Toby's Room

by Pat Barker

  For long stretches of time he might not have died at all. He wasn’t present, but then he hadn’t been present for most of the past two years. There was no body. No grave. No ceremony. Only his spare clothes, the stuff he’d left behind when he went into the line for the last time, and they’d been pushed out of sight.

  At first, this limbo state didn’t bother her, but then, as the days and weeks went by, not knowing how he’d died became a torment. She had to make his death real; otherwise this half-life could go on for ever. She knew there were people who cherished the malignant hope that their sons or husbands were still alive, prisoners of war perhaps, or mad, wandering the French countryside with no memory of who they were, or lying in a hospital bed too badly wounded to communicate at all. These were hardly consoling thoughts, and yet people clung to them. Anything, rather than face up to the finality of death. But it was finality that she’d begun to crave.

  She knew so little. What did ‘Missing, Believed Killed’ actually mean? What degree of certainty did it imply? Apart from the telegram and the official letter that followed, there were only two brief notes, one from Toby’s CO, another from the Chaplain. She read them again and again. How short they were, how grudging. She’d been puzzled by that at the time, though nobody else seemed to notice anything amiss. And there was another thing: Kit Neville, who was in the Royal Army Medical Corps and had served with Toby, hadn’t written.

  The more she thought about that, the more extraordinary it seemed. She wrote to him, asking if he knew anything about Toby’s death. No reply. Thinking he might not have got the letter, she wrote again. Still no reply. She bought The Times and searched the columns of wounded and dead for Kit’s name, convinced that something dreadful must have happened to him – nothing short of serious injury or death could excuse his silence – but his name wasn’t in the lists. Of course it might have been in previous issues, but no, if he were back in London she’d have heard.

  She was left with nothing to fill the gap but her own imagination, and even imagination needs some facts to work on. Now, when it was too late, she’d have liked to know the details of Toby’s life out there, but her long insistence on ignoring the war worked against her. When she tried to picture his final hours, her mind was blank.

  One morning she began to paint Toby’s portrait, wondering why it had taken her so long to think of doing it. As she worked, she kept stepping back from the easel and closing her eyes. She could see him more clearly like this: the shape of his head, the way his hair sprang from his temples, the blue eyes so like her own, but with a fleck of brown near the right pupil, his ears, the lobes extravagantly long and full; and then down across his body: the wart an inch away from his left nipple, the appendicitis scar …

  It was about this time she became aware that the smell of his clothes had begun to invade the lower rooms.

  At first she thought she must be imagining it. She was reminded of how the smell of the cadaver had pursued her even when she was miles away from the Dissecting Room. How strange: she hadn’t thought about that for years. But now, she remembered lying in bed at night, sniffing her fingers, always catching the whiff of formaldehyde though it couldn’t possibly have been there. Warily, she lifted her fingers to her nose, relieved to find only the familiar smells of oil and turps. No, the smell was just her imagination running away with her. She had to get a grip, stop thinking about the uniform, thrust it away again out of sight. And for a time she succeeded: the smell did seem to go away, only to return, a few days later, even more pungent than before.

  She couldn’t finish the portrait, or rather she couldn’t trust herself to recognize the moment when it was finished. Her judgement had deserted her. A morning came when she hardly managed to work at all. Toby’s features eluded her; his face seemed to be sliding in and out of focus. She took a short break and tried again, but it was no use. Tiredness; she’d been working too hard. This time, she gave herself several days off, only to find, when she returned to the studio, that she couldn’t paint at all.

  The clothes in the attic drew her to them. For days the smell had been particularly strong, especially in the corridor outside his room. At last, early one morning when it was no more than half light, she steeled herself to go upstairs to the attic. Madly, she managed to convince herself there would be nothing there. Rats and mice would have eaten them. So it was a shock to grope behind the old rug and the blankets she’d piled in front of them and find them still there, instantly recognizable to her probing fingertips by the cardboard stiffness of the cloth. She pulled the tunic clear of the wrapping and shook it, producing such a cloud of dust she started to cough. Then she wrapped the paper round the clothes again and carried them down the narrow stairs, clinging on to the banisters with an old woman’s fear of falling. If she fell now she could lie here for days.

