by Pat Barker
‘I do talk about it.’
Silence.
‘I just don’t see what good it would do to churn everything up. I know what the theory is.’ He looked down at his hands. ‘My son Robert, when he was little … he used to enjoy being bathed. And then quite suddenly he turned against it. He used to go stiff and scream blue murder every time his nurse tried to put him in. And it turned out he’d been watching the water go down the plug-hole and he obviously thought he might go down with it. Everybody told him not to be stupid.’ Manning smiled. ‘I must say it struck me as an eminently reasonable fear.’
Rivers smiled. ‘I won’t let you go down the plughole.’
At dinner the talk was all of the Pemberton Billing trial. Everybody was depressed by the medical evidence, since this was the first time psychologists had been invited to pronounce in court on such a subject. ‘What do we get?’ somebody asked. ‘Serrel Cooke rambling on about monsters and hereditary degeneracy. The man’s a joke.’
If he is, I’ve lost my sense of humour, Rivers thought.
After dinner he was glad to escape from the hospital and go for a stroll round the square. London had become a depressing place. Every placard, every newsboy’s cry, every headline focused on the trial. Lord Alfred Douglas was in the witness-box now, apparently blaming England’s poor showing in the war on the plays of Oscar Wilde. Any serious consideration of the terrible state of affairs in France was pushed into second place by the orgy of irrational prejudice that was taking place at the Old Bailey. Manning was quite right of course, people didn’t want reasons, they wanted scapegoats. You saw it in the hospital too, where hostility to the pacifist orderlies mounted as the news from France grew worse, but there was some element of logic in that. Men were being whipped back into line. Into the Line. Unless he were suffering from the complaint Jane Manning had diagnosed, of being incapable of seeing his own sex as peripheral to anything. But no, he thought Manning was right. Maud Allan was in the firing line almost by accident. The real targets were men who couldn’t or wouldn’t conform.
Rivers’s thoughts turned to Sassoon. Manning’s experience clearly showed that every member of Robert Ross’s circle was at risk, liable to the same treatment as Ross himself. It didn’t help that Ross was opposed to the war, though he had not approved of Sassoon’s protest, arguing – quite rightly in River’s opinion – that it would destroy Sassoon without having any impact on the course of events. Ross’s own method of opposition, according to Manning, was to show photographs of mutilated corpses to any civilian who might benefit from the shock. Rivers was glad Sassoon was well away from Ross, and the trial.
Once, at Craiglockhart, he’d tried to warn Sassoon of the danger. As long ago as last November he’d told him about the cabinet noir, the Black Book, the 47,000 names of eminent men and women whose double lives left them open to German blackmail.
– Relax, Rivers. I’m not eminent.
– No, but you’re afriend of Robert Ross, and you’ve publicly advocated a negotiated peace. That’s enough! You’re vulnerable, Siegfried. There’s no point pretending you’re not.
– And what am I supposed to do about it? Toe the line, tailor my opinions… But what you’re really saying is, if I can’t conform in one area of life, then I have to conform in the others. Not just the surface things, everything. Even against my conscience. Well, I can’t live like that. Nobody should live like that.
It had been pleasant talking to Manning about Siegfried. Apart from Robert Graves, whom Rivers saw occasionally, Manning was the only acquaintance they had in common.
The square was deserted. On nights of the full moon people hurried back to the safety of their cellars. Rivers’s footsteps seemed to follow him, echoing along the empty pavement. The moon had drifted clear from the last gauzy wrack of cloud, and his shadow stretched ahead of him, the edges almost as sharp as they would have been by day.
So calm, so clear a night. We’re in for it, he thought. That was one thing he’d never had to cope with at Craiglockhart: bombs falling within earshot of patients who jumped out of their skins if a teaspoon rattled in a saucer. He turned and began to walk rapidly towards the dark and shuttered building.
