Regeneration

17

Ada Lumb arrived on the nine o’clock train. Sarah met her at the station, and they spent the morning looking round the shops. Or rather Sarah looked round the shops, while her mother, by a mixture of bullying, wheedling, cajoling, questions, speculations, wild surmises and sudden, bitter silences, extracted the whole story of Sarah’s relationship with Billy Prior. By twelve, Sarah was glad to rest her feet, if not her ears, in a café, where they sat at a table for two by the window and ordered ham and chips. The alternative was steak and kidney pie, but Ada was having none of that. ‘You can’t trust anything with pastry wrapped round it,’ she said. ‘What they find to put in it, God knows. You’ve only got to look in the butchers to see there is nowt.’

Sarah was not deceived. She knew once the waitress was out of earshot she was in for a dollop of advice on rather more serious matters. She wiped a hole in the condensation on the window. Outside the people were moving shadows, the pavements of Princes Street jumped and streamed with rain. ‘Just in time,’ she said.

‘I suppose you let him in?’

‘What?’

‘You don’t say “what”, Sarah. You say “pardon”.’

‘What?’

‘I said, I suppose you let him in?’

‘Isn’t that my business, Mam?’

‘Would be if you were gunna cope with the consequences.’

‘There aren’t going to be any consequences.’

‘You think you know it all, don’t you? Well, let me tell you something, something you don’t know. In every one of them factories there’s a bloke with a pin. Every tenth one gets a pin stuck in it. Not every other one, they know we’re not fools. Every tenth.’

‘Nice work, if you can get it.’

‘Easier than bringing up the kid.’ Ada speared a chip. ‘The point is you gotta put a value on yourself. You don’t, they won’t. You’re never gunna get engaged till you learn to keep your knees together. Yeh, you can laugh, but men don’t value what’s dished out free. Mebbe they shouldn’t be like that, mebbe they should all be different. But they are like that and your not gunna change them.’

The waitress came to remove their plates. ‘Anything else, madam?’

Ada switched to her genteel voice. ‘Yes, we’d like to see the menu, please.’ She waited till the waitress had gone, then leant forward to deliver the knock-out blow. ‘No man likes to think he’s sliding in on another man’s leavings.’

Sarah collapsed in giggles. ‘Mam.’

‘Aye, well, you can laugh.’ She looked round the café, then down at the table, smoothing the white table cloth with brown-spotted hands. ‘Nice, isn’t it?’

Sarah stopped giggling. ‘Yeh, Mam, it’s nice.’

‘I wish you worked somewhere like this.’

‘Mam, the wages are rubbish. That girl didn’t live at home, she wouldn’t eat.’

‘She’s not bright yellow, though, is she?’

‘She not bright anything. She looks anaemic to me.’

‘But you meet nice people, Sarah. I mean I know some of the women you work with, and I’m not saying they’re not good sorts — some of them — but you got to admit, Sarah, they’re rough.’

‘I’m rough.’

‘You could’ve been a lady’s maid if you’d stuck in. That’s what gets me about you, you can put it on as well as anybody when you like, but it’s too much bloody bother.’

The waitress returned with the menu.

‘I don’t think I could eat anything else, Mam.’

Ada looked disappointed. ‘Aw, go on. It’s not often I get a chance to spoil you.’

‘All right, then. I’ll have the tapioca, please.’

Sarah ate in silence for a while, aware of her mother watching her. At last, she said, ‘Trouble is, Mam, the block chipped and you don’t like it.’

Ada shook her head. It was true all the same, Sarah thought. Ada, ox-jawed, determined, ruthless, had struggled to bring up her two girls alone, and yet, when it came to teaching the girls, she’d tried to encourage all the opposite qualities. Prettiness, pliability — at least the appearance of it — all the arts of pleasing. This was how women got on in the world, and Ada had made sure her daughters knew it. As little girls, Cynthia and Sarah had gone to the tin-roofed chapel at the end of the road, but as soon as their bodices revealed curves rather than straight lines, Ada had called them to her and announced their conversion to Anglo-Catholicism. The Church of St Edmund, King and Martyr, served a very nice neighbourhood. There, Cynthia had obediently ogled the young men in the choir, while Sarah, missing the point completely, had fallen in love with the Virgin Mary. Ada’s ambition was to see her daughters go down that aisle in white, on the arm of some young man with a steady income. If, subsequently, early widowhood left them with the income and not the man, then they were indeed blessed. Whether Ada was a widow or not, Sarah didn’t know. It had never been made clear whether her father had departed this life, the town, or merely his marriage. Certainly black bombazine figured prominently in Ada’s wardrobe, but then it was a material that conferred an air of awesome respectability at minimal cost. A dispiriting way to bring girls up, Sarah thought; to make marriage the sole end of female existence, and yet deny that love between men and women was possible. Ada did deny it. In her world, men loved women as the fox loves the hare. And women loved men as the tapeworm loves the gut. Nor did this view of life generate much sympathy for other women. Ada despised the hares, those who ‘got caught’. If a girl came into the shop crying, she might sell her Dr Lawson’s Cure, the Sovereign Remedy for Female Blockages and Obstructions (ninepence a bottle, and totally useless), but her sympathy ended there. The business of her life was scratching a living together; her recreation was reading romances, which she devoured three or four at a time, sitting in her rocking chair by the fire, sucking mint humbugs and laughing till her ribs ached.

‘How’s the tea hut going, Mam?’ Sarah asked, pushing her plate away.

‘Fine. I’m up there every day now.’

Ada had taken to selling tea to soldiers, young conscripts who did their six weeks’ training in one of the local parks before being shipped out to France. The hut, which in peace time had been the boating lake ticket office, she’d turned into a small café.

‘How much do you charge?’

‘Fivepence.’

‘My God.’

Ada shrugged. ‘No competition.’

‘You’re a war profiteer you are, Mam. In a small way.’

‘Wouldn’t be small if I could get me hands on some money. You could do soup and all sorts, specially with the winter coming on. But it’s the same old story. You need money to make money.’

Ada paid the bill, counting out the coppers with those thin, lined hands that Sarah could never see without pain.

‘You know Billy?’ Sarah asked suddenly.

‘No, I don’t, Sarah. I’ve not had the pleasure of an introduction.’

‘Well if you’ll just listen. If he gets slung out the hospital this time, he’ll have a bit of leave, and we thought we might… We thought we might drop in on you.’

‘Really?’

‘Is that all you can say?’

‘What am I supposed to say? Look, Sarah, he’s an officer. What do you think he wants you for?’

‘How should I know? Breath of fresh air, perhaps.’

‘Bloody gale.’

‘If he does come, you will be all right with him, won’t you?’

‘If he’s all right with me, I’ll be all right with him.’ Ada slipped a penny under the saucer. ‘But you’re a bloody fool.’

‘Why am I?’

‘You know why. Next time he starts waving his old doo-lally around, you think about that pin.’

Sassoon arrived late to find Graves sitting by himself in the bar. ‘Sorry I’m late.’

‘That’s all right. Owen was keeping me amused, but then he had to go. Somebody coming to see the printer.’

‘Yes, that’s right. I’d forgotten that.’

‘Good game?’

‘Not bad.’ Sassoon detected, or thought he detected, a slight chill. ‘It’s the only thing that keeps me sane.’

‘Last time you wrote you were complaining about playing golf with lunatics.’

‘Ssh, keep your voice down. One of them’s just behind you.’

Graves turned round. ‘Seems fairly normal to me.’

‘Oh, Anderson’s all right. Throws a temper tantrum whenever he looks like losing half a crown.’

‘You’ve been known to do that yourself.’

‘Only because you were fooling around with a niblick instead of playing properly.’ He raised a hand to summon the waiter. ‘Have you had time to look at the menu?’

‘I’ve had time to memorize it, Siegfried.’

At the table Graves said, ‘What do you find to talk to Owen about? He says he doesn’t play golf. And I don’t suppose for a moment he hunts.’

‘How acute your social perceptions are, Robert. No, I shouldn’t think he’d been on a horse in his life before he joined the army. Poetry, mainly.’

‘Oh, he writes, does he?’

‘No need to say it like that. He’s quite good. Matter of fact, I’ve got one here.’ He tapped his breast pocket. ‘I’ll show you after lunch.’

‘He struck me as being a bit shaky.’

‘Did he? I don’t think he is.’

‘I’m just telling you how he struck me.’

‘He can’t be all that shaky. They’re throwing him out at the end of the month. He was probably just overawed at meeting another Published Poet.’

A slight pause.

‘Aren’t you due to be boarded soon?’

‘The end of the month.’

‘Have you decided what you’re going to do?’

‘I’ve told Rivers I’ll go back, provided the War Office gives me a written guarantee that I’ll be sent back to France.’

‘I wouldn’t have thought you were in much of a position to bargain.’

‘Rivers seems to think he can wangle it. He didn’t say “wangle” of course.’

‘So it’s all over? Thank God.’

‘I’ve told him I won’t withdraw anything. And I’ve told him it’s got to be France. I’m not going to let them put me behind a desk filling in forms for the rest of the war.’

‘Yes, I think that’s right.’

‘Trouble is I don’t trust them. Even Rivers. I mean, on the one hand he says there’s nothing wrong with me and they’ll pass me for general service overseas — there’s nothing else they can do — and then in the next breath he tells me I’ve got a very powerful “anti-war complex”. I don’t even know what it means.’

‘I’ll tell you what it means. It means you’re obsessed. Do you know, you never talk about the future any more? Yes, I know what you’re going to say. How can you? Sass, we sat on a hill in France and we talked about the future. We made plans. The night before the Somme, we made plans. You couldn’t do that now. A few shells, a few corpses, and you’ve lost heart.’

‘How many corpses?’

‘The point is…’

‘The point is 102,000 last month alone. You’re right, I am obsessed. I never forget it for a second, and neither should you. Robert, if you had any real courage you wouldn’t acquiesce the way you do.’

Graves flushed with anger. ‘I’m sorry you think that. I should hate to think I’m a coward. I believe in keeping my word. You agreed to serve, Siegfried. Nobody’s asking you to change your opinions, or even to keep quiet about them, but you agreed to serve, and if you want the respect of the kind of people you’re trying to influence — the Bobbies and the Tommies — you’ve got to be seen to keep your word. They won’t understand if you turn round in the middle of the war and say “I’m sorry, I’ve changed my mind.” To them, that’s just bad form. They’ll say you’re not behaving like a gentleman — and that’s the worst thing they can say about anybody.’

‘Look, Robert, the people who’re keeping this war going don’t give a damn about the “Bobbies” and the “Tommies”. And they don’t let “gentlemanly behaviour” stand in the way either when it comes to feathering their own nests.’ He made a gesture of despair. ‘And as for “bad form” and “gentlemanly behaviour” — that’s just suicidal stupidity.’

Over coffee, the conversation changed tack.

‘There’s something I didn’t tell you in June,’ Graves said.

‘Do you remember Peter?’

‘I never met him.’

‘No, but you remember him? You remember about him? Well, he was arrested. Soliciting outside the local barracks. Actually not very far away from the school.’

‘Oh, Robert, I’m sorry. Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘How could I? You were in no state to think about anybody else.’

‘This was in July, was it?’

‘Same post I got your Declaration in.’ Graves smiled. ‘It was quite a morning.’

‘Yes, I can imagine.’

Graves hesitated. ‘It’s only fair to tell you that… since that happened my affections have been running in more normal channels. I’ve been writing to a girl called Nancy Nicholson. I really think you’ll like her. She’s great fun. The… the only reason I’m telling you this is… I’d hate you to have any misconceptions. About me. I’d hate you to think I was homosexual even in thought. Even if it went no further.’

It was difficult to know what to say. ‘I’m very pleased for you, Robert. About Miss Nicholson, I mean.’

‘Good, that’s all right, then.’

‘What happened to Peter?’

‘You’re not going to believe this. They’re sending him to Rivers.’

