Toby's Room (25 page)

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.

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 himself 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.’

Neville jerked his head at the portraits. ‘They don’t do badly.’

‘They can’t be shown.’

‘Like Goya’s engravings.
The Disasters of War
.’

Tonks burst out laughing. ‘Oh, Mr Neville, you flatter me.’

‘Do you think I was wrong?’

‘What about?’

‘Taking off the mask. Do you think it was wrong?’

‘Not if it was uncomfortable.’

‘You know what I mean.’

A groan of indecision. ‘I get angry too, you know. One of the convalescent homes we use – the neighbours have asked for the men to be kept indoors, so they don’t have to look at them. Of course that makes me angry. So no, I don’t think you were wrong, but I also think a lot of the people there would have been entirely sympathetic. It’s just, they don’t know what to do. They’re afraid their own faces will … I don’t know. Show something.’

‘Revulsion. Yes. And they’re absolutely bloody right. They do.’

Neville looked away for a moment, the muscles of his face and neck working with distress. ‘What’s going to happen next?’

‘The next operation? You’ll have the pedicle reattached.’

‘Just the one?’

‘Yes, I think so; you’d have to check with Gillies.’

‘One of the chaps in the next hut has three. I don’t mind looking like an elephant but I draw the line at squids.’ He watched Tonks work for a while. ‘Will you be there?’

‘In the operating theatre? Yes.’

Neville was cursing himself for revealing a need for reassurance from a man he’d always disliked. ‘Not that I’ll know who’s there and who isn’t, I’ll be well out of it.’

‘And there’ll be morphine afterwards.’

‘I think I dread that almost more than the pain. You have such terrible dreams. Dreams? More like hallucinations.’

A few minutes later Tonks said, ‘Well, that’s me finished.’ He stood up and put his pastels to one side. ‘Would you like to see it?’

‘Not if the others can’t.’ Neville was already on his feet, itching to leave. ‘Do you know I’ve been made a war artist?’

‘Yes, I heard.’

‘The thing is, I can’t paint here. And I can’t paint in that overcrowded loony bin up the hill either.’

‘You mean, the convalescent home?’

‘Whatever. I need to get away.’

‘I’ve been thinking about that. I had a word with Gillies and of course he’s sympathetic. We’ll see what we can do.’

Neville had been prepared for a fight and felt rather deflated to find it wasn’t necessary. He held out his hand, startled, not for the first time, by how cool Tonks’s skin was. Of course his hands were miles away from his heart.

‘Thanks.’

‘No need, I’m only too pleased to help. If you find Radcliffe waiting outside would you send him in?’

After lunch, Neville asked permission to leave the grounds and set off across the fields, carrying a sketch pad and pencils. After half an hour’s walking, he reached the brow of a hill. All around him were gorse and hawthorn bushes so deformed by the prevailing wind they seemed to be frozen in the act of running away. Below him, a shallow valley striated by hedges stretched up to a wooded ridge. It amazed him that Tarrant could still find pleasure in painting the English countryside, as apparently he did, when not working office hours at the Slade. Neville saw only potential battlefields. Nameless English woods became, in the blinking of an eye, Devil Wood, High Wood, Sanctuary Wood. It took no time at all to blast craters into these fields, splinter the trees, and blow up the farmhouse over there. And as for trying to take that ridge …