Silent Noon Read Free Page A

polish and long-neglected flowers gave the
wood-panelled passage a distinctive pre-term odour, unsullied by boys’ sweaty bodies, rubber shavings and adolescent experiments with pomade. “She’d attend chapel, of course, and
lessons. Not games, naturally.”
    They had stopped outside the Headmaster’s office, and Mr Pleming’s hand was already on the brass doorknob. He stared at Mr Flood, taking in the droll mouth and hair combed, fine as a
baby’s, over his perfectly round head. Still not sure whether an agreement had been reached, Mr Flood extended one hand.
    “We’re very grateful, Headmaster. I’ll make sure Belinda comes to see you first thing on Monday to express her thanks in person.”
    “That won’t be necessary.” They shook, and he opened the door. “Now you go and enjoy what’s left of the peace and quiet before the little rotters start to
arrive.”
    Returning to Ormer that evening, Flood had paused on the green to watch a nightjar cruise, silhouetted against an orange sky. The breeze that ran through the treetops felt like a long, slow
letting-out of breath.
    He let himself in through the side door and headed straight for the kitchen to tell his wife the good news.
    ~
    Belinda worried at a string of costume pearls between her fingers, twisting the necklace in coils around one slender arm. It was a restless, unthinking motion, and after a few
minutes her mother set down the tub of cold cream with a jerk.
    “Do stop that, darling,” she said.
    Belinda scowled and threw herself back onto the bed, dark hair fanning against the pink chenille. When this achieved no response, she pushed herself onto her elbows and studied her
mother’s bare back. The cotton nightdress had the narrowest of shoulder straps and scooped down low, revealing a single brown birthmark on her mother’s shoulder blade. It made Belinda
think of Miss Gallo’s kimono, which the English mistress had worn to the beach like a child playing dress-up: a thick-heeled polymath in a concubine’s nightie. Miss Gallo was not at all
like the woman sitting at the vanity before her.
    In the mornings, before she’d put on her face, her mother’s naked eyelashes were brittle and her lips slightly too thin. There were two tiny scars and crinkling of skin under one
arm, where she had cut herself falling into a shallow pond as a child, and a permanent bruise high up on one thigh, acquired in an adolescent riding accident. These marks were embarrassing to
Belinda, because they hinted at places on her own body which she felt to be ugly and beyond her control. The neat, inward-turning navel and the black, square-topped bristles that peeped high up her
thighs, around the pleats of her bathing costume – Belinda had grown inside that same body – were unintelligible and revolting to her.
    There was a knock on the bedroom door. Lucia appeared, dressed in a pink bathrobe, her hair twisted into rag curlers.
    “Is it true, Linda-Lou?” The child’s eyebrows inched up into her golden fringe. “Are you really staying? Will you come to school with me now?”
    “Your sister goes to big school,” said their mother, rising. “You know that, Lucia.”
    The younger child was ushered from the room with promises of one last chapter before bed, and so Belinda turned towards the dresser to examine the clutter of face creams, tonics and powders left
in the wake of her mother’s night-time regimen. Brushes, pencils and blotting pads; a jar of tablets labelled “Pentazine”. Belinda picked up one pot and raised it to her nose.
This was her mother’s smell, she told herself, considering the label. Only then did she realize that, if this were so, it must also be the smell of countless other women.
    For no obvious reason, the thought distempered Belinda.
A disruptive presence
, her headmistress had written. Suddenly it was all she could do to prevent herself from hurling the tub of
cream at the nasty, frightened little face in the