by Pat Barker
They’d set off to walk, but now, unexpectedly, Neville veered out into the road and hailed a cab.
‘Where are we going?’ Paul asked.
‘The Café Royal.’
‘Is that a –?’
But Neville was already inside the cab. Paul followed him in and gave the address. A sharp intake of breath from the driver as he turned and saw the mask, but his response was calm, if unpredictable.
‘I had him in my cab once.’
‘Who?’ Neville asked.
‘Rupert Brooke. He was good, him. “There’s some corner of a foreign field/ That is for ever England”.’
‘That would be the bit with my nose under it; just fucking drive, will you?’
Conversation was at an end. Shoulders stiff with offence, the driver turned his attention to the road ahead.
‘Christ,’ Neville said. ‘If there’s one thing I hate it’s cab drivers who think they have to be characters.’
‘Yes, but let’s face it, Neville, there aren’t many people you don’t hate.’
Paul leaned back and closed his eyes. He dreaded walking into the Café Royal with Neville in this state, but there seemed to be no hope of deflecting him.
‘I’m having second thoughts about this,’ Neville said.
‘What?’
He tapped his metal cheek. ‘This. The mask.’
‘Looks all right.’
‘Doesn’t bloody feel all right.’
Outside the Café Royal, Neville insisted on paying the fare, but ended by scattering coins all over the pavement. An elderly man who bent down to help pick them up, got the mask thrust full into his face, and hurried away, with a final incredulous glance over his shoulder.
‘I’ll get it,’ Paul said, reaching for his wallet. As he paid, he saw Neville bracing himself to enter the building. It moved him, that small, private act of courage. He reached out and touched Neville’s shoulder. ‘You’ll be all right, you know. They’re all friends.’
‘I have no friends.’
Outside the Domino Room, Neville hung back; it was Paul who pushed open the door and walked in. Treading on his heels, Neville stumbled and almost fell. Paul found a table near the entrance and ordered whiskies, but it was a minute or two before he felt able to look around. Once again they were the centre of attention, though nobody openly stared.
Despite Neville’s frequent, self-pitying assertions that he was finished as an artist, overlooked, forgotten, yesterday’s man, his return to London had been reported in all the papers, though nothing had been said about the nature or severity of his wounds. But he was known to be at Queen’s Hospital, so the injuries had to be facial. The rumours had begun almost at once. Some people said he was so hideously disfigured his own mother had run screaming from the room; others that his brain was affected too, that he was either mad or a cabbage. And now here he was, or here somebody was. Neville’s thickset figure and truculent bearing were almost enough to identify him, but not quite. People glanced at the mask and quickly away. Was it him? It had to be, but nobody was confident enough to come forward and speak to him. The mask didn’t help: Rupert Brooke’s face gazing around a room where he’d so often lorded it in the flesh. Enough to give you the shivers.
Neville was on his fifth whisky. Paul expected him to become even more aggressive, but instead he sank into a morose stupor, peering through the slits in the mask at scenes of former triumph. Two or three years ago, he’d have walked into this room as if he owned it. Paul remembered meeting him here: Neville, the famous war artist, whose latest exhibition was on everybody’s lips, and he felt a flicker of shameful pleasure at the reversal of their fortunes; a mean, filthy emotion, quickly suppressed.
The silence had gone on too long. He tried to find a topic of conversation that would rouse Neville from his stupor, but nothing worked. He either couldn’t, or wouldn’t, speak.
Instead, he sat staring round the room, the silver face of the dead poet turning from group to group. Gradually, uncertainly, a few people began to respond, raising their glasses, smiling ghost smiles at what must have seemed, to most of them, a ghost. Suddenly, Paul realized they weren’t sure Neville or whoever it was behind the mask could see them. Nothing was visible behind the slits in the mask and he’d stumbled when he first came into the room. A large group at a nearby table fell silent for a time, but then, slowly, the conversation started up again. They were talking about an exhibition that included three of Paul’s paintings. Some at least of the group must have recognized him, but nobody spoke; the cordon sanitaire round Neville obviously included him too. They were still, covertly, the focus for every eye in the room.
