’s been nosing around again. Told her she could be tried as a witch, scared the shit out of her. She couldn’t face prison again, nearly killed her last time.”

In the seance a great deal had been made of Albert’s long service on the Western Front, his officer status, but this was a music-hall version of an upper-class accent, and even that was slipping fast. “You know, I met her in Russell Square once.”

“I remember. We’re not all sozzled on gin.”

“She told me there was a boy standing behind me.”

“Well, there is, isn’t there?” Albert sounded bored. “I mean, it’s not as if you don’t know he’s there.”

His voice had begun to slur, vowel sounds elongating until the words became incomprehensible. Paul watched Bertha’s face become puddingy again, a doughy, undifferentiated mass in which once-pretty features were submerged in fat. It had never struck him before, but now he thought that in her youth she must have been beautiful. Was she asleep? She was breathing noisily through her open mouth, her eyes half closed, the whites unnervingly visible.

He could do nothing for her, neither save her life nor wrest her back to sanity. Indeed, the longer he stayed with her the more his own grip on reality would slacken. Reaching an abrupt decision, he stood up and retrieved his hat from the foot of her bed. Yet, even now, he lingered. Suddenly he became aware that in the last few minutes he’d unconsciously changed the rhythm of his breathing until it exactly matched hers.

Quickly then, he turned on his heel and walked out.

—

BERTHA LISTENED TO the footsteps dying away into the darkness. Somebody had been there, just now — they’d brought flowers — but she couldn’t remember who. Be glad to get out of this place. Talk about haunted, she’d never in her life experienced such a cluster of unquiet spirits. Now that was a point. Why did they cluster? Something to do with the place, the actual building? Had to be — unless, of course, they recognized a sensitive and were crowding round her. But no, that couldn’t be true, the night sister said they’d been here years.

Bertha had been surprised when she was on the toilet wrestling with constipation. The door was thrown open without so much as a by-your-leave and a woman came in wearing the dated uniform of a nursing sister in the last war. “Hurry up, now,” she’d said. “We haven’t got all day.” She’d been talking to somebody at the sink, totally oblivious to her, Bertha, sat there, needing a bit of privacy.

There was a child as well, a boy who came in and out of a wall where a door had once been. You could see the outline of the door under the paint. She felt sorry for him, he looked so lost, as did the young man in Victorian dress who sat with his back to the wall in the main corridor, sobbing his heart out, poor soul. She’d have helped them if she could, but they just stared through her. The spirits who came to her in seances—manifested—bloody Howard — wanted to make contact. These ones didn’t even know she was there.

The trouble was, she saw them all the time, whereas other people just caught glimpses now and then — the majority, not even that. Though she had once seen a doctor step aside to avoid the small boy as he came through the wall, and she’d thought: You don’t even know you did that. But he had, he’d stepped aside.

Payne was back. She thought it might actually be Payne this time, though she hadn’t heard him come in. On the other hand, she had been dozing, on and off, all day — she could easily have missed him. He was — well, not exactly talking, but words formed in her mind. On and on he bloody went. The school: how did she know how many people had died? Every bugger knows, she said. Just ’cos you say something’s secret doesn’t mean it is. And the boy-sailors on the Royal Oak, how did she know they were dead, when nobody had said the ship had been attacked? And the young men on the beaches of Dunkirk; the men she’d seen crawl out of funk holes in the trenches…“Oh, piss off and leave me alone.” She didn’t know whether she meant the spirits or him.

Somewhere in the lower regions Albert stirred. She was half inclined to let him come to the surface, give Payne a right good bollocking, bloody little pipsqueak. God, just look at him, objectionable little man. “Seedy”—that was the word. Seedy. She honestly did believe he could be the Devil, because he wasn’t fixed. Whenever you looked at him, he seemed to be a different shape and size. She felt herself start to sink, a sure sign Albert was on his way. She didn’t really know where she went when Albert was here, except sometimes it looked a bit like her bedroom at home. At night, when she was huddled up in the narrow bed, with the sheets over her head, she’d hear footsteps on the stairs and see the knob begin to turn, and then, as he came in, a tall, thin shadow would climb the wall behind the bed, and she’d hear a voice whispering: It’s all right, don’t cry. He loved her. He always said he did.

But tonight, letting herself sink didn’t seem to work. The thing in the chair, whoever he was—whatever — wouldn’t let go. She forced herself to go on looking at him. Neat mustache, reddish-brown with a few white hairs, nicotine-stained fingertips twirling his trilby, round and round, round and round, stains on the sweatband, shiny patches on his knees where the cloth had worn thin — oh, yes, he was down on his luck, this one, in spite of his airs and graces.

I see through you, she thought. And immediately, as in a dream, found she could do exactly that. He was still there, very much there, but reduced to an outline, like a child’s drawing. Where the solid mass of his face and body had been there was now only a string of rising bubbles, like you get in a pond when something’s rotting underneath. She couldn’t put her finger on the change, because she could still see him, only now there was a sense that his apparent solidity was a delusion, and the reality was this constant flux. And he was getting smaller; his feet no longer quite reached the floor. He was child-sized now, and still shrinking fast, but somehow this didn’t reduce the force of his presence. If anything it increased it. The more he shrank, the more he was reduced to his essence, the more powerful he became.

She wanted to cry out, call for help, but there was no help, not against this, because he was liquid. He could change shape endlessly, fit himself into anything, flow through every crack in every barrier. And flow he does, drenching her in slime.

Look away. She looks instead at her left arm, which is lying on top of the coverlet, but it doesn’t seem to belong to her anymore. She focuses on her hand, tries to wiggle the fingers, but they won’t move. It’s too heavy, too stiff, she can’t do anything with it. She feels a spurt of hostility towards it. Is it even hers? It doesn’t feel like hers. Is it his hand? Her whole body feels cold along that side and so heavy, so leaden, the bed must surely soon start to tilt. She won’t look at the chair. Her right eye can’t see anything anyway, but she closes the one eye that still obeys her. Spit drools from the corner of her mouth, she can’t wipe it away; she tries to wipe it away with her other hand. The sheets are briefly warm, then cold, oh God she’s wet the bed again, she won’t half get wrong for that. But she keeps her eye closed, she won’t look at the chair. She won’t look at the chair.

Voices now, in the ward behind the screens, feet come flapping; a light shines in her eye. Stroke, she hears, stroke, but makes no sense of it. Nobody’s stroked her, not for a long, long time. Oh, six strokes of the cane, yes, she remembers that, remembers running out of school the second the bell rang, along the beach and up the hill to the castle, its towers black against the sky as the sun sinks down behind it. Running across the courtyard, now, stones hard under her feet, flecks of foam drifting like blossom across the grass, her head, her ears, even the marrow in her bones filled with the roaring of the sea. Queen Margaret’s tower behind her, she stands on the edge of the cliff. Close, so close she’s blinded by the spray and the sea boiling and churning in the Egyncleugh beneath her feet. Oh, and it’s nothing now to step forward, to take another step, and then another, to walk on air, and see, in the last moment before the water closes over her head, high above her on the cliff, Dunstanburgh’s broken crown.