Pat Barker: Toby's Room

‘You must’ve realized by now there’s nothing good to be said.’

‘I thought perhaps he’d …’

‘Go on. What?’

‘I thought he’d lost his nerve.’

Neville made an ugly barking sound. ‘Brooke? He didn’t have any bloody nerves.’

‘What, then?’

‘Promise you won’t tell Elinor?’

Paul shook his head.

‘Well, that’s up to you.’

The silence went on so long Paul began to think Neville had decided to say no more, but then, staring down into his glass, seeming to talk as much to himself as Paul, he went on.

‘Once we were out of the line there wasn’t a lot to do. Sick parade every morning, one or two patients in sick bay, not many, and I started to notice how often Brooke slipped away. We all did. He used to ride a lot, all day sometimes, and it became a bit of a standing joke, you know: Doc’s in love with his horse. And then one night, we had a patient with pneumonia — it wasn’t looking too good — and Brooke told me to come and get him if he took a turn for the worse. Well, he did. Brooke wasn’t in his bunk, so I went looking for him, and I found him in the stables with one of the stable boys. Lad called Duke. Big, fair-haired, raw-boned carthorse of a lad, straight out of the shires, and … Well, I won’t spell it out. I must have made a sound because Brooke looked straight at me.’

‘What did you do?’

‘Backed off, of course. I could see it wasn’t the right time for a chat.’

‘No, I mean, later. What did you do?’

‘I didn’t know what to do, I —’

‘Did you tell anybody?’

Neville’s voice hardened. ‘We’re talking about a man exploiting his inferiors. Brooke was an officer. That lad couldn’t have said no even if he’d wanted to.’

Paul was silent for a moment. ‘Are you sure it was exploitation? I mean, if Brooke was just looking for … well, for relief — there’d be far safer ways of getting it than that. He must’ve felt something for him …’

‘Oh, so it’s a love story now, is it? Tarrant …’

‘How do you know it wasn’t?’

‘I knew the boy. Total idiot, face like a pig’s arse.’

Was that jealousy? No, it couldn’t be. ‘So you reported him?’

‘It was the right thing to do.’

‘Who did you tell?’

‘The Padre.’

‘Who couldn’t stand Brooke, anyway … I remember you said, didn’t you, they’d had that row about venereal disease?’

‘It’s no use idealizing that kind of thing. It’s not Greek love, you know, it’s just another form of bullying. I hated it at school and I hate it now.’

That was certainly true. Neville had an extreme hatred of what he described as ‘effeminacy’ or ‘degeneracy’, whether in life or in art.

‘You knew what would happen to him though, didn’t you? Court martial, ten years’ hard labour, struck off the medical register …’

‘God, yes, total waste. Tragedy. And all because he couldn’t keep his dick inside his breeches. But, you know, that was his decision, not mine.’

‘So what happened?’

‘Nothing. That was the awful thing. Brooke didn’t say anything. I mean, what could he say? I started to think the Padre must’ve kept it to himself, though that didn’t seem likely, but then Brooke was summoned to see the CO. He came back looking pretty grim. Still didn’t say anything. I thought he’d be arrested. But he wasn’t, and a day or two later we went back into the line. And right into the thick of it, this time. The Casualty Clearing Station was the best equipped I’ve ever seen — electric light, for God’s sake — virtually shellproof. But no, typical Brooke, he insisted on going forward.’ He drank the last of his whisky in one gulp. ‘It was, I think, the worst I’ve ever experienced. A lot of it’s a blur. At one point there was a flood of German prisoners coming in, a lot of them wounded, and among them there was a German doctor and he volunteered to help — I’ll always remember this — Brooke was on one side of the table, the German MO was on the other, both of them covered in blood, you couldn’t tell one uniform from the other, and they were laughing their heads off. Shells dropping everywhere, the wounded screaming, and there they were, stitching up what their respective armies had blown apart. If you ever want a picture of the complete bloody insanity of the whole thing that was it. Brooke was wounded, just a gash on the side of his face, but deep, he could’ve gone back, nobody would have blamed him, but he didn’t, of course, he went on operating. He’d have got the VC if it hadn’t been for the other thing.

‘There was so much confusion, nobody knew where the line was any more, the whole area was being shelled by both sides. It took us all night to get in the wounded, but we did, every single one of them. And then, just before dawn, Brooke looked through the periscope and said he could see something moving. I looked. I couldn’t see anything. But Brooke insisted, there was somebody still out there. Alive. He took me out with him. Just me this time.

‘The sun was still below the horizon but the sky was getting lighter by the minute. Absolute bloody suicide, but he was determined to go, and of course I had no choice, I had to go. And he was right, there was something moving. It was just a strip of cloth caught on the wire, but it was very strange, because every time the wind blew it seemed to be beckoning. As if it were waving us to come closer. When we finally got there, it was an empty sleeve. I think he’d known all along.

‘It was getting lighter all the time, I could see his face quite clearly now and there was … Oh, I don’t know, a kind of glitter about him. And it suddenly dawned on me he wasn’t just taking chances, not this time. He wasn’t going back, he couldn’t, and I think he’d made up his mind to take me with him.

‘We crouched in this bloody shell-hole and … He said the CO had offered him the chance of an honourable way out and he’d decided to take it, he knew what was waiting for him, he couldn’t bear the idea of putting his family through it. Then he got a revolver out — he didn’t normally carry one, some of the MOs did, but not Brooke — and as soon as I saw it I thought: He’s going to kill me . He was pointing it straight at me, he wanted to see me shitting myself, I know he did. But then he lowered it and … he just stood up. I remember the first sunlight falling on his head and shoulders. And then he turned to face the German lines and started firing shots into the air. Nothing happened. Honest to God, the hell we’d been through, day and night. Where’s the bloody Hun when you need him? And then I thought it was going to be all right, I thought he’d take cover, we’d wait and when it was dark we’d crawl back and … I don’t know what I thought was going to happen then. But it was never a possibility. He just looked down at me and shrugged. Then he put the revolver in his mouth and blew the back of his head off.’

Neville was struggling to go on. At last he wiped his hand across his mouth and said, ‘I had to go on lying there, I daren’t move. And then it got dark and it was so strange, you know, his dead face looking up at the stars, not seeing them, and rain falling into his eyes. I tried to make myself close them, but I couldn’t bear to touch him.’

‘How long were you there?’

‘A whole day, half the following night. Then I managed to crawl back, only just in time too, because the bombardment started up again and the whole area was pounded.’

‘Did they look for him?’

‘No point. Nothing would have been left.’

‘Wait a minute. If you saw him die, why was he posted “Missing”?’

‘Because I didn’t tell anybody. I said he left me in a crater and went on alone.’