by Pat Barker
They walked along a narrow raised path that divided the marshes from the river. Small yachts rode at anchor, the breeze just strong enough to make their rigging rattle, not a loud sound, but persistent and rather disturbing, like an irregular heart beat. Nothing else here could disturb. The estuary lay flat and peaceful under a shrunken, silver sun, and nothing moved, except the reeds, until a flight of ducks whistled past.
Rivers had begun to realize how remarkable the area was. A strip of land, at times no more than a hundred yards wide, divided the estuary from the North Sea. Walking out along this strip, away from the town, into the bleached shingle distances, you became aware of two separate sounds: the roar and suck of waves on shingle, and the lulling sound of the river among its reeds. If you moved to the left, the crunch and chop of boots on shingle cut out the gentler river sounds. If to the right, the tapping of rigging and the lapping of water dominated, though you could still hear that the sea was there.
They turned and looked back at the huddled town. ‘You know, I love this place,’ Burns said. ‘I wouldn’t like you to think I’d left London just because of the raids. Actually it wasn’t the raids, it was the regular meal-times. You know, everybody sitting down to eat. Waiting for food to be put in front of them. And father going on about the war. He’s a great believer in the war, my father.’
‘Will they be coming to Suffolk at all?’
‘No, I shouldn’t think so. They’re both very busy in London.’ They turned and walked on. ‘It’s best we don’t see too much of each other at the moment. I am not a sight for sore eyes.’
A squat, circular building had begun to loom up out of the mist. It looked rather like a Martello tower, Rivers thought, but he hadn’t known they’d been built as far north as this.
‘This is the most northerly,’ Burns said, slithering down the slope on to the beach. Rivers followed him across the shingle and down into the dank high moat that surrounded the tower. In its shadow, all water sounds, whether hissing waves or lapping water, abruptly ceased. Ferns grew from the high walls of the moat; and the tower, where the look-out turret had crumbled away, was thronged with bindweed, but the overall impression was of a dead place.
The sea must flood the moat at high tide, for all kinds of debris had been washed up and left. Driftwood, the torn-off wing of a gull, bits of blue and green glass. A child would have loved it, picking over these pieces.
‘We used to play here,’ Burns said. ‘Daring each other, you know. Who could go all the way up?’
There was a door, but it had planks nailed across it. Rivers peered through a crack and saw stone steps going down.
‘Strictly forbidden. They were always afraid we’d get trapped in the cellars.’
‘I suppose they flood, don’t they? At high tide?’
‘Yes. There’s all kinds of stories told about it. People chained up and left to drown. I think we rather liked that. We used to sit down there and pretend we could see ghosts.’
‘It feels like a place where people have died. I mean, violent deaths.’
‘You feel that, do you? Yes. I expect that’s why we liked it. Bloodthirsty little horrors, boys.’
Rivers wasn’t sorry when they climbed the bank of shingle and stood on the beach in the strengthening sunlight again.
‘Do you feel up to a longish walk?’ Burns asked.
‘Yes.’
‘All right. We can follow that path.’
They walked four or five miles inland, and came out into a wood where great golden tongues of fungus lapped the trees, and a mulch of dead leaves squelched underfoot. Rather to Rivers’s surprise they stopped at a pub on the way back, though no food was available. Burns could drink apparently, and did, becoming in the process quite flushed and talkative, though nothing was said about his illness.
They arrived back in the late afternoon with every bone and muscle aching. Mrs Burril had obviously built up the fire before she left, and it was rescuable, just about. Rivers knelt in front of it, sticking strips of cereal packet through the bars, and blowing when he got a flame. ‘Have you any newspapers?’
‘No,’ Burns said.
No, Rivers thought, silly question. Once the fire was burning well, Rivers went out and bought cakes and biscuits for tea, which he served in front of the fire, tucking in himself and not looking to see whether Burns ate or not. He ate, sitting on the hearth rug, his wind-reddened arms clasped about his knees, and the firelight playing on his face.
