Toby's Room

by Pat Barker

‘No, it makes me want to get away from it. Oh, I can see it’s beautiful, but it’s not for me.’

  She’d slowed down and was scuffing her sleeve along the balustrade, looking at the great arc of the bridge with the hundreds of grey and black figures pattering across.

  ‘Neville would love it. But then, he’s luckier than I am.’ Instantly, Paul realized how crass that sounded. ‘I mean, as a painter, he’s got all this waiting for him after the war.’

  ‘You’ve got the countryside.’

  ‘Well, ye-es. But landscape’s starting to feel a bit old hat even to me.’

  She turned to face him.

  ‘How was he?’

  He started to say something bland, and stopped.

  ‘Different. You know, before the war I used to think he was incredibly self-pitying, because, let’s face it, he had it a lot easier than most. And yet there he is, no nose, quite a lot of pain … Not that he ever mentions it, but … Well, I know the signs. Facing God knows how many more operations, and there isn’t a trace of self-pity. I mean, he’s actually quite funny about it now and then. Is it true the last operation was a failure because he had a cold in the nose?’

  ‘Oh, it was a bit more than that. Fact, I think he very nearly died.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Did you talk about Toby at all?’

  The white face under the lavender hat took the decision for him: he couldn’t lie to her, not about this. ‘Yes.’

  She tried to smile. ‘Well? How bad is it?’

  ‘Bad.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘He killed himself.’

  ‘Why?’ She was up in arms at once. ‘Because he was frightened? I don’t believe –’

  ‘No, nothing like that. Because …’ He threw up his hands. ‘He was having an affair with a boy who looked after the horses and somehow or other the CO found out.’ He watched her struggling to take it in. ‘You’ve got to realize nothing could’ve saved him. Yes, he was well liked, he was respected, he’d got the MC – none of it would’ve made the slightest difference. Except, I suppose, it was why the CO took the decision he did, which was to let Toby know he’d been reported. Otherwise, the first he knew he’d have been arrested. In effect the CO gave him the chance … Well. To sort it out in the only way possible.’

  Her face was completely blank; he couldn’t tell whether she was taking it in or not.

  ‘Otherwise, you see, it would have been a court martial, he’d have been stripped of his rank, probably got ten years with hard labour and he’d have been struck off the medical register – even when he came out he wouldn’t have been able to practise as a doctor. So you can see, can’t you, why suicide must have seemed the only way? He was trying to spare his family the disgrace.’

  Her mouth twitched as if she wanted to speak.

  ‘Does that make sense?’ he said.

  ‘Oh, God, yes. Except it wouldn’t be “family” – it would be Mother. Even as a boy he was always trying to protect her.’ A small, hard laugh. ‘The wind was never allowed to blow on her.’

  She turned and looked over the river. Before, when he’d tried to imagine this moment, he’d dreaded her tears. Now her composure worried him more.

  ‘Let’s get you somewhere warm. It’s freezing out here.’

  ‘How did he do it?’

  ‘You’re sure you want to know?’

  She looked at him.

  ‘He said he saw something moving in No Man’s Land. They’d spent all night getting in the wounded, but he thought, or said he thought, that there was somebody else out there. He took Neville with him.’

  ‘So Kit was there?’

  ‘Yes, he was. Just as it was getting light Toby stood up and fired at the German lines. Obviously, he thought he was going to be shot, but – God knows why – nothing happened, so he turned the revolver on himself. It was over in a second, there couldn’t possibly have been any pain.’

  ‘But there would have been a body.’

  ‘Another bombardment started, not long afterwards. Every inch of the ground was shelled. Of course, they went out looking for him, but there was nothing left.’

  She was breathing heavily, still tearless.

  ‘Thank you for telling me.’

  ‘Neville says he was quite exceptionally brave in the last few days. He refused to leave the line even when he was wounded. If it hadn’t been for this other thing he’d have been decorated again, no question.’

  ‘No, but there was, wasn’t there? This “other thing”.’

