Toby's Room (5 page)

She watched him turn the corner into Bedford Square, but for many minutes, after he disappeared, she remained standing in the doorway, staring at the space where he’d been, feeling the empty air close around his absence.

Elinor Brooke’s Diary

 

7 October 1912

 

The Indian summer’s well and truly gone. Today was cold and windy with bursts of torrential rain. I was almost blown into the hospital, dripping wet, and late, of course. I got up early, but then wasted time trying to decide what to wear. Don’t know why I bothered. I arrived looking like a drowned rat anyway.

The other girls were all waiting outside the lecture theatre. I must say my heart sank when I saw them – scrubbed faces, scraped-back hair, sensible shoes and suits. The jackets were cut exactly like men’s and the skirts swept the floor – so you got the worst of both worlds. Hats, of course. One or two of them were actually wearing ties. I’ve never seen that on a young woman before. Everybody had a good look at my hair. I stared back at them. At least my hair’s clean. I never noticed till the last few days how dirty most women’s hair smells. No wonder, when you think of the palaver of washing it – it used to take me an entire evening. I look back on that and I just think: what a complete waste of time.

The lecturer, Dr Angus Brodie, positively bounced on to the platform – short, red-haired, bristling with authority, skin speckled like a thrush’s egg. He took one look at me – I was sitting by myself right at the end of the third row – and said, ‘Miss Brooke, I presume?’ Then he made a concertina movement with his very small, neat hands. I shuffled along to join the others – blushing like mad and cursing myself for it – and he beamed. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Art and medicine reunited.’

Crime and medicine more like. Really, I had no idea. Leonardo
was fascinating, of course, but there was a lot of boring stuff after that. Until he got on to Burke and Hare, that awful killing spree they went on, supplying cadavers to the Edinburgh medical schools, especially to Dr Robert Knox, who used to give public demonstrations of dissection. The last – second to last? Can’t remember – victim was a retarded boy known as Daft Jamie. He was a well-known figure on the streets, so when he turned up on Knox’s slab several of the students recognized him. He was known to be missing, his mother was doing the rounds asking if anybody had seen him. Knox must have heard the whispers because he changed his usual routine and started by dissecting the face.

Within minutes, Daft Jamie’s mother wouldn’t have known him. It horrified me, that. The cold-bloodedness of it. I seemed to hear Toby’s voice saying, ‘He’s a scientist, for God’s sake.’

Burke and Hare were caught not long after that. Knox got off scot-free, at least as far as the law was concerned, though the Edinburgh mob attacked his house. Hare turned King’s evidence; Burke was hanged. His death mask’s in the medical museum, in Edinburgh.

I lost interest after that. I kept seeing Toby’s twin, in a glass jar on a shelf. Why can’t he see how horrible that is?

At the end of the lecture, Dr Brodie offered us a way out. Dissection was not for everybody, he said. Women, in particular, found the long hours of standing difficult. Any young lady who discovered she’d been mistaken in her aptitudes should come to him at once – there’d be no disgrace in this, mind, none whatsoever – and he’d arrange for her to transfer to a more suitable course: biology or chemistry or – his face brightened – botany.

Ah, yes. Girls and flowers.

I don’t know what effect it had on the others, but it made me more determined to stick it out, no matter how hard it is. Anyway, by this time tomorrow, we’ll know what we’re in for. Toby says I’ll enjoy it, but I can’t see how that’s possible.

Well, I’m off to bed – an hour early! – hoping not to receive any visits from Daft Jamie and his ruined face.

Next day, in the changing room, the smells were of wet wool, hair and rubber. A cold wind was blowing: everybody’s eyelids and nose were a bright, unbecoming pink. One girl stifled a yawn and immediately an epidemic of yawns spread around the room. There was a good deal of nervous giggling as they helped each other tuck strands of hair inside the green rubber caps that were obviously designed to be worn by men. Rubber boots, gloves and aprons completed the garb. They looked and smelled unfamiliar to themselves. Every time they moved they either rustled or squeaked.

‘Hurry up, ladies,’ said a bored male voice from behind the door. ‘We haven’t got all day.’