After the plates were cleared away, Rivers asked if he might work for a couple of hours. He was writing a paper on the Repression of War Experience which he was due to give to the British Medical Association in December, and he knew, once he got back to Craiglockhart, there would be very little time. He worked at the table in the window, with his back to the room. He began by reading through what he’d written so far on the evil effects that followed from patients trying to suppress their memories of war experience, and was about to start writing when it occurred to him he was in the same room as a man who was doing just that.
Why do I go along with it? he thought. One answer, the easy answer, was that he was no longer Burns’s doctor. It was up to Burns now how he chose to manage his illness. But then he’d gone along with the suppression in Craiglockhart too. Whenever he’d tried to apply to Burns the same methods of treatment he used with everybody else, and used, for the most part, successfully, his nerve had failed him. He’d told himself this was because of the peculiar nature of Burns’s experience, the utter lack of any redeeming feature the mind could grasp and hold on to while it steadied itself to face the full horror. But was Burns’s experience really worse than that of others? Worse than Jenkins’s, crawling between the dismembered pieces of his friend’s body to collect personal belongings to send back to the family? Worse than Prior’s? What shall I do with this gob-stopper?
Corpses were everywhere in the trenches. Used to strengthen parapets, to prop up sagging doorways, to fill in gaps in the duckboards. Many of his patients treading on a dead body had been startled by the release of gas. Surely what had happened to Burns was merely an unusually disgusting version of a common experience. And I’ve let him, Rivers thought – no, that was unfair, that was completely unfair – I’ve let myself turn it into… some kind of myth. And that was unforgivable. He wasn’t dealing with Jonah in the belly of the whale, still less with Christ in the belly of the earth, he was dealing with David Burns, who’d got his head stuck in the belly of a dead German soldier, and somehow had to be helped to live with the memory.
He turned and looked at Burns, who was still sitting on the hearth rug, though now he’d found himself a book and was reading, his tongue protruding slightly between his teeth. As he felt Rivers’s gaze, he looked up and smiled. Twenty-two. He should be worrying about the Tripos and screwing up his courage to ask a girl to the May ball. And yet even now Rivers was nervous of raising the subject of his illness. Burns’s instinctive reaction had been to get back to this house, to forget. And there had been some improvement under this regime, by day at least, though evidently not by night. If he wants to talk, he’ll talk, Rivers thought, and turned back to his paper.
That evening, rather to Rivers’s surprise, they went to the pub. He was surprised because he’d been assuming Burns was isolated here, but apparently all the locals knew him. They’d watched him growing up, summer by summer. The family had been staying here when war broke out. Burns had joined up along with most of the local lads. They all remembered him in his uniform, in the first days and weeks of the war, and perhaps that mattered a great deal. In London, Burns said, on his first trip out in civilian clothes, he’d been handed two white feathers.
Here, as soon as they pushed the bar door open, he was hailed by several people, and by one man in particular: ‘Old Clegg’. Clegg had rheumy blue eyes, whose overflow had dried to a scurfy crust at his temples; three brown but very strong teeth; unidentifiable stains on his abdomen, and other stains, only too identifiable, further down
. His conversation was so encrusted with salty Suffolk sayings that Rivers suspected him of deliberate self-parody. That, or leg-pulling. Once he’d discovered Rivers was interested in folklore, he was well away. Rivers spent a thoroughly enjoyable evening being initiated into the folklore of rural Suffolk. By closing time, he was convinced Clegg was possibly the most unreliable informant he’d ever had. For sheer imaginative flights of fancy none of the Melanesians came anywhere near him. ‘That man is a complete fraud,’ he said as they left the pub.
But Burns disagreed. ‘He’s not a fraud, he’s a rogue. Anyway as long as he teaches me flint-knapping, I don’t care.’
∗
Next morning the weather had changed. At dawn there was a strip of clear blue on the horizon, fading to yellow, but the sky darkened rapidly, until, by mid morning, the clouds humped, liver-coloured, and the sea was dark as iron. The wind had risen during the night, sweeping away the last remnants of mist. At first it came in little gusts, lifting the thin carpet in the hall, swirling dust in corners, then in blasts that made waves on the surface of the estuary, rocking the yachts until the rattle of their rigging became a frenzy, while on the beach great waves swelled like the muscles of an enormous animal, rising to crests that hung and seethed along their full length, before toppling over in thunder and bursts of spray.
