Regeneration

14

‘Hymn No. 373.’

With a rustling of paper the maroon-backed hymn books blossomed into white. The congregation struggled to its feet. Children at the front under the watchful eye of Sunday-school teachers, the rest, middle-aged or elderly men, and women. A preliminary wheeze from the organ, then:

God moves in a mysterious way

His wonders to perform…

Since the Somme, this seemed to have become the nation’s most popular hymn. Rivers had lost count of the number of times he’d heard it sung. He lifted his eyes to the flag-draped altar, and then to the east window. A crucifixion. The Virgin and St John on either side, the Holy Ghost descending, God the Father beaming benignly down. Beneath it, and much smaller, Abraham’s sacrifice of his son. Behind Abraham was the ram caught in a thicket by his horns and struggling to escape, by far the best thing in the window. You could see the fear. Whereas Abraham, if he regretted having to sacrifice his son at all, was certainly hiding it well and Isaac, bound on a makeshift altar, positively smirked.

Obvious choices for the east window: the two bloody bargains on which a civilization claims to be based. The bargain, Rivers thought, looking at Abraham and Isaac. The one on which all patriarchal societies are founded. If you, who are young and strong, will obey me, who am old and weak, even to the extent of being prepared to sacrifice your life, then in the course of time you will peacefully inherit, and be able to exact the same obedience from your sons. Only we’re breaking the bargain, Rivers thought. All over northern France, at this very moment, in trenches and dugouts and flooded shell-holes, the inheritors were dying, not one by one, while old men, and women of all ages, gathered together and sang hymns.

Blind unbelief is sure to err,

And scan His works in vain;

He is His own interpreter

And He will make it plain. Amen.

The congregation, having renounced reason, looked rather the happier for it, and sat down to await the sermon. Charles leant towards Rivers and whispered, ‘He doesn’t usually go on very long.’

That whisper brought back the Sunday mornings of their childhood when they’d drive to church in a pony and trap, and spent the sermon looking up the naughty bits in the Old Testament, a task made easier by the grubby fingerprints of those who had gone before. He remembered Michal’s bride-price: an hundred foreskins of the Philistines. As an anthropologist, he still found that fascinating. He remembered the smell of hassocks, and fastened his eyes on the flag-draped altar. They would never come back, those times.

The vicar had reached the top of the pulpit steps. A faint light flashed on his glasses as he made the sign of the cross. ‘In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost…’

Charles was busy with a great rehousing of the hens. They were to be transferred from deep litter in the barn to the new coops in Two-acre Field. This was best done after dusk when the hens were drowsy and less likely to rebel. The brothers lingered over tea in the living room, and then went out across the black, sodden, dismal mud of the yard towards the large, low barn. Rivers was wearing a pair of old cord breeches kept up with one of his brother’s belts, visible proof that Bertha’s strictures on his loss of weight were justified. ‘It isn’t as if,’ she said at every mealtime, piling his plate high, ‘you had it to lose.’ ‘He’s all right, Bertha, leave him alone,’ Charles always said, though it made no difference. Rivers still staggered away from the table feeling that he’d been force-fed.

Charles carried the hens easily, his arms binding the wings fast to his sides. Rivers, less expert, picked up two birds and set off after him. His fingers dug through the fluffiness into the surprisingly hard quills, and touched clammy flesh. The blood-red combs jiggled as he walked, amber eyes looked up with a kind of bright vacuity. As he tried to nudge the farmyard gate open with his elbow, one of them got its wings free and flapped frantically until he managed to subdue it again. God, I hate hens, he thought.

The chicken farm had been his idea, after Charles came back from the East with malaria. Work in the open air, Rivers had advised. He was paying for it now. As he left the shelter of the hedge and set off across Two-acre Field, a great gust of ‘open air’ almost lifted him off his feet. He felt responsible for the farm idea, and it wasn’t paying. At the moment they were only just breaking even. Mainly it was the effect of the war. Feed was scarce and expensive, male help impossible to get. The last land girl had stayed only long enough to work out the distance to the nearest town, before discovering that some domestic crisis required her immediate return home. But even without the war it might not have been easy. Hens had a curious way of not thriving. They seemed to be subject to a truly phenomenal range of diseases and to take a perverse pleasure in working their way down the list.

It was almost completely dark now, a few faint stars pricking through the clear sky. One hen, weaker than the rest, was being picked on by the others. Its chest was bare of feathers and raw where they’d pecked at it.

‘I’ll have to get that one out and wring its neck,’ Charles said.

‘Can’t you just isolate her and then put her back in?’

‘No. Once they start they never stop.’

They turned and walked back. McTavish, the farm cat, a black, battered tom, met them at the corner of the yard and preceded them across it. A notably morose cat, McTavish, a defect of temperament Rivers attributed to his being perpetually surrounded by forbidden flesh. He was fond of McTavish and slipped him titbits from his plate whenever he thought Bertha wasn’t looking.

They moved hens for an hour; slow, tedious work and then, as real darkness set in, went back to the house. Bertha had been baking. An earthenware pot full of bread dough stood by the kitchen range, and the whole firelit room was full of the smell of warm yeast. ‘You’ll be all right, won’t you?’ Bertha said, driving a hat pin neatly into her hat, and craning towards the mirror to make sure it was on straight. She and Charles were using Rivers as a chicken-sitter while they enjoyed a rare night out.

‘Don’t fuss, Bertha,’ Charles said.

‘There’s two loaves in the oven. They’ll be done at ten past eight. Turn them out, tap the base. If it sounds hollow, they’re done. Do you think you can manage that?’

‘He’s not a complete idiot, Bertha,’ Charles called in from the hall.

Bertha looked doubtful. ‘All right, then. Are we off?’

Charles came in wearing his hat and coat.

Rivers said, ‘I’ll see if I can get those accounts finished, Charles.’

‘I wish you would,’ Bertha murmured as she went past.

Once they’d gone, Rivers sat in the rocking chair by the fire, and concentrated on not dozing off. He hadn’t dared not eat at dinner, and the unaccustomed heavy meal and the firelight were making his eyelids droop. Last spring when he’d been here, boxes of chicks had been put to warm before the fire, and then the room had been full of the pecking and scratching of tiny beaks and feet. He remembered them struggling out of the eggs, how exhausted, wet and miserable they looked, and yet curiously powerful, little Atlases struggling to hold up the world. Now the same chicks were scruffy, bedraggled things running in the coops, and the only sound in the room was the roar of flame.

He stretched out his legs and looked at the account book on the edge of the kitchen table. He had letters he ought to write, the most urgent being one to David Burns, who’d invited him to spend the last few days of his leave at the family’s holiday cottage on the Suffolk coast. As far as Rivers could make out, Burns’s parents wanted to talk about his future, and although Rivers was not particularly anxious to do this — he found it difficult to envisage any future for Burns — he thought it his duty to accept. And then there was a half-completed letter to Sassoon, but the accounts would have to come first. Ten past eight. He got the loaves from the oven, tipped them out, and tapped the bases. Since he’d never done this before, he had no way of knowing whether this particular sound was ‘hollow’ or not. He decided they looked done, and set them to cool on the tray. Then he fetched the shoe box in which Charles stored his receipts and set to work on finishing the accounts. At intervals as he worked he looked up. The wind which had been blowing a gale all day was beginning to die down. Once he heard an owl hoot from the copse at the other side of Two-acre Field, a cold, shivery sound that made him glad of the fire and the smell of warm bread.

When he’d finished, he took the oil lamp and went along to the front room, intending to have another go at finishing his letter to Siegfried. He put the lamp down on the desk. Ranged at intervals around the walls, big heavy pieces of furniture squatted on their own shadows. Most of them he remembered from his childhood home: Knowles Bank. They were too big to fit into his sisters’ cottage, he had no need of them, and so Charles and Bertha had inherited them all. Their presence here in different places, at different angles to the walls and to each other, gave him an odd feeling of slipping back into an out-of-focus version of his childhood.

A cold, unused room. All the farm paperwork was done in the kitchen. He decided to take his letter along and finish it there, but then lingered, fingering the leather of the desk top and looking at the picture that hung above the empty grate. At Knowles Bank it had hung in the same position, above the fireplace, in his father’s study. As a picture it could hardly have been more appropriate to his father’s dual role as priest and speech therapist, since it showed the Apostles at Pentecost immediately after they had received the gift of tongues. There they sat, each under his own personal flame, rendered in an instant fluent, persuasive and articulate, not merely in their own language but in all known tongues. Rivers remembered the bishop’s sermon one Pentecost when he’d explained that the gift of tongues as bestowed upon the Apostles had absolutely nothing to do with ‘the gift of tongues’ as bestowed regularly every Sunday on uneducated riff-raff in various tin-roofed chapels about the diocese. The gift of Pentecost had made the Apostles comprehensible in all known languages. And there they sat still, looking, Rivers couldn’t help thinking, most unchristianly smug about it all.

