by Pat Barker
Willard’s eyes went to the photograph on his washstand. ‘Yes.’
‘Why don’t you get dressed? There’s no reason for you to be in bed. And if you got dressed you could go out into the grounds. It’d be a lot pleasanter for your wife.’
Willard thought about it, reluctant to concede anything that might suggest his illness was not purely physical. ‘Yes, all right.’
‘Good. I’ll send an orderly in to help you with your boots.’
Sassoon arrived at the Conservative Club about ten minutes early. ‘Captain Rivers isn’t here yet, sir,’ the porter said. ‘But if you’d like to wait in the morning room, I’m sure he won’t be long. Up the stairs and first right.’
The staircase was of twisting marble, almost too imposing for the size of the hall, like a Roman nose on an unprepossessing face. As Sassoon climbed, he passed portraits of Edinburgh worthies of the past, men with white beards and wing collars, whose gold watch-chains and fobs nestled on swelling abdomens. His first thought on entering the morning room was that somebody with a taste for practical jokes had cut the Edinburgh worthies out of their frames and stuck them in chairs all over the room. Everywhere saurian heads and necks peered out of wing armchairs, looking at the young man in the doorway with the automatic approval his uniform evoked, and then – or was he perhaps being oversensitive? – with a slight ambivalence, a growing doubt, as they worked out what the blue badge on his tunic meant. Perhaps it was just oversensitivity, for you saw that same look of mingled admiration and apprehension, wherever you went. Old men were often ambivalent about young men in uniform, and rightly so, when you considered how very ambivalent the young men felt about them.
The chairs, which looked uncomfortable, were very comfortable indeed. Sassoon, glad to be away from the boiled cabbage and custard smells of the Craiglockhart dining room, sank back and closed his eyes. Further along, at a table by the window, two old men were nattering about the war. Both had sons at the front, it seemed, or was it only one? No, the other was trapped in England, apparently, on a training course. He listened to the rumble of their voices and felt a well-practised hatred begin to flow. It needed only a slighting remark about the courage of the German Army to rouse him to real fury, and very soon it came. He was aware of something sexual in this anger. He looked at the cloth straining across their broad backs, at the folds of beef-pink skin that overlapped their collars, and thought, with uncharacteristic crudity, When did you two last get it up?
Gordon’s death had woken him up, there was no doubt. That moment when he’d come down to breakfast, glanced at the casualty lists and seen Gordon’s name had been a turning point of sorts, though he didn’t yet know in which direction he would turn. It seemed to him that his first month at Craiglockhart had been spent in a kind of sleep. Too much steam pudding, too much putting little balls into holes. Looking round the room, he knew why he felt sickened by himself, why his fuming against elderly men with sons at the front no longer satisfied him. It was because he’d given in, lapsed, pretended to himself that he was still actively protesting whereas in reality he’d let himself be pacified, sucked into the comforting routine, the uneventfulness of Craiglockhart life. As Rivers had meant him to be.
He got up and began looking at the pictures that lined the walls. The portraits here were not of the professional men and civic dignitaries of the recent past, but of the landed gentry of generations before that, shown, for the most part, either setting off to, or returning from, the hunt. He was obviously not destined to get away from memories of Gordon and hunting today. Walking from picture to picture, he remembered the notebook he’d taken with him into the trenches on his first tour of duty. It had contained nothing but bare details of past hunts, where they’d found, how far he’d run, whether they’d killed. On and on. A terribly meaningless little set of squiggles it would have seemed to anybody else, but for him it had contained the Sussex lanes, the mists, the drizzle, the baying of hounds, clods flying from under the horses’ feet, staggering into the house, bones aching, reliving the hunt over dinner, and then, after dinner, shadows on the wall of the old nursery and Gordon’s face in the firelight, the scent of logs, the warmth, his whole face feeling numbed and swollen in the heat. His mind switched to his last few hours in France when, already wounded in the shoulder, he’d careered along a German trench, slinging Mills bombs to left and right, shouting, ‘View halloa!’ That was the moment, he thought. That was when the old Sassoon had cracked wide open and something new had stepped out of the shell. Bless you, my dear, Eddie Marsh had written, when he told him about it. Never take it more seriously than that. But Eddie had missed the point. Hunting had always been serious. Every bit as serious as war.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ Rivers said, coming up behind him. ‘I meant to be here when you arrived.’
