The Eye in the Door

SEVENTEEN

Rivers had cleared the afternoon to finish a report on military training for the Medical Research Council. For days now he’d had infantry-training manuals piled up on his desk, and he spent the first hour immersed in them, before going back to the last sentence he’d written.

Many of those who pass unscathed through modern warfare do so because of the sluggishness of their imaginations, but if imagination is active and powerful, it is probably far better to allow it to play around the trials and dangers of warfare than to carry out a prolonged system of repression…

A tap on the door. Captain Bolden had attacked a nurse. Rivers did a disguised run along the corridor, saw the lift was in the basement and took the stairs three at a time. He found a group of nurses and two orderlies clustered round Bolden’s door. Apparently he was refusing to let them in. From a babble of indignant chatter he managed to extract the information that Bolden had thrown a knife at Nurse Pratt. Not a very sharp knife, and it hadn’t hit her, but still a knife. Nurse Pratt was one of the oldest and most experienced nurses on the ward. Unfortunately her experience had been gained on the locked wards of large Victorian lunatic asylums, where in any altercation between a member of staff and a patient the patient was automatically and indisputably wrong. One could see it so clearly from both points of view. Bolden resorted to violence quickly and easily, but then he had spent the past four years being trained to do exactly that. Nurse Pratt was being asked, for the first time in a working life of thirty years, to handle patients who were as accustomed to giving orders as to taking them.

Rivers handed his stick to an orderly and tapped on the door. ‘Can I come in?’

A grunt, not definitely discouraging. Rivers opened the door and walked in. Bolden was standing by the window, still angry, sheepish, ashamed. Rivers, who was taller than Bolden, sat down, allowing Bolden to tower over him. Bolden was a very frightened man. ‘Now then. What is it this time?’

‘I told her the beef was inedible. She said I should think myself lucky to have it.’

‘So you threw a knife?’

‘I missed, didn’t I?’

They talked for half an hour. Then Rivers stood up to go.

‘I’ll tell her I’m sorry,’ Bolden said.

‘Well, that would be a start. As long as you don’t get irritated by her response.’

‘I do try,’ Bolden said, glowering at him.

‘I know you do. And you’re right about the beef. I couldn’t eat it either.’

Rivers had a word with Sister Walters, hoping she could persuade Nurse Pratt to receive the apology graciously, and then thought he might as well have a word with Manning, since he was on the ward anyway. He set off towards Manning’s room, then checked, remembering Manning was more likely to be on the neurological ward where he had struck up a firm friendship with Lucas and a couple of other chess fanatics. Manning was making good progress. He was almost ready to go home.

They were playing chess. Entirely silent and absorbed. He was standing beside them before they looked up.

Now that the discharge from Lucas’s wound had stopped, his hair was growing back, and it covered the white scalp in a dark fuzz. Rather touching. He looked like some kind of incongruous, ungainly chick. ‘How’s it going?’ Rivers asked, directing the question at Manning.

‘I’m being trounced,’ Manning said cheerfully. ‘19–17 in his favour.’

Lucas pointed to the board. ‘20–17,’ he gurgled and grinned.

He certainly knew his numbers, Rivers thought, smiling as he walked away. In an unscreened bed further down the ward one of the pacifist orderlies was cleaning up an incontinent patient. Viggors’s legs circled continuously in an involuntary stepping movement, and it really needed two people to change him, one to clean him up, the other to hold his legs. He was getting liquid excrement on his heels, and spreading it all over the bottom sheet. Martin, the orderly, was red-faced and flustered, Viggors white with rage and shame.

Rivers stopped by the bed. ‘Have you heard of screens?’ he asked.

Martin looked up. ‘Wantage said he was going to get them.’

Wantage was lounging in the doorway of the staff-room, smoking a cigarette, clearly in no hurry to rescue a conchie orderly from an impossible position. His eyes widened. ‘I was just —’

‘I know exactly what you’re doing. Screens round that bed. Now. And get in there and help.’ He called over his shoulder as he walked off. ‘And put that cigarette out.’

Rivers was still shaking with anger when he got back to his desk. He made himself concentrate on the uncompleted sentence.

… if imagination is active and powerful, it is probably far better to allow it to play around the trials and dangers of warfare than to carry out a prolonged system of repression by which morbid energy may be stored so as to form a kind of dump ready to explode on the occurrence of some mental shock or bodily illness.

Exploding ammunition dumps had become a cliche, he supposed. Still, Bolden did a very good imitation of one. He wasn’t doing too badly himself.

A tap on the door. ‘No,’ Rivers said. ‘Whatever it is, no.’

Miss Rogers smiled. ‘There was a telephone call, while you were up on the ward. About a Captain Sassoon.’

Rivers was on his feet. ‘What about him?’

‘He’s in the American Red Cross Hospital at Lancaster Gate with a head wound, they said. Would you go and see him?’

‘How bad is it?’

‘I don’t know. They didn’t say.’

In the taxi going to Lancaster Gate, Rivers’s own words ran round and round in his head. If imagination is active and powerful, it is probably far better to allow it to play around… He looked out of the window, shaking his head as if to clear it. It wasn’t even as if the advice were appropriate. He didn’t need imagination, for Christ’s sake. He was a neurologist. He knew exactly what shrapnel and bullets do to the brain.

The ward was a large room with ornate plasterwork, and tall windows opening on a view of Hyde Park. Two of the beds were empty. The others contained lightly wounded men, all looking reasonably cheerful. On a table in the centre of the ward a gramophone was playing a popular love song. You made me love you.

A nurse came bustling up to him. ‘Who were you —’

‘Captain Sassoon.’

‘He’s been moved to a single room. Didn’t they tell you? Another two floors, I’m afraid, but I don’t think he’s allowed…” Her eye fell on his RAMC badges. ‘Are you Dr Rivers?’

‘Yes.’

‘I think Dr Saunders is expecting you.’

Dr Saunders was waiting outside the door of his room, a small man with pouched cheeks, receding ginger hair and blue eyes ten years younger than the rest of his face. ‘They sent you to the main ward,’ he said, shaking hands.

Rivers followed him into the room. ‘How bad is he?’

‘The wound — not bad at all. In fact, I can show you.’ He took an X-ray from a file on his desk and held it to the light. Sassoon’s skull stared out at them. ‘You see?’ Saunders pointed to the intact bone. ‘The bullet went right across there.’ He indicated the place on his own head. ‘What he’s got is a rather neat parting in the scalp.’

Rivers breathed out. ‘Lucky man,’ he said, as lightly as he could.

‘I don’t think he thinks so.’

They sat at opposite sides of the desk. ‘I got a rather garbled message, I’m afraid,’ Rivers said. ‘I wasn’t clear whether you’d asked me to see him or — ‘

‘It was me. I saw your name on the file and I thought since you’d dealt with him before you might not mind seeing him again.’ Saunders hesitated. ‘I gather he was quite an unusual patient.’

Rivers looked down at his own signature at the end of the Craiglockhart report. ‘He’d protested against the war. It was…’ He took a deep breath. ‘Convenient to say he’d broken down.’

‘Convenient for whom?’

‘The War Office. His friends. Ultimately for Sassoon.’

‘And you persuaded him to go back?’

‘He decided to go back. What’s wrong?’

‘He’s… He was all right when he arrived. Seemed to be. Then he had about eight visitors all at his bed at the one time. The hospital rules say two. But the nurse on duty was very young and apparently she felt she couldn’t ask them to leave. She won’t make that mistake again. Anyway, by the time they finally did leave he was in a terrible state. Very upset. And then he had a bad night — everybody had a bad night — and we decided to try a single room and no visitors.’

‘Is he depressed?’

‘No. Rather the reverse. Excitable. Can’t stop talking. And now he’s got nobody to talk to.’

Rivers smiled. ‘Perhaps I’d better go along and provide an audience.’

Deep-carpeted corridors, gilt-framed pictures on the wall. He followed Saunders, remembering the corridors of Craiglockhart. Dark, draughty, smelling of cigarettes. But this was oppressive too, in its airless, cushioned luxury. He looked out of a window into a deep dark well between two buildings. A pigeon stood on a window-sill, one cracked pink foot curled round the edge of the abyss.

Saunders said, ‘He seems to have a good patch in the afternoon. He might be asleep.’ He opened the door softly and they went in.

Sassoon was asleep, his face pale and drawn beneath the cap of bandages. ‘Shall I —’ Saunders whispered, pointing to Sassoon.

‘No, leave him. I’ll wait.’

‘I’ll leave you to it, then,’ Saunders said, and withdrew.

Rivers sat down by the bed. There was another bed in the room, but it was not made up. Flowers, fruit, chocolate, books were piled up on the bedside table. He did not intend to wake Siegfried, but gradually some recollection of whispered voices began to disturb the shuttered face. Siegfried moistened his lips and a second later opened his eyes. He focused them on Rivers, and for a moment there was joy, followed immediately by fear. He stretched out his hand and touched Rivers’s sleeve. He’s making sure I’m real, Rivers thought. A rather revealing gesture.

The hand slid down and touched the back of his hand. Siegfried swallowed, and started to sit up. ‘I’m glad to see you,’ he said, offering his hand. ‘I thought for a mo —’ He checked himself. ‘They won’t let you stay,’ he said, smiling apologetically. ‘I’m not allowed to see anybody.’

‘No, it’s all right. They know I’m here.’

‘I suppose it’s because you’re a doctor,’ Siegfried said, settling back. ‘They wouldn’t let Lady Ottoline in, I heard Mrs Fisher talking to her in the corridor.’

His manner was different, Rivers thought. Talkative, restless, rapid speech, and he was looking directly at Rivers, something he almost never did, particularly at the beginning of a meeting. But he seemed perfectly rational, and the changes were within normal bounds. ‘Why won’t they let you see anybody?’

‘It’s because of Sunday, everybody came, Robert Ross, Meicklejon, Sitwell, oh God, Eddie Marsh, and they were all talking about the book and I got excited and —’ He raised his hands to his forehead. ‘FIZZLE. POP. I had a bad night, kept everybody awake, and they put me in here.’

‘How was last night?’

Siegfried pulled a face. ‘Bad. I keep thinking how big it is, the war, and how impossible it is to write about, and how useless it is to get angry, that’s such a trivial reaction, it doesn’t, it just doesn’t do any sort of justice to the to the to the tragedy, you know you spend your entire life out there obsessed with this tiny little sector of the Front, I mean thirty yards of sandbags, that’s the war, you’ve no conception of anything else, and now I think I can see all of it, vast armies, flares going up, millions of people, millions, millions.’

Rivers waited. ‘You say you see it?’

‘Oh, yes, it just unfolds.’ A circling movement of his arms. ‘And it’s marvellous in a way, but it’s terrible too and I get so frightened because you’d have to be Tolstoy.’ He gripped Rivers’s hand. ‘I’ve got to see Ross, I don’t care about the others, but you’ve got to make them let me see him, he looks awful, that bloody bloody bloody trial. Do you know Lord Alfred Douglas called him “the leader of all the sodomites in London”? Only he said it in the witness-box, so Robbie can’t sue.’