THIRTEEN
Head is the one awake inside the sleeping hospital. Masked and gowned, a single light burning above his head, he stands beside a dissecting table on which a man lies, face upwards, naked, reeking of formaldehyde. The genitals are shrivelled, the skin the dingy gold of old paper. Head finishes drawing an outline on the shaven head, says, ‘Right then,’ and extends his gloved hand for the drill. But something’s wrong. Even as the drill whirs, the golden-skinned man stirs. Rivers tries to say, ‘Don’t, he’s alive,’ but Head can’t, or won’t, hear him. A squeak of bone, a mouth stretched wide, and then a hand grasps Head’s hand at the wrist, and the cadaver in all its naked, half-flayed horror rises from the table and pushes him back.
The corridor outside Rivers’s room is empty, elongated, the floor polished and gleaming. Then the doors at the end flap open with a noise like the beating of wings and the cadaver bounds through, pads from door to door, sniffs, tries to locate him more by smell than sight. At last it finds the right door, advances on the bed, bends over him, thrusts its anatomical drawing of a face into his, as he struggles to wake up and remember where he is.
Christ. He lay back, aware of sweat on his chest and in his groin. He was in a hospital bed, too high, too narrow, the mattress covered with rubber that creaked as he moved. He could see that ruin of a face bending over him. In these moments between sleep and waking, he was able to do – briefly – what other people take for granted: see things that were not there.
Quickly, before the moment passed, he began to dissect the images of which the dream was composed. The dissecting-room in the dream had not been the room at the Anatomical Institute where he’d watched Head at work that morning, but the anatomy theatre at Bart’s, where he had trained.
The whole emotional impression left by the dream was one of… He lay, eyes closed in the darkness, sifting impressions. Contamination. To imagine Head, the gentlest of men, drilling the skull of a conscious human being was a sort of betrayal. The link with Head’s carrying out the tests on Lucas was obvious. Rivers had thought, as he watched Head looking at Lucas, that the same suspension of empathy that was so necessary a part of the physician’s task was also, in other contexts, the root of all monstrosity. Not merely the soldier, but the torturer also, practises the same suspension.
The dream was about dissociation. Like most of his dreams these days, a dream about work. He never seemed to dream about sex any more, though before the war sexual conflicts had been a frequent subject of dreams. A cynic might have said he was too exhausted. He thought it was probably more complicated, and more interesting, than that, but he had little time for introspection. Certainly no time for it now. He sat up and flapped his pyjama jacket to make the sweat evaporate, then lay back and tried to compose himself for sleep. He never slept well on the nights he stayed at the hospital, partly because of the uncomfortable bed, partly because the expectation of being woken kept his sleep light.
He was just beginning to drift off when the whistles blew.
By the time the orderly knocked on his door, he was out of bed and fastening his dressing-gown. He followed the man along the corridor to the main ward where Sister Walters greeted him. She was a thin, long-nosed Geordie with a sallow skin and a vein of class-hatred that reminded him of Prior. Oddly enough, it seemed to be directed entirely at her own sex. She hated the VADs, most of whom were girls of good family ‘doing their bit’ with – it had to be admitted – varying degrees of seriousness. She loved her officer patients – my boys, she called them – but the VADs, girls from a similar social background after all, she hated. One night last December, as the guns thudded and the ground shook beneath the direct hit on Vauxhall Bridge, they’d sat drinking cocoa together, and the barriers of rank had come down, enough at least for her to say bitterly, ‘They
make me sick, the way they go on. “Oooh! Look at me! I’m dusting!” “I’m sweeping a floor.” Do you know, when I was training we got eight quid a year. That was for a seventy-hour week, and you got your breakages stopped off that.’
Cocoa was being made now and carried round on trays. Rivers went from bed to bed of the main ward. Most of the men were reasonably calm, though jerks and twitches were worse than normal. In the single rooms, where the more seriously disturbed patients were, the signs of distress were pitiful. These were men who had joked their way through bombardments that rattled the tea-cups in Kent, now totally unmanned. Weston had wet himself. He stood in the middle of his room, sobbing, while a nurse knelt in front of him and coaxed him to step out of the circle of sodden cloth. Rivers took over from her, got Weston into clean pyjamas and back into bed. He stayed with him till he was calm, then handed over to an orderly and went in search of Sister Walters.
She handed him his cocoa. ‘Captain Manning’s smoking. Do you think you could –’
‘Yes, of course.’