‘That’s all right. These old codgers’ve been keeping me amused.’ He glanced round quickly. ‘I mean the ones on the wall.’
‘It is rather a geriatric gathering, isn’t it?’ Rivers sat down. ‘Would you like a drink?’ He raised his arm and a white-jacketed, elderly waiter came tottering across. ‘Gin and tonic for me, I think. What’ll you have, Siegfried?’
‘The same, please.’
Rivers’s inspection of the menu was confined to identifying which particular variety of poached fish was currently on offer. Sassoon gave the matter more thought. Rivers watched him as he pored over the menu and thought how much easier his life would have been if they’d sent Siegfried somewhere else. It wasn’t simply the discomfort of having to express views he was no longer sure he held – though, as a scientist, he did find that acutely uncomfortable. No, it was more than that. Every case posed implicit questions about the individual costs of the war, and never more so than in the run up to a round of Medical Boards, when the MOs had to decide which men were fit to return to duty. This would have been easier if he could have believed, as Lewis Yealland, for example, believed, that men who broke down were degenerates whose weakness would have caused them to break down, eventually, even in civilian life, but Rivers could see no evidence of that. The vast majority of his patients had no record of any mental trouble. And as soon as you accepted that the man’s breakdown was a consequence of his war experience rather than of his own innate weakness, then inevitably the war became the issue. And the therapy was a test, not only of the genuineness of the individual’s symptoms, but also of the validity of the demands the war was making on him. Rivers had survived partly by suppressing his awareness of this. But then along came Sassoon and made the justifiability of the war a matter for constant, open debate, and that suppression was no longer possible. At times it seemed to Rivers that all his other patients were the anvil and that Sassoon was the hammer. Inevitably there were times when he resented this. As a civilian, Rivers’s life had consisted of asking questions, and devising methods by which truthful answers could be obtained, but there are limits to how many fundamental questions you want to ask in a working day that starts before eight am and doesn’t end till midnight. All very well for Sassoon. He spent his days playing golf.
None of this prevented him from watching Sassoon’s continued poring over the menu with affection as well as amusement.
Sassoon looked up. ‘Am I taking too long?’
‘No, take as long as you like.’
‘It’s almost pre-war standard, isn’t it?’
‘I hope you’re not going to protest?’
‘No. You can rely on me to be inconsistent.’
Rivers was not afraid of Sassoon’s noticing any change in him. Siegfried’s introversion was remarkable, even by the normal standards of unhappy young men. His love for his men cut through that self-absorption, but Rivers sometimes wondered whether anything else did. And yet he had so many good qualities. It was rare to find a man in whom courage was the dominating characteristic, as malice or laziness or greed might be the ruling characteristic of lesser men.
The dining room was almost empty. They were shown to a table
for two by a window that overlooked the club’s small, walled garden. A scent of roses, drenched from the morning’s rain, drifted in through the open window.
The waiter was very young, sixteen perhaps. Red hair, big freckles splodged over a pale skin, knobbly, pink-knuckled hand clasping the carving knife. With his other hand he lifted the domed lid from the platter to reveal a joint of very red beef. Sassoon smiled. ‘That looks nice.’
The boy carved three slices. As he bent to get the warmed plate from the shelf below, it was possible to see the nape of his neck, defenceless under the stiff collar.
‘Is that all right, sir?’
‘One more, perhaps?’
The boy was looking at Sassoon with undisguised hero-worship. Not surprisingly, Rivers thought. He’s dragging out the weeks in this dreary job waiting for his turn to go out. At least they no longer allowed boys of his age to lie their way in. He noticed Sassoon smiling to himself.
