Pat Barker: Toby's Room

‘When I got back.’

He sat on the bed, big hands clasped between his thighs, bulky, helpless. It made her angry.

‘I was surprised you left so early,’ she said.

‘Dad gave me a lift. No point hanging around.’

‘Mother was a bit put out.’ She waited. ‘We had quite a long chat, you know, Mother and me. While you and Tim were out shooting.’ Was that fleeting change of expression one of fear? ‘Did you know you were a twin?’

‘Yes.’

She was taken aback. ‘So why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Didn’t seem important.’

She thought of the boy in the garden playing with a girl whom nobody else could see. ‘Mother doesn’t even know where she’s buried.’

‘Buried?’

‘Well, yes. They wouldn’t —’

‘It’s in a museum, a medical museum. Edinburgh, I think.’ His eyes slid away. ‘They are quite rare.’

‘So what happened? The doctor gave her to a museum?’

He looked down.

‘No. Dad wouldn’t do that,’ she said. ‘His own flesh and blood?’

‘Oh, listen to yourself: “His own flesh and blood.” He’s a scientist, for God’s sake.’

‘I can see it mightn’t be much of a barrier to you.’

They’d got there, by a rather circular route, but there, nevertheless. She watched the Adam’s apple jerking in his throat. Like everything else about him, it seemed to be trying to escape.

‘You came to me,’ he said. ‘I’ll take ninety per cent of the blame, but I won’t take it all.’

It was impossible to speak without crying, and she was determined not to cry. So she said nothing, sitting there with her face in her hands and her eyes closed. After a moment, she felt him get up and come to stand behind her again. He reached out, but stopped just short of touching her shoulder, though close enough for her to feel the heat of his fingertips. She remembered the sea-anemone groping of his mouth, the shock of his harsh bristles on her skin.

‘If you like, I’ll stay away from you,’ he said. ‘You won’t have to see me again.’

Christmas? Birthdays?

She put up a hand and twined her fingers round his. ‘You know I don’t want that.’

‘Neither do I.’

They looked at each other in the glass, then for the first time she turned to face him directly. He touched the side of her face, lowered his head … With his mouth less than an inch away from hers, he recoiled violently, almost as if some external force had grabbed him by the hair and pulled him off. Breathing heavily, he said, ‘We’ve got to get back to the way things were.’

‘I don’t know how they were.’

‘We were friends.’

She shook her head. ‘No. If we’d been friends it would never have happened.’

‘We’ve got to try. Sis?’

‘Yes, I suppose we do. Bro .’

He took a short step back. Released.

‘I’ve brought my anatomy textbooks. You must be starting the course soon.’

How easily he’d returned to ‘normal’. She felt a spasm of anger, but relief too. A minute ago, she’d thought it was starting again, and she wasn’t sure she could have stopped him, or herself. Because he was right, she’d gone to him, gone in bewilderment and ignorance, nursing vague childish schemes of revenge, yes, but had that been her only motivation? The more she thought about that night the more … complicit she felt.

Now, she followed him through into the living room; they sat on the sofa, side by side, and talked about the anatomy course she’d be starting on Monday. And after a while, things did begin to seem normal, almost normal, though she noticed he sat a few feet away from her, about as far away as he could get. Even so, there seemed to be no space between them. If she closed her eyes for a second, she could feel the prickle of their shared sweat on her thigh.

Anatomy was Toby’s favourite subject, his passion, and he was a good teacher. As he talked, she forgot to feel distaste for the scurf of human skin on his notes, and simply marvelled, as he did, at the beauty and complexity of what lay beneath.

‘You’ll enjoy it, sis, honestly you will. Bit of a shock at first, but you soon get over that. I’m sure once you get the hang of it, it’ll really help your drawing, and then, wow — the next Michelangelo.’

‘I don’t like muscly men.’

‘Oh, well, never mind …’

He stayed for exactly one hour. It was like a tutorial. When he got up to go, she accompanied him to the front door, not wanting to be left, too abruptly, in a room that would still be full of his presence. He called her ‘sis’ again as he said goodbye. She watched him walk off down the street, unloading guilt behind him, step by step.

With his departure, her anger returned. All that stuff about bringing his anatomy textbooks … He’d come to say one word, no, not even that, the stupid, amputated stump of a word: sis . That was his pledge that what had happened between them would never happen again, that it would, in time, be forgotten.

And it was all lies. At one point, back there in the bedroom, they’d been on the verge of starting all over again. She’d felt it; she didn’t believe he hadn’t felt it too. How could he come as close as that, and then tell her to forget?

She mustn’t let herself slide into hating him. He was doing his clumsy best to repair the damage. And he did love her, she was sure of that. But in declaring that the events of that night must be forgotten, he’d left her, in effect, to face the memory alone. And that just wasn’t fair.

She watched him turn the corner into Bedford Square, but for many minutes, after he disappeared, she remained standing in the doorway, staring at the space where he’d been, feeling the empty air close around his absence.

Elinor Brooke’s Diary

7 October 1912

The Indian summer’s well and truly gone. Today was cold and windy with bursts of torrential rain. I was almost blown into the hospital, dripping wet, and late, of course. I got up early, but then wasted time trying to decide what to wear. Don’t know why I bothered. I arrived looking like a drowned rat anyway.

The other girls were all waiting outside the lecture theatre. I must say my heart sank when I saw them — scrubbed faces, scraped-back hair, sensible shoes and suits. The jackets were cut exactly like men’s and the skirts swept the floor — so you got the worst of both worlds. Hats, of course. One or two of them were actually wearing ties. I’ve never seen that on a young woman before. Everybody had a good look at my hair. I stared back at them. At least my hair’s clean. I never noticed till the last few days how dirty most women’s hair smells. No wonder, when you think of the palaver of washing it — it used to take me an entire evening. I look back on that and I just think: what a complete waste of time.

The lecturer, Dr Angus Brodie, positively bounced on to the platform — short, red-haired, bristling with authority, skin speckled like a thrush’s egg. He took one look at me — I was sitting by myself right at the end of the third row — and said, ‘Miss Brooke, I presume?’ Then he made a concertina movement with his very small, neat hands. I shuffled along to join the others — blushing like mad and cursing myself for it — and he beamed. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Art and medicine reunited.’

Crime and medicine more like. Really, I had no idea. Leonardo was fascinating, of course, but there was a lot of boring stuff after that. Until he got on to Burke and Hare, that awful killing spree they went on, supplying cadavers to the Edinburgh medical schools, especially to Dr Robert Knox, who used to give public demonstrations of dissection. The last — second to last? Can’t remember — victim was a retarded boy known as Daft Jamie. He was a well-known figure on the streets, so when he turned up on Knox’s slab several of the students recognized him. He was known to be missing, his mother was doing the rounds asking if anybody had seen him. Knox must have heard the whispers because he changed his usual routine and started by dissecting the face.