This was a bigger, and nastier, shock than Sassoon knew how to account for. ‘Why?’

‘What do you mean, “Why?”? To be cured, of course.’

Sassoon smiled faintly. ‘Yes. Of course.’

The munitions factory at night looked like hell, Sarah thought, as she toiled down the muddy lane towards it, and saw the red smouldering fires reflected from a bank of low cloud, like an artificial sunset. At the gate she fell in with the other girls all walking in the same direction, all subdued, with that clogged, dull look of people who’d just switched to night shift and hadn’t yet managed to adjust.

In the cloakroom, donning ankle-length green overalls, pulling on caps, dragging at a final cigarette, were thirty or forty women. Smells of sweat, lily-of-the-valley, setting lotion. After a while conversations sprang up, the women appeared more normal, even jolly for a time, until the supervisor appeared in the doorway, jabbing her finger at the clock.

‘Your mam get off all right, then?’ Lizzie asked, as they were walking down the stairs to the basement workroom.

‘Got the seven o’clock. She’ll be back by midnight, so it’s not so bad.’

‘How did it go?’

Sarah pulled a face. ‘All right. You know, I swore I wasn’t gunna tell her about Billy, but she winkled it all out of me.’

‘Well, she is your mam. She’s bound to be worried.’

‘Hm. All I could get out of her was: “What does he see in you?” ’S a nice thing to say to your daughter, isn’t it? I says, “A breath of fresh air.” As far as I can make out they’re all disappearing up their own arseholes up there.’

‘Long as it’s only their own,’ Lizzie said.

‘They’re not all like that,’ Sarah said.

‘Biggest part are,’ said Madge. ‘Place I used to work before the war, the son were like that. Oh, and when they found out you should’ve heard Missus. She stomped and she shrieked. Chandelier were going like that, I thought bugger were coming down. But you know he had no sisters, so he never met lasses that way. Goes to school, no lasses. Goes to university — no lasses. Time he finally claps eyes on me, it’s too late, isn’t it? It’s gelled. And even the ones that aren’t like that, they take one look at the Missus and bugger off round the Club.’ Madge strutted along the basement corridor with a finger held be low her nose, saying in a strangled, public school accent, ‘“I shall be dining at the Club tonight, m’dear. Don’t bother to wait up.’ Then he staggers in at two o’clock and flops out on bed in dressing room. Beats me how they breed.’

Raucous laughter from the other women as they spilled into the work room and sat down at the benches. The supervisor, a round-faced, bespectacled, crop-haired lady in a severely tailored suit, bore down upon them. ‘Do you girls ever intend to start work?’

They watched her walk away. ‘Eeh, I hope a man never tries to shove anything up her flue,’ Lizzie said. ‘Be cruelty to moths.’

Sarah pulled the first belt towards her and started to work. No reason at all why they couldn’t talk, since the task here required no concentration. It was intended as a break from the very demanding work on detonators, and from other jobs too, where masks had to be worn. Rather badly fitting masks. On more than one occasion Sarah had pulled hers away from her face and shaken out the yellow dust that had collected inside it. She remembered her mother’s strictures on her appearance, the broad hints she’d dropped about handing in her notice and going home to help with the tea hut. But I like it here, Sarah thought. And then she corrected herself. You like it now because Billy’s here. You mightn’t be so keen when he’s gone.

She turned, cautiously, to avoid attracting the supervisor’s attention, and looked round. The women sat at small tables, each table forming a pool of light under a low-hanging bulb. Apart from the work surfaces, the room was badly lit and so vast that its far end disappeared into shadow. All the women were yellow-skinned, and all, whatever their colouring, had a frizz of ginger hair peeping out from under the green cap. We don’t look human, Sarah thought, not knowing whether to be dismayed or amused. They looked like machines, whose sole function was to make other machines.

Sarah’s eyes fell on the next table, where the girls were close enough to be identified. After a while she looked puzzled and leant across the table to whisper to Lizzie. ‘Where’s Betty?’

‘You may well ask,’ Lizzie said. She sniffed and remained silent, enjoying the moment of power.

‘I am asking.’

Lizzie glanced round quickly. ‘You know she’s missed four times?’

All the girls nodded.

‘Tried everything,’ Lizzie said. ‘She was supping Dr Lawson’s Cure as if it was lemonade.’

‘It is,’ said Sarah.

‘Well, she must’ve got desperate, because she stuck summat up herself to bring it on. You know them wire coat hangers?’

Nods all round.

‘One of them. She straightened the curved bit and —’

‘We get the picture,’ Sarah said.

‘Yeh, well it’s worse than that. Silly little cow shoved it in her bladder.’

‘Aw no.’ Madge turned away as if she were going to vomit.

‘She was in agony. And you know she kept begging them not to send her to the hospital, because like she knew she hadn’t come all right. But anyway the girl she’s lodging with got that frightened she went and fetched the landlady. Well of course she took one look. She more or less says, “Sorry, love, you’re not dying here.” Took her in. And the irony of it is she’s still pregnant. She looks awful.’

‘You mean you’ve been to see her?’ Sarah asked.

‘Why aye. Went last night. You know, her face is all…’ Lizzie dragged her cheeks down. ‘Oh, and she says the doctor didn’t half railroad her. She was crying her eyes out, poor lass. He says, “You should be ashamed of yourself,” he says. “It’s not just an inconvenience you’ve got in there,” he says. “It’s a human being.”’

Sarah and Madge were eager to know more, but the supervisor had noticed the pause in Lizzie’s work and came striding towards them, though when she reached the table she found only silence and bowed heads and feverishly working fingers flicking machine-gun bullets into place inside the glittering belts.

On the night before a Board, Rivers took longer than usual over his rounds, since he knew the patients whose turn it was to be boarded would be feeling particularly tense. He was worried about Pugh, who had somehow managed to convince himself, in spite of repeated reassurances to the contrary, that he was to be sent back to France.

Sassoon, Rivers left till last, and found him lying on the bed in his new room, wrapped in his British warm coat. It was needed. The room was immediately beneath the tower and so cold that, in winter, patients who’d sweated their way through a succession of nightmares often woke to find the bedclothes stiff with frost. Siegfried seemed to like it, though, and at least now he had the privacy he needed to work. Rivers took the only available chair, and stretched out his legs towards the empty grate. ‘Well, how do you feel about tomorrow?’

‘All right. Still nothing from the War Office?’

‘No, I’m afraid not. You’ll just have to trust us.’

‘Us? You’re sure you don’t mean “them”?’

‘You know I’ll go on doing anything I can for you.’

‘Oh, I know that. But the fact is once they’ve got me out of here they can do what they like. Pen-pushing in Bognor, here I come.’

Rivers hesitated. ‘You sound rather down.’

‘No-o. Missing Robert. Don’t know why, we came quite close to quarrelling.’

‘About the war?’

‘I don’t know what about. Except he was in a peculiar mood.’ Sassoon stopped, then visibly decided to continue. ‘He had a bit of bad news recently.’

Rivers was aware of more going on in this conversation than he could identify. Sassoon had been distinctly reserved with him recently. He’d noticed it yesterday evening particularly, but he’d put it down to pre-Board nerves, and the worry of not hearing from the War Office. ‘From France?’

‘Oh, no, something quite different. I did ask if he’d mind my telling you, so I’m not breaking a confidence. Friend of his — a boy he knew at school and was very fond of — in an entirely honourable, platonic Robert-like way — got arrested for soliciting. Outside a barracks, actually not very far away from the school. As far as I can make out, Robert feels…’ Sassoon came to a halt. ‘Well. Rather as you might feel if you were… walking down a pleasant country road and suddenly a precipice opened at your feet. That’s how he sees it. Devastated. Because, you see, this… this abominable thing must’ve been there all the time, and be didn’t see it. He’s very anxious to make it clear that… the has no such disgusting feelings himself. We-ell.’

‘So you were left feeling…?’

‘Like a precipice on a country road.’

‘Yes.’

Sassoon looked straight at Rivers. ‘Apparently he’s being — the boy — sent to some psychiatrist or other.’

‘Which school was this?’

‘Charterhouse.’

‘Ah.’ Rivers looked up and found Sassoon’s gaze on him.

‘To be cured.’ A slight pause. ‘I suppose cured is the right word?’

Rivers said cautiously, ‘Surely it’s better for him to be sent to this psychiatrist than to go to prison?’ In spite of himself he started to smile. ‘Though I can see you might not think so.’

‘He wouldn’t have got prison!’

‘Oh, I think he might. The number of custodial sentences is rising. I think any psychiatrist in London would tell you that.’

Sassoon looked downcast. ‘I thought things were getting better.’

‘I think they were. Before the war. Slightly. But it’s not very likely, is it, that any movement towards greater tolerance would persist in wartime? After all, in war, you’ve got this enormous emphasis on love between men — comradeship — and everybody approves. But at the same time there’s always this little niggle of anxiety. Is it the right kind of love? Well, one of the ways you make sure it’s the right kind is to make it crystal clear what the penalties for the other kind are.’ He looked at Sassoon. ‘One of the reasons I’m so glad you’ve decided to go back. It’s not just police activity. It’s the whole atmosphere at the moment. There’s an MP called Pemberton Billing. I don’t know whether you’ve heard of him?’

Sassoon shook his head. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Well, he’s going around London claiming to know of the existence of a German Black Book containing the names of 47,000 eminent people whose private lives make their loyalty to their country suspect.’

‘Relax, Rivers. I’m not eminent.’

‘No, but you’re a friend of Robert Ross, and you’ve publicly advocated a negotiated peace. That’s enough! You’re vulnerable, Siegfried. There’s no point pretending you’re not.’

‘And what am I supposed to do about it? Toe the line, tailor my opinions —’

‘Not your opinions. I think you told me once that Robert Ross opposes the war? In private.’

‘I wouldn’t want to criticize Ross. I think I know him well enough to understand the impact those trials had on him. But what you’re really saying is, if I ‘can’t conform in one area of life, then I have to conform in the others. Not just the surface things, everything. Even against my conscience. Well, I can’t live like that.’ He paused, then added, ‘Nobody should live like that.’

‘You spend far too much time tilting at windmills, Siegfried. In ways which do you a great deal of damage — which I happen to care about — and don’t do anybody else any good at all.’ He hesitated, then said it anyway. ‘It’s time you grew up. Started living in the real world.’

18

Prior was not making a good impression. Getting a few simple facts out of him was like extracting wisdom teeth. At first Rivers thought Prior was simply being awkward — always a fairly safe assumption with Prior — but then he noted the tension in his jaw and realized the extent of the internal conflict that was going on. Prior had said he wanted nothing more than to get back to France as soon as possible, to get away from what he called ‘the shame’ of home service, and Rivers had no doubt that was true. But it was not the whole truth. He also wanted to save his life, and, in insisting on the importance of the asthmatic attacks, Rivers had, perhaps cruelly, held out the hope that he might be permitted to live. Small wonder, then, that Prior answered questions in monosyllables and finally, when asked whether he felt physically fit for service, said nothing at all, simply stared at Huntley, unable either to claim that he was ill or to deny it. Watching him, Rivers was filled with the most enormous compassion for his dilemma. Poor little blighter, he thought. Poor all of them.

Outside in the waiting room Sassoon looked at his watch. They were running almost an hour late and he wasn’t even next. Pugh was next. Pugh was a Welshman with prominent green eyes and the worst twitch Sassoon had ever seen, even in Craiglockhart, that living museum of tics and twitches. Pugh’s consisted of a violent sideways movement of the head, accompanied by a sound midway between a gasp and a scream. He did this approximately every thirty-five seconds. Like everybody else in the hospital, Sassoon’s reflexes were conditioned by the facts of trench warfare. It was almost impossible for him not to dodge whatever it was Pugh was dodging. Something Owen had told him about Pugh was hovering round the fringes of his mind. Yes, that was it. Some kind of freak accident, a hand grenade bouncing off the wire. Pugh had been picking bits of his platoon off his gas cape for an hour.