‘What’s amusing you?’
‘I was thinking about Campbell. Not our Campbell. A much less engaging man, and… er… allegedly sane. He gave lectures – still does, I believe – on “The Spirit of the Bayonet”. You know, “Stick him in the kidneys, it’ll go in like a hot knife through butter.” “What’s the good of six inches of steel sticking out the back of a man’s neck? Three inches’ll do him. When he croaks, go and find another.” And so on. And you know, the men sit there laughing and cheering and making obscene gestures. They hate it.’ He smiled. ‘I was reminded because that boy was doing so well with the carving knife.’
‘Yes, I noticed.’
‘Very much the sort of man you’d pick as your servant.’
Rivers said mischievously, ‘Not bad-looking either.’
‘I’m afraid that has to take second place. You look for skill with the bayonet first because he’s always on your left in the attack.’
They ate in silence for a while. Rivers said, ‘Have you heard from the friend you were going to write to about Gordon?’
‘Yes. It’s true apparently, he did die instantly. His father said he had, but they don’t always tell parents the truth. I’ve written too many letters like that myself.’
‘It must be some consolation to know he didn’t suffer.’
Sassoon’s expression hardened. ‘I was glad to have it confirmed.’ An awkward silence. ‘I had some more bad news this morning. Do you remember me talking to you about Julian Dadd? Shot in the throat, two brothers killed? Well, his mental state has worsened apparently. He’s in a – what I suppose I ought to call a mental hospital. Given present company. The awful thing is he’s got some crazy idea he didn’t do well enough. Nobody else thinks so, but apparently there’s no arguing with him. He was one of my heroes, you know. I remember looking at him one evening. We’d just come in from inspecting the men’s billets – which were lousy as usual, and – he cared. He really cared. And I looked at him and I thought, I want to be like you.’ He laughed, mocking his hero-worship, but not disowning it. ‘Anyway, I suppose I’ve succeeded, haven’t I? Since we’re both in the loony-bin.’
The provocation was deliberate. When Rivers didn’t rise to it, Sassoon said, ‘It makes it quite difficult to go on, you know. When things like this keep happening to people you know and and… love. To go on with the protest, I mean.’
Silence.
Sassoon leant forward. ‘Wake up, Rivers. I thought you’d pounce on that.’
‘Did you?’
A pause. ‘No, I suppose not.’
Rivers dragged his hand down across his eyes. ‘I don’t feel much like pouncing.’
Rivers left the club an hour later. He’d left Siegfried with Ralph Sampson, the Astronomer Royal of Scotland, whom they’d bumped into after lunch. At first Sassoon had been almost too overawed to speak, but Sampson had soon put paid to that. Rivers had left him chatting away quite happily. Lunch itself had been rather depressing. At one point Siegfried had said, ‘I’m beginning to feel used up.’ You could understand it. He’d suffered repeated bereavements in the last two years, as first one contemporary then another died. In some ways the experience of these young men paralleled the experience of the very old. They looked back on intense memories and felt lonely because there was nobody left alive who’d been there. That habit of Siegfried’s of looking back, the inability to envisage any kind of future, seemed to be getting worse.
Not an easy case, Rivers thought. Not in the usual sense a case at all. He had no idea what the outcome would be, though he thought he could get Siegfried to give in. His love for his men. The need he had to prove his courage. By any rational standard, he’d already proved it, over and over again, but then the need wasn’t altogether rational. Given the strength of that need, it was amazing he’d managed to tolerate being cooped up with ‘wash-outs’ and ‘degenerates’ even as long as he had. Putting those forces together and getting him back to France was a task of approximately the same order of difficulty as flicking a stag beetle on to its back. The trouble was Rivers respected Sassoon too much to manipulate him. He had to be convinced that going back was the right thing to do.
