Toby's Room (9 page)

She held out her hand. ‘Elinor Brooke.’

‘Paul Tarrant.’

‘Are you coming to the Slade?’

‘Don’t know. Doubt it.’

The northern working-class accent came as a bit of a shock. ‘Well, don’t let Tonks put you off, his bark’s worse than his bite.’

Liar
. She smiled and walked off, already thinking about the dress she was going to wear to the party that night, but at the end of the corridor, she turned and looked back. He was still on his feet, watching her. She gave him a little wave, before leaping and bounding down the stairs.

The heat on the hospital train, as it crawled through the fields of Kent, was almost unendurable. Nobody came to open the windows and none of the four men in the compartment could get off their bunks. The air was tainted with the smell of gangrene coming from the shoulder wound of the lad opposite Paul. Young, red-haired, his face streaked with blood and oil, wildly excited because he was going home. What time is it? he kept asking. Are we there yet? God, he was like a child on an outing to the seaside. He couldn’t stop talking, the people he was going to see, the things he was going to do: Mam, Dad, booze, football, girls, more girls, booze, girls …

SHUT UP! Paul wanted to shout, but he didn’t. All that talk about girls made him think about Elinor, how soon she would come to see him, whether she would come to see him. After her silence of the last two months, perhaps not … By the time they reached Charing Cross, the chattering had died away to a low mumble, followed by a succession of loud snores.

Unloading the train took the best part of an hour. At last, though, Paul was lying, strapped to a stretcher, staring up at the station roof where hundreds of bright-eyed pigeons cocked their heads at the noise and confusion below.

A crowd of well-wishers had gathered, but the police were keeping them back. An elderly man with a white moustache and a soldierly bearing did not so much break through the cordon as ignore it. He bent over Paul, his face reddening with effort, and thrust a leaflet into his hand, followed by a bag of sweets. The leaflet was headed: JESUS SAVES. Paul looked down at the sweets, thought about unwrapping one and decided not to bother.

A stretcher carrying the red-haired young man, still asleep or possibly unconscious, had been set down beside him. Minutes passed;
how many, he didn’t know. After a while, a nurse came up to him, asked him how he felt and lifted the blanket to check the dressing on his leg.

‘Wasting your time on that one, love. It’s in splints,’ a passing soldier said.

She actually blushed. It was rather nice, seeing that. He decided he would have a sweet after all.

By the time he’d unwrapped one and popped it into his mouth, she’d moved round to the other stretcher and was kneeling by the red-haired man, looking rather concerned. She put two fingers to his neck. Waited. Then, carefully expressionless, she pulled the blanket up over his face.

Looking up, she caught Paul watching her. ‘Is that nice?’ she asked.

He rolled the sweet from side to side. Tears gathered at the corners of his eyes and trickled into his hair. ‘Lovely.’

‘Shouldn’t be long now. Soon have you on the ambulance.’

Standing up, she dusted down the skirt of her uniform and left him alone with the dead.

Elinor Brooke’s Diary

3 August 1917

Arrived in Lewes not even knowing if I was going to be met or not. In the event:
not.
I’d brought a really heavy suitcase so stood there pinned to the wretched thing while the heat crept into the station from the dazzling street outside and everything started to prickle. Scalp, arms, back, chest. In the end I surrendered my case to the stationmaster – who seemed to be familiar with the problem – and he said he’d send it up on the milk float in the morning. I thought about my evening dress – such as it is! – trapped inside. Well, that couldn’t be helped, but I decided I needed my sketch pads and pencils. He watched me, looking rather amused, while I scrabbled
about. Oh, they’re well known, the Charleston crew. Without needing to be asked, he pointed out the path and soon I was swinging along between the harvest fields. It was unpleasantly hot, but beautiful too. I stopped to rest under some trees and the shade was full of the humming of insects. A heap of horse manure, still steaming, was covered in butterflies, which rose up in a great blue cloud as I approached.

VB was in the drawing room when I arrived, with her sister, Mrs Woolf. I’ve met her more than once, though I don’t think she remembered me and gave me a lukewarm welcome. Doesn’t like young women, I suspect. I thought the talk would be well above my head, but they were quite relaxed and gossipy and we chatted on easily enough. Or they did. I was too nervous to say much. It was like listening to an old married couple. They’ve got that habit of completing each other’s sentences, and yet VB seems … I don’t know. Wary? Something.

The men came in from the fields, brick red from the sun, hands covered in stubble scratches, and no doubt their ankles too – stubble gets through anything. They went off to wash, and came down more civilized, better-tempered. Meanwhile, a woman appeared with a tray of bread and butter, not home-made, of course – nobody can get the ingredients – which seems mad in the country, but there you are – and jam. The jam was marrow and ginger, the ginger’s supposed to counteract the blandness of the marrow.
Hmm.
We chewed valiantly and talked, mainly about painting. Which pleased me – I was so afraid it would be terribly intellectual, but I’ve decided I like the way artists talk, it’s so
practical
most of the time
.