Miss Cunningham, whom Elinor had spoken to briefly the previous day, looked around to check that everyone was ready, then pushed open the door. They filed into a long room where white-sheeted cadavers seemed to float like huge, dead fish in the subaqueous light. A fluttering sound was just perceptible above the squeaking of rubber-soled boots on the tiles. Elinor raised her eyes to the ceiling and saw that a small, colourless moth had become trapped inside the skylight and was fumbling against the glass, no doubt mistaking a watery sun for the moon.

Lowering her gaze, she saw that a thin young man had appeared in front of them. His name, he said, was Smailes, and it was his job to guide them through the process of dissection. He didn’t seem to be looking forward to it much. In fact, he sounded thoroughly bored and fed up. He kept scratching at a red patch on one side of his chin, pimples or a shaving rash or eczema, perhaps. Elinor was briefly curious about this yawning male presence, but nothing could distract her for long from what lay underneath the sheets.

She was directed, along with four other students, to the nearest cadaver. Miss Duffy and Miss Cunningham, who seemed to be friends, faced each other across the shoulders. Two other girls took up positions on either side of the torso. Elinor, in this, as in so much else, the odd one out, stood alone by the feet.

‘I think I’m going to faint,’ Miss Duffy said.

‘Don’t you
dare
,’ Miss Cunningham replied.

She sounded so fierce that the other girls immediately put all thoughts of fainting out of their heads, though the smell of formaldehyde and disinfectant – and another, nameless, smell – lay heavy on their stomachs.

‘All right,’ Mr Smailes continued. ‘Let’s unwrap the parcel.’

Miss Duffy and Miss Cunningham glanced at each other and then, with the determined calm of housemaids dealing with an unexpected death in the family, removed the sheet.

Mantegna’s
Dead Christ
. From where Elinor stood at the foot of the slab, the feet appeared huge, out of all proportion to the body. His face was dark, the eyes shuttered; nobody could have mistaken this stillness for sleep. Freed from the apprehension of an answering gaze, she let her eyes slide down, across the soaring chancel arch of his ribcage, along the flat nave of his belly to where his penis lay, a shrivelled seahorse on an outcrop of wrinkled and sagging skin.

Miss Duffy produced a sound midway between a giggle and a gasp. Of course, this would almost certainly be her first sight of a naked man. Elinor glanced at the other girls and saw from the slithering away of their eyes that the same was true of them. Mr Smailes smirked and suddenly, fiercely, Elinor hated him. But then at once she was back with the dead man. His skin glowed like a lit lampshade. Tiny moles and scars seemed to float on the surface where one quick flick of a palette knife would sweep them all away. She took a step back, and this movement seemed to break the stillness that had descended on them all.

‘Well, now,’ Mr Smailes said. ‘The first thing is to open the chest.’

A suture line ran along the base of the neck and down the centre of the chest. Under Mr Smailes’s direction, Miss Duffy wormed her fingers into the incision and pulled the chest wall back. Miss Cunningham did the same on the other side. The halves lay across his upper arms, almost casually, as if he’d done this to himself, removing his chest wall as nonchalantly as he might a shirt. It was rather horrible. But then they got their first glimpse of what lay beneath: the pectoral muscles, glistening under a translucent layer of connective tissue, fanning out in two huge wings to cover the ribs. It
reminded Elinor of the roof of King’s College Chapel, though she had enough sense not to confide this thought in Mr Smailes, who would certainly have thought her mad.

Somebody had to make the first incision. ‘Miss Brooke.’

He was holding out a scalpel. She looked from him to the other girls, all of them training to be doctors, for God’s sake; she was an artist, no, not even that, an art
student
, she couldn’t be expected to –

Fumbling, she took the scalpel from him.

‘Careful! You could have your finger off with that.’

He placed his two index fingers on the cadaver’s chest, indicating the length and direction of the cut.
Look for the line
, she heard Tonks say. Oh, my God, how did he get in here? Evidently the honour of the Slade was at stake. Well, then. She positioned the scalpel, took a deep breath, and began the cut.

