Toby's Room (10 page)

5 August 1917

I knew I wouldn’t sleep and I didn’t. The room was too hot so I had to leave the window open, and the thud-thud of the guns went on all night. I tried to cry; I’ve never found it easy and it seems almost impossible now. I manage a couple of sobs, and then give up in disgust. And, of course, I tell myself there’s nothing to cry about. Yet. Only, as the night hours pass, that belief starts to wear thin
.

This is difficult to write. Just before dawn I got dressed, walked down through the sleeping house, across the garden and into the
fields beyond. I was trudging uphill, feeling spikes of stubble jab my ankles, and then, just as I reached the top, the sun rose – huge, molten-red – and at that moment I knew – not thought, not feared
, knew
– that Toby wasn’t coming back. Not that he was dead, I didn’t think he was dead, it was quite precise: he wasn’t coming home.

Days went by before she stood at her bedroom window and watched the telegraph boy – ‘boy’ you called him, though he was a middle-aged, even elderly, man – all the boys were in France – dismount from his bicycle and push it up the hill.

At one point his head disappeared behind the hawthorn hedge – the lane dipped sharply there – and she convinced herself, standing motionless at the window, that he would never reappear. She had willed him away; even when, slowly, his peaked cap reappeared and then his head and shoulders and he stopped to mount his bicycle, even then, she knew it was in her power to prevent the telegram being delivered. There were other farmhouses, other families, further down the lane. The Smeddles had three sons; they could afford to lose one of them. She’d have swept all three Smeddle boys off the face of the earth without a second thought if by so doing she could have prevented Dodds coming through the gate and crunching up the gravel drive. Listening to the doorbell chime, she almost shouted out:
Don’t answer it, he’ll give up, he’ll go away
. If he went away it wouldn’t have happened. Only by now she was halfway down the stairs. She looked over the banisters at Mrs Robinson, drying her hands on her white apron as she hurried to answer the door. Then Elinor’s mother came out of the breakfast room, her face blank, but fearing the worst because these days no telegram was innocent. She, too, disappeared into the porch and, a minute later, Elinor heard a thin, despairing cry.
That doesn’t sound like Mother
. Elinor’s hands gripped the banisters.
Doesn’t sound like her at all
.

Mother became a white slug lying on the sofa in the living room. Rachel, with her two boys and their nurse, moved into the house and was in constant attendance, though after the first week she
began to get resentful. She had a husband working in the War Office, resigned to staying at his club all week, but expecting home comforts at the weekend and deserving them too. She had a house to run, two small children, who were so much easier to manage at home with their own toys and beds and a garden to run around in, this garden wasn’t even fenced in, and the pond, for God’s sake, ten feet deep at the centre if it was an inch … And what did Elinor do? Go off and see her friends in London, and not just there and back in a day, either. No, she stayed away two or three nights at a time. It was perfectly plain what should happen. Elinor should stay at home and look after Mother, freeing her, Rachel, to see to her husband and children who were, after all, her primary responsibility. Elinor could go on painting – if she really felt she had to – but it was absolutely clear where her first duty lay, and it was jolly well high time she started doing it too.

Elinor refused.

‘You are so selfish,’ Rachel said. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody as selfish as you.’

‘Yes, I am selfish. I need to be.’

Their father said very little, but Elinor knew he agreed with Rachel. Everybody – the aunts, the uncles, the second cousins twice removed, Mrs Robinson, the village, the farmer, the farmer’s wife, for all she knew, the farmer’s dog – agreed with Rachel, but it was only her father’s opinion that hurt.

It made no difference. She went back to London on the next train and forced herself to paint. She had very little contact with other people. She seemed to be surrounded by a great white silence, long echoing corridors, doors opening into empty rooms. On the rare occasions when she had to meet people, she barely coped. A solitary visit to the Café Royal lasted a mere twenty minutes, before she began to feel anxious to get away.

Round about this time, she went to see Paul Tarrant in the Third London General Hospital because really there was no alternative: she had to go. As she walked down the centre of a long ward she kept her eyes fixed on the bed at the end, afraid of the injuries she
might see if she looked to either side. She wasn’t good with hospitals at the best of times and some of the war wounds were so dreadful she couldn’t bear to look at them. Paul was sitting up in bed chatting to a middle-aged couple. His eyes widened with surprise when he saw her; her letters had become so infrequent he may well not have expected her to come.