‘Just as well, perhaps.’

‘And he’s been asked to resign from all his committees, I mean he offered, but it was accepted with alacrity. I’ve got to see him. Apart from anything else he brings me the reviews.’

‘They’re good, aren’t they? I’ve been looking out for them.’

‘Most of them.’

Rivers smiled. ‘You can’t write a controversial book and expect universal praise, Siegfried.’

‘Can’t I?’

They laughed, and for a moment everything seemed normal. Then Siegfried’s face darkened. ‘Do you know we actually sat in dug-outs in France and talked about that trial? The papers were full of it, I think it was the one thing that could have made me glad I was out there, I mean, for God’s sake, the Germans on the Marne, five thousand prisoners taken and all you read in the papers is who’s going to bed with whom and are they being blackmailed? God.’

‘I’ll see what I can do about Ross.’

‘Do you think they’ll listen to you?’

Rivers hesitated. ‘I think they might.’ Obviously Siegfried didn’t know he’d been called in professionally. ‘How’s the head?’

A spasm of contempt. ‘It’s a scratch. I should never’ve let them send me back, do you know that’s the last thing I said to my servant, “I’m coming back.” “Back in three weeks,” I yelled at him as I was being driven away. And then I let myself be corrupted.’

‘Corrupted? That’s a harsh word, isn’t it?’

‘I should’ve refused to come back.’

‘Siegfried, nobody would have listened to you if you had. Head injuries have to be taken seriously.’

‘But don’t you see, the timing was perfect? Did you see my poem in the Nation? “I Stood with the Dead”. Well, there you are. Or there I was rather, perched on the top-most bough, carolling away. BANG! Oops! Sorry. Missed.’

‘I’m glad it did.’

A bleak sideways glance from Siegfried. ‘I’m not.’

Silence.

‘I feel amputated. I don’t belong here. I keep looking at all this…’ The waving hand took in fruit, flowers, chocolates. ‘I just wish I could parcel it up and send it out to them. I did manage to send them a gramophone. Then I got… ill.’

‘You know, what I don’t understand,’ Rivers said, ‘is how you could possibly have been wounded there.’

‘I was in No Man’s Land.’

‘No, I meant under the helmet.’

‘I’d taken it off.’ An awkward pause. ‘We’d been out to lob some hand-grenades at a machine-gun, two of us, they were getting cheeky, you see, they’d brought it too far forward, and so we…” He smiled faintly. ‘Reestablished dominance. Anyway, we threw the grenades, I don’t think we hit anybody — by which I mean there were no screams — and then we set off back and by this time it was getting light, and I was so happy.’ His face blazed with exultation. ‘Oh, God, Rivers, you wouldn’t believe how happy. And I stood up and took the helmet off, and I turned to look at the German lines. And that’s when the bullet got me.’

Rivers was so angry he knew he had to get away. He walked across to the window and stared, unseeing, at the road, the railings, the distant glitter of the Serpentine under the summer sun. He had been lying to himself, he thought, pretending this was merely one more crisis in a busy working day. This anger stripped all pretence away from him. ‘Why?’ he said, turning back to Siegfried.

‘I wanted to see them.’

‘You mean you wanted to get killed.’

‘No.’

‘You stand up in the middle of No Man’s Land, in the morning, the sun rising, you take off your helmet, you turn to face the German lines, and you tell me you weren’t trying to get killed.’

Siegfried shook his head. ‘I’ve told you, I was happy.’

Rivers took a deep breath. He walked back to the bed, schooling himself to a display of professional gentleness. ‘You were happy?’

‘Yes, I was happy most of the time, I suppose mainly because I’ve succeeded in cutting off the part of me that hates it.’ A faint smile. ‘Except when writing poems for the Nation. I was… There’s a book you ought to read. I’ll try to dig it out, it says something to the effect that a man who makes up his mind to die takes leave of a good many things, and is, in some sense, dead already. Well, I had made up my mind to die. What other solution was there for me? But making up your mind to die isn’t the same as trying to get killed. Not that it made much difference.’ He touched the bandage tentatively. ‘I must say, I thought the standard of British sniping was higher than this.’

‘British sniping?’

‘Yes, didn’t they tell you? My own NCO. Mistook me for the German army, rushed out into No Man’s Land shouting, “Come on, you fuckers,” and shot me.’ He laughed. ‘God, I’ve never seen a man look so horrified.’

Rivers sat down by the bed. ‘You’ll never be closer.’

‘I’ve been closer. Shell landed a foot away. Literally. Didn’t explode.’ Siegfried twitched suddenly, a movement Rivers had seen many thousands of times in other patients, too often surely for it to be shocking.

‘You can’t get shell-shock, can you?’ Siegfried asked. ‘From a shell that doesn’t explode?’

Rivers looked down at his hands. ‘I think that one probably did a fair amount of damage.’

Siegfried looked towards the window. ‘You know, they’re going on a raid soon, Jowett, five or six of the others, my men, Rivers, my men, men I trained and I’m not going to be there when they come back.’

‘They’re not your men now, Siegfried. They’re somebody else’s men. You’ve got to let go.

“I can’t.’

EIGHTEEN

Rivers had been invited to dinner with the Heads, and arrived to find the Haddons and Grafton Elliot Smith already there. No opportunity for private conversation with Henry or Ruth presented itself until the end of the evening, when Rivers contrived that he should be the last to leave. It was not unusual after a dinner with the Heads for him to stay behind enjoying their particular brand of unmalicious gossip, well aware that his own foibles and frailties would be dissected as soon as he left, and sure enough of their love for him not to mind.

Not that he was inclined to gossip tonight. As soon as they were alone, he told them about Siegfried, clarifying his own perception of the situation as he spoke.

‘Excited, you say?’ Henry asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Manic?’

‘Oh, no, nowhere near. Though there was a hint of… elation, I suppose, once or twice, particularly when he was talking about his feelings immediately before he was wounded. And the afternoons are his best time. Apparently the nights are bad. I’ve promised I’ll go back. In fact, I ought to be going.’ He stood up. ‘I’m not worried. He’ll be all right.’

‘Does he regret going back?’ Ruth asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Rivers said. ‘I haven’t asked.’

After seeing Rivers off, Head came back into the living-room to find Ruth gazing reflectively into the fire.

‘No, well, he wouldn’t, would he?’ she said, looking up.

‘He might think there wasn’t much point,’ Henry said, sitting down on the other side of the fire.

A long, companionable silence. They were too replete with company and conversation to want to talk much, too comfortable to make the move for bed.

‘He came to see me last year, you know,’ Henry said. ‘Almost a sort of consultation. He got himself into quite a state over Sassoon.’

‘Yes, I know. I didn’t realize he’d talked to you about it.’

Head hesitated. ‘I think he suddenly realized he was using… his professional skills, if you like, to defuse a situation that wasn’t… medical. There’s really nothing else you can do if you’re a doctor in the army in wartime. There’s always the possibility of conflict between what the army needs and what the patient needs, but with Sassoon it was… very sharp. I told him basically not to be silly.’

Ruth gave a surprised laugh. ‘Poor Will.’

‘No, I meant it.’

‘I’m sure you did, but you wouldn’t have said it to a patient.’

‘I told him Sassoon was capable of making up his own mind, and that his influence probably wasn’t as great as he thought it was. I thought he was being… I don’t know. Not vain —’

‘Over-scrupulous?’

‘Frankly, I thought he was being neurotic. But I’ve seen him with a lot of patients since then, and I’m not so sure. You know how you get out of date with people if you haven’t seen them for a while? I think I was out of date. Something happened to him in Scotland. Somehow or other he acquired this enormous power over young men, people generally perhaps, but particularly young men. It really is amazing, they’ll do anything for him. Even get better.’

‘Even go back to France?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

Ruth shrugged slightly. ‘I don’t see the change. But then I suspect he’s always shown a slightly different side to me anyway.’ She smiled. ‘I’m very fond of him, but —’

‘He is of you.’

‘I sometimes wonder why we even like each other, you know. When you think how it started. You going to Cambridge every weekend so he could stick pins in your arm. I never had a weekend with you the whole of the first year we were married.’

‘It wasn’t as bad as that. Anyway, you got on all right.’

‘Do you think he still thinks Sassoon went back because of him?’

Head hesitated. ‘I think he knows the extent of his influence.’

‘Hmm,’ Ruth said. ‘Do you think he’s in love with him?’

‘He’s a patient.’

Ruth smiled and shook her head. ‘That’s not an answer.’

Head looked at her. ‘Yes, it is. It has to be.’

Siegfried was sitting up in bed, pyjama jacket off, face and chest gleaming with sweat. ‘Is it hot, Rivers?’ he asked, as if their conversation had never been interrupted. ‘Or is it just me?’

‘Warm.’

‘I’m boiling. I’ve been sitting here simmering like a kettle.’

Rivers sat down beside the bed.

‘I’ve been writing to Graves. In verse. Do you want to read it?’

Rivers took the notepad and found himself reading an account of his visit that afternoon. The pain was so intense that for a moment he had to keep quite still. ‘Is that how you see me?’ he said at last. ‘Somebody who’s going to make you go back to France till you break down altogether?’

‘Yes,’ Sassoon said cheerfully. ‘But that’s all right, I want you to. You’re my external conscience, Rivers, my father confessor. You can’t let me down now, you’ve got to make me go back.’

Rivers read the poem again. ‘You shouldn’t send this.’

‘Why not? It took me ages. Oh, I know what it is, you don’t think I should say all that about the lovely soldier lads. Well, they are lovely. You think Graves is going to be shocked. Frankly, Rivers, I don’t care; shocking Graves is one of my few remaining pleasures. I wrote to him — not to shock him — just an ordinary letter, only I made the mistake of talking with enthusiasm about training in one paragraph, and in the next paragraph I said what a bloody awful business the war was, and what do I get back? A lecture on consistency, oh, and some very pathetic reproaches about not terrifying your friends by pretending to be mad, I thought that was particularly rich. I’ve done one totally consistent, totally sane thing in my life, and that was to protest against the war. And who stopped me?’

Graves, Rivers thought. But not only Graves. It was true, he saw it now, perhaps more clearly than he had at the time, that whatever the public meaning of Siegfried’s protest, its private meaning was derived from a striving for consistency, for singleness of being in a man whose internal divisions had been dangerously deepened by the war.

‘You mustn’t blame Graves. He did what —’

‘I don’t blame him, I’m just not prepared to be lectured by him. I survive out there by being two people, sometimes I even manage to be both of them in one evening. You know, I’ll be sitting with Stiffy and Jowett — Jowett is beautiful — and I’ll start talking about wanting to go and fight, and I’ll get them all fired up and banging the table and saying, yes, enough of training, time to get stuck in to the real thing. And then I leave them and go to my room and think how young they are. Nineteen, Rivers. Nineteen. And they’ve no bloody idea. Oh, God, I hope they live.’

Suddenly, he started to cry. Wiping the back of his hand across his mouth, he sniffed and said, ‘Sorry.’