‘No, too hard. You don’t need to press.’

He was right there. She’d never encountered a knife as sharp as this. Flakes of putty-coloured flesh rose on either side of the blade as easily as water round the prow of a boat. When the incision was long enough and – she hoped – deep enough, but not too deep, she straightened up and immediately her hand began to shake.

She heard the other girls breathe out. Only one of them had held the scalpel, but all of them had followed its progress, inch by painful inch, and now they felt, with a great rush of blood to their faces:
Yes, we can do this
.

By the end of the session Elinor’s brain was aching almost as much as her back. She was too tired to follow Mr Smailes’s summing-up of what they’d learned and merely pretended to listen while gazing around the room. There were three cadavers. She worked out that the one on the next table was that of a very old man, though the fatty deposits around his nipples looked exactly like breasts. Perhaps that was what happened in extreme old age, the two sexes growing to resemble each other more and more, so that finally, in death, the body became androgynous again, as it had been in infancy? But the cadaver furthest away from her was no more than middle-aged and definitely female, despite the shaved
head and sunken breasts. The width of the pelvis alone … Whatever tricks the flesh may play in death, the bones don’t lie.

Instantly, she wanted to transfer to that group, to work on the female body. She knew, without being able to say how or why, that her business as an artist was with women. Women’s bodies held a meaning for her, a spark, which the male body lacked. Might it be possible to switch groups? After all, they’d only done one session. Why not? But then, none of the other girls had requested a transfer, and they’d all, in their professional lives, be mainly concerned with women’s health, if only because no right-thinking man would let a lady doctor anywhere near him. If it made sense for her to work on a female cadaver, it made even more sense for them.

Still, it couldn’t hurt to ask …

After the other girls had gone, she lingered in the changing room, hearing their excited, chattering voices recede along the corridor. They knew each other now, were well on the way to becoming friends. When everything was quiet, she went in search of Mr Smailes.

She didn’t have far to look: he was standing by the lift, wearing his overcoat and hat. Divested of the rubber cap and apron, he looked more, rather than less, strange. For a moment, it crossed her mind that he might have been waiting for her, but she didn’t let the idea settle. His face, as he turned towards her, wore its usual slight sneer. He gave every indication of disliking her intensely, and she didn’t understand why. It couldn’t be anything personal: he didn’t know her. Of course, unlike the other students, she didn’t have the cloak of serious professional intent to hide her femaleness. Perhaps that was it. She could easily imagine what Mr Smailes would make of lady artists studying anatomy.

They got into the lift together. He pulled the door across with a clang and at once she felt trapped behind the iron grille as the lift began its slow descent. Neither of them spoke, and with every second of silence the awkwardness increased.

‘Mr Smailes?’

He turned to look at her, his eyes snot-green behind pinky-beige lashes.

‘I was wondering if it might be possible for me to transfer to the female cadaver?’

‘Now, why on earth would you want to do that?’

‘Well, you know, I suppose, I draw mainly women – well, nearly all women – and so I just think it would be more …’

She was gabbling, but it hardly mattered: he was already shaking his head.

‘Believe me, Miss Brooke, you do not want to work on a female cadaver. The fat gets under your fingernails and however hard you scrub you can never quite get it out.’

But surely he would always wear gloves? She looked down at his hands. The nails were neatly trimmed and immaculately clean, but the cuticles had been picked raw. She found it disturbing: the carefully tended nails embedded in half-moons of bleeding flesh; and she knew he’d enjoyed telling her about the fat on female cadavers, how repulsive it was.

The jolt of the lift arriving on the ground floor saved her from the need to reply. He pulled the gates open and stood aside to let her pass, but even that small courtesy struck her as sarcastic. She held her head high as she swept past him, but she felt her cheeks burn.

At first, Elinor thought she’d never get used to the sight, sounds and smells of the Dissecting Room, but gradually, as the weeks passed, she became accustomed to them. As all the girls did. The cathedral hush of that first session had been replaced by chattering, even giggling. Left to herself for a moment, Elinor would slip into daydreaming, and at such times her thoughts invariably turned to Toby.