Free Toby's Room by Pat Barker Page A

puzzled. Obviously he’d no idea where he was, or why she was here, but he let her plump up his pillows and straighten the sheets.
    When she was sure he’d stopped struggling, she stepped away from the bed. Looking down at him, rubbing her arms, thinking:
That’ll bruise.
The fight seemed to have gone out of him. She didn’t know whether that was a good thing or a bad thing, and she was almost too tired to care. She sank back into the chair, pulled the coat over her again, and slept.
    She woke an hour later with dry lips and a dry tongue; she must have been sleeping with her mouth open. Toby was awake, watching her. She was so stiff it was a struggle to get out of the chair, but she managed to hobble the few steps to the bed and touch his hand. She was amazed to find it as cool as her own.
    ‘You look a lot better.’
    ‘Yes, I think I am.’
    ‘Do you think you could eat something?’
    He was staring up at her, dazed by his recovery, but then suddenly his expression darkened. ‘I must have talked an awful lot of rubbish last night.’
    She busied herself straightening the sheets. ‘No, you rambled on a bit, but I couldn’t make any of it out.’
    His gaze wandered round the room, no longer with the confusion of high fever, but with a baby’s indiscriminate curiosity.
    ‘Have you been here all night?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘I hope to God you don’t get it.’
    She shrugged. ‘Lap of the gods. Do you think you could manage a cup of tea?’
    As she searched for cups and saucers she felt his gaze heavybetween her shoulder blades, but he said nothing and before the kettle boiled he’d drifted off to sleep.
    She went to the window and looked out on to the garden far below. Snow, snow everywhere. Every roof, every gable, every branch of every tree had changed shape overnight. Big white birds circled over the gardens searching for scraps, finding none, until the back door of one of the houses opened and a woman carrying a blue-and-white serving dish came out. She threw a chicken carcass on to the lawn, and then stood scraping small bones and scraps of fat off the plate with the side of her hand. The minute she turned to go back in, the birds swooped down, fighting over the carcass in a great flurry of wings and snow.
    How close had Toby come to dying last night? Easy, sitting here in broad daylight, to think she must have exaggerated the danger. He was, after all, young and strong, and strong young men don’t die.
    What would her life have been like if he had? She couldn’t bear to think about it, not now, not while the fear was still present. But perhaps, after this illness, it would always be there? For a few hours last night, the unthinkable had become entirely possible, and from a realization like that there’s no going back.
    She turned and looked at him. His mouth had slackened in sleep; each breath puckered the upper lip. But his colour was so much better; he would get over this. And the separation, the distance, that had grown up between them in the last few months, that had to end.
Now
. Toby had been right all along. Somehow or other they had to get back to the way things were. What had happened was not something that could be talked about, or explained, or analysed, or in any other way resolved. It could only be forgotten.
    She stood at the window, timing her breaths to match the rise and fall of his. After a while, out of a white sky, more snow began to fall, tentatively, at first, then thick and fast, covering up the signs of battle on the lawn.

Eight
     
    A few days later Elinor was sitting under the tall window outside Tonks’s room. There was a row of five chairs, but she was the only person waiting. She was nervous, as she always was before meeting Tonks, and the bright light from the window hurt her eyes. She hadn’t had much sleep the last few days. Toby had now gone home to recuperate, but worrying about him still kept her awake. Silly, really, because he was getting better.
    She was here to tell