Toby's Room (13 page)

‘I remember,’ she said. ‘I looked out of the window and you and Dad were on the terrace talking about it.’

‘Oh, and Toby’s friend was staying too – what was his name?’

‘Andrew? He was killed in 1915. It changed Toby, there was always a kind of sadness about him after that.’

‘They were revising, weren’t they? And the rest of us all went off to see a church. The Doom. And on the way back Kit fell off his bike. Do you remember?’

‘Yes – he asked me to marry him.’

‘Then?’

‘Lying on the ground like a wounded hero.’

‘I didn’t know that. The slithy tove.’

‘Did you ever see him out there?’

‘Once, in Ypres. That was back in – oh, I don’t know. December, ’14? He was incredibly drunk, and we spent the entire evening talking about you.’

‘Hmm, did you? I’m glad I wasn’t a fly on that wall.’

‘All very flattering.’ Though it hadn’t been. Our Lady of Triangles, Neville had called her, and he certainly hadn’t meant it as a compliment. Well, no triangles now: just a strange, solitary woman obsessively painting her dead brother. ‘This is good,’ he said, taking another sip of the wine.

She’d eaten well, and the food seemed to have lightened her mood. She sat more easily, smiled more naturally. He wasn’t absolutely sure, but he thought she might have run a comb through her hair.

After coffee, they spent a few minutes walking in the garden.
A full moon threw their linked shadows across the lawn, but the temperature was falling rapidly and he was glad when she suggested they should go back inside. In the doorway, he paused, looking at the room they were about to enter: shadows flickering on the walls, pools of golden light around the lamps, two wine glasses side by side on the table. Whatever else happened tonight, he would remember this.

And what was going to happen was agonizingly difficult to predict. They took their glasses through to the drawing room. She sat at the piano, he joined her there, their hips and thighs almost, but not quite, touching. He could hardly play at all and she was by no means the accomplished young lady her mother had no doubt wished to produce, but together they managed to cobble together a medley of music-hall favourites, improvised, talked, laughed, sang, drank, before finally sinking into two armchairs. Suddenly, neither of them could think of anything to say. In the silence, he heard the clock ticking towards midnight.

He reached out and took her hand, feeling her finger bones crunch as he tightened his grip. ‘How long have you been here on your own?’

‘I don’t know, I’ve lost track. Mother’s staying with Rachel.’

‘How is she?’

‘Not good. To begin with she just seemed … dazed. Lay on the sofa all day, didn’t get dressed … They all thought I ought to stay and look after her, but …’ She shook her head. ‘We’d have killed each other in a week.’

That hardness in her. It was growing, he thought.

‘Anyway, she’s happier there. She’s got the grandchildren. Children help because they don’t understand, they live in the present. Animals too.
He
’s been wonderful.’ She nodded at Hobbes, who raised his head, then lowered it again with a groan, keeping his bloodshot eyes fixed on her. ‘Never says the wrong thing because he never says anything.’

‘Doesn’t it help to talk?’

‘Well, you know. You must’ve lost people …?’

‘It’s not the same out there.’

She was waiting for him to go on, and that was new. For the first time ever she’d asked him a question about the war.

‘Chap out there – Barnes, he was called,
Titus
Barnes. God knows why his parents thought they had the right to inflict that on him. Anyway, he got hit in the head, one side blown off. It was a couple of days before we could get to see him. And of course we all sat round and listened to him snore, it was pretty grim, we knew he wouldn’t live – the puzzle was why he was still alive – and we’d all liked him. But then we had to go, and by the time we’d gone a hundred yards we were laughing and joking as if nothing had happened.’ He looked at her averted face. ‘Sorry, I know it sounds harsh, but there’s not a lot of point grieving when you know you’re going to be next.’

He couldn’t tell what she thought. She was looking down at the dregs of wine in her glass, swishing them from side to side. ‘Can I get you another?’

