Toby's Room by Pat Barker Read Free Book Online Page B

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’dmeet 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,