Toby's Room (6 page)

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.

Laura, her name was. When she sat for the women’s life class, Elinor settled down to draw her with a painful sense of invading Kit’s privacy. Laura was beautiful: she had the milky white skin that sometimes goes with dark red hair. She was a wonderful subject. And yet Elinor produced a bad, weak, timid, insipid drawing, far below the standard of her recent work. She couldn’t seem to grasp the pose at all.

That night, when she’d finished undressing, she tilted the mirror to show the bed and lay down in the same pose. She told herself that an attempt at a self-portrait might serve, in Tonks’s words, ‘to explicate the form’, but she didn’t pick up the pencil. Instead, she cupped her breasts, feeling the warm, white weight of them, and then spread her fingers lightly over the curved flesh of her belly. After that, she simply lay and stared at herself, before, suddenly, jumping off the bed and pushing the mirror away.

Sometimes, like this morning when she’d looked at Laura on the dais, trying not to imagine her in bed with Kit, she felt … No, there was no point saying what she felt.

She felt spayed.

She saw Toby once or twice a week, never for very long, and he never again came to her rooms. The idea they’d once had that he would teach her anatomy was quietly dropped. Sometimes they’d
meet for tea in a restaurant and then they’d talk at greater length, but this was a Toby who painstakingly called her ‘sis’ and teased her in a ghastly imitation of brotherly affection. He had nothing in common with the other Toby, whose weight on her chest in the darkness cut off her breath.

Once, she and Kit Neville were having tea in Lockhart’s, when Toby came in with a group of friends. Seeing her sitting there by the window, he came across to join them. As she introduced Kit she was aware of Toby’s eyes flaring: he’d recognized the name. He sat down; they talked, Toby drawing Kit out on the inadequacies of Tonks as a teacher. Not a particularly difficult subject to get Kit started on.

‘To hear Elinor talk you’d think he was God,’ Toby said.

‘Huh. To hear Tonks talk you’d think he was God.’

And then he was off, on the uselessness of drawing from the Antique, the blind worship of the past, the failure to engage in any meaningful way with the realities of modern life and, above all, Tonks’s deplorable tendency to devote too much time to teaching women and useless men.

‘Do you think time spent teaching women is wasted?’ Toby said, with a sidelong glance at Elinor.

‘Present company excepted, yes. Well. Largely.’

‘I don’t think Elinor wants to be that kind of exception, do you, sis?’

She could feel Toby walking round Kit, sniffing him, assessing him as a rival, rather than meeting him as his sister’s friend. It was a relief, to her at least, when he got up and went to rejoin his friends.

‘Nice chap, your brother,’ Kit said, later.

‘Hmm.’

Even now, she still craved Toby’s approval. When one of her drawings won a prize – an exceedingly small prize, but a prize nevertheless – her first thought was, I must tell Toby. It had been like this ever since she could remember; nothing really happened to her until she confided it in him.

She waited for him at the foot of the medical school steps.
Students came and went in a steady stream. She was frozen by the time he appeared, muffled in a long coat with its collar turned up against the wind. He was coughing badly and stopped to get his breath, one arm resting on the plinth of the huge bronze male nude that towered above him. Somehow the statue’s heavily muscled torso served to emphasize how thin he’d become. She hadn’t noticed the change in him till now and the sudden perception produced a tweak of fear. When she ran up the steps to meet him, he waved her away.

‘You don’t want this.’

‘You should be in bed.’

Another fit of coughing. ‘Can’t. Exams.’

‘Toby, you look awful. Come on, let’s get you back to my rooms, I’ll make you a cup of tea.’

‘No, got to revise.’

‘Just for a few minutes; I’ll put the fire on.’

Did he hesitate? She thought he did, but then he fell into step beside her. For once, she was the one who had to slow her pace so they could keep in step. By the time they’d reached the top floor of her lodgings, he was gasping for breath and almost fell into a chair beside the fire.

Tight-lipped, she bent down to light it.

‘Seriously, Toby, you need to be in bed.’

‘No, if I miss the last two exams I’ll have to repeat the entire year –’

Again, a spasm of coughing cut off his breath.

‘Does Mother know you’re like this?’

‘No – and you’re not to tell her either.’

The room warmed up quickly; by the time she’d made the tea he was starting to breathe more easily. But he was sweating heavily, and when he took the cup from her his fingers felt clammy. He wouldn’t look at her.

‘There’s no reason to go putting the wind up people. It’s just a cold, everybody’s got it.’

‘Hmm. Have they all got it as bad as you?’

He shook his head. There was nothing to be gained by nagging him; he’d made up his mind. She sat in the other armchair. ‘Oh, one bit of good news: I’ve won a prize.’

