by Pat Barker
‘That doesn’t mean he’s right.’
‘No, but it does make it very difficult for me to keep my end up in a discussion.’
‘Did you talk about after the war?’
‘No. I can’t, I’ve no plans. Do you know what you’re going to do?’
‘I’m going to keep pigs.’
‘Pigs?’
‘Yes. People think pigs are dirty, you know, but they’re not. They’re very clean animals, given half the chance. And it would combine so well with poetry, you see. Actually much better than teaching, because if you’re teaching properly you’re using the same part of your mind. But pig-keeping…’
‘Perhaps we should go into partnership. It’d shut Rivers up.’
Owen, belatedly aware of being laughed at, blushed and didn’t reply.
‘No, well, I don’t suppose I’d be much use with the pigs, but I may be able to help with the poems.’ He nodded at Owen’s tunic.
Owen extracted a sheaf of papers. ‘I told you they were all short but actually there is one long one. Antaeus and and Hercules.’ He handed the papers over. ‘Do you know the legend? Antaeus is too strong for Hercules as long as he keeps his feet on mother Earth. But as soon as Hercules lifts him –’
‘He’s helpless. Yes, it rings a bell.’ Sassoon started to read. After a few seconds he looked up. ‘Why don’t you get yourself a book? There’s nothing worse than being watched by the Onlie Begetter.’
‘Sorry.’ Owen got up and pretended to look at the books on Sassoon’s shelf.
At last Sassoon looked up. ‘It’s very good. Why Antaeus?’
‘Oh, it’s something Brock’s keen on. He thinks we – the patients – are like Antaeus in the sense that we’ve been ungrounded by the war. And the way back to health is to reestablish the link between oneself and the earth, but understanding “earth” to mean society as well as nature. That’s why we do surveys and things like that.’
‘I thought all the dashing around was to keep your mind off it?’
‘No, that’s part of the treatment. Ergotherapy.’
‘Well, it’s an interesting idea. Though I don’t know that being stuck in a dugout ever made me feel I was losing contact with the earth.’
Owen smiled. ‘No, nor me. It does work, though.’
Sassoon picked up the next sheet. Craning his neck, Owen could just see the title of the poem. ‘That’s in your style,’ he said.
‘Yes. I… er… noticed.’
‘No good?’
‘Starts and ends well. What happened in the middle?’
‘That’s quite old, that bit. I wrote that two years ago.’
‘They do say if you leave something in a drawer long enough it’ll either rot or ripen.’
‘The bit at the end… About “dirt”. Those are the actual words.’
‘Yes, and they could do with changing. I’ve just cut: “You sod” out of a poem. Those were my actual words.’
‘So it’s no good?’
Sassoon hesitated. ‘It’s not much good at the moment. I suppose the thing is, are you interested enough to go on?’
‘Ye-es. I have to start somewhere. And I think you’re right. It’s mad not to write about the war when it’s –’
‘Such an experience.’
They looked at each other and burst out laughing.
‘My only doubt is… The the fact that you admire somebody very much doesn’t automatically mean they’re a good model. I mean, I admire Wilde, but if I started trying to be witty and elegant and incisive, I’d probably fall flat on my face.’
‘Yes, I see that. Well not that. I mean I see the point. But I do think I can take something from you.’
‘Fair enough.’ Sassoon went back to his reading. ‘I think you’re probably right,’ he said, after a while. ‘If I do nothing else, I might help you get rid of some of this mush.’
‘Some of the sonnets are quite early.’
‘Puberty?’ A long pause. Early sonnets fell like snow. ‘Oh, now this is good. “Song of Songs.”’
‘That’s last week.’
‘Is it? Now you see what I mean about me not being necessarily the right model? I couldn’t do this. And yet of it’s kind it’s absolutely perfect.’
Owen sat down. He looked as if his knees had buckled.
‘I think that should go in the Hydra.’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘a. It’s not good enough. b. Editors shouldn’t publish their own work.’
