Pat Barker - Toby's Room

Her eyes were fixed on the sky. When he tried to draw her into the shelter of the trees, she followed reluctantly, stumbling a little as her feet moved from tarmac to grass. At first, when he tried to hold her, she struggled, but then suddenly relaxed against him. With his back against a tree and Catherine in his arms, Paul looked up at the floating silver oval and prayed: Don’t burn. Don’t burn .

The guns boomed again. She was very strange to him, standing there in the circle of his arms. He remembered the night of the fancy-dress party, the almost serpentine suppleness of her body as they danced, the anonymous, masked face lifted to his.

‘Do you still think that? That they might be your cousins?’

‘Every time.’

‘You must feel … I don’t know, alienated.’

‘But that’s exactly what I am. An alien.’ She flared her eyes at him. ‘The enemy.’

‘But they don’t do much to women, do they?’

‘I can’t go home. Our house is right on the sea front — at least, it used to be — I expect some patriotic citizen’s burnt it down by now. I suppose they think we’d be flashing lights out to sea or something.’

Another crash and recoil of guns. The Zeppelin vanished into a cloud.

‘I think I should get you home.’

He walked her back to her lodgings. She cut through a side street and, a few minutes later, they were standing outside a tall, narrow house, while she scrabbled inside her handbag for the keys. He was a little surprised when she invited him in, but told himself she’d be sharing the flat with another girl. The three of them would soon, no doubt, be drinking cocoa together, the girls giggling and chattering while he fretted and burned. What a strange evening it had been. He’d known her for years and yet, in any meaningful way, they’d only met for the first time tonight. And where was Elinor in all this? He didn’t want to think about that.

‘The other tenants go downstairs when there’s a raid,’ she said, throwing her hat on to a chair. ‘I don’t bother.’

‘I tend not to either.’

He thought of telling her about his landlady, who kept suggesting he should take refuge with her in the understairs cupboard, but decided against it. Catherine had put the kettle on and was taking two cups from a shelf above the sink. The evening had taken an unexpected turn, but the cocoa, at least, was arriving on time.

She handed him a cup, and sat on the other side of the fireplace, slim ankles crossed, skirt pulled well down. Their situation might be unconventional, but her behaviour certainly wasn’t: she might have been entertaining the vicar to tea. A dreadful thought occurred to him: that she was simply indifferent to men. But no, that couldn’t be true. What about Kit Neville? They mightn’t have been lovers, but they’d certainly been very close. At one stage they’d been seen everywhere together. And Neville had head-butted the man who’d insulted her. He could remind her of that, surely?

He was rewarded with one of her slow, curved smiles.

‘That’s Kit for you.’

‘Do you suppose he’s ever heard of the Queensberry Rules?’

‘Oh, I think he might’ve heard of them.’ She shook her head. ‘He’s a strange man.’

That was one way of putting it.

‘Do you know, he always liked me to speak German when —’

Abruptly, she stopped, and blushed. To cover her confusion, he said, quickly, ‘He speaks it himself, doesn’t he?’

‘Yes, quite fluently. That’s one of the reasons he ended up nursing the German wounded — and he was very good at it too, by all accounts, but you can’t get him to talk about it.’

‘No, well, it doesn’t fit with the image of the great war artist, does it?’

God, that was sour. He wasn’t surprised when she didn’t reply.

‘Do you think he does know something about Toby Brooke’s death?’ he asked, after a short silence. ‘And he’s not telling Elinor because he doesn’t want to … I don’t know. Make things worse for her than they already are?’

‘I don’t think I know him well enough to say. He’s changed a lot in the last few years. We all have.’

He put his cup down. ‘I think I’d better be going, I’ve got an early start in the morning.’

She followed him to the door. As he opened it, he turned to face her. ‘Do you think we might go out again sometime? A concert or something. I don’t much like the music hall these days.’

‘No, nor me. A concert would be nice.’

‘Right.’ He nodded. ‘I’ll be in touch.’

He couldn’t bring himself to go back to his lodgings, not yet. After dark, his restlessness increased; he didn’t so much walk the streets as prowl, his senses alert for any sign of life. Even during a raid, there were always some people about. Across the road, in a shop doorway, there were two girls standing close together, huddled up against the cold. Rather bedraggled they looked, in their tawdry finery, and as skinny as a brace of ninepenny rabbits. He imagined what it would be like: their slim fingers swarming all over him, bringing his clay-cold body back to life …

No, definitely not. Though something about the idea of two girls together had always excited him. It was surprising how many of his memories of Elinor involved Catherine as well. He saw them walking round the quad with their arms around each other’s waists, or dancing together on the night of the fancy-dress party. And then there were the letters from Elinor in the first few weeks of the war, describing how she and Catherine, wearing only their nightdresses, had turned cartwheels round and round the lawn. They’d been cartwheeling around his imagination ever since, their white nightdresses falling in bell shapes over their heads, as they continually wheeled and turned. Now there was an image to come between a man and his sleep.

It was having quite a marked effect on him even now. He could hardly believe he was taking Catherine to a concert; she’d agreed to come out with him. Possibly he should have felt slightly awkward about this, but he didn’t. The last night he’d spent with Elinor had been so disastrous that, in a way, it had seemed to free both of them, to mark, not the resumption of their relationship, but its end. Of course, he couldn’t be absolutely certain she felt the same, but he strongly suspected she did.

All the way back to his lodgings, he thought about Catherine. Her alienation attracted him; it seemed to echo his own difficulty in fitting in. There’d been times, recently, when he’d hated London: the hysteria over the Zeppelin raids, the spurious sense of excitement and even glamour that seemed to cling to it all. Catherine’s nationality set her apart from all that, and her isolation drew him to her.

He let himself into the house just as the whistles were blowing the all-clear. His landlady, bright-eyed and sour-faced, emerged from the understairs cupboard where she’d been left to face the might of German air power alone. If this went on, she said, she’d have to think seriously about shutting up the house and going to live with her married sister in Worthing, and then some people, mentioning no names, but some people would have to find themselves somewhere else to live.

Paul disengaged himself as quickly as he could and climbed the stairs to his rooms where he undressed and lay on the bed, exhausted, in pain from the cramping of his leg, and, for the first time since his return to England, full of hope.

By mid-afternoon Paul was too tired to go on working and went outside for a cigarette. The shadows of trees and buildings were already encroaching on the quad; soon it would be time for the men in wheelchairs to be pushed away. They felt the cold badly — in spite of the blankets wrapped round their waists many of them looked grey — but somebody, somewhere, had decreed that fresh air was essential. Perhaps there was a theory that it made amputated limbs sprout? As Paul watched, a group of nurses arrived, greeted their patients with professional good cheer and, laughing and chattering, pushed the wheelchairs through the iron gates into Gower Street, for all the world like nursery maids pushing perambulators round the park.