The mask went on smiling its faint, archaic smile. Behind it, an eye like a dying sun sank beneath the rim of a shattered cheekbone, the hole where the nose had been gaped wide and the mouth endlessly, tirelessly snarled. Neville was clenching and unclenching his fists. ‘Bastards, I’ll bury the whole fucking lot of them.’
‘Calm down …’
‘Why? Why should I calm down? Two years ago they were queuing up to lick my arse and now look at them …’
‘They don’t know what to say, that’s all.’
He didn’t know what to say. More important, he didn’t know what to do, how to get them out of this situation. He turned to Neville. ‘Look, why don’t we –’
Suddenly, without any warning, Neville began to roar, the bellow of a wounded bull with the full force of his lungs behind it. Paul tried to grab his arm, but he was too late: Neville was on his feet. He waited till every eye in the room was fixed on him, and then he took off the mask.
One or two people cried out. Others were blank with shock. Instinctively, Paul stepped in front of Neville, though whether to shield him from their reactions or them from the sight of him, he didn’t know. He thought nothing could have been more terrible than that roaring, but then Neville started to cry, a puppy howl of abandonment and loss. Paul put an arm round his shoulders and managed to turn him towards the door. ‘Come on,’ he kept saying, ‘it’s all right, come on,’ the way he would have spoken to a distraught child or a frightened horse.
Neville let himself be led from the room. By the time they reached the pavement he’d stopped crying, though his chest still shook. And then, to Paul’s utter bewilderment, he started to laugh.
‘Did you see their faces? Oh, my God …’
Paul didn’t know how to respond to this. He knew – if he knew anything at all, he knew this – that every part of Neville’s anger and distress had been genuine. The brooding, the resentment, the rage, the ‘Look at me!’ of the abandoned child or the slighted artist, the tears, the sobbing … It had all been real. Surely it had? And yet Neville’s laughter, now, seemed to deny that. He realized Neville was already hard at work reshaping the events of the evening, carving out for himself, if only in retrospect, a position of authority and control. That was Neville all over: a fat, moist silkworm perpetually spinning the legend of himself.
And it worked. It worked. Paul had already started to edit his own memories of the evening. Perhaps Neville had always intended that dramatic sweeping aside of the mask; perhaps he’d got drunk in order to be able to do it. Perhaps. But none of that justified his behaviour.
‘Well, that was pretty grim,’ Paul said, tight-lipped.
‘My dear fellow, blame the mask. This is a mask of known bad character. Chap who owns it goes on the Underground, waits till there’s a few girls sitting near by, and then takes it off. Comes back to the ward, holds up his fingers.’ Neville held up his own hand to demonstrate. ‘How many screamed. How many fainted. There aren’t many faints, but he has had two.’ He seemed to sense Paul’s disapproval. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Tarrant, it’s a game.’
‘It’s a terrible game.’
‘You get your laughs where you can.’ He walked on a few steps. Turned back. ‘Do you know, Tarrant, you’re no fun at all tonight.’
‘Sorry about that.’
‘I’m making the
most of it, I won’t be able to wear it after the next op. Trunk gets in the way. Pedicle, sorry.’
‘Well count me out next time.’
Paul could feel Neville’s anger, which up to now had been directed impartially at everybody they met, narrowing to a point and focusing on him.
‘You’re going out with Catherine, aren’t you?’ he said.
‘No.’
‘What’s the point of denying it? Mother told me. And Catherine told her.’
‘We had supper once and went to a concert.’
‘Hmm.’
‘What does “hmm” mean?’
‘Elinor. Catherine.’
‘Yes?’
‘My girlfriends first, then yours. You seem to have some sort of morbid desire to slide in on my leavings.’
