by Pat Barker
He moved the stethoscope all over Prior’s chest, pressing so hard that at times the stethoscope left overlapping rings on the skin that flushed and faded to white. He thinks I’m shirking, Prior thought, and the idea made him go cold.
‘How are your nerves?’ the doctor said.
‘Better.’
‘Shell explosion, was it?’
‘Not exactly.’
Not one word of what he’d told Rivers would he repeat to this man.
‘Do you think you’re fit?’
‘I’m not a doctor.’
The doctor smiled. Contemptuously, it seemed to Prior. ‘Keen to get back, are we?’
Prior closed his eyes. He had a picture of himself driving his knee into the man’s groin, and the picture was so vivid that for a moment he thought he might have done it, but then he opened his eyes and there was the sallow face, still smiling. He stared at him.
The doctor nodded, almost as if Prior had replied, and then slowly, to avoid any suggestion of backing off, turned and made a brief note on the file. It’s all bluff, Prior thought. It’s what Eaglesham says that matters.
He was in a torment as he got back into his uniform, reckoning his chances, despising himself for reckoning them. He didn’t thank Rivers for any of this. I haven’t lied to any of them, he thought. I haven’t made things out to be worse than they really are. He finished lacing his puttees and stood up. The nurse came back with a card. ‘If you tell them at the appointments desk, three weeks.’
‘Yes, all right. Thank you.’
He took the card, but walking down the long corridor afterwards he was tempted not to make the appointment. In the end he did, then put the card away and strode out into the hospital grounds as fast as he could. He thought he might buy himself something from the barrow at the entrance, fruit or sweets, any little treat that might make him feel better. Less contaminated.
He saw her before she saw him, and called out, ‘Sarah.’ She turned and smiled. He’d thought about her a lot while he’d been in the sick bay, remembering that time on the beach. Illness, once the worst was over, always made him randy. What he’d forgotten, he thought now, looking at the yellow face beneath the aureole of extraordinary hair, was how much he liked her.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked, obviously delighted.
‘Having my chest examined.’
‘Are you all right?’
‘Fine – thanks to you. What are you doing here?’
‘I’m with Madge. Her fiancé’s been wounded.’
‘Is he all right?’
‘Yes, I think so.’ Her face darkened. ‘I’ve just seen some that aren’t all right. There’s a sort of conservatory round the back. They’re all sat in there. Where the rest of us don’t have to see them.’
‘Bad?’
She nodded. ‘You know I used to wonder how I’d go on if Johnny came back like that. You always tell yourself it’d make no difference. Easy said, isn’t it?’
He sensed the anger and responded to it immediately. She might not know much about the war, but what she did know she faced honestly. He admired her for that. ‘Look, do you have to wait for Madge?’ he asked. ‘I mean, how long do you think she’ll be?’
‘Ages, I should think. She was virtually in bed with him when I left.’
‘Well, can’t you tell her you’re going? She can walk back by herself all right, can’t she? It’s broad daylight.’
She looked at him consideringly. ‘Yes, all right.’ She started to move away. ‘I won’t be a minute.’
Left alone, Prior bought two bunches of chrysanthemums, bronze and white, from the barrow near the entrance. They weren’t the flowers he would have chosen, but he wanted to give her something. He stood craning his head for the first sight of her. When she arrived, smiling and out of breath, he handed her the flowers, and then, on a sudden impulse, leant across and kissed her. The flowers, crushed between them, released their bitter, autumnal smell.
They were burning leaves on Hampstead Heath where Rivers walked with Ruth Head on the second day of his visit. Acrid smoke drifted across their path and below them London lay in a blue haze. They stopped by one of the ponds, and watched a coot cleave the smooth water. ‘You see over there behind those houses?’ Ruth said. ‘That’s the RFC hospital. And then over there – just in that dip there – that’s the Big Gun.’
‘I’m glad you and Henry don’t take refuge in the kitchen every night. Everybody else seems to.’
‘Can you imagine Henry cowering under the kitchen table?’
They smiled at each other and walked on.