  At the foot of the stairs she hesitated, cradling the lifeless bundle in her arms, wondering where to take it, but these were his things: they belonged in his room.

  She dropped the parcel on the floor beside the bed, and knelt down to look at the clothes. The smell was still there, but fainter now. This was hardly reassuring, since it meant she must have been imagining it, in part at least. On a sudden impulse, she began laying out the garments on the bed: the peaked cap, the tunic, the Sam Browne belt and revolver case, breeches, putties, boots … And there he was, his body shaped by the clothes he’d worn in life.

  The smell was getting stronger again. Nothing else, nothing, could have made her want to imagine how he’d died. No words, no photographs, would have been powerful enough to break the taboo she’d imposed on herself: that the war was not to be acknowledged. But now smell, the most primitive of the senses, the one most closely linked to memory and desire, had swept all that away.

  Bullet wound, bayonet wound, shrapnel? She saw him staggering on a few paces before collapsing, lying under the patient stars, alone. Only that was nonsense, of course; if he’d died like that there’d have been a body. A grave. Even the cadaver she’d worked on all those years ago had been buried in the end. What she couldn’t grasp was the idea of a human being disintegrating; nothing left, not even a pile of greasy bones. And in only a second. Painless, everybody said. Yes, but also inhuman. Outside the natural order of things.

  She knelt beside the bed and pressed her face against the tunic, feeling the rough cloth scrape her cheek: the slight shock of it, like the roughness of his chin in life. Close to, like this, she caught the faint smell of his body underneath all the other smells. A giant hand got hold of her heart and squeezed. She stroked the cloth, the skin of her fingertips clicking on the threads, and then heard, or felt, something else: a crackle of paper from the lower-left pocket. She delved into it as deep as she could and found a hole in the lining, big enough to get two fingers through. There was a piece of paper there. Grasping it in a scissor movement, she manoeuvred it up into the light.

  Some sort of list – medical supplies. She could have wept with disappointment, but then she turned the page over and saw her own name.

  Elinor – I’ve had two goes at this already, so this is it, has to be, because we’re moving forward soon and there’ll be no time for writing after that. There’s no way of saying this without sounding melodramatic, and I really don’t think I am. In fact, I feel rather down-to-earth and matter-of-fact about it all. I don’t think I would even mind very much, except I know it’s going to be a shock to you – and I can’t think of any way of softening the blow.

  I won’t be coming back this time. This isn’t a premonition or anything like that. I can’t even explain why. I used to think officers’ letters weren’t censored, but they are sometimes, not by the people here, but back at base. They do random checks or something, and I can’t afford to risk that. I hate not being able to tell you. If you ever want to know more, I suggest you ask your friend Kit Neville – assuming he survives, and I’m sure he will. He’s been no friend to me. I know you’ll take care of Mother as best you can. Father’ll be
all right, I think – he’s got his work. And Rachel’s got Tim and the boys. I don’t know what to say to you. Remember

  Nothing else. One word: ‘Remember’, and then nothing else. She knew at once it was impossible to go on living without knowing what had happened to him, but beyond writing to Kit again … She would write, though she knew it was useless. What else could she do? All the years she’d pushed the war out of her mind, refusing to admit it had any significance, and now her ignorance was an impassable barrier between her and what she needed to know. She had no useful contacts; her friends were almost all pacifists. When she tried to think of somebody who might be able to help, the only person she could come up with was Paul. He had contacts in the army, and might know how to set about getting more information. And he and Kit were friends – rather prickly, competitive friends, it was true, but friends nevertheless. Only, after the grudging ten minutes she’d spent at his bedside in hospital, how could she possibly ask him for help?