The man beside the bed stood up and Paul introduced him as his father. He had Paul’s way of ducking his head when he shook hands, but not Paul’s looks. The woman was Paul’s stepmother. To Elinor’s dismay, they showed every sign of leaving her alone with Paul though they’d travelled three hundred miles for this visit. She could see they were slightly in awe of the nice middle-class young lady their son was walking out with. She supposed some such term as ‘walking out’ would be the one they’d choose.

‘No, please,’ she said. ‘Don’t leave on my account. I can only stay a few minutes anyway.’

And it was a few minutes. Afterwards she thought she might have done better not to have gone at all, since she and Paul had not managed to have any real conversation. The surgeon was pleased with him; he might get quite a bit more movement in the knee, probably not the full amount, but enough to get around. No, crutches, then? No, no crutches. He thought perhaps a nice stick with a swan on the handle. Out of hospital, probably by the end of the week, then a convalescent home in Dorset for a month after that. Looking forward to that, never seen Dorset. Had she ever been? And so it went on, until she was able to take her leave. After a second’s hesitation, she bent to kiss him, and felt his father and stepmother exchange a glance. Then she was off down the ward as if all the fiends in hell were after her. She might have deceived his parents about the warmth of her regard, but she was under no illusion that she’d deceived Paul.

Not long after the telegram arrived, Elinor was standing on the terrace when once again a postman turned into the drive. This time he was carrying a big brown-paper parcel entwined with thick, hairy
string. It was addressed to her parents. Already fearful of what it might contain, she took it into the conservatory where Rachel sat by their mother, who lay stretched out on the sofa. She’d hardly moved since the news of Toby’s death. Her skin seemed to have slackened, as if she’d shrunk away inside it. Until recently, she’d still been considered a beautiful woman, though nobody would think so now. Again, the image of a moist white slug came into Elinor’s mind. It filled her with guilt, but then, almost at once, her impatience returned. She couldn’t bear the weeping and wailing that punctuated her mother’s long silences. Elinor was determined not to grieve, and particularly not to grieve
like that
. Her own first reaction to the news had been a blaze of euphoria; immediately her fingers itched to grab a brush and paint. Grief was for the dead, and Toby would never be dead while she was alive and able to hold a brush.

But now here the three of them were. They looked at the parcel, trying to decipher the postmark, and then at each other.

‘Well,’ Rachel said.

Suddenly sick of the suspense, Elinor began trying to unfasten the knots, but her fingers felt swollen and stiff.

‘Ring for Mrs Robinson,’ Mother said. ‘She’ll have some scissors.’

Mrs Robinson’s eyes widened when she saw the parcel. She looked, rather shamefacedly, excited, as indeed she had when the telegram arrived. She’d been genuinely fond of Toby, but still, his death was drama in a humdrum life. She’d talk about him in the village post office; no doubt the family’s bereavement had enhanced her status there.

‘It’ll be his things,’ she said. ‘They send them back. They did with Mrs Jenkins’s lad.’

The scissors were duly fetched and the string cut, but even before the first layers of brown paper had been stripped away something entirely unexpected entered the room: the smell of the front line. Filthy water, chlorine gas, decomposition – and because it was a smell, and not a sight, Elinor was defenceless against it. She walked, stiff-legged, to the window where she looked out over the lawn and
trees, not seeing anything, every nerve and muscle in her body fighting to repudiate that smell.

When she turned back into the room they’d got the parcel unwrapped. Tunic, belt, a periscope, breeches, peaked cap, puttees, boots – all reeking of the same yellow-brown stench. Elinor’s mother touched the tunic, timidly, stroking the sleeve nearest to her. At first, she seemed entirely calm, but then her mouth twisted, a crease appeared between her eyebrows and she began to cry. Not like an adult; no, this was the dreadful, square-mouthed wail of an abandoned baby.

Rachel gathered the things together and thrust the bundle into Elinor’s hands. ‘Take it away.’