‘a. I’m a better judge of that than you are. At the moment. b. Rubbish. And c.’ Sassoon leant across and snatched his own poem back. ‘If you don’t publish that, you can’t have this.’
Owen seemed to be contemplating a counter-attack.
‘d. I’m bigger than you are.’
‘All right, I’ll print it.’ He took Sassoon’s poem back. ‘Anonymously.’
‘Cheat.’ Sassoon was shuffling Owen’s papers together. ‘Look, why don’t you have a go at…’ He peered at the title. ‘“The Dead-Beat”? Work at it till you think you’ve made some progress, then bring it back and we’ll have a go at it together. It’s not too traumatic, is it? That memory.’
‘Good heavens, no.’
‘How long do you spend on it? Not that one, I mean generally?’
‘Fifteen minutes.’ He saw Sassoon’s expression change. ‘That’s every day.’
‘Good God, man, that’s no use. You’ve got to sweat your guts out. Look, it’s like drill. You don’t wait till you feel like doing it.’
‘Well, it’s certainly a new approach to the Muse. “Number from the left! Form fours! Right turn!”’
‘It works. I’ll see you – shall we say Thursday? After dinner.’ He opened the door and stood aside to let Owen past. ‘And I shall expect to find both poems in the Hydra.’
12
__________
After Prior had been waiting for perhaps five minutes, the lodging house door opened and Sarah stood there. ‘You’ve got a nerve,’ she said, beginning to close the door.
Prior put a finger in the crack. ‘I’m here now.’
‘Which is more than you were last week. Go on, shift.’
‘I couldn’t come last week. I was so late back they kept me in.’
‘Bit strict, aren’t they? Your parents.’
Too late, he remembered the lies he’d told. He pointed to the blue badge on his tunic. ‘Not parents. The CO.’
The door stopped shutting.
‘I know it sounds stupid, but it is the truth.’
‘Oh, all right, I believe you.’ Her eyes fell on the badge. ‘And if you’re getting yourself upset about that, don’t bother. I knew anyway.’
‘How did you know?’ What had he been doing? Drooling?
‘You don’t think you’re the only one takes it off, do you? They all do. Betty says she had a young man once, she never saw him wearing it. Mind you, knowing Betty, I shouldn’t think she saw him wearing much at all.’
By day, the yellowness of her skin astonished him. It said a lot for her that she was still attractive, that she managed to wear it like a rather dashing accessory.
‘There is just one thing,’ she said, coming out into the porch. ‘If I do go out with you, I want one thing clear at the start. I think you must’ve got a very wrong impression of me the other night. Knocking all that port back.’ She raised her eyes to his face. ‘I don’t usually drink much at all.’
‘I know that. You were gone too quick for somebody that was used to it.’
‘Right, then. Long as you know. I’ll get me jacket.’
He waited, looking up and down the hot street. A trickle of sweat had started in his armpits. From deep inside the house came a woman’s voice raised in anger.
‘Me landlady,’ Sarah said, coming back. ‘Belgian, married a Scot, the poor sod. I don’t think he knew what he was getting. Still, she only charges a shilling for the laundry, and when you think the sheets come off the bed bright
yellow you can’t complain about that.’
He felt at home with her, with this precise delineation of the cost of everything, which was not materialistic or grasping, but simply a recognition of the boundaries and limitations of life. ‘I thought we’d get out of Edinburgh,’ he said. ‘It’s too hot.’
Most of Edinburgh was using this last weekend in August to escape the city, not deterred by a sallow tinge to the sky that suggested the hot, sticky weather might break into thunder before the day was out. The train was packed, but he managed to get her a seat, and stood near by. She smiled up at him, but in this rackety, sweating box it was impossible to talk. He looked at the other passengers. A trio of girls out on a spree, a young mother with a struggling toddler tugging at her blouse, a middle-aged couple whose bodies sagged together. Something about that stale intimacy sharpened his sense of the strangeness, the separateness of Sarah’s body. He was so physically aware of her that when the knee of his breeches brushed against her skirt he felt as if the contact had been skin on skin.