Sassoon looked at his watch again. Even allowing for the fact that nobody in their right mind could take long to decide whether Pugh was fit for duty, he couldn’t hope to be out of the place before six. He was supposed to have tea with the Sampsons at four thirty. Even if he left now and caught a tram immediately, he still wouldn’t be on time. It was too bad. People who were prepared to die had at least the right not to be kept waiting. He closed his eyes again. He was so tired he really thought if it wasn’t for Pugh and that dreadful jerking, he might have managed to nod off. He’d hardly slept at all last night.

In his breast pocket was a letter from Joe Cotterill, the Battalion Quartermaster. Sassoon knew it almost off by heart. Joe’s journey to Polygon Wood with the rations, the ground as full of holes as a pepperpot lid, nothing but mud and dead trees as far as the eye could see. They’d spent the night in a shell-hole, lost, under heavy fire. Several of the ration party had been killed. But, said Joe, the battalion got their rations. Reading that, Sassoon had wanted to rush back to France at once, but then, right at the end of the letter, Joe had said: Buck up and get out of there. Go to Parliament. Surely they can’t keep you there against your will? The trouble was, Sassoon thought, sighing and looking at his watch, that Joe’s anonymous ‘they’ was his Rivers.

Thorpe arrived. ‘D-d-d-do w-w-w-wwe kn-kn-know wwhwhat’s t-t-t-t-taking s-s-so l-l-long?’ he asked after a while.

Sassoon shook his head. Pugh shook his head too, though whether in answer to the question it was difficult to tell. And suddenly Sassoon had had enough. ‘And I for one don’t intend to stay and find out.’

He had a fleeting impression of Thorpe and Pugh with their mouths open, and then he was striding out of the room, down the corridor, through the swing doors and away.

‘Pugh next, I think?’ said Bryce.

‘Hang on, old chap,’ Huntley said. ‘Got to pump ship.’

The door closed behind him. Bryce said, ‘Where do you suppose he finds these nautical expressions?’ Receiving no reply, he turned to Rivers.

‘Why we had to take an hour over that I shall never know.’

‘Prior didn’t help himself much, did he?’

Rivers didn’t answer.

‘And at least you got what you wanted. In the end.’

The major came back, buttoning his breeches. ‘All right, all right,’ he said, as if he’d been waiting for them. ‘Let’s get on.’

Pugh was quick and distressing. Since the orderly had gone off to have dinner, Rivers himself went into the waiting room to summon Sassoon. Thorpe was sitting there alone. ‘Have you seen Sassoon?’

‘He’s…’ Thorpe went into one of his paroxysms. ‘G-g-g-g-g-gone.’

‘G-g-?’ Deep breath. ‘Where has he gone?’

Thorpe economized with a shrug. Rivers walked along to the patients’ common room and looked for Sassoon there, and instead found Prior, sitting at the piano picking out a few notes. Prior looked up. Rivers, thinking it was a long time to wait till the result was officially announced, stuck his thumb in the air and smiled.

‘All right, Thorpe,’ he said, going back to the ante-room. ‘You’d better come in.’

Rivers came out of Thorpe’s Board to find Sassoon still missing and Sister Duffy hovering in the corridor, wanting to talk about Prior. ‘Crying his eyes out,’ she said. ‘I thought he’d got permanent home service?’

‘He did.’

Rivers went up to Prior’s room and found him sitting on the bed, not crying now, though rather swollen about the eyes.

‘I suppose I’m expected to be grateful?’

‘No.’

‘Good. Because I’m not.’

Rivers tried to suppress a smile.

‘I told you I didn’t want it.’

‘It’s not a question of what you want, is it? It’s a question of whether you’re fit.’

‘I was all right. It never stopped me doing anything the others did.’

‘Now that’s not quite true, is it? You told me yourself you were excused running through the gas huts, because on the one occasion you tried it, you collapsed. Your participation in gastraining exercises was restricted to listening to lectures. Wasn’t it?’

No response.

‘It’s all very well to joke about being the battalion canary, but it’s true, isn’t it? You would be overcome by gas at much lower concentrations than most people, and that could be very dangerous. And not just for you.’

Prior turned away.

Rivers sighed. ‘You realize the other man who got permanent home service is throwing a party tonight?’

‘Good for him. I hope it’s a good party.’

‘Why do you hate it so much?’

Silence. After a while, Prior said, ‘I suppose I’m not your patient any more, am I?’

‘No.’

‘So I don’t have to put up with this?’

It was on the tip of Rivers’s tongue to point out that the relief was mutual, but he looked at the swollen eyes and restrained himself. ‘What don’t you have to put up with?’

‘The blank wall. The silences. The pretending.’

‘Look. At the moment you hate me because I’ve been instrumental in getting you something you’re ashamed of wanting. I can’t do much about the hatred, but I do think you should look at the shame. Because it’s not really anything to be ashamed of, is it? Wanting to stay alive? You’d be a very strange sort of animal if you didn’t.’

Prior shook his head. ‘You don’t understand.’

‘Tell me, then.’

‘I’ll never know now, will I? About myself…’

‘But you do know. You were a perfectly satisfactory officer, until —’

‘Until the strain got to me and I stopped being a perfectly satisfactory officer. Where does that leave me?’

‘With the whole of your life ahead of you and other challenges to face.’

‘If you were a patient here, don’t you think you’d feel ashamed?’

‘Probably. Because I’ve been brought up the same way as everybody else. But I hope I’d have the sense, or — whatever it is — the intelligence to see how unjustified it was.’

Prior was shaking his head. ‘Not possible. The hoop’s there, you jump through it. If you question it, you’ve failed. If it’s taken away from you, you’ve failed.’

‘No, I don’t see that. If it’s taken away, it’s out of your hands. You didn’t ask for permanent home service. You were given it, on the basis of Eaglesham’s report. Not my report. There’s nothing in your psychological state to prevent your going back.’

Prior didn’t answer. Rivers said gently, ‘Everybody who survives feels guilty. Don’t let it spoil everything.’

‘It’s not that. Well, partly. It’s just that I’ve never let the asthma stop me. I was ordered to stay out of those gas huts, I was quite prepared to go through them. Even as a — a child I was determined it wasn’t going to stop me. I could do anything the others did, and not only that, I could beat them. I’m not suggesting this is peculiar to me, I–I think most asthmatics are like that. My mother was always pulling the other way. Trying to keep me in. I shouldn’t criticize the poor woman, I think she probably saved my life, but she did use it. She wanted me in the house away from all the nasty rough boys. And then suddenly here you are…’ He raised his hands. ‘Doing exactly the same thing.’ He looked at Rivers, a cool, amused, mocking, affectionate, highly intelligent stare. ‘Probably why I never wanted you to be Daddy. I’d got you lined up for a worse fate.’

Rivers, remembering the manny goat, smiled. He was rather glad Prior didn’t have access to his thoughts.

‘Thanks for putting up with me.’

This was muttered so gracelessly Rivers wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly.

‘I was an absolute pig.’

‘Never.’

Prior hesitated. ‘Would you mind if I looked you up after the war?’

‘Mind? I’d be delighted. Though I don’t see why you have to wait till after the war. You can always write to me here. If — if I’ve moved on, they’ll know where I am.’

‘Thanks. I will write.’

At the door Rivers turned. ‘If I don’t see you again before you go, good luck.’

It was an effort to talk at dinner, partly tiredness, partly, Sassoon’s empty place. By now it was clear he’d deliberately skipped the Board. He’d left the Sampsons at six o’clock, but hadn’t yet returned to the hospital. It was possible he was having dinner at the Club, putting off the moment when he’d have to face Rivers, but he was impetuous enough, and perhaps desperate enough, to take the train for London and launch himself into some further crackpot scheme to stop the war. Rivers knew the full extent of the dilemma that would face him if Sassoon had deserted and did make another public protest. He would be asked to take part in declaring him insane; they would never court-martial him. Not now. The casualty lists were too terrible to admit of any public debate on the continuation of the war.

Rivers roused himself to take part in the conversation to find Major Huntley riding one of his hobby horses again. Racial degeneration, this time. The falling birth rate. The need to keep up what he called ‘the supply of heroes’. Did Rivers know that private soldiers were on average five inches shorter than their officers? And yet it was often the better type of woman who chose to limit the size of her family, while her feckless sisters bred the Empire to destruction. Rivers listened as politely as he could to the major’s theories on how the women of Britain might be brought back to a proper sense of their duties, but it was a relief when dinner was over, and he could plead pressure of work and escape to his own room.

He’d left a message with Sister Duffy that Sassoon was to be sent to him as soon as he got back, no matter how late that might be. It was very late indeed. He came in, looking penitent and sheepish.

Rivers said, ‘Sit down.’

Sassoon sat, folded his large hands in his lap, and waited. His demeanour was very much that of a keen, and basically decent, head boy who knows he’s let the headmaster down rather badly, and is probably in for ‘a bit of a wigging’, but expects it to be all right in the end. Nothing could have been more calculated to drive Rivers to fury. ‘I’m sure you have a perfectly satisfactory explanation.’

‘I was late for tea with Sampson.’

Rivers closed his eyes. ‘That’s it?’

‘Yes.’

‘It would have been quite impossible for you to telephone Sampson, and tell him that you were going to be late?’

‘It didn’t seem… courteous. It —’

‘And what about the courtesy due to Major Bryce? Major Huntley? Don’t you think you at least owed them an explanation before you walked out?’

Silence.

‘Why, Siegfried?’

‘I couldn’t face it.’

‘Now that does surprise me. Juvenile behaviour I might have expected from you, but never cowardice.’

‘I’m not offering excuses.’

‘You’re not offering anything. Certainly not reasons.’

‘I’m not sure there are any. I was fed up with being kept waiting. I thought if I was going to die, at least other people could make the effort to be on time. It was…’ A deep breath. ‘Petulance.’

‘So you can’t suggest a reason?’

‘I’ve told you, there aren’t any.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Look, I’ll apologize. I’ll grovel if you like.’

‘I’m not interested in your grovelling. I’d rather you told the truth.’

Sassoon wriggled in his chair. ‘All right. I’ve had this idea floating around in my mind, for… oh, for five or six weeks. I thought if I could get myself passed fit and then go to London, I could see somebody like… Charles Mercier.’

‘Dr Mercier?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why on earth would you want to see him?’

‘For a second opinion. He’s all right, isn’t he?’

‘Oh, yes, you couldn’t do better. Except that… if you’d just been passed fit by the Board — why would you need to see Mercier?’

‘So they couldn’t say I’d had a relapse, if I went on with the protest.’

Rivers sat back in his chair. ‘Oh, I see.’

Silence.

‘And had you definitely decided to do that?’

‘I hadn’t definitely decided anything. If you want the reason I walked out, that’s probably it. It suddenly struck me that in a few hours’ time I’d be packing and I had no idea where I was going. And then at the back of my mind there was the idea that if I went to Mercier I’d be…’

Rivers waited.

‘Doing the dirty on you.’

‘You could’ve had a second opinion at any time. I’d no idea you wanted it. People whose psychiatrists tell them they’re completely sane don’t usually ask for second opinions.’

‘That is what they’d do, though, isn’t it? Say I’d had a relapse?’

‘Yes. Probably. I take it you’ve definitely decided not to go back?’

‘No, I want to go back.’

Rivers slumped in his chair. ‘Thank God. I don’t pretend to understand, but thank God.’ After a while he added, ‘You know the real irony in all this? This morning I had a letter from the War Office. Not exactly an undertaking to send you back, but… signs of progress.’

‘And now I’ve gone and ruined it all by having tea with an astronomer.’

‘Oh, I don’t suppose you have. I’ll write to them tonight.’

Sassoon looked at the clock.

‘Well, we don’t want him hearing it from Huntley, do we? By the way, late as it is, I think Major Bryce would still like to see you.’