And I like VB a lot, though she paid hardly any attention to me after the men arrived. She is superbly casual with her painter’s smock and her slipping hair and her rather fine but obviously capable hands. That’s what I like about her, I think, her ability to
do things.
You feel she can stretch a canvas, decorate a room, soothe a fractious baby, sew, knit, grow plants, even cook, I suspect, if she had to. And, of course, paint. I like people who can do things. And I have less and less patience with those who can’t. At Garsington,
some of the conchies make no effort to acquire the skills they need to do farm work. Oh, I know it’s compulsory, they haven’t
chosen
to do it, but I do think, in their place, I’d make a bit more of an effort. But then, I never shall be in their place so oughtn’t to criticize, I suppose.

Later.
Between tea and dinner I walked in the garden. I didn’t have any unpacking or changing to do and I’m beginning to suspect I shan’t have tomorrow, either. Apparently the man who drives the milk float is trying to dodge conscription, so if he sees the police, or even thinks he sees them, he abandons the float and takes off into the Downs. I’d been hoping the evening would bring some relief from the fierce heat, but it didn’t. The walled garden was particularly hot. I stood still for a long time surrounded by tall flowers – sunflowers, hollyhocks, foxgloves – they always make me feel I’m five years old again, I have such a vivid memory of what it was like to poke my finger down their speckled throats – and everything seemed to be stunned by the heat. Few birds now, they’ve all gone quiet, just the hum of insects and a frenzy of midges around my bare arms, little frantic things, as if the air had turned to glass and they were trying to get out. I sat and sketched, though I’m not good at doing that in strange places – you’d think the unfamiliarity of the landscape would help you to see it more clearly, but it doesn’t seem to work that way
.

The midges were a nuisance, particularly near the pond where there was a punt tethered – all rather romantic. And of course I went off into a daydream, bending over the water, as if I were going to kiss my own reflection – and judging from the glimpse I had of the conscientious young men at tea I think I may have to. There was a shoal of fish, quite small, striped green and gold, very pretty, until you looked more closely and saw their malevolent grins.

When I looked up again, I’d been joined by two entirely naked young boys. The elder – about twelve, I suppose – had that finished look of late childhood, confident, even arrogant, a little prince in his
wild kingdom. The other was still soft and round and vulnerable. They were employed in blowing up toads. Apparently you insert a straw into their rear ends and blow and – Well! I just refuse to think about it.

Over dinner we talked about the war. What the men will do in winter when work on the land isn’t needed, though they’ll still have to do something, work in a factory or a hospital, I suppose. The boys didn’t appear, though through the open windows you could hear them fighting a battle of some sort, lots of blood-curdling yells and screams; and inside there were the adults being so seriously, conscientiously, determinedly opposed to it all. But it’s the little wild savages in the garden who’ll win, I think.

Now I’m sitting in my bedroom listening to an owl hooting and wishing I could talk to Toby. Or Paul. Paul’s in hospital in London, badly wounded, and I haven’t even been to see him yet, so what does it mean when I say I want to talk to him? It’s not even a conscious decision, not going to see him; I mean, I just can’t seem to make myself do it. Ever since he volunteered to fight, we’ve been drifting further and further apart. Sometimes I wonder if there’ll be anything left when we do, finally, meet. And then I feel terrible because while he was out there I virtually stopped writing to him altogether. Just couldn’t do it any more, couldn’t bear to spin out the trivialities of my life. And now there he is in hospital with a lump of shrapnel in his leg – though I suppose they’ll have got that out by now – and here I sit in a cosy little bedroom in a borrowed nightie, and …
And none of it is my fault.

And yet there’s so much guilt: always another letter needing to be written. And when you do write you can’t say any of the things you want to say – I can’t, anyway – because it might be the last thing they read. So you have to be nice, you have to be cheerful, you haven’t to mention anything that might upset them. It’s horrible for them, but it’s horrible for us as well.

Only it can’t be just that; I mean, the reason I stopped writing to Paul, because all that applies to Toby too, and I write to him twice a week.

4 August 1917

I think my heyday’s over. This came to me very clearly walking in the garden this morning after breakfast. Everybody else had gone off to work, or almost everybody. The boys had vanished, but I could feel them tracking me. I think all visitors are German spies in their eyes, needing to be watched. You hear them rather than see them, a twig cracking or the rustling of a leaf. Anyway, there I was, ‘alone’ in the garden, thinking, I’m past my prime.