She came to stand beside him while he poured. As he handed her the glass his hand touched hers and he felt her shiver. Gently, he ran his forefinger up her arm, tracking the groove between radius and ulna, pressing hard enough to produce a wave-like motion in her flesh. She didn’t pull away. He took the glass from her, set it down on the table and, cradling her face between his hands, began to kiss her, gently at first, barely brushing his lips against hers, letting their breaths mingle, afraid that any sudden movement would send her scurrying away. But then, she began to kiss him back. Soon their arms were twined around each other and he could feel the edge of her ribcage pressing into his chest; he was more aware of that than of her breasts. Her dry skin rubbed against his, as thirsty as sand. His hands slid down to her hips, tilting her pelvis towards him, his mouth found the hollow at the base of her throat …

Instantly, she pushed him away. ‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘I can’t. Don’t ask me, I just can’t.’

‘All right.’ He had to force the words out, producing in the process
a hard, scratchy little laugh that shaded uncertainly into tenderness. ‘But at least let’s sit together, you seem terribly far away over there.’

She came and curled up beside him on the sofa. Perhaps that’s what she wanted: a brother’s love. The comfort of long familiarity, without any of the thrill and danger of sex. But no, there’d been real passion in that kiss, and it hadn’t all come from him. She would let him make love to her, if not tonight, then tomorrow. They’d gone beyond the point where either of them wanted to turn back. But it would be completely wrong – and stupid – to go on pressing her now. So he was patient, stroking her arm, talking softly, pleased when he made her laugh.

When it was time for bed, they went upstairs together, passing the tall mirrors that faced each other across the half-landing. Briefly, they became a million couples, their linked reflections stretching away into an unimaginable distance. Even now, he was full of hope. But outside her bedroom door, she stopped and looked up at him, and her face in the lamplight was pinched and old.

‘Well then, goodnight,’ he said, deliberately flattening his voice on the final word to stop it becoming a question.

‘I’ve been sleeping in Toby’s room, I’m afraid I haven’t even got round to changing the sheets.’

‘We’ve slept in the same sheets before.’

He tried to prevent this remark sounding sharp, but he didn’t succeed, and the slight pressure hardened her against him, as he’d known it would.

‘Just go down and make yourself a cup of coffee in the morning,’ she said. ‘Though I’ll probably be up.’

She slipped into her bedroom and the door clicked shut behind her. He rested his hand, briefly, on the cold wood, before walking the few yards further along the corridor to Toby’s room.

It took him only a few minutes to unpack. Apart from his drawing pads, shaving kit and a change of underwear he’d brought next to nothing with him. Then, feeling too tense for sleep, he wandered round the room, looking at books and photographs.

It was very obviously a young man’s room. If Elinor had been sleeping here, she’d left no trace of her presence. He wished he could remember Toby more clearly, but he’d only met him once, that last weekend before the war, and all his memories of that time were of Elinor and Neville. Elinor, awkward and rebellious in her mother’s presence, quite unlike the startlingly self-possessed young woman he knew at the Slade. Neville, his usual bumptious self: almost, but never quite, ridiculous. Toby had just been a fair-haired young man in the background. Paul probably wouldn’t have noticed him at all, if it hadn’t been for his extraordinary resemblance to Elinor. Curiously, Toby had been beautiful, whereas Elinor, even at her best, just missed beauty, though Paul found her more attractive because she didn’t have that final, daunting perfection.

Apart from that, the weekend was a jumble of random recollections: newspapers on the terrace, fields of corn bending in the wind, shadows of clouds fleeing across them, Neville’s pink, excited face as he came into the drawing room after dinner to announce that Russia had mobilized. Paul hadn’t known what to make of it all; he’d swung between bursts of wild excitement and complete indifference. Wars were fought by professional armies. Once the novelty wore off, he couldn’t see this making much difference to his life.

The photographs were mainly of cricket and rugby teams. Nothing more recent than Toby’s schooldays, not even a graduation photograph, though there was one on the piano downstairs. This was a room frozen in time, and not at the moment of Toby’s death. No, long before that, possibly when he left home to live in London. You got the impression that on subsequent visits he’d brought very little of himself back.

But then, that was true of Paul as well. On his rare visits to see his father and stepmother in Middlesbrough he always felt as if he were impersonating the boy he’d once been. It was impossible to feel comfortable; even in his old bed, his shoulder blades refused to fit the hollows in the mattress left by a shorter version of himself.