At the foot of the Craiglockhart drive, Rivers saw Willard and Mrs Willard. For some extraordinary reason Willard had got his wife to push him as far as the gates, despite the downward slope which he must have seen would make the return journey difficult. Now they were marooned.
Rivers greeted Willard, waited for an introduction to his wife, and, when it failed to come, introduced himself. Mrs Willard was extremely young, attractive in the small-breasted, slim-hipped way of modern girls. As they chatted about the deceptive nature of slopes and the awkwardness of wheelchairs, Rivers became aware of Willard’s hands clenched on the arms of the chair. He felt Willard’s fury at being stranded like this, impotent. Good. The more furious he was the better.
Rivers said to Mrs Willard, ‘Here, I’ll give you a hand.’
With two of them pushing they made steady progress, though there was one nasty moment near the top, when they struck a muddy patch. But then the wheels bit, and they reached level ground at a cracking pace.
‘There you are,’ Mrs Willard said, bending over her husband, breathless and laughing. ‘Made it.’
Willard’s face would have curdled milk.
‘Why don’t you come in and have a cup of tea?’ Rivers suggested.
Mrs Willard looked to her husband for guidance. When none came, she said, ‘Yes, that would be lovely.’
‘My door’s on the left as you go in. I’ll just go ahead and arrange things. You’ll be all right now?’
‘Perfectly, thank you,’ said Willard.
Rivers went into the hall, smiling, only to have the smile wiped off his face by the sight of Matron standing immediately inside the entrance. She’d observed the entire incident and evidently disapproved. ‘You could have sent an orderly down to push the chair, Captain Rivers.’
Rivers opened his mouth, and shut it again. He reminded himself, not for the first time, that it was absolutely necessary for Matron to win some of their battles.
11
__________
Sassoon was trying to decipher a letter from H. G. Wells when Owen knocked on his door.
‘As far as I can make out, he says he’s coming to see Rivers.’
Owen looked suitably impressed. ‘He must be really worried about you.’
‘Oh, it’s not me he wants to talk about, it’s his new book.’ Sassoon smiled. ‘You don’t know many writers, do you?’
‘Not many.’
And I, Sassoon thought, am showing off. Which at least was better than moaning about Gordon’s death to somebody who had more than enough problems of his own. ‘I don’t suppose he’ll come. They all talk about it, but in the end it’s just too far. I sometimes wonder whether that’s why they put me here. Whether it was a case of being sent to Rivers or just sent as far away as possible.’
‘Probably Rivers. He gets all the awkward ones.’ Owen stopped in some confusion. ‘Not that you’re �
�’
‘Oh, I think I count as awkward. By any standard.’ He handed a sheet of paper across. ‘For the Hydra.’
‘May I read it?’
‘That’s the general idea.’
Owen read, folded the paper and nodded.
To forestall possible effusions, Sassoon said quickly, ‘I’m not satisfied with the last three lines, but they’ll have to do.’
‘I tried yesterday, but you were out.’
‘I’d be with Rivers.’ He smiled. ‘Do you ever feel like strangling Brock?’
‘No, I get on rather well with him.’
‘I get on with Rivers. It’s just… He picked up something I said at lunchtime about not being able to imagine the future. He doesn’t often press, but my God when he does…’
‘Why did he want you to talk about that?’
‘Part of the great campaign to get me back to France. He wants me to put the protest in a longer perspective. You know, “What did you do in the Great War, Siegfried?” Well, I spent three very comfortable years in a loony-bin eating steamed pudding and playing golf. While other people – some of them rather close friends – got blown to smithereens. He wants me to admit I won’t be able to bear it. What’s more, he’s probably right.’
‘Think of the poems you could write.’
‘Not war poems.’
Owen’s expression darkened. ‘There are other subjects.’
‘Yes, of course.’
A slightly awkward pause. ‘The trouble is he just knows more than I do. You know, he’s very good… He tries to behave as if we’re equal. But in the end he’s a Gold Medallist of the Royal Society, and I left Cambridge without taking a degree. And now and again it shows.’