‘That’s all right.’

‘You know what finally put the kibosh on my Jekyll and Hyde performance, no, listen, this is funny. I got a new second in command. Pinto. Absolute jewel. But the first time I met him he was reading Counter-Attack, and he looked up and said, “Are you the same Sassoon?” My God, Rivers, what a bloody question. But of course I said, “Yes.” What else could I say? And yet do you know I think that’s when things started to unravel.’ A marked change in tone. ‘It was when I faced up to how bloody stupid it was.’

Rivers looked puzzled. ‘What was?’

‘My pathetic little formula for getting myself back to France.’ He adopted a mincing, effeminate tone. ‘“I’m not going back to kill people. I’m only going back to look after some men.”’ His own voice. ‘Why didn’t you kick me in the head, Rivers? Why didn’t you put me out of my misery?’

Rivers made himself answer. ‘Because I was afraid if you started thinking about that, you wouldn’t go back at all.’

He might as well not have spoken. ‘You’ve only got to read the training manual. “A commander must demand the impossible and not think of sparing his men. Those who fall out must be left behind and must no more stop the pursuit than casualties stopped the assault.” That’s it. Expendable, interchangeable units. That’s what I went back to “look after”.’ A pause. ‘All I wanted was to see them through their first tour of duty and I couldn’t even do that.’

‘Pinto’s there,’ Rivers said tentatively.

‘Oh, yes, and he’s good. He’s really good.’

Siegfried’s face and neck were running with sweat. ‘Shall I open the window?’ Rivers asked.

‘Please. They keep shutting it, I don’t know why.’

Rivers went to open the window. Behind him, Siegfried said, ‘I’m sorry you don’t like my lovely soldier lads.’

‘I didn’t say I didn’t like them. I said you shouldn’t send them.’

‘There was one in particular.’

‘Jowett,’ said Rivers.

‘I wrote a poem about Jowett. Not that he’ll ever know. He was asleep. He looked as if he were dead.’ A silence. ‘It’s odd, isn’t it, how one can feel fatherly towards somebody, I mean, genuinely fatherly, not exploiting the situation or even being tempted to, and yet there’s this other current. And I don’t think one invalidates the other. I think it’s perfectly possible for them both to be genuine.’

‘Yes,’ said Rivers, with the merest hint of dryness, ‘I imagine so.’ He came back to the bed. ‘You say things “started to unravel”?’

‘Yes, because I’d always coped with the situation by blocking out the killing side, cutting it off, and then suddenly one’s brought face to face with the fact that, no, actually there’s only one person there and that person is a potential killer of Huns. That’s what our CO used to call us. It had a very strange effect. I mean, I went out on patrol, that sort of thing, but I’ve always done that, I’ve never been able to sit in a trench, it’s not courage, I just can’t do it, but this time it was different because I wasn’t going out to kill or even to test my nerve, though that did come into it. I just wanted to see. I wanted to see the other side. I used to spend a lot of time looking through the periscope. It was a cornfield. Farmland. Sometimes you’d see a column of smoke coming up from the German lines, but quite often you’d see nothing.’ A pause, then he said casually, ‘I went across once. Dropped down into the trench and walked along, and there were four Germans standing by a machinegun. One of them turned round and saw me.’

‘What happened?’

‘Nothing. We just looked at each other. Then he decided he ought to tell his friends. And I decided it was time to leave.’

A tense silence.

‘I suppose I should have killed him,’ Siegfried said.

‘He should certainly have killed you.’

‘He had the excuse of surprise. You know, Rivers, it’s no good encouraging people to know themselves and… face up to their emotions, because out there they’re better off not having any. If people are going to have to kill, they need to be brought up to expect to have to do it. They need to be trained not to care because if you don’t…” Siegfried gripped Rivers’s hand so tightly that his face clenched with the effort of concealing his pain. ‘It’s too cruel.’

Rivers had been with Siegfried for over an hour and so far nothing had been said that might not equally well have been dealt with at some more convenient time of day. But now, his excitement began to increase, words tripped him up, his mind stumbled along in the wake of his ideas, trying desperately to catch up. He spoke of the vastness of the war, of the impossibility of one mind encompassing it all. Again and again he spoke of the need to train boys to kill; from earliest childhood, he said, they must be taught to expect nothing else and they must never never be allowed to question what lies ahead. All this was mixed in with his anxieties about the raid Jowett and the others were going on. He spoke so vividly and with so much detail that at times he clearly believed himself to be in France.

There was no point arguing with any of this. It took Rivers three hours to calm him down and get him to sleep. Even after his breathing had become steady, Rivers went on sitting by the bed, afraid to move in case the withdrawal of his hand should cause him to wake. Long hairs on the back of Siegfried’s forearm caught the light. Rivers looked at them, too exhausted to think clearly, remembering the experiments he and Head had done on the pilomotor reflex. Head’s hairs had become erect every time he read a particular poem. The holy shiver, as the Germans call it. For Head it was awakened by poetry; for Rivers, more than once, it had been the beauty of a scientific hypothesis, one that brought into unexpected harmony a whole range of disparate facts. What had intrigued Rivers most was that human beings should respond to the highest mental and spiritual achievements of their culture with the same reflex that raises the hairs on a dog’s back. The epicritic grounded in the protopathic, the ultimate expression of the unity we persist in regarding as the condition of perfect health. Though why we think of it like that, God knows, since most of us survive by cultivating internal divisions.

Siegfried was now deeply asleep. Cautiously, Rivers withdrew his hand, flexing the fingers. It had grown colder and Siegfried had fallen asleep outside the covers. Rivers went to shut the window, and stood for a moment attempting to arrange the story he’d been told into a coherent pattern, but that wasn’t possible, though the outline was clear enough. Siegfried had always coped with the war by being two people: the anti-war poet and pacifist; the bloodthirsty, efficient company commander. The dissociation couldn’t be called pathological, since experience gained in one state was available to the other. Not just available: it was the serving officer’s experience that furnished the raw material, the ammunition, if you liked, for the poems. More importantly, and perhaps more ambiguously, that experience of bloodshed supplied the moral authority for the pacifist’s protest: a soldier’s declaration. No wonder Pinto’s innocent question had precipitated something of a crisis.

Though he would have broken down anyway this time, Rivers thought. He had gone back hating the war, turning his face away from the reality of killing and maiming, and as soon as that reality was borne in upon him, he had found the situation unbearable. All of which might have been foreseen. Had been foreseen.

Night had turned the window into a black mirror. His face floated there, and behind it, Siegfried and the rumpled bed. If Siegfried’s attempt at dissociation had failed, so had his own. He was finding it difficult to be both involved and objective, to turn steadily on Siegfried both sides of medicine’s split face. But that was his problem. Siegfried need never be aware of it.

It was still dark. A light wind stirred the black trees in the park. He took his boots off and climbed on to the other bed, not expecting to be able to sleep, but thinking that at least he might rest. He closed his eyes. At first his thoughts whirred on, almost as active as Siegfried’s and not much more coherent. For some reason the situation reminded him of sleeping on board the deck of a tramp steamer travelling between the islands of Melanesia. There, one slept in a covered cabin on deck, on a bench that left vertical stripes down one’s back, surrounded by fellow passengers, and what a motley assemblage they were. He remembered a particular voyage when one of his companions had been a young Anglican priest, so determined to observe holy modesty in these difficult conditions that he’d washed the lower part of his body underneath the skirt of his cassock, while Rivers stripped off and had buckets of water thrown over him by the sailors who came up to swab the deck.

His other companion on that trip had been a trader who rejoiced in the name of Seamus O’Dowd, though he had no trace of an Irish accent. O’Dowd drank. In the smoky saloon after dinner, belching gin and dental decay into Rivers’s face, he had boasted of his exploits as a blackbirder, for he’d started life kidnapping natives to work on the Queensland plantations. Now he simply cheated them. His most recent coup had been to convince them that the great Queen (nobody in the Condominion dared tell the natives Victoria was dead) found their genitals disgusting, and could not sleep easy in her bed at Windsor until they were covered by the long johns that Seamus had inadvertently bought as part of a job lot while even more drunk than usual.

They wore them on their heads, Rivers remembered. It had been a feature of the island in that first autumn of the war, naked young men wearing long johns elaborately folded on their heads. They looked beautiful. Meanwhile, in England, other young men had been rushing to don a less flattering garb.

Drifting between sleep and waking, Rivers remembered the smells of oil and copra, the cacophony of snores and whistles from the sleepers crammed into the small cabin on deck, the vibration of the engine that seemed to get into one’s teeth, the strange, brilliant, ferocious southern stars. He couldn’t for the life of him think what was producing this flood of nostalgia. Perhaps it was his own experience of duality that formed the link, for certainly in the years before the war he had experienced a splitting of personality as profound as any suffered by Siegfried. It had been not merely a matter of living two different lives, divided between the dons of Cambridge and the missionaries and headhunters of Melanesia, but of being a different person in the two places. It was his Melanesian self he preferred, but his attempts to integrate that self into his way of life in England had produced nothing but frustration and misery. Perhaps, contrary to what was usually supposed, duality was the stable state; the attempt at integration, dangerous. Certainly Siegfried had found it so.

He raised himself on his elbow and looked at Siegfried, who was sleeping with his face turned to the window. Perhaps the burst of nostalgia was caused by nothing more mysterious than this: the attempt to sleep in a room where another person’s breathing was audible. Sleeping in the same room as another person belonged with his Melanesian self. In England it simply didn’t happen. But it was restful, the rise and fall of breath, like the wash of waves round the prow of the boat, and gradually, as the light thinned, he drifted off to sleep.

He woke to find Siegfried kneeling by his bed. The window was open, the curtains lifting in the breeze. A trickle of bird-song came into the room.

In a half-embarrassed way, Siegfried said, ‘I seem to have talked an awful lot of rubbish last night.’ He looked cold and exhausted, but calm. ‘I suppose I had a fever?’

Rivers didn’t reply.

‘Anyway, I’m all right now.’ Diffidently, he touched Rivers’s sleeve. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you.’

NINETEEN

A week later Rivers was sitting in his armchair in front of the fire, feeling physically tired in an almost sensuous way. This was a rare feeling with him, since most days produced a grating emotional exhaustion which was certainly not conducive to sleep. But he had been flying, which always tired him out physically, and he’d seen Siegfried a lot calmer and happier than he had recently been, though still very far from well.

Prior was the mystery. Prior had missed an appointment, something he’d never done before, and Rivers wasn’t sure what he should do about it. There was little he could do except drop Prior a line expressing his continued willingness to help, but there had been some suggestion that Prior worried about the degree of his dependence. If he had decided to break off the association there was nothing Rivers could — or should — do about it. He wouldn’t come now. He was over two hours late.

Rivers was just thinking he really must make the effort to do something when there was a tap on the door, and the maid came in. ‘There’s a Mr Prior to see you,’ she said, sounding doubtful, for it was very late. ‘Shall I tell him—’

‘No, no. Ask him to come up.’