‘Actually the air raids are my guilty secret,’ Ruth said.
‘You mean you’d rather be under the table?’
‘Oh no, quite the opposite. I enjoy them. It’s a terrible thing to say, isn’t it? All that damage. People killed. And yet every time the siren goes, I feel this immense sense of exhilaration. I’d really like to go out and run about in it.’ She laughed, self-deprecatingly. ‘I don’t of course. But I get this feeling that the… the crust of everything is starting to crack. Don’t you feel that?’
‘Yes. I’m just not sure we’re going to like what’s under the crust.’
They started to walk towards Spaniard’s Road. Rivers said, ‘You know last night I got the distinct impression that Henry was plotting something.’
‘About you? If he is, it’ll be something to your advantage.’
‘You mean you know and you’re not going to tell me?’
Ruth laughed. ‘That’s right.’
By Spaniard’s Road, men in blue hospital uniforms sat in wheelchairs, waiting for someone to come and push them away. Ruth was silent for a while after they’d walked past. ‘You know there was something I didn’t say last night.’ She looked up at him. ‘I think Sassoon’s absolutely right.’
‘Oh dear, I was hoping I might be able to introduce you. But if you’re going to be a bad moral influence –’
‘Seriously.’
‘All right, seriously. Suppose he is right? Does that mean it’s a good idea to let him go ahead and destroy himself?’
‘Surely it has to be his choice?’
‘It is his choice.’
Ruth smiled and shook her head.
‘Look,’ Rivers said, ‘I wear the uniform, I take the pay, I do the job. I’m not going to apologize for that.’
‘I’m not suggesting you should. All the same,’ she said, turning to look at him, ‘you’re tearing yourself in pieces as well as him.’
They walked in silence for a while. Rivers said, ‘Is that what Henry thinks?’
Ruth laughed. ‘Of course not. You want perception, you go to a novelist, not a psychiatrist.’
‘I’m sure you’re right.’
‘No, you’re not. You don’t believe a word of it.’
‘At any rate, I’m too cowed to disagree.’
That evening, left alone with Henry after dinner, Rivers watched him massage the triangle of skin between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. ‘Does that still bother you?’
‘A bit. Cold weather. Do you know, I don’t think I’d have the courage to do that now.’
‘No, I look back sometimes, and… I’m amazed. What are you doing these days?’
‘Gross injuries to the spinal cord. We’ve got a lot of interesting material.’ Head’s mouth twisted. ‘As we call the poor sods.’
Rivers shook his head. He’d seen Head too often on the wards to believe him capable of that particular kind of research-orientated callousness.
‘It’s an interesting atmosphere,’ Head said. ‘Dealing with physical trauma and war neurosis in the same hospital. You’d like it.’
‘I’m sure I would.’ A trace of bitterness. ‘I’d like London.’
‘There’s a job going if you want it.’
‘You mean there’s a vacancy?’
‘No, I mean there’s a job for you if you want it. I’ve been asked to sound you out. Psychologist with the
Royal Flying Corps. At the Central Hospital, Hampstead.’
‘Ah. I wondered why Ruth was so keen on the Heath.’
‘I imagine you’d find it interesting? Apparently there are some quite striking differences between the rate of breakdown in pilots and in other branches of the service.’
‘It sounds marvellous.’ He raised his hands and let them drop. ‘I just don’t see how I can.’
‘Why not? You’d be closer to your family, your friends, your research contacts, you’d be able to get back to Cambridge at weekends. And… I don’t suppose it matters, but we’d be able to work together again.’
Rivers buried his face in his hands. ‘O-o-o-oh. “Get thee behind me, Satan.”’
‘I am behind you. I was thinking of giving you a shove.’
‘I couldn’t leave Bryce.’
Head looked incredulous. ‘You mean, your CO?’
‘He’s in a difficult situation. We’re in for a general inspection, and… it all goes back a long way. Bryce is determined this time he’s not going to play their game. He’s not going to parade the patients, or polish the bottoms of the frying-pans, or pretend to be anything other than just an extremely busy, overcrowded and I think bloody good hospital.’
