Toby's Room (23 page)

‘But he’s not …?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Did you talk to him?’

‘I tried, he wasn’t making a lot of sense.’ Quickly, she ran through as many of Kit’s ramblings as she could remember. ‘There was one moment, he said, “It wasn’t my fault, he knew the risks.” So he does obviously feel guilty about something.’

‘ “He”? Not “Toby”?’

She shrugged.

‘So you don’t know who he was talking about.’

‘Toby. Who else?’

‘Anybody else. Half the bloody army, more or less.’

‘No, you’re not listening. You don’t say “It wasn’t my fault” unless you’ve got a pretty good reason to think it might be.’

He was shaking his head. ‘Elinor, we all feel guilty. Everybody who survives.’

‘Do you?’

‘Every minute of every day.’

A dragging silence.

‘You don’t understand,’ he said, patting his pockets in search of a cigarette. ‘And it’s not your fault, I’m not blaming you. But the fact that he feels guilty –
if
he does – means absolutely nothing. And anyway you shouldn’t be listening to what he says when he’s off his head.’

‘I didn’t go on purpose. I was drawing somebody on the ward. What am I supposed to do? Walk past?’

Now she was lying. But only because he made her feel she was in the wrong, when she wasn’t.

‘I don’t know about you,’ he said. ‘But I could do with a drink.’

He was drinking a lot more than he used to. It was only a couple of days since she’d last seen him, but he looked different. Older. Harder. Or perhaps she hadn’t noticed the changes before. Still, in every way that mattered, the same old Paul. She thought:
I’ve missed you
.

‘What’s the matter with your landlady?’

‘Doesn’t approve of lady guests.’ He produced a small bottle of whisky from a cupboard under the sink. ‘Oh, and …’ He contemplated the end of the sentence and evidently decided against it. ‘I don’t know.’

‘How many are there? Lady guests?’

‘Catherine was here earlier, that’s all.’

‘Two young ladies in one day.’ She was smiling as she took a sip from her glass. ‘Bluebeard.’

‘Oh, hardly that.’

‘What’s going on? Between you and Catherine?’

‘Nothing’s going on.’

‘You like her, though, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I do, I’ve always liked her.’

‘Come on, Paul.’

‘I don’t know what you want me to say. After that weekend, you know, there didn’t seem to be a lot left between us. So when I bumped into Catherine I asked her if she’d like to go out with me. We went, I enjoyed it, I think she did too, and then … Well. Basically she thinks I’m not over you.’

‘And are you?’

‘Does it matter?’

She forced the last of the whisky down. ‘I think I should be going. Is that the only reason your landlady’s fed up?’

He shrugged. ‘It’s a long story.’

‘And you don’t want to boast.’

He insisted on coming with her to the front door, though she
wished he hadn’t. She needed to get away from him now. In the hall, they stood facing each other. The question: To kiss or not to kiss? In the end, they brushed each other’s cheeks with closed lips. Wrong choice. Worse than a handshake; worse than nothing. The awkwardness was almost unbearable.

‘Well …’ she started to say.

At that moment, the landlady’s door was thrown open.

‘You’d better get off, if you’re going. It’s not a station waiting room, you know.’

‘We are going,’ Paul said.

He pulled Elinor out of the house on to the pavement. A strangled sound, half sob, half derisive laugh, and then the door banged shut behind them.

‘How do you put up with it?’ Elinor said. ‘It’s like living in Wuthering Heights.’

He didn’t smile, just went on looking concerned. ‘Will you be all right?’

‘Good heavens,
yes
.’ The slight irritation she felt freed her to go and she turned to walk away.

He caught hold of her arm. ‘Look, you don’t want this, I don’t want it, what are we doing?’

‘You want Catherine.’

‘No, I don’t, honestly, I don’t. If anything I want the two of you together.’

‘
What?
Paul, I can’t believe you said that.’

If his expression was anything to go by, neither could he. ‘At least, let me walk you home. I can’t go back in there anyway.’

‘’Fraid she’ll gobble you up?’ Her expression softened. ‘You’re going to get soaked.’

It was starting to rain. They linked arms; she felt him shivering through his thin shirt.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘If we walk quickly …’

By the end of the street, the rain had thickened to a downpour and was bouncing off the pavements. Flitting along between the street lamps, they were blotched into a single shadow. His trousers,
her skirt, were quickly soaked to the knee. Outside Catherine’s door, they looked up at the light, at the silver lines that slanted away into the darkness.