He felt very unfit to cope with this, whatever it was, but he buttoned his tunic and looked vaguely around for his boots. Prior seemed to be climbing the stairs very quickly, an easy, light tread quite unlike his usual step. His asthma had been very bad on his last visit. He had paused several times on the final flight of stairs and even then had entered the room almost too breathless to speak. The maid must have misheard the name, that or –

Prior came into the room, pausing just inside the door to look round.

‘Are you all right?’ Rivers asked.

‘Yes. Fine.’ He looked at the clock and seemed to become aware that the lateness of the hour required some explanation. ‘I had to see you.’

Rivers waved him to a chair and went to close the door.

‘Well,’ he said, when Prior was settled. ‘Your chest’s a lot better.’

Prior breathed in. Testing. He looked hard at Rivers, and nodded.

‘You were going to go to the prison last time we spoke,’ Rivers said. ‘To see Mrs Roper. Did you go?’

Prior was shaking his head, though not, Rivers thought, in answer to the question. At last he said, in a markedly sibilant voice, ‘I didn’t think you would have pretended.’

‘Pretended what?’ Rivers asked. He waited, then prompted gently, ‘What am I pretending?’

‘That we’ve met before.’

Momentarily, Rivers closed his eyes. When he opened them again Prior was grinning. ‘I thought of saying, “Dr Rivers, I presume?”’

‘If we haven’t met before, how did you know me?’

‘I sit in.’ Prior spread his hands. ‘I sit in. Well, let’s face it, there’s not a lot of choice, is there? I don’t know how you put up with him. I couldn’t. Are you sure it’s a good idea to let him get away with it?’

‘With what?’

‘With being so cheeky.’

‘The sick have a certain licence,’ Rivers said dryly.

‘Oh, and he is sick, isn’t he?’ Prior said earnestly, leaning forward. ‘Do you know, I honestly believe he’s getting worse?

A long silence. Rivers clasped his hands under his chin. ‘Do you think you could manage to say “I”?’

‘’Fraid not. No.’

The antagonism was unmistakable. Rivers was aware of having seen Prior in this mood before, in the early weeks at Craiglockhart. Exactly this. The same incongruous mixture of effeminacy and menace.

‘You know, it’s really quite simple,’ Prior went on. ‘Either we can sit here and have a totally barren argument about which pronouns we’re going to use, or we can talk. I think it’s more important to talk.’

‘I agree.’

‘Good. Do you mind if I smoke?’

‘I never do mind, do I?’

Prior was patting his tunic pockets. ‘I’ll kill him,’ he said smiling. ‘Ah, no, it’s all right.’ He held up a packet of cigars. ‘I’ve got him trained. He used to throw them away.’

‘What would you like to talk about?’

A broad smile. ‘I thought you might have some ideas.’

‘You say you “sit in”. Does that mean you know everything he knows?’

‘Yes. But he doesn’t know anything I know. Only it’s… it’s not quite as neat as that. Sometimes I see things he can’t see, even when he’s there.’

‘Things he doesn’t notice?’

‘Doesn’t want to notice. Like for example he hates Spragge. I mean, he has perfectly good reasons for disliking him, but what he feels goes a long way beyond that. And he knows that, and he doesn’t know why, even though it’s staring him in the face. Literally. Spragge’s like his father.’

‘Like his own — like Spragge’s father?’

‘No. Well, he may be. How would I know? Like Billy’s father. I mean, it’s a really striking resemblance, and he just doesn’t see it.’ Prior paused, puzzled by some quality in Rivers’s silence. ‘You see what I mean?’

‘His father?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you really saying he’s not your father?’

‘Of course he isn’t. How could he be?’

‘How could he not be? In the end one body begets another.’

Prior’s expression hardened. ‘I was born two years ago. In a shell-hole in France. I have no father.’

Rivers felt he needed time to think. A week would have been about right. He said, ‘I met Mr Prior at Craiglockhart.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘He mentioned hitting Billy. Was that a frequent occurrence?’

‘No. Oddly enough.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I’ve told you. I know everything he knows.’

‘So you have access to his memories?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you also have your own memories.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Why “oddly”?’

A blank look.

‘You said it was odd his father didn’t beat him.’

‘Just because when you look at the relationship you think there must have been something like that. But there wasn’t. Once his parents were having a row and he went downstairs and tried to get between them, and his father picked him up and threw him on the sofa. Only, being a bit the worse for wear, he missed the sofa and hit the wall.’ Prior laughed. ‘He never went down again.’

‘So he just used to lie in bed and listen.’

‘No, he used to get up and sit on the stairs.’

‘What was he feeling?’

‘I’m not good on feelings, Rivers. You’d better ask him.’

‘Does that mean you don’t know what he was feeling?’

‘Angry. He used to do this.’ Prior banged his clenched fist against the palm of the other hand. ‘PIG PIG PIG PIG. And then he’d get frightened, I suppose he was frightened that if he got too angry he’d go downstairs. So he fixed his eyes on the barometer and blotted everything out.’

‘Then what happened?’

‘Nothing. He wasn’t there.’

‘Who was there?’

Prior shrugged his shoulders. ‘I don’t know. Somebody who didn’t care.’

‘Not you?’

‘No, I told you —’

‘You were born in a shell-hole.’ A pause. ‘Can you tell me about it?’

An elaborate shrug. ‘There isn’t much to tell. He was wounded. Not badly, but it hurt. He knew he had to go on. And he couldn’t. So I came.’

Again that elusive impression of childishness. ‘Why were you able to go on when he couldn’t?’

‘I’m better at it.’

‘Better at…?’

‘Fighting.’

‘Why are you better?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake—’

‘No, it isn’t a stupid question. You’re not taller, you’re not stronger, you’re not faster… you’re not better trained. How could you be? So why are you better?’

‘I’m not frightened.’

‘Everybody’s frightened sometimes.’

‘I’m not. And I don’t feel pain.’

‘I see. So you didn’t feel the wound?’

‘No.’ Prior looked at Rivers, narrowing his eyes. ‘You don’t believe a bloody word of this, do you?’

Rivers couldn’t bring himself to reply.

‘Look.’ Prior drew strongly on his cigar, until the tip glowed red, then, almost casually, stubbed it out in the palm of his left hand. He leant towards Rivers, smiling. ‘This isn’t acting, Rivers. Watch the pupils,’ he said, pulling down the lid of one eye.

The room filled with the smell of burning skin.

‘And now you can have your little blue-eyed boy back.’

A withdrawn, almost drugged look, like extreme shock or the beginning of orgasm. Then, abruptly, the features convulsed with pain, and Prior, teeth chattering uncontrollably, raised his shaking hand and rocked it against his chest.

‘I haven’t got any pain-killers,’ Rivers said.’You’d better drink this.’

Prior took the brandy and held out his other hand for Rivers to complete the dressing. ‘Aren’t you going to tell me what happened?’ he said.

‘You burnt yourself.’

‘Why?’

Rivers sighed. ‘It was a dramatic gesture that went wrong.’

He’d decided not to tell Prior about the loss of normal sensation. It was a common symptom of hysterical disorders, but knowledge of it would only serve to reinforce Prior’s belief that the alternating state of consciousness was a monster with whom he could have nothing in common.

‘What was he like?’ Prior asked.

‘What were you like? Bloody-minded.’

‘Violent?’

‘Well, yes. Obviously,’ Rivers said, indicating the burn.

‘No, I meant —’

‘Did you take a swing at me? No.’ Rivers smiled. ‘Sorry.’

‘You make it sound as if it’s something I want.’

Rivers was thinking deeply. ‘I think that’s true,’ he said, knotting the ends of the bandage.

‘No. Why should I want it? It’s creating bloody havoc.’

‘You know, Billy, the really interesting thing about tonight is that you turned up in the other state. I mean that while in the other state you still wanted to keep the appointment.’

‘What did you call me?’

‘Billy. Do you mind? I — ‘

‘No, it’s just that it’s the first time. Did you know that? Sassoon was Siegfried. Anderson was Ralph. I noticed the other day you called Manning Gharles. I was always “Prior”. In moments of exasperation I was Mister Prior.’

‘I’m sorry, I —’ Oh, God, Rivers thought. Prior was incapable of interpreting that as anything other than snobbery. And perhaps it had been. Partly. Though it had been more to do with his habit of sneering suggestiveness. ‘I’d no idea you minded.’

‘No, well, you’re not very perceptive, are you? Anyway, it doesn’t matter.’ He stood up. ‘I’d better be off.’

‘You can’t go now, the trains have stopped. And, in any case, you’re in no state to be on your own. You’d better sleep here.’

Prior hesitated. ‘All right.’

Til make up the bed.’

Rivers saw Prior settled for the night, then went to his own room, telling himself it would be fatal, at this late hour, to attempt any assessment of Prior’s situation. That must wait till morning. But the effort of not thinking about Prior proved almost equally disastrous, for he drifted off into a half-dreaming state, the only condition, apart from feverish illness, in which he had normal powers of visualization. He tossed and turned, scarcely aware of his surroundings, while persistent images floated before him. France. Craters, a waste of mud, splintered trees. Once he woke and lay looking into the darkness, faintly amused that his identification with his patients should have reached the point where he dreamt their dreams rather than his own. He heard the church bell chime three, and then sank back into his half-sleep. This was a dreadful place. Nothing human could live here. Nothing human did. He was entirely alone, until, with a puckering of the surface, a belch of foul vapours, the mud began to move, to gather itself together, to rise and stand before him in the shape of a man. A man who turned and began striding towards England. He tried to call out, no, not that way, and the movement of his lips half woke him. But he sank down again, and again the mud gathered itself into the shape of a man, faster and faster until it seemed the whole night was full of such creatures, creatures composed of Flanders mud and nothing else, moving their grotesque limbs in the direction of home.

Sunlight was streaming into the room. Rivers lay thinking about the dream, then switched his thoughts to yesterday evening. In the fugue state (though it was more than that) Prior had claimed to feel no pain and no fear, to have been born in a shell-hole, to have no father. Presumably no relationships that pre-dated that abnormal birth.

To feel no pain and no fear in a situation that seemed to call for both was not impossible, or even abnormal. He’d been in such a state himself, once, while on his way to the Torres Straits, suffering from severe sunburn, severe enough to have burnt the skin on his legs black. He’d lain on the deck of a ketch, rolling from side to side as waves broke across the ship, in constant pain from the salt water that soaked into his burns, vomiting helplessly, unable to stand or even sit up. Then the ketch had dragged her anchor and they’d been in imminent danger of shipwreck, and for the whole of that time he’d moved freely, he hadn’t vomited, he’d felt no pain and no fear. He had simply performed coolly and calmly the actions needed to avert danger, as they all had. After they’d landed, his legs had hurt like hell and he’d once more been unable to walk. He’d been carried up from the beach on a litter, and had spent the first few days seeing patients from his sick bed, shuffling from the patient to the dispensing cupboard and back again on his bottom. He smiled to himself, thinking Prior would like that story. Physician, heal thyself.

