The Eye in the Door

TEN

Prior returned to London to find the city sweltering in sticky, humid, thundery heat. Major Lode was more difficult than ever, and not merely because of the weather. An attempt was under way to centralize the intelligence services under the control of the War Office, and Lode was fighting for the survival of the unit. The change was being pushed through at an exalted level and very little filtered down to Prior, but he observed Lode daily becoming fiercer, the blue eyes more vulnerable, the moustache in ever greater need of protective dab-bings and strokings, as his empire collapsed around him. The files, ‘the brain cells of the unit’ Lode proclaimed (God help it, thought Prior), were to be transferred to the War Office. The task of ‘tidying them up’ before they were transferred was allotted to Prior. At first he took this to be merely a routine clerical task, perhaps designed to keep him out of trouble, but it quickly became clear that Lode wanted ‘sensitive material’ referred to him. In other words, evidence for the worst of the unit’s cock-ups was to be removed. The job, though huge — the files numbered more than eight hundred — suited Prior very well, since it solved what had hitherto been his main problem: how to get enough access to past files to compile a dossier on Spragge.

He was busy and, within reason, happy, though he did not feel particularly well. Then, four days after his return, something disturbing happened.

He’d gone out to lunch in a nearby pub, bought himself a pint of beer and opened The Times, as he always did, at the casualty lists. The name leapt out at him.

Hore, Captain James Frederick. Killed in action on the 5th April, dearly beloved younger son…

Jimmy Hore. They’d met on a riding course, trotting round a ring with their stirrups crossed in front of them, their hands clasped behind their heads. Acquiring the correct seat. The seat of gentlemen. Prior, who’d already experienced the realities of trench warfare, had been angry and amused, though he kept both reactions to himself, since he was convinced nobody else could appreciate the idiocy of the situation as he did. Certainly not this blank-faced moron trotting towards him, but then, as they trotted past each other, he caught Jimmy’s eye and realized his face wasn’t blank at all, but rigid with suppressed laughter. That glance of shared amusement had been too much for Jimmy, who burst out laughing and fell off his horse.

Prior looked round the pub. Prosperous-looking men in pin-striped suits jostled at the bar, chinking coins, bestowing well-oiled smiles on the pretty, chestnut-haired barmaid. And Jimmy was dead. All the poor little bugger had ever wanted to do was get married to… whatever her name was. And work in a bank. Prior would have liked nothing better, at that moment, than for a tank to come crashing through the doors and crush everybody, the way they sometimes crushed the wounded who couldn’t get off the track in time. The violence of his imaginings — he saw severed limbs, heard screams — terrified him.

He couldn’t eat. He would just drink up and go. But when he lifted his glass, his attention was caught by the amber lights winking in the beer. Sunlight, shining through the glass, cast a ring of shimmering gold on the surface of the table that danced when his hand moved. He started to play with it, moving his hand to and fro.

He was back at his desk. No interval. One second he was in the pub, the next sitting behind his desk. He looked across at the closed door. Blinked. Thought, I must’ve gone to sleep. He felt relaxed, but without the clogged feeling that follows midday sleep. He’d been reading The Times… Jimmy Hore was dead. He couldn’t remember leaving the pub. He must have walked all the way back in a complete dream. He looked at his watch, and his brain struggled to make sense of the position of the hands. Ten past four.

Three hours had passed since he broke for lunch, and of that he could account for perhaps twenty to twenty-five minutes. The rest was blank.

He made himself work until six. After all, in France he’d done paperwork on a table that kept jumping several feet into the air. He could surely manage to ignore a little disturbance like this. Though, as file after file passed across his desk, he was aware, somewhere on the fringes of his consciousness, that it was not ‘a little disturbance’. Something catastrophic had happened.

Shortly after six he thought he recognized voices, and went out of his room and a little way along the corridor. Major Lode and Lionel Spragge were deep in conversation by the lifts. It was not possible to hear what they were saying, but he noticed that Lode shook Spragge’s hand warmly as the lift arrived. Prior slipped back into his room, but left the door open.

He was ready to produce some small query that would bring Lode into his room, but in the event he didn’t need to. Lode stood in the doorway, grinning. ‘Just seen Spragge,’ he said in his clipped, staccato voice. ‘What have you been doing to him?’

‘Me? Nothing.’

‘Says you offered him a job.’

‘I didn’t offer him anything. Wishful thinking, I’m afraid.’

‘Well, he certainly seems to think you did. I had to tell him there was nothing doing. Nappoo.’ Lode looked at him for a moment, then said in a menacing, nannyish singsong, ‘He’s got it in for you.’

Bastard, Prior thought, as Lode closed the door behind him. It’s not my fault your frigging unit’s being closed down.

Towards six it began to thunder, a desultory grumble on the horizon, though the sun still shone. Prior worked for a further half hour, then gave up. He’d been having bad headaches ever since he got back to London and blamed them on the weather, though in fact he knew they’d started after his fall into the children’s trench. He would go somewhere fairly reasonable to eat. Cosset himself.

A sudden downpour began just as he reached the main steps. He looked up, trying to judge how long it would last. A white sun shone through a thin layer of cloud, but there were darker clouds massing over Nelson’s Column. He went back upstairs to fetch his greatcoat. As he passed Lode’s room, he heard an unfamiliar voice say, ‘Do you think he believed it?’

Lode replied, ‘Oh, I think so. I don’t see why he shouldn’t.’

Prior went along to his own room, shrugged himself into the heavy greatcoat, and walked back to the lift. For once it arrived immediately in a great clanking of cables and gates. He told himself there was no reason to connect the overheard conversation with himself, but he found it difficult not to. The atmosphere in the unit was rather like that. Plots and counterplots, many of them seemingly pointless. So far he’d managed to hold himself aloof.

The underground was crowded. Currents of hot, dead air moved across his face as he waited on the edge of the platform. He couldn’t carry his greatcoat — that was forbidden — and the sweat streamed down his sides. He found himself wondering whether this reaction was not excessive, whether he was not really ill. A subterranean rumbling, and the train erupted from the tunnel. He found himself a seat near the door and glanced at the girl beside him. Her hair was limp, her neck had a creased, swollen whiteness, and yet she was attractive in her rumpled skirt and white blouse. He glanced at her neckline, at the shadow between her breasts, then forced himself to look away. He found that rumpled look in women amazingly attractive.

He ate at a small café not far from Marble Arch. It wasn’t as pleasant as it had looked from the outside: the walls had faded to a sallow beige, the windows streamed with condensation, blasts of steamy air belched from the swing doors into the kitchen as waitresses banged in and out. After his meal he lit a cigarette, drank two cups of hot, sweet, orange-coloured tea and persuaded himself he felt better.

A twisting flight of stairs led down to his basement flat. The dustbins from all the apartments in the house were kept in the small forecourt outside his living-room window. The smell of rotting cabbage lingered. At night there were rustlings that he tried to convince himself were cats. He put his key in the lock and walked in. The hall was dark, but not cool. He threw his briefcase and coat down on to a chair, then, pulling his tie off, went along the corridor to the bathroom, ran a cold bath and nerved himself to get in. His skin under the water looked bloated, and there were lines of silver bubbles trapped in his pubic hair. He ran his fingers through, releasing them, then clasped the edges of the bath and lowered his head beneath the water.

He got out, wrapped himself in a towel, opened the french windows into the small yard and lay down on the bed. Despite the open windows there was no decrease in stuffiness. The only way you could get a movement of air through the place was to have the french windows and the front door open. But then you let the smell of cabbage in as well.

His head was aching. He turned and looked at the photograph of Sarah by his bed. She was sitting on the bottom step of some kind of monument, younger, plump, though not fat, with her hair dressed low so that it almost covered her forehead. She was pretty, but he thought she looked more ordinary than she did now, when her cheekbones had become more prominent, and she wore her hair back from the high rounded forehead. Her smile was different too. In the photograph it looked friendly, confiding, almost puppyish. Now, though still warm, it always kept something back. She was coming to see him sometime in the next few weeks, or at least it seemed almost certain that she was. He was afraid to count on it. He was afraid to picture her in the flat, because he knew that if he did the emptiness when her imagined presence failed him would be intolerable.

What he needed was to get out. These days he tried to circumvent the nightmares by going for a long walk early in the evening and then having three very large whiskies before bed. He’d reluctantly come to the conclusion that Rivers was right: sleeping draughts stopped working after the first few weeks, and when they stopped the nightmares returned with redoubled force. At least with the walk and the whisky he could count on a few good hours before they started.

Walking the city streets on a hot evening, he seemed to feel the pavements and the blank, white terraces breathe the day’s stored heat into his face. His favourite walks were in Hyde Park. He liked the dusty gloom beneath the trees, the glint of the Serpentine in the distance. Close to, by the water’s edge, there was even the whisper of a breeze. He stopped and watched some children paddling, three little girls with their dresses tucked into their drawers, then switched his attention to two much bigger girls, who came strolling along, arm in arm, but they read the hunger in his eyes too clearly and hurried past, giggling.

He felt restless, and, for once, the restlessness had nothing to do with sex. He had a definite and very strange sensation of wanting to be somewhere, a specific place, and of not knowing what that place was. He began to stroll towards the Achilles Monument. This was a frequent objective on his evening walks, for no particular reason except that its heroic grandeur both attracted and repelled him. It seemed to embody the same unreflecting admiration of courage that he found in ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, a poem that had meant a great deal to him as a boy, and still did, though what it meant had become considerably more complex. He stared up at the stupendous lunging figure, with its raised sword and shield, and thought, not for the first time, that he was looking at the representation of an ideal that no longer had validity.

Feeling dissatisfied, as if he’d expected the walk to end in something more than this routine encounter with Achilles, he turned to go, and noticed a man staring at him from under the shadow of the trees. We-ell. Young men who linger in the park at dusk can expect to be stared at. Deliberately, he quickened his pace, but then the back of his neck began to prickle, and a second later he heard his name called.

Lionel Spragge came lumbering up to him, out of breath and plaintive. ‘Where are you going?’ he demanded.

‘Home.’

At that moment a gang of young people, five or six abreast, came charging along the path, arms linked, broke round Spragge like a river round a stone, and swept on. Two more boys, running to catch up, elbowed him out of the way. Under cover of this disturbance, Prior walked away.

‘Hey, hang on,’ Spragge came puffing up behind him. ‘You can’t just go walking off like that.’

‘Why not?’

Spragge tapped his watch. ‘Achilles. Nine o’clock.’

‘Well?’

Spragge looked genuinely bewildered. ‘Why make the appointment if you don’t want to talk?’

Prior was beginning to feel frightened. ‘I came out for a walk.’

‘You came to see me.’

‘Did I? I don’t think so.’

‘You know you did.’ He stared at Prior. ‘Well, if this doesn’t take the biscuit. You said, “I can’t talk now. Statue of Achilles, nine o’clock.” What’s the point of denying it? I mean what is the point?’

Spragge stank. His shirt was dirty, there was three days’ growth of stubble on his chin, he’d been drinking, his eyes were bloodshot, but the bewilderment was genuine.

Prior said, ‘Well, I’m here now anyway. What do you want?’

‘If you hadn’t turned up I’d’ve come to your house.’

‘You don’t know where I live.’

‘I do. I followed you home.’

Prior laughed. A bark of astonishment.

‘I was behind you on the platform. I sat three seats away from you on the train.’ Spragge waggled his finger at his temple. ‘You want to watch that. First step to the loony bin.’

‘Piss off.’

Spragge caught his arm. ‘Don’t you want to know what I’ve got to say?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘Yes, you do,’ Spragge said confidingly, leaning close, breathing into his face. ‘Come on. Sit down.’

They found a place. At the other end of the bench an elderly woman sat, feeding a squirrel on nuts. Prior watched the animal’s tiny black hands turning the nut delicately from side to side. ‘Make it quick, will you?’

‘I’ve remembered where I saw you.’

‘Have you?’

‘Meeting in Liverpool. You were speaking for the war, your father was speaking against.’

‘Get to the point.’

‘Oh, I know a lot about you. It’s amazing what you can find out when you try, and finding out things was my job, wasn’t it? When I had a job.’

‘You didn’t find things out,’ Prior said crisply. ‘You made them up.’

‘You and the Ropers. You were like this.’ Spragge jabbed his crossed fingers into Prior’s face. ‘Thick as thieves. And MacDowell.’

‘That’s why I got the job.’

‘Oh, yeh, chuck me out and push you in.’

‘I came a year after you left.’

‘You told me I’d got a job.’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Yes, you did. I went straight back home and told the wife. And then when I didn’t hear anything I went to see Lode, and he threw me out. Bloody laughed at me.’ Spragge turned his downwards-slanting turquoise eyes on Prior. ‘You were just pumping me. Trying to make out I put the old cunt up to it.’

Prior got up. ‘Wash your mouth out.’

‘I thought that’d get you. You and her, you were —’

Prior crossed his fingers. ‘Like this?’

Spragge stared at him, a vein standing out at his temple, like a worm under the clammy skin. ‘People don’t change.’

‘No, I agree, they don’t. I was a socialist then, I’m a socialist now. As far as the war goes, I don’t have to prove my patriotism to you. I didn’t offer you a job. I’m sorry if you told your wife I did, but that’s your responsibility, not mine. Now bugger off and leave me alone.’

Prior walked away. He was aware of Spragge shouting, but was too angry to hear what he said. He thought Spragge might follow him, and that if he did there would be a fight. Spragge was taller, but older and flabbier. And he didn’t care anyway. He wanted a fight. Spragge’s face floated in front of him: the slightly bulbous nose, the sheen of sweat, the enlarged pores around the nostrils, the tufts of grey hair protruding from them. He’d never experienced such intense awareness of another person’s body before, except in sex. What he felt was not simple dislike, but an intimate, obsessive, deeply physical hatred.

Back in the flat he rinsed his face in cold water and, trembling slightly, lay down on the bed. He plumped the pillows up behind him and groped in the pocket of his tunic for a cigarette. Weren’t any. Then he remerabered he’d been wearing his greatcoat. He got up, checked the pockets and found a packet of cigars. He didn’t smoke cigars. But he must have bought them, and either smoked or offered them to somebody else, because there were two missing from the pack. Just as he must have arranged to meet Spragge. Spragge wouldn’t have lied about that. It was too blatant, too easily discounted. No, he’d made the appointment all right. God knows when, or why.

He got up from the bed, feeling the palms of his hands sticky. He went to the front door and locked it, then stood with his back to it, looking down the dark corridor to the half-open door of his bedroom, feeling a momentary relief at being locked in, though he quickly realized this was nonsense. Whatever it was he needed to be afraid of, it was on this side of the door.

ELEVEN

After a pause, Rivers asked, ‘Have there been any further episodes since then?’