He’d sat with other boys — his father’s pupils — underneath that picture for many a long hour, stumbling over the consonants of his own language, remembering to hold down the back of his tongue, project his breath in an even flow, etc., etc. Sometimes his father would walk with him up and down the room, since he believed the measured pace helped to regulate the flow of breath. Rivers hadn’t been the star pupil in those classes, not by any means. If anything he’d made rather less progress than the rest, in spite of — or because of? — having his teacher with him all the time. The house was full of stammering boys, any age from ten to nineteen, and at least it meant he was not the only one. It had had another advantage too, he remembered. While the boys were there, the Reverend Charles Dodgson stayed away. Mr Dodgson didn’t like boys. As soon as they left at Christmas or in the summer holidays, he arrived, taking lessons every evening after dinner. Rivers, from long exposure to other people’s speech impediments, could sum up the main features of a stammer almost as quickly as his father. Dodgson found m difficult, and p in consonant combinations, particularly in the middle of words, but his arch enemy was hard c.

During the day there were boating trips on the river. Dodgson and the four Rivers children, himself, Charles, Ethel and — Dodgson’s favourite — Katharine. He’d never enjoyed those trips much, and neither, he thought, had Charles, though probably that was no more than the slight pique of two Victorian schoolboys, finding themselves, for the first time in their lives, not of the preferred sex. Afterwards, during those apparently endless summer evenings, there would be croquet on the lawn, Rivers’s father and Dodgson playing, the children watching. There was a photograph of them on the desk, doing just that, he and Charles leaning back against the garden roller, no doubt getting grass stains on their white shirts, the two little girls, his sisters, under the shade of the beech tree. If he tried hard, he could recall the feel of the roller against his shoulder blades, the heat of the sun on the back of his neck.

He had one other memory of Dodgson. One evening he’d crept close to the open window of his father’s study, sat down with his back to the wall and listened to the lesson in progress. Why he’d done this he couldn’t now remember, except that it hadn’t felt like eavesdropping, since he knew nothing private was likely to be said. Perhaps he’d just wanted to hear Dodgson put through the same routine he and the other boys were put through. Perhaps he’d wanted to see him cut down to size. Dodgson had just embarked on the sentence about the careful cat catching the mouse — a simple enough tale, but already, in Dodgson’s mouth, threatening to become an epic. Rivers listened to his father’s advice, the same advice, basically, that he got, though conveyed without that peculiar note of fraught patience. He thought suddenly, this is nonsense. It doesn’t help to remember to keep your tongue down, it doesn’t help to think about the flow of breath. So he’d thought, sweeping away his father’s life work in a single minute as twelve-year-old boys are apt to do. He’d raised his head very cautiously above the window sill, and seen his father sitting behind the desk — this desk — his back to the window, clean pink neck showing above clean white collar, broad shoulders straining the cloth of his jacket. He stared at the back of his neck, at the neck of the man whom he had, in a way, just killed, and he didn’t feel sad or guilty about it at all. He felt glad.

Later that summer he’d given a talk to the speech therapy group on monkeys. M was to him what c was to Dodgson, but he was interested in monkeys, and still more interested in Darwin’s theory of evolution, which by this time had achieved acceptance in some circles. Knowles Bank was not among them. His father had been furious, not because Rivers had stumbled over every single m without exception — though indeed he had — but because he’d dared suggest that Genesis was no more than the creation myth of a Bronze Age people. Dinner that night was a strained occasion. Father angry, mother upset, Charles covertly sympathetic, sisters goggle-eyed and making the most of it, Rivers himself outwardly subdued, inwardly triumphant. For the first time in his life, he’d forced his father to listen to what he had to say, and not merely to the way he’d said it.

And yet, Rivers thought, running his hands across the scarred leather of the desk top, the relationship between father and son is never simple, and never over. Death certainly doesn’t end it. In the past year he’d thought more about his father than he’d done since he was a child. Only recently it had occurred to him that if some twelve-year-old boy had crept up to his window at Craiglockhart, as he’d done to his father’s window at Knowles Bank, he’d have seen a man sitting at a desk with his back to the window, listening to some patient, with a stammer far worse than Dodgson’s, try and fail to reach the end of a sentence. Only that boy would not have been his son.

The unfinished letter to Siegfried lay on the desk. He’d got as far as a comment on the weather, and there the letter had ground to a halt. What he did so easily in conversation, always nudging Siegfried gently in the same direction, and yet always avoiding any suggestion of pressure, was a feat he apparently could not perform on paper. Perhaps he was just too tired. He told himself the letter could wait till morning.

He picked up the lamp, pushed aside the heavy dark red curtains and opened the window. A big dizzy moth flew in, with pale wings and a fat, furry body, and began bumping against the ceiling. He leant out of the window, smelling roses he couldn’t see. The wind had fallen completely now, giving way to a breathless hush. Faintly, over dark hedges and starlit fields, came the soft thud-thud of the guns. When he’d first arrived, suffering from the usual medley of physical and neurasthenic symptoms — headaches, dry mouth, pounding heart — he’d confused that sound with the throbbing of blood in his head. Then one night, lying sleepless, he’d heard the water jug vibrating in the bowl, and realized what it was that he kept hearing. Siegfried must have heard it in June when he was at home convalescing from his wound.

Perhaps he’d better write tonight after all. He closed the window, and sat down at the desk. The moth’s huge shadow, flickering over the walls and ceiling, darkened the page, as, drawing the pad towards him, he tore off the sheet and started again. My dear Siegfried…

‘What draft is this?’

‘Lost count,’ Owen said. ‘You did tell me to sweat my guts out.’

‘Did I really? What an inelegant expression. “What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?” I see we got to the slaughterhouse in the end.’ Sassoon read through the poem. When he’d finished, he didn’t immediately comment.

‘It’s better, isn’t it?’

‘Better? It’s transformed.’ He read it again. ‘Though when you look at the sense… You do realize you’ve completely contradicted yourself, don’t you? You start by saying there is no consolation, and then you say there is.’

‘Not consolation. Pride in the sacrifice.’

‘Isn’t that consolation?’

‘If it is, it’s justifiable. There’s a point beyond which —’

‘I don’t see that.’

‘There’s a point beyond which you can’t press the meaninglessness. Even if the courage is being abused, it’s still…’

Owen leapt up, went to the drawer of his washstand and produced the typescript Sassoon had lent him. He began leafing quickly but carefully through it. Sassoon, watching, thought, he’s getting better. No stammer. Quick, decisive movements. The self-confidence to contradict his hero. And the poem had been a revelation.

‘Look, you do exactly the same thing,’ Owen said, coming across with the sheet he wanted.

O my brave brown companions, when your souls

Flock silently away, and the eyeless dead

Shame the wild beast of battle on the ridge,

Death will stand grieving in that field of war

Since your unvanquished hardihood is spent.

And through some mooned Valhalla there will pass

Battalions and battalions, scarred from hell;

The unreturning army that was youth;

The legions who have suffered and are dust.

‘What’s that if not pride in the sacrifice?’

‘Grief? All right, point taken. I just don’t like the idea of… making it out to be less of a horror than it really is.’ He looked down at the page. ‘I think you should publish this.’

‘You mean in the Hydra?’

‘No, I mean in the Nation. Give me a fair copy and I’ll see what I can do. You’ll need a different title, though. “Anthem for…”’ He thought for a moment, crossed one word out, substituted another. ‘There you are,’ he said, handing the page back, smiling. ‘“Anthem for Doomed Youth.”’

The main corridor of the hospital stretched the whole length of the building, with wards opening off on either side. From one of these came an unpleasant smell which Madge said was gangrene, though Sarah didn’t believe she knew. Ward Fourteen was overcrowded, the beds packed close together, men sitting up and staring with interest at the two girls hesitating just inside the door. Most of them looked reasonably well and cheerful. The trouble was that with their cropped heads and hospital blue uniforms, they also looked exactly alike.

‘I won’t recognize him,’ Madge said in a frantic whisper.

‘Go on,’ Sarah said, giving her a shove.

They started to walk up the ward. Madge stared from bed to bed with a dazed look. She really mightn’t recognize him at this rate, Sarah thought, but then a voice cried, ‘Madge!’ A dark-haired man with a gingery moustache was sitting up, waving and looking delighted to see her. Madge walked forward cautiously, located the bandaged left arm, checked to see that the swelling beneath the counterpane was the right length and breadth to consist of two legs. He looked all right. He planted a smacking kiss on Madge’s lips, and Sarah looked away in embarrassment, only to realize she was herself the object of amused appreciation from all parts of the ward.

‘Eh, look, I’ve brought you these,’ Madge said. ‘How are you?’

‘I’m all right. Went right through,’ he said. ‘Just here.’ He pointed to his biceps. ‘No gangrene, no nothing.’

‘You were lucky.’

‘I’ll say. I’m gunna be in here two weeks they reckon, and then I’ll have a bit of leave before I go back.’

‘This is Sarah,’ Madge said.

‘Pleased to meet you.’

