Pat Barker - Toby's Room

I turned to say something to Michael, who was breathing rather heavily, but suddenly he grabbed me by the arms and kissed me. Not very expertly, it has to be said. Our teeth clashed. My mouth fell open in surprise. Perhaps he mistook this for feminine yielding — at any rate, he stuck a surprisingly long tongue down my throat. I got both hands between our chests and pushed him away. I don’t know why I wasn’t flattered — as I say, my heyday’s over and we old maids must take what we can get — but I wasn’t. As quickly as possible, I started off to walk back. The sun on my back seemed to push me along. I was sweating, thoroughly out of sorts; it was easier to blame the weather than think seriously about bloody Michael.

His friend Philip Bannister was waiting on the lawn when we got back. Michael kept darting little defiant glances at him, very daring, very naughty-boy, and suddenly I knew why I wasn’t flattered. I nodded to Philip, and went straight upstairs to my room. I hope without a flounce, but I can’t be sure of that.

Later. What a silly trivial little incident — and yet it’s opened a door into a room I never thought to visit again. I keep thinking about that walk to the old mill with Toby and the night that followed. I resent having it dragged out into the daylight like this — by nonsense. Toby and I put it behind us so successfully, we built a different, in many ways deeper, relationship, on that patch of burnt earth. And now I feel I’m being dragged back to the beginning again. Well, I won’t go. Michael bloody Stoddart doesn’t have the power to do that .

After dinner, there was rum punch. I drank a bit too much of it and ended up with a bursting head and a short fuse. At some point — I can’t really remember — the talk turned to who was likely to be commissioned as a war artist. And of course Kit Neville’s name came up — and then Paul’s.

‘You know both of them, don’t you?’ VB said .

Glances across the table. Immediately I felt my relationship with Paul — possibly even with Kit, not that there ever was one — had been a topic of discussion, and I hated the idea. So I just said yes, I’d overlapped with both of them at the Slade, Kit Neville in my first and second year, Paul in my third .

Then Michael said he didn’t know what he thought about war artists. Wasn’t it just propaganda? And then Philip said, ‘At least it’ll get them out of the war.’

Now that is a perfectly innocuous remark, if you’re not on your fourth glass of rum punch .

I said I was sure that was the last thing on either of their minds. And I pointed out that Paul was back home wounded so getting out of it wasn’t an issue for him, and then I said, ‘They did both volunteer.’

What a thing to say in a room full of conchies. A hole opened up in the conversation and we all stared into it, until several people at once rushed in to fill the silence .

After dinner, we walked in the garden, the moths fluttering round a lamp, the women in their pale dresses looking like ghosts. VB came up and sort of semi-apologized for Philip’s behaviour at dinner. ‘I don’t think he realized how close you are to Paul Tarrant.’ I just muttered something and changed the subject. I couldn’t be doing with it all, and besides my headache was getting worse by the minute. I could hear a steady thump, thump, thump and I really didn’t know if it was inside my head, but then I thought, No, it’s thunder. I said, ‘Thank goodness’ — something like that anyway — and everybody looked amused. And then Philip said, ‘No, it’s the guns.’

I don’t know what’s the matter with me. You can hear the guns in south London sometimes — teaspoons rattling in saucers, that sort of thing — so they’re bound to be audible here. But, surely, not as loud as that? It must mean something’s going on — a ‘show’ they call it, bloody stupid word — and I’d really rather not know. It only deepens the fear that’s there beneath the surface anyway .

When everybody else went inside, I stayed in the garden saying I had a headache and thought the fresh air would do me good. I had the feeling that my relationship with Paul was being gossiped about, fingered, passed round, pawed at, the way the Bloomsbury crowd always do, and that made me think about it: the fact I haven’t been to see him, didn’t write. I don’t know how much is left — if anything. Probably not very much. I threw it away — and I did throw it away, we didn’t ‘drift apart’, as people say. I ought to have written more regularly when he was in France, and I didn’t. I ought to have been to see him in hospital, and I haven’t.

And when I ask myself what went wrong the only answer I can come up with is the war. In those first weeks it seemed to throw us together — and then there was that mad weekend in Ypres, in the room with the big shiny brass bed and the view over the rooftops — which aren’t there any more. Apparently, you can look from one end of the city to the other and there’s hardly a wall left standing that’s above knee height. But Paul and I became lovers there in that doomed city, the first bombardment started while I was there, and somehow the war has always followed us. It made us and then it unmade us.

Because late in 1915, Paul enlisted — and not for medical work this time — no, he volunteered to fight. And I know he says he volunteered because everybody knew conscription was coming anyway and he didn’t want to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to the front — but still he did it, and from that moment on things began to unravel between us. It became harder and harder to know what to write .

So that’s the truth, I think, or as close as I can get to it. The war brought us together; the war tore us apart .

At least he’s back home now, and that’s one less to worry about. I’m so frightened for Toby. Of course I’m worried about Kit Neville too, he’s in the same unit, facing the same dangers, but fear has an awful way of revealing the truth. Toby’s the one I couldn’t bear to lose. Nobody else, not even Paul — certainly not Kit, though I’d be terribly upset, of course, if anything happened to him .

I sat on a bench for a full hour and listened to the night sounds. The soft explosive hooting of an owl seemed to be compounded of blood and fear. And I thought, nothing’s safe any more .

5 August 1917

I knew I wouldn’t sleep and I didn’t. The room was too hot so I had to leave the window open, and the thud-thud of the guns went on all night. I tried to cry; I’ve never found it easy and it seems almost impossible now. I manage a couple of sobs, and then give up in disgust. And, of course, I tell myself there’s nothing to cry about. Yet. Only, as the night hours pass, that belief starts to wear thin .

This is difficult to write. Just before dawn I got dressed, walked down through the sleeping house, across the garden and into the fields beyond. I was trudging uphill, feeling spikes of stubble jab my ankles, and then, just as I reached the top, the sun rose — huge, molten-red — and at that moment I knew — not thought, not feared , knew — that Toby wasn’t coming back. Not that he was dead, I didn’t think he was dead, it was quite precise: he wasn’t coming home.

Days went by before she stood at her bedroom window and watched the telegraph boy — ‘boy’ you called him, though he was a middle-aged, even elderly, man — all the boys were in France — dismount from his bicycle and push it up the hill.

At one point his head disappeared behind the hawthorn hedge — the lane dipped sharply there — and she convinced herself, standing motionless at the window, that he would never reappear. She had willed him away; even when, slowly, his peaked cap reappeared and then his head and shoulders and he stopped to mount his bicycle, even then, she knew it was in her power to prevent the telegram being delivered. There were other farmhouses, other families, further down the lane. The Smeddles had three sons; they could afford to lose one of them. She’d have swept all three Smeddle boys off the face of the earth without a second thought if by so doing she could have prevented Dodds coming through the gate and crunching up the gravel drive. Listening to the doorbell chime, she almost shouted out: Don’t answer it, he’ll give up, he’ll go away . If he went away it wouldn’t have happened. Only by now she was halfway down the stairs. She looked over the banisters at Mrs Robinson, drying her hands on her white apron as she hurried to answer the door. Then Elinor’s mother came out of the breakfast room, her face blank, but fearing the worst because these days no telegram was innocent. She, too, disappeared into the porch and, a minute later, Elinor heard a thin, despairing cry. That doesn’t sound like Mother . Elinor’s hands gripped the banisters. Doesn’t sound like her at all .