Toby's Room (15 page)

At the end of the street, he stopped and looked up into the sky. A searchlight fingered the underside of the clouds, like a careful housewife assessing the quality of cloth. He couldn’t go back to his lodgings. He should probably go to the Café Royal where at least there would be people he knew and could – well, almost – talk to. Any company was better than his own.

But tonight, there was another possibility. He’d written to Catherine Stein, and received a brief, friendly reply expressing a willingness to meet. No date had been suggested. Now, though, he thought he might call on her. If she was out there was no harm done; if she was busy she needn’t see him. At the very least, it would provide a focus for his walk.

The streets were almost deserted. On these bright moonlit nights people hurried home, pulled the blackout curtains across and slept – if they slept at all – under the kitchen table or in the cupboard beneath the stairs. It was difficult not to despise these excessively timid civilians, when you thought what their sons and husbands were going through. No, not difficult: impossible.

He turned into Catherine’s road. A girl was walking along the pavement ten or so yards ahead of him, a slight figure wearing a black coat and hat. There was something about her posture – rounded shoulders and folded arms – that gave her the look of a victim. Even as he thought this, she turned and the light from the street lamp fell full on her face.

Catherine
, he almost said, but checked himself. ‘Miss Stein.’ He’d called her Catherine when they were students but it seemed presumptuous to do so now. ‘I was just on my way to see you.’

‘Paul. Good heavens. I wrote to you.’

‘Yes, I got it this morning.’

They were still put out by the unexpected meeting, a little awkward with each other.

‘It’s been a long time,’ she said.

‘Two years?’

‘More than that.’

She was right, must be more like three. Yes, that was it. The last time he saw her, they’d been to the Café Royal, not long after the war broke out, and just as they were leaving a man came up and insulted her – called her a filthy German, something like that – and Kit Neville had head-butted him.

‘I was thinking about you only the other day.’ He sensed a slight withdrawal, a wariness. ‘You and Elinor. I’m working at the Slade now and I was walking through the quad and … Oh, I don’t know, getting a bit nostalgic, I suppose. Thinking about old times.’

‘Well, they were good.’

The sadness in her voice so subtly echoed his own he knew he had to talk to her – and not merely about Neville.

‘Are you going out tonight?’ he asked.

‘No, I was just –’

‘Would you have dinner with me?’

She seemed to hesitate, but only for a second. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’d like that.’

They set off walking down the hill.

‘I was very sorry to hear about your father,’ he said.

‘Least they let him out before he died. I’d have hated him to die in that place.’

Catherine’s father had been interned as an enemy alien and spent the first year of the war in what had once been the Islington workhouse. Conditions there had broken his health, which, even before the war, had been giving cause for concern. He’d been released on health grounds but died not long after. Paul’s sympathy was entirely genuine, and yet part of him almost jeered. An elderly man dying at home in his own bed, surrounded by people who love and care for him … What, exactly, is there to be upset about in that?

But he liked Catherine; he liked her a lot. He took her to one of the few restaurants that had stayed open despite the threat of air raids. From the outside it looked closed. As they entered the dining room, a bored waiter peeled himself off the wall. The place was empty.

Facing Catherine across the table, Paul had his first chance to look at her properly. In the street, she’d been no more than a black shadow flitting by his side. Now, as she shrugged off her coat, he thought she looked beautiful, without being beautiful. Her face was full of light. Her front teeth protruded slightly and she kept pressing down her upper lip to hide them in a way he found utterly enchanting. She was far more conscious of the slight imperfection than she had reason to be.

As she read the menu, he remembered with a rush of blood that he’d seen her naked. Some of the girls at the Slade got together to pose for each other in the evenings and Elinor had produced a really exquisite drawing of Catherine lying naked on a bed. And he’d danced with her – God, how the memories came flooding back. She and Elinor had both come to the end-of-term fancy-dress party as
Harlequin: identical costumes, and, of course, wearing masks. For a long time they’d danced together, the two girls, totally absorbed in each other, and every male eye in the room had been fixed on them.

‘Catherine,’ he said. ‘What would you like to eat?’