They shook hands. Madge was now sitting by the bed, beginning, cautiously, to bask in the admiration of her restored lover and to plan what they would do on his leave. After this had been going on for a while, Sarah began to feel distinctly green and hairy. ‘I’ll just have a walk round the grounds,’ she said. ‘It’s a bit hot in here.’

‘Yeh, all right,’ Madge said.

‘I’ll see you at the main entrance, then. Half an hour?’

They hardly noticed her go. None of these men was badly wounded, and several of them whistled and clicked their tongues as she walked past. The whole atmosphere of the ward was happy. The general air of relief at being out of it was what chiefly came across, though she supposed there must be other wards where the wounds were not so slight.

Outside, in the corridor, she looked up and down, realizing she didn’t know in which direction the exit lay. She was surrounded by notices directing people to the pharmacy, the path lab, the X-ray department, everywhere except the way out. She tried walking to her left, but her way was blocked by a large notice saying: THEATRES. NO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL BEYOND THIS POINT. She turned right, and shortly afterwards came to a corridor she thought she recognized, and began to walk along it, but the feeling of familiarity soon vanished. The building was enormous, and seemed to have no plan, no structure to it, at all. To add to the sense of unreality most of the notices referred to its civilian use before the war. Maternity, she read, and then the swing doors banged open to reveal beds full of people who were most unlikely ever to give birth.

Obviously she ought to stop and ask somebody, but then everybody seemed to be in such a hurry, and so grim-faced. At last she found a door that led out to the grounds at the back of the hospital, where the tall chimney of an incinerator dribbled brownish-yellow smoke. Here, a huge tent had been erected and this served as another ward. She glanced into the interior, which was golden in the sunlight filtered through the roof, but the atmosphere was close, stifling, a humming darkness in which the clumsiness of bandages and the itch of healing skin must be almost intolerable.

A constant traffic of nurses and orderlies passed between the tent and the main building, and, feeling herself to be in the way, Sarah looked around for somewhere she could find temporary refuge and not bother anybody. There was a conservatory along the side of the hospital, facing east so that at the moment it caught the full warmth of the sun. Shadowy figures sat inside, and the door was open so she thought she might perhaps sit there.

Once across the threshold she became aware of a silence, a silence caused, she suspected, by her entrance. She was still dazzled by the brightness of the light outside and the relative dimness of the interior, and so she had to blink several times before she saw them, a row of figures in wheelchairs, but figures that were no longer the size and shape of adult men. Trouser legs sewn short; empty sleeves pinned to jackets. One man had lost all his limbs, and his face was so drained, so pale, he seemed to have left his blood in France as well. The blue of the hospital uniform looked garish against his skin. They’d been pushed out here to get the sun, but not right outside, and not at the front of the hospital where their mutilations might have been seen by passers-by. They stared at her, but not as the men had stared on the other ward, smiling, trying to catch her eye. This was a totally blank stare. If it contained anything at all, it was fear. Fear of her looking at the empty trouser legs. Fear of her not looking at them. She stood there, unable to go forward, and unable, for a few crucial moments, to turn back, until a nurse bustled up to her and said, ‘Who is it you want to see?’

‘I’m just waiting for a friend. It’s all right, I’ll wait outside.’

She backed out, walking away in the sunlight, feeling their eyes on her, thinking that perhaps if she’d been prepared, if she’d managed to smile, to look normal, it might have been better. But no, she thought, there was nothing she could have done that would have made it better. Simply by being there, by being that inconsequential, infinitely powerful creature: a pretty girl, she had made everything worse. Her sense of her own helplessness, her being forced to play the role of Medusa when she meant no harm, merged with the anger she was beginning to feel at their being hidden away like that. If the country demanded that price, then it should bloody well be prepared to look at the result. She strode on through the heat, not caring where she was going, furious with herself, the war… Everything.

∗

Prior took off his clothes, put on the white hospital gown and sat on the bed to await the arrival of the doctor. This was his second visit. The first time he’d seen Eaglesham, the consultant, a big, kindly, grizzled bear of a man who’d said very little but whom he’d trusted at once. He’d raised his eyebrows when Prior blew into the Vitalograph or whatever the machine was called, but he hadn’t said what he thought, and Prior had not wanted to ask. It wasn’t going to be Eaglesham today, though. A much younger man with a sallow skin and slick dark hair was popping in and out of the other cubicles. Prior looked down at his thin white legs. He didn’t see why he had to take all his clothes off. Were they trying to cater for some unforeseen medical emergency in which his lungs had slipped into his pelvis? He didn’t like the way the gown fastened at the back. He didn’t mind displaying his wares, if he liked the other person and the time seemed right, but he did like the illusion at least that the act was voluntary. He could hear the doctor’s voice in the cubicle next door, talking to a man who couldn’t complete a sentence without coughing. At last the curtains were pushed aside and the doctor came in, followed by a nurse, clasping a beige file to her bosom. Prior slipped off the robe and stood up to be examined.

‘Second-Lieutenant Prior.’

‘Mister’ he wanted to say. He said, ‘Yes.’

‘I see there’s some question whether you’re fit to go back. I mean apart from the state of your nerves.’

Prior said nothing at all.

The doctor waited. ‘Well, let’s have a look at you.’

He moved the stethoscope all over Prior’s chest, pressing so hard that at times the stethoscope left overlapping rings on the skin that flushed and faded to white. He thinks I’m shirking, Prior thought, and the idea made him go cold.

‘How are your nerves?’ the doctor said.

‘Better.’

‘Shell explosion, was it?’

‘Not exactly.’

Not one word of what he’d told Rivers would he repeat to this man.

‘Do you think you’re fit?’

‘I’m not a doctor.’

The doctor smiled. Contemptuously, it seemed to Prior. ‘Keen to get back, are we?’

Prior closed his eyes. He had a picture of himself driving his knee into the man’s groin, and the picture was so vivid that for a moment he thought he might have done it, but then he opened his eyes and there was the sallow face, still smiling. He stared at him.

The doctor nodded, almost as if Prior had replied, and then slowly, to avoid any suggestion of backing off, turned and made a brief note on the file. It’s all bluff, Prior thought. It’s what Eaglesham says that matters.

He was in a torment as he got back into his uniform, reckoning his chances, despising himself for reckoning them. He didn’t thank Rivers for any of this. I haven’t lied to any of them, he thought. I haven’t made things out to be worse than they really are. He finished lacing his puttees and stood up. The nurse came back with a card. ‘If you tell them at the appointments desk, three weeks.’

‘Yes, all right. Thank you.’

He took the card, but walking down the long corridor afterwards he was tempted not to make the appointment. In the end he did, then put the card away and strode out into the hospital grounds as fast as he could. He thought he might buy himself something from the barrow at the entrance, fruit or sweets, any little treat that might make him feel better. Less contaminated.

He saw her before she saw him, and called out, ‘Sarah.’ She turned and smiled. He’d thought about her a lot while he’d been in the sick bay, remembering that time on the beach. Illness, once the worst was over, always made him randy. What he’d forgotten, he thought now, looking at the yellow face beneath the aureole of extraordinary hair, was how much he liked her.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked, obviously delighted.

‘Having my chest examined.’

‘Are you all right?’

‘Fine — thanks to you. What are you doing here?’

‘I’m with Madge. Her fiancé’s been wounded.’

‘Is he all right?’

‘Yes, I think so.’ Her face darkened. ‘I’ve just seen some that aren’t all right. There’s a sort of conservatory round the back. They’re all sat in there. Where the rest of us don’t have to see them.’

‘Bad?’

She nodded. ‘You know I used to wonder how I’d go on if Johnny came back like that. You always tell yourself it’d make no difference. Easy said, isn’t it?’

He sensed the anger and responded to it immediately. She might not know much about the war, but what she did know she faced honestly. He admired her for that. ‘Look, do you have to wait for Madge?’ he asked. ‘I mean, how long do you think she’ll be?’

‘Ages, I should think. She was virtually in bed with him when I left.’

‘Well, can’t you tell her you’re going? She can walk back by herself all right, can’t she? It’s broad daylight.’

She looked at him consideringly. ‘Yes, all right.’ She started to move away. ‘I won’t be a minute.’

Left alone, Prior bought two bunches of chrysanthemums, bronze and white, from the barrow near the entrance. They weren’t the flowers he would have chosen, but he wanted to give her something. He stood craning his head for the first sight of her. When she arrived, smiling and out of breath, he handed her the flowers, and then, on a sudden impulse, leant across and kissed her. The flowers, crushed between them, released their bitter, autumnal smell.

They were burning leaves on Hampstead Heath where Rivers walked with Ruth Head on the second day of his visit. Acrid smoke drifted across their path and below them London lay in a blue haze. They stopped by one of the ponds, and watched a coot cleave the smooth water. ‘You see over there behind those houses?’ Ruth said. ‘That’s the RFC hospital. And then over there — just in that dip there — that’s the Big Gun.’

