Pat Barker - Toby's Room

When he came round, a tall, straight-backed woman with white hair was standing at the foot of his bed. Gillies was there too: Gillies, the surgeon, the elephant-maker, smiling obsequiously, inclining his droopy eyes and droopier moustache towards her. Their voices mingled: clipped, aristocratic English salted with Gillies’s Antipodean twang. Fellow sat on your bed, called you ‘honey’, called you ‘dear’, stuck a trunk on the end of your nose and tied you up so you couldn’t pull it off. Bloody good mind to tell him what he thought of him. He opened his mouth to protest, words bubbling up like sewage out of a blocked drain, and immediately the straight-backed lady was whisked away, and Sister Lang- widge ! took her place.

‘Clench your fist for me now, there’s a good boy,’ she said. ‘Just a little, tiny prick …’

Insult to injury. Bollocks like a bull , he wanted to say, but then, before he could speak, the darkness rushed in and the waters closed over his head.

The bed started moving. He was travelling, seasick, train sick, didn’t know what sort of sick, sick anyway. There was a smell of engine oil. The officers had colonized all the best spaces: the lounge bar, the dining room. High-ranking officers had cabins; junior officers played cards in the bar. The men, other ranks, privates, the poor bloody fucking infantry — of whom he was one, a source of mingled pride and shame — slept in the corridors. There were puddles on the floor where rainwater had dripped off their capes as they settled in. Then the engines started up, everything shook, and the noise restored him, briefly, to his sweaty bed. Bound hands, the shadowy figures of nurses all around, Gillies’s face looming in. A crackle of speech, some of it addressed to him, but it faded and he was back on the ship, trying to make himself comfortable with his kitbag for a pillow and a buckle scraping his neck.

Had to get up, get out of bed, get free. And he managed it, he did, he stood up, he flexed his fingers and the next minute he was walking down the heaving corridor and climbing the stairs on to the deck.

Cold air on his face. The stars formed clusters like apple blossom. He stood at the rail and opened his mouth to catch the salt spray: he seemed to be drinking stars. The ship was travelling without lights. Half a mile away, lean, predatory, grey destroyers loped along, almost invisible except where starlight caught the white foam of their wakes. Gradually, the wind off the sea cooled his hot flesh. He couldn’t go back down there, with the smells of engine oil and wet rubber and sweaty bodies; he’d find somewhere out of sight and stay on deck all night.

Crouching in the shadow of a lifeboat, he felt sufficiently safe to drift off to sleep, though women’s voices kept snagging him awake.

I don’t think he’ll need any more tonight, do you?

No, he’s out for the count .

Women on board? There must be a group of nurses going out. He rolled up his coat to form a pillow and slipped into a deeper sleep, from which he woke, jolted half out of his wits, because some blithering idiot had fallen over him.

‘Look where you’re going, you —’ Too late he registered the peaked cap. ‘Sorry, sir.’

‘Good God, it’s Neville, isn’t it?’

Didn’t know the bloke from Adam. But then he took off the cap and there, impossibly, in army uniform with the caduceus badge of the RAMC on her chest, stood Elinor Brooke.

Of course it bloody wasn’t. Fighting off the last vestiges of sleep, he said, ‘Captain Brooke, sir.’

Brooke sat down on the deck beside him and offered him a cigarette. In civilian life, this would not have been remarkable — they did, after all, know each other through Elinor, though not very well — but here, where men were not supposed to address officers except in the presence of an NCO, it was unusual, to say the least. All Kit’s ambivalent feelings about not being an officer rose to the surface; he compensated by boasting about the extent of his experience with the Belgian Red Cross. He’d been in France in 1914, well before anybody else got there. French medical services on the verge of collapse, wounded sleeping on pissy straw, half a dozen orderlies to five hundred men, no supplies, that was the situation he’d found, and only three months later he’d been a dresser in a properly run hospital. And, though he said it as shouldn’t, a bloody good one too.

Brooke nodded, asked questions, taking it all in. What an extraordinary coincidence, Elinor wrote, when he told her he was serving with her brother. Wasn’t a bloody coincidence at all. He asked for me . Oh, he didn’t flatter himself for a minute that Brooke had any particular interest in him personally, he just wanted an experienced dresser for his team and he made bloody certain he got one.

And slowly, with the bitterness of that realization, the hut took shape around him. While he slept, they’d moved him from his cubicle on to the main ward. In the next bed, Trotter was struggling to ingest the regulation amount of gruel. The nurse who was feeding him looked across at Kit. ‘You’re awake, then.’

People’s willingness to state the absolutely bleeding obvious never ceased to amaze him. ‘Yes.’

‘That’s nice.’

Mousey brown hair; eyes like currants stuck in dough. Good pair of tits on her, though. It humiliated him: this melancholy, all-pervading lust.

‘You going to the concert?’

‘Not allowed out of bed.’

‘Oh, what a shame. I always think it breaks up the day.’

The day was feeling pretty bloody broken, yes. He turned on his side to indicate that the conversation was over, but the sounds of Trotter being fed went on and on. Couldn’t screen them out. He knew every stage of the process that produced these chokings and gurglings and regurgitations, the oohings and aahings and cooings, the ‘just one more mouthful now, there’s a good boy’. If he stayed in this place much longer he really would go mad.

Somehow or other the morning passed. Just before lunch, Gillies, attended by Sister Lang- widge ! and surrounded by white-coated acolytes, appeared at the foot of his bed. They stared at him. He stared back. Gillies examined the trunk, which he appeared to think was a very good sort of trunk, and then they all retreated to the foot of the bed and began talking to each other in low voices. Mouths opening and shutting, drooling strings of words. It was a relief when they moved on. He was feeling drowsy; he wanted to sleep, though he knew the moment he closed his eyes he’d find Brooke waiting for him on the inside of the lids.

For God’s sake . He was tired, so tired. Bloody well bugger off, can’t you, and leave me alone .

When Elinor met her father in his favourite restaurant on George Street she was shocked by the change in his appearance. Toby’s death had aged him ten years, though he greeted her cheerfully. An elderly waiter doddered across to their table and Father addressed him by name. He loved this place, mainly, she suspected, because it served exactly the same kind of food he ate in his club. They ordered Brown Windsor soup and steak-and-kidney pie: God alone knew what would be in it, probably neither steak nor kidney. She watched him lovingly as he chased globules of grease around his soup. ‘So how have you been keeping?’ he said.

‘Not too bad, I’m spending more time in London now, staying with Catherine. You remember Catherine?’

‘Yes, of course.’

It was quite clear he didn’t.

‘What about you?’ she asked.

‘Oh, you know, work. And more work.’

‘I don’t really know whether it’s worth my getting a flat in London, I still spend quite a bit of time at home.’