  She made as if to walk on and for a moment he hoped that might be the end of it, but then she turned back.

  ‘Who told the CO?’

  ‘The Padre. I don’t know how he knew.’

  He’d set out to tell her the truth, or at least the version of the truth that Neville had told him. Instead, he’d started lying without ever taking a conscious decision.

  ‘Will you tell your parents?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. What’s the point? It only adds to the pain.’

  ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you?’

  ‘No, I needed to know.’

  He touched her elbow and they started to walk on again. She looked almost dazed.

  ‘Did you know about Toby?’

  ‘That he liked men?’ She shrugged. ‘Yes and no. I mean, I always thought he and Andrew were lovers. But … It’s never that simple, is it?’

  ‘Were there ever any girls?’

  She took so long to answer he was beginning to think she hadn’t heard the question.

  ‘There was a girl, once.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  They turned away from the river, cutting up the steep lane that lead from the Embankment to the Strand. At the top of the hill, Paul looked back at the water. Here and there, dark, sketchy shapes of boats smirched the mist. Tiny figures like insects still swarmed across the bridge, while underneath the strong, brown, muscular river flowed, oblivious of the city that befouled it.

  He touched her arm. ‘Let’s have a drink, shall we?’

  They went to the Savoy. Paul had never been there before, nor ever dreamt he would one day be able to afford it. The foyer seemed vast, with red-and-gold rugs covering a black-and-white marble floor. A short flight of stairs led down to a room in which groups of smartly dressed people were reflected in tall gilt mirrors. A murmur of conversation, a chink of glasses, gloved waiters bending deferentially over the tables …

  They sat on a leather sofa several feet apart, for all the world like a Victorian courting couple. He ordered two brandies, and was pleased to see some colour returning to her face as she drank. He told himself it didn’t matter that he’d withheld a large part of the truth from her. Some secrets aren’t meant to be told.

  After a long pause, he said tentatively, ‘Have you thought what you might do after the war?’

  He was painfully aware of how insensitive this question might seem so soon after she’d learned of Toby’s suicide, but she turned to him with a smile.

  ‘Depends who wins.’

  ‘I think that counts as Spreading Gloom and Despondency.’

  She nodded towards the chattering crowd. ‘They could do with a bit of that.’

  ‘They might look at us and think exactly the same.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right, of course. Nobody wears a broken heart on their sleeve. Oh, now … What would I do? I don’t know. I take it we’re not thinking Thirty Years?’

  ‘No point, we’d all be past it.’

  ‘I’m past it now.’

  ‘No, you’re not.’

  ‘I don’t know, I can’t think that far. Actually, it’s worse than that. The other day I realized – this is going to sound really mad – what I really think, deep down, is that the dead are only dead for the duration. When it’s over they’ll all come back and it’ll be just the same as it was before.’ She glanced at him. ‘I told you it was mad.’

  ‘There mightn’t be anything left worth coming
back for.’

  ‘Now who’s spreading Gloom? Anyway, presumably you have thought?’

  ‘Something Neville said … I suddenly thought I want to get away from all this. Everything. I want to be somewhere where I know I could never possibly fit in …’

  ‘England?’

  ‘No, somewhere warm. Somewhere oranges grow on trees.’

  She laughed. ‘It does sound rather nice.’

  ‘You could come too.’

  No reply. He was damning himself for a fool, but then, just as the silence became unbearable, her hand crept along the expanse of leather between them and took refuge in his. Frightened, they looked into each other’s eyes and tried to smile, but it wasn’t possible. Not yet.

  Now they’d decided to sell the house, it seemed to turn its face away from her, like an abandoned child rejecting the mother when she returns. No click of claws in the hallway; no bloodshot eyes raised to hers: Hobbes had gone to live with her mother. The house seemed to be giving up: there was a smell of damp, though Mrs Robinson said she lit fires in all the downstairs rooms whenever she came in to clean.