‘Yes, but I don’t think any of them involved other people. I don’t think they did.’ Prior’s mouth twisted. ‘How would I know?’

‘Nobody’s said anything?’

‘No.’

‘How many?’

‘Seven.’

‘As many as that?’

Prior looked away.

‘How long do they last?’

‘Longest, three hours. Shortest… I don’t know. Twenty minutes? The long ones are frightening because you don’t know what you’ve done…’ He attempted a laugh. ‘You just know you’ve had plenty of time to do it.’

‘I don’t think you should assume you’ve done anything wrong.’

‘Don’t you? Well, if it’s so bloody good, why do I need to forget it?’

Rivers waited a while. ‘What do you think you might have done?’

‘I don’t know, do I? Nipped across to Whitechapel and ripped up a few prostitutes.’

Silence.

‘Look,’ Prior said, with the air of one attempting to engage the village idiot in rational discourse, ‘you know as well as I do that that…’ He flung himself back in his chair. ‘I’m not going to do this, I just refuse.’

Rivers waited.

Still not looking at him, Prior said, or rather chanted, ‘I have certain impulses which I do not give way to except in strict moderation and at the other person’s request. At least, in this state I don’t. I’m simply pointing out that in the the the the other state I might not be so fucking scrupulous. And don’t look at me like that.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘You think this is a load of self-dramatizing rubbish, don’t you?’

Rivers said carefully, ‘I think you’ve been alone with the problem too long.’

‘There’s nothing ridiculous in anything I’ve said.’

Rivers looked at the pale, proud, wintry face and caught a sigh. ‘I certainly wouldn’t call it ridiculous.’

‘The fact is I don’t know and neither do you, so you’re in no position to pontificate.’

Silence. Rivers said, ‘How are the nightmares?’

‘Bad. Oh, I had one you’ll like. I was was walking along a path in a kind of desert and straight ahead of me was an eyeball. Not this size.’ Prior’s cheeks twitched like boiling porridge. ‘Huge. And alive. And it was directly in front of me and I knew this time it was going to get me.’ He smiled. ‘Do whatever it is eyeballs do. Fortunately, there was a river running along beside the path, so I leapt into the river and I was all right.’ He gazed straight at Rivers. ‘But then I suppose all your patients jump into fucking rivers sooner or later, don’t they?’

The antagonism was startling. They might have been back at Craiglockhart, at the beginning of Prior’s treatment. ‘How did you feel about being in the river?’

‘Fine. It sang to me, a sort of lullaby, it kept telling me I was going to be all right and I was all right — as long as I stayed in the river.’

‘You didn’t feel you wanted to get out?’

‘In the dream? No. Now, YES.’

Rivers spread his hands. ‘Your coming here is entirely voluntary.’

‘With that degree of dependency? Of course it’s not fucking voluntary.’ He started to say something else and bit it back. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be, there’s no need.’ Suddenly Rivers leant across the desk. ‘I’m not here to be liked.’

‘I am sorry,’ Prior said, his face and voice hardening. ‘I thought I was supposed to be accepting my emotions? Well, my emotion is that I’m sorry.’

‘In that case I accept your apology.’

A pause. ‘Do you know what I do when I come round from one of these spells? I look at my hands because I half expect to see them covered in hair.’

Rivers made no comment.

‘You’ve read Jekyll and Hyde?’

‘Yes.’ Rivers had been waiting for the reference. Patients who suffered from fugue states invariably referred to the dissociated state — jocularly, but not without fear — as ‘Hyde’. ‘In real life, you know, the fugue state is — well, I was going to say “never”, but, in fact, there is one case — is almost never the darker side of the personality. Usually it’s no more than a difference in mood.’

‘But we don’t know. You see, the conversation I’m trying not to have is the one where I point out that you could find out in five minutes flat and you say, “Yes, I know, but I won’t do it.”’

Silence.

‘Well?’

‘I’m sorry, I thought you said you didn’t want that conversation.’

‘You know, for somebody who isn’t here to be liked you have the most wonderful manner. You used hypnosis at Craiglockhart.’

‘Yes, but in that case we could check the memory. You see, one of the things people who believe in… the extensive use of hypnosis claim — well, they don’t even claim it, they assume it — is that memories recovered in that way are genuine memories. But they’re very often not. They can be fantasies, or they can be responses to suggestions from the therapist. Because one’s constantly making suggestions, and the ones you’re not aware of making — not conscious of — are by far the most powerful. And that’s dangerous because most therapists are interested in dissociated states and so they — unconsciously of course — encourage the patient further down that path. And one can’t avoid doing it. Even if one excludes everything else, there’s still the enlargement of the pupils of the eyes.’

Prior leant forward and peered. ‘Yours are enlarged.’

Rivers took a deep breath. ‘You can get your memory back by the same methods we used at Craiglockhart. You were very good at it.’

‘Is that why you do this?’ Prior swept his hand down across his eyes.

Rivers smiled. ‘No, of course not, it’s just a habit. Eye-strain. Now can we —’

‘No, that’s not true. If it was eye-strain, you’d do it at random and you don’t. You do it when… when something touches a nerve. Or or… It is a way of hiding your feelings. You’ve just said it yourself, the eyes are the one part you can’t turn into wallpaper — and so you cover them up.’

Rivers found this disconcerting. He tried to go on with what he’d been going to say, and realized he’d lost the train of thought. After so many hours of probing, manipulating, speculating, provoking, teasing, Prior had finally — and almost casually — succeeded. He couldn’t ignore this; it had to be dealt with. ‘I think… if as you say it isn’t random — and I don’t know because it’s not something I’m aware of — it’s probably something to do with not wanting to see the patient. For me the patient’s expressions and gestures aren’t much use, because I have no visual memory, so I think perhaps I stop myself seeing him as a way of concentrating on what he’s saying. All right? Now perhaps we can —’

‘No visual memory at all?’

‘None at all.’

‘I don’t see how you think.’

‘Well, I suspect you’re a very visual person. Could we—’

‘Have you always been like this?’

Rivers thought, all right. He stood up and indicated to Prior that they should exchange seats. Prior looked surprised and even uneasy, but quickly recovered and sat down in Rivers’s chair with considerable aplomb. Rivers saw him look round the study, taking in his changed perspective on the room. ‘Isn’t this against the rules?’ he asked.

‘I can’t think of a single rule we’re not breaking.’

‘Can’t you?’ Prior said, smiling his delicate smile. ‘I can.’

‘I’m going to show you how boring this job is. When I was five…’

Prior shifted his position, leant forward, rested his chin on his clasped hands, and said, in meltingly empathic tones, ‘Yes? Go on.’

Rivers was not in fact breaking the rules. He intended to do no more than offer Prior an illustration from his own experience that he’d already used several times in public lectures, but he hadn’t reckoned on doing it while confronted by a caricature of himself. ‘One of the expressions of having no visual memory is that I can’t remember the interior of any building I’ve ever been in. I can’t remember this house when I’m not in it. I can’t remember Craiglockhart, though I lived there for over a year. I can’t remember St John’s, though I’ve lived there twenty years, but there is one interior I do remember and that’s a house in Brighton I lived in till I was five. I can remember part of that. The basement kitchen, the drawing-room, the dining-room, my father’s study, but I can’t remember anything at all about upstairs. And I’ve come to believe — I won’t go into the reasons — that something happened to me on the top floor that was so terrible that I simply had to forget it. And in order to ensure that I forgot I suppressed not just the one memory, but the capacity to remember things visually at all.’ Rivers paused, and waited for a response.

‘You were raped,’ Prior said. ‘Or beaten.’

Rivers’s face went stiff with shock. ‘I really don’t think I was.’

‘No, well, you wouldn’t, would you? The whole point is it’s too terrible to contemplate.’

Rivers said something he knew he’d regret, but he had to say it. ‘This was my father’s vicarage.’

‘I was raped in a vicarage once.’

It was on the tip of Rivers’s tongue to say that no doubt Prior had been ‘raped’ in any number of places, but he managed to restrain himself. ‘When I said terrible I meant to a child of that age. I was five remember. Things happen to children which are an enormous shock to the child, but which wouldn’t seem terrible or or or even particularly important to an adult.’

‘And equally things happen to children which are genuinely terrible. And would be recognized as terrible by anybody at any age.’

‘Yes, of course. How old were you?’

‘Eleven. I wasn’t meaning myself.’

‘You don’t classify that as “terrible”?’

‘No. I was receiving extra tuition.’ He gave a yelping laugh. ‘God, was I receiving extra tuition. From the parish priest, Father Mackenzie. My mother offered him a shilling a week — more than she could afford — but he said, “Don’t worry, my good woman, I have seldom seen a more promising boy.”’ He added irritably, ‘Don’t look so shocked, Rivers.’

‘I am shocked.’

‘Then you shouldn’t be. He got paid in kind, that’s all.’ Suddenly Prior leant forward and grasped Rivers’s knee, digging his fingers in round the kneecap. ‘Everything has to be paid for, doesn’t it?’ He grasped the knee harder. ‘Doesn’t it?’

‘No.’

Prior let go. ‘This terrible-in-big-black-inverted commas thing that happened to you, what do you think it was?’

‘I don’t know. Dressing-gown on the back of a door?’

‘As bad as that? Oh, my God.’

Rivers pressed on in defiance of Prior’s smile. ‘I had a patient once who became claustrophobic as the result of being accidentally locked in a corridor with a fierce dog. Or it seemed fierce to him. In that —’

‘Oh, I see. Even the bloody dog wasn’t really fierce.’

‘In that case his parents didn’t even know it had happened.’

‘You say you were five when this… non-event didn’t happen?’

‘Yes.’

‘How old were you when you started to stammer?’

‘Fi-ive.’

Prior leant back in Rivers’s chair and smiled. ‘Big dog.’

‘I didn’t mean to imply there was —’

‘For God’s sake. Whatever it was, you blinded yourself so you wouldn’t have to go on seeing it.’

‘I wouldn’t put it as dramatically as that.’

‘You destroyed your visual memory. You put your mind’s eye out. Is that what happened, or isn’t it?’

Rivers struggled with himself. Then said simply; ‘Yes.’

‘Do you ever think you’re on the verge of remembering?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘And what do you feel?’

‘Fear.’ He smiled. ‘Because the child’s emotions are still attached to the memory.’

‘We’re back to the dressing-gown.’

‘Yes. Yes. I’m afraid we are, because I do sincerely believe it may be as simple as that.’

‘Then one can only applaud,’ Prior said, and did. Three loud claps.

‘You know…’ Rivers hesitated and started again. ‘You must be wary of filling the gaps in your memory with… with monsters. I think we all tend to do it. As soon as we’re left with a blank, we start projecting our worst fears on to it. It’s a bit like the guide for medieval map-makers, isn’t it? Where unknown, there place monsters. But I do think you should try not to do it, because what you’re really doing is subjecting yourself to a constant stream of suggestion of of a very negative kind.’

‘All right. I’ll try not to. I’ll substitute the Rivers guide to map-making: Where unknown, there place dressing-gowns. Or just possibly, dogs. Here, have your chair back.’ Prior settled himself back into the patient’s chair, murmuring, ‘Do you know, Rivers, you’re as neurotic as I am? And that’s saying quite a lot.’

Rivers rested his chin on his hands. ‘How do you feel about that?’

‘Oh, my God, we are back to normal. You mean, “Do I feel a nasty, mean-spirited sense of triumph?” No. I’m mean-spirited enough, I’m just not stupid enough.’ Prior brooded a moment. ‘There’s one thing wrong with the Rivers guide to map-making. Suppose there really are monsters?’

‘I think if there are, we’ll meet them soon enough.’

Prior looked straight at Rivers. ‘I’m frightened.’

‘I know.’

When Prior finally left — it had been a long, exhausting session — Rivers switched off the desk lamp, went to sit in his armchair by the fire, and indulged in some concentrated, unobserved eye-rubbing. Did he do it ‘when something touched a nerve’? It was possible, he supposed. If there was a pattern, Prior would certainly have spotted it. On the other hand, Prior was equally capable of making the whole thing up.

He didn’t regret the decision to give Prior what he’d always claimed he wanted — to change places — because in the process he’d discovered an aspect of Prior that mightn’t have been uncovered in any other way. Not so much the ‘extra tuition’ — though that was interesting, particularly in view of Prior’s habit of aggressive flirtation — as the assumption that Rivers’s loss of visual memory must have some totally traumatic explanation. That had revealed more about Prior than he was aware of.

Though Prior had been a formidable interrogator. Whatever it was, you blinded yourself so you wouldn’t have to go on seeing it… You put your mind’s eye out. Simply by being rougher than any professional colleague would ever have been, Prior had brought him face to face with the full extent of his loss. People tended to assume he didn’t know what he’d lost, but that wasn’t true. He did know, or glimpsed at least. Once, in the Torres Straits, he’d attended a court held by the British official in collaboration with the native chiefs, and an old woman had given evidence about a dispute in which she was involved. As she spoke, she’d glanced from side to side, clearly reliving every detail of the events she was describing, and very obviously seeing people who were not present in court. And he had looked at her, this scrawny, half-naked, elderly, illiterate woman, and he had envied her. No doubt he’d encountered Europeans who had visual memories of equal power, but his own deficiency had never before been brought home to him with such force.

It was a loss, and he had long been aware of it, though he had been slow to connect it with the Brighton house experience. Slower still to recognize that the impact of the experience had gone beyond the loss of visual memory and had occasioned a deep split between the rational, analytical cast of his mind and his emotions. It was easy to overstate this: he had, after all, been subject to a form of education which is designed to inculcate precisely such a split, but he thought the division went deeper in him than it did in most men. It was almost as if the experience — whatever it was — had triggered an attempt at dissociation of personality, though, mercifully, not a successful one. Still, he had been, throughout most of his life, a deeply divided man, and though he would once have said that this division exercised little, if any, influence on his thinking, he had come to believe it had determined the direction of his research.

