by Pat Barker
Prior glanced sideways at him. ‘No, you don’t.’
‘All right, I don’t.’
‘You could always say you’re showing moral courage.’
‘No such thing. It’s a bit like medieval trial-by-combat, you know. In the end moral and political truths have to be proved on the body, because this mass of nerve and muscle and blood is what we are.’
‘That’s a very dangerous idea. It comes quite close to saying that the willingness to suffer proves the rightness of the belief. But it doesn’t. The most it can ever prove is the believer’s sincerity. And not always that. Some people just like suffering.’
Mac was looking round the shed. He said, ‘I don’t think I do,’ but he seemed to have tired of the argument, or perhaps the whisky had begun to soften his mood. ‘I often think about those days.’
Prior waited. ‘You can trust me, you know.’
‘I trusted Spragge.’
‘You didn’t have pissing competitions with Spragge.’
‘Oh, that’s it, is it? Piss brothers?’
Prior laughed. ‘Something like that.’
A long silence. ‘What do you want?’
‘I want you to tell me about Spragge.’
Mac gave a choking laugh. ‘He’s your fucking employee.’
‘Not any more. The trial blew his cover.’
‘Good.’
‘He was with you, wasn’t he, the night before?’
‘I sent him there.’
Mac must find that almost intolerable, Prior thought. His debt to the Ropers was total. Without Beattie, he’d’ve been a scabby, lousy, neglected kid, barely able to read and write, fit only for the drovers’ road and the slaughterhouse. Beattie had taken him in. By the age of thirteen he’d been living more with her than with his own mother. As soon as the older boys in the street gang stopped speculating about sex and started climbing Lizzie’s stairs in search of more concrete information, Mac had found his own home unbearable. He’d disappeared altogether for a time, going up the drovers’ road one summer, returning, older, harder, the first traces of cynicism and deadness round his mouth and eyes. Then Beattie took charge. ‘What the hell’s the matter with you?’ she asked. ‘You can read, can’t you? Just ‘cos the teachers think you’re stupid, doesn’t mean you are. Some of them aren’t too bright. Here, read this. No, go on, read it. I want to know what you think.’
‘He was after you, wasn’t he?’ Prior asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Do you think she meant to kill Lloyd George?’
‘Nah. You know Beattie. She finds a spider in the sink, she gets a bit of newspaper and puts it in the yard.’
‘Hmm. I just wonder what she’d do if she found Lloyd George in the sink.’
‘Run the fucking taps.’
They looked at each other and burst out laughing.
‘Look, if there was anything, the idea came from Spragge. And I think helping people escape from a detention centre sounds about right. And Spragge had tried it on before.’
‘Who with?’
‘Charlie Greaves, Joe Haswell. He offered them explosives to blow up a munitions factory. Said he knew where he could get some. Well, for God’s sake. They’re not exactly lying around, are they? As soon as they said no, he started backing off. Pretended he hadn’t meant it.’
‘And you still sent him to Beattie?’
‘This is hindsight, man. It sticks in my mind now because of what happened. At the time I just thought, oh God, another mad bugger.’
‘Could you get them to write it down? With dates, if possible.’
‘I don’t even know where they are.’
‘It’s for Beattie, Mac.’
Mac let out a sharp breath. ‘What do you want it for?’
‘To discredit Spragge, of course.’
‘They won’t reopen the case.’
‘Not publicly. But they might let her out. Quietly. She’s going to die in there, Mac. She won’t last anywhere near ten years.’
A dragging silence.
‘I’m not asking them to incriminate themselves. All they have to do is say “He offered us explosives and we refused.”’
‘And you think they’re going to be believed?’
‘I think there’s a better chance than you might think. There’s a lot of questions being asked about the way spies are used in munition factories. Some of them are better at starting strikes than you are, Mac.’
‘All right.’ Mac stood up. ‘It’ll take a few weeks.’
‘As long as that?’
‘I’ve told you. I don’t know where they are.’
‘Where can I contact you?’
Mac laughed. ‘You fucking can’t. Here, give me your address.’
Prior took the notepad and pencil, and scribbled. ‘All right?’
