by Pat Barker
One morning Lode sent for him.
‘I just thought I’d share the good news,’ Lode said. ‘Since there isn’t much of it these days. They’ve caught MacDowell.’
Prior was knocked sick by the shock, but he managed to keep his face expressionless. ‘Oh? When?’
‘A few days ago. In Liverpool. Charles Greaves’s house. They got Greaves too.’
‘Hmm. Well, that is progress.’
‘Good news, isn’t it?’
Prior nodded.
‘You know,’ Lode said, watching him narrowly, ‘I used to think I understood you. I used to think I had you taped.’ He waited. ‘Ah, well. Back to work.’
Prior wondered why Lode’s endless patting and petting of his moustache should ever have struck him as a sign of vulnerability. It didn’t seem so now.
The nights were bad. He was still taking sleeping draughts, sometimes repeating the dose when the first one failed to work. Rivers strenuously advised him against it, but he ignored the advice. He had to sleep.
That evening, fast asleep after the second draught, he was awakened by a knocking on the door. The bromide clung to him like glue. Even when he managed to get out of bed, he felt physically sick. For a moment, as he pulled on his breeches and shirt, he thought he might actually be sick. The knocking went on, then stopped.
Presumably whoever it was had got tired and gone away. Prior was about to fall back into bed when he remembered he’d left the door open. Of all the bloody stupid things to do. But it was the only way of getting some air into the place.
It was no use, he’d have to go and close it.
The passage was full of the smell of rotting cabbage. The area round the bins had not been cleaned, in spite of Mrs Rollaston’s promise. Prior stumbled along, hitching up his braces as he went.
The door was open. He looked out. The sky was not the normal blue of a summer evening, but brownish, like caught butter. He went back inside and closed the door.
He was walking past the door of the living-room when he heard a movement.
Slowly, he pushed the half-open door wide. Spragge was sitting, stolidly, in the armchair, thick fingers relaxed on his splayed thighs. He looked up with a sheepish, rather silly expression on his face. Sheepish, but obstinate. ‘Well?’ he said. ‘What do you want to see me about?’
‘Do you always walk into people’s houses uninvited?’
‘I thought I heard you say come in.’ He didn’t bother to make the lie convincing. ‘I knew you must be in because the door was open. You want to watch that. You could get burgled.’ A glance round the room pointed out that there was nothing worth taking.
Prior was angry. Not because Spragge had walked in uninvited; it was deeper, less rational than that. He was angry because of the way Spragge’s fingers curled on his thighs, innocent-looking fingers, the waxy pink of very cheap sausages.
‘I’ll get up and knock again if you like,’ Spragge said, pulling a comical face.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Prior said, sitting down. ‘What do you want?’
‘What do you want?’
Prior looked blank.
‘You’re the one who’s been chasing me.’
Spragge was drunk. Oh, he hid it well. There was just the merest hint of over-precision in his speech, a kind of truculence bubbling beneath the surface.
‘What about a drink?’ Prior suggested.
‘Yeh, all right.’
Prior needed time to think, to work out how he was going to approach Spragge. He went into the kitchen where he kept the whisky. The trouble was he detested Spragge to the point where the necessary manipulation became distasteful. You didn’t manipulate people like Spragge. You squashed them.
He poured a jug of water and, in the sudden silence after he’d turned off the tap, heard a movement, furtive, it seemed to him, in the next room. Rapidly, he crossed to the door.
Spragge was removing Sarah’s letter from underneath the ornament on the mantelpiece. No, not removing it. Putting it back.
‘Have you read that?’ Prior burst into the room. He was remembering how explicit Sarah’s references to their love-making had been. ‘Have you read it?’
Spragge swallowed hard. ‘It’s the job.’
‘You shouldn’t’ve done that.’
‘Aw, for God’s sake,’ Spragge said. ‘Do you think she’d mind? I saw her in the Palm House, she virtually had your dick out.’