This was so offensive, and in so many different ways, that Paul was speechless. Neville had not had an affair with Elinor. Catherine … ? Well, yes, possibly, he didn’t know. But Elinor, definitely not.
He said, evenly, ‘This is where I punch you on the nose, isn’t it? Oops, sorry, you haven’t got one.’
The words opened a gap between them that it seemed nothing could ever fill, and yet, a second later, Neville laughed and threw a heavy arm across Paul’s shoulder.
‘You know I don’t mean it.’
‘No, I don’t know.’
‘We should be friends.’
‘Yeah, well, you don’t make it easy.’
‘I know.’ He patted Paul awkwardly on the arm. ‘Come on, I’d better be getting back. If I’m late they mightn’t let me out again.’
Please, God.
There were no cabs in sight so they started to walk. After the way Neville had behaved that evening, Paul felt justified in saying anything he wanted to say. ‘Why didn’t you reply to Elinor’s letters? You did get them, didn’t you?’
‘Nothing I could say.’
‘That bad?’
‘I think so.’
They walked on, pausing now and then to look for cabs, but none appeared. Neville was setting a cracking pace. Paul was quickly out of breath and his leg had started to bother him.
‘I will tell you,’ Neville said. ‘Just don’t push me – I’ve got enough on my plate at the moment. Another bloody operation for starters …’
This was so obviously true that Paul couldn’t bring himself to argue. A few yards further on, Neville succeeded in flagging down a cab. The driver was mercifully free of poetic associations and so they travelled to Charing Cross in virtual silence.
As the train to Sidcup left, Paul stood on the platform watching its blue-tinged lights disappear into the darkness. After it had gone, he sat on one of the benches, massaging the muscles of his injured leg. Memories of the evening: the mask, the Café Royal, the shocked faces turning towards them, buzzed around his head until he was too exhausted to think any more. Then he simply sat, staring at the humming lines, blank and motionless, as if a piece had been cut out of his brain.
Twenty-three
The northern light flooding in through the high windows was pitiless, but not more so than Tonks’s gaze. He was still at the table selecting pastels from a tray, but now and then he stopped to look at Neville, who felt his injuries had never been more cruelly exposed than in this glaring light.
Partly to distract attention from himself, Neville nodded at the wall of portraits behind Tonks’s chair.
‘I suppose I’m joining the Rogues’ Gallery, am I?’
‘That’s the general idea.’
‘Do I have to?’
‘I’m sorry, I –’
‘I mean, can I refuse?’
‘You’re in the army, Mr Neville. What do you think?’
Neville shrugged. ‘What’s it for, anyway?’
‘It’s to help Gillies work out how to restore an aesthetically pleasing appearance –’
‘Restore? Huh. Not sure I ever had one.’
‘I’ve known people say they come out looking better than when they went in. One or two of the portraits –’
‘Do you mind if I have a look?’
‘Not at all.’
Neville went across to the wall of framed portraits, his eye moving from one disfigured face to the next. ‘Very powerful,’ he said, at last. ‘Mind, with subjects like that, you could hardly fail, could you? Who sees them?’
‘Gillies, the other surgeons. Visitors.’
‘Visitors?’
‘They’ve become something of a curiosity, I’m afraid. I think it’s a bit …’ He waved a hand in the air.
‘Voyeuristic?’
‘Distasteful.’
‘So why do you let it happen?’
‘They don’t belong to me.’
‘Pity. They’re probably the best things you’ve done.’
‘It hardly matters, does it? They can never be shown.’
‘Mark my words, somebody’s going to want to.’
‘The War Office did ask, I told them I didn’t think it was appropriate. There’s not much else I can do. As I say, they’re not mine.’
‘Can’t imagine why the War Office wants them, anyway. I mean, they’re hardly recruiting posters, are they?’