  But Paul was Paul: he wouldn’t hold that against her. And however little was left of love between them she knew she could rely on his kindness. Paul, then, it must be.

  Eleven

  Paul landed heavily on the platform and had to stand still for a moment, clenching his teeth against the pain. His fellow passengers stared down at him until, with a cough and wheeze, the train pulled away and their pale faces were replaced by reflections of sky. He drew a deep breath, waiting for the pain to subside, and then looked around him. The station was deserted. The blue paint on the waiting-room door was cracked and blistered; grass grew between the flagstones in the small yard. The last time he’d been here was with Kit Neville, August Bank Holiday weekend, 1914, the last few days and hours of peace. They’d been met, then, by a pony and trap. Not much hope of that now. He shouldered his kitbag and set off to walk.

  As he pushed open the gate, the first thin blowing of rain met him and, before he’d gone a hundred yards, it was pelting down. On either side of the lane, the ploughed fields had become a waste of mud; black, leafless trees were stencilled on to a white sky. Everything he saw, everything he felt, seemed to be filtered through his memories of the front line, as if a thin wash had been laid over his perceptions of this scene. Columns of sleety rain marched across the fields while, in the distance, grey clouds massed for another attack. Somehow or other, he had to connect with the present, but he found it almost impossible. Turning to look back down the lane, he saw the pony and trap of that pre-war visit turn the corner and come towards him, the fat, chestnut pony twitching its skin against the flies. And there, on the left-hand side of the trap, was his younger self, staring up into the green canopy above his head. There’d been a smell of hot tar, of warm dust on nettles. A bluebottle had zoomed drunkenly about, trying to settle on his upper lip. He remembered it all so vividly, and yet he couldn’t get back inside the mind of that young man. Boy, really, though he would not have said so. He’d been recovering from a love affair with one of the models at the Slade; no doubt he’d thought his heart was broken, though actually he’d been more than ready to fall in love again. And there in the farmhouse, waiting for them, was Elinor; and beside him, in the trap, was Kit Neville, who also loved her.

  Three years and many lifetimes later, Paul watched the trap carrying two raw, hopeful young men reach the crest of the hill and dip into the hollow beyond it, and then, forcing his stiffening leg to move, he turned and limped after it.

  It had become a preoccupation of his – almost an obsession – working out how the war had changed him; other people too, of course. He never managed to talk openly about it, not even to men he’d served with, perhaps because, for him, the changes had been mainly sexual. The young man in the trap had been a romantic: deferential, almost timid, in his approach to women. Three years later, he’d become coarser, less scrupulous, his behaviour verged, at times, on the predatory. For two years, his relationship with Elinor had protected him, but then her letters had become shorter, colder, until eventually she’d stopped writing altogether; after that, he’d regarded himself as free to take what he wanted.

  Ahead of him, the farmhouse appeared and disappeared behind waves of rain, like an outcrop of rocks at low tide. The last hundred yards was up a steep hill. When, at last, he reached the gate he paused, not wanting to arrive breathless and in pain from the cramping of his leg. It was a full five minutes before he was ready to go on, and then he was aware, as he trudged up the drive, of a face looking down at him from an upstairs window. Elinor. A girl’s face at an upstairs window, framed by ivy leaves. It seemed like the beginning of a story, though after her silence of the last few months their story must surely be drawing to a close. One visit to the hospital. One. People he hardly knew had visited more often than that. And then, during his stay in a convalescent home in Dorset, when he’d been bored almost to distraction: no letters, no card, nothing. Right, he’d thought. That was that. Over.

  And then, out of the blue, this invitation to spend a weekend at the farmhouse. Not with her parents either; the note had made it clear they’d be alone. But no warmth in the note, no expression of love or longing, no hint that she continued to feel for him what he still felt for her. He’d found the tone chilling – and yet it hadn’t occurred to him not to accept.