Prior grasped Spragge lightly by the forearms and butted him in the face, his head coming into satisfying, cartilage-crunching contact with Spragge’s nose. Spragge tried to pull away, then slumped forward, spouting blood, snorting, putting up an ineffectual shaking hand to stop the flow.
Prior tried to make him stand up, like a child trying to make a toy work. Spragge staggered backwards and fell against the standard lamp, which crashed over and landed on top of him. He lay there, holding his spread fingers over his shattered nose, trying to speak, and gurgling instead.
Disgusted, with himself as much as Spragge, Prior went into the kitchen, wrung out a tea-towel in cold water, came back, and handed it to Spragge. ‘Here, put this over it.’
Wincing, tears streaming down his face, Spragge dabbed at his face with the wet cloth. ‘Broken,’ he managed to say. He gestured vaguely at the towel, which was drenched in blood. Prior took it away and brought another.’ He looked at the roll of fat above Spragge’s trousers and contemplated landing a boot in his kidneys. But you couldn’t, the man was pathetic. He threw the tea-towel at Spragge and sat down in the nearest chair, shaking with rage, unappeased. He wanted to fight. Instead of that he was farting about with tea-towels like Florence fucking Nightingale.
After a while Spragge started to cry. Prior stared at him with awed disgust and thought, my God, I’m not taking this. ‘Come on,’ he said, grabbing Spragge by the sleeve. ‘Out.’
‘Can’t walk.’
‘I’ll get you a taxi.’
Prior struggled into his boots and puttees, then returned to the living-room and dragged Spragge to his feet. Spragge lurched and stumbled to the door, half of his own volition, half dragged there by Prior. Bastard, Prior thought, pushing him up the steps, but the anger was ebbing now, leaving him lonely.
They staggered down the street, Spragge leaning heavily on Prior. Like two drunks. ‘Do you realize how much trouble I’d get into if I was seen like this?’ Prior asked.
The first two taxis went past. Spragge’s face, in the brown air, looked dingy, but less obviously bloody than it had in the flat. He stood, swaying slightly, apart from the noise and heat, the passing crowds, the sweaty faces. He was visibly nursing his bitterness, carrying it around with him like a too full cup. ‘Lode offered me a passage to South Africa. Did you know that? All expenses paid.’
‘Will you go?’
‘Might.’ He looked round him, and the bitterness spilled. ‘Fuck all here.’
Prior remembered there were things he needed to know. ‘Did Lode tell you to follow me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Were you following me when I went to see Hettie Roper?’
‘No, not there.’
Either Spragge was a better actor than he’d so far appeared, or he was telling the truth. Spragge started waving and shouting ‘Taxi!’
It pulled up a few paces further on. ‘I’ll need money,’. he said.
Prior dug in his breeches pockets. ‘Here, take this.’
Spragge bent down and said, ‘Marble Arch.’ He wasn’t going to give an address while Prior was within hearing.
‘You must have been following me,’ Prior said. ‘It was you who told the police where to find MacDowell.’
Spragge looked up from the dim interior. ‘Not me, guv.’ His tone was ironical, indifferent. ‘Lode says it was you.’
SIXTEEN
In the Empire Hospital Charles Manning surveyed the chess-board and gently, with the tip of his forefinger, knocked over the black king.
‘You win,’ he said. ‘Again.’<
br />
Lucas grinned, and then pointed over Manning’s shoulder to the figure of a man in army uniform, standing just inside the entrance to the ward.
Manning stood up. For a second there might have been a flicker of fear. Fear was too strong a word, perhaps, but Manning certainly wasn’t at ease though he gave the usual, expensively acquired imitation of it, coming towards Prior, offering his hand. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘This is a surprise.’
‘How are you?’
‘Getting better. Let’s go along to my room.’
Manning chatted easily as they walked along the corridor. ‘Remarkable chap, that. Do you know, he can’t remember the names of any of the pieces? But, my God, he knows how to play.’
Manning’s room was pleasant, with a bowl of roses on the bedside table, and a bright, yellow and red covered book lying face down on the bed.
‘A name you’ll know,’ Manning said, picking it up.