Rivers worked on his paper all morning, looking up now and then to find the window mizzled with rain. Burns slept late, having had another bad and very noisy night. He appeared just before noon, pink eyed and twitching, and announced he was going to the White Horse to see Clegg and arrange a definite time for his flint-knapping session. Clegg was proving rather difficult to pin down.
‘Git him up agin’ a gorse bush, bor,’ Rivers said, in a passable imitation of Clegg’s voice. ‘He ont back away then.’
‘That’s girls in kissing season, Rivers.’
‘Is it? Well, I shouldn’t go kissing Clegg. I doubt if flint-knapping’s worth it.’
He was immersed in his paper again before Burns left the house.
He came back an hour later, looking rather pleased with himself. ‘Thursday.’
‘Good.’
‘I thought we might go for a walk.’
Rivers looked at the rain-spattered glass.
‘It’s died down a bit,’ Burns said, not altogether convincingly.
‘All right, I could do with a break.’
The sea was racing in fast. The fishermen’s huts were empty, the boats hauled up high above the last stretch of shingle, with the fishing nets in dark heaps behind them. Either they’d not been out today or they’d turned back early, for Rivers had seen none of them come in. Even the seabirds seemed to be grounded, huddled in the lee of the boats, watching the town with unblinking amber eyes.
Faced with this sea, the land seemed fragile. Was fragile. To the north, cliffs were scoured away, to the south, notice boards were buried up to their necks in shingle. And the little Moot Hall that had once stood at the centre of the town was now on the edge of the sea.
They walked as far as Thorpeness, then turned back, not talking much, since the wind snatched the breath from their mouths. The sea had covered the thin strip of sand, so they had to walk along the steep shelf of shingle, a lopsided business that set the back as well as the legs aching.
It took them two hours, there and back, and Rivers was looking forward to the fire and – if he could contrive it – toasted tea cakes for tea. Breakfast, lunch and dinner, he could do without, but afternoon tea mattered. His boot squelched on something soft. Looking down, he saw the place was littered with cods’ heads, thirty or more, with blood-stained gills and staring eyes. It gave him no more than a slight frisson. Obviously the fishermen gutted their catch and threw the offal away. But Burns had stopped dead in his tracks and was staring at the heads, with his mouth working. As Rivers watched, he jerked his head back, the same movement that had been so common when he first arrived at Craiglockhart.
‘It’s all right,’ he said, when Rivers went back for him. But it was obviously very far from all right.
They got back to the house. Rivers made tea, though Burns didn’t manage to eat anything.
After tea they went out and piled sandbags against the doors, struggling with the heavy bags through driving rain and then struggling again to close the storm shutters. The air was full of spray and blown spume.
‘We should’ve done that earlier,’ Burns said, wiping the rain from his face and blinking in the firelight. He was very concerned to pretend everything was normal. He sat on the hearth rug, in his favourite position, while the wind buffeted and slogged the house, and talked about his drink with Clegg and various items of local gossip. But he jumped from topic to topic, assuming the connections would be obvious when very often they were not. His mood, once he’d got over the shock of seeing the cods’ heads, seemed to be almost elated. He said more than once that he loved storms, and he seemed, at times, to be listening to something other than the roar of wind and sea.
Closing his eyes, Rivers could imagine the town entirely given over to the storm, bobbing on the tide of darkness like a blown eggshell, without substance or power to protect. Burns’s conversation became more and more disconnected, the jerking of his head more pronounced. Piling up sandbags, followed by the nearest thing to a bombardment nature could contrive, was not what Rivers would have prescribed. He was prepared to sit up with Burns, if he wanted to stay up, but Burns started talking about bed rather earlier than usual. Probably he took bromides. Rivers would have liked to advise him to stop, since they certainly wouldn’t help the nightmares, but he was determined to let Burns be the first to raise the subject of his illness.
