He shook his head. They spread the lime together, sprinkling it thickly along the firestep, throwing shovelfuls at a bad patch of wall. When at last they stood back, beating the white dust from the skirts of their tunics, he wanted to say something casual, something that would prove he was all right, but a numbness had spread all over the lower half of his face.
Back in the dugout he watched people’s lips move and was filled with admiration for them. There was a sense of joy in watching them, of elation almost. How complex those movements were, how amazing the glimpses of teeth and tongue, the movement of muscles in the jaw. He ran his tongue along the edges of his teeth, curved it back, stroked the ridged palate, flexed his lips, felt the pull of skin and the stretching of muscles in his throat. All present and correct, but how they combined together to make sounds he had no idea.
It was Logan who took him to the casualty clearing station. Normally it would have been his servant, but Logan asked if he could go. They thumped and splodged along cheerfully enough, or at least Prior was cheerful. He felt as if nothing could ever touch him again. When a shell whined across, he didn’t flinch, though he knew the Germans had an accurate fix on both communication trenches. They marched from stinking mud to dryish duckboards, and the bare landscape he sensed beyond the tangles of rusty wire gradually changed to fields. Clumps of brilliant yellow cabbage weed, whose smell mimics gas so accurately that men tremble, hung over the final trench.
In the clearing station he sat down, Logan beside him. Lying on the floor was a young man wounded in the back who seemed hardly to know that they were there. From time to time he moaned, ‘I’m cold, I’m cold,’ but when the doctor came in, he shook his head and said there was nothing he could do. ‘There’s no need for you to stay,’ he said to Logan. ‘He’ll be all right.’ So they shook hands and parted. He sat down on the bench again and tried to think back over the events that had brought him there, but found he could remember very little about them. Two of his men were dead, he remembered that. Nothing else. Like the speechlessness, it seemed natural. He sat on the bench, his clasped hands dangling between his legs, and thought of nothing.
Rivers watched the play of emotions on Prior’s face as he fitted the recovered memory into his past. He was unprepared for what happened next.
‘Is that all?’ Prior said.
He seemed to be beside himself with rage.
‘I don’t know about all,’ Rivers said. ‘I’d’ve thought that was a traumatic experience by any standards.’
Prior almost spat at him. ‘It was nothing.’
He put his head in his hands, at first, it seemed, in bewilderment, but then after a few moments he began to cry. Rivers waited a while, then walked round the desk and offered his handkerchief. Instead of taking it, Prior seized Rivers by the arms, and began butting him in the chest, hard enough to hurt. This was not an attack, Rivers realized, though it felt like one. It was the closest Prior could come to asking for physical contact. Rivers was reminded of a nanny goat on his brother’s farm, being lifted almost off her feet by the suckling kid. Rivers held Prior’s shoulders, and after a while the butting stopped. Prior raised his blind and slobbery face. ‘Sorry about that.’
‘That’s all right.’ He waited for Prior to wipe his face, then asked, ‘What did you think happened?’
‘I didn’t know.’
‘Yes, you did. You thought you knew.’
‘I knew two of my men had been killed. I thought…’ He stopped. ‘I thought it must’ve been my fault. We were in the same trenches we’d been in when I first arrived. The line’s terrible there. It winds in and out of brick stacks. A lot of the trenches face the wrong way. Even in daylight with a compass and a map you can get lost. At night… I’d been there about a week, I suppose, when a man took out patrol to see if a particular dugout was occupied at night. Compasses don’t work, there’s too much metal about. He’d been crawling round in circles for God knows how long, when he came upon what he thought was a German wiring party. He ordered his men to open fire. Well, all hell was let loose. Then after a while somebody realized there were British voices shouting on both sides. Five men killed. Eleven injured. I looked at his face as he sat in the dugout and he was… You could have done that and he wouldn’t’ve blinked. Before I’d always thought the worst thing would be if you were wounded and left out there, but when I saw his face I thought, no. This is the worst thing. And then when I couldn’t remember anything except that two of my men had been killed, I thought it had to be something like that.’ He looked up. ‘I couldn’t see what else I’d need to forget.’
