Pat Barker - Toby's Room

One night after work he got his drawing pad out and tried to go on working, but he was too tired to think. Losing patience with himself, he grabbed his coat and went downstairs, hoping a walk might help to clear his head. The night was clear and cold; the moon full. He walked rapidly, head down, pushing his body as hard as the pain in his leg allowed. Shuttered windows — dead eyes — ignored him as he passed, and the blue-painted lamps gave people’s faces a cyanosed look, not unlike the first darkening of the skin after death. It would be easy, in his present febrile state, to start seeing London as the City of Dreadful Night.

At the end of the street, he stopped and looked up into the sky. A searchlight fingered the underside of the clouds, like a careful housewife assessing the quality of cloth. He couldn’t go back to his lodgings. He should probably go to the Café Royal where at least there would be people he knew and could — well, almost — talk to. Any company was better than his own.

But tonight, there was another possibility. He’d written to Catherine Stein, and received a brief, friendly reply expressing a willingness to meet. No date had been suggested. Now, though, he thought he might call on her. If she was out there was no harm done; if she was busy she needn’t see him. At the very least, it would provide a focus for his walk.

The streets were almost deserted. On these bright moonlit nights people hurried home, pulled the blackout curtains across and slept — if they slept at all — under the kitchen table or in the cupboard beneath the stairs. It was difficult not to despise these excessively timid civilians, when you thought what their sons and husbands were going through. No, not difficult: impossible.

He turned into Catherine’s road. A girl was walking along the pavement ten or so yards ahead of him, a slight figure wearing a black coat and hat. There was something about her posture — rounded shoulders and folded arms — that gave her the look of a victim. Even as he thought this, she turned and the light from the street lamp fell full on her face.

Catherine , he almost said, but checked himself. ‘Miss Stein.’ He’d called her Catherine when they were students but it seemed presumptuous to do so now. ‘I was just on my way to see you.’

‘Paul. Good heavens. I wrote to you.’

‘Yes, I got it this morning.’

They were still put out by the unexpected meeting, a little awkward with each other.

‘It’s been a long time,’ she said.

‘Two years?’

‘More than that.’

She was right, must be more like three. Yes, that was it. The last time he saw her, they’d been to the Café Royal, not long after the war broke out, and just as they were leaving a man came up and insulted her — called her a filthy German, something like that — and Kit Neville had head-butted him.

‘I was thinking about you only the other day.’ He sensed a slight withdrawal, a wariness. ‘You and Elinor. I’m working at the Slade now and I was walking through the quad and … Oh, I don’t know, getting a bit nostalgic, I suppose. Thinking about old times.’

‘Well, they were good.’

The sadness in her voice so subtly echoed his own he knew he had to talk to her — and not merely about Neville.

‘Are you going out tonight?’ he asked.

‘No, I was just —’

‘Would you have dinner with me?’

She seemed to hesitate, but only for a second. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’d like that.’

They set off walking down the hill.

‘I was very sorry to hear about your father,’ he said.

‘Least they let him out before he died. I’d have hated him to die in that place.’

Catherine’s father had been interned as an enemy alien and spent the first year of the war in what had once been the Islington workhouse. Conditions there had broken his health, which, even before the war, had been giving cause for concern. He’d been released on health grounds but died not long after. Paul’s sympathy was entirely genuine, and yet part of him almost jeered. An elderly man dying at home in his own bed, surrounded by people who love and care for him … What, exactly, is there to be upset about in that?

But he liked Catherine; he liked her a lot. He took her to one of the few restaurants that had stayed open despite the threat of air raids. From the outside it looked closed. As they entered the dining room, a bored waiter peeled himself off the wall. The place was empty.

Facing Catherine across the table, Paul had his first chance to look at her properly. In the street, she’d been no more than a black shadow flitting by his side. Now, as she shrugged off her coat, he thought she looked beautiful, without being beautiful. Her face was full of light. Her front teeth protruded slightly and she kept pressing down her upper lip to hide them in a way he found utterly enchanting. She was far more conscious of the slight imperfection than she had reason to be.

As she read the menu, he remembered with a rush of blood that he’d seen her naked. Some of the girls at the Slade got together to pose for each other in the evenings and Elinor had produced a really exquisite drawing of Catherine lying naked on a bed. And he’d danced with her — God, how the memories came flooding back. She and Elinor had both come to the end-of-term fancy-dress party as Harlequin: identical costumes, and, of course, wearing masks. For a long time they’d danced together, the two girls, totally absorbed in each other, and every male eye in the room had been fixed on them.

‘Catherine,’ he said. ‘What would you like to eat?’

There was no great choice; in the end, they settled for the game pie.

‘At least you know roughly what’s in it.’ Paul indicated the owner, who was slumped over the bar, gulping down his own wares at an alarming rate. ‘He goes shooting every weekend.’

She giggled. ‘Good for him. I shoot, you know, when I’m in Scotland. I thought I’d hate it, but I don’t. Only I kept bagging too many rabbits and, in the end, my aunt just refused to go on gutting them, so we started selling them to the local hotels.’

Her first glass of wine brought a flush to her cheeks. She seemed excited, even reckless, but then she’d been living with grief for a long time and that did strange things to you. He remembered the relief he’d felt at getting away from Elinor. Perhaps he should be ashamed to admit it, but relief was what he had felt.

‘Is your mother in London with you?’

‘No, I don’t think she’ll ever come back. It’s been … Well, you know. Quite hard.’

It must’ve been. Before the war, everybody had known Catherine was German, though she had no trace of an accent. Nobody had attached any importance to it, and yet there it had been, all those years, like an unexploded bomb waiting to blow up in her face. Exiled from her home in Lowestoft — enemy aliens were not allowed within five miles of the coast — shunned by previous acquaintances, even by some so-called friends, she must have been incredibly lonely.

‘Oh, by the way, it’s not “Stein” any more,’ she said. ‘It’s “Ashby”.’

Of course she’d have changed her name; it was the obvious thing to do. ‘Is that your mother’s maiden name?’

‘No, it’s a village in Suffolk.’

‘Well, you’re in good company. The King’s changed his name to “Windsor”. Another village. Bit less of a mouthful than “Saxe-Coburg-Gotha”.’

‘It’ll take more than that. I mean, to make people forget they’re German.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. We’ve been ruled by German grocers for centuries. Why make a fuss about it now.’

‘I feel sorry for Dachshunds,’ she said. ‘Apparently quite a few of them get killed.’