Sassoon took the hint and stood up. ‘What do you think he’ll do?’

‘No idea. Roast you, I hope.’

19

Prior had never broken into a house before. Not that he was exactly breaking into this one, he reminded himself, though it felt like it, standing cold and shivering in the back yard, in a recess between what must be, he supposed, the coalhouse and the shithouse. He wrapped his coat more tightly round him and craned his neck to see the sky. Light cloud, no moon, stars pricking through, a snap of frost.

He was waiting for the signal of the lamp at Sarah’s window, but she was a long time coming, and there was a chill inside him that had nothing to do with the cold. The darkness, the nervousness, the repeated unnecessary swallowing… He was back in France, waiting to go out on patrol.

He remembered the feel of No Man’s Land, the vast, unimaginable space. By day, seen through a periscope, this immensity shrank to a small, pock-marked stretch of ground, snarled with wire. You never got used to the discrepancy. Part of its power to compel the imagination lay precisely in that. It was the difference between seeing a mouth ulcer and probing it with your tongue. He told himself he was never going back, he was free, but the word ‘free’ rang hollow. Hurry up, Sarah, he thought.

He was beginning to wonder whether she’d met her landlady on the stairs, when a light appeared at the window. Immediately, he started to climb, clambering from the rusting washer on to the sloping roof of the scullery. Nothing difficult about the climb, the only hazard was the poor state of the tiles. He shuffled along, trying not to make too much noise, though if they did hear they’d probably think it was a cat.

Sarah’s room was on the first floor. As he reached the main wall, he stood up, cautiously, and hooked his fingertips into the crack between two bricks. Sarah’s window was perhaps three feet away, but there was a convenient drainpipe. He swung his left foot out, got a toe-hold on the drainpipe — fortunately in a better state of repair than the roof — and launched himself at the dark hole. He landed safely, though not quietly, colliding with Sarah, who’d come back to see why he was taking so long. They froze, listening for any response. When none came, they looked at each other, and smiled.

Sarah was carrying an oil lamp. She set it down on the table by the bed, and went to draw the curtains. He was glad to have the night shut out, with its memories of fear and worried sentries whispering. She turned back into the room.

They looked at each other, not finding anything to say. The bed, though only a single, seemed very big. Their imminent nakedness made them shy of each other. In all the weeks of love-making, they’d never once been able to undress. Prior was touched by Sarah’s shyness, and a little ashamed of his own.

With an air of unconcern, he started to look round the room. Apart from the bed, there was a bedside table, a chair, a chest of drawers, and a washbasin, squeezed into the corner beside the window. A camisole hung from the back of the chair, and a pair of stays lay on the floor beside it. Sarah, seeing the direction of his gaze, kicked them under the chair.

‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I’m not tidy.’

The sound of his voice released them from nervousness. Prior sat on the bed, and patted it for her to come and sit beside him.

‘We’d better not talk much,’ she said. ‘I told them I’d be late back, but if they hear voices they’ll all be in.’

He couldn’t have talked much anyway; his breath caught in his throat. They stared at each other. He reached up and unpinned her hair, shaking it out at the sides of her head. Then they lay down side by side, still gazing at each other. At this distance, her eyes merged into a single eye, fringed by lashes like prehistoric vegetation, a mysterious, scarcely human pool. They lay like that for ten or fifteen minutes, neither of them wanting to hurry, amazed at the time that lay ahead.

After a while Prior rolled over on to his back and looked at the photograph on the bedside table, moving the lamp so he could see better. A wedding group. Cynthia’s wedding, he thought, and that rather fat, pasty-faced soldier, smiling sheepishly at the centre of the group, must now be dead. People in group photographs look either idiotic or insane, their faces frozen in anticipation of the flash. Not Sarah’s mother. Even in sepia, her eyes jetted sparks. And that jaw. It would’ve been remarkable on a man. ‘Your mother looks like my doctor,’ he said. He looked at the photograph again. ‘She’s not smiling much, is she?’

‘She was smiling at the memorial service.’ She looked at the photograph. ‘I love her, you know.’

‘Of cou…’ He stopped. Why ‘of course’? He didn’t love his father.

‘I’m glad you’re not going back.’

Without warning, Prior saw again the shovel, the sack, the scattered lime. The eyeball lay in the palm of his hand. ‘Yes,’ he said.

She would never know, because he would never tell her. Somehow if she’d known the worst parts, she couldn’t have gone on being a haven for him. He was groping for an idea that he couldn’t quite grasp. Men said they didn’t tell their women about France because they didn’t want to worry them. But it was more than that. He needed her ignorance to hide in. Yet, at the same time, he wanted to know and be known as deeply as possible. And the two desires were irreconcilable.

‘Do you think your mam’ll like me?’

They’d arranged to spend part of his leave together.

‘Not as much as she would if you were going back.’

‘Tell her about me lungs. That’ll cheer her up.’ He felt he knew Ada already.

Sarah rolled over and started to undress him. He pretended to struggle, but she pushed him back on to the bed, and he lay there, shaking with laughter, as she got into a tangle over his puttees. At last she gave up, rested her head on his knees, giggling. ‘They’re like stays.’

‘Don’t tell the War Office. You’ll have a lot of worried men.’

They stopped laughing and looked at each other.

‘I love you,’ he said.

‘Oh, there’s no need to say that.’

‘Yes, there is. It’s true.’

She took her time thinking about it. At last she said on an indrawn breath, ‘Good. I love you too.’

∗

Owen and Sassoon sat in a corner of the lounge at the Conservative Club. They had the room to themselves, except for one other member, and he was half hidden behind the Scotsman. After the waiter had served the brandies and departed, Sassoon produced a book from his pocket. ‘I’d like to read you something. Do you mind?’

‘No, go ahead. Anybody I know?’

‘Alymer Strong. Given to me by the author. He brought me a copy of Lady Margaret’s book and — er — happened to mention he wrote himself. Like a fool, I made encouraging noises.’

‘Not always disastrous. Why am I being read it?’

‘You’ll see. There’s a sort of dedication. In one of the poems.’

Siegfried, thy fathers warr’d

With many a kestrel, mimicking the dove.

Owen looked blank. ‘What does it mean?’

‘What a philistine question. I hope this isn’t the future pig-keeper speaking. I believe it to be a reference to the persecution of the Jews.’

‘But you’re not a Jew.’

‘I am, actually. Or rather my “fathers” were.’

‘I didn’t know that.’ Owen contemplated the fact through a haze of burgundy. ‘That’s why you’re called Siegfried?’

‘No-o, I’m called Siegfried because my mother liked Wagner. And the only thing I have in common with orthodox Jews is that I do profoundly thank God I was born a man and not a woman. If I were a woman, I’d be called Brünnhilde.’

‘This is our last evening and I feel as if I’ve just met you.’

‘You know all the important things.’

They looked at each other. Then a rustling of the Scotsman’s pages returned their attention to the book. Sassoon began reading extracts, and Owen, who was drunk and afraid of becoming too serious, laughed till he choked. Sassoon had begun by declaiming the verse solemnly, but when he came to:

Can it be I have become

This gourd, this gothic vaccu-um?

he burst out laughing. ‘Oh, I love that. You might like this better.’

What cassock’d misanthrope,

Hawking peace-canticles for glory-gain,

Hymns from his rostrum’d height th’ epopt of Hate?

‘The what of hate?’

‘Epopt.’

‘No such word.’

‘There is, you know. It’s the heroic form of epogee.’

‘Can I see?’ Owen read the poem. ‘This man’s against the war.’

‘Oh, yes.’ Sassoon’s lips twitched. ‘And particularly devastated by the role the Christian Church is playing in it. The parallels are worrying, Owen.’

‘I’m worried.’ He made to hand the book back. ‘It’s incredible, isn’t it?’

‘No, look inside.’

Owen looked at the flyleaf and read: Owen. From S.S. Edinburgh. Oct. 26th 1917. Underneath Sassoon had written:

When Captain Cook first sniffed the wattle,

And Love columbus’d Aristotle.

‘That’s absolutely typical,’ Owen said.

‘It does rather encapsulate his style, doesn’t it?’

‘You know what I mean. The only slightly demonstrative thing you’ve ever done and you do it in a way which makes it impossible to take seriously.’

‘Do you think it’s a good idea to be serious tonight?’

‘For God’s sake, I’m only going to Scarborough. You’ll be in France before I will.’

‘I hope so.’

‘No news from the War Office?’

‘No. And Rivers dropped a bombshell this morning. He’s leaving.’

‘Is he?’

‘I don’t look forward to Craiglockhart without either of you. I did mention you to Rivers, you know.’

‘What did he say?’

‘That you were an extremely gallant and conscientious young officer…’

‘ “Ooob”. Who needed no one to teach him his duty. Unlike dot dot dot. And there were no grounds at all that he could see for keeping you at the hospital a moment longer. I think he was a bit put out about being asked to overrule Brock.’

‘I’m not surprised. You shouldn’t have done it. Look, I could do a lot with another month. I bate leaving. But the fact is I’d be taking up a bed some other poor blighter needs far more than I do.’

‘As I shall be doing.’

‘I didn’t mean that.’

‘No, but it’s true.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I’d better be off. Under the new regime I believe the penalty for staying out late is public crucifixion.’

In the hall Sassoon produced an envelope from his breast pocket. ‘This is a letter of introduction to Robert Ross. It’s sealed because there’s something else inside, but that doesn’t mean you can’t read it.’

Owen tried to think of something to say and failed.

‘Take care.’

‘And you.’

Sassoon patted him on the shoulder, and was gone. Nothing else, not even ‘goodbye’. Perhaps it was better that way, Owen thought, going back to the lounge. Better for Siegfried, anyway. Their empty brandy glasses stood together on the table, in the pool of light cast by the standard lamp, but the unseen listener had gone. The Scotsman, neatly folded, lay on a table by the door.

Owen sat down, got out the letter of introduction, but didn’t immediately open it. The ticking of the clock was very loud in the empty room. He lay back in the chair and closed his eyes. He was afraid to measure his sense of loss.

20

Rivers was due to leave Craiglockhart on 14 November, having fulfilled his promise to Bryce to see the new CO in. He was leaving in what he considered a totally undeserved blaze of glory. Willard was walking at last. Rivers could understand the VADs, the orderlies, the secretaries and the kitchen staff regarding this ‘cure’ as a great medical feat, but it was a little dismaying to find that even some of the senior nursing staff seemed to agree.

Willard himself was exasperating. All Rivers’s efforts to inculcate insight into his condition, to enable him to understand why he’d been in the wheelchair and how the same outcome might be avoided in future, were met with a stare of glassy-eyed, quivering respect. Whenever Rivers came anywhere near him, Willard positively leapt to the salute. He knew his spinal cord had been broken. He knew Rivers had reconnected the severed ends. Needless to say the other MOs were unimpressed. Indeed, after observing Rivers acknowledge one particularly sizzling salute, Brock was heard to murmur: ‘And for my next trick I shall walk on water.’

The last evening round was distressing both for Rivers and the patients. He left Sassoon till last and then, remembering that he’d spent the day with Lady Ottoline Morrell and had, presumably, been exposed to a great dose of pacifist propaganda, went along to his room.

Sassoon was sitting on the floor, hands clasped around his knees, staring into the fire.

‘How was Lady Ottoline?’ Rivers said, taking the only chair. ‘In full cry?’

‘Not really. The war was hardly mentioned.’

‘Oh?’

‘No, we talked about Carpenter mainly. Homosexuality. Or rather I talked. She listened.’

Poor Lady Ottoline. ‘The war didn’t come up at all?’

‘Not today. Last night it did. I think we both knew there was no point going over that again. Do you know what she asked me? Did I realize that going back would involve killing Germans?’ He brought his anger under control. ‘Pacifists can be amazingly brutal.’