‘Then you must be relieved.’
‘Relieved?’
‘You did your duty. You’ve nothing to reproach yourself with. You even finished cleaning the trench.’
‘I’ve cleaned up dozens of trenches. I don’t see why that would make me break down.’
‘You’re thinking of breakdown as a reaction to a single traumatic event, but it’s not like that. It’s more a matter of… erosion. Weeks and months of stress in a situation where you can’t get away from it.’ He smiled. ‘I’m sorry to sound so impersonal. I know how you hate being “the patient”.’
‘I don’t mind in the least. I just want to understand why it happened. You see what I find so difficult is… I don’t think of myself as the kind of person who breaks down. And yet time and time again I’m brought up hard against the fact that I did.’
‘I don’t know that there is “a kind of person who breaks down”. I imagine most of us could if the pressure were bad enough. I know I could.’
Prior gazed round the room in mock amazement. ‘Did the wallpaper speak?’
Rivers smiled. ‘I’ll tell them to give you a sleeping tablet.’
At the door Prior turned. ‘He had very blue eyes, you know. Towers. We used to call him the Hun.’
After making sure Prior got his sleeping tablet, Rivers went upstairs to his own room and began to undress. He tugged at his tie, and as he did so caught sight of himself in the looking-glass. He pulled down his right lid to reveal a dingy and blood-shot white. What am I supposed to do with this gob-stopper? He released the lid. No need to think about that. If he went on feeling like this, he’d have to see Bryce and arrange to take some leave. It’d reached the point where he woke up in the morning feeling almost as exhausted as he had done when he went to bed. He sat on the edge of the bath and began to take his boots off. Ye will surely say unto me this proverb. Physician, heal thyself. One of his father’s favourite texts. Sitting, bored and fidgety, in the family pew, Rivers had never thought it an odd choice, though now he wondered why it cropped up as frequently as it did. Fathers remain opaque to their sons, he thought, largely because the sons find it so hard to believe that there’s anything in the father worth seeing. Until he’s dead, and it’s too late. Mercifully, doctors are also opaque to their patients. Unless the patient happens to be Prior.
Rivers finished undressing and got into the bath. He lay back, eyes closed, feeling the hot water start to unravel the knots in his neck and shoulders. Not that Prior was the only patient to have found him… Well. Rather less than opaque. He remembered John Layard, and as always the memory was painful, because his treatment of Layard had ended in failure. He told himself there was no real resemblance between Layard and Prior. What made Prior more difficult was the constant probing. Layard had never probed. But then Layard hadn’t thought he needed to probe. Layard had thought he knew.
Lying with his eyes closed like this, Rivers could imagine himself back in St John’s, hearing Layard’s footsteps coming across the court. What was it he’d said? ‘I don’t see you as a father, you know.’ Looking up from the rug in front of the fire. Laughing. ‘More a sort of… male mother.’ He was like Prior. The same immensely shrewd eyes. X-ray eyes. The same outrageous frankness.
Why should he remember that? It was because of that ridiculous image of the nanny goat that had flashed into his mind while Prior was butting him in the stoma
ch. He disliked the term ‘male mother’. He thought he could remember disliking it even at the time. He distrusted the implication that nurturing, even when done by a man, remains female, as if the ability were in some way borrowed, or even stolen, from women – a sort of moral equivalent of the couvade. If that were true, then there was really very little hope.
He could see why Layard might use the term. Layard’s relationship with his father had been difficult, and he was a young man, without any personal experience of fathering. Though fathering, like mothering, takes many forms beyond the biological. Rivers had often been touched by the way in which young men, some of them not yet twenty, spoke about feeling like fathers to their men. Though when you looked at what they did. Worrying about socks, boots, blisters, food, hot drinks. And that perpetually harried expression of theirs. Rivers had only ever seen that look in one other place: in the public wards of hospitals, on the faces of women who were bringing up large families on very low incomes, women who, in their early thirties, could easily be taken for fifty or more. It was the look of people who are totally responsible for lives they have no power to save.