‘Why don’t you come up?’

‘Catherine might be in.’

‘And that bothers you?’ She seemed to regret the sharpness. ‘No, please, I’d like to talk to you.’

‘I thought we had.’

‘No, properly. About the hospital. I promise I won’t mention Kit.’

A heavier squall of rain settled the matter. It would be madness to walk back in this. He stood shivering and wiping his eyes as she unlocked the door to let them in.

Rain beating down on Queen’s Hospital, peppering the rhododendrons in the formal gardens, shaking the last petals from a rose.

A nurse emerges from one of the huts, peers up into the lowering sky and runs, stiff-legged, splashing through puddles, to the shelter of the main building.

The windows of the hut are blind with rain. ‘Bloody hell, will you look at that,’ somebody says, but though several men glance up from their card game, nobody bothers to comment.

Neville, in bed, dozing, is only half aware of the gust of wind that slams doors shut and blows dead leaves along the slippery walkways. His eyes flicker behind his closed lids.

Rain gleams on the capes of a party of stretcher-bearers preparing to go out, drips from their helmets, drives pale furrows in their mud-daubed skin. Their eyeballs, in the darkness of the trench, appear unnaturally big and bright.

Brooke’s voice, echoing around the hut, along the covered walkway, and into the formal garden where a pale mulch of rose petals half covers the wet soil, says:

‘Right, then. Off we go.’

He was lying naked on the side of a shell hole when they got to him. The blast had blown off almost all his clothes. He was curled up, comma-shaped, like a newborn baby who hasn’t yet cast off the constriction of the womb. Deep, black night. A prickle of stars; no moon. They’d been crawling on their bellies through mud for a hundred years and were close, now, to the German trenches. The bottom of the crater was flooded: oily, iridescent swirls catching the faint light of the stars. Then, for a long, long moment, the whole scene was brilliantly illuminated as a Very light went up and hung,
trembling, in the black sky. Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear. Odd little tatters of words and phrases blew through his brain, nothing to do with anything that was happening here.

They slipped and slithered over the rim down to where Warren lay, coiled in his foetal dream. Neville noticed that Brooke didn’t bother to check for a pulse. They rolled Warren on to his back. Rain fell steadily on to his face, but he didn’t blink or turn his head away. It was strange to crouch beside him, watching the Very lights bloom and die in his dead eyes.

They were going to have to drag him all the way. The fighting had been too fierce to allow chivalrous gestures to the stretcher-bearers of either side. The rain became heavier, bouncing on the black surface of the water. They tried to get a grip on him, but their numbed hands slid across his naked flesh and they had to fasten a rope round his waist before they could begin dragging him, against gravity, away from the stinking water and up to the crater’s edge. They crouched there for a moment, waiting for another Very light to die. Neville could see Brooke’s cheekbones gleaming like a skull.

‘Come on,’ Brooke said. ‘If they fire, they fire.’

Slowly, infinitely slowly, they started to drag Warren back to their own lines. It must have taken thirty minutes or more, but though firing continued, causing every muscle to jerk, nobody seemed to be firing specifically at them. They crawled through the gap in their wire, with a further delay when the few remaining shreds of Warren’s tunic snagged on one of the barbs. Boiler reached behind and tore it free. And then they were clambering, falling rather, into the trench in a great gush splother cascade of mud and water and for a minute Neville just sat there, wiping mud out of his eyes, but then he couldn’t be bothered to do even that, he just let it drip.

Brooke was already on his feet.

‘Come on,’ he said, sharply. They heaved Warren on to the stretcher and set off along the crowded trench, Boiler at the front calling out ‘
Beep-beep!
’ to secure a passage. He seemed to have no nerves, Boiler. No nerves, no manners, no eyelashes, no bloody nothing, but still he survived. Stuck a tab end in his mouth, squinted
through the smoke, foul-mouthed, fond of dirty jokes, laughed among the dying without a care in the world, apparently. Sentimental, though, about horses and mules.

