Pat Barker - Toby's Room

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.

‘Coffee?’

She pouted. ‘That’s not very flattering.’

‘Man cannot live on love alone.’

In a hurry to be gone, he went downstairs. The coat’s silk lining, warmed by his body, had produced an unpleasant clamminess, like the touch of skin on skin. He would have liked to take it off, but the kitchen was cold.

While waiting for the water to boil, he went across the yard to the barn. As he opened the door he caught ghost smells of hay and cattle, though this couldn’t have been a working farm for years. Before its conversion into a studio, the barn would have housed only gardening tools and a lawnmower, certainly not cattle. The lawnmower was still there, a heap of earth-smelling sacks piled up beside it. At the centre of the open space, a wood stove, crusted with rust, squatted in its own shadow.

He touched the cloth on the easel, but didn’t pull it off. He hated people looking at his own uncompleted work and he wouldn’t do it to her. Slowly, methodically, he worked through the finished paintings, admiring, doubting, more than once feeling a stab of envy at what she’d achieved. He was Toby-hunting. Only one landscape was genuinely empty: the fields behind the house in winter. Cropped hawthorn hedges ran across a vast expanse of snow, like lines of Hebrew script. Even here, though, a shadow between the trees revealed itself, on closer examination, to be the head and shoulders of a man. She hadn’t left him out of anything.

When, eventually, he carried two cups of coffee upstairs, he found her sleeping. It was almost a relief. Quickly, he scooped up his clothes and went along to the bathroom, where he washed and shaved, avoiding, as far as possible, his own gaze in the mirror. He didn’t want to think.

Downstairs again, he made a pot of tea, spread butter thinly over a crust of bread and forced it down. The house seemed to have turned against him. Even Hobbes, curled up in his basket by the dead fire, opened one bloodshot eye, only to close it again when he saw Paul. He no longer felt welcome. Images from last night clung like bats to the inside of his skull; he needed a blast of cold morning air to shake them off. He put on his coat, his own coat this time, thank God, and went out.

He chose the path through the woods. It was still dark, though on the fringes of the wood the trees were beginning to let in shafts of stronger light. Frost, everywhere. A single leaf fell to the ground and immediately he was back inside the landscape of his dream. The girl in the white nightdress belonged in that dream. Nothing that had happened between them belonged to the waking world. He went on his way, rustling through dead leaves, cracking twigs, breathing heavily, no doubt in a fug of his own hot stink. All around him, he felt small animals shrink into the shelter of the trees.

He came out into an open field enclosed by hawthorn hedges. Because he’d just been looking at Elinor’s painting, he saw the place through her eyes, more clearly than he could have seen it on his own. Thorns pulled at his sleeves. He blew on his fingertips to warm them, but the real chill was in his memories of last night.

Something had been wrong from the start. He’d felt it, but pushed on anyway, he couldn’t stop; and he’d thought he could make it all right. But even in the most passionate moments — and there weren’t many — Elinor had seemed to pull away. Of course, she was grieving for her brother … And it wasn’t as if he didn’t know about grief; his mother had killed herself when he was fourteen. It had taken him years to get over it: if he ever had. It seemed, looking back, that he’d grown around the loss, that it had become part of him, as trees will sometimes incorporate an obstruction, so they end up living, but deformed. He certainly didn’t underestimate what Elinor was going through. Only he’d felt there was something else, a shadow falling across them, cast by something he couldn’t see. He’d never known lovemaking like it. It had felt like a battle, not between the two of them — there’d been no antagonism — no, more like he was struggling to pull her out of a pit and sometimes she’d wanted to come with him, and at other times she’d turned back into the dark.

Always before, even at the most difficult moments in their long, wrangling love affair, sex had never failed them. Last night, it had.

He’d hoped to find her downstairs waiting for him when he returned, but the kitchen was empty. No fire; only one log left in the basket. Well, however useless he’d been in bed, at least he could chop wood. He went across the yard to the fuel store, where he found a pile of logs and an axe.

The first blow sent shock waves up his arm. He freed the axe, struck again, and the two halves fell sweetly apart. A smell of raw wood, sharp on the cold air. He was reaching for another log when he realized Elinor had come up behind him. She smelled of oil paint and turps, and that smell, mingling with the more feminine scents of skin and hair, took him back to the Slade and ‘the wild girls’. They were the best thing about the Slade, those girls. The memory softened him towards her.

‘Did you have a good morning?’ he asked.

‘Quite good.’

He sensed her excitement. ‘I’ll just finish these, then I’ll come in.’

‘Have you been for a walk?’

‘Just up the hill there. I wish I’d had a gun, I could’ve got you some rabbits. Place was hopping.’

‘You’re a town boy, aren’t you? Who taught you to shoot?’

‘The army,’ he said. Very dry.

‘Oh, yes, of course. Sorry.’

She was blushing. He positioned the next log and swung the axe, smiling to himself as the blade bit.

Five minutes later, he came into the kitchen carrying an armful of logs. She was by the range, heating up the remains of last night’s stew. He put a hand on her shoulder and she turned round; her face was pale, but her eyes glittered with barely suppressed excitement.

‘You have had a good day,’ he said.

‘The thing is, I think I might have finished. But you never really know, do you?’

‘Let it settle.’

He began to build up the fire, feeling an immense, simple satisfaction as he saw the first lick of flame. Holding a sheet of old, yellowing newspaper across the fireplace, he heard the roar of the draught behind it. Columns of names curled and blackened in the heat. Worse than the Somme, people were saying, as the lists grew longer day by day. A black hole edged with sallow gold appeared at the centre of the page and he whisked the paper away in a whirl of smoke and sparks. ‘There.’