Many years after that initial unremembered experience, he and Henry Head had conducted an experiment together. The nerve supplying Head’s left forearm had been severed and sutured, and then over a period of five years they had traced the progress of regeneration. This had taken place in two phases. The first was characterized by a high threshold of sensation, though when the sensation was finally evoked it was, to use Head’s own word, ‘extreme’. In addition to this all-or-nothing quality, the sensation was difficult to localize. Sitting blindfold at the table, Head had been unable to locate the stimulus that was causing him such severe pain. This primitive form of innervation they called the protopathic. The second phase of regeneration-which they called the epicritic-followed some months later, and was characterized by the ability to make graduated responses and to locate the source of a stimulus precisely. As the epicritic level of innervation was restored, the lower, or protopathic, level was partially integrated with it and partially suppressed, so that the epicritic system carried out two functions: one, to help the organism adapt to its environment by supplying it with accurate information; the other, to suppress the protopathic, to keep the animal within leashed. Inevitably, as time went on, both words had acquired broader meanings, so that ‘epicritic’ came to stand for everything rational, ordered, cerebral, objective, while ‘protopathic’ referred to the emotional, the sensual, the chaotic, the primitive. In this way the experiment both reflected Rivers’s internal divisions and supplied him with a vocabulary in which to express them. He might almost have said with Henry Jekyll, It was on the moral side, and in my own person, that I learned to recognize the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both…

It was odd how the term ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ had passed into the language, so that even people who had never read Stevenson’s story used the names as a shorthand for internal divisions. Prior spoke of looking at his hands to make sure they had not been transformed into the hairy hands of Hyde, and he was not alone in that. Every patient Rivers had ever had who suffered from a fugue state sooner or later referred to that state as ‘Hyde’, and generally this was a plea for reassurance. In a hospital setting, where the fugue state could be observed, such reassurance was easily given, but it was less easy to reassure Prior. Partly because the fugue state couldn’t be observed, but also because Prior’s sense of the darker side of his personality was unusually strong. He might talk about being incapable of sexual guilt, but, Rivers thought, he was deeply ashamed of his sadistic impulses, even frightened of them. He believed there were monsters on his map, and who was to say he was wrong?

There was one genuinely disturbing feature of the case: that odd business of making an appointment in the fugue state and keeping it in the normal state. It suggested the fugue state was capable of influencing Prior’s behaviour even when it was not present, in other words, that it was functioning as a co-consciousness. Not that a dual personality need develop even from that. He intended to make sure it didn’t. There would be no hypnosis, no artificial creation of dissociated states for experimental purposes, no encouraging Prior to think of the fugue state as an alternative self. Even so. It had to be remembered Prior was no mere bundle of symptoms, but an extremely complex personality with his own views on his condition. And his imagination was already at work, doing everything it could to transform the fugue state into a malignant double. He believed in the monsters — and whatever Rivers might decide to do, or refrain from doing — Prior’s belief in them would inevitably give them power.

TWELVE

‘Now I want you to draw me an elephant,’ Head said.

His voice distorted, as if he were blowing bubbles in soapy water, Lucas replied, ‘Yeth ah seen dom. Up. Uvver end.’

He took the notepad and pencil, and began to draw. Rivers was sitting beside Head, but neither of them spoke since Lucas’s concentration must not be disturbed. They had been doing the tests for half an hour and Lucas was already tired. His tongue protruded between his teeth, giving him the look of a small boy learning to read, except that, in Lucas’s case, the protrusion was permanent.

Rivers noticed Head looking at the shrapnel wound on Lucas’s shaved scalp, and knew he was thinking about the technical problems of duplicating this on the skull of the cadaver he’d been working on that morning. It was an interesting technique, Rivers thought. Head measured the dimensions of the wound on the living patient, then traced the outline on to the skull of a cadaver, drilled holes at regular intervals around the outline, and introduced a blue dye into the holes. The entire skull cap could then be lifted off and the brain structures underlying the dyed area dissected and identified. In this way the area of brain death could be correlated precisely with the nature of the patient’s language defects.

A laborious business, made more so by the need to duplicate the wounds of two patients on every cadaver. One of the more surprising consequences of the war was a shortage of suitable male corpses.

Rivers lifted his hands to his chin, smelling the medical school smell of human fat and formaldehyde, only partially masked by carbolic soap. He watched Head’s expression as he looked at Lucas’s shaved scalp, and realized it differed hardly at all from his expression that morning as he’d bent over the cadaver. For the moment, Lucas had become simply a technical problem. Then Lucas looked up from his task, and instantly Head’s face flashed open in his transforming smile. A murmur of encouragement, and Lucas returned to his drawing. Head’s face, looking at the ridged purple scar on the shaved head, again became remote, withdrawn. His empathy, his strong sense of the humanity he shared with his patients, was again suspended. A necessary suspension, without which the practice of medical research, and indeed of medicine itself, would hardly be possible, but none the less identifiably the same suspension the soldier must achieve in order to kill. The end was different, but the psychological mechanism employed to achieve it was essentially the same. What Head was doing, Rivers thought, was in some ways a benign, epicritic form of the morbid dissociation that had begun to afflict Prior. Head’s dissociation was healthy because the researcher and the physician each had instant access to the experience of the other, and both had access to Head’s experience in all other areas of his life. Prior’s was pathological because areas of his conscious experience had become inaccessible to memory. What was interesting was why Head’s dissociation didn’t lead to the kind of split that had taken place in Prior. Rivers shifted his position, and sighed. One began by finding mental illness mystifying, and ended by being still more mystified by health.

Lucas had finished. Head leant across the desk and took the drawing from him. ‘Hmm,’ he said, looking at the remarkably cow-like creature in front of him. A long pause. ‘What’s an elephant got in front?’

Again the blurting voice, always on the verge of becoming a wail. ‘He got a big’ — Lucas’s good hand waved up and down — ‘straight about a yard long.’

‘Do you know what it’s called?’

‘Same what you. Drive. Water with.’

‘Has he got a trunk?’

Lucas wriggled in his wheelchair and laughed. ‘He lost it.’

He reached for his drawing, wanting to correct it, but Head slipped it quickly into the file. ‘Sums now.’

They went quickly through a range of simple sums. Lucas, whose ability to understand numbers was unimpaired, got them predictably right. It was Head’s custom to alternate tasks the patient found difficult or impossible with others that he could perform successfully. The next task — designed to discover whether Lucas’s understanding of ‘right’ and ‘left’ was impaired — involved his attempting to imitate movements of Head’s arms, first in a mirror and then facing him across the desk.

Rivers watched Head raise his left hand — ‘professional in shape and size;… large, firm, white and comely’ — and thought he probably knew that hand better than any part of his own body. He’d experimented on it for five years, after all, and even now could have traced on to the skin the outline of the remaining area of protopathic innervation — for the process of regeneration is never complete. A triangle of skin between the thumb and forefinger retained the primitive, all-or-nothing responses and remained abnormally sensitive to changes in temperature. Sometimes, on a cold day, he would notice Head shielding this triangle of skin beneath his other hand.

For a while, after the tests were complete, Head chatted to Lucas about the results. It was Head’s particular gift to be able to involve his patients in the study of their own condition. Lucas’s face, as Head outlined the extent of his impairments, was alight with what one could only call clinical interest. When, finally, an orderly appeared and wheeled him out of the room, he was smiling.

‘He has… improved,’ Head said. ‘Slightly.’ He brushed his thinning hair back from his forehead and for a moment looked utterly bleak. ‘Tea?’

‘I wouldn’t mind a glass of milk.’

‘Milk?’

Rivers patted his midriff. ‘Keeps the ulcers quiet.’

‘Why, are they protesting?’

‘God, how I hate psychologists.’

Head laughed. ‘I’ll get you the milk.’

Rivers glanced at The Times while he waited. In the Pemberton Billing trial they’d reached the medical evidence — such as it was. As Head came back into the room, Rivers read aloud: ‘“Asked what should be done with such people. Dr Serrel Cooke replied, ‘They are monsters. They should be locked up.’” The voice of psychological medicine.’

Head handed him a cup. ‘Put it down, Rivers.’

Rivers folded the paper. ‘I keep trying to tell myself it’s funny.’

‘Well, it is, a lot of it. It was hilarious when that woman told the Judge his name was in the Black Book.’ He waited for a reply. ‘Anyway, when do you want to see Lucas? Tomorrow?’

‘Oh, I think we give the poor little blighter a rest, don’t we? Monday?’

They talked for a while about Lucas, then drifted into a rambling conversation about the use of pacifist orderlies. The hospital contained a great many paralysed patients in a building not designed to accommodate them. There were only two lifts. The nurses and the existing orderlies — men who were either disabled or above military age — did their best, but the lives of patients were inevitably more restricted than they need have been. What was desperately required was young male muscle, and this the pacifist orderlies — recruited under the Home Office scheme — supplied. But they also aroused hostility in the staff obliged to work with them. It had now reached a point where it was doubtful whether the hospital could go on using them. The irrationality of getting rid of much needed labour exasperated Rivers, and he had spoken out against it at the last meeting of the hospital management committee, rather too forcefully, perhaps, or at least Head seemed to think ‘so. ‘I’m not g-going b-back on it,’ he said. ‘I’ve spent m-most of my l-life t-t-toning down what I w-wanted to s-say. I’m not d-doing it any more.’

Head looked at him. ‘What happened to the gently flowing Rivers we all used to know and love?’

‘Went AWOL in Scotland. Never been seen since.’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes what?’

‘Yes, that was my impression.’

The lift door was about to close. Rivers broke into a run, and Wantage, one of the non-pacifist orderlies, clanged the gate open again. ‘There you are, sir,’ he said, stepping back. ‘Room for a thin one.’

He was returning a man in a wheelchair to the ward. Rivers squeezed in beside the wheelchair and pressed the button for the top floor.

Wantage was the most popular of the orderlies, partly because his built-up boot supplied an instant explanation for why he wasn’t in France. He was a fat, jolly man with a limitless capacity for hate. He hated skivers, he hated shirkers, he hated conchies, he hated the Huns, he hated the Kaiser. He loved the war. He had the gentlest hands in the hospital. He would have given anything to be able to go and fight. Whenever Rivers saw him lurching along behind a wheelchair, he was reminded of the crippled boy in the Pied Piper story, left behind when the other children went into the mountain.

At the second floor the lift stopped and a young nurse got in. Viggors, the patient in the wheelchair, spoke to her, blushing slightly — she was evidently a great favourite — and then sat, slumped to one side, his eyes level with her waist, gazing covertly at her breasts. Wantage chattered on. On the third floor the lift stopped again and Wantage pushed the wheelchair out.

Rivers was left wishing he hadn’t seen that look. Every day in this hospital one was brutally reminded that the worst tragedies of the war were not marked by little white crosses.

For safety reasons — his patients were mobile and could use the fire escapes — both his wards were on the top floor. The hospital had been built as a children’s hospital; the top floor had been the nursery and the walls were decorated with Baa-baa Black Sheep, Little Bo Peep, Red Riding Hood, Humpty-Dumpty. The windows were barred. On his arrival Rivers had asked for these bars to be removed, but the War Office refused to pay for any alterations beyond the absolute minimum: the provision of adult-size baths and lavatories. Not washbasins. Lawrence was there now, shaving in a basin that barely reached his knees. The eye, deprived of normal perspective, saw him as a giant. No amount of experience seemed to correct the initial impression.

Rivers collected his overnight key from sister and walked along the corridor to his own room. The room was vast, with a huge bay window overlooking Vincent Square. He went through into the adjoining room and asked his secretary to send Captain Manning in.

Manning had been admitted because the anxiety attacks he’d suffered ever since his return from France had become more severe, partly as a result of his obsession with the Pemberton Billing affair. Rivers would have liked to tell him to ignore the trial for the farrago of muck-raking nonsense it was, but that was not possible. Manning had been sent a newspaper cutting about Maud Allan and the ‘cult of the clitoris’. More recently he’d received a copy of the 47,000 article. Manning was being targeted, presumably by someone who knew he was a homosexual, and he could hardly be expected to ignore that.

‘Have you been waiting long?’ Rivers asked.

‘Couple of minutes.’

Manning looked tired. No doubt last night had been spent dreading coming into hospital. ‘How are you settling in?’

‘All right. I’ve been given a room to myself. I didn’t expect that.’

‘Have you brought the article with you?’ Rivers asked.

Manning handed it over. It was not, as Rivers had been assuming, a newspaper cutting, but a specially produced copy, printed on to thick card. At the top — typewritten — was the message: In the hope that this will awaken your conscience.

‘Did you read it at the time?’ Manning asked. ‘When it first came out?’

‘No.’ Rivers smiled faintly. ‘A pleasure postponed.’

AS I SEE IT — THE FIRST 47,000

Harlots on the Wall

There have been given many reasons why England is prevented from putting her full strength into the War. On several occasions in the columns of the Imperialist I have suggested that Germany is making use of subde but successful means to nullify our effort. Hope of profit cannot be the only reason for our betrayal. All nations have their Harlots on the Wall, but these are discovered in the first assault and the necessary action is taken. It is in the citadel that the true danger lies. Corruption and blackmail being the work of menials is cheaper than bribery. Moreover, fear of exposure entraps and makes slaves of men whom money could never buy. There is all the more reason, as I see it, to suppose that the Germans, with their usual efficiency, are making use of the most productive and cheapest methods.

Often in this column I have hinted at the possession of knowledge which tends to substantiate this view. Within the past few days the most extraordinary facts have been placed before me which co-ordinate with my past information.

Spreading Debauchery

There exists in the cabinet noir of a certain German Prince a book compiled by the Secret Service from the reports of German agents who have infested this country for the past twenty years, agents so vile and spreading debauchery of such a lasciviousness as only German minds could conceive and only German bodies execute.

Sodom and Lesbia

The officer who discovered this book while on special service briefly oudined for me its stupefying contents. In the beginning of the book is a precis of general instructions regarding the propagation of evils which all decent men thought had perished in Sodom and Lesbia. The blasphemous compilers even speak of the Groves and High Places mentioned in the Bible. The most insidious arguments are outlined for the use of the German agent in his revolting work. Then more than a thousand pages are filled with the names mentioned by German agents in their reports. There are the names of 47,000 English men and women.

It is a most catholic miscellany. The names of privy councillors, youths of the chorus, wives of Cabinet Ministers, dancing girls, even Cabinet Ministers themselves, while diplomats, poets, bankers, editors, newspaper proprietors and members of His Majesty’s household follow each other with no order of precedence.

As an example of the thoroughness with which the German agent works, lists of public houses and bars were given which had been successfully demoralized. These could then be depended upon to spread vice with the help of only one fixed agent. To secure those whose social standing would suffer from frequenting public places, comfortable flats were taken and furnished in an erotic manner. Paphian photographs were distributed, while equivocal pamphlets were printed as the anonymous work of well-known writers.

The Navy in Danger

No one in the social scale was exempted from contamination by this perfect system. Agents were specially enlisted in the navy, particularly in the engine-rooms. These had their special instructions. Incestuous bars were established in Portsmouth and Chatham. In these meeting places the stamina of British sailors was undermined. More dangerous still, German agents, under the guise of indecent liaison, could obtain information as to the disposition of the fleet.

Even the loiterer in the streets was not immune. Meretricious agents of the Kaiser were stationed at such points as Marble Arch and Hyde Park Corner. In this black book of sin details were given of the unnatural defloration of children who were drawn to the parks by the summer evening concerts.