‘Don’t write to Hettie. The post’s opened. And one more thing.’ Mac came very close, resting his hands heavily on Prior’s shoulders. ‘If this is a trap, Billy, you’re dead. I’m not a fucking Quaker, remember.’
For a moment the pressure on his shoulders increased, then Mac turned and strode away.
Prior decided to take the short-cut home across the brick fields. This patch of waste land always reminded him of France. Sump holes reflected a dull gleam at the sky, tall grasses bent to the wind, pieces of scrap metal rusted, rubbish stank, a rusting iron bedstead upreared itself, a jagged black shape that, outlined against the horizon, would have served as a landmark on patrol.
One of the ways in which he felt different from his brother officers, one of the many, was that their England was a pastoral place: fields, streams, wooded valleys, medieval churches surrounded by ancient elms. They couldn’t grasp that for him, and for the vast majority of the men, the Front, with its mechanization, its reduction of the individual to a cog in a machine, its blasted landscape, was not a contrast with the life they’d known at home, in Birmingham or Manchester or Glasgow or the Welsh pit villages, but a nightmarish culmination. ‘Equally not at home in either,’ Mac had said. He was right.
Prior lingered a while, listening to the night noises, remembering the evenings in his childhood when he’d sat on the stairs, unable to sleep, until his father had come in and gone to bed, and he knew his mother was safe. Engines rumbled, coughed, whistled, hissed. Trucks shunted along, bumpers clanged together. A few streets away a drunk started singing: ‘There’s an old mill by the stream, Nelly Dean.’
He ought to be getting back. He’d already been away much longer than he’d meant. He began walking rapidly across the brick fields. One moment he was striding confidently along and the next he was falling, sliding rather, down a steep slope into pitch-black. He lay on his back at the muddy bottom of the hole and saw the tall weeds wave against the sky. He wasn’t hurt, but the breath had been knocked out of him. Gradually, his heart stopped thumping. The stars looked brighter down here, just as they did in a trench. He reached out for something to hold on to, and his groping fingers encountered a sort of ledge. He patted along it and then froze. It was a firestep. It couldn’t be, but it was. Disorientated and afraid, he felt further and encountered a hole, and then another beside it, and another: funk holes, scooped out of the clay. He was in a trench. Even as his mind staggered, he was groping for an explanation. Boys played here. Street gangs. They must have been digging for months to get as deep as this. But then probably the trench was years old, as old as the real trenches, perhaps. He clambered out, over what he suspected was No Man’s Land, and there, sure enough, were the enemy lines.
Smiling to himself, unwilling to admit how deeply the bizarre incident had shocked him, he walked on, more cautiously now, and reached the railings at the far side. He was trembling. He had to hold on to the railings to steady himself.
The shock made him rebellious. He decided he wouldn’t go straight home after all. Witnessing these nasty little rows between his parents did them no good, and him a great deal of harm. The time had come to call a halt. He would go to the pub. W
hich pub? His way home took him past the Rose and Crown, whose brass door flashed to and fro, letting out great belches of warm beery air. He would go there. He would do what other men do who come home on leave. Get drunk and forget.
He was greeted by a fug of human warmth, so hot he felt the skin on his nose tingle as the pores opened. He stood looking round at the flushed and noisy faces, and in the far corner spotted Mrs Thorpe and Mrs Riley with a great gaggle of other women. He decided he ought to stand them a drink. After all, they’d stood him many a drink in their day. A cry of recognition greeted him as he approached, and the whole boozy crowd of them opened up and took him in.
Two hours later Harry Prior was stumbling home, gazing in bleary appreciation at the full moon, riding high and magnificent in the clear sky. He paused on the bridge that spanned the canal to take a quick leak and admire the view. The moon was reflected in the water. He looked down at it, as a jet of hot piss hit the wall and trickled satisfyingly between the cobbles, and wondered why it should be bobbling up and down. He checked to see the real moon was behaving itself, then peered more closely at its reflection.