Prior read the title, Counter-Attack, and the name, Siegfried Sassoon.
‘You must’ve been at Craiglockhart at the same time,’ Manning said.
‘Ye-es. Though I don’t know how much of a bond that is. Frankly.’ Prior closed the book and put it on the bedside table beside a photograph of Manning’s wife and children, the same photograph that had been on the grand piano at his house. ‘He hated the place.’
‘Did he?’
‘Oh, yes, he made that perfectly clear. And the people. Nervous wrecks, lead-swingers and degenerates.’
‘Well,’ Manning said, waving Prior to a chair, ‘as one nervous, lead-swinging degenerate to another… how are you?’
‘All right, I think. The Intelligence Unit’s being closed down, so I don’t quite know what’s going to happen.’
Manning smiled. ‘I suppose you want to stay in the Ministry?’
‘Not particularly.’
‘Oh? Well, that might be a bit more difficult. I’ve got a friend at the War Office – Charles Moncrieff – I don’t know whether you know him? Anyway, one of his jobs is to select instructors for cadet battalions. I suppose that might be a possibility?’
Prior leant forward. ‘Hang on a minute. I didn’t come here to brown-nose you or your fucking friend at the War Office. What I was going to say – if you wouldn’t mind listening – is that I want to talk to you about something.’
‘What?’
‘Who. A woman called Mrs Roper. Beattie Roper.’
Manning was looking puzzled. ‘The Mrs Roper? Poison-plot Roper?’
‘Yes.’ Prior got a file out of his briefcase. ‘Except she didn’t do it.’
Manning took the file from him. ‘You want me to read it?’
‘I’ve summarized it. It’ll only take you a few minutes.’
Manning read with total concentration. When he finished he looked up. ‘Can I keep this?’
‘Yes, I’ve got a copy. I’ve got copies of the documents as well.’
‘You mean you’ve made personal copies of Ministry files?’ Manning pursed his lips. ‘You certainly don’t play by the rules, do you?’
‘Neither do you.’
‘We’re in the same boat there, aren’t we?’ A hardening of tone. ‘I would have thought we were in exactly the same boat.’
The merest hint of a glance at the photograph. ‘Not quite.’
Manning got up and walked across to the window. For a while he said nothing. Then he turned and said, ‘Why? Why on earth couldn’t you just come in and say, “Look, I’m worried about this. Will you read the report?” All right, you’ve got the opening to do so because of… There was no need for anything like that.’
Prior had a sudden chilling perception that Manning was right. ‘Rubbish. Beattie Roper’s a working-class woman from the back streets of Salford. You don’t give a fuck about her. I don’t mean you personally – though that’s true too – I mean your class.’
Manning was looking interested now rather than angry. ‘You really do think class determines everything, don’t you?’
‘Whether people are taken seriously or not? Yes.’
‘But it’s not a question of individuals, is it? All right, I don’t know anything about women in the back streets of Salford. I don’t pretend to. I don’t want to. It doesn’t mean I want to see them sent to prison on perjured evidence. Or anybody else for that matter.’
‘Look, can we skip the moral outrage? When I came in here, you assumed I was after a cushy job. I didn’t even get the first bloody sentence out. Are you seriously saying you would have made that assumption about a person of your own class?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘No, I would.’
‘You get dozens of them, I suppose, begging for safe jobs?’
‘Yes,’ Manning said bleakly.
Prior looked at him. ‘Golly. What fun.’
‘Not really.’
They sat in silence, each registering the change in atmosphere, neither of them sure what it meant. ‘You’re right,’ Manning said at last. ‘It was an insulting assumption to make. I’m sorry.’
At that moment the door opened and Rivers came in.
‘Charles, I – ‘He stopped abruptly when he saw Prior. ‘Hello. I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you had a visitor.’ He smiled at Prior. ‘I hope you’re not tiring my patient?’
‘He’s wearing me out,’ Prior snapped.
‘What did you want to see me about?’ Manning asked.
