Pat Barker: Toby's Room

Instantly, she wanted to transfer to that group, to work on the female body. She knew, without being able to say how or why, that her business as an artist was with women. Women’s bodies held a meaning for her, a spark, which the male body lacked. Might it be possible to switch groups? After all, they’d only done one session. Why not? But then, none of the other girls had requested a transfer, and they’d all, in their professional lives, be mainly concerned with women’s health, if only because no right-thinking man would let a lady doctor anywhere near him. If it made sense for her to work on a female cadaver, it made even more sense for them.

Still, it couldn’t hurt to ask …

After the other girls had gone, she lingered in the changing room, hearing their excited, chattering voices recede along the corridor. They knew each other now, were well on the way to becoming friends. When everything was quiet, she went in search of Mr Smailes.

She didn’t have far to look: he was standing by the lift, wearing his overcoat and hat. Divested of the rubber cap and apron, he looked more, rather than less, strange. For a moment, it crossed her mind that he might have been waiting for her, but she didn’t let the idea settle. His face, as he turned towards her, wore its usual slight sneer. He gave every indication of disliking her intensely, and she didn’t understand why. It couldn’t be anything personal: he didn’t know her. Of course, unlike the other students, she didn’t have the cloak of serious professional intent to hide her femaleness. Perhaps that was it. She could easily imagine what Mr Smailes would make of lady artists studying anatomy.

They got into the lift together. He pulled the door across with a clang and at once she felt trapped behind the iron grille as the lift began its slow descent. Neither of them spoke, and with every second of silence the awkwardness increased.

‘Mr Smailes?’

He turned to look at her, his eyes snot-green behind pinky-beige lashes.

‘I was wondering if it might be possible for me to transfer to the female cadaver?’

‘Now, why on earth would you want to do that?’

‘Well, you know, I suppose, I draw mainly women — well, nearly all women — and so I just think it would be more …’

She was gabbling, but it hardly mattered: he was already shaking his head.

‘Believe me, Miss Brooke, you do not want to work on a female cadaver. The fat gets under your fingernails and however hard you scrub you can never quite get it out.’

But surely he would always wear gloves? She looked down at his hands. The nails were neatly trimmed and immaculately clean, but the cuticles had been picked raw. She found it disturbing: the carefully tended nails embedded in half-moons of bleeding flesh; and she knew he’d enjoyed telling her about the fat on female cadavers, how repulsive it was.

The jolt of the lift arriving on the ground floor saved her from the need to reply. He pulled the gates open and stood aside to let her pass, but even that small courtesy struck her as sarcastic. She held her head high as she swept past him, but she felt her cheeks burn.

At first, Elinor thought she’d never get used to the sight, sounds and smells of the Dissecting Room, but gradually, as the weeks passed, she became accustomed to them. As all the girls did. The cathedral hush of that first session had been replaced by chattering, even giggling. Left to herself for a moment, Elinor would slip into daydreaming, and at such times her thoughts invariably turned to Toby.

We’ve got to get back to the way things were.

I don’t know how they were.

Compulsively, now, she scrutinized the past, searching for the moment when it had gone wrong. She saw them walking through the woods together, watched them as if she were actually a third party present at the scene, a ghost from the future. They were off to the pond to collect minnows and frogspawn and they were taking it in turns to carry the big jar. At the pond, they took off their clothes, because the spawn was at the far side among the reeds. They looked like little albino tadpoles themselves, stirring up clouds of milky sludge as they walked around the edge. At the centre there was supposed to be a deep well, hundreds of feet deep, though perhaps their mother had told them that to stop them going so far in.

On the way home, Toby insisted he should carry the jar, which was heavy now, full to the brim with murky water that slopped over on to his chest with every step. They’d got masses and masses of frogspawn, and minnows too, and they’d remembered to put in a clump of reeds for food and shelter. They didn’t know that lurking in the reeds was a dragonfly larva, the most voracious of all pond creatures. Over the next few days it had devoured every other living creature in the jar.

‘Don’t they get on well together?’ one of the aunties said, watching them walk up the drive.

They did. They were about as close as any brother and sister could be. Dragging herself back to the present, Elinor found herself staring at the cadaver’s shrunken genitals, feeling again a spatter as of hot candle wax on the back of her hand. When had it become the wrong kind of love?

‘Miss Brooke, if we could have your attention, please?’

They were about to remove the lungs. Despite their increasing skill with the scalpel, this rapidly degenerated into an undignified tug of war. So much for treating the cadaver with respect. The chest cavity just wasn’t big enough to get the lungs out. Elinor gritted her teeth, tried not to think too hard about what she was doing, and pulled. At last they were out, lying side by side on the still-intact abdomen, like stillborn twins. Stillborn, black twins.

‘Why are they black?’ Miss Duffy asked.

‘I expect he was a miner,’ Mr Smailes said. ‘You might like to think about that the next time you’re toasting your toes in front of the fire.’

Elinor needed no urging to think about the cadaver away from the Dissecting Room. After a night out with Kit Neville, dancing or at a music hall, she’d return to her lodgings and lie in the darkness, sniffing the tips of her fingers, where, mysteriously, the smell of formaldehyde lingered. Gloves, scrubbing: nothing seemed to help. Sometimes she dreamt about him, hearing a hiss of indrawn breath as she made that first incision. Always, in the dreams, she avoided looking at his face, because she knew his eyes would be open. Even by day, he followed her. She didn’t know how to leave him behind in the Dissecting Room, where, session after session, the slim girls swarmed over him like coffin beetles, reducing him to the final elegance of bone.

She and Kit Neville had become close friends and spent a lot of time together. Kit was London born and bred, and he enjoyed showing her his native city. They went to Speakers’ Corner on Sunday mornings, sat in the gods at the music hall, danced the turkey trot till sometimes well past midnight or simply wandered along the Strand, tossing roasted chestnuts from hand to hand till they were cool enough to eat.

Away from the studio and the Dissecting Room, she lived a life almost obsessively devoted to triviality. She’d turned into a pond skater, not because she didn’t know what lay beneath the surface, but precisely because she did.

At the end of their evenings, Kit would escort her back to her lodgings, but he never tried to kiss her goodnight and he never asked to come in. They were both rather proud of their platonic friendship. She knew he had a life apart from her, that he was having an affair — if you could call it that — with one of the models, in fact with the same girl whose name had been linked with Tonks.