‘What do they want?’
‘They want a barracks. It’s got all the makings of a really nasty confrontation. I think Bryce may have to go.’
‘Well, I hate to sound harsh, but wouldn’t that rather solve the problem? Your problem, I mean.’
‘If it happened. Meanwhile, I think I can be… of some use to him.’
‘When is this inspection?’
‘End of the month.’
‘We’d need to know about the job… Well. Three weeks?’
‘I’ll think about it.’
‘Good. And don’t be too altruistic, will you? You’re isolated up there, it’s not good for you.’
‘I don’t know about isolated. I never have a minute to myself.’
‘Precisely. Come on, let’s find Ruth.’
15
__________
Aldeburgh was the end of the line, but the train, as if reluctant to accept this, produced, as Rivers stepped down on to the platform, an amazing burst of steam. He stood, looking up and down, as the train’s hissing subsided into grunts, and the steam cleared. Burns had promised to meet him, but his memory wasn’t good, and, faced with the empty platform, Rivers was glad he had the address. But then, just as Rivers was resigning himself to finding the house on his own, Burns appeared, a tall, emaciated figure wearing a coat of stiff herringbone tweed that reached almost to the ground. He’d obviously been running, and was out of breath. ‘Hello,’ he said. Rivers tried to judge whether Burns looked better or worse. It was hard to tell. His face in the light of the naphtha flares was as expressionless as beaten bronze.
‘How are you?’ they asked simultaneously, and then laughed.
Rivers decided he should be the one to answer. ‘A lot better, thanks.’
‘Good,’ Burns said. ‘It’s walking distance,’ he added across his shoulder, already striding off. ‘We don’t need a taxi.’
They came out of the station and began walking downhill, through the quiet cold fringes of the town, past the church, through streets of huddled houses, and out on to the front.
The sea was calm, almost inaudible, a toothless mouth mumbling pebbles in the darkness. Instead of walking along the path, Burns struck out across the shingle and Rivers followed, to where the tide had laid bare a thin strip of sand. The crunch and slither of shingle under their feet blotted out all other sounds. Rivers turned, and saw the bones of Burns’s face gleaming in the moonlight. He wondered what he made of the tangles of barbed wire that ran along the beach, with only two narrow channels left for fishing boats and for the lifeboat to come and go. But Burns seemed not to see the wire.
They stood together at the water’s edge, two black shadows on the pale shingle, and small waves creamed over at their feet. Then the moon came out from behind a bank of dark cloud, and the fishermen’s huts, the boats lined up in two short rows behind the wire, and the heaped nets, cast shadows behind them almost as sharply edged as day.
They returned to the path and began walking along the terrace of houses, which here and there had gaps. Many of the houses were shuttered and had sandbags piled against the front doors. ‘The sea’s been known to pay visits,’ Burns said, following the direction of Rivers’s gaze. ‘I was here once when it flooded.’ Evidently sandbags brought back no other memories.
‘This is it,’ he said a few minutes later, stopping in front of a tall but extremely narrow house. At this end of the foreshore the sea was much closer, turning and turning in the darkness. Rivers looked out and caught a glint of white. ‘What’s along there?’
‘The marshes. More shingle. I’ll show you tomorrow.’
They groped their way into the hall, closing the door carefully behind them before Burns switched on the light. His face, deeply shadowed from the unshaded bulb, peered anxiously at Rivers. ‘I expect you’d like to go upstairs,’ he said. ‘I think I’ve given you a towel…’ He looked like a child trying to remember what it was that grown-ups said to newly arrived guests. He also looked, for the first time, deranged.
Rivers followed him up the narrow stairs and into a small bedroom. Burns pointed out the bathroom and then went downstairs. Rivers put his bag down, bounced on the bed to test the mattress, and looked round. The walls were covered with paper of an indeterminate and confusing pattern, the background colour faded to the yellow of an old bruise. Everything smelled of the sea, as if the furniture had soaked it in. It reminded him of childhood holidays in Brighton. He splashed his face in the bowl, then, turning off the light, opened the shutters. His room overlooked the sea. The wind was rising, and with each gust the coils of wire twitched as if they were alive.