Other people had had similar experiences. Men had escaped from danger before now by running on broken legs. But Prior had created a state whose freedom from fear and pain was persistent, encapsulated, inaccessible to normal consciousness. Almost as if his mind had created a warrior double, a creature formed out of Flanders clay, as his dream had suggested. And he had brought it home with him.

Rivers, thinking over the previous evening, found that he retained one very powerful impression. In Prior’s speech and behaviour there had been a persistent element of childishness. He’d said, He was wounded. Not badly, but it hurt. He knew he had to go on. And he couldn’t. So I came. So I came. The simplicity of it. As if one were talking to a child who still believed in magic. And on the stairs. What happened then? Nothing. He wasn’t there. It was like a toddler who believes himself to be invisible because he’s closed his eyes. And that extraordinary claim: I have no father. Surely behind the adult voice, there was another, shrill, defiant, saying, He’s not my Dad? At any rate it was a starting-point. He could think of no other.

Rivers had not thought Prior would appear for breakfast, but no sooner had he sat down himself than the door opened and Prior came in, looking dejected, and in obvious pain. ‘How did you sleep?’ Rivers asked.

‘All right. Well, I got a couple of hours.’

‘I’ve asked the girl to bring us some more.’

‘It doesn’t matter, I’m not hungry.’

‘Well, at least have some coffee. You ought to have something.’

‘Yes, thanks, but then I must be going.’

‘I’d rather you stayed. For a few days. Until things are easier.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of imposing on you.’

‘You wouldn’t be “imposing”.’

‘All right,’ Prior said at last. ‘Thank you.’

The maid arrived with a second tray. Rivers was amused to see Prior devour the food with single-minded concentration, while he sipped milky coffee and read The Times. ‘I’ve got an hour before I need go to the hospital,’ he said, when Prior had finished. ‘Do you feel well enough?’

When they were settled in chairs beside the desk, Rivers said, ‘I’d like to go back quite a long way.’

Prior nodded. He looked too exhausted to be doing this.

‘Do you remember the house you lived in when you were five?’

A faint smile. ‘Yes.’

‘Do you remember the top of the stairs?’

‘Yes. It’s no great feat, Rivers. Most people can.’

Rivers smiled. ‘I walked into that one, didn’t I? Do you remember what was there?’

‘Bedrooms.’

‘No, I mean on the landing.’

‘Nothing, there wasn’t… No, the barometer. That’s right. The needle always pointed to stormy. I didn’t think that was funny at the time.’

‘Do you remember anything else about it?’

‘No.’

‘What did you do when your father came in drunk?’

‘Put my head under the bedclothes.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘I went down once. He threw me against the wall.’

‘Were you badly hurt?’

‘Bruised. He was devastated. He cried.’

‘And you never went down again?’

‘No. I used to sit on the landing, going PIG PIG PIG PIG.’ He made as if to pound his fist against the other palm, then remembered the burn.

‘Where were you exactly? Leaning over the banisters?’

‘No, I used to sit on the top step. If they started shouting I’d shuffle a bit further down.’

‘And where was the barometer in relation to you?’

‘On my left. I hope this is leading somewhere, Rivers.’

‘I think it is.’

‘It was a bit like a teddy-bear, I suppose. I mean it was a sort of companion.’

‘Can you imagine yourself back there?’

‘I’ve said I —’

‘No, take your time.’

‘All right.’ Prior closed his eyes, then opened them again, looking puzzled.

‘Yes?’

‘Nothing. It used to catch the light. There was a street lamp…’ He gestured vaguely over his shoulder. ‘This is going to sound absolutely mad. I used to go into the shine on the glass.’

A long silence.

‘When it got too bad. And I didn’t want to be there.’

‘Then what happened? Did you go back to bed?’

‘I must’ve done, mustn’t I? Look, if you’re saying this dates back to then, you’re wrong. The gaps started in France, they got better at Craiglockhart, they started again a few months ago. It’s nothing to do with bloody barometers.’

Silence.

‘Say something, Rivers.’

‘I think it has. I think when you were quite small you discovered a way of dealing with a very unpleasant situation. I think you found out how to put yourself into a kind of trance. A dissociated state. And then in France, under that intolerable pressure, you rediscovered it.’

Prior shook his head. ‘You’re saying it isn’t something that happens. It’s something I do.’

‘Not deliberately.’ He waited. ‘Look, you know the sort of thing that happens. People lose their tempers, they burst into tears, they have nightmares. They behave like children, in many respects. All I’m suggesting is that you rediscovered a method of coping that served you well as a child. But which is —’

‘I went into the shine on the glass.’

Rivers looked puzzled. ‘Yes, you said.’

‘No, in the pub, the first time it happened. The first time in England. I was watching the sunlight on a glass of beer.’ He thought for a moment. ‘And I was very angry because Jimmy was dead, and… everybody was enjoying themselves. I started to imagine what it would be like if a tank came in and crushed them. And I suppose I got frightened. It was so vivid, you see. Almost as if it had happened.’ A long pause. ‘You say it’s self-hypnosis.’

‘I think it must be. Something like that.’

‘So if I could do it and tell myself to remember in theory that would fill in the gaps. All the gaps, because I’d bring all the memories back with me.’

‘I don’t know if that’s the right thing to do.’

‘But in theory it would work.’

‘If you could become sufficiently aware of the process, yes.’

Prior was lost in thought. ‘Is it just remembering?’

‘I don’t think I know what you mean.’

‘If I remember is that enough to heal the split?’

‘No, I don’t think so. I think there has to be a moment of… recognition. Acceptance. There has to be a moment when you look in the mirror and say, yes, this too is myself.’

‘That could be difficult.’

‘Why should it be?’

Prior’s lips twisted. ‘I find some parts of me pretty bloody unacceptable even at the best of times.’

The sadism again. ‘There was nothing I saw or heard last night that would lead me to believe anything… terrible might be happening.’

‘Perhaps you’re just not his type.’

‘“Mister Prior.’”

A reluctant smile. ‘All right.’

Rivers stood up. ‘I think we’ve got as far as we can for the moment. Don’t spend the day brooding, will you? And don’t get depressed. We’ve made a lot of progress. It’ll do you much more good to have a break. Here, you’ll need this.’ Rivers went to his desk, opened the top drawer, and took out a key. ‘I’ll tell the servants to expect you.’

TWENTY

Prior woke with a cry and lay in the darkness, sweating, disorientated, unable to understand why the grey square of window was on his right, instead of opposite his bed as it should have been. He’d been with Rivers for over a fortnight and yet he still had these moments when he woke and couldn’t remember where he was. Footsteps came padding to his door.

‘Are you all right?’ Rivers’s voice.

‘Come in.’ Prior put the lamp on. ‘I’m sorry I woke you.’

‘You cried out. I couldn’t think what it was.’

‘Yes, I know, I’m sorry.’

They looked at each other. Prior smiled. ‘Shades of Craiglockhart.’

‘Yes,’ Rivers said. ‘We’ve done this often enough.’

‘You were on duty then. Go on, get back to bed. You need the rest.’

‘Will you be able to get back to sleep?’

‘Oh, yes, I’ll be all right.’ He looked at Rivers’s exhausted face. ‘And you certainly should. Go on, go back to bed.’

The dream had been about Mac, Prior thought, as the door closed behind Rivers. He couldn’t remember it clearly, only that it had been full of struggling animals and the smell of blood. Rivers seemed to think it was a good sign that his nightmares had moved away from the war, back into his childhood, but they were no less horrifying, and in any case they were still about the war, he knew they were. Rivers made him talk endlessly about his childhood, particularly his early childhood, the rows between his parents, his own fear, the evenings he’d spent at the top of the stairs, listening, words and blows burnt into him till he could bear it no longer, and decided not to be there. He could still not remember what happened in the childhood gaps, though now he remembered that there had been gaps, though only when he was quite small. Once, in sheer exasperation, he’d asked Rivers how he was getting on with his own gap, the darkness at the top of his own stairs, but Rivers had simply smiled and pressed on. One always thought of Rivers as a gentle man, but Prior sometimes wondered why one did. Relentless might have been a better word.

The nightmares, though, were not about the rows between his parents. The nightmares were about Mac. And that was strange because most of his memories of Mac were pleasant.

An expanse of gritty asphalt. A low building with wire cages over the windows. Smells of custard and sweaty socks. The singing lesson, Monday morning, straight after Assembly, with Horton prowling up and down the aisles, swishing his cane against his trouser leg, listening for wrong notes. His taste had run to sentimental ballads, ‘The Lost Chord’ a firm favourite. This was the time Mr Hailes was inculcating a terror of masturbation, with his lectures on Inflamed Organs and the exhaustion which followed from playing with them. Horton sat down at the piano and sang in his manly baritone:

I was seated one day at the organ

Weary and ill at ease.

Prior gave an incredulous yelp of laughter, one or two of the others sniggered, Mac guffawed. The piano faltered into silence. Horton stood up, summoned Mac to the front of the room and invited him to share the joke. ‘Well?’ said Horton. ‘I’m sure we could all do with being amused.’

‘I don’t think you’d think it was funny, sir.’

Mac was savagely caned. Prior was let off. Horton had heard Prior laugh too, he was sure of it, but Prior, thanks to his mother’s skrimping and saving, was always well turned out. Shirts ironed, shoes polished, he looked like the sort of boy who might get a scholarship, as indeed he did, thanks partly to Father Mackenzie’s more robust approach to organ playing. Bastard, Prior thought, as Horton’s arm swung.

Years later, after witnessing the brutalities of trench warfare, he still thought: Bastard.

At the time he had been determined on revenge. Angrier on Mac’s behalf than he would ever have been on his own.

Horton was a man of regular habits. Precisely twenty minutes before the bell rang for the end of the dinner break, he could be seen trekking across the playground to the masters’ lavatory. Not for him the newspaper the boys had to make do with. Bulging from one side of his jacket, like a single tit, was a roll of toilet-paper. He marched across the yard with precise military tread, almost unnoticed by the shouting and running boys. Humour in the playgrpund was decidedly scatological, but Horton’s clockwork shitting was too old a joke to laugh at.

One dinnertime, posting Mac where he could see the main entrance to the school, Prior went in on a recce. Next day he and Mac slipped into the lavatory and locked the door of one of the cubicles. Prior lit a match, applied it to the wick of a candle, shielded the flame with both hands until it burned brightly, and fixed it in its own wax to a square of plywood.

Prompt to the minute, Mr Horton entered. He was puzzled by the locked cubicle. ‘Mr Barnes?’

Prior produced a baritone grunt of immense effort and Horton said no more. Not even that constipated grunt tempted them to giggle. Horton’s beatings were no laughing matter. They waited in silence, feeling the rise and fall of each other’s breath. Then, slowly, Prior lowered the candle into the water that ran beneath the lavatory seat. It was one long seat, really, though the cubicles divided it. The candle flickered briefly, but then the flame rose up again and burnt steadily. Prior urged it along the dark water, and it bobbed along, going much faster than he’d thought it would. Mac was already unbolting the door. They ran across the playground, to where a game of High Cockalorum was in progress (by arrangement) and hurled themselves on top of the heap of struggling boys.

