Read Toby's Room for Free Online

watched him walk off down the street, unloading guilt behind him, step by step.
    With his departure, her anger returned. All that stuff about bringing his anatomy textbooks … He’d come to say one word, no, not even that, the stupid, amputated stump of a word:
sis
. That was his pledge that what had happened between them would never happen again, that it would, in time, be forgotten.
    And it was all lies. At one point, back there in the bedroom, they’d been on the verge of starting all over again. She’d felt it; she didn’t believe he hadn’t felt it too. How could he come as close as that, and then tell her to forget?
    She mustn’t let herself slide into hating him. He was doing his clumsy best to repair the damage. And he did love her, she was sure of that. But in declaring that the events of that night must be forgotten, he’d left her, in effect, to face the memory alone. And that just wasn’t fair.
    She watched him turn the corner into Bedford Square, but for many minutes, after he disappeared, she remained standing in the doorway, staring at the space where he’d been, feeling the empty air close around his absence.

Four
     
     
Elinor Brooke’s Diary
     
7 October 1912
     
The Indian summer’s well and truly gone. Today was cold and windy with bursts of torrential rain. I was almost blown into the hospital, dripping wet, and late, of course. I got up early, but then wasted time trying to decide what to wear. Don’t know why I bothered. I arrived looking like a drowned rat anyway.
The other girls were all waiting outside the lecture theatre. I must say my heart sank when I saw them – scrubbed faces, scraped-back hair, sensible shoes and suits. The jackets were cut exactly like men’s and the skirts swept the floor – so you got the worst of both worlds. Hats, of course. One or two of them were actually wearing ties. I’ve never seen that on a young woman before. Everybody had a good look at my hair. I stared back at them. At least my hair’s clean. I never noticed till the last few days how dirty most women’s hair smells. No wonder, when you think of the palaver of washing it – it used to take me an entire evening. I look back on that and I just think: what a complete waste of time.
The lecturer, Dr Angus Brodie, positively bounced on to the platform – short, red-haired, bristling with authority, skin speckled like a thrush’s egg. He took one look at me – I was sitting by myself right at the end of the third row – and said, ‘Miss Brooke, I presume?’ Then he made a concertina movement with his very small, neat hands. I shuffled along to join the others – blushing like mad and cursing myself for it – and he beamed. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Art and medicine reunited.’
Crime and medicine more like. Really, I had no idea. Leonardowas fascinating, of course, but there was a lot of boring stuff after that. Until he got on to Burke and Hare, that awful killing spree they went on, supplying cadavers to the Edinburgh medical schools, especially to Dr Robert Knox, who used to give public demonstrations of dissection. The last – second to last? Can’t remember – victim was a retarded boy known as Daft Jamie. He was a well-known figure on the streets, so when he turned up on Knox’s slab several of the students recognized him. He was known to be missing, his mother was doing the rounds asking if anybody had seen him. Knox must have heard the whispers because he changed his usual routine and started by dissecting the face.
Within minutes, Daft Jamie’s mother wouldn’t have known him. It horrified me, that. The cold-bloodedness of it. I seemed to hear Toby’s voice saying, ‘He’s a scientist, for God’s sake.’
Burke and Hare were caught not long after that. Knox got off scot-free, at least as far as the law was concerned, though the Edinburgh mob attacked his house. Hare turned King’s evidence; Burke was hanged. His death mask’s in the medical museum, in Edinburgh.
I lost