The World of High Politics

Impure as were all these things, the great danger was seen in the reports of those agents who had obtained entrée to the world of high politics. Wives of men in supreme position were entangled. In Lesbian ecstasy the most sacred secrets of State were betrayed. The sexual peculiarities of members of the peerage were used as a leverage to open fruitful fields for espionage.

In the glossary of this book is a list of expressions supposed to be used among themselves by the soul-sick victims of this nauseating disease so skilfully spread by Potsdam.

Lives are in Jeopardy

In his official reports the German agent is not an idle boaster. The thought that 47,000 English men and women are held in enemy bondage through fear calls all clean spirits to mortal combat. There are three million men in France whose lives are in jeopardy, and whose bravery is of no avail because of the lack of moral courage in 47,000 of their countrymen, and numbering among their ranks, as they do, men and women in whose hands the destiny of this Empire rests.

As I see it, a carefully cultivated introduction of practices which hint at the extermination of the race is to be the means by which the German is to prevent us avenging those mounds of lime and mud which once were Britons.

The Fall of Rome

When in time I grasped the perfection of this demoniacal plan, it seemed to me that all the horrors of shells and gas and pestilence introduced by the Germans in their open warfare would have but a fraction of the effect in exterminating the manhood of Britain as the plan by which they have already destroyed the first 47,000.

As I have already said in these columns, it is a terrible thought to contemplate that the British Empire should fall as fell the great Empire of Rome, and the victor now, as then, should be the Hun.

The story of the contents of this book has opened my eyes, and the matter must not rest.

Rivers threw the page down. ‘If only German minds can conceive of this lasciviousness and only German bodies execute it, how on earth do the 47,000 manage to do it?’ He took off his glasses and swept his hand down across his eyes. ‘Sorry, I’m being donnish.’ He looked at Manning, noting the lines of strain around his eyes, the coarse tremor as he raised the cigarette to his mouth. For somebody like Manning, profoundly committed to living a double life, the revelation that both sides of his life were visible to unknown eyes must be like having the door to the innermost part of one’s identity smashed open. ‘Has anybody else been sent this?’

‘Ross. One or two others.’

‘Friends of Ross?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ross is a… quite a dangerous man to know.’

‘What can I do, Rivers? It’s not a recent friendship.’

Rivers sighed. ‘I don’t think you can do anything.’

Manning sat brooding. ‘I think it would help if I felt I could understand it. I mean, I can see the war’s going pretty badly and there are always going to be people who want scapegoats instead of reasons, but… Why this? I can see why people with German names get beaten up… or or interned. And conchies. I don’t approve, but I can understand it. I don’t understand this.’

‘I’m not sure I do. I think it’s the result of certain impulses rising to the surface in wartime, and having to be very formally disowned. Homosexuality, for instance. In war there’s this enormous glorification of love between men, and yet at the same time it arouses anxiety. Is it the right kind of love? Well, one way to make sure it’s the right kind is to make public disapproval of the other thing crystal clear. And then there’s pleasure in killing—’

Manning looked shocked. ‘I don’t know that —’

‘No, I meant civilians. Vicarious, but real nevertheless. And in the process sadistic impulses are aroused that would normally be repressed, and that also causes anxiety. So to put on a play by a known homosexual in which a woman kisses a man’s severed head…’

‘I talked about the trial to Jane. I said I thought the real target was Ross, and one or two others, and she said of course I did. Seeing — what was it? “Seeing his own sex as peripheral to the point at issue was a feat of mental agility of which no man is capable.”’

‘I look forward to meeting Mrs Manning one day.’

‘She says the the… sentimentality about the role women are playing — doing their bit and all that — really masks a kind of deep-rooted fear that they’re getting out of line. She thinks pillorying Maud Allan is actually a way of teaching them a lesson. Not just lesbians. All women. Just as Salome is presented as a strong woman by Wilde, and yet at the same time she has to be killed. I mean it is quite striking at the end when all the men fall on her and kill her.’

‘What do you think about that?’

‘I think it’s a bit naïve. I think it ignores Wilde’s identification with Salome. He isn’t saying women like this have to be destroyed. He’s saying people like me have to be destroyed. And how right he was. Is.’

This was all very well, Rivers thought, but Manning was ill, and it was not literary discussion that was going to cure him.

‘Do you think Spencer’s mad?’ Manning asked abruptly.

‘On the basis of his evidence, yes. Though whether he’ll be recognized as mad…’

‘It’s an odd contrast with Sassoon, isn’t it?’

Rivers looked surprised.

‘Spencer being feted like this. Sassoon says something perfectly sensible about the war, and he’s packed off to a mental hospital.’

Of course, Rivers thought, all the members of Robert Ross’s circle would know the story of Sassoon’s protest against the war, and the part he’d played in persuading Sassoon to go back.

Manning said, ‘I suppose I shouldn’t mention him?’

‘Why not?’

‘Because he’s a patient.’

‘He’s somebody we both know.’

‘Only he’s been on my mind lately. I was wondering if they’d have the nerve to send this to him. Or to anybody out there.’

‘I think the sort of mind that produces this can’t conceive of the possibility that any of “the 47,000” might be in France.’

So far Manning had found it impossible to talk about the war. Manning himself would have denied this. He would have said they talked about it all the time: strategy, tactics, war aims, the curiously inadequate response of civilian writers, the poems of Sassoon and Graves. Suddenly, Rivers thought he saw a way of beginning, very gently, to force the issue. ‘Are you familiar with the strict Freudian view of war neurosis?’ he asked. Manning, he knew, had read a certain amount of Freud.

‘I didn’t know there was one.’

‘Oh, yes. Basically, they believe the experience of an all-male environment, with a high level of emotional intensity, together with the experience of battle, arouses homosexual and sadistic impulses that are normally repressed. In vulnerable men — obviously those in whom the repressed desires are particularly strong — this leads to breakdown.’

‘Is that what you believe?’

Rivers shook his head. ‘I want to know what you think.’

‘I don’t know what makes other people break down. I don’t think sex had much to do with my breakdown.’ A slight smile. ‘But then I’m not a repressed homosexual.’

Rivers smiled back. ‘But you must have a… an instinctive reaction, that it’s possible, or it’s obvious nonsense, or —’

‘I’m just trying to think. Do you know Sassoon’s poem “The Kiss”?’

‘The one about the bayonet. Yes.’

‘I think that’s the strongest poem he’s ever written. You know, I’ve never served with him so I don’t know this from personal experience, but I’ve talked a lot to Robert Graves and he says the extent to which Sassoon contrives to be two totally different people at the Front is absolutely amazing. You know he’s a tremendously successful and bloodthirsty platoon commander, and yet at the same time, back in billets, out comes the notebook. Another anti-war poem. And the poem uses the experience of the platoon commander, but it never uses any of his attitudes. And yet for once, in that one poem, he gets both versions of himself in.’

Yes, Rivers thought. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I see that.’

‘And of course it’s crawling with sexual ambiguities. But then I think it’s too easy to see that as a matter of personal… I don’t know what. The fact is the army’s attitude to the bayonet is pretty bloody ambiguous. You read the training manuals and they’re all going on about importance of close combat. Fair enough, but you get the impression there’s a value in it which is independent of whether it gains the objective or not. It’s proper war. Manly war. Not all this nonsense about machine-guns and shrapnel. And it’s reflected in the training. I mean, it’s one long stream of sexual innuendo. Stick him in the gooleys. No more little fritzes. If Sassoon had used language like that, he’d never have been published.’ Manning stopped abruptly. ‘You know I think I’ve lost the thread. No, that’s it, I was trying… I was trying to be honest and think whether I hated bayonet practice more because… because the body that the sack represents is one that I… come on, Rivers. Nice psychological term?’

‘Love.’

‘I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t think so. We all hate it. I’ve no way of knowing whether I hate it more, because we don’t talk about it. It’s just a bloody awful job, and we get on and do it. I mean, you split enormous parts of yourself off, anyway.’

‘Is that what you did?’

‘I suppose so.’ For a moment it seemed he was about to go on, then he shook his head.

When he was sure there’d be no more, Rivers said, ‘You know we are going to have to talk about the war, Charles.’

‘I do talk about it.’

Silence.

‘I just don’t see what good it would do to churn everything up. I know what the theory is.’ He looked down at his hands. ‘My son Robert, when he was little … he used to enjoy being bathed. And then quite suddenly he turned against it. He used to go stiff and scream blue murder every time his nurse tried to put him in. And it turned out he’d been watching the water go down the plug-hole and he obviously thought he might go down with it. Everybody told him not to be stupid.’ Manning smiled. ‘I must say it struck me as an eminently reasonable fear.’

Rivers smiled. ‘I won’t let you go down the plughole.’

At dinner the talk was all of the Pemberton Billing trial. Everybody was depressed by the medical evidence, since this was the first time psychologists had been invited to pronounce in court on such a subject. ‘What do we get?’ somebody asked. ‘Serrel Cooke rambling on about monsters and hereditary degeneracy. The man’s a joke.’

If he is, I’ve lost my sense of humour, Rivers thought.

After dinner he was glad to escape from the hospital and go for a stroll round the square. London had become a depressing place. Every placard, every newsboy’s cry, every headline focused on the trial. Lord Alfred Douglas was in the witness-box now, apparently blaming England’s poor showing in the war on the plays of Oscar Wilde. Any serious consideration of the terrible state of affairs in France was pushed into second place by the orgy of irrational prejudice that was taking place at the Old Bailey. Manning was quite right of course, people didn’t want reasons, they wanted scapegoats. You saw it in the hospital too, where hostility to the pacifist orderlies mounted as the news from France grew worse, but there was some element of logic in that. Men were being whipped back into line. Into the Line. Unless he were suffering from the complaint Jane Manning had diagnosed, of being incapable of seeing his own sex as peripheral to anything. But no, he thought Manning was right. Maud Allan was in the firing line almost by accident. The real targets were men who couldn’t or wouldn’t conform.

Rivers’s thoughts turned to Sassoon. Manning’s experience clearly showed that every member of Robert Ross’s circle was at risk, liable to the same treatment as Ross himself. It didn’t help that Ross was opposed to the war, though he had not approved of Sassoon’s protest, arguing — quite rightly in River’s opinion — that it would destroy Sassoon without having any impact on the course of events. Ross’s own method of opposition, according to Manning, was to show photographs of mutilated corpses to any civilian who might benefit from the shock. Rivers was glad Sassoon was well away from Ross, and the trial.

Once, at Craiglockhart, he’d tried to warn Sassoon of the danger. As long ago as last November he’d told him about the cabinet noir, the Black Book, the 47,000 names of eminent men and women whose double lives left them open to German blackmail.

— Relax, Rivers. I’m not eminent.

— No, but you’re afriend 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… 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. Nobody should live like that.

It had been pleasant talking to Manning about Siegfried. Apart from Robert Graves, whom Rivers saw occasionally, Manning was the only acquaintance they had in common.

The square was deserted. On nights of the full moon people hurried back to the safety of their cellars. Rivers’s footsteps seemed to follow him, echoing along the empty pavement. The moon had drifted clear from the last gauzy wrack of cloud, and his shadow stretched ahead of him, the edges almost as sharp as they would have been by day.

So calm, so clear a night. We’re in for it, he thought. That was one thing he’d never had to cope with at Craiglockhart: bombs falling within earshot of patients who jumped out of their skins if a teaspoon rattled in a saucer. He turned and began to walk rapidly towards the dark and shuttered building.

THIRTEEN

Head is the one awake inside the sleeping hospital. Masked and gowned, a single light burning above his head, he stands beside a dissecting table on which a man lies, face upwards, naked, reeking of formaldehyde. The genitals are shrivelled, the skin the dingy gold of old paper. Head finishes drawing an outline on the shaven head, says, ‘Right then,’ and extends his gloved hand for the drill. But something’s wrong. Even as the drill whirs, the golden-skinned man stirs. Rivers tries to say, ‘Don’t, he’s alive,’ but Head can’t, or won’t, hear him. A squeak of bone, a mouth stretched wide, and then a hand grasps Head’s hand at the wrist, and the cadaver in all its naked, half-flayed horror rises from the table and pushes him back.

The corridor outside Rivers’s room is empty, elongated, the floor polished and gleaming. Then the doors at the end flap open with a noise like the beating of wings and the cadaver bounds through, pads from door to door, sniffs, tries to locate him more by smell than sight. At last it finds the right door, advances on the bed, bends over him, thrusts its anatomical drawing of a face into his, as he struggles to wake up and remember where he is.

Christ. He lay back, aware of sweat on his chest and in his groin. He was in a hospital bed, too high, too narrow, the mattress covered with rubber that creaked as he moved. He could see that ruin of a face bending over him. In these moments between sleep and waking, he was able to do — briefly — what other people take for granted: see things that were not there.

Quickly, before the moment passed, he began to dissect the images of which the dream was composed. The dissecting-room in the dream had not been the room at the Anatomical Institute where he’d watched Head at work that morning, but the anatomy theatre at Bart’s, where he had trained.

The whole emotional impression left by the dream was one of… He lay, eyes closed in the darkness, sifting impressions. Contamination. To imagine Head, the gentlest of men, drilling the skull of a conscious human being was a sort of betrayal. The link with Head’s carrying out the tests on Lucas was obvious. Rivers had thought, as he watched Head looking at Lucas, that the same suspension of empathy that was so necessary a part of the physician’s task was also, in other contexts, the root of all monstrosity. Not merely the soldier, but the torturer also, practises the same suspension.

The dream was about dissociation. Like most of his dreams these days, a dream about work. He never seemed to dream about sex any more, though before the war sexual conflicts had been a frequent subject of dreams. A cynic might have said he was too exhausted. He thought it was probably more complicated, and more interesting, than that, but he had little time for introspection. Certainly no time for it now. He sat up and flapped his pyjama jacket to make the sweat evaporate, then lay back and tried to compose himself for sleep. He never slept well on the nights he stayed at the hospital, partly because of the uncomfortable bed, partly because the expectation of being woken kept his sleep light.

He was just beginning to drift off when the whistles blew.

By the time the orderly knocked on his door, he was out of bed and fastening his dressing-gown. He followed the man along the corridor to the main ward where Sister Walters greeted him. She was a thin, long-nosed Geordie with a sallow skin and a vein of class-hatred that reminded him of Prior. Oddly enough, it seemed to be directed entirely at her own sex. She hated the VADs, most of whom were girls of good family ‘doing their bit’ with — it had to be admitted — varying degrees of seriousness. She loved her officer patients — my boys, she called them — but the VADs, girls from a similar social background after all, she hated. One night last December, as the guns thudded and the ground shook beneath the direct hit on Vauxhall Bridge, they’d sat drinking cocoa together, and the barriers of rank had come down, enough at least for her to say bitterly, ‘They make me sick, the way they go on. “Oooh! Look at me! I’m dusting!” “I’m sweeping a floor.” Do you know, when I was training we got eight quid a year. That was for a seventy-hour week, and you got your breakages stopped off that.’