  This would be Elinor’s last visit. Paul was coming tomorrow to help take her luggage to the station. Father was organizing a van to remove the furniture and the rest of their stuff. She wandered from room to room, unable to settle to anything, then forced herself to go upstairs, pack what remained of her clothes, and start on the far more difficult job of sorting out books and papers. She’d take just the one photograph of Toby, she decided; the one where his face seemed to be disappearing into a white light. All the others were of teams at school and university; this was the only one of Toby by himself.

  She picked it up and looked at his face, wondering why she found it so hard to paint, when she knew every inch: the blue eyes, closed now; the ears, crammed with silence; the mouth, stopped for ever. It was too painful to go on looking, so she replaced the photograph gently on the shelf.

  After two hours’ packing, she went across to the barn. She needed to look at her paintings again before they were sent off to be stored. As she raised the lamp, the studio’s familiar shadows fled before her. One by one, she held the paintings up to the light. Who are you? they seemed to say. Nothing ruder, more dismissive, than a completed piece of work. But then, her eyes were drawn to the portrait waiting on the easel. She swept the white cloth aside and held the lamp close. Why didn’t it work? Something about the eyes, was it? Perhaps without realizing she’d slipped into self-portraiture, producing, in the end, a composite figure, the joint person she and Toby had become. She replaced the cloth, but the eyes still followed her; she could feel them burrowing into her back as she walked to the door.

  After that, she was glad to collapse on to the sofa in the living room. She felt the pressure of Toby’s empty room above her head. Wherever she was in the house, she was conscious of that emptiness. The ache of his absence was like nothing she’d ever experienced before. And knowing how he’d died had made everything worse, because now she was angry with him. He was no longer an innocent victim: his death had been a choice.

  She forced herself to stand up, to go into the kitchen and look for food. Mrs Robinson had left a stew on the stove. She started to warm it up, but couldn’t bear the slow breaking up of congealed fat on its surface. Tomorrow, she told herself. She went to bed very early these days, exhausted by her work at the hospital. It drained her as nothing else ever had, except perhaps – all those years ago – dissecting poor old George. In the last few weeks George had re-entered her life as she trawled through her old anatomy notes, trying to make sense of the chaos left by shrapnel wounds. Toby’s textbooks too. She got them out and sat with them on her knees, discovering, as she turned over a page, that Toby had left a perfect thumbprint in the margin. She felt very close to him at such times. Almost as if, in that final moment of unthinkable tearing and rending, part of him had fled and taken refuge in her.

  Slowly, she went upstairs, not bothering to switch on the lights, wanting to avoid seeing her duplicated reflection in the mirrors that faced each other across the half-landing. In the darkness of Toby’s room, she undressed, feeling her way from wardrobe to chair with the assurance of long familiarity. She threw Toby’s coat on the bed as an extra cover, then slipped between the sheets and buried her face in the cool silk of its lining. Beneath her own scent, she could still smell Toby’s hair and skin, but fading, always fading.

  Somewhere downstairs, a door creaked open. That was old houses for you; never still. She fell into a restless sleep, always aware of the square of light in the window, the shapes of objects in the room. The bedclothes seemed to be tightening round her. She flung out her arm and encountered something solid: another body lying beside her, cold and inert. The cold was spreading into her bones. She opened her eyes. God, what a dream. Rolling over, she reached for the bedside lamp meaning to turn it on, but she couldn’t get to it. Something was in the way, an obstacle the size and shape of a bolster, lying along her side.

  The body was still there.

  This time she came properly awake, with a cry that must have sounded through the whole house. The sheets were damp; sweat had gathered in the creases of her neck. But now, at least she was free to switch on the lamp, and the light, gradually, calmed her.

  It had been Toby, in her dream, and nothing Toby did could make her afraid. After twenty minutes or so she felt calm enough to go to sleep again. At the last moment, slipping beneath the surface, she heard Toby’s voice say: ‘I can’t give this up.’

  When she woke again, she heard him calling her name. The voice was coming from downstairs, and though the prospect made her shiver, she knew she had to go to him. She went slowly, sliding her feet carefully to the edge of each tread. Toby called her name again. She glided towards the sound of his voice, half in memory, half in dream.