A ganglion of rails, the train juddering over points, and then they were slowing, and people were beginning to stir and clutch bags, and jam the aisles. ‘Let’s wait,’ he said.
Sarah pressed against him, briefly, to let the woman and her child past, and then he sat beside her as the train emptied. After a while she reached down and touched his hand.
They took their time walking to the sea. At first he was disappointed, it was so crowded. Men with trousers rolled up to show knobbly legs, handkerchiefs knotted over sweating scalps, women with skirts tucked up to reveal voluminous bloomers, small children screaming as the damp sand was towelled off their legs. Everywhere people swirling their tongues round icecream cones, biting into candy-floss, licking rock, sucking fingers, determined to squeeze the last ounce of pleasure from the day. In his khaki, Prior moved among them like a ghost.
Only Sarah connected him to the jostling crowd, and he put his hand around her, clasping her tightly, though at that moment he felt no stirring of desire. He said, ‘You wouldn’t think there was a war on, would you?’
They walked down to the water’s edge. He felt quite callous towards her now, even as he drew her towards him and matched his stride to hers. She belonged with the pleasure-seeking crowds. He both envied and despised her, and was quite coldly determined to get her. They owed him something, all of them, and she should pay. He glanced at her. ‘Shall we walk along?’
Their linked shadows, dumpy and deformed, stretched across the sand. After a while they came to an outcrop of rock, and, clambering over it, found they’d left the crowded part of the beach behind. Sarah took off her jacket and then, with a great fuss and pleas not to look, her shoes and stockings as well. She paddled at the water’s edge, where the waves seethed between her toes.
‘I don’t suppose you’re allowed to take anything off?’ she said, looking back at him, teasing.
‘Not a thing.’
‘Not even your boots?’
‘No, but I can wade. I always paddle with me boots on.’
He didn’t expect her to understand, or if she did, to admit it, but she turned on him at once. ‘Boots have a way of springing a leak.’
‘Not mine.’
‘Oh, you’d be different, I suppose?’
Until now the air had been so still it scarcely moved against the skin. But now small gusts began to whip up the sand, stinging patches of bare skin. Prior looked back the way they’d come. The sun was past its height. Even the little mounds of worm-casts had each its individual shadow, but what chiefly struck him was the yellowing of the light. It was now positively sulphurous, thick with heat. They seemed to be trapped, fixed, in some element thicker than air. Black figures, like insects, swarmed across the beach, making for the shelter of the town.
Sarah, too, had turned to look back. He said quickly, ‘No, don’t let’s go back. It’ll blow over.’
‘You think that’s gunna blow over?’
Reluctantly he said, ‘Do you want to go back?’
‘We’d be drenched before we got there. Anyway, I like storms.’
They stood looking out to sea, while the yellow light deepened. There was no difference now between his skin colour and hers. Suddenly Sarah clutched her head. ‘What’s happening?’
He could hardly believe what he saw. The coppery wires on the surface of her hair were standing straight up, in a way he had never believed any human hair could do. He pulled his cap off, and winced at the tingling in his scalp.
‘What is it?’ Sarah said.
‘Electricity.’
She burst out laughing.
‘No, I mean it.’
Lightning flickered once, illuminating her yellow skin.
‘Come on,’ Prior said.
He snatched her hand and started to run with her towards the shelter of some bushes. Scrambling up the last slope, he staggered, and would have fallen if he hadn’t grabbed a clump of marram grass. He felt a sharp pain, and, bringing his hand up, saw a smear of blood on the palm. Sarah pushed him from behind. They stumbled down the other side of the slope, just as a sudden fierce thickening of rain blinded them, and the first rumblings of thunder came.
A dense thicket of buckthorn offered the only possible shelter. Prior stamped down the nettles and thistles that thronged the gaps, and then held the thorns back for Sarah to crawl inside. He followed her in. They crouched down, the rain scarcely reaching them through the thick roof of thorn, though the wind rocked and beat the bush. Prior looked round. The ground was dry, and very bare, the thorn too thick to allow anything else to grow.
Sarah was feeling her hair. ‘Is it all right?’
