Pat Barker - Toby's Room

‘Trawler in trouble. Did you get any drawing done?’

‘Not a lot. Fantastic place though. Oh, and I bumped into Dr Mason, in the pub along there. He sends his regards.’

‘Yes, he’s a good man. Shame about Ian, I used to play with him when we were boys.’ Neville seemed very tense; he jumped when somebody knocked on the door. ‘That’ll be the sandbags.’

Paul heard a rumble of voices from the front door, and then Neville came back into the room.

‘They’ve dumped them at the end of the path so I’m afraid we’ll have to carry them. Are you up to it?’

‘Of course,’ Paul said.

Outside, it was growing dark, sea and sky streaming together in a wash of grey. Even the seabirds had taken refuge inland. Every roof was covered in gulls and as they watched more came flying in, great white boomerangs of bone and sinew swooping low above their heads, before landing in a scuffle of flapping wings and jabbing beaks.

They lugged ten sandbags back to the house. Another echo of life in the trenches; the place was full of them. Now that he was getting used to the idea, Paul found the echoes almost soothing; they seemed to integrate aspects of his life that were otherwise chasms apart. Physically, though, it was hard-going. Icy rain plastered their clothes against their bodies; talking was impossible, breathing difficult. They scaled along the walls, staggering when they came to one of the gaps and caught the full blast of the wind. Once Paul’s knee gave way under him and he almost fell.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Fine!’ Paul said, shouting above the wind. Their rivalry wasn’t confined to painting and girls.

‘That’s it,’ Neville said, at last. ‘I can’t do any more and you look done in.’

‘I’m —’

‘Yes, I know, “fine”.’

In the hallway, Paul wiped water out of his eyes. ‘Do you know, I used to love rain? Now all I can think of are the poor bloody bastards out there.’

Neville threw more coal on to the fire, then propped a shovel and newspaper against the grate to draw the flames. But he was too impatient to do it properly: a singed brown patch appeared in the centre of the page, deepened to orange and began to curl back. Soon, the whole sheet was ablaze. He grabbed the poker and beat the flames down, then trod the remains of the paper into the hearth. Scraps of newsprint were sucked into the chimney; shrieking headlines whirled into the storm-tossed air.

Unable to wait any longer, Paul went to the table and poured them both a large whisky.

‘Give me your coat,’ Neville said. ‘I’ll put it to dry.’

Paul did as he asked, though the really uncomfortable bit was the lower part of his trousers, which chafed against his skin.

Neville came back and threw him a towel. ‘Here, dry yourself off. Thanks for that, I couldn’t’ve managed on my own.’ He sank into the armchair and took the glass Paul handed to him. ‘Your knee’s bad, isn’t it?’

‘Been better.’

‘I’ve got some stuff somewhere …’

‘No, please —’

But Neville was already on his feet. When he returned he was holding a box of powders. ‘Here. You dissolve them in water and they really do work.’

‘I’m not leaving you short, am I?’

Neville pulled what was left of his face. ‘Doesn’t really hurt that much. I mean, obviously it did after the operation, but it’s not so bad now.’

Paul dissolved one of the powders, swirling it round the glass with a pencil he found lying on a side table, and then threw it down in one gulp. ‘Uck.’

‘Takes half an hour. Meanwhile, I recommend whisky.’

‘I’m drinking too much.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake … How much is too much?’

The whisky was already spreading its insidious warmth through every part of Paul’s body. He stretched out his hands to the fire, which, despite Neville’s ministrations, was now crackling away. The shutters banged and thumped. After one particularly loud crash Paul jumped, slopping some of his whisky on to the back of his hand. He licked it up.

‘There’s plenty more,’ Neville said, drily.

‘How do you get it?’

‘Father. Dunno where he gets it. I don’t ask.’

Neville’s painkillers were already starting to take effect. Paul’s speech was becoming slurred, or sounded so to his own ears; he doubted if Neville would notice. He seemed to have become almost torpid, staring blankly across the hearth. What came next was unexpected.

‘Brooke came here, you know. He sat in that chair.’

‘No, I didn’t know. I didn’t realize —’

‘Oh, we weren’t friends, not really friends, he just came with Elinor.’ A short silence. ‘In a way, you know, I think that might have been the trouble, part of it. He was an officer, I wasn’t, and yet before the war we’d stayed in each other’s houses. He could never quite …’

‘He couldn’t accept it?’

‘He wasn’t comfortable. One thing, he was supposed to censor our letters, but I know for a fact he never read mine. Not the done thing, old chap. He was quite conventional in a lot of ways. Surprisingly so.’

‘Were you with him when he got his MC?’

Paul expected Neville to back off at this point as he’d done on every previous occasion he’d been questioned about Toby, but he didn’t.

‘Oh, God, yes. We were told we were going forward again and there was — I don’t know — a very flat feeling. Everybody was sick, sick as in “fed up”, but also sick as in “sick”. We had a real run of coughs and colds, stomach upsets, nothing serious, but one after the other it starts to drag you down. Oh, and I had toothache.’ He jabbed at his cheek. ‘There. One of the back molars with nice deep roots. It’d been niggling on for quite a bit and I’d been trying to ignore it, sticking cloves in, you know, rubbing it with brandy, God knows what, but then it flared up and I just had to go. Man was an absolute butcher, I ended up with a face like a football, no, literally, right out here. And I don’t think he’d got it all out either. Ridiculous, isn’t it? You know you can have an arm or a leg blown off any time and yet you’re still frightened of the dentist. Or you can get your head blown off, for that matter, but then that would solve the problem.

‘Then, well, you know, it was one of those cock-ups. We were supposed to be taken to the attack positions by guides, they never showed up, we hung about, more guides arrived, didn’t know where we were going. By the time we finally got there it was less than an hour before the attack. The barrage was deafening, nobody could hear the orders, shells dropping everywhere. Massive casualties in the first minute, the stretcher-bearers were just overwhelmed. The men who couldn’t make it back were left out there crying for water, flies everywhere …

‘As soon as it was dark Brooke took a party out and we started bringing in the wounded, took us the best part of three days. That’s how bad it was. And then we brought in the dead. I’ve never been able to see the point of it; of course I can see it’s a good thing to do, in itself, but not if it means risking lives, especially not my life.’ He glanced at Paul. ‘I’m telling you the truth. Brooke was a hero, I was a fat man with toothache. And then we went out looking for identity discs. Well, you can imagine, can’t you, pitch black, poddling about in God knows what … Do you know what he did? He got a torch out and switched the bugger on.’

‘Did they fire?’

‘’Course they bloody fired. The age of chivalry’s dead, Tarrant, or hadn’t you noticed. Brooke got a slight wound on the back of his hand, we had a handful of identity discs. Oh, and Brooke’s MC. Eventually.’

‘Strange, isn’t it? All that effort put into collecting identity discs and yet he ended up “Missing, Believed Killed”.’