  Outside the door, he paused again. He was just raising his hand to knock when the door opened and there stood a tall, thin girl dressed in black. It took him a second to recognize her. ‘Elinor.’

  ‘Paul.’

  A moment’s uncertainty, then she raised her face for him to kiss. Her lips were as dry and cracked as baked mud and she pulled away from him immediately.

  ‘You sound surprised,’ he said. ‘I haven’t got the day wrong, have I?’

  ‘No, of course not, come in.’

  The porch was exactly as he remembered it: a jumble of muddy boots, umbrellas, mackintoshes. A powerful smell of wet dog hung over everything, though it was a while before a springer spaniel appeared, his claws clicking on the stone flags: old, milky-eyed, but still going through the motions of defending his mistress and his home.

  Paul knelt down and rubbed behind the dog’s ears, producing grunts of contentment. ‘Hello, boy.’

  ‘Oh, he’ll take any amount of that.’

  ‘I don’t remember him.’

  ‘He’d have been in the kitchen; he used to live there more or less. Nowadays, he’s got the run of the house.’ She led the way into the hall. ‘I expect you’d like to freshen up before tea?’

  He followed her upstairs, watching the sway of her hips under the narrow skirt, hearing the whisper of silk as her thighs brushed together. Suddenly, he was aroused, impatient to hold her. He’d have liked to reach out now, but knew he had to be careful. She seemed so … friable, as if one rough movement might break her. He’d never seen her like this before.

  ‘I’ve put you in Toby’s room.’

  She opened the door and stood aside to let him pass. He swung his kitbag on to the nearest chair. When he looked round she was standing by the bed, stroking the jade-green counterpane. He heard the click of silk threads as they snagged on the palms of her hands.

  ‘I’m afraid I’m not very well organized these days.’ She didn’t meet his eyes, wouldn’t look at him, kept chafing her arms as if she were cold. ‘I paint till my head spins and then there’s no time left for anything else.’ An attempt at a smile. ‘Anyway. Come down when you’re ready.’

  He moved towards her, but she slipped past him.

  ‘I’ll be in the kitchen. Give me a shout if there’s anything you want.’

  I want you.

  She’d gone. He heard her footsteps running downstairs.

  Left alone, he poured tepid water into a bowl and splashed his face and as much of his neck and chest as he could easily reach. Still dripping, he went to stand in front of the mirror. The face looking back at him had a pink, excited, slightly furtive look. Behind his reflection, he could see one side of the double bed; he didn’t intend to slee
p in it alone. The house creaked and sighed all around him. How long had she been living here by herself? Painting, she said, till her head spun, and obviously neglecting herself: she was stick thin. The house, too, seemed bereft. He’d glimpsed dust sheets shrouding the furniture in some of the downstairs rooms. She was not so much living here as camping out, and he felt a stab of pity for her, mingled with curiosity. What on earth possessed her, to shut herself away like this? Of course, her brother’s death must have been devastating, but for a few weeks after it, she’d been seen frequently in town. But then – and nobody seemed to know why – her trips to London had ceased, and she’d walled herself up here, alone.

  Well, no doubt she’d tell him, sooner or later. He dried his hands and face and went downstairs.

  She was making a cup of tea. ‘I’ve forgotten if you take sugar.’

  ‘Two, please.’

  It mattered, that she’d forgotten. When they first became lovers ‘sugar’ had been their private word for sex. One weekend they’d stayed in a boarding house on the coast – Eastbourne, was it? No, Brighton. Elinor was wearing a wedding ring he’d bought in Woolworth’s. Over tea, sitting in a prim, chintzy lounge on a fat, overstuffed sofa, she’d leaned towards him and said, in a stagey whisper, ‘Darling, I can’t remember, do you take sugar in your tea?’

  They’d collapsed in giggles while, at the next table, a middle-aged couple, puzzled and slightly scandalized, had pretended not to listen.