That brief flash of anger was the only emotion Sassoon had shown since skipping the Board. He seemed at times to be almost unaware of his surroundings, as if he could get through this interim period between one Board and the next only by shutting down all awareness of where he was or what was happening. And yet he was writing, and he seemed to think he was writing well. All the anger and grief now went into the poetry. He’d given up hope of influencing events. Or perhaps he’d just given up hope. At the back of Rivers’s mind was the fear that Craiglockhart had done to Sassoon what the Somme and Arras had failed to do. And if that were so, he couldn’t escape responsibility.

Sassoon roused himself. ‘You’re off first thing, aren’t you?’

‘Yes. The six o’clock.’

‘So this is goodbye, then.’

‘Only for a fortnight. I’ll be back for the Board. Meanwhile…’ He stood up. ‘Keep your head down?’

Rivers stayed overnight with the Heads and then moved into his new lodgings in Holford Road, a short walk from the RFC hospital. The floor below was occupied by a family of Belgian refugees whose demands for better food and apparent indifference to rationing irritated the landlady, Mrs Irving, beyond measure. She was inclined to stop Rivers on the stairs and complain about them at considerable length. The other lodgers were apparently more easily satisfied, and gave no grounds for complaint.

The nights were disturbed by air raids, though less by German action than by the guns on the Heath that boomed out with a sound like bombs falling. Everybody congregated in the basement during these raids, the Belgian refugees, Mrs Irving, her unmarried daughter who worked at the hospital, all the other lodgers, and the two young girls who lived in the attics and between them did the whole work of the house. As far as he could make out, they sat around, or under, the table, venturing out to the kitchen to make endless cups of cocoa. He was invited to join these parties, but always declined, saying that the air raids didn’t bother him much and he needed his sleep.

He managed to sleep through some of the raids, but on other nights, the guns made sleep impossible. He was not particularly well, but he didn’t want to take more sick leave, and he had no routine leave due to him. He spent a lot of the time with the Heads, who turned up one night and swept him off to the theatre to see the Russian ballet. They came out, still dazed with swirling light and colour, to find another raid in progress. In Leicester Square they stopped and looked up at the sky, and there was a Zeppelin floating like a strange, silver fish. Rumour had it they were piloted by women. It seemed incredible to Rivers that anybody should believe this, but he soon discovered that most people did. Mrs Irving knew it for a fact.

As soon as he started work at the hospital he became busy and, as Head had predicted, fascinated by the differences in severity of breakdown between the different branches of the RFC. Pilots, though they did indeed break down, did so less frequently and usually less severely than the men who manned observation balloons. They, floating helplessly above the battlefields, unable either to avoid attack or to defend themselves effectively against it, showed the highest incidence of breakdown of any service. Even including infantry officers. This reinforced Rivers’s view that it was prolonged strain, immobility and helplessness that did the damage, and not the sudden shocks or bizarre horrors that the patients themselves were inclined to point to as the explanation for their condition. That would help to account for the greater prevalence of anxiety neuroses and hysterical disorders in women in peacetime, since their relatively more confined lives gave them fewer opportunities of reacting to stress in active and constructive ways. Any explanation of war neurosis must account for the fact that this apparently intensely masculine life of war and danger and hardship produced in men the same disorders that women suffered from in peace.

So he had plenty to think about, and before long it was clear he would have plenty to do. Many of his old Craiglockhart patients who were living in London or the south of England had already written to ask if they could come to see him. That, by itself, would supply him with a great deal of work.

He was due back at Craiglockhart on the 25th of November. On the 24th he’d accepted an invitation to visit Queen Square. The invitation had been issued several times before and he’d always found a reason for refusing, but now that he was one of the small number of physicians in London dealing with the psycho-neuroses of war, he judged it rather more expedient than pleasant that he should accept. And so, at half past nine on the 24th November, he walked up the steps of the National Hospital. His night had been even more disturbed by the guns than usual, and he was feeling distinctly unwell. If he’d been able to cancel or postpone this visit without giving offence, he would certainly have done so. He gave his name to the receptionist. Dr Yealland was expecting him, she said. Go up.

He took the lift to the third floor. He pushed through the swing doors on to a long, empty, shining corridor, which, as he began to walk down it, seemed to elongate. He began to be afraid he was really ill. This deserted corridor in a hospital he knew to be overcrowded had something eerie about it. Uncanny. Almost the feeling his patients described, talking about their experience of the front, of No Man’s Land, that landscape apparently devoid of life that actually contained millions of men.

The swing doors at the far end of the corridor flapped open. At first Rivers was pleased, expecting to be received by some bustling nurse or VAD, but instead a creature — it hardly resembled a man — crawled through the door and began moving towards him. The figure made remarkably rapid progress for somebody so bent, so apparently deformed. His head was twisted to one side, and drawn back, the spine bent so that the chest was parallel with the legs, which themselves were bent at the knees. In addition one arm, the left, was pulled away from the body and contracted. The right hand clung to the rail, not sliding along it, but brought forward step by step, making repeated slapping sounds on the wood.

As they converged, the man turned his head, insofar as he was able to turn it, and stared up at Rivers. Probably this was dictated by no more than the curiosity patients always feel at the appearance of a doctor on wards where nothing else ever happens, but it seemed to Rivers that his expression was both sombre and malevolent. He had to drag his own gaze away. At that moment a VAD came out of a side ward and said in that bracingly jolly way of theirs, ‘Nearly ten o’clock. Let’s have you in bed.’

The morning round. Rivers wondered if he was in for that.

He was. Yealland came out of his room, flanked by two junior doctors, shook hands briskly and said that he thought the best general introduction was perhaps simply a ward round.

The party consisted of Yealland, the two junior doctors who were being put through their paces, a ward sister, who made no contribution and was invited to make none, and a couple of orderlies who hovered in the background in case they were required to lift. Yealland was an impressive figure. In conversation he did not merely meet your eye, but stared so intently that you felt your skull had become transparent. His speech was extremely precise. Something in this steady, unrelenting projection of authority made Rivers want to laugh, but he didn’t think he’d have wanted to laugh if he’d been a junior doctor or a patient.

They did the post-treatment ward first. The bulk of the conversation was between Yealland and the two junior doctors, with occasional asides to Rivers. Contact with patients was restricted to a brisk, cheerful, authoritative greeting. No questions were asked about their psychological state. Many of them, Rivers thought, showed signs of depression, but in every case the removal of the physical symptom was described as a cure. Most of these patients would be out within a week, Yealland said. Rivers asked questions about the relapse rate, the suicide rate, and received the expected reply. Nobody knew.

The admissions ward was next. An immensely long ward, lined with white-covered beds packed close together. On both sides windows reached from floor to ceiling, and the room was flooded with cold northern light. The patients, many displaying bizarre contractures of their limbs, sat, if they were capable of sitting, upright in their beds, as near to attention as they could get. Rivers’s corridor acquaintance was just inside the room, lying face down on his bed, buttocks in the air, presumably the only position he was capable of maintaining. It couldn’t be said he added to the desired impression of tidiness, but the nurses had done their best. The little procession came to a halt by his bed.

Yealland’s previous performance had been perfunctory. Rivers suspected he lost interest in the patients once the miracle had been worked. Now, though, he turned to Rivers with real zest. ‘This one’s fairly typical,’ he said, and nodded to the ginger-haired doctor.

A shell had exploded close to the patient, who had been buried up to the neck and had remained in that position for some time under continued heavy fire. For two or three days after being dug out he’d been dazed, though he did have a vague recollection of the explosion. Six weeks later he’d been sent to England, to a hospital in Eastbourne where he’d been treated with physical exercises. During this time the abnormal flexure of the spine had grown worse.

The sheets were pulled back. It was not possible to bend the trunk passively, the doctor said, demonstrating. The patient couldn’t eat from a table and, as they could all see, he couldn’t lie straight in bed. He complained of considerable pain in the head, which was worse at night. And when he woke up there were coloured lights dancing in front of his eyes. Some right hemianalgesia was present. There was tenderness — probing — from the sixth dorsal spine down to the lumbar region. Free, but not excessive, perspiration of the feet. A mark made on the sole of the foot lasted an abnormally long time.

‘And?’ Yealland said.

The young man looked frightened, a fear Rivers remembered only too clearly. The missing fact came to him just in time. ‘No sign of organic disease,’ he finished triumphantly.

‘Good. So at least we may be encouraged to believe the patient is in the right hospital?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Yealland walked to the head of the bed. ‘You will receive treatment this afternoon,’ he said. ‘I shall begin by making your back straight. This will be done by the application of electricity to your spine and back. You have power to raise your head, indeed you can even extend it. I am sure you understand the pain is due to the position you assume. The muscles are in too great a stretch and there is no relief, because even when you rest the same position is maintained. The electricity may be strong, but it will be the means of restoring your lost powers — the power to straighten your back.’

It was extraordinary. If Yealland had appeared authoritative before, it was nothing compared with the almost God-like tone he now assumed. The patient was looking distinctly alarmed. ‘Will it hurt?’ he asked.

Yealland said: ‘I realize you did not intend to ask that question and so I will overlook it. I am sure you understand the principles of the treatment, which are…’ He paused, as if expecting the patient to supply them. ‘Attention, first and foremost; tongue, last and least; questions, never. I shall see you this afternoon.’

And so on round the ward. Yealland stopped in some triumph by the last bed. ‘Now this is interesting.’

Rivers had been aware of this patient ever since they entered the ward. He sat up very straight in bed, and followed their progress with an air of brooding antagonism.

‘Callan,’ Yealland said. ‘Mons, the Marne, Aisne, first and second Ypres, Hill 60, Neuve-Chapelle, Loos, Armentières, the Somme and Arras.’ He looked at Callan. ‘Have I missed any?’

Callan obviously heard the question, but made no response. His eyes flicked from Yealland to Rivers, whom he looked up and down dispassionately. Yealland leant closer to Rivers and murmured, ‘Very negative attitude.’ He nodded to the junior doctor to begin.

Callan had broken down in April. He’d been employed behind the lines on transport at the time, perhaps because his nervous state was already giving cause for concern. While feeding the horses, he had suddenly fallen down, and had remained unconscious for a period of five hours. When he came round, he was shaking all over and was unable to speak. He hadn’t spoken at all since then. He attributed his loss of speech to heatstroke.

‘Methods of treatment?’ Yealland asked.

The patient had been strapped to a chair for periods of twenty minutes at a time, and very strong electric current applied to his neck and throat. Hot plates had been applied repeatedly to the back of the throat, and lighted cigarettes to the tongue.

‘I’m sorry?’ Rivers said. ‘What was that?’

‘Lighted cigarettes to the tongue. Sir.’

‘None of it persevered with,’ Yealland said. ‘It’s the worst possible basis for treatment because the electricity’s been tried and he knows — or thinks he knows — that it doesn’t work.’ He walked to the head of the bed. ‘Do you wish to be cured? Nod if you do.’

Callan smiled.

‘You appear to me to be very indifferent to your condition, but indifference will not do in such times as these. I have seen many patients suffering from similar conditions, and not a few in whom the disorder has existed for a much longer time. It has been my experience with these cases to find two kinds of patients, those who want to recover and those who do not want to recover. I understand your condition thoroughly and it makes no difference to me which group you belong to. You must recover your speech at once.’

As they were leaving the ward, Yealland drew him aside. ‘Do you have time to witness a treatment?’

‘Yes. I’d very much like to.’ Apart from anything else he was curious to know how strong ‘strong’ was when describing an electric current. It was a matter on which published papers were apt to be reticent. ‘Would it be possible for me to see the man we’ve just left?’

‘Yes. Though it won’t be quick. And I can’t interrupt the treatment.’

‘That’s all right. I’ve no afternoon appointments. I’d like to see him because of the the previous failed treatments.’

‘Oh, quite right. He’s the interesting one. The others are just routine.’

They were walking down to the MOs’ dining room for lunch.

‘You do only one session?’ Rivers asked.

‘Yes. The patient has to know when he enters the electrical room that there’s no way out except by a full recovery.’ Yealland hesitated. ‘I normally do treatments alone.’

