by Pat Barker
That night, when she’d finished undressing, she tilted the mirror to show the bed and lay down in the same pose. She told herself that an attempt at a self-portrait might serve, in Tonks’s words, ‘to explicate the form’, but she didn’t pick up the pencil. Instead, she cupped her breasts, feeling the warm, white weight of them, and then spread her fingers lightly over the curved flesh of her belly. After that, she simply lay and stared at herself, before, suddenly, jumping off the bed and pushing the mirror away.
Sometimes, like this morning when she’d looked at Laura on the dais, trying not to imagine her in bed with Kit, she felt … No, there was no point saying what she felt.
She felt spayed.
She saw Toby once or twice a week, never for very long, and he never again came to her rooms. The idea they’d once had that he would teach her anatomy was quietly dropped. Sometimes they’d meet for tea in a restaurant and then they’d talk at greater length, but this was a Toby who painstakingly called her ‘sis’ and teased her in a ghastly imitation of brotherly affection. He had nothing in common with the other Toby, whose weight on her chest in the darkness cut off her breath.
Once, she and Kit Neville were having tea in Lockhart’s, when Toby came in with a group of friends. Seeing her sitting there by the window, he came across to join them. As she introduced Kit she was aware of Toby’s eyes flaring: he’d recognized the name. He sat down; they talked, Toby drawing Kit out on the inadequacies of Tonks as a teacher. Not a particularly difficult subject to get Kit started on.
‘To hear Elinor talk you’d think he was God,’ Toby said.
‘Huh. To hear Tonks talk you’d think he was God.’
And then he was off, on the uselessness of drawing from the Antique, the blind worship of the past, the failure to engage in any meaningful way with the realities of modern life and, above all, Tonks’s deplorable tendency to devote too much time to teaching women and useless men.
‘Do you think time spent teaching women is wasted?’ Toby said, with a sidelong glance at Elinor.
‘Present company excepted, yes. Well. Largely.’
‘I don’t think Elinor wants to be that kind of exception, do you, sis?’
She could feel Toby walking round Kit, sniffing him, assessing him as a rival, rather than meeting him as his sister’s friend. It was a relief, to her at least, when he got up and went to rejoin his friends.
‘Nice chap, your brother,’ Kit said, later.
‘Hmm.’
Even now, she still craved Toby’s approval. When one of her drawings won a prize – an exceedingly small prize, but a prize nevertheless – her first thought was, I must tell Toby. It had been like this ever since she could remember; nothing really happened to her until she confided it in him.
She waited for him at the foot of the medical school steps. Students came and went in a steady stream. She was frozen by the time he appeared, muffled in a long coat with its collar turned up against the wind. He was coughing badly and stopped to get his breath, one arm resting on the plinth of the huge bronze male nude that towered above him. Somehow the statue’s heavily muscled torso served to emphasize how thin he’d become. She hadn’t noticed the change in him till now and the sudden perception produced a tweak of fear. When she ran up the steps to meet him, he waved her away.
‘You don’t want this.’
‘You should be in bed.’
Another fit of coughing. ‘Can’t. Exams.’
‘Toby, you look awful. Come on, let’s get you back to my rooms, I’ll make you a cup of tea.’
‘No, got to revise.’
‘Just for a few minutes; I’ll put the fire on.’
Did he hesitate? She thought he did, but then he fell into step beside her. For once, she was the one who had to slow her pace so they could keep in step. By the time they’d reached the top floor of her lodgings, he was gasping for breath and almost fell into a chair beside the fire.
Tight-lipped, she bent down to light it.
‘Seriously, Toby, you need to be in bed.’
‘No, if I miss the last two exams I’ll have to repeat the entire year –’
Again, a spasm of coughing cut off his breath.
‘Does Mother know you’re like this?’
‘No – and you’re not to tell her either.’
The room warmed up quickly; by the time she’d made the tea he was starting to breathe more easily. But he was sweating heavily, and when he took the cup from her his fingers felt clammy. He wouldn’t look at her.
‘There’s no reason to go putting the wind up people. It’s just a cold, everybody’s got it.’
‘Hmm. Have they all got it as bad as you?’
He shook his head. There was nothing to be gained by nagging him; he’d made up his mind. She sat in the other armchair. ‘Oh, one bit of good news: I’ve won a prize.’
‘That’s wonderful. Oh, I am so pleased.’
He was genuinely, unaffectedly delighted for her. Of course he’d been the one who’d fought for her to go to the Slade in the first place, when her mother and Rachel had been so resolutely opposed. Toby had badgered their father until suddenly the impossible had become possible. He was a good brother. She felt a sudden pang of grief for everything they’d lost.
‘What did you get it for?’
‘A female nude. Not very good.’
He raised his eyebrows.
‘No, no, really not very good. I only won because Tonks was the judge and the anatomy was spot on.’
‘So this course is helping?’
‘Well, I’m not sure it is, actually. My nudes used to look like blancmanges, now they look like prizefighters.’
As she chattered on, she was watching him intently, alert to every catch in his breath.
‘Where’ve you got to in the dissection?’ he asked.
