Silent Noon Read Online Free PDF Page B

for
Woman’s Hour
. The air was so close in here – why hadn’t
she opened the window? Before Belinda could object, the sounds and smells of the school drive flooded the room. It made her think of those days when the tall grass outside was whipped flat by the
wind, when Miss Gallo would stop in the middle of the lesson to rush across the room and throw open the windows, so that in the dormitories at night the girls would giggle that she must have
started the Change.
    She watched her mother twist the ring from her finger, which had swollen in the late-summer humidity, and place it in a saucer on the window sill. The soap squeaked a complaint in her hands.
Lather, rinse and re-lather – and then attacking herself with the nail brush as well, scrubbing so aggressively that it was a wonder she had any fingers left at all.
    “Syrup sandwiches again,” she was saying. “Was breakfast not enough?”
    Belinda reddened.
    Thankfully, her mother didn’t expect an answer: she was too preoccupied with her own impenetrable tics to launch a thorough investigation into her daughter’s. In particular, tidying.
Or rather, rearranging things – the sugar bowl, some letters, Mr Flood’s cufflinks – into neat clusters, or columns, or piles. It was an infuriating habit, tinged with tragedy.
Sisyphean
, Miss Gallo would have called it. But Belinda was not at the age to wonder at the cause of her mother’s unhappiness: only to be irritated by it.
    Now there was the usual barrage of comments about crumbs and posture. Questions about the day’s lessons and what time she would be home for lunch; a nudge between the shoulder blades,
encouragements to work hard and smile when introduced to the masters. The same encouragements had been made five years ago, when Belinda started at St Mary’s: only then her mother had been
confined to her bed, pale and red-eyed with stomach flu so severe the doctor had wanted to send her to hospital for investigations. But Belinda’s mother didn’t believe in making a fuss
– she had driven ambulances in the war, hadn’t she?
    By now the last of the boys had disappeared inside. Belinda waited for the siren’s cry before heaving herself in silence from her chair and tugging her satchel from the hook by the
door.
    ~
    The laundry was at the end of the basement corridor. Robin had told him that the passage had once joined up to a network of German bunker tunnels: a concrete underworld now all
but forgotten, sealed off from the things that grew and lived and died on the island. The walls were painted pea-green from the floor to shoulder height and whitewashed up to the ceiling. At the
far end was a plastered-over doorway where the whitewash was a lighter shade than the walls. From the laundry there seeped a clammy smell of steam rising through hot linen. Human noises were
muffled by machine ones: the roll and thump of pumping cylinders, the agitated whirl of spinning drums. Robin said that it became a lawless zone in the evenings, after the cooks and laundresses
went home, so that the youngest pupils preferred to walk outside through the dark after prep.
    It turned out that he had been summoned because Matron wanted to know why he hadn’t registered a games shirt.
    “If you think I’m going to spend half a day scrubbing grass stains out of a perfectly good school shirt, you’ve another think coming,” she said.
    Then she asked how many handkerchiefs he’d brought with him, and Barney told her just the one: it had been a leaving present from Miss Lynch in the flat across the hall.
    “Just the one,” repeated Matron in a tutting voice. Barney could tell it wasn’t a proper telling-off, but he made sure to look chastened.
    Duly dismissed, he continued down the basement corridor with a dull dread of what awaited him upstairs. The morning’s lessons stretched before him as no man’s land stretches before a
soldier in the trenches. He slackened his pace, concentrating on the flagstones and