Ignoring Tonks’s obvious desire to get on, Neville went on looking at the portraits. The hospital had no looking glasses, no shaving mirrors, even. If you cut yourself, too bloody bad. It was nothing to what the surgeons had in mind. Even the water in the ornamental fountain had been drained, in case some poor deluded Narcissus decided to risk a peep. Of course, people did try to see themselves: in puddles, windows at night, polished taps – even in dessert spoons, though that was a quick route to hell. And yet here, all the time, were these portraits, by the Slade Professor of Fine Art, no less.
‘Do they see them? The sitters?’
‘Patients? No.’
‘Well, I think that tells us all we need to know.’
Neville went back to the window and sat down facing Tonks. ‘So why am I allowed to see them?’
‘Because you’re an artist.’
‘I seem to remember you expressing some doubts about that. Not so very long ago.’
No response from Tonks; he’d selected a number of flesh-tinted pastels and was ready to begin.
‘Who else is doing this?’ Neville asked.
‘Daryl Lindsey. Do you know him? Watercolourist. Oh, and Lady Scott. You know, Scott’s widow.’ He peered at Neville’s face. ‘Interesting woman. She was saying how sometimes the injury makes them more beautiful.’
‘More beautiful?’
‘You know, like an Antique sculpture with bits missing.’
‘No wonder the poor bugger froze to death.’
Tonks stopped drawing. ‘That really is an incredibly offensive remark.’
‘Is it? Dunno, past caring.’
For a moment, Neville was back in the Antiques Room where his insistence on the pointlessness of copying Classical sculpture had very nearly got him expelled from the Slade. He wondered in passing what he could say or do that would be bad enough to get him thrown out of here. Nothing, probably. He was stuck.
‘I went out the other night,’ he said. ‘Wearing Tyler’s mask. You know about his mask?’
‘Yes, there’s not a lot they can do for him, so they sent him off to the tin-noses department.’
‘That’s where you go, isn’t it, when they’ve given up?’
‘How was it?’
‘Interesting. You know, I look round the ward and some of them … The number of operations, there’s one chap coming up to his twenty-third. Can you imagine that? Twenty-three operations. I used to think: Bloody hell, why not just cover it up and have done with it?’
‘And now?’
‘Don’t know. I was talking – well, mainly to Tarrant – and I could see him struggling, because obviously behind the mask there are all kinds of expressions going on, and you forget nobody can see them. As far as other people are concerned, it’s like talking to a brick wall.’ Neville felt himsel
f becoming more and more agitated. The light from the window seemed to be burning his skin. And Tonks’s stare, his silence … ‘I kept trying to see it from a girl’s point of view and of course it’s impossible. Any lump of meat would be better than that – even if it does look like Rupert Brooke.’
Tonks was looking down at his drawing.
‘Did you know people ask to look like Rupert Brooke?’ asked Neville.
‘Well, he was very beautiful.’
‘I find that Greek-god look in men rather repellent.’
No reply from Tonks; just the continual needle prick of his glances.
‘Well, don’t you?’
‘Not really, no. I’m afraid I find beauty in either sex very attractive.’
‘But not in the same way?’
Tonks was openly smiling. ‘No, not in the same way.’
Silence except for the whisper and slur of pastels on paper. Neville was trying to twist his head to see the image, but whenever he tried Tonks stopped drawing, waiting for him to resume the pose.
‘We went to the Café Royal.’
‘I know, I heard.’
‘Oh, Tarrant blabbed, did he?’
‘No, as a matter of fact he didn’t. There were quite a few people from the Slade there. Somebody’s birthday, I think. Tarrant didn’t say anything. Fact, I don’t often see him. I think it’s better if he’s just left to get on with it – without his old teacher looking over his shoulder. Not that I’d presume to comment.’
‘How’s it going?’
‘This?’
‘No, Tarrant’s … whatever.’
‘As I say, I rarely see him.’
Neville turned his head to look at the portraits again.
‘What are you thinking?’ Tonks asked.
‘Nothing special. Churned-up flesh; churned-up earth. If you take the other features away, the wound becomes a landscape.’
‘Well, I’ve always thought landscape’s the only way of telling the truth about this war.’
