Pat Barker - Toby's Room

‘I have no friends.’

Outside the Domino Room, Neville hung back; it was Paul who pushed open the door and walked in. Treading on his heels, Neville stumbled and almost fell. Paul found a table near the entrance and ordered whiskies, but it was a minute or two before he felt able to look around. Once again they were the centre of attention, though nobody openly stared.

Despite Neville’s frequent, self-pitying assertions that he was finished as an artist, overlooked, forgotten, yesterday’s man, his return to London had been reported in all the papers, though nothing had been said about the nature or severity of his wounds. But he was known to be at Queen’s Hospital, so the injuries had to be facial. The rumours had begun almost at once. Some people said he was so hideously disfigured his own mother had run screaming from the room; others that his brain was affected too, that he was either mad or a cabbage. And now here he was, or here somebody was. Neville’s thickset figure and truculent bearing were almost enough to identify him, but not quite. People glanced at the mask and quickly away. Was it him? It had to be, but nobody was confident enough to come forward and speak to him. The mask didn’t help: Rupert Brooke’s face gazing around a room where he’d so often lorded it in the flesh. Enough to give you the shivers.

Neville was on his fifth whisky. Paul expected him to become even more aggressive, but instead he sank into a morose stupor, peering through the slits in the mask at scenes of former triumph. Two or three years ago, he’d have walked into this room as if he owned it. Paul remembered meeting him here: Neville, the famous war artist, whose latest exhibition was on everybody’s lips, and he felt a flicker of shameful pleasure at the reversal of their fortunes; a mean, filthy emotion, quickly suppressed.

The silence had gone on too long. He tried to find a topic of conversation that would rouse Neville from his stupor, but nothing worked. He either couldn’t, or wouldn’t, speak.

Instead, he sat staring round the room, the silver face of the dead poet turning from group to group. Gradually, uncertainly, a few people began to respond, raising their glasses, smiling ghost smiles at what must have seemed, to most of them, a ghost. Suddenly, Paul realized they weren’t sure Neville or whoever it was behind the mask could see them. Nothing was visible behind the slits in the mask and he’d stumbled when he first came into the room. A large group at a nearby table fell silent for a time, but then, slowly, the conversation started up again. They were talking about an exhibition that included three of Paul’s paintings. Some at least of the group must have recognized him, but nobody spoke; the cordon sanitaire round Neville obviously included him too. They were still, covertly, the focus for every eye in the room.

The mask went on smiling its faint, archaic smile. Behind it, an eye like a dying sun sank beneath the rim of a shattered cheekbone, the hole where the nose had been gaped wide and the mouth endlessly, tirelessly snarled. Neville was clenching and unclenching his fists. ‘Bastards, I’ll bury the whole fucking lot of them.’

‘Calm down …’

‘Why? Why should I calm down? Two years ago they were queuing up to lick my arse and now look at them …’

‘They don’t know what to say, that’s all.’

He didn’t know what to say. More important, he didn’t know what to do, how to get them out of this situation. He turned to Neville. ‘Look, why don’t we —’

Suddenly, without any warning, Neville began to roar, the bellow of a wounded bull with the full force of his lungs behind it. Paul tried to grab his arm, but he was too late: Neville was on his feet. He waited till every eye in the room was fixed on him, and then he took off the mask.

One or two people cried out. Others were blank with shock. Instinctively, Paul stepped in front of Neville, though whether to shield him from their reactions or them from the sight of him, he didn’t know. He thought nothing could have been more terrible than that roaring, but then Neville started to cry, a puppy howl of abandonment and loss. Paul put an arm round his shoulders and managed to turn him towards the door. ‘Come on,’ he kept saying, ‘it’s all right, come on,’ the way he would have spoken to a distraught child or a frightened horse.

Neville let himself be led from the room. By the time they reached the pavement he’d stopped crying, though his chest still shook. And then, to Paul’s utter bewilderment, he started to laugh.

‘Did you see their faces? Oh, my God …’

Paul didn’t know how to respond to this. He knew — if he knew anything at all, he knew this — that every part of Neville’s anger and distress had been genuine. The brooding, the resentment, the rage, the ‘ Look at me! ’ of the abandoned child or the slighted artist, the tears, the sobbing … It had all been real. Surely it had? And yet Neville’s laughter, now, seemed to deny that. He realized Neville was already hard at work reshaping the events of the evening, carving out for himself, if only in retrospect, a position of authority and control. That was Neville all over: a fat, moist silkworm perpetually spinning the legend of himself.

And it worked. It worked. Paul had already started to edit his own memories of the evening. Perhaps Neville had always intended that dramatic sweeping aside of the mask; perhaps he’d got drunk in order to be able to do it. Perhaps. But none of that justified his behaviour.

‘Well, that was pretty grim,’ Paul said, tight-lipped.

‘My dear fellow, blame the mask. This is a mask of known bad character. Chap who owns it goes on the Underground, waits till there’s a few girls sitting near by, and then takes it off. Comes back to the ward, holds up his fingers.’ Neville held up his own hand to demonstrate. ‘How many screamed. How many fainted. There aren’t many faints, but he has had two.’ He seemed to sense Paul’s disapproval. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Tarrant, it’s a game .’

‘It’s a terrible game.’

‘You get your laughs where you can.’ He walked on a few steps. Turned back. ‘Do you know, Tarrant, you’re no fun at all tonight.’

‘Sorry about that.’

‘I’m making the most of it, I won’t be able to wear it after the next op. Trunk gets in the way. Pedicle, sorry.’

‘Well count me out next time.’

Paul could feel Neville’s anger, which up to now had been directed impartially at everybody they met, narrowing to a point and focusing on him.

‘You’re going out with Catherine, aren’t you?’ he said.

‘No.’

‘What’s the point of denying it? Mother told me. And Catherine told her.’

‘We had supper once and went to a concert.’

‘Hmm.’

‘What does “hmm” mean?’

‘Elinor. Catherine.’

‘Yes?’

‘My girlfriends first, then yours. You seem to have some sort of morbid desire to slide in on my leavings.’

This was so offensive, and in so many different ways, that Paul was speechless. Neville had not had an affair with Elinor. Catherine …? Well, yes, possibly, he didn’t know. But Elinor, definitely not.

He said, evenly, ‘This is where I punch you on the nose, isn’t it? Oops, sorry, you haven’t got one.’

The words opened a gap between them that it seemed nothing could ever fill, and yet, a second later, Neville laughed and threw a heavy arm across Paul’s shoulder.

‘You know I don’t mean it.’

‘No, I don’t know.’

‘We should be friends.’

‘Yeah, well, you don’t make it easy.’

‘I know.’ He patted Paul awkwardly on the arm. ‘Come on, I’d better be getting back. If I’m late they mightn’t let me out again.’