At the back of the stretcher, Neville’s hands were rubbed raw, his thoughts scattered like pins. All he could think was:
I mustn’t let him drop
. And then he wanted to laugh, because what the hell did it matter whether they dropped him or not? Warren was past caring. Out of the front line they trudged, down the communication trenches, jam-packed with men crowding up for the counter-attack, bulky figures they were in the darkness, stamping and steaming like horses. Cigarettes everywhere, illuminating a mouth, a hand, an eye.

One more corner and they’d reached the regimental first-aid post. Tarpaulin had been rigged up over the entrance; the walking wounded queued underneath it, teeth chattering in blue faces, blackened wounds oozing blood. The slight wounds attempted jokes, but jerked like the others as a shell whizzed over.

Boiler pushed through the crowd, down the steps to the dugout where they set the stretcher down. Neville flexed his raw fingers and then, suddenly, in a great explosion of rage, kicked Warren in the ribs. The shock as his boot made contact travelled all the way up his body and reverberated inside his brain.

Brooke turned on him. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

‘What do I think I’m doing? You just risked four men’s lives for a corpse.’

‘Orders. We were ordered to get him back and we did.’ He glanced at the other stretcher-bearers and lowered his voice. ‘Look, I know you’re having a rough time but it’s no easier for the rest of us.’

Pointless saying anything. Anyway, all he wanted to do was sleep. The others were hunkered down against a wall, their hands hanging between their knees.

‘Right,’ Brooke said. ‘I want you to go across to C Company. They could do with a bit of help.’

He was gone before anybody could speak. Boiler began swearing steadily, inventively, under his breath. He was a great big bully-boy on the surface, but too used to doing what his betters told him to
really
protest. Not Neville. He pushed through the crowd into the back room, the operating theatre, if you could call it that. The low ceiling was hung with lamps, and despite the stench of blood, the place had a curious seedy glamour about it, halfway between a nightclub and an abattoir. Brooke was scrubbing his hands while two orderlies heaved a bleeding lump of meat on to the table.

‘Captain Brooke, sir.’

He was always correct, even formal, in front of the others. Brooke wiped his face on his sleeve, looking at Neville with smears of blood around his eyes.

‘You can’t just lend them out like that. They’re absolutely bloody knackered. Look at Wilkie, he’s dead on his feet.’

‘That was an order.’

They stared at each other. For a moment the prospect of head-on collision loomed, then Neville turned on his heel and went back into the other room. ‘Come on, lads.’ He dragged Wilkie to his feet, pushed the gas curtain aside and went out into the night.

Somewhere a tenor voice was singing:
They didn’t believe me, they didn’t believe me …

Well, no, Neville thought, struggling to sit up in bed. Who the fuck would?

He could kill for a cigarette. Instead, he lay with his eyes closed, his mind ranging back through the furthest reaches of his dream. Lending them to another company when they were on their knees with exhaustion. Even now, looking back, he didn’t believe it.

That was the moment, he thought. After that, Brooke was the enemy.

Gillies settled one buttock on the edge of his bed. ‘You’re looking a lot better.’

‘Oh. Grown back, has it?’

‘Now then.’

Why did everybody in this fucking hospital talk to you as if you were three years old? ‘I just need to get out of this place. It’s driving me insane.’

‘You are allowed out, you know. It’s not a prison.’

‘Could I go into London?’

‘I’d try a walk round the grounds first.’

‘And the operation?’

‘Well, that was a very nasty infection you had. I’m afraid the first thing I’m going to have to do is remove the pedicle …’

‘
Remove
it?’

‘It hasn’t taken. In fact it’ll slough off by itself in a few days –’

‘You mean, you have to start again?’

‘Afraid so. Things might look a bit worse initially …’

‘You keep saying that.’

‘I know, I’m sorry.’

‘Ah, well.’

After Gillies had gone, Neville sat looking round the ward, from face to face to face. Once, he and Brooke had watched some young officers, newly arrived from England, using beetroots on poles for target practice. Shouts of ‘Howzat?’ when somebody smashed the beetroot head to pieces. ‘Idiots,’ he’d said. But Brooke shook his head. ‘Don’t be too hard on them. They’ll learn, soon enough.’

Suddenly Neville pushed back the bedclothes and swung his feet on to the floor. When he first tried to stand he went dizzy and toppled back on to the bed. Getting dressed took the best part of an hour, but he managed it at last.