‘I’ll be as unobtrusive as I can.’

Yealland nodded. ‘Good. The last thing these patients need is a sympathetic audience.’

21

After lunch they went straight to the electrical room. Rivers sat on a hard chair in the corner, prepared to stay as long as necessary. The only other furniture was a small desk under the tall window, with a stack of buff-coloured files on it, the battery and the patient’s chair, rather like a dentist’s chair, except for the straps on the arms and around the foot rest. Yealland, who’d been emptying his bladder in preparation for a long session, came in, rubbing his hands. He nodded cheerfully to Rivers, but didn’t speak. Then, rather to Rivers’s surprise, he began pulling down the blinds. The blinds were the thick, efficient blinds of wartime, and after he’d finished not a chink of light from the dank, November day could get into the room. Rivers now expected him to turn on the overhead lights, but he didn’t. Instead, he left the room in darkness, except for a small circle of light round the battery. This light was reflected off his white coat and up on to his face.

Callan was brought in. He looked indifferent, or defiant, though once he was settled in the chair his eyes shifted from side to side in a way that suggested fear.

‘I am going to lock the door,’ Yealland said. He returned to stand before the patient, ostentatiously dropping the key into his top pocket. ‘You must talk before you leave me.’

All very well, Rivers thought. But Yealland had locked himself in as well as the patient. There could be no backing down.

Yealland put the pad electrode on the lumbar spines and began attaching the long pharyngeal electrode. ‘You will not leave me,’ he said, ‘until you are talking as well as you ever did. No, not a minute before.’

The straps on the chair were left unfastened. Yealland inserted a tongue depressor. Callan neither co-operated nor struggled, but simply sat with his mouth wide open and his head thrown back. Then the electrode was applied to the back of his throat. He was thrown back with such force that the leads were ripped out of the battery. Yealland removed the electrode. ‘Remember you must behave as becomes the hero I expect you to be,’ Yealland said. ‘A man who has been through so many battles should have a better control of himself.’ He fastened the straps round Callan’s wrists and feet. ‘Remember you must talk before you leave me.’

Callan was white and shaking, but it was impossible to tell how much pain he was in, since obviously he could no more scream than he could speak. Yealland applied the electrode again, continuously, but evidently with a weaker current since Callan was not thrown back. ‘Nod to me when you are ready to attempt to speak.’

It took an hour. Rivers during all that time scarcely moved. His empathy with the man in the chair kept him still, since Callan himself never moved, except once to flex the fingers of his strapped hands. At last he nodded. Immediately the electrode was removed, and after a great deal of effort Callan managed to say ‘ah’ in a sort of breathy whisper.

Yealland said, ‘Do you realize that there is already an improvement? Do you appreciate that a result has already been achieved? Small as it may seem to you, if you will consider rationally for yourself, you will believe me when I tell you that you will be talking before long.’

The electrode was applied again. Yealland started going through the sounds of the alphabet: ah, bah, cah, dah, etc., encouraging Callan to repeat the sounds after him, though only ‘ah’ was repeated. Whenever Callan said ‘ah’ on request, the electrode was momentarily removed. Whenever he substituted ‘ah’ for other sounds, the current was reapplied.

They had now been in the room an hour and a half. Callan was obviously exhausted. Despite the almost continuous application of the electric current he was actually beginning to drop off to sleep. Yealland evidently sensed he was losing his patient’s attention and unstrapped him. ‘Walk up and down,’ he said.

Callan did as he was bid, and Yealland walked beside him, encouraging him to repeat the sounds of the alphabet, though, again, only ‘ah’ was produced and that in a hoarse whisper, very far back in the throat. Callan stumbled as he walked, and Yealland supported him. Up and down they went, up and down, in and out of the circle of light around the battery.

Rebellion came at last. Callan wrenched his arm out of Yealland’s grasp and ran to the door. Evidently he’d forgotten it was locked, though he remembered at once and turned on Yealland.

Yealland said, ‘Such an idea as leaving me now is most ridiculous. You cannot leave the room. The door is locked and the key is in my pocket. You will leave me when you are cured, remember, not before. I have no doubt you are tired and discouraged, but that is not my fault; the reason is that you do not understand your condition as I do, and the time you have already spent with me is not long in comparison with the time I am prepared to stay with you. Do you understand me?’

Callan looked at Yealland. For a second the thought of striking him was clearly visible, but then Callan seemed to admit defeat. He pointed to the battery and then to his mouth, miming: Get on with it.

‘No,’ Yealland said. ‘The time for more electrical treatment has not yet come; if it had, I should give it to you. Suggestions are not wanted from you; they are not needed. When the time comes for more electricity, you will be given it whether you want it or not.’ He paused. Then added with great emphasis: ‘You must speak, but I shall not listen to anything you have to say.’

They walked up and down again, Callan still repeating ‘ah’, but making no other sound. The ‘ah’ was produced by an almost superhuman effort, the muscles of the neck in spasm, the head raised in a series of jerks. Even the torso and the arms were involved in the immense effort of pushing this sound across his lips. Rivers had to stop himself trying to make the sound for him. He was himself very tense; all the worst memories of his stammer came crowding into his mind.

Yealland said, ‘You are now ready for the next stage of treatment, which consists of the administration of strong shocks to the outside of the neck. These will be transmitted to your voice box and you will soon be able to say anything you like in a whisper.’

Callan was again placed in the chair and again strapped in. The key electrode was applied in short bursts to his neck in the region of the larynx, Yealland repeating ‘ah, bah, cah, dah’, etc. in time with the shocks. On the third repetition of the alphabet, Callan suddenly said ‘ba’. Instead of attempting the next sound, he went on repeating ‘ba’, not loudly, but venomously. ‘Bah, bah’, and then, unmistakably ‘Baaaa! Baaaaa! Baaaaaa!’

Yealland actually looked gratified. He said, ‘Are you not glad you have made such progress?’

Callan started to cry. For a while there was no other sound in the room than his sobbing. Then he wiped his eyes on the back of his hand and mimed a request for water.

‘Yes, you will have water soon. Just as soon as you can utter a word.’

Callan pushed Yealland aside and ran to the door, rattling the handle, beating on the wood with his clenched fists. Rivers couldn’t bear to go on watching. He looked down at the backs of his clasped hands.

Yealland said, ‘You will leave this room when you are speaking normally. I know you do not want the treatment suspended now you are making such progress. You are a noble fellow and these ideas which come into your mind and make you want to leave me do not represent your true self. I know you are anxious to be cured and are happy to have recovered to such an extent; now you are tired and cannot think properly, but you must make every effort to think in the manner characteristic of your true self: a hero of Mons.’

Perhaps Callan remembered, as Yealland apparently did not, that Mons had been a defeat. At any rate he went back to the chair.

‘You must utter a sound,’ Yealland said. ‘I do not care what the nature of the sound is. You will understand me when I say I shall be able to train any sound into the production of vowel sounds, then into letter sounds, and finally into words and sentences. Utter a sound when you take a deep breath, and as soon as I touch your throat.’

Callan, although he appeared to be co-operating, could make no expiratory sound.

Yealland appeared to lose patience. He clamped his hands down on to Callan’s wrists and said, ‘This has gone on long enough. I may have to use a stronger current. I do not want to hurt you, but if necessary I must.’

Rivers couldn’t tell whether the anger was acted or real, but there was no doubt about the strength of the current being applied to the neck in shock after shock. But it worked. Soon Callan was repeating ‘ah’ at a normal pitch, then other sounds, then words. At this point Yealland stopped the use of electricity, and Callan sagged forward in the chair. He looked as if he were going to fall, but the straps held him in place. ‘Go on repeating the days,’ Yealland said.

‘S-s-s-sunday. M-m-m-m-m-monday. T-t-t-t-tuesday…’

Saturday came at last.

Yealland said, ‘Remember there is no way out, except by the return of your proper voice and by that door. I have one key, you have the other. When you can talk properly, I shall open the door and you can go back to the ward.’

And so it went on, through the alphabet, the days of the week, the months of the year — the shocks sometimes mild, sometimes extremely strong — until he was speaking normally. As soon as he could say words clearly at a normal pitch, he developed a spasm or tremor — not unlike paralysis agitans — in his left arm. Yealland applied a roller electrode to the arm. The tremor then reappeared in the right arm, then the left leg, and finally the right leg, each appearance being treated with the application of the electrode. Finally the cure was pronounced complete. Callan was permitted to stand up. ‘Are you not pleased to be cured?’ Yealland asked.

Callan smiled.

‘I do not like your smile,’ Yealland said. ‘I find it most objectionable. Sit down.’

Callan sat.

‘This will not take a moment,’ Yealland said. ‘Smile.’

Callan smiled and the key electrode was applied to the side of his mouth. When he was finally permitted to stand up again, he no longer smiled.

‘Are you not pleased to be cured?’ Yealland repeated.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Nothing else?’

A fractional hesitation. Then Callan realized what was required and came smartly to the salute. ‘Thank you, sir.’

22

That evening after dinner Rivers tried to work on a paper he was due to give to the Royal Society of Medicine in December. As he read through what he’d written, he became aware that he was being haunted by images. The man in the corridor at Queen Square, Yealland’s hands, Callan’s open mouth, the two figures, doctor and patient, walking up and down, in and out of the circle of light round the battery. It was unusual for Rivers to visualize as intensely as this, indeed to visualize at all, but then the whole experience, from beginning to end, had had something… hallucinatory about it.

Rivers left the typewriter and went to sit in his armchair by the fire. As soon as he abandoned the attempt to concentrate on the paper, he knew he was ill. He was sweating, his heart pounded, pulses all over his body throbbed, and he felt again that extraordinary sensation of blood squeezing through his veins. He thought he might have a slight temperature, but he never, as a matter of principle, took his own temperature or measured his pulse. There were depths of neuroticism to which he was not prepared to sink.

His confrontation with Yealland had exhausted him, for, however polite they had each been to each other, it had been a confrontation. He was too tired to go on working, but he knew if he went to bed in this state he wouldn’t sleep, even if there was no disturbance from the guns. He decided to take a turn on the Heath, fetched his greatcoat from the peg and crept downstairs. Mrs Irving was a pleasant enough woman, but she was also a very lonely woman, and inclined to air her grievances about the excessive demands of Belgian refugees. He reached the bottom of the stairs, listened a moment, then quietly let himself out of the house.

He felt his way along the dark street. Shuttered windows, like blind eyes, watched from either side. It was something new this darkness, like the deep darkness of the countryside. Even on the Heath, where normally London was spread out before you in a blaze of light, there was only darkness, and again darkness. Starlight lay on the pond, waking a dull gleam, like metal. Nothing else. He started to walk round the edge, trying to empty his mind of Queen Square, but the images floated before him like specks in the eye. Again and again he saw Callan’s face, heard his voice repeating simple words, a grotesque parody of Adam naming created things. He felt pursued. There they were, the two of them, Yealland and his patient, walking up and down inside his head. Uninvited. If this was what habitual visualizers experienced, he could only say he found it most unpleasant.

He stopped and looked at the pond. He was aware of rustling, dragging footsteps. Somebody bumped into him and muttered something, but he moved away. By the time he got back to his lodgings he felt much better, well enough to greet Mrs Irving in the hall and compliment her on a more than adequate dinner.

Back in his own rooms he went straight to bed. The sheets felt cold, so cold he again wondered if he was running a temperature, but at least the palpitations and the breathlessness had gone. He thought he might manage to sleep if the Zeppelins and the guns allowed it, and indeed he did fall asleep almost as soon as he turned off the light.

He was walking down the corridor at Queen Square, an immensely long corridor which elongated as he walked along it, like a strip of elastic at full stretch. The swing doors at the far end opened and shut, flap-flapping an unnaturally long time, like the wings of an ominous bird. Clinging to the rail, the deformed man watched him approach. The eyes swivelled to follow him. The mouth opened and out of it came the words: I am making this protest on behalf of my fellow-soldiers because I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.