‘The face. And I’m not sure I can face it.’ She winced. ‘Sorry, not intended.’
‘Why can’t you?’
‘The face is the person, I suppose. Cutting into that, it’s … I don’t know. Different. I keep thinking about Daft Jamie, which is …’
‘Daft?’
‘Well, yes, I suppose so. How did that dreadful man get away with it?’
‘Hare?’
‘No, Knox.’
‘He didn’t, I don’t think he ever practised medicine again.’
‘He didn’t die though, did he?’
‘No, but it might have felt like it – to him.’
Toby was breathing more easily now and some of his colour had returned.
‘The other girls call him George; the cadaver, I mean. One of them said she thought it was more respectful, to give him a name. I don’t know, I don’t see it like that. The fact is, he’s got a name. It’s just that we don’t know it.’
‘Ours was called Albert. It’s nearly always the royal family. Though I think one of the other tables called theirs Herbert. Asquith.’
She hoped he might stay for a while, perhaps even have something to eat, but as soon as he’d finished drinking the tea he was on his feet.
‘Can’t you stay? I’ve got some soup, I could –’
‘No, thanks all the same, but I need an early night. The first exam’s at nine …’
He touched her hand as he said goodbye, his fingertips as cold and slippery as a dead fish. He stood looking at her for a moment. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be all right.’
But the cold air tightened his chest and he was coughing again before he reached the bottom step.
Six
December was unusually cold and foggy even by the standards of London in winter. Day after day went by with no glimpse of the sun and it never became really light, not even at midday. Whenever someone came through the doors of the London Hospital, wisps and coils of sulphurous smoke followed them in. The air on the ground-floor corridors tasted metallic.
These mornings Elinor went straight to the cupboard where the heads were kept. By now, in this final stage of dissection, the face had
become unrecognizable. She identified him only by the name tag clipped to his right ear. Not his name, of course – officially he had no name – but hers. At the start of each session she looked into the pallid eyes, still in place inside the dissected orbits, and once again became possessed by the desire to know who he was. The need to name him, to understand how and why he’d come to this, grew in her with each stage of his disintegration.
As soon as she started work, however, this obsession with his identity fell away. Under Mr Smailes’s appraising eye, they teased out layers of muscle and exposed nerves and tendons to the light. He encouraged them to explore their own and each other’s faces: to feel the skull beneath the skin. It made sense to test what they’d learned against the living reality. All the same … Elinor couldn’t help noticing how Smailes’s lips parted as he watched their fingers probe and delve.
She hated these sessions of ‘living anatomy’, but they were probably more useful to her as an artist than the actual dissection. Certainly, she felt her growing knowledge was now feeding into her drawing, though for a long time she’d been unable to make a connection. The cadaver hadn’t helped her see the model on the dais more clearly. If anything, the dissection had become linked in her mind to the passion, bewilderment and pain of that night in Toby’s room. As if it were his body on the slab: familiar, frightening, unknown.
And then, one morning, it was over. Elinor left the Dissecting Room determined she would never go back. Next term the other girls would start work on another cadaver, the second in a long line, but for her there would only ever be this one. She lingered for a moment in the doorway, trying to squeeze out the appropriate emotion, whatever that might be.
As she closed the door behind her, one of the attendants was sluicing down the slab.
It was snowing when she left the hospital, as it had been, on and off, for the past two days; the sky above the rooftops had a jaundiced look that suggested more was on the way. The pavements had been trodden to a grey sludge. She stopped outside the main entrance to watch the flakes whirling down. Before the end of term – and that wasn’t far away now – she’d have to see Tonks and explain that she didn’t want to go on with dissection. She’d say she’d learned a lot and she was very grateful to have had the opportunity, but … But. Still planning what she’d say to Tonks, she set off to catch the bus home, walking fast, head down, arms swinging, away, away, away …
And then, just as she reached the bus stop, she realized she’d left her bag behind.
It was Friday afternoon, and the Dissecting Room would be locked up over the weekend. It was no use: she’d have to go back. She ran most of the way, a blundering, impeded canter through slush and icy puddles, slipping and slithering across patches of black ice. As she pushed the doors open, cold air rushed after her into the building. She waited impatiently for the lift and then ran all the way down the top-floor corridor.
The Dissecting Room smelled different: less formaldehyde, but enough bleach to make your eyes sting. The lights were still on, so somebody must be around. In the harsh glare, the organs in their display jars glittered like jewels. Forgetting her lost bag, she stood at the foot of the slab where she’d worked and slowly recreated the man who’d lain there, surrendering himself to their scalpels through the long hours of dissection. She remembered the shock she’d felt when the covers first came off; the glow of his uncut skin. Now, when there was nothing of him left, the full force of her desire to know who he was, who he’d been, returned.
The door at the far end of the room had been left ajar. Normally, it was kept locked. This was where the mortuary attendants disappeared to at the end of each session; access to students was strictly forbidden. She walked across the room, hesitated, then pushed the door further open. Nobody spoke, nobody demanded to know what on earth she thought she was doing, so she went in.