It wasn’t the bloody moon at all, it was an arse. My God, the lad was going at it. Harry had half a mind to cheer him on, but then he thought, no, better not. A person might very easily be mistaken for a peeping Tom. He leant further over, pressing himself against the rough granite, wishing he could see more. All he could see of the woman was knees. Who the bloody hell wants to watch a male arse bobbing up and down? Bloody golf-balls. Still, it didn’t half give you ideas. Bugger all doing at home, knees glued together. He rubbed himself against the wall for comfort, then wandered disconsolately on.
‘There’s somebody on the bridge.’
Prior turned, but he couldn’t see anything. He listened to the fading footsteps. ‘They’re going.’
She’d gone tense and braced herself against him. He’d have to start from the beginning. He kissed her mouth, her nose, her hair, and then, lowering his head in pure delight, feeling every taboo in the whole fucking country crash round his ears, he sucked Mrs Riley’s breasts.
PART TWO
TEN
Prior returned to London to find the city sweltering in sticky, humid, thundery heat. Major Lode was more difficult than ever, and not merely because of the weather. An attempt was under way to centralize the intelligence services under the control of the War Office, and Lode was fighting for the survival of the unit. The change was being pushed through at an exalted level and very little filtered down to Prior, but he observed Lode daily becoming fiercer, the blue eyes more vulnerable, the moustache in ever greater need of protective dab-bings and strokings, as his empire collapsed around him. The files, ‘the brain cells of the unit’ Lode proclaimed (God help it, thought Prior), were to be transferred to the War Office. The task of ‘tidying them up’ before they were transferred was allotted to Prior. At first he took this to be merely a routine clerical task, perhaps designed to keep him out of trouble, but it quickly became clear that Lode wanted ‘sensitive material’ referred to him. In other words, evidence for the worst of the unit’s cock-ups was to be removed. The job, though huge – the files numbered more than eight hundred – suited Prior very well, since it solved what had hitherto been his main problem: how to get enough access to past files to compile a dossier on Spragge.
He was busy and, within reason, happy, though he did not feel particularly well. Then, four days after his return, something disturbing happened.
He’d gone out to lunch in a nearby pub, bought himself a pint of beer and opened The Times, as he always did, at the casualty lists. The name leapt out at him.
Hore, Captain James Frederick. Killed in action on the 5th April, dearly beloved younger son…
Jimmy Hore. They’d met on a riding course, trotting round a ring with their stirrups crossed in front of them, their hands clasped behind their heads. Acquiring the correct seat. The seat of gentlemen. Prior, who’d already experienced the realities of trench warfare, had been angry and amused, though he kept both reactions to himself, since he was convinced nobody else could appreciate the idiocy of the situation as he did. Certainly not this blank-faced moron trotting towards him, but then, as they trotted past each other, he caught Jimmy’s eye and realized his face wasn’t blank at all, but rigid with suppressed laughter. That glance of shared amusement had been too much for Jimmy, who burst out laughing and fell off his horse.
Prior looked round the pub. Prosperous-looking men in pin-striped suits jostled at the bar, chinking coins, bestowing well-oiled smiles on the pretty, chestnut-haired barmaid. And Jimmy was dead. All the poor little bugger had ever wanted to do was get married to… whatever her name was. And work in a bank. Prior would have liked nothing better, at that moment, than for a tank to come crashing through the doors and crush everybody, the way they sometimes crushed the wounded who couldn’t get off the track in time. The violence of his imaginings – he saw severed limbs, heard screams – terrified him.
He couldn’t eat. He would just drink up and go. But when he lifted his glass, his attention was caught by the amber lights winking in the beer. Sunlight, shining through the glass, cast a ring of shimmering gold on the surface of the table that danced when his hand moved. He started to play with it, moving his hand to and fro.
He was back at his desk. No interval. One second he was in the pub, the next sitting behind his desk. He looked across at the closed door. Blinked. Thought, I must’ve gone to sleep. He felt relaxed, but without the clogged feeling that follows midday sleep. He’d been reading The Times… Jimmy Hore was dead. He couldn’t remember leaving the pub. He must have walked all the way back in a complete dream. He looked at his watch, and his brain struggled to make sense of the position of the hands. Ten past four.