Rivers said, ‘Nothing that can’t wait.’
He went out and left them alone.
There was a short silence. ‘I’m sorry too,’ Prior said. ‘You’re right, of course. Class prejudice isn’t any more admirable for being directed upwards.’ Just more fucking justified. ‘Do you think I should show that to her MP?’
‘Oh, God, no, don’t do that. Once they’ve denied it in the House, it’ll be set in concrete. No, I’ll have a word with Eddie Marsh. Only don’t expect too much. I mean, it’s perfectly clear even from your report she was sheltering deserters. That’s two years’ hard labour. She’s only done one.’
‘She wasn’t charged with that.’
Manning said, ‘They’re not going to let her out yet.’
‘So what will they do?’
‘Wait till the war’s over. Let her go quietly.’
Prior shook his head. ‘She won’t last that long.’
That night, at nine o’clock, Prior went out for a drink. He came to himself in the small hours of the morning, fumbling to get his key into the lock. He had no recollection of the intervening five hours.
Rivers rubbed the corners of his eyes with an audible squidge. ‘That’s the longest, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. Just.’
‘Any clues? I mean, had you been drinking?’
‘Like a fish. I’ve still got the headache.’
Rivers replaced his glasses.
‘One of the… how shall I put it?’ Prior breathed deeply. ‘Inconveniences of my present position is that I do tend to end up with somebody else’s hangover. Really rather frequently.’
‘Not “somebody else’s”.’
Prior looked away. ‘You’ve no idea how disgusting it is to examine one’s own underpants for signs of “recent activity”.’
Rivers looked down at the backs of his hands. ‘I’m going to say something you probably won’t like.’
The telephone began to ring in the next room.
Prior smiled. ‘And I’m going to have to wait for it too.’
The call was from Captain’ Harris, telephoning to arrange the details of a flight they were to make tomorrow. Rivers jotted the time down, and took a few moments to collect his thoughts before returning to Prior.
Prior was standing by the mantelpiece, looking through a stack of field postcards. Well, that was all right, Rivers thought, closing the door. Field postcards contained no information about the sender except the fact that he was alive. Or had been at the time it was posted. ‘His book’s out, you know?’ Prio
r said, holding a postcard up. ‘Manning’s got a copy.’
‘Yes.’
Rivers sat down and waited for Prior to join him.
‘I suppose this is the real challenge,’ Prior said. ‘For you. The ones who go back. They must be the ones you ask the questions about. I mean obviously all this face your emotions, own up to fear, let yourself feel grief… works wonders. Here.’ Prior came closer. Bent over him. ‘But what about there? Do you think it helps there? Or do they just go mad quicker?’
‘Nobody’s ever done a follow-up. Electric shock treatment has a very high relapse rate. What mine is, I just don’t know. Obviously the patients who stay in touch are a self-selected group, and such evidence as they provide is anecdotal, and therefore almost useless.’
‘My God, Rivers. You’re a cold bugger.’
‘You asked me a scientific question. You got a scientific answer.’
Prior sat down. ‘Well dodged.’
Rivers took his glasses off. ‘I’m really not trying to dodge anything. What I was going to say is I think perhaps you should think about coming into hospital. The–’
‘No. You can’t order me to.’
‘No, that’s true. I hoped you trusted me enough to take my advice.’
Prior shook his head. ‘I just can’t face it.’
Rivers nodded. ‘Then we’ll have to manage outside. Will you at least take some sick leave?’
Another jerk of the head. ‘Not yet.’
Prior avoided thinking about the interview with Beattie Roper till he was crossing the prison yard. She’d been on hunger strike again, the wardress said, jangling her keys. And she’d had flu. No resistance. In sick bay all last week. He’d find her weak. The prison doctor had wanted to force-feed her, but the Home Office in its wisdom had decided that such methods were not to be used.
She was thinner than he remembered.
He stood just inside the door. She was lying on the bed, the light from the barred window casting a shadow across her face. The wardress stood against the wall, by the closed door.
‘I need to see her alone.’