One of the paradoxes of the war – one of the many – was that this most brutal of conflicts should set up a relationship between officers and men that was… domestic. Caring. As Layard would undoubtedly have said, maternal. And that wasn’t the only trick the war had played. Mobilization. The Great Adventure. They’d been mobilized into holes in the ground so constricted they could hardly move. And the Great Adventure – the real life equivalent of all the adventure stories they’d devoured as boys – consisted of crouching in a dugout, waiting to be killed. The war that had promised so much in the way of ‘manly’ activity had actually delivered ‘feminine’ passivity, and on a scale that their mothers and sisters had scarcely known. No wonder they broke down.
In bed, he switched off the light and opened the curtains. Rain, silvery in the moonlight, streaked the glass, blurring the vista of tennis courts and trees, gathering, at the lower edge of the pane, into a long puddle that bulged and overflowed. Somebody, on the floor below, screamed. Rivers pulled the curtains to, and settled down to sleep, wishing, not for the first time, that he was young enough for France.
10
__________
Sarah watched the grey trickle of tea creep up the sides of her cup. The tea-lady looked at it, doubtfully. ‘That strong enough for you, love?’
‘It’ll do. Long as it’s warm and wet.’
‘My God,’ Betty Hargreave said. ‘Virgin’s pee. I can’t drink that.’
Madge nudged Sarah sharply in the ribs. ‘No, well, it wouldn’t be very appropriate, would it?’
‘Hey up, you’ll make us spill it.’
They went to the far end of the top trestle table and squeezed on to the bench. ‘Come on, move your bums along,’ Madge said. ‘Let two little ’uns in.’
Lizzie collected her Woodbines and matches, and shuffled along. ‘What happened to your young man, then, Sarah?’
‘Didn’t bloody show up, did he? I was sat an hour on Sunday all dolled up and nowhere to go.’
‘Aw,’ Lizzie said.
‘Probably just as well,’ said Madge. ‘At least now you know what he was after.’
‘I knew what he was after. I just want to know why he’s not still after it.’
‘Didn’t get it, then?’ Betty said, bringing her cup to the table.
‘No, he bloody did not.’
‘He was good-looking, though, wasn’t he?’ said Madge.
‘All right, I suppose.’
Betty laughed. ‘Better fish in the sea, eh, Sarah?’
‘Aye, and they can stop there ’n’ all. Not interested.’
A whoop of incredulity. Sarah buried her nose in her cup and then, as soon as she felt their attention had been withdrawn, looked at the window. You couldn’t really see what it was like outside because the glass was frosted, but here and there raindrops clung to the panes, each with its crescent moon of silver. She wished she was outside and could feel the rain on her face. It would have been nice to have gone to the seaside yesterday, she thought. Bugger him, why didn’t he show up?
The others were talking about Lizzie’s husband, who’d thrown her into a state of shock by announcing, in his last letter, that he was hoping to come home on leave soon.
‘I haven’t had a wink of sleep since,’ said Lizzie.
‘You’re getting yourself into a state about nothing,’ Betty said. ‘First of all he mightn’t get it, and second, they sometimes only give them a few days. Ten to one, he’ll get no further than London.’
‘Aye, and he’ll be pissed as a newt.’
‘Well, better pissed down there than up here.’
‘Don’t you want to see him?’ asked Sarah.
‘I do not. I’ve seen enough of him to last me a lifetime. Aye, I know what you’re thinking. You think I’m hard, don’t you? Well I am hard and so would you be.’ Lizzie’s yellow face showed two bright spots of colour on the cheekbones. ‘Do you know what happened on August 4th 1914?’
Sarah opened her mouth.
‘I’ll tell you what happened. Peace broke out. The only little bit of peace I’ve ever had. No, I don’t want him back. I don’t want him back on leave. I don’t want him back when it’s over. As far as I’m concerned the Kaiser can keep him.’ She lowered her chin, brooding. ‘I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to get meself some false teeth, and I’m going to have a bloody good time.’
‘Yes, well, you want to,’ said Betty.
‘She’s been on about them teeth as long as I’ve known her.’ said Madge. ‘You want to stop talking about it, and go and do it. You can afford it. All this won’t last, you know.’ She jerked her thumb at the room full of overall-clad women. ‘It’s too good to last.’