Cocoa was being made now and carried round on trays. Rivers went from bed to bed of the main ward. Most of the men were reasonably calm, though jerks and twitches were worse than normal. In the single rooms, where the more seriously disturbed patients were, the signs of distress were pitiful. These were men who had joked their way through bombardments that rattled the tea-cups in Kent, now totally unmanned. Weston had wet himself. He stood in the middle of his room, sobbing, while a nurse knelt in front of him and coaxed him to step out of the circle of sodden cloth. Rivers took over from her, got Weston into clean pyjamas and back into bed. He stayed with him till he was calm, then handed over to an orderly and went in search of Sister Walters.

She handed him his cocoa. ‘Captain Manning’s smoking. Do you think you could —’

‘Yes, of course.’

At Craiglockhart the corridors had reeked of cigarettes, and there the staff had contrived not to notice. Here, with two wards full of paralysed patients, the no-smoking rule had to be enforced. Rivers tapped once and walked in.

Manning was sitting up in bed. ‘Hello,’ he said, sounding surprised.

‘I’m afraid I’ve got to ask you to put that out. Two lifts. Twenty wheelchairs.’

‘Yes, certainly.’ Manning stubbed his cigarette out. ‘Stupid of me. I didn’t know you did nights.’

‘Only at full moons.’

‘I thought that theory of mental illness had been exploded.’

Rivers smiled. ‘You know what I mean.’

‘Sister Walters says they got Vauxhall Bridge twice. Is that right?’

‘Yes. Though we don’t need to worry when they hit it. Only when they miss.’

‘Reminds me of last Christmas. Do you remember that raid? I was staying with Ross, Sassoon was there as well, and it was very funny because it was the first raid I’d experienced, and I was all set to be the cool, collected veteran, calming down the poor nervous civilians. I was a complete bloody wreck. Ross’s housekeeper was better than me. Sassoon was the same. In fact I remember him saying, “All that fuss about whether I should go back or not. I won’t be any bloody good when I do.”’

A ragged sound of singing. ‘Listen,’ Manning said. He began to sing with them, almost under his breath.

Bombed last night

And bombed the night before

Gunna get bombed tonight

If we never get bombed any more.

When we’re bombed we’re scared as we can be…

‘First time I’ve heard that outside France.’ A pause. ‘You know, I’ve been thinking about what you said… about remembering and trying to talk about it.’

Rivers propped his chin on his hands and said, ‘Go on.’ Even as he spoke, he recalled Prior’s wickedly accurate imitation of this position. Damn Prior.

‘You know these attacks I have? Well, they tend to start with a sort of waking dream. It’s nothing very much actually, it’s not horrifying, it’s just a line of men marching along duckboards wearing gas masks and capes. Everything’s a sort of greenish-yellow, the colour it is when you look through the visor. The usual… porridge.’ He swallowed. ‘If a man slips off the duckboard it’s not always possible to get him out and sometimes he just sinks. The packs are so heavy, you see, and the mud’s fifteen feet deep. It’s not like ordinary mud. It’s like a bog, it… sucks. They’re supposed to hold on to the pack of the man in front.’

‘And you say this… dream triggers the attack?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose so.’

‘What in particular?’

Manning tried to answer and then shook his head.

‘If you had to pick out the worst thing, what would it be?’

‘There’s a hand coming out of the mud. It’s holding the duckboard and… nothing else. Everything else is underneath.’

A short silence.

‘Oh, and there’s a voice.’ Manning reached for his cigarettes and then remembered he couldn’t smoke. ‘It’s not coming from anybody. It’s just… there.’

Rivers waited. ‘What does it say?’

‘“Where’s Scudder?’” Manning smiled. ‘It’s a rather nasty, knowing little voice. “Where’s Scudder? Where’s Scudder?’”

‘Do you answer?’

Manning shook his head. ‘No point. It knows the answer.’

Silence, except for the sound of singing, fading now, and then, in the distance, the thudding of the guns.

Rivers said, ‘You know, if we went down to my room you could smoke.’

Manning looked surprised. ‘Now?’

‘Why not? Unless you think you can get back to sleep?’

Manning didn’t answer that. There was no need.

‘There,’ Rivers said, putting an ashtray at Manning’s elbow. The lamp created a circle of light around the desk, a world.

‘You don’t, do you?’ Manning said, lighting up.

‘A cigar now and then.’

Manning inhaled deeply, his eyes closed. ‘One of the reasons I don’t talk about it,’ he said, smiling, ‘apart from cowardice, is that it seems so futile.’

‘Because it’s impossible to make people understand?’

‘Yes. Even a comparatively small thing. The feeling you get when you go into the Salient, especially if you’ve been there before and you know what you’re facing. You really do say goodbye to everything. You just put one foot in front of another, one step, then the next, then the next.’

Rivers waited.

‘It’s… ungraspable,’ Manning said at last. ‘I don’t mean you can’t grasp it because you haven’t been there. I mean, I can’t grasp it and I have been there. I can’t get my mind round it.’

‘You were going to tell me about Scudder.’

‘Was I?’

Their eyes met.

Manning smiled. ‘Yes, I suppose I was. He was a man in my company. You know, the whole thing’s based on the idea that if you’ve got the right number of arms and legs and you’re not actually mentally defective you can be turned into a soldier. Well, Scudder was the walking proof that it isn’t true. He was hopeless. He knew he was. The night before we were due to move up, he got drunk. Well, a lot of them got drunk, but he was… legless. He didn’t turn up for parade, and so he was court-martialled. I went to see him the night before. He was being held in a barn, and we sat on a bale of straw and talked. It turned out he’d been treated for shell shock the previous year. With electric shocks. I didn’t know they did that.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Rivers said. ‘They do.’

‘He was at Messines when the mines went up. Apparently he used to dream about mines and blood. And he used to jerk his head and make stupid noises. That’s what the doctor called them. Stupid noises. Anyway it worked, after a fashion. The electric shocks. The night after he had the treatment he didn’t dream about mines. He dreamt he was back in the trenches having electric shock treatment. I stayed with him a couple of hours, I suppose.’ Manning smiled faintly. ‘He was a most unfortunate-looking youth. I mention that in case there’s a doctrinaire Freudian lurking under your desk.’

Rivers pretended to look. ‘No-o. There isn’t one behind it either.’

Manning laughed. ‘The thing was he was extremely bright. And I don’t know whether it was snobbery or… or what it was, but I’d been assuming he wasn’t. Actually I don’t think it was snobbery, it was just he was so bloody bad at everything. You couldn’t believe there was an intelligent mind behind all those… cock-ups. But there was.’ His expression became momentarily remote. ‘After that, I noticed him more. I thought —’

‘What did he get?’

‘At the court martial? Two hours’ field punishment a day. When everybody else was resting — uh! — he’d be cleaning limbers, that sort of thing. I used to stop and have a word with him. I don’t think it helped because it took him away from the other men, and in the end it’s the other men who keep you going.’

‘Go on. You say you thought —’

‘I thought he was clumsy. And then after this talk I watched him, I watched him at bayonet practice, running in and lunging and… missing. You know, the thing’s this big, and he was missing it. And suddenly I realized it was nothing to do with clumsiness. He couldn’t switch off. He couldn’t… turn off the part of himself that minded. I’m quite certain when he finally got the bayonet in, he saw it bleed. And that’s the opposite of what should be happening. You know I saw men once… in close combat, as the manuals say, and one man was reciting the instructions. Lunge, one, two: twist, one, two, out, one, two… Literally, killing by numbers. And that’s the way it has to be. If a man’s properly trained he’ll function on the day almost like an automaton. And Scudder was the opposite of that. Somehow the whole thing had gone into reverse. I think probably because of the breakdown, because I can see the same sort of thing happening to me. Like red — the colour red — whatever it is, even if it’s a flower or a book — it’s always blood.’

Rivers had gone very still. He waited.

‘When I was out there, I could be in blood up to the elbows, it didn’t bother me. It’s almost as if instead of normal feelings being cut off, there aren’t any divisions left at all. Everything washes into everything else. I don’t know if that makes sense.’

‘Very much so.’

A pause. ‘Anyway, we moved forward. It was raining. I don’t know why I bother to say that. It was always raining. The heavens had opened. And we were told to report to the graveyard.’ Manning laughed, a genuine full-blooded laugh. ‘I thought, my God somebody’s developed a sense of humour. But it was absolutely true. We were billeted in the graveyard. And it was extraordinary. All the tombs had been damaged by shells and you could see through into the vaults, and this was in an area where there were corpses everywhere. The whole business of collecting and burying the dead had broken down. Wherever you looked there were bodies or parts of bodies, and yet some of the younger ones — Scudder was one — were fascinated by these vaults. You’d come across them lying on their stomachs trying to see through the holes, because the vaults were flooded, and the coffins were floating around. It was almost as if these people were really dead, and the corpses by the road weren’t. Any more than we were really alive.

‘We were shelled that night. Three men wounded. I was organizing stretcher-bearers — not easy, as you can imagine — and I’d just finished when Hines walked up and said, “Scudder’s gone.” He’d just got up and walked away. The other men thought he’d gone to the latrine, but then he didn’t come back. We got together a search-party. I thought he might have fallen into one of the vaults, and we crawled round calling his name, and all the time I knew he hadn’t. I decided to go after him. I know, not what a company commander ought to have done, but I had a very good second in command and I knew he couldn’t have got far. You see, everything was coming forward for the attack, and the road was absolutely choked. I hoped I could get to him before the military police picked him up. He’d have been shot. We were far enough forward for it to count as desertion in the face of the enemy. I was struggling and floundering along, and it really was almost impossible, and then I saw him. He hadn’t got very far. When I caught up with him, he didn’t even look at me. Just went on walking. And I walked beside him and tried to talk to him, and he obviously wasn’t listening. So I just pushed him off the road, and we slithered down and stopped on the rim of a crater. There’s always gas lingering on the water. When you get close your eyes sting. He was blue. And I tried to talk to him. He said, “This is mad.” And I said, “Yes, I know, but we’ve all got to do it.” In the end I simply named people. Men in his platoon. And I said, “They’ve got to do it. You’ll only make it harder for them.” In the end he just got up and followed me, like a little lamb.’

Manning stirred and reached for another cigarette. ‘We went forward almost as soon as we got back. The orders were full of words like “trenches” and “attacking positions”. There weren’t any trenches. The attacking position was a line of sticks tied with bits of white ribbon. We were late arriving, and it was getting light. If we hadn’t been late, we’d’ve crawled straight past them in the dark. The “line” was a row of shell-craters, filled with this terrible sucking mud. And you just crouched beneath the rim, and… waited. We advanced. No close work, but machine-guns directly ahead up the slope. A lot of casualties. A lot, and no hope of getting them back. It was taking the stretcher-bearers a couple of hours to go a hundred yards. So there we were, crouched in another row of shell-holes exactly like the first. And all hell was let loose. As soon as it died down a bit, I tried to crawl from one hole to another. It took me an hour to crawl between two holes. And in the other hole I found four men, none of them wounded, and I thought, thank God, and then suddenly one of them said, “Where’s Scudder?” Well, there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t move, the shelling was so heavy. And then there was a lull, and we heard a cry. It seemed to be coming from a crater slightly further back, not far, and we crawled along and found him.

‘He’d either slipped or been blown down the slope. Blown, I suspect, because he’d got quite a way in. He was already up to his chest. We tried to get him out, but even forming a line and holding out a rifle we couldn’t reach him. He could just get the tips of his fingers on the butt, but his hands were slippery with mud and they kept sliding off. I could see if we went on trying somebody else was going to slip in. And Scudder was panicking and… pleading with us to do something. I have never seen anything like his face. And it went on and on. He was slipping away all the time, but slowly. I knew what I had to do. I got the men lined up and told him we were going to try again, and while he was looking at the others I crawled round the other side, and fired.’ Manning closed his eyes. ‘I missed. And that was terrible, because then he knew what was happening. I fired again, and this time I didn’t miss.

‘We spent the rest of the night there, in that hole. It was very odd. You know, I don’t think any of the men would have said, “You did the wrong thing. You should have let him die slowly.” And yet nobody wanted to talk to me. They kept their distance.’

A long silence. ‘His mother wrote to me in hospital. To thank me. Apparently Scudder had written to her and told her I’d been kind to him.’

Rivers said firmly, ‘You were.’

Manning looked at him and then quickly away. ‘We were relieved the following night. I reported back to Battalion HQ and they expressed extreme displeasure. Apparently we’d been a bulge in the line. We’d been sitting in the wrong shell-holes. They were having dinner, veal and ham pie and red wine, and suddenly I realized they weren’t even going to offer us a fucking drink. I had Hines with me, he was dead on his feet. So I leant across the table, took two glasses, gave one to Hines and said, “Gentlemen, the King.” And of course they all had to struggle to their feet.’ He laughed. ‘And then we got the hell out of it before they could work out how to put an officer on a charge for proposing the loyal toast. We staggered down that road giggling like a pair of schoolboys. We were still laughing when the shell got us. I got this. Poor old Hines… I crawled across to him. And he looked straight at me and said, “I’m all right, Mum.” And died.’

Rivers stirred. He was about to speak when he heard bugles in the streets. ‘Let’s have the curtains open, shall we?’ he said.

He pulled the heavy curtains back, and grey dawn light flooded into the room. Manning flinched. He got up and joined Rivers by the window, and was just in time to see a taxi drive along the other side of the square. Rivers opened the windows, and the sound of birdsong filled the room.

‘You know,’ Manning said, ‘when Ross told me they sounded the all-clear by driving boy scouts with bugles round the streets in taxis, I didn’t believe him.’

They watched the taxi leave the square. Manning said, ‘I used to find a certain kind of Englishness engaging. I don’t any more.’

FOURTEEN

Sarah was coming. The thought buoyed Prior up as he walked along the Bayswater Road to the underground station. Only when he was on the train, staring sightlessly at his reflection in the black glass, did his thoughts turn to Spragge. He hadn’t seen him face to face since that evening in the park, but he’d suspected more than once that Spragge was following him. Possibly it was just nerves. His nerves were bad, and the intolerable sticky heat didn’t help. The gaps in his memory were increasing both in length and frequency, and they terrified him.

Like the undiscovered territory on medieval maps, Rivers said. Where unknown, there place monsters. But a better analogy, because closer to his own experience, was No Man’s Land. He remembered looking down a lane in France. The lane had a bend in it, and what was beyond the bend was hidden by a tall hedge. Beyond that was No Man’s Land. Beyond that again, the German lines. Full of men like himself. Men who ate, slept, shat, blew on their fingers to ease the pain of cold, moved the candle closer, strained their eyes to read again letters they already had by heart. He knew that, they all knew it. Only it was impossible to believe, because the lane led to a country where you couldn’t go, and this prohibition alone meant that everything beyond that point was threatening. Uncanny.