A row of books lined the shelf above the mantelpiece. He ran his fingers along the spines, selecting a volume here and there for a
closer look. Shakespeare’s Sonnets, heavily underlined throughout, little self-conscious comments written in the margins. Obviously a school prize: the name and date written in a rounded, still unformed hand.
Treasure Island
. Another prize, but much earlier. On the flyleaf, Toby had written his name and address: ‘Tobias Antony Brooke, Leybourne Farm, Netherton, Sussex, England, Great Britain, Europe, Northern Hemisphere, Earth, Solar System, Milky Way, the Universe.’

Paul was smiling as he closed the book. That little boy was suddenly a powerful presence in the room. He picked up a photograph, the only one, as far as he could see, of Toby as an individual rather than a member of a team. The image was overexposed, so one side of his face had faded into white. Looking at it, Paul could almost believe he heard a faint echo of the explosion that had blown this laughing boy into unidentifiable gobs of flesh. The poignancy of a young life cut short. He hadn’t known Toby, but at this moment he could have cried for him: the small boy who’d located himself so precisely in the world, and now was nowhere.

Thoroughly unsettled, Paul got into bed and turned off the lamp. Lying on his back, listening to the night sounds that came through the open window, he closed his eyes and tried to sleep. The sheets smelled of Elinor’s hair and skin. He wondered whether they’d been changed since Toby’s last leave, but yes, surely they would’ve been: the shrine-keeping would have started with his death. The room was a shrine, but there was nothing unusual in that: thousands of women were tending shrines to dead young men. Many of them went to seances, and were battened on by people who claimed to be able to contact the dead. There were even some who produced photographs of the dead man’s spirit hovering behind his loved ones. Well, Elinor didn’t need that: she had her paintings. Was there even one in which Toby didn’t appear? Tomorrow, he’d ask Elinor if he could look at them again.

If tomorrow ever came. He was afraid of nightmares. He’d worked out little rituals to fend them off, routines he went through every night at bedtime, but nothing worked for long. And tonight,
made restless by desire and with far too much alcohol coursing through his veins, he knew he was in for a bad time.

An owl hooted. And again. And again. Perhaps there were two, calling to each other? Some dispute over territory that would not be resolved in blood. He lay, listening. An owl’s cry is such a knowing sound. As he drifted off, he found himself wondering what it was that these owls knew. Their cries pursued him through the thickets of sleep. He was stumbling over tree roots in the depths of a winter forest, so still that a solitary leaf, falling, fractured the silence. But then, from somewhere up ahead, came the sound of a branch creaking. The noise fretted his sleep until, at last, he came awake with a cry, his heart thudding against his ribs. He’d heard something. Perhaps no more than a floorboard creaking, but somehow the sound had wound its way into his dream. Then he caught the soft slur of naked feet, and, clearly visible in the violent moonlight, the knob of the door began to turn.

Elinor slipped into the room, a slight figure in a white nightdress.

It was no dream: I lay broad waking.

‘Can’t you sleep?’ he asked.

‘It’s the owls, I’ve never heard them like this before.’

Still half drowned in sleep, he shifted towards the wall and patted the counterpane, inviting her to sit down.

Instead, she slipped her nightdress off her shoulders and let it fall around her feet. His throat was too swollen to let him speak. Silently, he held the covers open and welcomed her into his arms.

Next morning, he woke to find her still sleeping, curled up against his side like a medieval carving of Eve, newly born of Adam – and how scathing Elinor would have been about
that
. Looking down at her, he noticed again the sharpness of her bones. He was tempted to wake her, but resisted and edged out of bed.

She woke as he reached the door.

‘It’s freezing,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you put that on?’

She was pointing to a dark grey coat that hung on the back of the door. As he put it on, the cloth released a masculine whiff of tobacco and hair oil. She lay looking up at him as he stood there, in Toby’s coat. He thought it must be painful for her to see him like that, but no, she was smiling, though her eyes were darkening as the engorged pupils swallowed the blue.

She pulled him down on to the bed and started kissing him, as hungrily as if they’d never made love. He struggled to free himself from the heavy coat, but as often as he tried to shrug it off, she pulled it on again, and, suddenly, he thought:
No
. He rolled off her, swept a kiss across her forehead to soften the rejection, and stood up.