There was no great choice; in the end, they settled for the game pie.

‘At least you know roughly what’s in it.’ Paul indicated the owner, who was slumped over the bar, gulping down his own wares at an alarming rate. ‘He goes shooting every weekend.’

She giggled. ‘Good for him. I shoot, you know, when I’m in Scotland. I thought I’d hate it, but I don’t. Only I kept bagging too many rabbits and, in the end, my aunt just refused to go on gutting them, so we started selling them to the local hotels.’

Her first glass of wine brought a flush to her cheeks. She seemed excited, even reckless, but then she’d been living with grief for a long time and that did strange things to you. He remembered the relief he’d felt at getting away from Elinor. Perhaps he should be ashamed to admit it, but relief was what he had felt.

‘Is your mother in London with you?’

‘No, I don’t think she’ll ever come back. It’s been … Well, you know. Quite hard.’

It must’ve been. Before the war, everybody had known Catherine was German, though she had no trace of an accent. Nobody had attached any importance to it, and yet there it had been, all those years, like an unexploded bomb waiting to blow up in her face. Exiled from her home in Lowestoft – enemy aliens were not allowed within five miles of the coast – shunned by previous acquaintances, even by some so-called friends, she must have been incredibly lonely.

‘Oh, by the way, it’s not “Stein” any more,’ she said. ‘It’s “Ashby”.’

Of course she’d have changed her name; it was the obvious thing to do. ‘Is that your mother’s maiden name?’

‘No, it’s a village in Suffolk.’

‘Well, you’re in good company. The King’s changed his name to “Windsor”. Another village. Bit less of a mouthful than “Saxe-Coburg-Gotha”.’

‘It’ll take more than that. I mean, to make people forget they’re German.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. We’ve been ruled by German grocers for centuries. Why make a fuss about it now.’

‘I feel sorry for Dachshunds,’ she said. ‘Apparently quite a few of them get killed.’

The bored-looking waiter arrived with two plates of game pie and they spent the next few minutes stoically picking shotgun pellets out of lumps of strong-tasting and unidentifiable meat. They smiled at each other’s efforts, but didn’t bother to comment.

‘Have you seen Elinor recently?’ she asked.

‘Yes, the weekend before last.’

‘How is she?’

‘Tired. Working too hard.’

‘Well, at least she can work. I couldn’t. I mean, after Father died. I couldn’t concentrate.’

‘She told me once if Toby was killed she’d go back home and paint, you know, paint the places they’d grown up in together. And that’s exactly what she’s done – only I think she’s worn herself out in the process. I’m actually quite worried about her. I wish she’d come to London.’

‘She’d be very welcome to stay with me, but I’ve told her that already.’

‘She’s obsessed with finding out how Toby died.’

Catherine went very still. ‘Yes, I know.’

‘She wrote to Kit Neville, twice in fact, and he didn’t reply. Did you know they were serving together?’

‘I believe Kit mentioned it once.’

‘So you do still hear from him?’

‘Well, yes, now and then.’

‘It seems so out of character … I mean, not replying.’

‘I don’t know. Kit can be very awkward.’

‘Oh, yes, but surely … I’ve been in this position and whatever you thought about the man you cobble something together for the sake of the relatives. It’s just not acceptable.’

She shrugged. ‘Kit was so kind to me when my father was interned, I find it very hard to think badly of him.’

He watched her add another pellet to the heap on the side of her plate, letting the silence pile up around them, forcing her to go on.

‘You know, we were walking down Oxford Street once and it was the night of that very big raid. Do you remember?’

‘I was in France.’

‘I don’t know how many people died in the raid – too many – and there was this Zeppelin just hanging there, and that awful throbbing sound they make … Oxford Street was crowded, people just looking up, open-mouthed, staring. And suddenly it caught fire, a great whoosh of flame all over it, and everybody cheered. All the people in shop doorways, cheering, cheering … And not just in Oxford Street either. There were people cheering all over London. And I just stood there and watched it burn, and I thought what a terrible death. It could’ve been my cousins in there, I haven’t heard from them since the war started, I don’t know if they’re still alive …’ She pushed her plate away. ‘That was the moment I stopped being British.’