The evening ended with nothing to the point having been said. Rivers went to bed and undressed in the darkness, listening to the wind howl, and imagined Burns in the room above, also listening. He read for a while, thinking he might be too tense to go to sleep, but the fresh air and the struggle with the wind along the beach to Thorpeness had tired him out. His eyelids started to droop and he switched off the light. The whole house creaked and groaned, riding the storm like a ship, but he enjoyed that. He’d always found it possible to sleep deeply on board ship, though on land sleep often eluded him.
He was woken by what he immediately took to be the explosion of a bomb. Less than a minute later, while he was still groping for the light switch, he heard a second boom and this time managed to identify it as the sound of a maroon. The lifeboat, no doubt. He was getting out of bed to go to the window when he remembered that he probably ought not to open the shutters, for he could hear from the whistling of wind and lashing of rain that the storm had by no means blown itself out. His heart was pounding, unreasonably, since there was nothing to be afraid of. He supposed it was having come straight from London with its incessant talk of air raids that had made him identify the sound so positively as a bomb.
He lay back and a moment or two later heard footsteps padding past the door of his room. Obviously Burns too had been woken up. Probably he was going downstairs to make himself a cup of tea, perhaps even to sit up the rest of the night.
The more Rivers thought about Burns sitting alone in the kitchen, the more he thought he ought to get up. The sounds of the storm had now been joined by running footsteps. He wouldn’t find it easy to sleep again anyway.
The kitchen was empty, and didn’t seem to have been disturbed since last night. He told himself that he’d been mistaken, and Burns was still in bed. By now rather anxious, perhaps unreasonably so, he went upstairs and peered into Burns’s room. The bedclothes had been pushed back, and the bed was empty.
He had no idea what he should do. For all he knew midnight walks – or rather three am walks – were a habit of Burns’s when the nights were particularly bad. Surely he wouldn’t go out in this. Rivers heard shouts, followed by more running footsteps. Obviously other people were out in it. Quickly, he returned to his own room, pulled on socks, boots and coat, and went out into the storm.
A small group of figures had gathered round the lifeboat, three of them holding storm lanterns. The overlapping circles of light shone on yellow oilskins glistening with wet, as the men struggled to clear the shingle from the planks that were used to launch the boat. Silver rain slanted down into the lighted area, while beyond, pale banks of shingle faded into the darkness.
A knot of bystanders had gathered by the hut, separate from the labouring figures around the boat. Convinced that Burns must be among them, Rivers ran across to join them, but when he looked from face to face Burns was not there. A woman he thought to be familiar, but couldn’t immediately identify, pointed to the marshes south of the town.
As he turned and began walking quickly towards the marshes, he was dimly aware of the boat hitting the sea, and of the waves surging up around her. He left the shelter of the last houses, and the wind, roaring across the marshes, almost knocked him off his feet. He dropped down from the path and walked along beside the river where he was slightly sheltered, though the wind still howled and the yacht rigging thrummed, a sound like no other he had ever heard. He could see fairly clearly most of the time. Once, the moon freed itself from the tatters of black cloud, and then his own shadow and the shadow of the tower were thrown across the gleaming mud.
Looking at the tower, Rivers thought again how squat and unimpressive it was, and yet how menacing. A resemblance that had merely nagged at him before returned to his mind with greater force. This waste of mud, these sump holes reflecting a dim light at the sky, even that tower. It was like France. Like the battlefields. A resemblance greater by night than by day, perhaps, because here, by day, you could see things grow, and there nothing grew.
– They were always afraid we’d get trapped in the cellars.
– I suppose they flood, don’t they? At high tide?
Rivers climbed on to the path, trying to work out where the tide was and whether it was rising or falling, but he could hear only the crash of breaking waves and feel the drizzle of blown spume on his face. In spite of his mud-clogged boots and aching thighs, he started to run. As he neared the tower, a stronger blast of wind sent him staggering off the path. He was slithering and floundering through mud, calling Burns’s name, though the sound was snatched from his mouth and carried off into the whistling darkness.