Behind them, candle flame met arse. A howl of pain and incredulity, and Horton appeared, gazing wildly round him. No use him looking for signs of guilt. He inspired such terror that guilt was written plain on every one of the two hundred faces that turned towards him. In any case there was dignity to be considered. He limped across the playground and no more was heard.

Once he was safely out of sight, Prior and Mac went quietly round the corner to the forbidden area by the pile of coke and there they danced a solemn and entirely silent dance of triumph.

And why am I bothering to recall such an incident in so much detail, Prior asked himself. Because every memory of friendship I come up with is a shield against Hettie’s spit in my face, a way of saying of course I couldn’t have done it. What surprised him now was how innocent he’d felt when Beattie first mentioned Hettie’s belief that he’d betrayed Mac. ‘I didn’t do it,’ he’d said automatically, with total assurance, for all the world as if he could answer for every minute of his waking life. Only on the train coming back to London had he forced himself to accept that it was possible he’d betrayed Mac. Or at any rate that it was impossible for him to deny it.

Since then he’d gained one fact from Rivers that filled him with fear. He now knew that in the fugue state he’d denied that his father was his father. If he was prepared to deny that — a simple biological fact after all — what chance did pre-war friendships have? Rivers had hesitated visibly when telling him what his other state had said, and yet Prior’s reaction to it had been more complicated than simple rejection or denial. To say that one had been born in a shell-hole is to say something absurdly self-dramatizing. Even by my standards, Prior thought wryly. Yet if you asked anybody who’d fought in France whether he thought he was the same person he’d been before the war, the person his family still remembered, the overwhelming majority — no, not even that, all of them, all of them would say no. It was merely a matter of degree. And one did feel at times very powerfully that the only loyalties that actually mattered were loyalties forged there. Picard clay was a powerful glue. Might it not, applied to pre-war friendships with conscientious objectors, be an equally powerful solvent?

Not in this state, he reminded himself. In this state he’d risked court martial for Beattie’s sake, copying out documents that incriminated Spragge. But then Beattie was a woman, and couldn’t fight. His other self might be less tolerant of healthy strapping young men spending the war years trying to disrupt the supply of ammunition on which other lives depended.

But Mac, he thought. Mac.

He did eventually drift off to sleep, and woke three hours later, to find the room full of sunshine. He peered sleepily at his watch, then reached for his dressing-gown. Rivers, already shaved and fully dressed, was sitting over the remains of breakfast. ‘It seemed better to let you sleep,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid the coffee’s cold.’

‘Did you get back to sleep?’

‘Yes.’

Lying hound, thought Prior. He drank the cold coffee as he shaved and dressed. Rivers was waiting by the desk. For a moment Prior felt rebellious, but then he looked at Rivers and saw how tired he was and thought, my God, if he can manage, it, I can. He sat down, and the familiar position, the light falling on to Rivers’s face, made him aware that he’d taken a decision. ‘I’m going to see Mac,’ he said.

Silence. ‘I think the reason I’m not making any progress is that… there’s a there’s th-there’s oh, for Christ’s sake.’ He threw back his head. ‘There’s a barrier, and I think it’s something to do with him.’

‘Finding out one fact about your behaviour over the past few weeks isn’t going to change anything.’

‘I think it might.’

Another long silence. Rivers shifted his position, ‘Yes, I do see that.’

‘And although I see the point, I mean, I see how important it is to get to the root of it, I do need to be functioning now. Somehow going over what happened with my parents just makes me feel like a sort of lifelong hopeless neurotic. It makes me feel I’ll never be able to do anything.’

‘Oh, I shouldn’t worry about that,’ Rivers said. ‘Half the world’s work’s done by hopeless neurotics.’

This was accompanied by an involuntary glance at his desk. Prior laughed aloud. ‘Would you like me to help you with any of it?’

Rivers smiled. ‘I was thinking of Darwin.’

‘Like hell. Why don’t you let me do that?’ Prior asked, pointing to a stack of papers on the desk. ‘You’re just typing it out, aren’t you? You’re not altering it.’

‘It’s very kind of you, but you couldn’t read the writing. That’s why I have to type it. My secretary can’t read it either.’

‘Let’s have a look. Do you mind?’ Prior picked up a sheet of paper. ‘Rivers, do you realize this is the graphic equivalent of a stammer? I mean, whatever it is you couldn’t say, you certainly didn’t intend to write it.’

Rivers pointed his index finger. ‘You’re getting better.’

Prior smiled. Without apparent effort, he read a sentence aloud: Thus, a frequent factor in the production of war neurosis is the necessity of restraint of the expression of dislike or disrespect for those of superior rank. ‘There’s no hope for me, then, is there? I wonder why you bother.’ He pushed Rivers gently off the chair. ‘Go on, you get on with something else.’

Rivers shook his head. ‘Do you know, nobody’s ever done that before.’

‘I’m good at breaking codes.’

‘Is that a boast?’

‘No. Pure terror.’

As Rivers turned the corner, he saw a man leaving Sassoon’s room. They met face to face in the narrow corridor, and stopped.

‘Dr Rivers?’

‘Yes.’

‘Robert Ross.’

They shook hands. After a few pleasantries about the weather, Ross said, ‘I don’t know whether Siegfried’s talked about the future at all?’

‘I believe he has various plans. Obviously he’s in no state to do anything very much at the moment.’

‘Gosse has some idea he could be useful in war propaganda, you know. Apparently Siegfried told him his only qualification for the job was that he’d been wounded in the head.’

They laughed, united by their shared affection for Siegfried, then said goodbye. Rivers was left with the impression that Ross had wanted to tell him something, but had thought better of it.

Siegfried was sitting up in bed, a notepad on his knees. ‘Was that you talking to Ross?’

‘Yes.’

‘He looks ill, doesn’t he?’

He looked worse than ‘ill’. He looked as if he were dying. ‘It’s difficult to tell when you don’t know the person.’

‘I shan’t be seeing him next week. He’s off to the country.’

Rivers sat down by the bed.

‘I’ve been trying to write to Owen,’ Sassoon said. ‘You remember Owen? Little chap. Used to be in the breakfast-room selling the Hydra.’

‘Yes, I remember. Brock’s patient.’

‘Well, he sent me a poem and I praised it to to the skies and now it’s been passed round…’ Siegfried pulled a face. ‘Nobody else likes it. And now I look at it again I’m not sure either. The fact is…’ he said, putting the pad on his bedside table, ‘my judgement’s gone. And not just for Owen’s work. I thought I’d done one or two good things, but when I look at them again they’re rubbish. In fact, I don’t think I’ve done anything good since I left Craiglockhart.’

Rivers said carefully, ‘You think that at the moment because you’re depressed. Give yourself a rest.’

‘Am I depressed?’

‘You know you are.’

‘I don’t know what point there is in it anyway. What’s an anti-war poet except a poet who’s dependent on war? I thought a lot of things were simple, Rivers, and…’ A pause. ‘Eddie Marsh came to see me. He thinks he can find me a job at the Ministry of Munitions.’

‘What do you think about that?’

‘I don’t know.’

Rivers nodded. ‘Well, you’ve got plenty of time.’

‘I don’t even know whether I’m going back to France. Am I?’

‘I shall do everything I can to prevent it. I don’t think anybody expects you to go back this time.’

‘I never regretted going back, you know. Not once.’ He sat up suddenly, clasping his arms round his knees. ‘You know what I’d really like to do? Go to Sheffield and work in a factory.’

‘In a factory?’

‘Yes, why not? I don’t want to spend the rest of my life wrapped up in the sort of cocoon I was in before the war. I want to find out about ordinary people. Workers.’

‘Why Sheffield?’

‘Because it’s close to Edward Carpenter.’

Silence.

‘Why not?’ Siegfried demanded. ‘Why not? I did everything anybody wanted me to do. Everything you wanted me to do. I gave in, I went back. Now why can’t I do something that’s right for me?’

‘Because you’re still in the army.’

‘But you say yourself nobody expects —’

‘That’s a very different matter from a General Discharge. I see no grounds for that.’

‘Does it rest with you?’

‘Yes.’ Rivers got up and walked to the window. He had hoped this time to be able to use his skills unambiguously for Siegfried’s benefit. Instead, he was faced with the task of putting obstacles in the way of yet another hare-brained scheme, because this was another protest, smaller, more private, less hopeful, than his public declaration had been, but still a protest.

Behind him Siegfried said, ‘There was a great jamboree in the park yesterday. Bands playing.’

Rivers turned to look at him. ‘Of course, I was forgetting. August 4th.’

‘They were unveiling some sort of shrine to the dead. Or giving thanks for the war, I’m not sure which. There’s a Committee for War Memorials. One of the committees Robbie had to resign from. Can’t have the Glorious Dead commemorated by a sodomite. Even if some of the Glorious Dead were sodomites.’

‘You’re very bitter.’

‘And you’re right, it’s no good. You can ride anger.’ Siegfried raised his hands in a horseman’s gesture, forefingers splayed to take the reins. ‘I don’t know what you do with bitterness. Nothing, probably.’

Rivers caught and held a sigh. ‘There’s something I want to say. In my own defence, I suppose. If at any time you’d said to me, “I am a pacifist. I believe it’s always and in all circumstances wrong to kill”, I… I wouldn’t have agreed with you, I’d’ve made you argue the case every step of the way, but in the end I’d’ve done everything in my power to help you get out of the army.’

‘You don’t need a defence. I told you, I never regretted going back.’

‘But then you have to face the fact that you’re still a soldier.’ Rivers opened his mouth, looked down at Siegfried, and shut it again. ‘You know, you really oughtn’t to be lying in bed on a day like this. Why don’t you get dressed? We could go out.’

Siegfried looked at his tunic, hanging on the back of the door. ‘No, thanks, I’d rather not.’

‘You haven’t been dressed since you arrived.’

‘I can’t be bothered to dazzle the VADs.’

‘Dazzle? Isn’t that a bit conceited?’

‘Fact, Rivers.’ Siegfried smiled. ‘One of life’s minor ironies.’

Rivers walked across the room, took Siegfried’s tunic from the peg and threw it on to the bed. ‘Come on, Siegfried. Put it on. You can’t spend the rest of your life in pyjamas.’

‘I can’t spend the rest of my life in that either.’

‘No, but you have to spend the rest of the war in it.’

For a moment it looked as if Siegfried would refuse. Then, slowly, he pushed back the covers and got out of bed. He looked terrible. White. Twitching. Exhausted.

‘We needn’t go far,’ Rivers said.

Slowly, Sassoon started to put on the uniform.

It was easier for Prior to arrange a visit to Mac than he had expected. He still had Ministry of Munitions headed notepaper, having taken a pile with him when he cleared his desk. But probably even without it, the uniform, the wound stripe, the earnestly expressed wish to save an old friend from the shame of pacifism, would have been enough to get him an interview.

Mac was sitting on his plank bed, his head in his hands.

Prior said, ‘Hello, Mac.’

