The photographs were mainly of cricket and rugby teams. Nothing more recent than Toby’s schooldays, not even a graduation photograph, though there was one on the piano downstairs. This was a room frozen in time, and not at the moment of Toby’s death. No, long before that, possibly when he left home to live in London. You got the impression that on subsequent visits he’d brought very little of himself back.
But then, that was true of Paul as well. On his rare visits to see his father and stepmother in Middlesbrough he always felt as if he were impersonating the boy he’d once been. It was impossible to feel comfortable; even in his old bed, his shoulder blades refused to fit the hollows in the mattress left by a shorter version of himself.
A row of books lined the shelf above the mantelpiece. He ran his fingers along the spines, selecting a volume here and there for a closer look. Shakespeare’s Sonnets, heavily underlined throughout, little self-conscious comments written in the margins. Obviously a school prize: the name and date written in a rounded, still unformed hand. Treasure Island. Another prize, but much earlier. On the flyleaf, Toby had written his name and address: ‘Tobias Antony Brooke, Leybourne Farm, Netherton, Sussex, England, Great Britain, Europe, Northern Hemisphere, Earth, Solar System, Milky Way, the Universe.’
Paul was smiling as he closed the book. That little boy was suddenly a powerful presence in the room. He picked up a photograph, the only one, as far as he could see, of Toby as an individual rather than a member of a team. The image was overexposed, so one side of his face had faded into white. Looking at it, Paul could almost believe he heard a faint echo of the explosion that had blown this laughing boy into unidentifiable gobs of flesh. The poignancy of a young life cut short. He hadn’t known Toby, but at this moment he could have cried for him: the small boy who’d located himself so precisely in the world, and now was nowhere.
Thoroughly unsettled, Paul got into bed and turned off the lamp. Lying on his back, listening to the night sounds that came through the open window, he closed his eyes and tried to sleep. The sheets smelled of Elinor’s hair and skin. He wondered whether they’d been changed since Toby’s last leave, but yes, surely they would’ve been: the shrine-keeping would have started with his death. The room was a shrine, but there was nothing unusual in that: thousands of women were tending shrines to dead young men. Many of them went to seances, and were battened on by people who claimed to be able to contact the dead. There were even some who produced photographs of the dead man’s spirit hovering behind his loved ones. Well, Elinor didn’t need that: she had her paintings. Was there even one in which Toby didn’t appear? Tomorrow, he’d ask Elinor if he could look at them again.
If tomorrow ever came. He was afraid of nightmares. He’d worked out little rituals to fend them off, routines he went through every night at bedtime, but nothing worked for long. And tonight, made restless by desire and with far too much alcohol coursing through his veins, he knew he was in for a bad time.
An owl hooted. And again. And again. Perhaps there were two, calling to each other? Some dispute over territory that would not be resolved in blood. He lay, listening. An owl’s cry is such a knowing sound. As he drifted off, he found himself wondering what it was that these owls knew. Their cries pursued him through the thickets of sleep. He was stumbling over tree roots in the depths of a winter forest, so still that a solitary leaf, falling, fractured the silence. But then, from somewhere up ahead, came the sound of a branch creaking. The noise fretted his sleep until, at last, he came awake with a cry, his heart thudding against his ribs. He’d heard something. Perhaps no more than a floorboard creaking, but somehow the sound had wound its way into his dream. Then he caught the soft slur of naked feet, and, clearly visible in the violent moonlight, the knob of the door began to turn.
Elinor slipped into the room, a slight figure in a white nightdress.
It was no dream: I lay broad waking.
‘Can’t you sleep?’ he asked.
‘It’s the owls, I’ve never heard them like this before.’
Still half drowned in sleep, he shifted towards the wall and patted the counterpane, inviting her to sit down.
Instead, she slipped her nightdress off her shoulders and let it fall around her feet. His throat was too swollen to let him speak. Silently, he held the covers open and welcomed her into his arms.
Twelve
Next morning, he woke to find her still sleeping, curled up against his side like a medieval carving of Eve, newly born of Adam — and how scathing Elinor would have been about that. Looking down at her, he noticed again the sharpness of her bones. He was tempted to wake her, but resisted and edged out of bed.
She woke as he reached the door.
‘It’s freezing,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you put that on?’
She was pointing to a dark grey coat that hung on the back of the door. As he put it on, the cloth released a masculine whiff of tobacco and hair oil. She lay looking up at him as he stood there, in Toby’s coat. He thought it must be painful for her to see him like that, but no, she was smiling, though her eyes were darkening as the engorged pupils swallowed the blue.
She pulled him down on to the bed and started kissing him, as hungrily as if they’d never made love. He struggled to free himself from the heavy coat, but as often as he tried to shrug it off, she pulled it on again, and, suddenly, he thought: No. He rolled off her, swept a kiss across her forehead to soften the rejection, and stood up.
‘Coffee?’
She pouted. ‘That’s not very flattering.’
‘Man cannot live on love alone.’
In a hurry to be gone, he went downstairs. The coat’s silk lining, warmed by his body, had produced an unpleasant clamminess, like the touch of skin on skin. He would have liked to take it off, but the kitchen was cold.
While waiting for the water to boil, he went across the yard to the barn. As he opened the door he caught ghost smells of hay and cattle, though this couldn’t have been a working farm for years. Before its conversion into a studio, the barn would have housed only gardening tools and a lawnmower, certainly not cattle. The lawnmower was still there, a heap of earth-smelling sacks piled up beside it. At the centre of the open space, a wood stove, crusted with rust, squatted in its own shadow.
He touched the cloth on the easel, but didn’t pull it off. He hated people looking at his own uncompleted work and he wouldn’t do it to her. Slowly, methodically, he worked through the finished paintings, admiring, doubting, more than once feeling a stab of envy at what she’d achieved. He was Toby-hunting. Only one landscape was genuinely empty: the fields behind the house in winter. Cropped hawthorn hedges ran across a vast expanse of snow, like lines of Hebrew script. Even here, though, a shadow between the trees revealed itself, on closer examination, to be the head and shoulders of a man. She hadn’t left him out of anything.
When, eventually, he carried two cups of coffee upstairs, he found her sleeping. It was almost a relief. Quickly, he scooped up his clothes and went along to the bathroom, where he washed and shaved, avoiding, as far as possible, his own gaze in the mirror. He didn’t want to think.
Downstairs again, he made a pot of tea, spread butter thinly over a crust of bread and forced it down. The house seemed to have turned against him. Even Hobbes, curled up in his basket by the dead fire, opened one bloodshot eye, only to close it again when he saw Paul. He no longer felt welcome. Images from last night clung like bats to the inside of his skull; he needed a blast of cold morning air to shake them off. He put on his coat, his own coat this time, thank God, and went out.