Something about the lifeless air of the underground encouraged morbid thoughts. Above ground, in the relatively cool, coke-smelling air of King’s Cross, he felt more cheerful. Please God, he thought, no gaps while Sarah’s here.

He waited by the barrier, sick with excitement. The train slid to a halt, grunted, wheezed, belched, subsided into a series of disgruntled mutters, and then all along its length doors swung open, and people started to get out. The sheer excitement of knowing he was going to see her stopped him seeing her, and for one terrifying moment all the women on the platform were Sarah. Then his mind cleared, and there was only one woman, walking straight towards him.

He caught her in his arms and swung her off her feet. When, finally, he set her down they stared at each other. He noticed the yellow skin, the dark shadows round her eyes, the fringe of ginger hair which was not her own colour, but some effect of the chemicals she worked with.

‘Well?’ she said.

‘You look beautiful. But then you always do.’

He took her bag and steered her towards the taxi rank.

‘Can’t we go on the underground?’ she said, pulling back.

He looked surprised.

‘I’ve never been on it.’

Her face lit up as she stepped out on to the descending staircase. She was too excited to talk until they were on the train, and had stopped at several stations, and the first novelty of hurtling in a lighted capsule through dark tunnels had worn off. Then she turned to him and said, ‘You look a bit tired. Are you all right?’

‘It’s the heat,’ he said. ‘I haven’t been sleeping well.’

‘You will tonight.’

He smiled. ‘I was hoping not to sleep at all tonight.’

But that was too direct. She smiled but looked away.

‘How’s your mother?’

‘The same. The shop’s not doing too well. No demand for second-hand stuff these days.’

‘What about Dr Lawson’s Cure for Female Blockages and Obstructions? I bet she’s doing a roaring trade in that.’

‘Geraway, man. It’s all sixpenny ticklers these days.’

‘Is it?’ Prior asked innocently.

She smiled and eventually laughed.

‘How was your trip home?’ she asked after a while.

‘Not bad. I met a few old friends.’

‘Did you tell your mam about me?’

He hesitated.

‘You didn’t,’ she said.

‘I prepared the ground.’

‘Billy. You think she won’t like me, don’t you?’

He knew she wouldn’t. He had a very clear idea of the sort of girl his mother wanted him to marry. One of those green-skinned, titless girls who wore white lawn blouses and remembered their handkerchiefs. The Ministry was full of them. The extraordinary thing was he did find them attractive, though not in a way he liked. They woke his demons up, just as surely as making love to Sarah put them to sleep. ‘It’s not that,’ he said.

‘Isn’t it?’ She smiled, and he realized she simply didn’t care. ‘What about your dad?’

‘I don’t tell him anything.’

‘Do you think he’d like me?’

He’d never thought about it. As soon as he considered it, he knew his father would like her, and she’d like him. She wouldn’t approve of the old sod, but she’d get on all right with him. Instantly the idea of taking her home became even less attractive. ‘There’s plenty of time,’ he said.

Leading her down the steps to the basement he was ashamed of the overflowing bins and the smell, but he needn’t have worried. Sarah was delighted with the flat. He realized, as he took her from room to room, that it could have been twice as dark, twice as stuffy, and she would still have been pleased with it. For two days and nights this would be their home, and that was all that mattered.

She ended the tour sitting on the single bed in his room, unselfconsciously bouncing up and down to test the mattress. Then she looked up and found him watching her, and her face was suffused with a blush that banished the yellow from her skin. His breath caught in his throat, and he swallowed hard. ‘If you’d like to get washed or or bathed, it’s next door.’

‘Yes, I—’

‘I’ll get a towel.’

Prior wished sometimes he didn’t know what it was like to be groped, to be pounced on before you’re ready. As he pulled a towel out of the airing cupboard, he heard the bathroom door open and then felt her arms come round him and clasp his chest. She pressed her face between his shoulders, her mouth against his spine. ‘Can you feel this?’ she asked. And she began to groan, deep noises, making his spine and the hollows of his chest vibrate with her breath. He pushed her gently away. ‘You must be tired,’ he said.

She giggled, and he felt her laughter in his bones. ‘Not too tired.’

They did have a bath, eventually. Afterwards, lying on the bed, she traced his ribs with the tips of her fingers, propped up on one elbow, her hair screening them both. ‘You know the part of men I like best?’ she said, moving her finger down.

‘Men?’ Cupping his hands around his mouth, he called into the passage, ‘George? Albert? Are you there?’

She smiled, but persisted. ‘This part.’ Her finger slid into the hollow beneath his ribs and down across his belly.

‘There?’

‘Yes.’

‘Uh? Uh?’ he said, thrusting his hips upward.

‘Oh, that.’

‘“That”!’ He struggled to sit up, only to subside as she slid down the bed and took his flaccid penis into her mouth.

She looked up and smiled. ‘He’s nice too.’

‘He’s a bloody disgrace at the moment. Look at him.’

‘You can’t expect miracles.’

He closed his eyes. ‘Go on doing that you might just get one.’

Hanging over her, watching the stretched mouth, the slit eyes, the head thrown back until it seemed her spine must crack, he remembered other faces. The dying looked like that.

‘What shall we do?’ he asked. ‘Are you hungry?’

‘Not really.’

‘We could go to Oxford Street. Look round the shops.’

‘Don’t sound so enthusiastic.’

‘Or Kew.’

‘What do you want to do?’

‘Kew, I think. The weather can’t last and we can do indoor things tomorrow.’

‘More? You’ll wear me out.’

‘Other things.’

‘Oh.’

Once in the gardens they wandered aimlessly, more interested in each other than in the plants. As the afternoon wore on, the heat thickened until there was a brassy glare in the sky, as if a furnace door had opened. Still they walked, each adjusting to the other’s stride, hardly aware when their linked shadow faded from the grass.

Drops of rain striking their faces startled them out of their absorption. They looked around, dazed. The rain began to beat down, lashing their heads and shoulders. In less time than seemed possible, Sarah’s hair was hanging in dark, reddish-brown strands and the sleeves of her blouse had become transparent. Prior looked for shelter, but could see only some trees. They made for those and stood under them, but there was little protection. Rain streaked the trunks and splashed through the leaves on to the backs of their necks.

Sarah was beginning to shiver with cold. Prior didn’t know where they were. He could see a little mock Grecian temple on a grassy mound, but that was open to the wind. From his previous visits he remembered the Palm House, which was certainly warm. That would be the best place if he could manage to locate it. He worked out where the main gate was, and thought he could remember that you turned left. ‘I think we should make a run for it,’ he said. ‘This isn’t going to go over.’

They ran, heads bent, Prior with his arm round Sarah, splashing through puddles. Rivulets of mud, washed out of flowerbeds, ran down the paths. Sarah refused the offer of his tunic and strode through it all, drenched, skirt caught between her legs, blouse transparent, hair stringy, skin glowing, with a stride that would have covered mountains. She had decided to enjoy it, she said.

The lake was a confusion of exploding circles and bubbles, too turbulent to reflect the inky sky. They ran the last few yards and entered the Palm House. Prior felt a rippling effect on his face and neck and then, immediately, an uncomfortable wave of damp heat. He began to cough. Sarah turned to him. ‘Isn’t this bad for your chest?’

‘No,’ he said, straightening up. ‘In fact it’s ideal.’

The aisles were crowded, so much so it was difficult to move. Thick green foliage surrounded them, and towered to the dazzling glass roof above their heads. Smells of wet earth, of leaves dripping moisture, a constant trickle of water, and somewhere a trapped blackbird singing. But as they moved deeper into the crush, it was the smell of people that took over: damp cloth, wet hair, steamy skin.

Prior took Sarah’s arm and pointed to the gangway above. ‘Come on, it’ll be less crowded.’

He had a dim feeling there might also be more air up there, for in spite of what he’d said to Sarah he was finding the atmosphere oppressive. Sarah followed slowly, wanting to look at the plants. She tugged at his arm and pointed to a flower that had the most incredibly pink penile-looking stamens. ‘Isn’t he beautiful?’

‘I thought you were a rib-cage girl?’

‘Not ribs. The —’

He laughed and pulled her to him. They were standing at the bottom of the spiral staircase. She slid her hand between his legs and rubbed. ‘I could be converted.’

He pressed her more closely against him, his mouth buried in her wet hair, looking over her head, focusing on nothing. Suddenly his eye registered a familiar shape. The green blur cleared, and he found himself gazing, through the branches of some tall plant with holes in its leaves, into the face of Lionel Spragge. There could be no mistake. They stared at each other through the foliage, no more than four or five feet apart. Then Spragge turned and pushed into the crowd, which swallowed him.

Sarah looked up. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Let’s go upstairs.’

He took her hand and pulled her towards the staircase. At every turn he looked down through the green leaves of the canopy at the heads and shoulders below, until eventually they ceased to look like individual people. As they climbed higher, the sound of rain on the glass roof grew louder. The windows were misted up, and a steamy, diffuse, white light spread over everything. He looked down on to the gleaming canopy of leaves. And then at the aisles, searching for Spragge’s broad shoulders and square head. He thought he saw him several times as he and Sarah walked round the gangway, but could never be sure. At first Sarah exclaimed over the different shapes and patterns of the leaves, which were indeed beautiful, as he acknowledged after a cursory glance. Then, gradually, sensing his withdrawal, she fell silent.

I should have spoken to him, Prior thought, though he couldn’t imagine what he would have said. But somehow the not speaking seemed in retrospect to give the encounter a hallucinatory quality. He looked down again, and now he would have been relieved to see Spragge’s square head moving below.

He felt Sarah watching him and made an effort to behave more normally, rubbing condensation from the glass, trying to see out. ‘You know, I think we might just as well make a dash for it.’

He had begun to feel exposed, here above the leaves, with the white light flooding over everything. Down there in the crowd, Spragge had only to look up through a gap in the foliage and there he was, floodlit under the white light of the dome.

‘Yes, all right,’ Sarah said.

She sounded puzzled, but ready to go along with whatever he suggested. But she was no fool, his Sarah. He was going to have to tell her something.

Others had also decided to make a dash for it. A group of women with heavy drenched skirts were running stiff-legged towards the main gate.

‘Can you run?’ he asked.

A glint of amusement. ‘Can you?’

Good question. By the time they reached the underground station, he was more out of breath than her. He remembered, as he pressed his hand to his side, Spragge saying, ‘I was behind you on the platform.’ Suddenly he didn’t want the underground. He didn’t want to be shut in. ‘Look, I’ve got a better idea,’ he said. ‘Why don’t we go on the river? If we get off at Westminster Bridge we could see the Abbey.’

The boat was already moored when they reached the landing stage, and beginning to be crowded. At the last moment, as the engine began to throb, a crowd of people swept on board, including what looked like a girls’ school party. Prior stood up and gave one of the teachers his seat. ‘I’ll get you a cup of tea,’ he whispered to Sarah and went to the bar.

As he stood waiting his turn, the roar increased, the river churned, and they began moving out into midstream. He got the tea, took it back to Sarah, and tried to drink his own, but found it too difficult to keep his feet on the tilting deck, so he moved away from her and went to stand in the doorway that connected the covered deck with the open benches in the stern. Even these were full, and in fact the rain had almost stopped. A white sun could be glimpsed now and then through a hazy veil of cloud.

On the front bench a group of elderly cockney men were making the best of a bad job, laughing and joking at everything. A little way behind, on the end of the third bench, sat a man with unusually broad shoulders. He looked like Spragge, but it was difficult to tell because he was wearing a hat and facing away from Prior. Prior craned to see the side of his face. It was Spragge. Had to be. And yet he wasn’t sure. There was something odd about the way the man didn’t turn, didn’t move. Edging along the railing towards him, Prior became aware of a slowness in his movements, as if he were wading through glue. He saw himself, in his mind’s eye, go up to the man, tap him on the shoulder, wait for him to turn, and the face that turned towards him… was his own. He sat down, his eyes level with the railings from which a row of glittering raindrops hung. He reached out his hand and, with the tip of his forefinger, destroyed them one by one. The wet, running uncomfortably under his shirt cuff, brought him back to himself. He looked again. It might or might not be Spragge, but it certainly looked nothing like him. The whole powerful, brutal bulk of the head and shoulders was as different from his own slight build as any two physiques could be, and yet again, as he got up and began to move forward, he felt he was looking at the back of his own head. He breathed deeply, gazing through the rails at the brown, swollen, sinuous river, making himself follow individual twigs and leaves as they were borne along, noticing how the different currents of water, as they met and parted, rippled like muscles under skin. They were approaching another bridge. He steadied himself, walked up to the man and tapped him on the shoulder.

Spragge’s face was a relief. So much so that it took several seconds for the anger to surface. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

‘Going back to London. What are you doing?’

He sounded genuinely surprised, but Prior had caught the hiccup of laughter in his voice. Spragge had spoken more loudly than he needed, playing to the small audience of cockneys, and to the larger audience on the benches behind.

Prior lowered his voice. ‘Are you following me?’

‘Following you?’ Again very loud. ‘Now why should I do that?’

He sounded like a bottom-of-the-bill music-hall actor conveying injured innocence. The impression was not of somebody who’d decided to act as one possible response to a situation, but of somebody who couldn’t not act. You had the feeling he would act in front of the bathroom mirror. That if ever you succeeded in ripping the mask off there would be no face behind it. Prior felt a wave of revulsion. ‘If you’re following me,’ he said, ‘I’ll—’

‘Yes, what will you do?’ Spragge waited, as if the question genuinely interested him. ‘Call the police? Have me arrested? It’s not against the law to go to Kew.’ He smiled. ‘Nice girl,’ he said, nodding towards the prow. And then he cupped his hands against his chest.

‘If you go anywhere near her, I’ll break your fucking neck.’

Spragge laughed, jowls shaking. He put his hand on Prior’s chest and slapped it, genially. ‘That’s all right,’ he said. Then he sat down again and looked out over the river, with no more than a sideways glance at the cockneys, and a faint smile.

In something not moving, something too steady for a boat. Hands, mottled purple and green, moved along polished wood. Then he was back, staring up at a window made of chips of purple and green light. He looked for Sarah and couldn’t see her. In a panic he leapt up and began searching the Abbey, thrusting tourists aside, trailing hostile stares.

He found her at last, standing by the effigy of an eighteenth-century bishop, running her hand over the smooth marble. A shaft of sunlight had found the auburn lights in her hair.

She looked up as he arrived, breathless. ‘You back now?’