At Craiglockhart the corridors had reeked of cigarettes, and there the staff had contrived not to notice. Here, with two wards full of paralysed patients, the no-smoking rule had to be enforced. Rivers tapped once and walked in.
Manning was sitting up in bed. ‘Hello,’ he said, sounding surprised.
‘I’m afraid I’ve got to ask you to put that out. Two lifts. Twenty wheelchairs.’
‘Yes, certainly.’ Manning stubbed his cigarette out. ‘Stupid of me. I didn’t know you did nights.’
‘Only at full moons.’
‘I thought that theory of mental illness had been exploded.’
Rivers smiled. ‘You know what I mean.’
‘Sister Walters says they got Vauxhall Bridge twice. Is that right?’
‘Yes. Though we don’t need to worry when they hit it. Only when they miss.’
‘Reminds me of last Christmas. Do you remember that raid? I was staying with Ross, Sassoon was there as well, and it was very funny because it was the first raid I’d experienced, and I was all set to be the cool, collected veteran, calming down the poor nervous civilians. I was a complete bloody wreck. Ross’s housekeeper was better than me. Sassoon was the same. In fact I remember him saying, “All that fuss about whether I should go back or not. I won’t be any bloody good when I do.”’
A ragged sound of singing. ‘Listen,’ Manning said. He began to sing with them, almost under his breath.
Bombed last night
And bombed the night before
Gunna get bombed tonight
If we never get bombed any more.
When we’re bombed we’re scared as we can be…
‘First time I’ve heard that outside France.’ A pause. ‘You know, I’ve been thinking about what you said… about remembering and trying to talk about it.’
Rivers propped his chin on his hands and said, ‘Go on.’ Even as he spoke, he recalled Prior’s wickedly accurate imitation of this position. Damn Prior.
‘You know these attacks I have? Well, they tend to start with a sort of waking dream. It’s nothing very much actually, it’s not horrifying, it’s just a line of men marching along duckboards wearing gas masks and capes. Everything’s a sort of greenish-yellow, the colour it is when you look through the visor. The usual… porridge.’ He swallowed. ‘If a man slips off the duckboard it’s not always possible to get him out and sometimes he just sinks. The packs are so heavy, you see, and the mud’s fifteen feet deep. It’s not like ordinary mud. It’s like a bog, it… sucks. They’re supposed to hold on to the pack of the man in front.’
‘And you say this… dream triggers the attack?’
‘I don’t know. I suppose so.’
‘What in particular?’
Manning tried to answer and then shook his head.
‘If you had to pick out the worst thing, what would it be?’
‘There’s a hand coming out of the mud. It’s holding the duckboard and… nothing else. Everything else is underneath.’
A short silence.
‘Oh, and there’s a voice.’ Manning reached for his cigarettes and then remembered he couldn’t smoke. ‘It’s not coming from anybody. It’s just… there.’
Rivers waited. ‘What does it say?’
‘“Where’s Scudder?’” Manning smiled. ‘It’s a rather nasty, knowing little voice. “Where’s Scudder? Where’s Scudder?’”
‘Do you answer?’
Manning shook his head. ‘No point. It knows the answer.’
Silence, except for the sound of singing, fading now, and then, in the distance, the thudding of the guns.
Rivers said, ‘You know, if we went down to my room you could smoke.’
Manning looked surprised. ‘Now?’
‘Why not? Unless you think you can get back to sleep?’
Manning didn’t answer that. There was no need.
‘There,’ Rivers said, putting an ashtray at Manning’s elbow. The lamp created a circle of light around the desk, a world.
‘You don’t, do you?’ Manning said, lighting up.
‘A cigar now and then.’
Manning inhaled deeply, his eyes closed. ‘One of the reasons I don’t talk about it,’ he said, smiling, ‘apart from cowardice, is that it seems so futile.’
‘Because it’s impossible to make people understand?’
‘Yes. Even a comparatively small thing. The feeling you get when you go into the Salient, especially if you’ve been there before and you know what you’re facing. You really do say goodbye to everything. You just put one foot in front of another, one step, then the next, then the next.’
Rivers waited.