‘I’m glad you and Henry don’t take refuge in the kitchen every night. Everybody else seems to.’

‘Can you imagine Henry cowering under the kitchen table?’

They smiled at each other and walked on.

‘Actually the air raids are my guilty secret,’ Ruth said.

‘You mean you’d rather be under the table?’

‘Oh no, quite the opposite. I enjoy them. It’s a terrible thing to say, isn’t it? All that damage. People killed. And yet every time the siren goes, I feel this immense sense of exhilaration. I’d really like to go out and run about in it.’ She laughed, self-deprecatingly. ‘I don’t of course. But I get this feeling that the… the crust of everything is starting to crack. Don’t you feel that?’

‘Yes. I’m just not sure we’re going to like what’s under the crust.’

They started to walk towards Spaniard’s Road. Rivers said, ‘You know last night I got the distinct impression that Henry was plotting something.’

‘About you? If he is, it’ll be something to your advantage.’

‘You mean you know and you’re not going to tell me?’

Ruth laughed. ‘That’s right.’

By Spaniard’s Road, men in blue hospital uniforms sat in wheelchairs, waiting for someone to come and push them away. Ruth was silent for a while after they’d walked past. ‘You know there was something I didn’t say last night.’ She looked up at him. ‘I think Sassoon’s absolutely right.’

‘Oh dear, I was hoping I might be able to introduce you. But if you’re going to be a bad moral influence —’

‘Seriously.’

‘All right, seriously. Suppose he is right? Does that mean it’s a good idea to let him go ahead and destroy himself?’

‘Surely it has to be his choice?’

‘It is his choice.’

Ruth smiled and shook her head.

‘Look,’ Rivers said, ‘I wear the uniform, I take the pay, I do the job. I’m not going to apologize for that.’

‘I’m not suggesting you should. All the same,’ she said, turning to look at him, ‘you’re tearing yourself in pieces as well as him.’

They walked in silence for a while. Rivers said, ‘Is that what Henry thinks?’

Ruth laughed. ‘Of course not. You want perception, you go to a novelist, not a psychiatrist.’

‘I’m sure you’re right.’

‘No, you’re not. You don’t believe a word of it.’

‘At any rate, I’m too cowed to disagree.’

That evening, left alone with Henry after dinner, Rivers watched him massage the triangle of skin between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. ‘Does that still bother you?’

‘A bit. Cold weather. Do you know, I don’t think I’d have the courage to do that now.’

‘No, I look back sometimes, and… I’m amazed. What are you doing these days?’

‘Gross injuries to the spinal cord. We’ve got a lot of interesting material.’ Head’s mouth twisted. ‘As we call the poor sods.’

Rivers shook his head. He’d seen Head too often on the wards to believe him capable of that particular kind of research-orientated callousness.

‘It’s an interesting atmosphere,’ Head said. ‘Dealing with physical trauma and war neurosis in the same hospital. You’d like it.’

‘I’m sure I would.’ A trace of bitterness. ‘I’d like London.’

‘There’s a job going if you want it.’

‘You mean there’s a vacancy?’

‘No, I mean there’s a job for you if you want it. I’ve been asked to sound you out. Psychologist with the Royal Flying Corps. At the Central Hospital, Hampstead.’

‘Ah. I wondered why Ruth was so keen on the Heath.’

‘I imagine you’d find it interesting? Apparently there are some quite striking differences between the rate of breakdown in pilots and in other branches of the service.’

‘It sounds marvellous.’ He raised his hands and let them drop. ‘I just don’t see how I can.’

‘Why not? You’d be closer to your family, your friends, your research contacts, you’d be able to get back to Cambridge at weekends. And… I don’t suppose it matters, but we’d be able to work together again.’

Rivers buried his face in his hands. ‘O-o-o-oh. “Get thee behind me, Satan.”’

‘I am behind you. I was thinking of giving you a shove.’

‘I couldn’t leave Bryce.’

Head looked incredulous. ‘You mean, your CO?’

‘He’s in a difficult situation. We’re in for a general inspection, and… it all goes back a long way. Bryce is determined this time he’s not going to play their game. He’s not going to parade the patients, or polish the bottoms of the frying-pans, or pretend to be anything other than just an extremely busy, overcrowded and I think bloody good hospital.’

‘What do they want?’

‘They want a barracks. It’s got all the makings of a really nasty confrontation. I think Bryce may have to go.’

‘Well, I hate to sound harsh, but wouldn’t that rather solve the problem? Your problem, I mean.’

‘If it happened. Meanwhile, I think I can be… of some use to him.’

‘When is this inspection?’

‘End of the month.’

‘We’d need to know about the job… Well. Three weeks?’

‘I’ll think about it.’

‘Good. And don’t be too altruistic, will you? You’re isolated up there, it’s not good for you.’

‘I don’t know about isolated. I never have a minute to myself.’

‘Precisely. Come on, let’s find Ruth.’

15

Aldeburgh was the end of the line, but the train, as if reluctant to accept this, produced, as Rivers stepped down on to the platform, an amazing burst of steam. He stood, looking up and down, as the train’s hissing subsided into grunts, and the steam cleared. Burns had promised to meet him, but his memory wasn’t good, and, faced with the empty platform, Rivers was glad he had the address. But then, just as Rivers was resigning himself to finding the house on his own, Burns appeared, a tall, emaciated figure wearing a coat of stiff herringbone tweed that reached almost to the ground. He’d obviously been running, and was out of breath. ‘Hello,’ he said. Rivers tried to judge whether Burns looked better or worse. It was hard to tell. His face in the light of the naphtha flares was as expressionless as beaten bronze.

‘How are you?’ they asked simultaneously, and then laughed.

Rivers decided he should be the one to answer. ‘A lot better, thanks.’

‘Good,’ Burns said. ‘It’s walking distance,’ he added across his shoulder, already striding off. ‘We don’t need a taxi.’

They came out of the station and began walking downhill, through the quiet cold fringes of the town, past the church, through streets of huddled houses, and out on to the front.

The sea was calm, almost inaudible, a toothless mouth mumbling pebbles in the darkness. Instead of walking along the path, Burns struck out across the shingle and Rivers followed, to where the tide had laid bare a thin strip of sand. The crunch and slither of shingle under their feet blotted out all other sounds. Rivers turned, and saw the bones of Burns’s face gleaming in the moonlight. He wondered what he made of the tangles of barbed wire that ran along the beach, with only two narrow channels left for fishing boats and for the lifeboat to come and go. But Burns seemed not to see the wire.

They stood together at the water’s edge, two black shadows on the pale shingle, and small waves creamed over at their feet. Then the moon came out from behind a bank of dark cloud, and the fishermen’s huts, the boats lined up in two short rows behind the wire, and the heaped nets, cast shadows behind them almost as sharply edged as day.

They returned to the path and began walking along the terrace of houses, which here and there had gaps. Many of the houses were shuttered and had sandbags piled against the front doors. ‘The sea’s been known to pay visits,’ Burns said, following the direction of Rivers’s gaze. ‘I was here once when it flooded.’ Evidently sandbags brought back no other memories.

‘This is it,’ he said a few minutes later, stopping in front of a tall but extremely narrow house. At this end of the foreshore the sea was much closer, turning and turning in the darkness. Rivers looked out and caught a glint of white. ‘What’s along there?’

‘The marshes. More shingle. I’ll show you tomorrow.’

They groped their way into the hall, closing the door carefully behind them before Burns switched on the light. His face, deeply shadowed from the unshaded bulb, peered anxiously at Rivers. ‘I expect you’d like to go upstairs,’ he said. ‘I think I’ve given you a towel…’ He looked like a child trying to remember what it was that grown-ups said to newly arrived guests. He also looked, for the first time, deranged.

Rivers followed him up the narrow stairs and into a small bedroom. Burns pointed out the bathroom and then went downstairs. Rivers put his bag down, bounced on the bed to test the mattress, and looked round. The walls were covered with paper of an indeterminate and confusing pattern, the background colour faded to the yellow of an old bruise. Everything smelled of the sea, as if the furniture had soaked it in. It reminded him of childhood holidays in Brighton. He splashed his face in the bowl, then, turning off the light, opened the shutters. His room overlooked the sea. The wind was rising, and with each gust the coils of wire twitched as if they were alive.

No sign of Burns’s parents. Rivers had mistakenly assumed he was being invited to meet them, since a large part of Burns’s letter had dealt with their anxieties about his future. But apparently not. This was probably their room. The house was so narrow there couldn’t be more than one, or at the most, two small rooms on each floor.

The evening passed pleasantly enough. No mention of Burns’s illness, no mention of the war. These were evidently taboo topics, but they talked about a great range of other things. Whatever else the war had done to Burns, it had certainly deepened his love for his native county. Suffolk flowers, birds, churches, he was knowledgeable about them all. More recently, he’d become interested in the preservation of country crafts. ‘Old Clegg’, who was apparently something of a local character, had promised to teach him flint-knapping, and he seemed to be looking forward to that. Even before the war he’d been very much a countryman in his interests, rather like Siegfried in a way, though without Siegfried’s passion for hunting.