The hands came down. Mac looked… as people do look who’ve had repeated disagreements with detention camp guards.

‘On your feet,’ the guard said.

‘No,’ Prior said sharply. ‘Leave us.’

The man looked startled, but obeyed. It was a relief when the door clanged shut behind him. Prior had been dreading a situation where Mac refused to salute him, and the guards spent the next half hour bouncing his head off the wall.

‘Well,’ Prior said.

No chair. No glass in the window. A smell of stale urine from the bucket, placed where it could be seen from the door. And behind him… yes, of course. The eye.

‘I didn’t expect to see you,’ Mac said. Neither his voice nor his manner was friendly, but he showed no obvious rancour. Perhaps, like a soldier, he’d become accustomed to the giving and receiving of hard, impersonal knocks. There was no room for emotion in this.

‘At least they’ve given you a blanket.’

Mac was naked underneath the blanket and the cell was cold even in summer.

‘For your visit. It goes when you go.’

Prior sat down at the foot of the plank bed and looked around him.

‘One of the main weapons, that,’ said Mac conversationally. ‘Marching you about the place naked. Especially since they don’t give you any paper to wipe yourself with and the food in here’s enough to give a brass monkey the shits.’ He waited. ‘The arsehole plays a major part in breaking people down, did you know that?’

‘You look as if they’ve worked you over.’

‘Work? Pleasure. One of them…’ Mac raised his forearm. ‘Hang your towel on it.’

‘Is that over now?’

‘The beatings? They’re over when I give in.’

A uniform was lying, neatly folded, on the end of the bed.

‘Can I ask you something, Billy? Do you talk about the war in the trenches? I don’t mean day-to-day stuff, pass the ammunition, all that, I mean, “Why are we fighting?” “What is it all for?”’

‘No. We’re ‘ere because we’re ‘ere.’

‘Same in here.’

Prior looked puzzled. ‘There’s nobody to talk to.’

Mac smiled. ‘Morse code on the pipes. I take it I can rely on you not to tell the CO?’

‘Of course.’

‘“Of course”, Billy?’

‘It wasn’t me.’

Mac smiled and shook his head. ‘Why come here if you’re going to say that? Why come at all? I don’t know. Do you just want to see what you’ve done?’

Prior opened his mouth for a second denial, and closed it again. ‘I’ve got something for you,’ he said, digging into his tunic pocket and bringing out two bars of chocolate. He watched Mac’s pupils flare, then go dead. ‘Yes, I know. It’s contaminated. I’ve touched it.’ He held the chocolate out, using his body to screen Mac from the eye. ‘But you have to survive.’

Mac aligned himself exactly with Prior so that he could take the chocolate without being seen. ‘That’s true.’

‘You’d better eat it. They’ll search you.’

‘They won’t. That would mean doubting your integrity. An officer and a gentleman, no less. All the same I think I will have some.’ He slit the paper with his fingernail, broke off a piece and started to eat. The movements of his mouth and throat were awkward. Hunger had turned eating into an act as private as bishop-bashing. Prior tried to look away, but there was nothing to look at. His eyes could only wander round the cell and return to Mac.

‘Nine steps that way. Seven this. I do a lot of walking.’

‘How long are you in for?’

‘Solitary? Ninety days. If I reoffend — which is my intention — back in. Another ninety.’

Prior looked down at his hands. ‘And no letters?’

‘No.’

Mac managed a smile between mouthfuls. ‘Why did you come, Billy?’

‘To find out what you thought.’

‘About you? What a self-centred little shit you are.’

‘Yes.’

‘I didn’t believe it. The sergeant in Liverpool told me it was you, I mean, he mentioned your name. He was standing on my scrotum at the time, so, as you can imagine, it had a certain ring to it. I still didn’t believe it, but the more I thought about it the more I thought, yes.’ Mac was speaking intently, and yet almost indifferently, as if he didn’t care whether Prior listened or not. Perhaps speaking at all was merely a way of salving his pride, of distracting Prior’s attention while the all-important business of devouring the chocolate went on. ‘And then I thought, he told you. Do you remember in the cattle shed I asked you what you’d have done if you’d found a deserter in Hettie’s scullery and you said, “I’d turn him in. What else could I do?” And then I remembered a story I heard, about a man who found a snake half dead and nursed it back to life. He fed it, took care of it. And then he let it go. And the next time they met it bit him. And this was a very poisonous snake, he… knew he was going to die. And with his last gasp, he said, “But why? I saved you, I fed you, I nursed you. Why did you bite me?” And the snake said, “But you knew I was a snake.”’

A long silence. Prior moved at last. ‘It’s a good story.’

‘It’s a fucking marvellous story. Only…’

Prior waited. ‘Only what?’

‘Now shall I be greedy, and eat it all?’

‘Make sure of it. I would.’

‘I probably hate you a lot less than you think. Not that I’d say we were bosom pals exactly, in fact if I meet you after the war I’ll probably try to kill you…” He smiled and shook his head. ‘Was it all a lie about wanting to help Beattie?’

‘No, it was all true.’

‘You know what I’d like? I’d like you to look me straight in the eye, put on that phoney public school accent of yours, and say, yes I told the police where to find you, and I’m not ashamed of that. It was my duty.’

‘I can’t.’

Mac was watching him intently. ‘Then I don’t understand. I thought you’d finally worked out whose side you were on.’

‘There was never any doubt about that,’ Prior said, raising his sleeve. ‘People who wear this. More or less with pride.’ He stood up. ‘I shan’t say I’m sorry.’

Mac looked up at him. ‘Don’t. Chocolate’s too precious to bring back.’

Prior knocked, and waited impatiently for the guard to appear. He realized the painted eye must be looking straight at his belt buckle. Surreptitiously, he put his finger into the hole until it touched cool glass. Towers’s eye, he remembered, lying in the palm of his hand, had been warm.

The guard appeared and, with one backward glance, he followed him along the iron landing and down the stairs. He had the rest of the day to get through before he could talk to Rivers, but he was glad of that. It was right that the first confusion and pain should be borne alone. He did not doubt for a moment that Mac’s story was true — Mac had no reason to lie. Though he still had no memory of doing it, he had betrayed Mac.

He remembered an occasion when he’d held out a shaking hand to Rivers, stuttering something totally incoherent about Towers’s eye, how the memory of holding it in his hand had become a talisman, a reminder of where the deepest loyalties lie. That was still true. And yet he could not justify what he had done to Mac. Even if his other self hated Mac for refusing to fight, for trying to bring the munitions factories to a halt, it remained true that in arranging to meet Mac he had in effect offered him a safe conduct — for Beattie’s sake. Even leaving aside the childhood friendship, there had been a personal undertaking given in the present, trusted in the present, betrayed in the present. He could not, whether to satisfy Mac or console himself, say, ‘I did my duty.’ What had happened was altogether darker, more complex than that.

Drill was going on in the yard outside. Familiar shouts, the slurrying and stamping of boots, lines of regimented bodies moving as one. In the front rank a conchie was being ‘persuaded’ to take part. That is, he was being manhandled first into one position, then another. ‘Marking time’ consisted of being kicked on the ankles by the guards on either side. No attempt was made to hide what was happening. Presumably it was taken for granted that an officer would approve.

Prior watched for a while, then turned away.

TWENTY-ONE

A freshening breeze, blowing across the Serpentine, fumbled the roses, loosening red and yellow petals that lay on the dry soil or drifted across the paths. Rivers and Sassoon had been wandering along beside the lake for no more than fifteen minutes, but already Sassoon looked tired.

‘I’ve been very good,’ he said. ‘The last few days. Out of bed and dressed before breakfast.’

‘Good.’

Glutinous yellow sunlight, slanting between the trees, cast their shadows across the water.

‘Do you remember me telling you about Richard Dadd?’ Siegfried asked suddenly. ‘Drowning his father in the Serpentine?’

‘Yes,’ Rivers said, and waited for more. When Siegfried didn’t speak, he asked, ‘Should I be hanging on to a tree?’

Siegfried smiled. ‘No, not you.’

The deck-chairs beside the lake were empty, bellying in the wind, but on a sunny sheltered bank soldiers home on leave sat or lay entwined with their girls, the girls’ summer dresses bright splashes against the khaki of their uniforms. A woman in a black uniform appeared on the ridge and began to make her way diagonally down the slope. As she advanced, a black beetle toiling across the grass, the lovers drew apart, and a girl close to the path tugged anxiously at the hem of her skirt.

‘I’ve even been to the common room,’ Siegfried said. ‘You know what the topic of conversation was? The changes you notice when you’re home on leave and whether any of them are for the better. And somebody said, yes, every time you came home women’s skirts were shorter. I’m afraid it’s not much consolation to me.’

Rivers caught a sigh. Depression and bitterness had become Siegfried’s settled state. If he seemed better than he had when he first arrived, it was mainly because depression — provided it hasn’t reached the point of stupor — is more easily disguised than elation. He was actually very ill indeed.

‘I must say I’ll be glad to be out of London,’ Siegfried went on. ‘Have you heard any more about this convalescent home?’

‘Oh, yes. They can take you.’

‘It’s… I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten where you said it was.’

‘Coldstream. Near Berwick-on-Tweed.’

‘Is that anywhere near Scarborough? It’s just Owen’s stationed in Scarborough.’

‘Well, it’s not near, but you could probably get there and back in a day.’ Rivers hesitated. ‘There is one thing I think you… might not like. There has to be a Medical Board first.’

‘Yes.’

Siegfried sounded puzzled. This wasn’t the first time he’d been in hospital: riding accident during training, trench fever, wounded, ‘shell-shocked’ at Craiglockhart, wounded again. He knew the routine backwards.

‘At Craiglockhart,’ Rivers said.

A stunned silence. ‘No. Why Craiglockhart?’

‘Because you’re my patient. Because I want to be on the Board.’

Siegfried couldn’t take it in. ‘I can’t go back there.’

‘I’m afraid you’ve got to. It’s only for a few days, Siegfried.’

Siegfried shook his head. ‘I can’t. You don’t know what you’re asking.’

There was an empty bench a few yards further on. Rivers sat down and indicated that Siegfried should join him. ‘Tell me, then.’

A silence during which Sassoon struggled visibly with himself.

‘Why can’t you?’ Rivers prompted gently.

‘Because it would mean admitting I’m one of them.’

Rivers felt a flare of anger, but brought it quickly under control. ‘One of whom?’

Siegfried was silent. At last he said, ‘You know what I mean.’

‘Yes, I’m afraid I do. One of the degenerates, the loonies, the lead-swingers, the cowards.’ He waited for a response, but Siegfried had turned his head away. ‘You know, Siegfried, sometimes I… reproach myself with having exercised too great an influence on you. At a time when you were vulnerable and… perhaps needed to be left alone to come to your own decision in your way.’ Rivers shook his head. ‘Well, I shan’t be doing that again. If you still think like that I haven’t influenced you at all. I haven’t managed to convey a single bloody thing. Not a bloody thing.’ He looked out over the lake. The wind blew a dark ripple across the surface like goose pimples spreading across skin. ‘Perhaps we’d better be getting back.’