To her left, a trestle table ran the full length of the room. On it were three bundles of bones, each with a label attached. With a thud of the heart, she guessed the labels would have names on, and walked across to read them, but no, there were only numbers. Number three was hers, the little that was left of him. He looked like a Christmas turkey the day after Boxing Day, when all the bones have been picked clean.
She looked around for solace, for something, anything, to make this bearable, and her eye fell on a green ledger. The corners were furry with use and so smeared by greasy fingerprints they looked black. Of course: they’d have to keep records because these pitiable piles of bones had to be given a proper burial – and presumably they’d be kept under the names they’d borne in life. She picked up the book and, fully aware that she was breaking every conceivable rule, began shuffling through the pages. The last entry should give her three names, one of them female. That would still leave two possibilities, but, irrationally perhaps, she felt she’d know his name when she saw it.
‘Miss Brooke! Can I help you?’ The usual sneer.
‘I was looking for my bag.’
‘Well, you’re not likely to find it in here, are you?’
She tried to push past him, but he wouldn’t step aside. She was totally in the wrong, she knew that, but she didn’t take kindly to being bullied, and instinctively she went on the attack. ‘Why do you dislike me so much?’ she asked.
‘Because you think you’re the lily on the dungheap.’
So direct, so uncompromisingly contemptuous, it shocked her. ‘Well, somebody has to be and it’s never going to be you.’ How childish that sounded. How embarrassingly childish. ‘I just wanted to know who he was.’
He took the ledger away from her. ‘I think you’ll find your bag’s in the changing room.’
He waited till she reached the door. ‘It wouldn’t have done you any good anyway,’ he said, holding up the ledger. ‘He was one of the unclaimed. Nobody knows who he was.’
‘The unclaimed?’
‘Found in a shop doorway, I expect.’
She nodded, took one last look at the heap of bones, and went in search of her bag.
Seven
That evening Elinor sat alone in her lodgings. She’d had a bath, washed her hair, put on her dressing gown and curled up in front of the fire. Only now, when it was over, did she realize how much the work of dissection had taken out of her. She stared at the blue buds of the fire, listening to its hissing and popping, but saw only the nameless man as he’d been on that first morning: the huge, yellow-soled feet and the flat plain of the body stretching out beyond them. What a dreadful end. Even Daft Jamie had had a name.
She ought to make the effort to go out, if only round the corner to Catherine’s. A few of the girls had started to meet and do life drawing away from the college, taking it in turns to pose. They were supposed to be meeting tonight, but nobody would show up in this weather. Still, an evening alone with Catherine – the little German girl, as Kit Neville rather patronizingly called her – would be good too. Cocoa and gossip, that’s what she needed. But how bad was the snow? The way it was falling when she came in, it might be impossible to get out.
She couldn’t see much from the window, so she went downstairs and looked out into the street. Snow was still coming down fast, six inches at least had piled up against the door; it must have been falling steadily ever since she got home. Looking up into the circle of light around the street lamp, she could see how big the flakes were. Whirling down from the sky, each flake cast a shadow on to the snow, like big, fat, grey moths fluttering. She’d never noticed shadows like that before. Mesmerized, she stood and watched, trying to follow first one flake and then another, until she felt dizzy, and had to stop.
When she looked up again, she realized she wasn’t alone. A man was standing at the foot of the steps, only five or six feet away from her. The snow must have muffled the sound of his approach. She took an involuntary step back.
Instantly, he took off his hat. ‘Miss Brooke?’
‘Ye-es?’
‘My name’s Andrew Martin. I’m a friend of Toby’s.’
Yes, she remembered seeing him on the steps of the medical school with Toby. ‘Is he all right?’
‘Well, no, not really, that’s why I’m here.’
Fear slipped into her mind so easily, it might always have been there. ‘How bad is it?’
‘I think you should come.’
‘I’ll get dressed. You get back to him.’
‘No, it’s all right, I’ll wait.’
She stepped back. ‘Well, at least wait inside.’
He brushed past her. She closed the door, shutting out the dervish dance of flakes and shadows. He stood awkwardly, snow coating his shoulders as if he were a statue. Big, raw, red hands – he’d come out without gloves – a long nose with a dewdrop trembling on the tip, and a terrible, intractable, gauche shyness coming off him like a bad smell.
‘I won’t be a minute,’ she said.
She ran upstairs, burst into her bedroom, snatched up the first clothes that came to hand, put on her coat and wound a scarf round her neck, all the time trying to think what she would need to take. She’d be staying all night; she might have to stay longer than that. Nightdress, then: soap, flannel, toothbrush, toothpaste, brush, comb. What else? She snapped the lock shut and carried the case downstairs.
The snow on his boots had melted to a puddle on the floor.
‘Can we get a cab?’
‘No, I tried on my way here but they said they’re not taking fares.’
London had become a silent city. For Elinor the stillness added to the strangeness of this walk through deserted streets with a man she didn’t know to a place she’d never been. How secretive Toby was, really. She hadn’t realized till now. He always seemed so laughing and open, so uncomplicated, and yet he’d never once invited her to his lodgings or offered to introduce her to his friends.