‘It’s… ungraspable,’ Manning said at last. ‘I don’t mean you can’t grasp it because you haven’t been there. I mean, I can’t grasp it and I have been there. I can’t get my mind round it.’
‘You were going to tell me about Scudder.’
‘Was I?’
Their eyes met.
Manning smiled. ‘Yes, I suppose I was. He was a man in my company. You know, the whole thing’s based on the idea that if you’ve got the right number of arms and legs and you’re not actually mentally defective you can be turned into a soldier. Well, Scudder was the walking proof that it isn’t true. He was hopeless. He knew he was. The night before we were due to move up, he got drunk. Well, a lot of them got drunk, but he was… legless. He didn’t turn up for parade, and so he was court-martialled. I went to see him the night before. He was being held in a barn, and we sat on a bale of straw and talked. It turned out he’d been treated for shell shock the previous year. With electric shocks. I didn’t know they did that.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Rivers said. ‘They do.’
‘He was at Messines when the mines went up. Apparently he used to dream about mines and blood. And he used to jerk his head and make stupid noises. That’s what the doctor called them. Stupid noises. Anyway it worked, after a fashion. The electric shocks. The night after he had the treatment he didn’t dream about mines. He dreamt he was back in the trenches having electric shock treatment. I stayed with him a couple of hours, I suppose.’ Manning smiled faintly. ‘He was a most unfortunate-looking youth. I mention that in case there’s a doctrinaire Freudian lurking under your desk.’
Rivers pretended to look. ‘No-o. There isn’t one behind it either.’
Manning laughed. ‘The thing was he was extremely bright. And I don’t know whether it was snobbery or… or what it was, but I’d been assuming he wasn’t. Actually I don’t think it was snobbery, it was just he was so bloody bad at everything. You couldn’t believe there was an intelligent mind behind all those… cock-ups. But there was.’ His expression became momentarily remote. ‘After that, I noticed him more. I thought –’
‘What did he get?’
‘At the court martial? Two hours’ field punishment a day. When everybody else was resting – uh! – he’d be cleaning limbers, that sort of thing. I used to stop an
d have a word with him. I don’t think it helped because it took him away from the other men, and in the end it’s the other men who keep you going.’
‘Go on. You say you thought –’
‘I thought he was clumsy. And then after this talk I watched him, I watched him at bayonet practice, running in and lunging and… missing. You know, the thing’s this big, and he was missing it. And suddenly I realized it was nothing to do with clumsiness. He couldn’t switch off. He couldn’t… turn off the part of himself that minded. I’m quite certain when he finally got the bayonet in, he saw it bleed. And that’s the opposite of what should be happening. You know I saw men once… in close combat, as the manuals say, and one man was reciting the instructions. Lunge, one, two: twist, one, two, out, one, two… Literally, killing by numbers. And that’s the way it has to be. If a man’s properly trained he’ll function on the day almost like an automaton. And Scudder was the opposite of that. Somehow the whole thing had gone into reverse. I think probably because of the breakdown, because I can see the same sort of thing happening to me. Like red – the colour red – whatever it is, even if it’s a flower or a book – it’s always blood.’
Rivers had gone very still. He waited.
‘When I was out there, I could be in blood up to the elbows, it didn’t bother me. It’s almost as if instead of normal feelings being cut off, there aren’t any divisions left at all. Everything washes into everything else. I don’t know if that makes sense.’
‘Very much so.’
A pause. ‘Anyway, we moved forward. It was raining. I don’t know why I bother to say that. It was always raining. The heavens had opened. And we were told to report to the graveyard.’ Manning laughed, a genuine full-blooded laugh. ‘I thought, my God somebody’s developed a sense of humour. But it was absolutely true. We were billeted in the graveyard. And it was extraordinary. All the tombs had been damaged by shells and you could see through into the vaults, and this was in an area where there were corpses everywhere. The whole business of collecting and burying the dead had broken down. Wherever you looked there were bodies or parts of bodies, and yet some of the younger ones – Scudder was one – were fascinated by these vaults. You’d come across them lying on their stomachs trying to see through the holes, because the vaults were flooded, and the coffins were floating around. It was almost as if these people were really dead, and the corpses by the road weren’t. Any more than we were really alive.