‘It’s going down.’
‘So’s yours.’
He grinned. ‘’S not surprising. Storm took me mind right off it.’
She laughed, but refused to reply. Prior was remembering childhood games, making dens. An interior like this, so dark, so private, so easily defended, would have been a real find. Mixed with this distinctly childish excitement another excitement was growing. He no longer felt hostile to her, as he’d done back there in the crowd. They seemed to have walked away from all that. It was ages since he’d made love. He felt as he sometimes did coming out of the line, listening to the others talk and sometimes joining in, what they were going to do and how many times they were going to do it, though as far as he knew everybody else’s experience was like his own. The first time was almost always a disappointment. Either stuck at half mast or firing before you reached the target. He didn’t want to think about Sarah like this.
Sarah rolled over on to her elbow and looked at him. ‘This is nice.’
He lay beside her. A few splashes of rain found his upturned face. After a while he touched her hand and felt her fingertips curl round his. Through the thickness in his throat, he said, ‘I’m not pushing, but if you wanted to, I’d make sure it was all right.’
After a while he felt her fingers creep across his chest, insinuating themselves between the buttons of his tunic. He kissed her, moving from her lips to her breasts, not looking at her, not opening his eyes, learning her with his tongue, flicking the nipples hard, probing the whorled darkness of her navel, and then on down, down, across the smooth marble of her belly into the coarse and springy turf. His nostrils filled with the scent of rock pools at low tide. He slipped his hands underneath her, and lifted her, until her whole pelvis became a cup from which he drank.
Afterwards they lay in silence, enjoying the peace, until footsteps walking along the coastal path warned them that the storm was over. The buckthorn scattered raindrops over them, as they crawled out on to the grass.
They beat sand and twigs from each other’s clothes, then started to walk back along the coastal path.
‘What we need is something to warm us up,’ Prior said.
‘We can’t go anywhere looking like this.’
They stopped on the outskirts of the town, and tried more seriously to set themselves to rights. They went
to a pub, and leant back against the wooden seat, nudging each other under the table, drunk with their love-making and the storm and the sense of having secrets.
‘I can feel your voice through the wood,’ Sarah said.
Abruptly, the joy died. Prior became quite suddenly depressed. He pushed his half-finished meal away.
‘What is it?’
‘Oh, I was remembering a man in my platoon.’ He looked at her. ‘Do you know, he sent the same letter to his wife every week for two years.’
Sarah felt a chill come over her. She didn’t know why she was being told this. ‘Why?’
‘Why not?’
‘How do you know he did?’
‘Because I had to censor it. I censored it every week. We read all their letters.’
He could see her not liking this, but she kept her voice light. ‘Who reads yours?’
‘Nobody.’ He looked at her again. ‘They rely on our sense of honour. Oh, we’re supposed to leave them open so the CO can read them if wants to, but it would be thought frightfully bad form if he did.’ Prior had slipped into his mock public school voice, very familiar to Rivers.
Sarah took it at face value. ‘You lot make me sick,’ she said, pushing her own plate away. ‘I suppose nobody else’s got a sense of honour?’
He preferred her like this. On the beach, she was only too clearly beginning to think that something had happened that mattered. He wasn’t going to admit that. A few grains of sand in the pubic hair, a mingling of smells. Nothing that a prolonged soak in the tub wouldn’t wash away. ‘Come on,’ he said, putting down a tip. ‘We’d better be getting back.’
13
__________
Burns paced up and down the waiting room. Rivers had told him he intended to recommend an unconditional discharge, and though he hadn’t actually said the Board would accept the recommendation, this had been very strongly implied. So there was nothing to worry about, though when the orderly came and asked him to step inside, his stomach knotted and his hands started to tremble. The Sam Browne belt, bunching the loose fabric round his waist, made him look rather like a scarecrow tied together with string. He got himself into the room somehow, and managed a salute. He couldn’t see their faces to begin with, since they sat with their backs to the tall windows, but after Bryce had told him to sit down, his eyes started to become accustomed to the light.