The question was so apposite it silenced him. For a moment he thought, she knows. And immediately rejected the idea. Of course she didn’t know.

They went home by taxi. Prior thought about Spragge, because he was afraid of thinking about anything else. What angered him was the thought that Spragge might have seen that little act of intimacy in the Palm House when Sarah had moved closer and rubbed his cock through the hard cloth of his breeches. A good moment. In all that press of wet, sweating, steamy-skinned people, they’d been alone, and then Spragge’s face peering through the leaves. Had he seen? He must have. Prior was aware of feeling an almost excessive sense of exposure, of violation even, as if he’d been seen, arse upwards, in the act itself.

The taxi jolted and swayed. A memory started to surface that seemed to have nothing to do with the afternoon’s events. He was ill with asthma, walking with his father’s hand. Where could they have been going? His father had never taken him anywhere, he’d been too ashamed of the little runt that had mysteriously sprung from his loins. Perhaps his mother had been ill. Yes, that was it.

They’d sat on a bench somewhere, and a woman brought him lemonade. Real lemonade, his father had said proudly — but why proudly? — not that gassy bottled stuff. There had been lime jelly too, with jelly babies suspended in it. While he was picking at it, his father and the woman went upstairs. He could hear voices from the open window above his head. The boy, Harry. Then his father’s voice, thick and hurried. He’s all right. Wraps himself round that lot he won’t have much to grumble about.

‘Wrapping himself round that lot’ had not been easy. He loved jelly, but hated jelly babies, mainly because of the way people ate them, nibbling at their feet, then at their faces, then boldly biting off the head and turning the headless body round to display the shiny open wound. He contemplated eating his way round them, freeing them from their quivering prison, but he knew he couldn’t do that. The jelly had been specially made — it wasn’t grownup food — and his father would be angry. So, one by one, he had forced them down, swallowing them whole, his eyes fixed on the trees so he wouldn’t have to think about what he was doing. Even so, he’d gagged once or twice, his eyes had watered, while upstairs the thick whispers came and went and the bed springs creaked.

On the way home his father had said, casually, ‘Better not tell your mam.’ And then he’d sat him astride his shoulders and carried him all the whole way home, all the way up the street with everybody looking, his meaty hands clasped round his son’s thin white thighs. For once he’d ridden home in triumph. And he hadn’t told his mam, though he’d stood by her sick bed and listened to his father describe a visit to the park. He’d been invited to join the great conspiracy and even at the age of five he knew the value of it. He wasn’t going to jeopardize future outings by telling her anything.

That night he’d woken up, hot and sticky, knowing he was going to be sick. He started to cry and after a long time his father came in, blundering round and stubbing his toes before he found the light. He looked up at him, the huge man, looming over the bed. Then, slowly, erupting from his mouth, the jelly babies returned — intact, or very nearly so — while his father stood and gaped.

It must have been quite a sight, Prior thought, helping Sarah out of the cab and turning to pay the driver. Like watching a sea-horse give birth.

Once inside the flat he lit the gas fire and made two mugs of strong sweet tea, while Sarah went to take off her wet clothes. She came back wearing his dressing-gown, shivering from the cold. He sat her down between his knees and towelled her hair.

‘You know you were saying about the bit you liked best? For me it’s your hair,’ he said, feeling his tongue thick and unwieldy, getting in the way of his teeth. ‘It was the first thing I noticed. The different colours.’

‘You told me,’ she said, twisting round. ‘And you needn’t make it sound so romantic. You were wondering which colour was down there. Weren’t you?’

He smiled. ‘Yes.’

They sat sipping their tea. She said, ‘Well, are you going to tell me?’

‘Yes.’ He picked up two handfuls of hair and tugged on them. ‘But it’s worse than you think. I need you to tell me what happened.’

‘When?’

‘On the boat.’

Her eyes widened, but she didn’t argue. ‘You gave your seat to that woman and got a cup of tea and then you went and stood over by the bar. I didn’t see what happened then, I was looking at the bank. Then the sun came out and some of the girls went out on deck and this woman thought she ought to go and keep an eye on them. So next time you came back there was a seat next to me. I asked you which bridge we were going under and you didn’t answer. I could see you were in one of your moods. So I left you to it. Then when we got out, that man in the Palm House was waiting at the top of the steps. He said something about me — I honestly didn’t hear what it was — and you hit him. He came back at you, and you lifted your cane and you were obviously going to brain him, so he backed off. He went across the bridge, and you got hold of me and dragged me into the Abbey. I kept saying, “What’s the matter?” I couldn’t get an answer, so I thought, sod it. And I went off and looked at things on me own.’ She waited. ‘Are you telling me you don’t remember all that?’

‘I remember the first bit.’

‘You don’t remember hitting him?’

‘No.’

‘Who is he?’

‘Doesn’t matter.’

‘It does bloody matter.’

‘It’s got nothing to do with you.’

Her face froze.

As she pulled away, he said, ‘No, look, I didn’t mean it like that.’ He buried his head in his hands. ‘I’ll tell you all about him if you like, but that’s not the bit that matters. What matters is that I can’t remember.’

‘It’s happened before?’

‘It’s been happening for oh… two months.’

He could see her mind busily at work, trying to minimize the significance. ‘But you lost your memory once before, didn’t you? I mean, when you came back from France you said you couldn’t remember anything.’ She switched to a tone of condemnation. ‘You’ve let yourself get run down, that’s what you’ve done.’

‘Look, I need you to tell me about it.’ He tried to sound light-hearted. ‘You’re the first person who’s met him.’

‘Don’t you mean “me”? Well, it is you, isn’t it?’

Prior shook his head. ‘You don’t understand.’ He leapt up and took a piece of paper out of the top drawer of the sideboard. ‘Look.’

Sarah looked down and read: Why don’t you leave my fucking cigars alone?

‘I found some cigars in my pocket. I threw them away.’

‘But it’s your writing.’

‘YES. How can I say “I” about that?’

Sarah was thinking. ‘When I said it was you, I didn’t just mean… the obvious. I meant I… I meant I recognized you in that mood. Do you remember the first time we went out together? That day on the beach.’

‘Yes, of—’

‘Well, you were like that then. Hating everybody. You were all right on the train, but once we were on the beach, I don’t know what happened, you just went right away from me and I couldn’t reach you. I could feel the hatred coming off you. It was like anybody who hadn’t been to France was rubbish. Well, you were like that on the boat. And there’s no talking to you when you’re in that mood. You just despise everybody.’ She hesitated. ‘Including me.’

‘It’s not a mood, Sarah. People remember moods.’

In bed that night, coiled round her, he kissed all along her spine, gently, so as not to wake her, his lips moving from one vertebra to the next.

Stepping stones to sanity.

But the day after tomorrow, she would be gone.

FIFTEEN

Sarah left early on the Monday morning. They clung together by the barrier at King’s Cross, breathing in coke fumes, and did not say goodbye.

He worked late, putting off the moment when he’d have to face the empty flat. On his way home he kept telling himself it wouldn’t be too bad, or at least it wouldn’t be as bad as he expected.

It was worse.

He wandered from room to room, searching for traces of her, trying to convince himself a dent in the sofa cushion was where her head had rested. He sat down and put his own head there, but this simply provided a more painful vantage point from which to survey the emptiness of the room.

It’ll get better, he told himself.

It didn’t.

He took to walking the streets at night in an effort to get tired enough to sleep. London by night fascinated him. He walked along the pavements, looking at place-names: Marble Arch, Piccadilly, Charing Cross, Tottenham Court Road. All these places had trenches named after them. And, gradually, as he walked through the streets of the night city, that other city, the unimaginable labyrinth, grew around him, its sandbag walls bleached pale in the light of a flare, until some chance happening, a piece of paper blown across the pavement, a girl’s laugh, brought him back to a knowledge of where he was.

He got a letter from Sarah and put it on the mantelpiece, under a small china figure of a windblown girl walking a dog, where he would see it as soon as he came through the door.

Often, on his night-time walks, he thought about Spragge, and the more he thought the more puzzled he became. The man’s whole sweaty, rumpled, drink-sodden appearance suggested a down-and-out, a man blundering through life, and yet the effort required to watch the flat and follow him all the way to Kew revealed a considerable degree of persistence. It didn’t make sense.

One obvious explanation was that he was working for Lode, but Prior distrusted the idea. The atmosphere in the Intelligence Unit was such that baseless suspicions were mistaken for reality at every turn. It was like a trick picture he’d seen once, in which staircases appeared to lead between the various floors of a building. Only very gradually did he realize that the perspective made no sense, that the elaborate staircases connected nothing with nothing.

His landlady, Mrs Rollaston, turned up on the doorstep, cradling her bosom in her arms as women do when they feel threatened. ‘I thought you’d like to know there’s somebody coming to do the bins. I know I said Monday, but I just couldn’t get anybody.’

She was obviously continuing a conversation.

Prior nodded, and smiled.

He could recall no occasion on which he’d spoken to Mrs Rollaston about the bins.

He needed to see Spragge, but the address on the file, as he discovered standing on a gritty, windswept pavement in Whitechapel, was out of date. The bloodless girl who peered up at him from the basement, a grizzling baby in her arms, said she’d lived there a year and no, she didn’t know where the previous tenant had gone. The landlady might, though.

The landlady, traced to the snug bar of the local pub, confirmed the name had been Spragge. She didn’t know where he was now. Did he know this was the very pub Mary Kelly had been drinking in the night the Ripper killed her? She’d known Mary Kelly as well as she knew her own sister, heart in one place, liver in another, intestines draped all over the floor, in that very chair –

He bought her a port and lemon and left her to her memories. Odd, he thought, that the fascination with the Ripper and his miserable five victims should persist, when half of Europe was at it.

He was losing more time. Not in huge chunks, but frequently, perhaps four or five times a day. In the evenings, unless he was seeing Rivers, he stayed at home. He knew the flat was bad for him, both physically and mentally, but he was afraid to venture out because it seemed to give him more scope. Nonsense, of course. He could and did go out, though sometimes the only sign was the smell of fresh air on Prior’s skin.

One morning Lode sent for him.

‘I just thought I’d share the good news,’ Lode said. ‘Since there isn’t much of it these days. They’ve caught MacDowell.’

Prior was knocked sick by the shock, but he managed to keep his face expressionless. ‘Oh? When?’

‘A few days ago. In Liverpool. Charles Greaves’s house. They got Greaves too.’

‘Hmm. Well, that is progress.’

‘Good news, isn’t it?’

Prior nodded.

‘You know,’ Lode said, watching him narrowly, ‘I used to think I understood you. I used to think I had you taped.’ He waited. ‘Ah, well. Back to work.’

Prior wondered why Lode’s endless patting and petting of his moustache should ever have struck him as a sign of vulnerability. It didn’t seem so now.

The nights were bad. He was still taking sleeping draughts, sometimes repeating the dose when the first one failed to work. Rivers strenuously advised him against it, but he ignored the advice. He had to sleep.

That evening, fast asleep after the second draught, he was awakened by a knocking on the door. The bromide clung to him like glue. Even when he managed to get out of bed, he felt physically sick. For a moment, as he pulled on his breeches and shirt, he thought he might actually be sick. The knocking went on, then stopped.

Presumably whoever it was had got tired and gone away. Prior was about to fall back into bed when he remembered he’d left the door open. Of all the bloody stupid things to do. But it was the only way of getting some air into the place.

It was no use, he’d have to go and close it.

The passage was full of the smell of rotting cabbage. The area round the bins had not been cleaned, in spite of Mrs Rollaston’s promise. Prior stumbled along, hitching up his braces as he went.

The door was open. He looked out. The sky was not the normal blue of a summer evening, but brownish, like caught butter. He went back inside and closed the door.

He was walking past the door of the living-room when he heard a movement.

Slowly, he pushed the half-open door wide. Spragge was sitting, stolidly, in the armchair, thick fingers relaxed on his splayed thighs. He looked up with a sheepish, rather silly expression on his face. Sheepish, but obstinate. ‘Well?’ he said. ‘What do you want to see me about?’

‘Do you always walk into people’s houses uninvited?’

‘I thought I heard you say come in.’ He didn’t bother to make the lie convincing. ‘I knew you must be in because the door was open. You want to watch that. You could get burgled.’ A glance round the room pointed out that there was nothing worth taking.

Prior was angry. Not because Spragge had walked in uninvited; it was deeper, less rational than that. He was angry because of the way Spragge’s fingers curled on his thighs, innocent-looking fingers, the waxy pink of very cheap sausages.

‘I’ll get up and knock again if you like,’ Spragge said, pulling a comical face.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Prior said, sitting down. ‘What do you want?’

‘What do you want?’

Prior looked blank.

‘You’re the one who’s been chasing me.’

Spragge was drunk. Oh, he hid it well. There was just the merest hint of over-precision in his speech, a kind of truculence bubbling beneath the surface.

‘What about a drink?’ Prior suggested.

‘Yeh, all right.’

Prior needed time to think, to work out how he was going to approach Spragge. He went into the kitchen where he kept the whisky. The trouble was he detested Spragge to the point where the necessary manipulation became distasteful. You didn’t manipulate people like Spragge. You squashed them.

He poured a jug of water and, in the sudden silence after he’d turned off the tap, heard a movement, furtive, it seemed to him, in the next room. Rapidly, he crossed to the door.

Spragge was removing Sarah’s letter from underneath the ornament on the mantelpiece. No, not removing it. Putting it back.

‘Have you read that?’ Prior burst into the room. He was remembering how explicit Sarah’s references to their love-making had been. ‘Have you read it?’

Spragge swallowed hard. ‘It’s the job.’

‘You shouldn’t’ve done that.’

‘Aw, for God’s sake,’ Spragge said. ‘Do you think she’d mind? I saw her in the Palm House, she virtually had your dick out.’

Prior grasped Spragge lightly by the forearms and butted him in the face, his head coming into satisfying, cartilage-crunching contact with Spragge’s nose. Spragge tried to pull away, then slumped forward, spouting blood, snorting, putting up an ineffectual shaking hand to stop the flow.

Prior tried to make him stand up, like a child trying to make a toy work. Spragge staggered backwards and fell against the standard lamp, which crashed over and landed on top of him. He lay there, holding his spread fingers over his shattered nose, trying to speak, and gurgling instead.

Disgusted, with himself as much as Spragge, Prior went into the kitchen, wrung out a tea-towel in cold water, came back, and handed it to Spragge. ‘Here, put this over it.’

Wincing, tears streaming down his face, Spragge dabbed at his face with the wet cloth. ‘Broken,’ he managed to say. He gestured vaguely at the towel, which was drenched in blood. Prior took it away and brought another.’ He looked at the roll of fat above Spragge’s trousers and contemplated landing a boot in his kidneys. But you couldn’t, the man was pathetic. He threw the tea-towel at Spragge and sat down in the nearest chair, shaking with rage, unappeased. He wanted to fight. Instead of that he was farting about with tea-towels like Florence fucking Nightingale.