‘What did Kit do?’

‘Put his arm round me, took me home.’ She laughed. ‘Asked me to marry him.’

Did he ask every girl he knew to marry him? This was the second proposal Paul had heard about in the last ten days. ‘What did you say?’

‘Ask me again when the war’s over. I mean, it was kind of him, but … Kindness isn’t enough, is it?’

Kind?
Well, yes, but there’d have been another force at work: Neville’s strange need to be an outsider. There he was: quite possibly the most famous artist of his generation – the toast of London, no less – only, being Neville, he’d have felt compelled to engineer his own rejection, and what better way of doing that than marriage to a German?

Paul realized the silence had gone on too long. ‘No, it’s not enough.’

They contemplated pudding, but decided not to risk it and ordered coffee instead. The owner didn’t mind how little they ate; he was resigned to the collapse of his business and far too drunk to care. The waiter went back to leaning against the wall and picking at his spots. Paul looked at him: too young for conscription. With any luck he might miss it altogether and spend the rest of his life wondering how he would have measured up.

‘Sixteen,’ she said.

He looked at her.

‘The waiter. Sixteen.’

‘Yes, about that.’

He felt very comfortable with her. Always before, there’d been a slight tension between them, the unspoken knowledge that in different circumstances they might have been lovers. Now the awkwardness was gone. She was leaning towards him over the table, her hand almost touching his. A faint, musky scent clung to her dress, not the usual roses or violets, something much darker, at odds with her delicate features and fair hair. He was intensely aware of her body under the plain dress, of the breasts he’d seen, and not seen.

She was restless under his scrutiny. ‘Perhaps we’d better be going,’ she said.

As he helped her on with her coat, his mouth was only inches away from the nape of her neck, that secret groove she never saw.
Careful
. They said goodnight to the owner, who managed to raise his drooping eyelids long enough to acknowledge their departure. Paul opened the door and the bell chimed as they stepped out into the night.

The cold air restored a certain formality, though after a few yards of walking along the uneven pavements in virtually total darkness Catherine’s hand came up and nestled in the crook of his arm. He liked that. It was a good feeling to be strolling along beside her, adjusting his stride to hers.

‘Do you mind if we walk for a bit?’ she asked.

‘No, I’d love to.’

It was getting late. The houses in the moonlight seemed
insubstantial. Only the moon was real, pouring white acid on to the streets, dissolving cabs, trams, motor cars, offices and shops in its cold stream. Its light seemed to form a brittle crust over the city, like the clear fluid that oozes from a wound. He suggested they should go for a walk on the Heath and she nodded without speaking. Once they’d left the shelter of the buildings behind, the moon emerged in its full murderous magnificence. They stood with their heads back and their mouths slightly open, drinking it in.

‘Makes you wonder about the blackout, doesn’t it?’ she said. ‘I mean, if you were up there now in a Zeppelin you’d be able to see absolutely everything.’

Something in her voice made him shiver. He wondered if her father’s death and the prolonged isolation of her life had made her change sides: she’d said she no longer felt British. So perhaps he was walking with the enemy? Oh, what nonsense. Catherine, whom he’d known since she was, what – seventeen, eighteen?
The enemy?

They stopped on top of the hill. He’d often visited this spot before the war, looking down on a city laid out before him in all its brilliance. He’d been so full of hope then, of vague, cloudy ambitions: the life he was going to lead, the pictures he was going to paint. He didn’t despise that boy. Of course, he should’ve been at the Slade, hard at work, exposing himself, day by day, to the brutal gap that opens up between aspiration and reality the moment you put brush on canvas; but the dreams are necessary too.

Catherine was silent. She’d taken her hand from his arm and left a small, lonely space there. Trying to pull her back, he said, ‘You know, I used to love coming here, before the war. You could see all the little villages lit up like fireflies.’

Somewhere in the distance whistles began to blow.

‘I hate that noise,’ she said.

‘Me too.’ In the trenches, whistles blowing signalled the start of an attack. ‘Do you remember when the raids first started, there used to be boy scouts with trumpets cycling round the streets?’