‘Where shall I put it?’

‘How do I know? Just get rid of it, for God’s sake.’

Elinor backed out of the room – bumping into Mrs Robinson, who’d heard the cry and was rushing in to help – and took the parcel upstairs to her own room, then along to Toby’s room, but then she remembered that her mother often came up here and sat in the window, for hours on end sometimes, looking down the road into the village, to the train station where she’d seen him for the last time. He wouldn’t let anybody go to London with him.

Nowhere seemed to be the right place. In the end, she wrapped everything up again as best she could and took the parcel up into the attic where she pushed it deep into a recess under the eaves. Right at the back, out of sight. Then she piled old blankets and a rug in front of it, anything to fend off the smell. Closing the door at the top of the stairs, she felt as if she’d disposed of a corpse. Out of sight, out of mind, she told herself.

Only it never was, quite. That smell broke the last numbness of shock. The following day Elinor’s mother left for Rachel’s house; Elinor was left alone, and glad to be alone. The parcel containing Toby’s clothes remained in her mind, but separated from her waking consciousness, like a nightmare whose every detail is forgotten, though the fear survives, poisoning the day.

Now that she could work at home, there was no need to go back to London. She spent all the hours of daylight painting in the barn
across the yard, creeping back into the house at dusk, often forgetting to eat at all. At night, she slept in Toby’s room.

Painting numbed the pain; nothing else did. In the evenings, when she was too exhausted to work, she sat in front of the fire, trying to read. Usually, she had to abandon the attempt because nothing stayed in her head. She could read the same paragraph half a dozen times and still not be able to remember what it said. Above her head the floorboards creaked as if somebody were pacing up and down in the corridor outside his room. She paid no attention to this. It was a trivial manifestation of her state of mind; no more.

For long stretches of time he might not have died at all. He wasn’t present, but then he hadn’t been present for most of the past two years. There was no body. No grave. No ceremony. Only his spare clothes, the stuff he’d left behind when he went into the line for the last time, and they’d been pushed out of sight.

At first, this limbo state didn’t bother her, but then, as the days and weeks went by, not knowing how he’d died became a torment. She had to make his death real; otherwise this half-life could go on for ever. She knew there were people who cherished the malignant hope that their sons or husbands were still alive, prisoners of war perhaps, or mad, wandering the French countryside with no memory of who they were, or lying in a hospital bed too badly wounded to communicate at all. These were hardly consoling thoughts, and yet people clung to them. Anything, rather than face up to the finality of death. But it was finality that she’d begun to crave.

She knew so little. What did ‘Missing, Believed Killed’ actually mean? What degree of certainty did it imply? Apart from the telegram and the official letter that followed, there were only two brief notes, one from Toby’s CO, another from the Chaplain. She read them again and again. How short they were, how grudging. She’d been puzzled by that at the time, though nobody else seemed to notice anything amiss. And there was another thing: Kit Neville, who was in the Royal Army Medical Corps and had served with Toby, hadn’t written.

The more she thought about that, the more extraordinary it
seemed. She wrote to him, asking if he knew anything about Toby’s death. No reply. Thinking he might not have got the letter, she wrote again. Still no reply. She bought
The Times
and searched the columns of wounded and dead for Kit’s name, convinced that something dreadful must have happened to him – nothing short of serious injury or death could excuse his silence – but his name wasn’t in the lists. Of course it might have been in previous issues, but no, if he were back in London she’d have heard.

She was left with nothing to fill the gap but her own imagination, and even imagination needs some facts to work on. Now, when it was too late, she’d have liked to know the details of Toby’s life out there, but her long insistence on ignoring the war worked against her. When she tried to picture his final hours, her mind was blank.

One morning she began to paint Toby’s portrait, wondering why it had taken her so long to think of doing it. As she worked, she kept stepping back from the easel and closing her eyes. She could see him more clearly like this: the shape of his head, the way his hair sprang from his temples, the blue eyes so like her own, but with a fleck of brown near the right pupil, his ears, the lobes extravagantly long and full; and then down across his body: the wart an inch away from his left nipple, the appendicitis scar …