The words echoed along the white corridor. Abruptly the dream changed. He was in the electrical room, a pharyngeal electrode in his hand, a man’s open mouth in front of him. He saw the moist, pink interior, the delicately quivering uvula, the yellowish, gramy surface of the tongue, and the tonsils, like great swollen, blue-purple eggs. He slipped the tongue depressor in, and tried to apply the electrode, but the electrode, for some reason, wouldn’t fit. He tried to force it. The man struggled and bucked beneath him, and, looking down, he saw that the object he was holding was a horse’s bit. He’d already done a lot of damage. The corners of the man’s mouth were raw, flecked with blood and foam, but still he went on, trying to force the bit into the mouth, until a cry from the patient woke him. He sat up, heart pounding, and realized he had himself cried out. For a second the dream was so real that he went on seeing the chair, the battery, the tortured mouth. Then, nothing. Gradually, his heart beat returned to normal, though when he got out of bed and went across to sit by the window the small effort made it pound again.

No raid tonight. It was ironic that on this one quiet night he should have woken himself up with a nightmare. As with all nightmares, the horror lingered. He was still inclined to accuse himself. That, he thought — self-reproach — had been the dominant affect. At first he was inclined to connect it with the quasi-sexual imagery of the dream, for the dream action had been both an accurate representation of Yealland’s treatment and uncomfortably like an oral rape. He didn’t feel, however, that the underlying conflict had been sexual.

The manifest content came from his visit to Queen Square, and was present with relatively little transformation. There was no doubt that the visit had been rife with opportunities for conflict. From the beginning he’d felt a tension between, on the one hand, his sympathy for the patients, his doubts about the quality of the treatment they were receiving, and on the other, the social and professional demands on him to be reasonably polite. As the day had gone on, this conflict had certainly deepened. Over lunch Yealland had told him about an officer patient of his who stammered badly, and whom Yealland had cured in — as usual — one session. Rivers — to his own amusement and exasperation — had responded to the story by beginning to stammer rather badly. And whenever he’d hesitated over a word, he’d sensed Yealland calculating the voltage. All nonsense of course. He’d been more amused by the situation than anything else, but nevertheless the worsening of his stammer did point to an underlying conflict that might well find expression in a dream.

The man in the corridor with the spinal contracture seemed to represent Sassoon, since he’d quoted the Declaration, though it was difficult to imagine anybody more physically unlike Sassoon than that deformed, pseudo-dwarf. And the expression of antagonism — that certainly didn’t correspond with anything in the real Sassoon’s attitude towards him. But then there was no reason why it should. The dream action is the creation of the dreamer. The mood of this dream, a mood so powerful he could still not shake it off, was one of the most painful self-accusation. The man’s expression need reflect no more than his feeling that Sassoon, perhaps, had grounds for antagonism.

He hadn’t been able to see the face of the second patient, and had no clear sense of who it was. The obvious candidate was Callan, since it was Callan he’d watched being treated. And Callan had been working with horses when he became mute, which might account for the bit. And yet he was fairly certain the dream patient had not been Callan.

On the wards he’d been struck by a slight facial resemblance between Callan and Prior, who had also been mute when he arrived at Craiglockhart. He remembered an incident shortly after Prior’s arrival when he’d dragged a teaspoon across the back of his throat, hoping that the choking reflex would trigger the return of speech. This did sometimes happen. He’d seen more than one patient recover his voice in that way. But he’d tried it while in a state of acute irritation with Prior, and the choking had occasioned a momentary spasm of satisfaction. Very slight, but enough to make him feel, in retrospect, discontented with his own behaviour. Mute patients did arouse exasperation, particularly, as with both Prior and Callan, when their satisfaction with their condition was hardly at all disguised. Perhaps the dream patient was a composite figure, part Callan, part Prior, the combination suggested by his application of a teaspoon to Prior’s throat and Yealland’s application of an electrode to Callan’s.

But there was no comparison in the amount of pain inflicted. On the face of it he seemed to be congratulating himself on dealing with patients more humanely than Yealland, but then why the mood of self-accusation? In the dream he stood in Yealland’s place. The dream seemed to be saying, in dream language, don’t flatter yourself. There is no distinction.

A horse’s bit. Not an electrode, not a teaspoon. A bit. An instrument of control. Obviously he and Yealland were both in the business of controlling people. Each of them fitted young men back into the role of warrior, a role they had — however unconsciously — rejected. He’d found himself wondering once or twice recently what possible meaning the restoration of mental health could have in relation to his work. Normally a cure implies that the patient will no longer engage in behaviour that is clearly self-destructive. But in present circumstances, recovery meant the resumption of activities that were not merely self-destructive but positively suicidal. But then in a war nobody is a free agent. He and Yealland were both locked in, every bit as much as their patients were.

Bits. The scold’s bridle used to silence recalcitrant women in the Middle Ages. More recently, on American slaves. And yet on the ward, listening to the list of Callan’s battles, he’d felt that nothing Callan could say could have been more powerful than his silence. Later, in the electrical room, as Callan began slowly to repeat the alphabet, walking up and down with Yealland, in and out of the circle of light, Rivers had felt that he was witnessing the silencing of a human being. Indeed, Yealland had come very close to saying just that. ‘You must speak, but I shall not listen to anything you have to say.’

Silencing, then. The task of silencing somebody, with himself in Yealland’s place and an unidentified patient in the chair. It was possible to escape still, to pretend the dream accusation was general. Just as Yealland silenced the unconscious protest of his patients by removing the paralysis, the deafness, the blindness, the muteness that stood between them and the war, so, in an infinitely more gentle way, he silenced his patients; for the stammerings, the nightmares, the tremors, the memory lapses, of officers were just as much unwitting protest as the grosser maladies of the men.

But he didn’t believe in the general accusation. He didn’t believe this was what the dream was saying. Dreams were detailed, concrete, specific: the voice of the protopathic heard at last, as one by one the higher centres of the brain closed down. And he knew who the patient in the chair was. Not Callan, not Prior. Only one man was being silenced in the way the dream indicated. He told himself that the accusation was unjust. It was Sassoon’s decision to abandon the protest, not his. But that didn’t work. He knew the extent of his own influence.

He went on sitting by the window as dawn grew over the Heath, and felt that he was having to appeal against conviction in a courtroom where he himself had been both judge and jury.

23

Head’s room was very quiet. The tall windows that overlooked the square were shrouded in white net. Outside was a day of moving clouds and fitful sunlight, and whenever the sun shone, the naked branches of plane trees patterned the floor. So Head’s patients must sit, hour after hour, with those bright, rather prominent eyes fixed on them, while elsewhere in the house doors banged and a telephone started to ring. But there the normality of the ‘consultation’ ended, for Head would never, not even under the most extreme provocation, have told a patient that he was talking a load of self-indulgent rubbish. Rivers opened his mouth to protest and was waved into silence.

‘All right,’ Head swept on. ‘He’s muddle-headed, immature, liable to fits of enthusiasm, inconsistent. All of that. But… And he virtually had no father and he’s put you in his father’s place. But, he’s also’ — ticking off on his fingers — ‘brave, capable of resisting any amount of pressure — the mere fact he protested at all in the present climate tells us that — and above all — no, let me finish — he has integrity. Everything you’ve told me about him suggests he was always going to go back, as soon as he knew the protest was useless, simply because there’s no way he can honourably stay in Craiglockhart taking up a bed he doesn’t need.’

Rivers smiled. ‘What are friends for if not letting you off the hook?’

‘Well, let me get you off the other hook while I’m about it. You and Yealland doing essentially the same thing. Good God, man, if you really believe that it’s the first sign of dementia. I can’t imagine anybody less like Yealland — methods, attitudes, values — everything. The whole attitude to the patient. And in spite of all this self-laceration, I can’t help thinking you know that. Who would you rather be sent to if you were the patient?’

‘You.’

Head smiled. ‘No. I don’t say I do a bad job, but I’m not as good with these particular patients as you are.’

‘I suppose I’m worried about him.’

‘Yes. Well…’

‘I think what bothers me more than anything else is this total inability to think about after the war. You see, I think he’s made up his mind to get killed.’

‘All the more reason for you to get it clear whose decision it was that he went back.’ A pause. ‘You know after dinner the other night Ruth was saying how much she thought you’d changed.’

Rivers was looking out of the window.

‘Do you think you have?’

‘I’m probably the last person to know. I can’t imagine going back to the same way of life. But…’ He raised his hands. ‘I’ve been there before. And…’ A little, self-deprecating laugh. ‘Nothing happened.’

‘When was this?’

‘After my second trip to the Solomons.’

Head waited.

‘I don’t know whether you’ve ever had the… the experience of having your life changed by a quite trivial incident. You know, nothing dramatic like the death of a parent, or the birth of a child. Something so trivial you almost can’t see why it had the effect it had. It happened to me on that trip. I was on the Southern Cross — that’s the mission boat — and there was a group of islanders there — recent converts. You can always tell if they’re recent, because the women still have bare breasts. And I thought I’d go through my usual routine, so I started asking questions. The first question was, what would you do with it if you earned or found a guinea? Would you share it, and if so who would you share it with? It gets their attention because to them it’s a lot of money, and you can uncover all kinds of things about kinship structure and economic arrangements, and so on. Anyway at the end of this — we were all sitting cross-legged on the deck, miles from anywhere — they decided they’d turn the tables on me, and ask me the same questions. Starting with: What would I do with a guinea? Who would I share it with? I explained I was unmarried and that I wouldn’t necessarily feel obliged to share it with anybody. They were incredulous. How could anybody live like that? And so it went on, question after question. And it was one of those situations, you know, where one person starts laughing and everybody joins in and in the end the laughter just feeds off itself. They were rolling round the deck by the time I’d finished. And suddenly I realized that anything I told them would have got the same response. I could’ve talked about sex, repression, guilt, fear — the whole sorry caboodle — and it would’ve got exactly the same response. They wouldn’t’ve felt a twinge of disgust or disapproval or… sympathy or anything, because it would all have been too bizarre. And I suddenly saw that their reactions to my society were neither more nor less valid than mine to theirs. And do you know that was a moment of the most amazing freedom. I lay back and I closed my eyes and I felt as if a ton weight had been lifted.’

‘Sexual freedom?’

‘That too. But it was it was more than that. It was… the Great White God de-throned, I suppose. Because we did, we quite unselfconsciously assumed we were the measure of all things. That was how we approached them. And suddenly I saw not only that we weren’t the measure of all things, but that there was no measure.’

‘And yet you say nothing changed?’

‘Nothing changed in England. And I don’t know why. I think partly just the sheer force of other people’s expectations. You know you’re walking around with a mask on, and you desperately want to take it off and you can’t because everybody else thinks it’s your face.’

‘And now?’

‘I don’t know. I think perhaps the patients’ve… have done for me what I couldn’t do for myself.’ He smiled. ‘You see healing does go on, even if not in the expected direction.’

Rivers’s return to Craiglockhart on this occasion was quieter than any previous return had been. There were no boisterous young men playing football with a visitor’s hat; indeed, the whole building seemed quieter, though Brock, whom Rivers sat next to at dinner, said that the change in regime had not been as striking as had been intended. The wearing of Sam Browne belts was strictly enjoined and offenders relentlessly pursued, but, aside from that, the attempt to run a psychiatric hospital on parade ground lines had been briefly and vociferously tried, then rapidly and quietly abandoned.

After dinner Rivers set out to see the patients who were due to be Boarded the following day. Anderson had at last received a visit from his wife, though it didn’t seem to have cheered him up much. The conflict between himself and his family, as to whether he should return to medicine or not, was deepening as the time came for him to leave Craiglockhart. The nightmares were still very bad, but in any case the haemophobia alone prevented any hospital service whether in Britain or France. Rivers hoped that he would be given a desk job in London, which would also enable Rivers to go on seeing him. At the same time he was a little doubtful even about that. Anderson had moved from a position of being sceptical and even uncooperative to a state of deep attachment, in which there was a danger of dependency. He left Anderson’s room shaking his head.

