At last, Neville’s stream of reminiscences seemed to be trickling to an end. Paul sat gazing into the fire, waiting for the right moment. He was tired; he hadn’t slept very well last night. Once or twice he caught Neville looking sideways at him; he was expecting the question. All right …
‘Is there anything else to say about Brooke?’
‘Nothing it would do her the slightest good to know.’
‘You could tell me.’
‘No, I couldn’t, you’ll tell her. Oh, I know you’ll say you won’t, but you would, you couldn’t help yourself. She’d have it out of you in no time.’
‘So there is something?’
‘You know the rules as well as I do. What happens out there stays out there.’ He stood up. ‘Along with my fucking nose.’
Clearly, the conversation was over. Paul had no choice but to get to his feet and accompany Neville to the door.
With his hand on the knob, Neville turned. ‘Will you come again?’
‘If you want me to.’
‘It’s up to you. No, I’d like to see you.’
He actually managed to make the admission sound hostile. The old Neville was still there, very much intact behind the shattered face, biting every hand that presumed to feed him.
‘I’ll come next week,’ Paul said. ‘Meanwhile, if there’s anything you want, just let me know.’
Neville nodded, tapped him briskly on the shoulder, and was gone.
Fifteen
When the door clicked shut behind Elinor, she stood for a moment listening, but no sound reached her from the room beyond. The door was solid oak. This house had belonged — perhaps still belonged — to a wealthy man. It would have been commandeered ‘for the duration’ — or perhaps he’d volunteered to move out. Either way, he was going to get it back in very poor condition. Scratch marks, made by hundreds of heavy boots, had ruined the parquet floors.
Elinor’s thoughts were skittering about like bugs on the surface of a pond while her real feelings lurked in the depths somewhere, out of reach. She looked around: she’d lost all sense of where the main entrance was.
A man with one eye came up to her. ‘Can I help you?’
The other eye was a moist slit with a few sparse eyelashes clinging feebly to the lid.
‘No, thanks, I’m fine.’
She pretended she had somewhere to get to and walked off, head down, away from him. She could feel him watching her with his one eye, and started to walk faster. A turning led into a dark passage; she was afraid she might have blundered into the kitchen area, but no, the passage opened out again on to a wider corridor. She knew she had to give Paul plenty of time to make Kit talk, so she would just go wherever this corridor took her. God, she’d have liked to shake the truth out of Kit, but it wouldn’t have worked. If she’d tried to put pressure on him he’d only have clammed up more. He wasn’t going to tell her anything.
She was walking head down when a near-collision with somebody in a blue uniform forced her to look up. The corridor, almost empty when she set off, had become crowded with people all moving in the same direction: some nurses, but mainly patients. Faces loomed up in front of her, all kinds of faces; the bodies in their garish uniforms hardly registered. Men with no eyes were being led along by men with no mouths; there was even one man with no jaw, his whole face shelving steeply away into his neck. Men, like Kit, with no noses and horribly twisted faces. And others — the ones she couldn’t understand at all — with pink tubes sprouting out of their wounds and terrible cringing eyes looking out over the top of it all. Brueghel; and worse than Brueghel, because they were real.
She had to get away. She scaled along the wall, quickening her pace as the crowd began to thin. By the time the last of them had gone by she was almost running, and not looking where she was going until her nose came into violent contact with a man’s chest. Slowly, she raised her eyes, braced for God knows what horrors, and found herself looking at Henry Tonks.
‘Miss Brooke. Good heavens.’
Her mouth opened but no sound came out.
‘You don’t look at all well. Come along, let’s see if we can find you a cup of tea.’
Still unable to speak, she fell into step beside him.
‘You must be visiting Mr Neville,’ Tonks said, pleasantly, as he unlocked a door.
‘Yes, that’s right. Paul Tarrant’s still with him. I fancied a breath of fresh air.’
Even that little lie made her feel uncomfortable. This was a place for truth.
Tonks ushered her into a large room that contained a desk, two chairs and a filing cabinet. There was a screened-off recess to her right. The part of the room she could see resembled a doctor’s surgery, except that at the far end, underneath the tall windows, there was an easel and a table covered with drawing pads, pens and ink and pastels. Directly underneath the window was a stool, presumably for the patient since it had been placed where the full, shadowless glare of northern light would fall directly on the face.
‘I’ll see about the tea. Have a seat.’
He went out; she could hear his voice in the room across the corridor requesting a pot of tea and two slices of that rather nice fruit cake, do you think we could manage that? A woman’s voice replied; and then a man’s voice — not Tonks — and, finally, a rumble of conversation. Clearly, Tonks had got embroiled in hospital business.
Elinor went across to the table and looked at a pen-and-ink drawing of a patient with a gaping hole in his cheek. Presumably, Tonks’s medical drawings would be done in pen and ink — ironic, really, since he’d never made any secret of how much he hated that medium. In fact, he’d described it to her once as the least forgiving medium an artist could work in, calculated to expose every flaw in draughtsmanship. Yet she’d have recognized this as Tonks’s work from the purity of the line alone.
She wondered what lay behind the screen; probably a washbasin, something like that. But when she looked behind it she saw, instead, a whole wall full of portraits of men with hideously disfigured faces. One of them, the man with no jaw, she recognized from the corridor. Individually, each portrait would have been remarkable; displayed together like this, row upon row, they were overwhelming. She took her time, pausing in front of first one portrait, then another. Were they portraits, or were they medical illustrations? Portraits celebrate the identity of the sitter. Everything — the clothes they’ve chosen to wear, the background, the objects on a table by the chair — leads the eye back to the face. And the face is the person. Here, in these portraits, the wound was central. She found her gaze shifting continuously between torn flesh and splintered bone and the eyes of the man who had to suffer it. There was no point of rest; no pleasure in the exploration of a unique individual. Instead you were left with a question: How can any human being endure this?
Tonks came back into the room. ‘Ah, I see you’ve found my Rogues’ Gallery.’
She thought she detected reserve, even disapproval, in his voice. ‘I’m sorry, I–I realize they’re not on display.’
‘No, don’t worry, you’d be amazed how many people see them. Though I like to think they’re mainly surgeons.’ A pause. ‘I’d be quite interested to hear what you think.’