When the conversation turned to other matters, Burns was very much the bright sixth former, idealistic, intolerant, naïve, inclined to offer sweeping generalizations as fact, attractive in the freshness of his vision as such boys often are. Rivers thought how misleading it was to say that the war had ‘matured’ these young men. It wasn’t true of his patients, and it certainly wasn’t true of Burns, in whom a prematurely aged man and a fossilized schoolboy seemed to exist side by side. It did give him a curiously ageless quality, but ‘maturity’ was hardly the word. Still, he was better than he’d been at Craiglockhart, so perhaps his conviction that if he could only get back to Suffolk and forget the war he would be all right had been proved correct. But then why am I here? Rivers thought. Despite Burns’s reluctance to mention his illness, Rivers didn’t believe he’d been invited to Suffolk to talk about church architecture. But it would be quite wrong to force the pace. Whatever was bothering him, he would raise the matter in his own time.

Rivers woke the following morning to find the beach shrouded in mist. He leant on the window sill, and watched the fishing boats return. The pebbles on the beach were wet, though not from rain or tide. The mist clung to them like sweat, and the air tasted of iron. Everything was so quiet. When a gull flew in from the sea and passed immediately overhead, he heard the creak of its wings.

Burns was already up, in the kitchen by the sound of things, but not, Rivers thought, preparing breakfast. Nothing in the way of dinner or supper had appeared the night before, and Rivers had hesitated, on his first evening, to go into the kitchen and forage for food, though he suspected that might be the only way of getting any.

He washed, dressed, shaved, and went downstairs. By this time the mist on the beach had begun to thin, but it was cold for the time of year, and the sight of a fire in the first floor living room was welcome. He went down a further flight of stairs into the kitchen and found Burns at the kitchen table with a pot of tea.

‘There’s some cereal,’ he said, pointing.

He sounded shy again, though last night he’d begun to talk quite freely by the end of the evening, just as Rivers, caught between the roar of the fire and the roar of the sea, had started nodding off to sleep. ‘I’m sorry I had to go to bed so early,’ Rivers said, reaching for the cereal packet.

‘’S all right.’ Visibly, he remembered what it was he was supposed to ask next. ‘Did you have a good night?’

‘Fine.’ Rivers bit the reciprocal question back. He’d heard part of Burns’s night. Obviously, however hard Burns tried to thrust memories of the war behind him, the nightmare followed.

The doorbell rang, and Burns got up to answer it. ‘This is Mrs Burril’s day for sorting me out,’ he said.

Mrs Burril was a remarkably silent person, but she managed, without words, to make it clear their presence was superfluous.

Burns said, ‘I thought we might go for a walk.’

The mist had thinned but not cleared. It moved in slow, cold currents over the marshes, where drainage ditches and sump holes reflected a steely light at the sky. Reeds whispered, with a noise like the palms of hands being rubbed together. It was difficult to breathe, difficult even to move, and they spoke in low voices when they spoke at all.

They walked along a narrow raised path that divided the marshes from the river. Small yachts rode at anchor, the breeze just strong enough to make their rigging rattle, not a loud sound, but persistent and rather disturbing, like an irregular heart beat. Nothing else here could disturb. The estuary lay flat and peaceful under a shrunken, silver sun, and nothing moved, except the reeds, until a flight of ducks whistled past.

Rivers had begun to realize how remarkable the area was. A strip of land, at times no more than a hundred yards wide, divided the estuary from the North Sea. Walking out along this strip, away from the town, into the bleached shingle distances, you became aware of two separate sounds: the roar and suck of waves on shingle, and the lulling sound of the river among its reeds. If you moved to the left, the crunch and chop of boots on shingle cut out the gentler river sounds. If to the right, the tapping of rigging and the lapping of water dominated, though you could still hear that the sea was there.

They turned and looked back at the huddled town. ‘You know, I love this place,’ Burns said. ‘I wouldn’t like you to think I’d left London just because of the raids. Actually it wasn’t the raids, it was the regular meal-times. You know, everybody sitting down to eat. Waiting for food to be put in front of them. And father going on about the war. He’s a great believer in the war, my father.’

‘Will they be coming to Suffolk at all?’

‘No, I shouldn’t think so. They’re both very busy in London.’ They turned and walked on. ‘It’s best we don’t see too much of each other at the moment. I am not a sight for sore eyes.’

A squat, circular building had begun to loom up out of the mist. It looked rather like a Martello tower, Rivers thought, but he hadn’t known they’d been built as far north as this.

‘This is the most northerly,’ Burns said, slithering down the slope on to the beach. Rivers followed him across the shingle and down into the dank high moat that surrounded the tower. In its shadow, all water sounds, whether hissing waves or lapping water, abruptly ceased. Ferns grew from the high walls of the moat; and the tower, where the look-out turret had crumbled away, was thronged with bindweed, but the overall impression was of a dead place.

The sea must flood the moat at high tide, for all kinds of debris had been washed up and left. Driftwood, the torn-off wing of a gull, bits of blue and green glass. A child would have loved it, picking over these pieces.

‘We used to play here,’ Burns said. ‘Daring each other, you know. Who could go all the way up?’

There was a door, but it had planks nailed across it. Rivers peered through a crack and saw stone steps going down.

‘Strictly forbidden. They were always afraid we’d get trapped in the cellars.’

‘I suppose they flood, don’t they? At high tide?’

‘Yes. There’s all kinds of stories told about it. People chained up and left to drown. I think we rather liked that. We used to sit down there and pretend we could see ghosts.’

‘It feels like a place where people have died. I mean, violent deaths.’

‘You feel that, do you? Yes. I expect that’s why we liked it. Bloodthirsty little horrors, boys.’

Rivers wasn’t sorry when they climbed the bank of shingle and stood on the beach in the strengthening sunlight again.

‘Do you feel up to a longish walk?’ Burns asked.

‘Yes.’

‘All right. We can follow that path.’

They walked four or five miles inland, and came out into a wood where great golden tongues of fungus lapped the trees, and a mulch of dead leaves squelched underfoot. Rather to Rivers’s surprise they stopped at a pub on the way back, though no food was available. Burns could drink apparently, and did, becoming in the process quite flushed and talkative, though nothing was said about his illness.

They arrived back in the late afternoon with every bone and muscle aching. Mrs Burril had obviously built up the fire before she left, and it was rescuable, just about. Rivers knelt in front of it, sticking strips of cereal packet through the bars, and blowing when he got a flame. ‘Have you any newspapers?’

‘No,’ Burns said.

No, Rivers thought, silly question. Once the fire was burning well, Rivers went out and bought cakes and biscuits for tea, which he served in front of the fire, tucking in himself and not looking to see whether Burns ate or not. He ate, sitting on the hearth rug, his wind-reddened arms clasped about his knees, and the firelight playing on his face.

After the plates were cleared away, Rivers asked if he might work for a couple of hours. He was writing a paper on the Repression of War Experience which he was due to give to the British Medical Association in December, and he knew, once he got back to Craiglockhart, there would be very little time. He worked at the table in the window, with his back to the room. He began by reading through what he’d written so far on the evil effects that followed from patients trying to suppress their memories of war experience, and was about to start writing when it occurred to him he was in the same room as a man who was doing just that.

Why do I go along with it? he thought. One answer, the easy answer, was that he was no longer Burns’s doctor. It was up to Burns now how he chose to manage his illness. But then he’d gone along with the suppression in Craiglockhart too. Whenever he’d tried to apply to Burns the same methods of treatment he used with everybody else, and used, for the most part, successfully, his nerve had failed him. He’d told himself this was because of the peculiar nature of Burns’s experience, the utter lack of any redeeming feature the mind could grasp and hold on to while it steadied itself to face the full horror. But was Burns’s experience really worse than that of others? Worse than Jenkins’s, crawling between the dismembered pieces of his friend’s body to collect personal belongings to send back to the family? Worse than Prior’s? What shall I do with this gob-stopper?

Corpses were everywhere in the trenches. Used to strengthen parapets, to prop up sagging doorways, to fill in gaps in the duckboards. Many of his patients treading on a dead body had been startled by the release of gas. Surely what had happened to Burns was merely an unusually disgusting version of a common experience. And I’ve let him, Rivers thought — no, that was unfair, that was completely unfair — I’ve let myself turn it into… some kind of myth. And that was unforgivable. He wasn’t dealing with Jonah in the belly of the whale, still less with Christ in the belly of the earth, he was dealing with David Burns, who’d got his head stuck in the belly of a dead German soldier, and somehow had to be helped to live with the memory.

He turned and looked at Burns, who was still sitting on the hearth rug, though now he’d found himself a book and was reading, his tongue protruding slightly between his teeth. As he felt Rivers’s gaze, he looked up and smiled. Twenty-two. He should be worrying about the Tripos and screwing up his courage to ask a girl to the May ball. And yet even now Rivers was nervous of raising the subject of his illness. Burns’s instinctive reaction had been to get back to this house, to forget. And there had been some improvement under this regime, by day at least, though evidently not by night. If he wants to talk, he’ll talk, Rivers thought, and turned back to his paper.