Oh, what nonsense, Catherine would say. At least I hope she would! I’ve lost touch with all my other Slade friends, so I don’t suppose they’d have an opinion. No, my best time was at the Slade before the war, I was happy then. Pursued by men, especially after I cut my hair off. (So much for Mother’s fears that I’d become a nun.) And let’s face it, being pursued is always rather nice, however little one may wish to be caught.

And then I saw Michael Stoddart, one of the conscientiously objecting young men, standing by the pond smoking a cigarette, so I went up to him, suggested a walk through the fields, and off we went.

Intolerable heat, really intolerable. Generally there’s a breeze on the Downs, so you know you’re going to be cool up there, however hot it is elsewhere, but these last few days even the breeze has been hot. Something very un-English about it – the Sirocco, one of those peculiar winds I used to know the names of, which are supposed to drive people mad. So anyway, we walked and observed an aeroplane flying over us towards the coast, and countless butterflies. It’s been a fantastic year for butterflies, silver fritillaries, peacocks, blues – clouds of blues – but the conversation limped along. I did my Jane Austen-ish best with the weather – how strange it’s been, so hot and dry in Kent, absolutely pouring down everywhere else – and the farmhouse, how beautiful it is, and the very convenient ease of the train journey from London, I almost asked after the health of his family, but then I thought, No, for goodness’ sake,
I haven’t met them.
Your turn.
And to give him his due, he did his best
.

Him.
Tall, lean, floppy blond hair, blue eyes – very striking at the moment because he’s suntanned from all that working on the farm – slightly stuttering speech, a rather modest, self-deprecating air, which I always think conceals arrogance, but then I’m getting cynical in my old age
.

We carried on walking across the fields. The heat of the sun seemed to have contracted to a single point that was boring into my head like a bottle opener being screwed into a cork. Great blasts of hot wind coming off the Downs – a furnace door opening and shutting. He didn’t say much, just glanced at me sidelong now and then. I think girls must be a rarity in his life because he certainly seemed to think I was some kind of exotic creature. He asked about my painting, and obviously expected me to ask about his, but I hadn’t heard of him, so I didn’t, and then he asked if I had anybody Out There. So of course I told him about Toby and Kit Neville, and the others. Sometimes it seems as if every young man I’ve ever known is in France. (Or under it.) I could see him waiting for me to ask why he wasn’t Out There too, but I didn’t. I never do. When he pushed, I said it didn’t concern me. As a woman, it didn’t concern me. To be honest, I was copying something I’d heard Mrs Woolf say last night after dinner, about how women are outside the political process and therefore the war’s got nothing to do with them. It sounded clever when she said it, and stupid when I repeated it. And immediately I started thinking about women in Deptford hurling bricks through the windows of ‘German’ shopkeepers – they aren’t German, they’re Polish or Russian or something, but the name’s foreign and that’s enough – and about the girls who handed white feathers to Toby when he was called back to London to complete his studies. All the medical students got white feathers, that’s why in the end they had to let them wear army uniform. And I thought, No, it’s not true, women aren’t more peaceful than men. It pains me to say it, but the one thing this war has shown conclusively is how amazingly and repulsively belligerent women are
. Some
women
.

Anyway, he didn’t have the temerity to disagree with me. No doubt Mrs W’s views are sacrosanct.

We were walking down a lane between two fields. In the one on the right German prisoners were cutting the corn with hooks, guarded by a soldier with a gun, though he was cradling it in his arms like a baby and seemed half asleep. The prisoners were joking and laughing as they worked, though they looked up as we walked past. Further on was a field reduced to its last stand of corn, the grain heads heaving and turbulent with the wild life trapped inside. With every turn of the harvester the cutting blades moved nearer. We stopped to watch. Men like charred sticks stood around – I mean, they were black against the burning gold of the field – everything seemed to be on the point of bursting into flame, like one of Van Gogh’s landscapes, and the air burnt the back of your throat. Dogs leaping up and down on the end of their leashes like black scribbles on the air. Then first one rabbit broke cover, then another, and another. Almost leisurely it seemed, the guns were raised, one smooth fluid movement, and a rabbit leapt off the stubble, fell, ran on again, limping and falling, until a second shot put an end to it. It lay there twitching for a few seconds, then went still, a bundle of dusty fur, looking suddenly much smaller than it had in life.

I turned to say something to Michael, who was breathing rather heavily, but suddenly he grabbed me by the arms and kissed me. Not very expertly, it has to be said. Our teeth clashed. My mouth fell open in surprise. Perhaps he mistook this for feminine yielding – at any rate, he stuck a surprisingly long tongue down my throat. I got both hands between our chests and pushed him away. I don’t know why I wasn’t flattered – as I say, my heyday’s over and we old maids must take what we can get – but I wasn’t. As quickly as possible, I started off to walk back. The sun on my back seemed to push me along. I was sweating, thoroughly out of sorts; it was easier to blame the weather than think seriously about bloody Michael.

