Pat Barker - Toby's Room

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.