That evening, rather to Rivers’s surprise, they went to the pub. He was surprised because he’d been assuming Burns was isolated here, but apparently all the locals knew him. They’d watched him growing up, summer by summer. The family had been staying here when war broke out. Burns had joined up along with most of the local lads. They all remembered him in his uniform, in the first days and weeks of the war, and perhaps that mattered a great deal. In London, Burns said, on his first trip out in civilian clothes, he’d been handed two white feathers.

Here, as soon as they pushed the bar door open, he was hailed by several people, and by one man in particular: ‘Old Clegg’. Clegg had rheumy blue eyes, whose overflow had dried to a scurfy crust at his temples; three brown but very strong teeth; unidentifiable stains on his abdomen, and other stains, only too identifiable, further down. His conversation was so encrusted with salty Suffolk sayings that Rivers suspected him of deliberate self-parody. That, or leg-pulling. Once he’d discovered Rivers was interested in folklore, he was well away. Rivers spent a thoroughly enjoyable evening being initiated into the folklore of rural Suffolk. By closing time, he was convinced Clegg was possibly the most unreliable informant he’d ever had. For sheer imaginative flights of fancy none of the Melanesians came anywhere near him. ‘That man is a complete fraud,’ he said as they left the pub.

But Burns disagreed. ‘He’s not a fraud, he’s a rogue. Anyway as long as he teaches me flint-knapping, I don’t care.’

∗

Next morning the weather had changed. At dawn there was a strip of clear blue on the horizon, fading to yellow, but the sky darkened rapidly, until, by mid morning, the clouds humped, liver-coloured, and the sea was dark as iron. The wind had risen during the night, sweeping away the last remnants of mist. At first it came in little gusts, lifting the thin carpet in the hall, swirling dust in corners, then in blasts that made waves on the surface of the estuary, rocking the yachts until the rattle of their rigging became a frenzy, while on the beach great waves swelled like the muscles of an enormous animal, rising to crests that hung and seethed along their full length, before toppling over in thunder and bursts of spray.

Rivers worked on his paper all morning, looking up now and then to find the window mizzled with rain. Burns slept late, having had another bad and very noisy night. He appeared just before noon, pink eyed and twitching, and announced he was going to the White Horse to see Clegg and arrange a definite time for his flint-knapping session. Clegg was proving rather difficult to pin down.

‘Git him up agin’ a gorse bush, bor,’ Rivers said, in a passable imitation of Clegg’s voice. ‘He ont back away then.’

‘That’s girls in kissing season, Rivers.’

‘Is it? Well, I shouldn’t go kissing Clegg. I doubt if flint-knapping’s worth it.’

He was immersed in his paper again before Burns left the house.

He came back an hour later, looking rather pleased with himself. ‘Thursday.’

‘Good.’

‘I thought we might go for a walk.’

Rivers looked at the rain-spattered glass.

‘It’s died down a bit,’ Burns said, not altogether convincingly.

‘All right, I could do with a break.’

The sea was racing in fast. The fishermen’s huts were empty, the boats hauled up high above the last stretch of shingle, with the fishing nets in dark heaps behind them. Either they’d not been out today or they’d turned back early, for Rivers had seen none of them come in. Even the seabirds seemed to be grounded, huddled in the lee of the boats, watching the town with unblinking amber eyes.

Faced with this sea, the land seemed fragile. Was fragile. To the north, cliffs were scoured away, to the south, notice boards were buried up to their necks in shingle. And the little Moot Hall that had once stood at the centre of the town was now on the edge of the sea.

They walked as far as Thorpeness, then turned back, not talking much, since the wind snatched the breath from their mouths. The sea had covered the thin strip of sand, so they had to walk along the steep shelf of shingle, a lopsided business that set the back as well as the legs aching.

It took them two hours, there and back, and Rivers was looking forward to the fire and — if he could contrive it — toasted tea cakes for tea. Breakfast, lunch and dinner, he could do without, but afternoon tea mattered. His boot squelched on something soft. Looking down, he saw the place was littered with cods’ heads, thirty or more, with blood-stained gills and staring eyes. It gave him no more than a slight frisson. Obviously the fishermen gutted their catch and threw the offal away. But Burns had stopped dead in his tracks and was staring at the heads, with his mouth working. As Rivers watched, he jerked his head back, the same movement that had been so common when he first arrived at Craiglockhart.

‘It’s all right,’ he said, when Rivers went back for him. But it was obviously very far from all right.

They got back to the house. Rivers made tea, though Burns didn’t manage to eat anything.

After tea they went out and piled sandbags against the doors, struggling with the heavy bags through driving rain and then struggling again to close the storm shutters. The air was full of spray and blown spume.

‘We should’ve done that earlier,’ Burns said, wiping the rain from his face and blinking in the firelight. He was very concerned to pretend everything was normal. He sat on the hearth rug, in his favourite position, while the wind buffeted and slogged the house, and talked about his drink with Clegg and various items of local gossip. But he jumped from topic to topic, assuming the connections would be obvious when very often they were not. His mood, once he’d got over the shock of seeing the cods’ heads, seemed to be almost elated. He said more than once that he loved storms, and he seemed, at times, to be listening to something other than the roar of wind and sea.

Closing his eyes, Rivers could imagine the town entirely given over to the storm, bobbing on the tide of darkness like a blown eggshell, without substance or power to protect. Burns’s conversation became more and more disconnected, the jerking of his head more pronounced. Piling up sandbags, followed by the nearest thing to a bombardment nature could contrive, was not what Rivers would have prescribed. He was prepared to sit up with Burns, if he wanted to stay up, but Burns started talking about bed rather earlier than usual. Probably he took bromides. Rivers would have liked to advise him to stop, since they certainly wouldn’t help the nightmares, but he was determined to let Burns be the first to raise the subject of his illness.

The evening ended with nothing to the point having been said. Rivers went to bed and undressed in the darkness, listening to the wind howl, and imagined Burns in the room above, also listening. He read for a while, thinking he might be too tense to go to sleep, but the fresh air and the struggle with the wind along the beach to Thorpeness had tired him out. His eyelids started to droop and he switched off the light. The whole house creaked and groaned, riding the storm like a ship, but he enjoyed that. He’d always found it possible to sleep deeply on board ship, though on land sleep often eluded him.

He was woken by what he immediately took to be the explosion of a bomb. Less than a minute later, while he was still groping for the light switch, he heard a second boom and this time managed to identify it as the sound of a maroon. The lifeboat, no doubt. He was getting out of bed to go to the window when he remembered that he probably ought not to open the shutters, for he could hear from the whistling of wind and lashing of rain that the storm had by no means blown itself out. His heart was pounding, unreasonably, since there was nothing to be afraid of. He supposed it was having come straight from London with its incessant talk of air raids that had made him identify the sound so positively as a bomb.

He lay back and a moment or two later heard footsteps padding past the door of his room. Obviously Burns too had been woken up. Probably he was going downstairs to make himself a cup of tea, perhaps even to sit up the rest of the night.

The more Rivers thought about Burns sitting alone in the kitchen, the more he thought he ought to get up. The sounds of the storm had now been joined by running footsteps. He wouldn’t find it easy to sleep again anyway.

The kitchen was empty, and didn’t seem to have been disturbed since last night. He told himself that he’d been mistaken, and Burns was still in bed. By now rather anxious, perhaps unreasonably so, he went upstairs and peered into Burns’s room. The bedclothes had been pushed back, and the bed was empty.

He had no idea what he should do. For all he knew midnight walks — or rather three am walks — were a habit of Burns’s when the nights were particularly bad. Surely he wouldn’t go out in this. Rivers heard shouts, followed by more running footsteps. Obviously other people were out in it. Quickly, he returned to his own room, pulled on socks, boots and coat, and went out into the storm.

A small group of figures had gathered round the lifeboat, three of them holding storm lanterns. The overlapping circles of light shone on yellow oilskins glistening with wet, as the men struggled to clear the shingle from the planks that were used to launch the boat. Silver rain slanted down into the lighted area, while beyond, pale banks of shingle faded into the darkness.

A knot of bystanders had gathered by the hut, separate from the labouring figures around the boat. Convinced that Burns must be among them, Rivers ran across to join them, but when he looked from face to face Burns was not there. A woman he thought to be familiar, but couldn’t immediately identify, pointed to the marshes south of the town.

As he turned and began walking quickly towards the marshes, he was dimly aware of the boat hitting the sea, and of the waves surging up around her. He left the shelter of the last houses, and the wind, roaring across the marshes, almost knocked him off his feet. He dropped down from the path and walked along beside the river where he was slightly sheltered, though the wind still howled and the yacht rigging thrummed, a sound like no other he had ever heard. He could see fairly clearly most of the time. Once, the moon freed itself from the tatters of black cloud, and then his own shadow and the shadow of the tower were thrown across the gleaming mud.