‘Not yet.’

‘You have to go back to Craiglockhart. I’m sorry, I’ll make it as short as I can, but you have to go.’

Siegfried nodded. He was sitting with his big hands clasped between his knees. ‘All right. But you do see what I’m trying to say? I know you find it offensive, but… It’s not just admitting I’m one of them now, it’s admitting I always was. Don’t you see?’

‘Yes, and it’s nonsense. One day I’m going to give you a copy of your admission report. “No physical or mental signs of any nervous disorder.” If you’re tormenting yourself with the idea that your protest was some kind of symptom, well, for God’s sake, stop. It wasn’t. It was an entirely valid, sane response to the situation we’re all in.’ He paused. ‘Wrong, of course.’

‘When I was in France I used to think of it as breakdown. It was easier than —’

‘Than remembering what you believed?’

‘Yes.’ Siegfried looked down at his hands. ‘Now I just feel as if a trap’s been sprung.’ A slight laugh. ‘Not by you, I don’t mean by you. But it has, hasn’t it? It’s absolutely full circle. Literally back to the beginning. Only worse, because now I belong there.’

‘Three days. I promise.’

Siegfried got up. ‘All right.’

Rivers remained seated for a moment. He wanted to say, if there is a trap, I’m in it too, but he couldn’t. ‘Come on,’ he said, standing up. ‘Let’s go back.’

The bomb site had been tidied up, Prior saw. Rubble cleared away, the pavements swept clean of white dust, the houses on either side of the gap shored up. A cold wind whistled through the gap, disturbing the trees, whipping up litter into whirlpools that ran along the gutters. The sun blazed in the windows of the houses opposite the gap, turning the far side of the square into a wall of fire.

Prior was early for his appointment and dawdled along, noticing what on his previous visit, walking with Charles Manning through the spring dark, he had not noticed: that many of the elegant houses had dingy basements, like white teeth yellow round the gums.

He pressed the bell of Manning’s house and turned slightly away, expecting to have to wait, but the door was opened almost immediately and by Manning himself, so quickly indeed that he must have been hovering in the hall. He might have appeared anxious, but his smile, his whole bearing, gave the impression of impulsive informality.

‘It’s all right, I’ve got it,’ he said to somebody over his shoulder, and stood aside to let Prior in. ‘I’m glad you could come. I thought of waiting till we were both back at work, but —’

‘I’m not going back,’ Prior said quickly.

‘Ah.’

The living-room door stood open. No dust-sheets now.

‘Oh, yes, come and see,’ Manning said, noticing the direction of his glance.

They went in. A smell of furniture polish and roses.

‘You found a builder, then,’ Prior said, looking up at the door.

‘Yes. I must say he didn’t inspire a lot of confidence, but he seems to have done all right. As far as one can tell.’ Manning patted the wall. ‘I’ve got a sneaking suspicion the wallpaper might be holding the plaster up.’

They found themselves staring rather too long at the place where the crack had been, and glanced at each other, momentarily at a loss. ‘Come and sit down,’ Manning said.

A bowl of red and yellow roses stood in the fireplace where before there had been scrumpled newspaper dusted with soot. No mirror either — that had been moved. The whole room had been redecorated. So much was changed that the unyielding brocade of the sofa came as a shock. Prior flexed his shoulders, remembering. It was almost as if the body had an alternative store of memory in the nerve endings, for the sensation of being held stiffly erect induced a state of sensual awareness. He looked at Manning, and knew that he too was remembering.

‘Would you like a drink?’

Manning went across to the sideboard. Prior, noticing a book lying face down on the floor near an armchair, reached across and picked it up. Rex v. Pemberton Billing. It was a complete transcript of the trial. What an extraordinary thing for Manning to be reading. Manning came back with the drinks. ‘Is it good?’ Prior asked, holding up the book.

‘Fascinating,’ Manning said. ‘I realized while I was reading it wh-wh-what’s actually h-happening. It’s just that people are saturated with tragedy, they simply can’t respond any more. So they’ve decided to play the rest of the war as farce.’

‘I can’t say I’d be prepared to fork out good money for this.’

‘I didn’t,’ Manning said, sitting down. ‘It was sent to me. By “a well-wisher”.’

Prior raised his eyebrows. ‘Really?’

‘Oh, yes. I’ve had several little… communications.’

‘Captain Spencer came to see us, you know.’

‘“Us”?’

‘The Intelligence Unit. I think somebody must have told him the first question he’d be asked in court was whether he’d informed the appropriate authorities when he discovered the Great Conspiracy. So he was scurrying round London informing them.’ Prior laughed.

‘Did he mention any names?’

‘Good Lord, yes.’ Prior looked up and caught a fleeting expression of anxiety. ‘Not you.’

‘No, I didn’t think that, I’m not important enough. Robert Ross?’

‘Well, yes.’

Manning nodded. ‘You say you’re not going back?’

‘There’s nothing to go back to. I went in to check my pigeonhole and… it was like the Marie Celeste. Files gone. Lode gone.’

‘He’s…’

‘Teaching cadets. In Wales. No doubt that pleases him.’

‘Why, is he Welsh?’

‘I was being sarcastic. I shouldn’t think it pleases him in the least. Spragge. I don’t know whether you —’

‘The informer?’

‘That’s right. He’s gone — or going, I’m not sure which — to South Africa. All expenses paid.’

Manning hesitated. ‘I… don’t think you should feel nothing useful came out of that. I showed Eddie Marsh your report and… he was rather impressed actually. As I was. He thought it was… very cogently argued. Very effective.’

‘It may have been cogently argued. It certainly wasn’t effective. She’s still in prison.’

Manning smiled. ‘The point is —’

The french windows were thrown open, and a chubby-cheeked child peered, blinking, into the dark interior. ‘Daddy?’

‘Not now, Robert,’ Manning said, turning round. ‘Ask Elsie.’

Manning’s face softened as he watched the child close the door carefully behind him. His delight in his house and family was so obvious it seemed churlish to wonder if he ever regretted the empty rooms of early spring, the smells of soot and fallen plaster, the footsteps that had followed him upstairs to the maids’ bedroom.

‘The point is that being able to organize an array of complicated facts and present them succinctly is quite a rare ability. And just the sort of thing we’re looking for in my line of work.’

‘Which is…’

‘Health and safety. To cut a long story short, I’m offering you a job.’

‘Ah.’

‘I think you might find it worth while. Since it’s basically protecting the interests of the workers.’

Prior was in no hurry to reply. He had resigned himself, not entirely with reluctance, to going back to Scarborough, to resuming the boring, comfortless life of an army camp in England. At the same time he knew Manning’s offer was one for which a great many men would have given an arm or a leg, and not merely in the meaningless way that expression was normally used. ‘Is Rivers behind this?’

‘No.’

Prior wasn’t sure he believed him. ‘I’m very grateful, Charles — don’t think I don’t appreciate it — but I’m afraid I can’t accept.’

‘Why not?’

‘Sarah — that’s my girlfriend — she’s in the north. I’d be able to see quite a lot of her if I was in Scarborough. And — that’s a big factor. And… I’m not sure how much I want a cushy job.’

Manning hesitated. ‘It does have one very big advantage. It’s most unlikely you’d be sent back to France. Though I suppose that’s not very likely anyway.’

‘Oh, I don’t know.’

‘What rating are you?’

‘A4.’

‘That’s a long way from the top.’

‘With a Board in two weeks’ time.’

‘Rivers wouldn’t let it happen.’

‘Rivers has nothing to do with it. I was given my original rating on the basis of my asthma.’

‘But he’d write to the Board if you asked him.’

‘I know. In fact I think Rivers could be quite eloquent on the subject of my unfitness for France. The point is, he won’t be asked.’

‘How are you really?’

‘A lot better.’

Manning toyed with his glass. ‘What was the trouble exactly?’

Prior smiled, remained silent just long enough for Manning to feel embarrassed by the intrusiveness of the question, then answered it. ‘Memory lapses. Black-outs, I suppose. They do seem to be over.’

‘Do you know what you did during them?’

‘Yes.’ Prior smiled again. ‘Nothing I don’t have a tendency to do.’

Manning became aware that he was looking almost indecently curious, and quickly corrected his expression.

‘How about you?’ Prior said.

‘Mending. It was much harder work than I thought it would be.’

‘Rivers? Oh, yes.’

‘I mean, he’s an absolute slave-driver. And you can’t grumble because you know he’s driving himself even harder.’

A glance of amusement and shared affection. Then Manning said, ‘You sound almost as if you want to go back.’

‘Yes, I suppose I do, in a way. It’s odd, isn’t it? In spite of everything — I mean in spite of Not Believing in the War and Not Having Faith in Our Generals and all that, it still seems the only clean place to be.’

‘Yes. My God, yes.’

They stared at each other, aware of a depth of understanding that the surface facts of their relationship scarcely accounted for.

‘Not an option for me, I’m afraid,’ Manning added, stretching out his leg. ‘But I do know what you mean.’

‘Do you think we’re mad?’

‘Both been in the loony bin.’

‘You’d better not let Rivers hear you calling it that.’

‘I wouldn’t dare. The offer’s open for the next few days, you know,’ Manning said, putting down his glass. ‘I shan’t be seeing Marsh till —’

Prior smiled and shook his head. ‘No. Thank you, but no.’

‘You don’t think you might regret it?’

Prior laughed. ‘Charles, if I get sent back — if, if, if, if — I shall sit in a dug-out and look back to this afternoon, and I shall think, “You bloody fool.”’

‘Well,’ Manning said, standing up. ‘I tried.’

In the hall a maid came forward carrying Prior’s cap and cane. Prior glanced at her: she was sallow-skinned, middle aged, about as old as his mother, he supposed. He stared at her uniform, remembering how he’d pressed his face into the armpits, smelling the careworn, sad smell. Manning was saying something, but he didn’t hear what it was. He turned to him and said, ‘Now I come to think of it, Spencer did mention other names.’

Manning said smoothly, ‘Thank you, Alice. I’ll see Mr Prior out.’

‘Winston Churchill and Edward Marsh.’

Manning gave an astonished yelp. ‘Churchill?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then he is mad.’

‘Yes, that’s what I thought.’ Prior walked to the door, then stopped. ‘He said Churchill and Marsh spent an entire afternoon beating each other’s buttocks with a plaited birch.’

‘Yes.’

‘What do you mean “yes”?’

‘Churchill was Home Secretary at the time.’

‘Oh, well, that explains everything.’

‘It was a new kind of birch.’ Manning looked impatient. ‘I don’t know the details, there’d been some sort of controversy about it. I think people were saying it was cruel. So naturally they —’

‘Tried it out on each other.’

‘Yes.’ Manning’s expression hardened. ‘They were doing their duty.’

‘What conclusion did they reach?’

‘I think they both thought they’d had worse beatings at school.’

Prior nodded, glanced round to make sure they were unobserved, then took hold of Manning’s pudgy cheeks and chucked them. ‘There’ll always be an England,’ he told him and ran, laughing, down the steps.