After a while Spragge started to cry. Prior stared at him with awed disgust and thought, my God, I’m not taking this. ‘Come on,’ he said, grabbing Spragge by the sleeve. ‘Out.’

‘Can’t walk.’

‘I’ll get you a taxi.’

Prior struggled into his boots and puttees, then returned to the living-room and dragged Spragge to his feet. Spragge lurched and stumbled to the door, half of his own volition, half dragged there by Prior. Bastard, Prior thought, pushing him up the steps, but the anger was ebbing now, leaving him lonely.

They staggered down the street, Spragge leaning heavily on Prior. Like two drunks. ‘Do you realize how much trouble I’d get into if I was seen like this?’ Prior asked.

The first two taxis went past. Spragge’s face, in the brown air, looked dingy, but less obviously bloody than it had in the flat. He stood, swaying slightly, apart from the noise and heat, the passing crowds, the sweaty faces. He was visibly nursing his bitterness, carrying it around with him like a too full cup. ‘Lode offered me a passage to South Africa. Did you know that? All expenses paid.’

‘Will you go?’

‘Might.’ He looked round him, and the bitterness spilled. ‘Fuck all here.’

Prior remembered there were things he needed to know. ‘Did Lode tell you to follow me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Were you following me when I went to see Hettie Roper?’

‘No, not there.’

Either Spragge was a better actor than he’d so far appeared, or he was telling the truth. Spragge started waving and shouting ‘Taxi!’

It pulled up a few paces further on. ‘I’ll need money,’. he said.

Prior dug in his breeches pockets. ‘Here, take this.’

Spragge bent down and said, ‘Marble Arch.’ He wasn’t going to give an address while Prior was within hearing.

‘You must have been following me,’ Prior said. ‘It was you who told the police where to find MacDowell.’

Spragge looked up from the dim interior. ‘Not me, guv.’ His tone was ironical, indifferent. ‘Lode says it was you.’

SIXTEEN

In the Empire Hospital Charles Manning surveyed the chess-board and gently, with the tip of his forefinger, knocked over the black king.

‘You win,’ he said. ‘Again.’

Lucas grinned, and then pointed over Manning’s shoulder to the figure of a man in army uniform, standing just inside the entrance to the ward.

Manning stood up. For a second there might have been a flicker of fear. Fear was too strong a word, perhaps, but Manning certainly wasn’t at ease though he gave the usual, expensively acquired imitation of it, coming towards Prior, offering his hand. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘This is a surprise.’

‘How are you?’

‘Getting better. Let’s go along to my room.’

Manning chatted easily as they walked along the corridor. ‘Remarkable chap, that. Do you know, he can’t remember the names of any of the pieces? But, my God, he knows how to play.’

Manning’s room was pleasant, with a bowl of roses on the bedside table, and a bright, yellow and red covered book lying face down on the bed.

‘A name you’ll know,’ Manning said, picking it up.

Prior read the title, Counter-Attack, and the name, Siegfried Sassoon.

‘You must’ve been at Craiglockhart at the same time,’ Manning said.

‘Ye-es. Though I don’t know how much of a bond that is. Frankly.’ Prior closed the book and put it on the bedside table beside a photograph of Manning’s wife and children, the same photograph that had been on the grand piano at his house. ‘He hated the place.’

‘Did he?’

‘Oh, yes, he made that perfectly clear. And the people. Nervous wrecks, lead-swingers and degenerates.’

‘Well,’ Manning said, waving Prior to a chair, ‘as one nervous, lead-swinging degenerate to another… how are you?’

‘All right, I think. The Intelligence Unit’s being closed down, so I don’t quite know what’s going to happen.’

Manning smiled. ‘I suppose you want to stay in the Ministry?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘Oh? Well, that might be a bit more difficult. I’ve got a friend at the War Office — Charles Moncrieff — I don’t know whether you know him? Anyway, one of his jobs is to select instructors for cadet battalions. I suppose that might be a possibility?’

Prior leant forward. ‘Hang on a minute. I didn’t come here to brown-nose you or your fucking friend at the War Office. What I was going to say — if you wouldn’t mind listening — is that I want to talk to you about something.’

‘What?’

‘Who. A woman called Mrs Roper. Beattie Roper.’

Manning was looking puzzled. ‘The Mrs Roper? Poison-plot Roper?’

‘Yes.’ Prior got a file out of his briefcase. ‘Except she didn’t do it.’

Manning took the file from him. ‘You want me to read it?’

‘I’ve summarized it. It’ll only take you a few minutes.’

Manning read with total concentration. When he finished he looked up. ‘Can I keep this?’

‘Yes, I’ve got a copy. I’ve got copies of the documents as well.’

‘You mean you’ve made personal copies of Ministry files?’ Manning pursed his lips. ‘You certainly don’t play by the rules, do you?’

‘Neither do you.’

‘We’re in the same boat there, aren’t we?’ A hardening of tone. ‘I would have thought we were in exactly the same boat.’

The merest hint of a glance at the photograph. ‘Not quite.’

Manning got up and walked across to the window. For a while he said nothing. Then he turned and said, ‘Why? Why on earth couldn’t you just come in and say, “Look, I’m worried about this. Will you read the report?” All right, you’ve got the opening to do so because of… There was no need for anything like that.’

Prior had a sudden chilling perception that Manning was right. ‘Rubbish. Beattie Roper’s a working-class woman from the back streets of Salford. You don’t give a fuck about her. I don’t mean you personally — though that’s true too — I mean your class.’

Manning was looking interested now rather than angry. ‘You really do think class determines everything, don’t you?’

‘Whether people are taken seriously or not? Yes.’

‘But it’s not a question of individuals, is it? All right, I don’t know anything about women in the back streets of Salford. I don’t pretend to. I don’t want to. It doesn’t mean I want to see them sent to prison on perjured evidence. Or anybody else for that matter.’

‘Look, can we skip the moral outrage? When I came in here, you assumed I was after a cushy job. I didn’t even get the first bloody sentence out. Are you seriously saying you would have made that assumption about a person of your own class?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘No, I would.’

‘You get dozens of them, I suppose, begging for safe jobs?’

‘Yes,’ Manning said bleakly.

Prior looked at him. ‘Golly. What fun.’

‘Not really.’

They sat in silence, each registering the change in atmosphere, neither of them sure what it meant. ‘You’re right,’ Manning said at last. ‘It was an insulting assumption to make. I’m sorry.’

At that moment the door opened and Rivers came in.

‘Charles, I — ‘He stopped abruptly when he saw Prior. ‘Hello. I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you had a visitor.’ He smiled at Prior. ‘I hope you’re not tiring my patient?’

‘He’s wearing me out,’ Prior snapped.

‘What did you want to see me about?’ Manning asked.

Rivers said, ‘Nothing that can’t wait.’

He went out and left them alone.

There was a short silence. ‘I’m sorry too,’ Prior said. ‘You’re right, of course. Class prejudice isn’t any more admirable for being directed upwards.’ Just more fucking justified. ‘Do you think I should show that to her MP?’

‘Oh, God, no, don’t do that. Once they’ve denied it in the House, it’ll be set in concrete. No, I’ll have a word with Eddie Marsh. Only don’t expect too much. I mean, it’s perfectly clear even from your report she was sheltering deserters. That’s two years’ hard labour. She’s only done one.’

‘She wasn’t charged with that.’

Manning said, ‘They’re not going to let her out yet.’

‘So what will they do?’

‘Wait till the war’s over. Let her go quietly.’

Prior shook his head. ‘She won’t last that long.’

That night, at nine o’clock, Prior went out for a drink. He came to himself in the small hours of the morning, fumbling to get his key into the lock. He had no recollection of the intervening five hours.

Rivers rubbed the corners of his eyes with an audible squidge. ‘That’s the longest, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. Just.’

‘Any clues? I mean, had you been drinking?’

‘Like a fish. I’ve still got the headache.’

Rivers replaced his glasses.

‘One of the… how shall I put it?’ Prior breathed deeply. ‘Inconveniences of my present position is that I do tend to end up with somebody else’s hangover. Really rather frequently.’

‘Not “somebody else’s”.’

Prior looked away. ‘You’ve no idea how disgusting it is to examine one’s own underpants for signs of “recent activity”.’

Rivers looked down at the backs of his hands. ‘I’m going to say something you probably won’t like.’

The telephone began to ring in the next room.

Prior smiled. ‘And I’m going to have to wait for it too.’

The call was from Captain’ Harris, telephoning to arrange the details of a flight they were to make tomorrow. Rivers jotted the time down, and took a few moments to collect his thoughts before returning to Prior.

Prior was standing by the mantelpiece, looking through a stack of field postcards. Well, that was all right, Rivers thought, closing the door. Field postcards contained no information about the sender except the fact that he was alive. Or had been at the time it was posted. ‘His book’s out, you know?’ Prior said, holding a postcard up. ‘Manning’s got a copy.’

‘Yes.’

Rivers sat down and waited for Prior to join him.

‘I suppose this is the real challenge,’ Prior said. ‘For you. The ones who go back. They must be the ones you ask the questions about. I mean obviously all this face your emotions, own up to fear, let yourself feel grief… works wonders. Here.’ Prior came closer. Bent over him. ‘But what about there? Do you think it helps there? Or do they just go mad quicker?’

‘Nobody’s ever done a follow-up. Electric shock treatment has a very high relapse rate. What mine is, I just don’t know. Obviously the patients who stay in touch are a self-selected group, and such evidence as they provide is anecdotal, and therefore almost useless.’

‘My God, Rivers. You’re a cold bugger.’

‘You asked me a scientific question. You got a scientific answer.’

Prior sat down. ‘Well dodged.’

Rivers took his glasses off. ‘I’m really not trying to dodge anything. What I was going to say is I think perhaps you should think about coming into hospital. The—’

‘No. You can’t order me to.’

‘No, that’s true. I hoped you trusted me enough to take my advice.’

Prior shook his head. ‘I just can’t face it.’

Rivers nodded. ‘Then we’ll have to manage outside. Will you at least take some sick leave?’

Another jerk of the head. ‘Not yet.’

Prior avoided thinking about the interview with Beattie Roper till he was crossing the prison yard. She’d been on hunger strike again, the wardress said, jangling her keys. And she’d had flu. No resistance. In sick bay all last week. He’d find her weak. The prison doctor had wanted to force-feed her, but the Home Office in its wisdom had decided that such methods were not to be used.

She was thinner than he remembered.

He stood just inside the door. She was lying on the bed, the light from the barred window casting a shadow across her face. The wardress stood against the wall, by the closed door.

‘I need to see her alone.’

He expected an argument, but the wardress withdrew immediately.

‘The voice of authority, Billy.’

Mucus clung to the corners of her lips when she spoke, as if her mouth were seldom opened.

He moved closer to the bed. ‘I hear you’ve been ill.’

‘Flu. Everybody’s had it.’

He remained standing, as if he needed her permission to sit. She nodded towards the chair.

‘I’ve been doing what I can,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid it doesn’t amount to much. I was hoping Mac might be able to help, but —’

A chest movement that might have been a laugh. ‘Not where he is. You know where they’ve sent him, don’t you? Wandsworth.’

‘You see, you did shelter deserters. They think you’d do it again.’

She hoisted herself up the bed. ‘Bloody right ‘n’ all. I might look like a bloody scarecrow but in here’ — she tapped the side of her head — ‘I’m the same.’

Outside the door the wardress coughed.

‘You remember a lad called Brightmore?’

‘No.’

‘Go on, you do.’

He didn’t, but he nodded.

‘Lovely lad. They sent him to Cleethorpes. Twelve months’ detention. ‘Course he went on refusing to obey orders so he got twenty-eight days solitary and what they did they dug a hole, and it was flooded at the bottom and they put him in that. Couldn’t sit down, couldn’t lie down. Nothing to look at but clay walls. Somebody come to the top of the pit and told him his pals had been shipped off to France and shot, and if he didn’t toe the line the same thing’d happen to him. He thought his mind was going to give way. Then it started pissing down and the hole flooded and the soldiers who were guarding him were that sorry for him they took him out and let him sleep in a tent. They didn’t half cop it when the CO found out. Next day he was back in the pit. If one of them soldiers hadn’t given him a cigarette packet to write on, he’d’ve died in there. As it was they got a letter smuggled out —’

‘And the officers who did it were court-martialled. Beattie, there’s a million men in France up to their dicks in water. Who’s going to get court-martialled for that?’

‘Every bloody general in France if I had my way. You’re not the only one who cares about them lads, what do you think this is about if it’s not about them?’ A pause. ‘What I was trying to say was compared with a hole in the ground this is a fucking palace. And I’m lucky to be here.’

He looked at her, seeing her heart beat visibly under the thin shift. ‘Have you seen Hettie?’

‘Twice. Fact, she’s due today. I gather we’ve got you to thank for that?’

‘It’s nothing.’

‘No, it’s not nothing, Billy. It’s a helluva lot.’ She hesitated. ‘One thing I should tell you — I’m not saying I believe it, mind — our Hettie thinks it was a bit too much of a coincidence Mac getting picked up the way he was. She…’ Beattie shook her head. ‘She thinks you told them where to go.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘No, I know it’s not. It’s all right, son, I’ll talk to her.’

He put his hand on her bare arm and felt the bone. ‘I’ve got to go,’ he said.

He went to the door and knocked. ‘I’ll see you again,’ he said, turning back to her.

She looked at him, but didn’t answer.

Following the wardress across the yard, he was hardly aware of the massive walls with their rows of barred windows. He didn’t see Hettie coming towards him, carrying a string bag, accompanied by another wardress, until they were almost level. Then he called her name and, reluctantly, she stopped.

The wardresses stood and watched.

Hettie came towards him. ‘I’m surprised you’ve got the nerve to show your face.’

In spite of the words he bent towards her, expecting a greeting. She spat in his face.

The wardress grasped her arm. Wiping his cheek, slowly, not taking his eyes off Hettie, he said, ‘It’s all right. Let her go.’

Each with an escort, they moved off in opposite directions, toiling across the vast expanse of asphalt like beetles. Hettie turned before the building swallowed her and, in a voice that cracked with despair, she shouted, ‘You bastard. What about Mac?’

Outside, Prior stared up at the building as the blood-and-bandages facade darkened in the light drizzle. Hettie’s spit seemed to burn his skin. He raised his hand and wiped his cheek again, then turned and began walking rapidly towards the station. A refrain beat in his head. With every scuff and slurry of his boots on the gravel, he heard: the bastards have won. The bastards have won. The bastards…