  And there he was: standing with his back to the window, stripped to the waist, his braces dangling round his hips, and his arms outstretched in a parody of crucifixion. The room was full of viscous, golden light; he seemed to be the source of it. His skin glowed. She walked up to him, smiling, happy, full of the wonder of his being there. ‘Oh, you’re back,’ she said. His arms held her, his head bent down to kiss her. She touched his warm skin, she flowed towards him, but then a shadow fell. She thought, or said – there was no difference here – ‘We can’t do this, you’re dead.’ Instantly, the warmth and light began to fade. In a second, he was gone.

  She knew she had to get back to bed: there was a sense of urgency in this. She walked, stiff-backed, up the stairs and into Toby’s room. Bed, she thought. The owls were in full cry. Like a statue on a catafalque, she lay: legs straight, arms by her sides, wandering on the borders of sleep, until the half-light of a winter dawn restored her to the waking world.

  That morning, despite her broken night, she achieved more in the way of packing and sorting out than she’d managed in the whole of the previous weekend. As she worked, she thought about her dream. She had to call it a dream, because there was no other available word, but she knew that, unlike any other dream that she’d ever had, it had been an event in the real world with the power to effect change.

  Paul would be here soon. With her suitcases lined up in the hall, Elinor went upstairs to Toby’s room. She stripped the bed, folded the sheets, and left them on the landing for Mrs Robinson to find. In the process, she uncovered a small stain on the mattress, a crescent shape, like a foetus curled up in the womb, or a dolphin leaping. She pulled the blanket up to hide it, and then went across to the window.

  Looking down, she saw the narrow ledge that ran the length of the house between the first and second floors. Once, when they’d been particularly naughty, she and Toby had been locked in their rooms and that night he’d crawled along the ledge to get to her. She couldn’t have been more than five or six years old at the time, and yet, the following morning, looking down at the terrace below, she’d thought, with a flash of adult perception: Yes, but you could’ve been
killed.

  She raised her eyes, and there was Paul, bobbing along the lane, his head just visible above the hedge. At the gate, he stopped, flexing his injured leg, his face twisted by the pain he would never let her see. She was half ashamed of witnessing it and pulled back into the room so he wouldn’t notice her standing there.

  She waited for his knock, and then, briefly aware that she was leaving Toby’s room for the last time, ran downstairs to let him in.

  Author’s Note

  Readers who would like to see the Tonks portraits can find them online at http//www.gilliesarchives.org.uk together with photographs and case histories of many of the same patients. The original portraits are with The Royal College of Surgeons of England, 35–43 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London.

  Henry Tonks: Art and Surgery by Emma Chambers, published by The College Art Collections (University College London, 2002), contains a thought-provoking examination of the aesthetic and ethical questions raised by the portraits. Chavasse, Double VC by Ann Clayton, published by Leo Cooper, and Doctors in the Great War by Ian R. Whitehead, also published by Leo Cooper, give a vivid and detailed picture of the work of medical officers in the front line. Dr Andrew Bamji’s unpublished notes on Queen Mary’s Hospital, Sidcup, contain much fascinating information about the facial reconstruction carried out there.

  Thanks are due to Emma Chambers; John Aiken, Slade Professor; and Dr Andrew Bamji, Consultant Rheumatologist and Curator of the Gillies Archive, for their help during my research for the writing of this book. I would also like to thank my agent, Gillon Aitken, for his shrewd advice and unfailing support and kindness over many years.

  He just wanted a decent book to read …

  Not too much to ask, is it? It was in 1935 when Allen Lane, Managing Director of Bodley Head Publishers, stood on a platform at Exeter railway station looking for something good to read on his journey back to London. His choice was limited to popular magazines and poor-quality paperbacks – the same choice faced every day by the vast majority of readers, few of whom could afford hardbacks. Lane’s disappointment and subsequent anger at the range of books generally available led him to found a company – and change the world.