His friend Philip Bannister was waiting on the lawn when we
got back. Michael kept darting little defiant glances at him, very daring, very naughty-boy, and suddenly I knew why I wasn’t flattered. I nodded to Philip, and went straight upstairs to my room. I
hope
without a flounce, but I can’t be sure of that.

Later.
What a silly trivial little incident – and yet it’s opened a door into a room I never thought to visit again. I keep thinking about that walk to the old mill with Toby and the night that followed. I resent having it dragged out into the daylight like this – by nonsense. Toby and I put it behind us so successfully, we built a different, in many ways deeper, relationship, on that patch of burnt earth. And now I feel I’m being dragged back to the beginning again. Well, I won’t go. Michael bloody Stoddart doesn’t have the power to do that
.

After dinner, there was rum punch. I drank a bit too much of it and ended up with a bursting head and a short fuse. At some point – I can’t really remember – the talk turned to who was likely to be commissioned as a war artist. And of course Kit Neville’s name came up – and then Paul’s.

‘You know both of them, don’t you?’ VB said
.

Glances across the table. Immediately I felt my relationship with Paul – possibly even with Kit, not that there ever was one – had been a topic of discussion, and I hated the idea. So I just said yes, I’d overlapped with both of them at the Slade, Kit Neville in my first and second year, Paul in my third
.

Then Michael said he didn’t know what he thought about war artists. Wasn’t it just propaganda? And then Philip said, ‘At least it’ll get them out of the war.’

Now that is a perfectly innocuous remark, if you’re not on your fourth glass of rum punch
.

I said I was sure that was the last thing on either of their minds. And I pointed out that Paul was back home wounded so getting out of it wasn’t an issue for him, and then I said, ‘They did both volunteer.’

What a thing to say in a room full of conchies. A hole opened up in the conversation and we all stared into it, until several people at once rushed in to fill the silence
.

After dinner, we walked in the garden, the moths fluttering round a lamp, the women in their pale dresses looking like ghosts. VB came up and sort of semi-apologized for Philip’s behaviour at dinner. ‘I don’t think he realized how close you are to Paul Tarrant.’ I just muttered something and changed the subject. I couldn’t be doing with it all, and besides my headache was getting worse by the minute. I could hear a steady thump, thump, thump and I really didn’t know if it was inside my head, but then I thought, No, it’s thunder. I said, ‘Thank goodness’ – something like that anyway – and everybody looked amused. And then Philip said, ‘No, it’s the guns.’

I don’t know what’s the matter with me. You can hear the guns in south London sometimes – teaspoons rattling in saucers, that sort of thing – so they’re bound to be audible here. But, surely, not as loud as that? It must mean something’s going on – a ‘show’ they call it, bloody stupid word – and I’d really rather not know. It only deepens the fear that’s there beneath the surface anyway
.

When everybody else went inside, I stayed in the garden saying I had a headache and thought the fresh air would do me good. I had the feeling that my relationship with Paul was being gossiped about, fingered, passed round, pawed at, the way the Bloomsbury crowd always do, and that made me think about it: the fact I haven’t been to see him, didn’t write. I don’t know how much is left – if anything. Probably not very much. I threw it away – and I did
throw
it away, we didn’t ‘drift apart’, as people say. I ought to have written more regularly when he was in France, and I didn’t. I ought to have been to see him in hospital, and I haven’t.

And when I ask myself what went wrong the only answer I can come up with is the war. In those first weeks it seemed to throw us together – and then there was that mad weekend in Ypres, in the room with the big shiny brass bed and the view over the rooftops – which aren’t there any more. Apparently, you can look from one end of the city to the other and there’s hardly a wall left standing that’s
above knee height. But Paul and I became lovers there in that doomed city, the first bombardment started while I was there, and somehow the war has always followed us. It made us and then it unmade us.

Because late in 1915, Paul enlisted – and not for medical work this time – no, he volunteered to fight. And I know he says he volunteered because everybody knew conscription was coming anyway and he didn’t want to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to the front – but still he did it, and from that moment on things began to unravel between us. It became harder and harder to know what to write
.

So that’s the truth, I think, or as close as I can get to it. The war brought us together; the war tore us apart
.

At least he’s back home now, and that’s one less to worry about. I’m so frightened for Toby. Of course I’m worried about Kit Neville too, he’s in the same unit, facing the same dangers, but fear has an awful way of revealing the truth. Toby’s the one I couldn’t bear to lose. Nobody else, not even Paul – certainly not Kit, though I’d be terribly upset, of course, if anything happened to him
.

I sat on a bench for a full hour and listened to the night sounds. The soft explosive hooting of an owl seemed to be compounded of blood and fear. And I thought, nothing’s safe any more
.