Looking at the tower, Rivers thought again how squat and unimpressive it was, and yet how menacing. A resemblance that had merely nagged at him before returned to his mind with greater force. This waste of mud, these sump holes reflecting a dim light at the sky, even that tower. It was like France. Like the battlefields. A resemblance greater by night than by day, perhaps, because here, by day, you could see things grow, and there nothing grew.

— They were always afraid we’d get trapped in the cellars.

— I suppose they flood, don’t they? At high tide?

Rivers climbed on to the path, trying to work out where the tide was and whether it was rising or falling, but he could hear only the crash of breaking waves and feel the drizzle of blown spume on his face. In spite of his mud-clogged boots and aching thighs, he started to run. As he neared the tower, a stronger blast of wind sent him staggering off the path. He was slithering and floundering through mud, calling Burns’s name, though the sound was snatched from his mouth and carried off into the whistling darkness.

He slid down on to the beach. An outgoing wave sucked shingle after it, but the entrance to the moat was clear. He hesitated, peering into the darkness, afraid that an unusually powerful wave might trap him in there. He called ‘David’, but he knew he couldn’t be heard and would have to go down, into the black darkness, if he were ever to find him.

He groped his way into the moat, steadying himself against the wall. It was so wet, so cold, so evil-smelling, that he thought perhaps the tide had already reached its height and was now falling. At first he could see nothing, but then the moon came out from behind a bank of cloud, and he saw Burns huddled against the moat wall. Rivers called ‘David’ and realized he was shouting when there was no need. Even the howl of the storm sounded subdued in the shelter of the moat. He touched Burns’s arm. He neither moved nor blinked. He was staring up at the tower, which gleamed white, like the bones of a skull.

‘Come on, David.’

His body felt like a stone. Rivers got hold of him and held him, coaxing, rocking. He looked up at the tower that loomed squat and menacing above them, and thought, Nothing justifies this. Nothing nothing nothing. Burns’s body remained rigid in his arms. Rivers was aware that if it came to a fight he might not win. Burns was terribly emaciated, but he was also thirty years younger. His surrender, when it came, was almost shocking. Suddenly his body had the rag-doll floppiness of the newborn. He collapsed against Rivers and started to shake, and from there it was possible to half lead, half push him out of the moat and up on to the relative safety of the path.

At the kitchen table, wrapped in a blanket, Burns said, ‘I couldn’t seem to get out of the dream. I woke up, I knew I was awake, I could move and yet… it was still there. My face was dripping. I could taste it.’ He tried to laugh. ‘And then the bloody maroon went off.’

There were no electric lights. The power lines must be down. They were talking by the light of an oil lamp that smoked and smelled, and left wisps of black smoke like question marks on the air.

‘I think we can do without this now,’ Rivers said, walking across to the window and pulling the curtains back. He opened the windows and shutters. The storm had almost blown itself out. A weak light seeped into the room, falling on Burns’s red eyes and exhausted face.

‘Why don’t you go to bed? I’ll bring you a hot-water bottle if you’ve got such a thing.’

Rivers saw him settled into bed. Then he went out to the butchers in the High Street, which he’d already noticed was surprisingly well stocked, bought bacon, sausages, kidneys, eggs, took them home and fried them. As he was spooning hot fat over the eggs, he remembered his reaction when he was looking up at the tower. Nothing can justify this, he’d thought. Nothing nothing nothing. He was rather glad not to be faced with the task of explaining that statement to Siegfried.

He sat down at the table and began to eat. He was still chasing the last dribble of egg yolk with a triangle of toast when Mrs Burril came in. She looked at the plates. ‘Cracked, did you?’ Two unpacked bags later she added, ‘Thought you might.’

‘Is the boat back?’

‘Not yet. I keep busy.’

Rivers went upstairs to check on Burns and found him still asleep. The room was full of books, stacked up on tables and chairs, spilling over on to the floor. Church architecture, country crafts, ornithology, botany and — a slight surprise — theology. He wondered whether this was an expression of faith, or a quest for faith, or simply an obsession with the absence of God.

One of the reasons the books had to be stacked on tables and chairs was that the bookcase was already full of other books: boys’ annuals, the adventure stories of Henty, Scouting for Boys. Games too: Ludo and Snakes and Ladders, a bat for beach cricket, collections of pebbles and shells, a strip of bladderwrack. All these things must have been brought here, or collected here, summer by summer, and then outgrown, but never thrown away, so that the room had become a sort of palimpsest of the young life it contained. He looked at Burns’s sleeping face, and then tiptoed downstairs.

The lifeboat came back later that morning. Rivers looked out of the living room window and saw it beached at the water’s edge, in that narrow space between the coils of tangled and rusting wire. He went out to watch.

The men were laying down the flat wooden skids over which the boat would be winched slowly back into place. A small group of villagers, mainly relatives of the crew, had gathered and were talking in low voices. The sea was choppy, but with none of the menace of the previous night. A light drizzle had begun to fall, matting the surface hairs on the men’s jerseys and woollen caps.

When he got back, he found Burns stirring, though not yet up.

‘Are they back?’ he asked.

‘Yes, they’re hauling her up now.’

Burns got out of bed and came across to the window. The drizzle had become a downpour. The lifeboat, now halfway up the beach, was obscured by sheets of smoking rain.

‘Be a load off Mrs Burril’s mind. She’s got two sons in the crew.’

‘Yes. She said.’

‘You mean she spoke?’

‘We had quite a chat. I didn’t know the lifeboat was such a family matter.’

‘Oh, yes. You see it on the memorial in the church. Not a good idea, really. From the woman’s point of view.’ A long pause. Then Burns added, ‘You get the same thing in a battalion. Brothers joining up together.’

Rivers went very still. This was the first time Burns had volunteered any information at all about France. Even in Craiglockhart, where he couldn’t altogether avoid talking about it, the bare facts of his war service had had to be prised out of him.

‘You know, you’ll be writing letters and suddenly you realize you’ve written the same name twice.’

Rivers said carefully, ‘That must be one of the worst jobs.’

‘You get used to it. I did it for eighty per cent of the company once.’

A long silence. Rivers was beginning to think he’d dried up, but then he said, ‘That was the day before the Somme. They got out there, and there was this bloody great dyke in the way. You couldn’t see it from the trench because there were bramble bushes round it. And it wasn’t on the map. Everybody bunched up, trying to get across it. German machine-gunners had a field day. And the few who did manage to get across were cut to pieces on the wire. General came round the following day. He said, “My God, did we really order men to attack across that?” Apparently we were intended to be a diversion from the main action. Further south.’

Slowly, Burns began to talk. He’d been promoted captain at the age of twenty-one, and this promotion coincided with the run-up to the Somme campaign. In addition to all the other strains, he’d been aware of a widespread, though unvoiced, opinion in the company that he was too young for the command, though in length of service he had been senior.

The story was one Rivers was well used to hearing: healthy fear had given way to indifference, and this in turn had given way to a constant, overwhelming fear, and the increasing realization that breakdown was imminent. ‘I used to go out on patrol every night,’ Burns said. ‘You tell yourself you’re setting a good example, or some such rubbish, but actually it’s nothing of the kind. You can’t let yourself know you want to be wounded, because officers aren’t supposed to think like that. And, you see, next to a battle, a patrol is the best chance of getting a good wound. In the trenches, it’s shrapnel or head injuries. On patrol, if you’re lucky, it’s a nice neat little hole in the arm or leg. I’ve seen men cry with a wound like that.’ He laughed. ‘Cry for joy. Anyway, it wasn’t my luck. Bullets went round me, I swear they did.’ A pause. ‘It was going to happen anyway, wasn’t it?’

‘The breakdown? Oh yes. You mustn’t attribute breaking down to that one incident.’

‘I went on for three days afterwards.’

‘Yes, I know.’

They talked for over an hour. Near the end, after they’d been sitting in silence for a while, Burns said quietly, ‘Do you know what Christ died of?’

Rivers looked surprised, but answered readily enough. ‘Suffocation. Ultimately the position makes it impossible to go on inflating the lungs. A terrible death.’

‘That’s what I find so horrifying. Somebody had to imagine that death. I mean, just in order to invent it as a method of execution. You know that thing in the Bible? “The imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth”? I used to wonder why pick on that? Why his imagination? But it’s absolutely right.’

Rivers, going downstairs to make the tea, thought that a curious thing had happened during that conversation. For the first time, Burns had been able to put the decomposing corpse into some kind of perspective. True, he hadn’t managed to talk about it, but at least it hadn’t prevented him, as it so often had in the past, from talking about other, more bearable aspects of his war experience. Yet, at the same time, Rivers’s own sense of the horror of the event seemed actually to have increased. It was different in kind from other such experiences, he thought, if only because of the complete disintegration of personality it had produced. He was very fond of Burns, but he could discern in him no trace of the qualities he must have possessed in order to be given that exceptionally early command. Not that one could despair of recovery. Rivers knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay. Burns was young, after all. If today really marked a change, a willingness to face his experiences in France, then his condition might improve. In a few years’ time it might even be possible to think of him resuming his education, perhaps pursuing that unexpected interest in theology. Though it was difficult to see him as an undergraduate. He had missed his chance of being ordinary.