‘It’s not the money that bothers me.’
‘He’d give you gas,’ said Madge. ‘You’re never going to look anything while you’ve got them in your mouth. And you’re never going to feel right either for the simple reason you’re swallowing all the corruption.’
‘Yeh, I know. I will go.’
‘Time, ladies,’ the supervisor said. ‘Time.’
‘Eeh, it never is,’ said Lizzie. ‘Do you know, I’m bloody sure they fix that clock!’
‘Three hours down,’ said Sarah. ‘Nine to go.’
All over the room yellow-skinned women were dragging themselves to their feet. As they were going up the stairs, Sarah fell into line beside Betty. Lizzie had nipped into the toilet to finish her cigarette.
‘You think she’s hard, don’t you?’ said Betty.
‘Well, yes, I do a bit. When you think what he’s going through.’
‘Yes, well. You know when I was a kid we used to live next door to them, and it was thump thump thump half the bloody night, you’d’ve thought she was coming through the wall. Oh, and you used to see her in the yard next morning, and her face’d be all swelled up. “I fell over the coal scuttle,” she used to say. Well that used to get me Mam. “He knocks you about,” she says, “and you go round apologizing for it,” she says. “Where’s the justice in that?” And mind you, she was right, you know.’
Willard lay face down on his bed, naked. His thighs and buttocks were trenched with purple scars, some just beginning to silver. These injuries had been sustained when his company was retreating across a graveyard under heavy fire, and several tombstone fragments had become embedded in his flesh. ‘You want to try it,’ he said. ‘Lying two months on your belly in a hospital bed with Requiescat in Pace stuck up your arse.’
This remark was ostensibly addressed to the orderly, so Rivers was able to ignore it. ‘They’ve healed well,’ he said, moving down the bed.
Willard looked across his shoulder. ‘The flesh wounds have. There’s still the injury to the spine.’
‘Let’s have you on your back.’
The orderly came forward to help, but Willard waved him away. His whole upper body
was massively powerful, though inevitably running to flab. By heaving and twisting, he could just manage to drag the wasted legs over, though they followed the bulk of his body, passively, like slime trails after a snail. The orderly bent down and straightened his feet.
Rivers waited until Willard was covered up, then nodded to the orderly to leave. After the door had closed, he said, ‘There was no injury to the spine.’
Willard lay back against the pillows, his jaw stubbornly set.
‘If you believe your spine was damaged, how do you account for the fact that so many doctors have examined you and told you that it isn’t?’ He watched Willard’s face closely. ‘Do you think they’re all incompetent? All of them? Or do you think they’re in some kind of conspiracy to convince you you can walk when in fact you can’t?’
Willard raised himself on to one elbow. It was extraordinary the impression he created, that mixture of immobility and power. Like a bull seal dragging itself across rocks. ‘You think I’m malingering.’
‘I know you’re not.’
‘But you’ve just said I am.’
‘No.’
‘If there’s no injury to the spine, then why can’t I walk?’
‘I think you know why.’
Willard gave a short, hissing laugh. ‘I know what you want me to say. I can’t walk because I don’t want to go back.’ He glared at Rivers. ‘Well, I won’t say it. It would be tantamount to an admission of cowardice.’
Rivers picked up his cap and cane. ‘Not in my book.’ He was aware of Willard watching him. ‘It’s true paralysis occurs because a man wants to save his life. He doesn’t want to go forward, and take part in some hopeless attack. But neither is he prepared to run away.’ He smiled. ‘Paralysis is no use to a coward, Mr Willard. A coward needs his legs.’
Willard didn’t reply, though Rivers thought he detected a slight relaxation of tension. The bone structure of Willard’s face was strong almost to the point of brutality, and his eyes were a curious shade of pale blue. There was a sheen on his hair and skin like the gloss on the coat of an animal. He’d been something of an athlete before the war, though Rivers suspected he had never been remarkable for depth of intelligence. ‘Your wife’s coming to see you this afternoon, isn’t she?’