Noonday

TWENTY-SEVEN

Neville walked as far as Russell Square before stopping to look back at the Ministry of Information: a brutal gray mass dominating the skyline. Then he selected a bench where he could sit with his back to it and began enjoying the last warmth of the sun as best he could through his heavy clothes. A few feet away, a pigeon crooned and preened, puffed out its neck feathers, gave its inane, throaty chuckle. He aimed a kick at the bird. “Why don’t you do something useful? Piss off up there and shit on it?” The pigeon lifted off, flapped a few yards farther away, and settled contemptuously on the grass.

“Kicking pigeons now, are we?”

He spun round to see Elinor sitting on the grass. She was looking up at him, so amused, so, in a way, accepting, that he had to get up and go to her. Then, feeling he couldn’t conduct even a brief conversation looking down on her like this, lowered himself onto the prickly grass. “Sorry.”

“What for? Wasn’t me you kicked.”

“Language.”

“Shouldn’t worry, I don’t suppose it understood.”

All around, people were sitting or lying in couples or singly on the grass, the girls still in their summer dresses. The brilliant summer had given way to a golden and apparently endless autumn, almost as if the bombs that stopped the clocks had power to stop the seasons as well.

Elinor was stretched out, her eyes closed. It pleased him that she didn’t feel the need to sit up, to make conversation. Slowly, he lay back himself, enjoying the warmth of the sun on his lids. Lying here like this, they had no past — or none that had the power to hurt them now — and, quite possibly, no future; but that didn’t seem to matter. He knew from gossip at the depot that she was living alone. And he knew about Paul and Sandra. Some men would have seized the opportunity, but he’d always been held back by diffidence, the knowledge that he wasn’t attractive. Long before the injury to his face, he’d felt that. Years of reconstructive surgery had merely confirmed what he already knew: that his place was in the dark, listening to the tap-tap of approaching feet, a muffled voice, a face he couldn’t see, and didn’t want to see.

After a while, though, he felt he ought to say something. “How’s Paul?”

“Pretty well, I think. As far as I know…”

He pricked alert, listening not to the words, but to the tone. “It’s just, I haven’t seen him around much.” This was a lie: he’d seen Paul “around’ fairly frequently — and once or twice with Sandra.

“We’re separated.”

“Really?”

“Yes, he’s having an affair.”

“Actually, I—”

“You knew?” Immediately hostile.

“Somebody said something, but you know what it’s like, gossip, I didn’t pay much attention.” He rolled over onto his elbow. “Do you know the girl?”

“I’m glad you said ‘girl.’ Every day of twenty-three.”

“He’s a fool.”

“Most men wouldn’t think so.”

“I’m not most men.”

Her face softened. “No, you’re not, are you?”

He might, at this point, have told her that Sandra Jobling had left London, since she appeared not to know; but he chose not to. “Are you on duty tonight?”

“Yes, in fact…” She glanced at her watch. “I should probably be going.”

But she made no move. She’d rolled over onto her stomach and was idly picking the grass. He was afraid to speak, afraid of disturbing the intimacy of the moment. After a minute or so, she turned onto her back again, raising one arm to shield her eyes from the light that seemed to become only more dazzling as the sun sank behind the trees.

A memory had begun nibbling at the corners of his mind. A year or two before the last war, smarting from one of Professor Tonks’s more withering comments on his work, he’d walked as far as Russell Square, intending to calm down or, failing that, play truant, go to the British Museum instead. And there she was: Elinor Brooke, whom he passed every day in the corridors of the Slade and watched, covertly, during drawing sessions in the Antiques room, but whom — despite all the brash self-confidence of his public persona — he’d never yet summoned up the courage to approach.

Until that afternoon…

“Do you remember—?”

She smiled. “Warm lemonade.”

“Oh God, yes.” He’d forgotten the lemonade.

“There was a hut over there.” She pointed behind her, but without turning her head.

So she did remember. He tried to pin down what he thought about that, but all thought was dissolved in warmth and light. He let his eyes close, aware all the time of how ridiculous he must look in his dark suit and polished shoes and his briefcase lying on the grass beside him. Lying side by side like this, they must look like an established couple, too tired, too jaded, to be bothered to touch each other, and yet so firmly bonded they couldn’t bear to be more than an inch apart. In a word, married.

As always, when he was close to Elinor, memories of their student days drifted into his mind. He’d proposed to her, once, on a summer’s day a long, long time ago, and this heat, the prickly grass, the tickle of sweat on his upper lip, reminded him forcefully of that day. Riding a bike, of all things, on his way to see the Doom in the local church — and a very fine painting it was too, though his pose as a Futurist had not permitted him to say so. And then, on the way back, he’d hit a bump in the road, soared over the handlebars and landed hard on the gravelly tarmac, cutting his hands and knee and sustaining quite a sharp blow to the head.

Tarrant, who’d been there, of course, waiting to grab Elinor for himself at the earliest opportunity, had gone for help, and he’d lain with his head in her lap. Briefly, when he struggled to sit up, the back of his head had touched her breasts — not entirely accidentally. And he’d asked her to marry him, and then when she refused, or rather laughed, he’d told her that being in love with her was like loving a mermaid. That must have hurt. Or perhaps not. Perhaps she’d just found him as ridiculous as he’d feared he was.

He didn’t want to think about that day, but in this merciless, unseasonable heat, things resurfaced, like the spars of a submerged boat in a lake that was drying out. He saw Toby Brooke, in the conservatory, helping his friend Andrew revise for an anatomy exam. Toby, stripped to the waist, arms stretched out on either side, and painted onto his skin: ribs, lungs, liver, heart; all the internal organs. “Living anatomy,” it was called. But standing there, in the sickly golden light of late afternoon, Toby had looked like a man turned inside out. It had disturbed him then in ways he’d never fully understood, and it disturbed him now. He felt a sudden chill, as if a shadow had fallen across his face, though when he opened his eyes there was nobody there, and the sky was the same ruthless blue it had been for months.

What an autumn it had been. What a year. He closed his eyes again and almost immediately something unexpected happened. He began to feel Elinor — not merely sense her presence; this was actual physical contact — all along the side that was closest to her. He raised his head and looked at her, needing to reassure himself that she had not, as in some libidinous dream, moved closer and was actually touching him. Of course she hadn’t, one arm was still across her face, the other lying on the grass, an inch away from his own. He tried to think of something to say, to make her look at him, to dispel this strange hallucination. Could you hallucinate touch? Well, obviously, yes, since he’d just been doing it. And when he lay back and closed his eyes, the sensation came back. So, in the end, he simply surrendered to it, lying beside her on the grass, touching and not touching, soaking up the last of the sun.