Sassoon was sitting by the fire in almost the same position he’d been in when Rivers left.

‘What have you been doing with yourself?’ Rivers asked.

‘Trying to keep my head down.’

‘Successfully?’

‘I think so.’

‘Have you managed to write?’

‘Finished the book. It’s called Counter-Attack.’

‘Very appropriate.’

‘You shall have the first copy.’

Rivers looked round the room, which seemed cold and bleak in spite of the small fire. ‘Do you hear from Owen at all?’

‘Constantly. He… er… writes distinctly effusive letters. You know…’ He hesitated. ‘I knew about the hero-worship, but I’m beginning to think it was rather more than that.’

Rivers watched the firelight flicker on Sassoon’s hair and face. He said, ‘It happens.’

‘I just hope I was kind enough.’

‘I’m sure you were.’

‘I don’t suppose you’ve heard from the War Office?’

‘On the contrary. I had dinner with Hope the other night, and I have an informal assurance that no obstacles will be put in your way. It’s not a guarantee, but it’s the best I can do.’

Sassoon took a deep breath. ‘All right. Back to the sausage machine.’

‘It doesn’t mean you don’t have to be careful with the Board.’

Sassoon smiled. ‘I shall say as little as possible.’

The Board was chaired by the new CO, Colonel Balfour Graham. The previous evening Rivers and Brock had discussed the likely effects of this on the conduct of the Board, but had not been able to reach any firm conclusion. Balfour Graham hadn’t had time to get to know most of the patients. Either he’d be content simply to move things along as smoothly as possible or, at worst, he might feel obliged to assert his authority by asking both patient and MO more questions than was usual. The third member of the Board was Major Huntley, still — if his conversation over breakfast was anything to go by — obsessed by rose growing and racial degeneracy.

Anderson came first. Balfour Graham expressed some surprise that Rivers was not recommending a general discharge.

‘He still wants to serve his country,’ Rivers said. ‘And there’s absolutely no reason why he shouldn’t be able to do so. In an administrative capacity. I rather think he may be given a desk job in the War Office.’

‘Are we doing the War Office or the patient a favour?’ Balfour Graham asked.

‘He’s an able man. It might be quite good for them to have somebody with extensive experience of France.’

‘Lord, yes,’ said Huntley.

‘It merely occurred to me that it might be convenient for Anderson to be able to postpone the moment when he has to face the prospect of civilian medicine.’

‘That too,’ said Rivers.

The actual interview with Anderson was reasonably quick. Indeed, the whole morning went quickly. They stopped for lunch — over which Rivers professed great interest in mildew and blackspot — and then sat down rather wearily but on time for the next ten. Rivers hardly knew at this stage whether he felt reassured or not. Balfour Graham was quick, courteous, efficient — and shrewd. Huntley’s interventions, though rare, were rather unpredictable, and seemed to depend entirely on whether he liked the patient. He took to Willard at once, and was scandalized when Rivers made some comment deploring Willard’s lack of insight. ‘What’s he want insight for? He’s supposed to be killing the buggers, Rivers, not psychoanalysing them.’

Sassoon was last but one. ‘A slightly unusual case,’ Rivers began, dismissively. ‘In the sense that I’m recommending him for general service overseas.’

‘More than slightly unusual, surely?’ Balfour Graham asked with a faint smile. ‘I don’t think it’s ever been done before. Has it?’

‘I couldn’t make any other recommendation. He’s completely fit, mentally and physically, he wants to go back to France, and… I have been given an assurance by the War Office that no obstacles will be placed in his way.’

‘Why should they be?’ asked Huntley.

Balfour Graham said, ‘This is the young man who believes the war is being fought for the wrong reasons, and that we should explore Germany’s offer of a negotiated peace. Do you think —’

‘Those were his views,’ Rivers said, ‘while he was still suffering from exhaustion and the after-effects of a shoulder wound. Fortunately a brother officer intervened and he was sent here. Really no more was required than a brief period of rest and reflection. He now feels very strongly that it’s his duty to go back.’

‘He was dealt with very leniently, it seems to me,’ Huntley said.

‘He has a good record. MC. Recommended for the D S O.’

‘Ah,’ Huntley said.

‘I do see what you mean by unusual,’ Balfour Graham said.

‘The point is he wants to go back.’

‘Right, let’s see him.’

Sassoon came in and saluted. Rivers watched the other two. Balfour Graham acknowledged the salute pleasantly enough. Major Huntley positively beamed. Rivers took Sassoon through the recent past, framing his questions to require no more than a simple yes or no. Sassoon’s manner was excellent. Exactly the right mixture of confidence and deference. Rivers turned to Balfour Graham.

Balfour Graham was shuffling about among his papers. Suddenly, he looked up. ‘No nightmares?’

‘No, sir.’

Sassoon’s expression didn’t change, but Rivers sensed he was lying.

‘Never?’

‘Not since I left the 4th London, sir.’

‘That was in… April?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Balfour Graham looked at Rivers. Rivers looked at the ceiling.

‘Major Huntley?’

Major Huntley leaned forward. ‘Rivers tells us you’ve changed your mind about the war. Is that right?’

A startled glance. ‘No, sir.’

Balfour Graham and Huntley looked at each other.

‘You haven’t changed your views?’ Balfour Graham asked.

‘No, sir.’ Sassoon’s gaze was fixed unwaveringly on Rivers. ‘I believe exactly what I believed in July. Only if possible more strongly.’

A tense silence.

‘I see,’ Balfour Graham said.

‘Wasn’t there something in The Times?’ Huntley asked. ‘I seem to…’

He reached across for the file. Rivers leant forward, pinning it to the table with his elbow. ‘But you do now feel quite certain it’s your duty to go back?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And you have no doubts about that?’

‘None whatsoever.’

‘Well,’ Balfour Graham said as the door closed behind Sassoon, ‘I suppose you are sure about this, Rivers? He’s not going to go back and foment rebellion in the ranks?’

‘No, he won’t do that. He won’t do anything to lower the morale of his men.’

‘I hope you’re right. He was lying about the nightmares, you know.’

‘Yes, I gathered that.’

‘I suppose he thinks that might be a reason for keeping him here. The point is do we see a reason for keeping him here? Huntley?’

Major Huntley seemed to return from a great distance. ‘Spanish Jews.’

Balfour Graham looked blank.

‘Father’s side. Spanish Jews.’

‘You know the family?’ Rivers asked.

‘Good lord, yes. Mother was a Thornycroft.’ He shook his head. ‘Ah well. Hybrid vigour.’

Rivers was across the rose garden several paces ahead of Balfour Graham. ‘So you think he’s fit?’

‘’Course he’s fit. Good God, man, how often do you see a physique like that, even in the so-called upper classes?’

They were back to eugenics again, but for once Rivers had no desire to interrupt.

After dinner Sassoon came to say goodbye. He’d been told the result of the Board and had spent the intervening time packing. Rivers hadn’t expected him to linger. Apart from Owen, he’d made no friends at Craiglockhart, not even Anderson, though they’d spent a large part of every day together. And he’d never bothered to disguise his hatred of the place.

‘What are you going to do?’ Rivers asked.

‘Oh, I’ll have a couple of days in London, then go home, I suppose.’

‘Time for a consultation with Dr Mercier? No, I mean it.’

‘I know you mean it. You old fox. Then Garsington, try to explain myself to the pacifists.’ He pulled a face. ‘I don’t look forward to that.’

‘Blame me. They will.’

‘I shall do no such thing.’

‘It’s a possible way of telling the story, you know.’

‘Yes, I know. But it’s not the way I’d tell it. Was it difficult, the Board?’

‘No, surprisingly easy. Major Huntley thinks you have a great future as a rose bush. Hybrid vigour.’

‘Ah, I see. Dad’s lot.’

‘I must say the sheer force of your refusal to recant came as rather a shock.’

Sassoon looked away. ‘I couldn’t lie.’

‘You managed all right about the nightmares.’

Silence.

‘How long has that been going on?’

‘Since you left. I’ll be all right once I’m out of this place.’

Sassoon didn’t want to talk about the nightmares. He was feeling distinctly cheerful. Exactly the same feeling he had had on board ship going to France, watching England slide away into the mist. No doubts, no scruples, no agonizing, just a straightforward, headlong retreat towards the front.

Rivers seemed to read his thoughts. ‘Don’t take unnecessary risks.’

‘No, of course not,’ Sassoon said. Though he thought he might.

He stood up, visibly anxious to be off. Rivers followed him to the door and then out into the entrance hall. Balfour Graham and Huntley were there, deep in conversation. It was going to be a very public farewell.

‘I’ll keep in touch,’ Sassoon said.

‘Yes. Try and see me before you leave England.’

They shook hands. Then Sassoon, glancing sideways at the colonel and the major, smiled a distinctly conspiratorial smile and came smartly to the salute. ‘Thank you, sir.’

For a moment, it was Callan standing there. Then the electrical room at Queen Square faded, and Rivers was back at Craiglockhart, on the black and white tiled floor, alone.

He returned to his desk, and drew a stack of files towards him. He was writing brief notes on the patients who’d been Boarded that day, but this he could do almost automatically. His thoughts wandered as he wrote. He wasted no time wondering how he would feel if Siegfried were to be maimed or killed, because this was a possibility with any patient who returned to France. He’d faced that already, many times. If anything, he was amused by the irony of the situation, that he, who was in the business of changing people, should himself have been changed and by somebody who was clearly unaware of having done it.

It was a far deeper change, though, than merely coming to believe that a negotiated peace might be possible, and desirable. That at least it ought to be explored. He remembered telling Head how he had tried to change his life when he came back from Melanesia for the second time and how that attempt had failed. He’d gone on being reticent, introverted, reclusive. Of course it had been a very introverted, self-conscious attempt, and perhaps that was why it hadn’t worked. Here in this building, where he had no time to be introverted or self-conscious, where he hardly had a moment to himself at all, the changes had taken place without his knowing. That was not Siegfried. That was all of them. Burns and Prior and Pugh and a hundred others. As a young man he’d been both by temperament and conviction deeply conservative, and not merely in politics. Now, in middle age, the sheer extent of the mess seemed to be forcing him into conflict with the authorities over a very wide range of issues… medical, military. Whatever. A society that devours its own young deserves no automatic or unquestioning allegiance. Perhaps the rebellion of the old might count for rather more than the rebellion of the young. Certainly poor Siegfried’s rebellion hadn’t counted for much, though he reminded himself that he couldn’t know that. It had been a completely honest action and such actions are seeds carried on the wind. Nobody can tell where, or in what circumstances, they will bear fruit.

How on earth was Siegfried going to manage in France? His opposition to the war had not changed. If anything it had hardened. And to go back to fight, believing as he did, would be to encounter internal divisions far deeper than anything he’d experienced before. Siegfried’s ‘solution’ was to tell himself that he was going back only to look after some men, but that formula would not survive the realities of France. However devoted to his men’s welfare a platoon commander might be, in the end he is there to kill, and to train other people to kill. Poetry and pacifism are a strange preparation for that role. Though Siegfried had performed it before, and with conspicuous success. But then his hatred of the war had not been as fully fledged, as articulate, as it was now.

It was a dilemma with one very obvious way out. Rivers knew, though he had never voiced his knowledge, that Sassoon was going back with the intention of being killed. Partly, no doubt, this was youthful self-dramatization. I’ll show them. They’ll be sorry. But underneath that, Rivers felt there was a genuine and very deep desire for death.

And if death were to be denied? Then he might well break down. A real breakdown, this time.

Rivers saw that he had reached Sassoon’s file. He read through the admission report and the notes that followed it. There was nothing more he wanted to say that he could say. He drew the final page towards him and wrote: Nov. 26, 1917. Discharged to duty.