No sign of Burns’s parents. Rivers had mistakenly assumed he was being invited to meet them, since a large part of Burns’s letter had dealt with their anxieties about his future. But apparently not. This was probably their room. The house was so narrow there couldn’t be more than one, or at the most, two small rooms on each floor.
The evening passed pleasantly enough. No mention of Burns’s illness, no mention of the war. These were evidently taboo topics, but they talked about a great range of other things. Whatever else the war had done to Burns, it had certainly deepened his love for his native county. Suffolk flowers, birds, churches, he was knowledgeable about them all. More recently, he’d become interested in the preservation of country crafts. ‘Old Clegg’, who was apparently something of a local character, had promised to teach him flint-knapping, and he seemed to be looking forward to that. Even before the war he’d been very much a countryman in his interests, rather like Siegfried in a way, though without Siegfried’s passion for hunting.
When the conversation turned to other matters, Burns was very much the bright sixth former, idealistic, intolerant, naïve, inclined to offer sweeping generalizations as fact, attractive in the freshness of his vision as such boys often are. Rivers thought how misleading it was to say that the war had ‘matured’ these young men. It wasn’t true of his patients, and it certainly wasn’t true of Burns, in whom a prematurely aged man and a fossilized schoolboy seemed to exist side by side. It did give him a curiously ageless quality, but ‘maturity’ was hardly the word. Still, he was better than he’d been at Craiglockhart, so perhaps his conviction that if he could only get back to Suffolk and forget the war he would be all right had been proved correct. But then why am I here? Rivers thought. Despite Burns’s reluctance to mention his illness, Rivers didn’t believe he’d been invited to Suffolk to talk about church architecture. But it would be quite wrong to force the pace. Whatever was bothering him, he would raise the matter in his own time.
Rivers woke the following morning to find the beach shrouded in mist. He leant on the window sill, and watched the fishing boats return. The pebbles on the beach were wet, th
ough not from rain or tide. The mist clung to them like sweat, and the air tasted of iron. Everything was so quiet. When a gull flew in from the sea and passed immediately overhead, he heard the creak of its wings.
Burns was already up, in the kitchen by the sound of things, but not, Rivers thought, preparing breakfast. Nothing in the way of dinner or supper had appeared the night before, and Rivers had hesitated, on his first evening, to go into the kitchen and forage for food, though he suspected that might be the only way of getting any.
He washed, dressed, shaved, and went downstairs. By this time the mist on the beach had begun to thin, but it was cold for the time of year, and the sight of a fire in the first floor living room was welcome. He went down a further flight of stairs into the kitchen and found Burns at the kitchen table with a pot of tea.
‘There’s some cereal,’ he said, pointing.
He sounded shy again, though last night he’d begun to talk quite freely by the end of the evening, just as Rivers, caught between the roar of the fire and the roar of the sea, had started nodding off to sleep. ‘I’m sorry I had to go to bed so early,’ Rivers said, reaching for the cereal packet.
‘’S all right.’ Visibly, he remembered what it was he was supposed to ask next. ‘Did you have a good night?’
‘Fine.’ Rivers bit the reciprocal question back. He’d heard part of Burns’s night. Obviously, however hard Burns tried to thrust memories of the war behind him, the nightmare followed.
The doorbell rang, and Burns got up to answer it. ‘This is Mrs Burril’s day for sorting me out,’ he said.
Mrs Burril was a remarkably silent person, but she managed, without words, to make it clear their presence was superfluous.
Burns said, ‘I thought we might go for a walk.’
The mist had thinned but not cleared. It moved in slow, cold currents over the marshes, where drainage ditches and sump holes reflected a steely light at the sky. Reeds whispered, with a noise like the palms of hands being rubbed together. It was difficult to breathe, difficult even to move, and they spoke in low voices when they spoke at all.