‘That’s wonderful. Oh, I am so pleased.’

He was genuinely, unaffectedly delighted for her. Of course he’d been the one who’d fought for her to go to the Slade in the first place, when her mother and Rachel had been so resolutely opposed. Toby had badgered their father until suddenly the impossible had become possible. He was a good brother. She felt a sudden pang of grief for everything they’d lost.

‘What did you get it for?’

‘A female nude. Not very good.’

He raised his eyebrows.

‘No, no,
really
not very good. I only won because Tonks was the judge and the anatomy was spot on.’

‘So this course is helping?’

‘Well, I’m not sure it is, actually. My nudes used to look like blancmanges, now they look like prizefighters.’

As she chattered on, she was watching him intently, alert to every catch in his breath.

‘Where’ve you got to in the dissection?’ he asked.

‘The face. And I’m not sure I can face it.’ She winced. ‘Sorry, not intended.’

‘Why can’t you?’

‘The face is the person, I suppose. Cutting into that, it’s … I don’t know. Different. I keep thinking about Daft Jamie, which is …’

‘Daft?’

‘Well, yes, I suppose so. How did that dreadful man get away with it?’

‘Hare?’

‘No, Knox.’

‘He didn’t, I don’t think he ever practised medicine again.’

‘He didn’t die though, did he?’

‘No, but it might have felt like it – to him.’

Toby was breathing more easily now and some of his colour had returned.

‘The other girls call him George; the cadaver, I mean. One of them said she thought it was more respectful, to give him a name. I don’t know, I don’t see it like that. The fact is, he’s got a name. It’s just that we don’t know it.’

‘Ours was called Albert. It’s nearly always the royal family. Though I think one of the other tables called theirs Herbert. Asquith.’

She hoped he might stay for a while, perhaps even have something to eat, but as soon as he’d finished drinking the tea he was on his feet.

‘Can’t you stay? I’ve got some soup, I could –’

‘No, thanks all the same, but I need an early night. The first exam’s at nine …’

He touched her hand as he said goodbye, his fingertips as cold and slippery as a dead fish. He stood looking at her for a moment. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be all right.’

But the cold air tightened his chest and he was coughing again before he reached the bottom step.

December was unusually cold and foggy even by the standards of London in winter. Day after day went by with no glimpse of the sun and it never became really light, not even at midday. Whenever someone came through the doors of the London Hospital, wisps and coils of sulphurous smoke followed them in. The air on the ground-floor corridors tasted metallic.

These mornings Elinor went straight to the cupboard where the heads were kept. By now, in this final stage of dissection, the face had become unrecognizable. She identified him only by the name tag clipped to his right ear. Not his name, of course – officially he had no name – but hers. At the start of each session she looked into the pallid eyes, still in place inside the dissected orbits, and once again became possessed by the desire to know who he was. The need to name him, to understand how and why he’d come to this, grew in her with each stage of his disintegration.

As soon as she started work, however, this obsession with his identity fell away. Under Mr Smailes’s appraising eye, they teased out layers of muscle and exposed nerves and tendons to the light. He encouraged them to explore their own and each other’s faces: to feel the skull beneath the skin. It made sense to test what they’d learned against the living reality. All the same … Elinor couldn’t help noticing how Smailes’s lips parted as he watched their fingers probe and delve.

She hated these sessions of ‘living anatomy’, but they were probably more useful to her as an artist than the actual dissection. Certainly, she felt her growing knowledge was now feeding into her drawing, though for a long time she’d been unable to make a connection. The cadaver hadn’t helped her see the model on the dais more clearly. If anything, the dissection had become linked in her
mind to the passion, bewilderment and pain of that night in Toby’s room. As if it were his body on the slab: familiar, frightening, unknown.

And then, one morning, it was over. Elinor left the Dissecting Room determined she would never go back. Next term the other girls would start work on another cadaver, the second in a long line, but for her there would only ever be this one. She lingered for a moment in the doorway, trying to squeeze out the appropriate emotion, whatever that might be.

As she closed the door behind her, one of the attendants was sluicing down the slab.

It was snowing when she left the hospital, as it had been, on and off, for the past two days; the sky above the rooftops had a jaundiced look that suggested more was on the way. The pavements had been trodden to a grey sludge. She stopped outside the main entrance to watch the flakes whirling down. Before the end of term – and that wasn’t far away now – she’d have to see Tonks and explain that she didn’t want to go on with dissection. She’d say she’d learned a lot and she was very grateful to have had the opportunity, but …
But
. Still planning what she’d say to Tonks, she set off to catch the bus home, walking fast, head down, arms swinging, away, away, away …