Three hours had passed since he broke for lunch, and of that he could account for perhaps twenty to twenty-five minutes. The rest was blank.
He made himself work until six. After all, in France he’d done paperwork on a table that kept jumping several feet into the air. He could surely manage to ignore a little disturbance like this. Though, as file after file passed across his desk, he was aware, somewhere on the fringes of his consciousness, that it was not ‘a little disturbance’. Something catastrophic had happened.
Shortly after six he thought he recognized voices, and went out of his room and a little way along the corridor. Major Lode and Lionel Spragge were deep in conversation by the lifts. It was not possible to hear what they were saying, but he noticed that Lode shook Spragge’s hand warmly as the lift arrived. Prior slipped back into his room, but left the door open.
He was ready to produce some small query that would bring Lode into his room, but in the event he didn’t need to. Lode stood in the doorway, grinning. ‘Just seen Spragge,’ he said in his clipped, staccato voice. ‘What have you been doing to him?’
‘Me? Nothing.’
‘Says you offered him a job.’
‘I didn’t offer him anything. Wishful thinking, I’m afraid.’
‘Well, he certainly seems to think you did. I had to tell him there was nothing doing. Nappoo.’ Lode looked at him for a moment, then said in a menacing, nannyish singsong, ‘He’s got it in for you.’
Bastard, Prior thought, as Lode closed the door behind him. It’s not my fault your frigging unit’s being closed down.
Towards six it began to thunder, a desultory grumble on the horizon, though the sun still shone. Prior worked for a further half hour, then gave up. He’d been having bad headaches ever since he got back to London and blamed them on the weather, though in fact he knew they’d started after his fall into the children’s trench. He would go somewhere fairly reasonable to eat. Cosset himself.
A sudden downpour began just as he reached the main steps. He looked up, trying to judge how long it would last. A white sun shone through a thin layer of cloud, but there were darker clouds massing over Nelson’s Column. He went back upstairs to fetch his greatcoat. As he passed
Lode’s room, he heard an unfamiliar voice say, ‘Do you think he believed it?’
Lode replied, ‘Oh, I think so. I don’t see why he shouldn’t.’
Prior went along to his own room, shrugged himself into the heavy greatcoat, and walked back to the lift. For once it arrived immediately in a great clanking of cables and gates. He told himself there was no reason to connect the overheard conversation with himself, but he found it difficult not to. The atmosphere in the unit was rather like that. Plots and counterplots, many of them seemingly pointless. So far he’d managed to hold himself aloof.
The underground was crowded. Currents of hot, dead air moved across his face as he waited on the edge of the platform. He couldn’t carry his greatcoat – that was forbidden – and the sweat streamed down his sides. He found himself wondering whether this reaction was not excessive, whether he was not really ill. A subterranean rumbling, and the train erupted from the tunnel. He found himself a seat near the door and glanced at the girl beside him. Her hair was limp, her neck had a creased, swollen whiteness, and yet she was attractive in her rumpled skirt and white blouse. He glanced at her neckline, at the shadow between her breasts, then forced himself to look away. He found that rumpled look in women amazingly attractive.
He ate at a small café not far from Marble Arch. It wasn’t as pleasant as it had looked from the outside: the walls had faded to a sallow beige, the windows streamed with condensation, blasts of steamy air belched from the swing doors into the kitchen as waitresses banged in and out. After his meal he lit a cigarette, drank two cups of hot, sweet, orange-coloured tea and persuaded himself he felt better.
A twisting flight of stairs led down to his basement flat. The dustbins from all the apartments in the house were kept in the small forecourt outside his living-room window. The smell of rotting cabbage lingered. At night there were rustlings that he tried to convince himself were cats. He put his key in the lock and walked in. The hall was dark, but not cool. He threw his briefcase and coat down on to a chair, then, pulling his tie off, went along the corridor to the bathroom, ran a cold bath and nerved himself to get in. His skin under the water looked bloated, and there were lines of silver bubbles trapped in his pubic hair. He ran his fingers through, releasing them, then clasped the edges of the bath and lowered his head beneath the water.