16

Rivers arrived back at Craiglockhart in the late afternoon of yet another stormy day. This autumn seemed to have a store of such days, slapping them down remorselessly, one after the other, like a fortune-teller with a deadly pack of cards. The trees had already shed their leaves. They blew across the tennis courts and, when Rivers pushed open the swing doors, accompanied him into the hall.

Where a football match seemed to be in progress. A knot of struggling backs and thighs gradually unravelled, as they became aware of him standing there. On the black and white tiled floor lay a mud-brown, pork-pie hat, evidently belonging to a visitor. Rivers looked round the group and found Sassoon. ‘Careful with that hat, Sassoon,’ he said, and passed through on his way to his office.

Behind him, a much subdued Sassoon picked up the hat, punched it into some semblance of its former shape, and restored it to the peg. The other footballers slunk away.

Bryce was standing at the window of his room, looking out over the leaf-littered tennis courts. Pausing in the doorway, Rivers thought he looked older, but then he turned, and seemed as full of energy as ever.

‘Did you get my letter?’ Rivers asked.

‘I did.’

‘I’ve said I’ll wait and see how things turn out.’

‘Take it, for God’s sake. It’s quite obvious how things are going to turn out. I don’t expect to be here next month.’ He smiled. ‘Of course they might appoint you.’

Rivers shook his head. ‘No, they won’t do that. I’m too identified with you.’

‘Will you take it?’

‘I don’t know. Probably.’

More than probably, Rivers thought, returning to his own room. The thought of Craiglockhart without Bryce was intolerable. He sat behind his desk, and looked round the large, overfamiliar room. Whenever he’d come back before, he’d had an almost physical sense of the yoke settling on to his shoulders, beginning to chafe almost before he was into the building. Not this time. He looked at his crowded appointments book and actually managed to feel some affection for it. The offer of a job in London, with its prospect of more frequent contact with other anthropologists, had had the paradoxical effect of making him realize how much he enjoyed his work here. It had become of equal importance to him, and he’d begun to think of ways in which the two interests could combine. The condensation and displacement one encountered in the dreams of patients here — might not these mechanisms also be at work in the myth and ritual of primitive people? At any rate it was an idea worth exploring. But these new combinations only occurred because he no longer thought of his work here as an interruption of his ‘real’ work. Far from it, he thought, spreading his hands across his desk. The work he did in this room was the work he was meant to do, and, as always, this recognition brought peace.

‘… we actually drove past your place.’

‘You should’ve called in,’ Sassoon said. ‘Mother wouldn’t’ve stood on ceremony where you were concerned. She regards you as the Saviour of the Family Name. From the Disgrace of Pacifism.’

‘Prematurely, perhaps?’

No answer.

‘Have you been able to think…?’

‘I haven’t been able to think at all. Look, Rivers, I’ve never asked you for anything. I’ve never asked or expected to be treated any differently from anybody else.’

‘I should hope not,’ Rivers said. ‘I don’t know what the grounds would be.’

Sassoon came to an abrupt halt. ‘All right.’

‘No, what were you going to say?’

‘I was going to point out that the man in my room is driving me stark, staring mad, but it doesn’t matter.’

‘That could be grounds for a room change. If true. For you as for anybody else. What does he do? Does he sleep badly?’

‘Snores like a newborn baby, if newborn babies snore.’

‘So what does he do?’

‘Preaches the consolations of Theosophy in his own inimitable brand of pseudo-medieval English.’

‘I can see that might be irritating. Give me an example.’

‘Friend of mine, Ralph Greaves. He’s… Is! Was a good pianist. He’s just had one arm amputated, and the other’s almost useless. Do you know what Fothersgill said? “It will assist his spiritual development.”

‘Perhaps it would have been wiser not to tell him?’

Silence.

‘After all, you must’ve had some idea of the kind of response you were likely to get?’

‘I can’t keep it in all the time.’

‘Look, he’s due to be boarded soon. Surely you can put up with the inconvenience for another… what, ten days?’

‘We had a row this morning. I pointed out the casualties for September were 102,000 — official figures. He said, “Yes, Sassoon, the Celestial Surgeon is at work upon humanity.”’

Rivers sighed. He was thinking that Sassoon’s insistence of hammering home the bitter reality was probably not doing Fothersgill much good either. ‘What does he think about you? Do you know?’

‘I have a disturbed aura. Apparently.’

‘Really?’

‘Indigo. I’m glad somebody finds it amusing.’

‘I was just thinking how useful it would be. Instant diagnosis.’

‘I’ve woken him up once or twice.’

‘Nightmares?’

‘Not exactly.’

Sassoon was avoiding his eye, but then he often did at the beginning of interviews. ‘Do you want to tell me about it?’

‘Oh, it was nothing. I just… saw something I couldn’t possibly have seen.’

He thinks I’ll despise him for being irrational, Rivers thought. ‘I did once see… well, not see… hear something I couldn’t explain. It was on one of the Solomon Islands. On this particular island, the people believe the souls of the dead go to a bay at the other side — the spirits come up to the house in canoes and carry the dead person’s soul away. So you have a kind of wake, and on this particular night we were all crowded together, gathered round the corpse, waiting for the sound of paddles. The whole village was there, all these dark brown intently listening faces. And we listened too and asked questions in whispers. The atmosphere was unbelievable. And then a moment came when they heard the paddles. You saw this expression of mingled joy and grief spread over all their faces, and of course we heard nothing. Until the moment when the spirits were actually in the room, taking the soul away, and then the whole house was suddenly filled with whistling sounds. I could see all the faces. Nobody was making those sounds, and yet we all heard them. You see, the rational explanation for that is that we’d allowed ourselves to be dragged into an experience of mass hypnosis, and I don’t for a moment deny that that’s possible. But what we’d been told to expect was the swish of paddles. Nobody’d said anything about whistling. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a rational explanation. Only I don’t think that particular rational explanation fits all the facts.’

After Rivers had finished there was a pause. Then Sassoon said, with great difficulty, ‘What happened to me started with a noise.’

‘What sort of noise?’

‘Tapping. It started in Owen’s room and then when I went back to my own room it started again. Owen didn’t hear it. It didn’t bother me particularly, I just went off to sleep and… when I woke up, somebody was standing just inside the door. I knew who it was. I couldn’t see the face, but I recognized his coat.’ He paused. ‘Orme. Nice lad. Died six months ago.’

‘You said “once or twice”. The same man?’

‘No. Various people.’ A long silence. ‘I know this must sound like the the kind of thing I was seeing in London, but it isn’t. It’s… nothing like that. In London they were clutching holes in their heads and waving their stumps around. These are… very quiet. Very restrained.’ He smiled. ‘Obviously you get a better class of hallucination round here.’

‘What do you feel when you see them?’

Sassoon shrugged. ‘I don’t feel anything. At the time.’

‘You’re not frightened?’

‘No. That’s why I said they weren’t nightmares.’

‘Afterwards?’

‘Guilt.’

‘Do they look reproachful?’

Sassoon thought about it. ‘No. They just look puzzled. They can’t understand why I’m here.’

A long silence. After a while, Sassoon roused himself. ‘I wrote about it. I’m sorry, I know you hate this.’

Rivers took the sheet of paper: ‘I don’t hate it. I just feel inadequate.’

When I’m asleep, dreaming and drowsed and warm,

They come, the homeless ones, the noiseless dead.

While the dim charging breakers of the storm

Rumble and drone and bellow overhead,

Out of the gloom they gather about my bed.

They whisper to my heart; their thoughts are mine.

‘Why are you here with all your watches ended?

‘From Ypres to Frise we sought you in the line.’

In bitter safety I awake, unfriended;

And while the dawn begins with slashing rain

I think of the Battalion in the mud.

‘When are you going back to them again?

‘Are they not still your brothers through our blood?’

Sassoon, who’d got up and walked across to the window, turned round when a movement from Rivers seemed to indicate he’d finished. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘Don’t feel you have to say something.’

But Rivers was not capable of saying anything. He’d taken off his glasses and was dabbing the skin round his eyes. Sassoon didn’t know what to do. He pretended to look out of the window again. At last Rivers put his glasses on again and said, ‘Does the question have an answer?’

‘Oh, yes. I’m going back.’

A long indrawn breath. ‘Have you told anybody else yet?’

‘No, I wanted you to be the first.’

‘Your pacifist friends won’t be pleased.’

‘No, I know. I’m not looking forward to that.’ He was looking at Rivers with an extraordinary mixture of love and hostility. ‘You are, though, aren’t you? You’re pleased.’

‘Oh, yes. I’m pleased.’