The Ghost Road

by Pat Barker

  And then ruined it by arguing about the war. Or Potts and Hallet argued. Potts had been a science student at Manchester University, bright, articulate, cynical in the thorough-going way of those who have not so far encountered much to be cynical about. The war, he insisted loudly, flushed with wine, was feathering the nests of profiteers. It was being fought to safeguard access to the oil-wells of Mesopotamia. It had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with Belgian neutrality, the rights of small nations or anything like that. And if Hallet thought it had, then Hallet was a naïve idiot. Hallet came from an old army family and had been well and expensively educated to think as little as possible; confronted by Potts, he floundered, but then quickly began to formulate beliefs that he had hitherto assumed everybody shared.

  Prior and Owen exchanged secretive smiles, though neither probably could have said of what the secret consisted. Owen was playing with the fallen petals of roses he’d picked that afternoon. Pink, yellow, white roses, but no red roses, Prior saw.

  ‘What do you think?’ Potts asked, irritated by Prior’s silence.

  ‘What do I think? I think what you’re saying is basically a conspiracy theory, and like all conspiracy theories it’s optimistic. What you’re saying is, OK the war isn’t being fought for the reasons we’re told, but it is being fought for a reason. It’s not benefiting the people it’s supposed to be benefiting, but it is benefiting somebody. And I don’t believe that, you see. I think things are actually much worse than you think because there isn’t any kind of rational justification left. It’s become a self-perpetuating system. Nobody benefits. Nobody’s in control. Nobody knows how to stop.’

  Hallet looked from one to the other. ‘Look, all this just isn’t true. You’re – no, not you – people are letting themselves get demoralized because they’re having to pay a higher price than they thought they were going to have to pay. But it doesn’t alter the basic facts. We are fighting for the legitimate interests of our own country. We are fighting in defence of Belgian neutrality. We are fighting for French independence. We aren’t in Germany. They are in France.’ He looked round the table and, like a little boy, said pleadingly, ‘This is still a just war.’

  ‘You say we kill the Beast,’ Owen said slowly. ‘I say we fight because men lost their bearings in the night.’ He smiled at their expressions, and stood up. ‘Shall we open another bottle?’

  Alone that night, the smell of snuffed-out candle lingering on the air, Prior remembered the bowl of pink and gold and white roses, but did not bother to recall Potts’s and Hallet’s arguments. This house they shared was so strange in terms of what the war had hitherto meant that he wanted to fix the particular sights and sounds and smells in his mind. He felt enchanted, cocooned from anything that could possibly cause pain, though even as the thought formed, a trickle of plaster leaked from the ceiling of the back bedroom where a shell had struck, the house bleeding quietly from its unstaunchable wound.

  In the mornings he went into town, wandering round the stalls that had been set up in front of the cathedral to sell ‘souvenirs’. So many souvenirs were to be found in the rubble of the bombed city that trade was not brisk. Prior saw nothing that he wanted to buy, and anyway he had a shelf of souvenirs at home, mainly collected on his first time in France. He’d thought of them often at Craiglockhart as Rivers probed his mind for buried memories of his last few weeks in France. Souvenirs, my God. When the mind will happily wipe itself clean in the effort to forget.

  On the way home he saw Owen and Potts ahead of him, and hurried to catch them up. Owen had found a child’s lace-trimmed surplice in the rubble near the cathedral and wore it as a scarf, the cloth startlingly white against his sunburnt neck. Potts hugged a toby-jug to his chest, stoutly refusing to admit it was hideous. They turned off the road and cut through the back gardens, entering a world that nobody would have guessed at, from the comparative normality of the road.

  A labyrinth of green pathways led from garden to garden, and they slipped from one to another, over broken walls or through splintered fences, skirting bramble-filled craters, brushing down paths overgrown with weeds, with flowers that had seeded themselves and become rank, with overgrown roses that snagged their sleeves and pulled them back. Snails crunched under their boots, nettles stung their hands, cuckoo spit flecked a bare neck, but the secret path wound on. Hundreds of men, billeted as they were in these ruined houses, had broken down every wall, every fence, forced a passage through all the hedges, so that they could slip unimpeded from one patch of ground to the next. The war, fought and refought over strips of muddy earth, paradoxically gave them the freedom of animals to pass from territory to territory, unobserved. And something of an animal’s alertness too, for just as Owen pushed aside an elderberry branch at the entrance to their own garden, his ears caught a slight sound, and he held up his hand.

  Hallet was in the garden, undressing. Dappled light played across his body, lending it the illusion of fragility, the greenish tinge of ill-health, though he was as hard and sun-tanned as the rest of them. As they watched, not calling out a greeting as by now they should have done, he stepped out of his drawers and out of time, standing by the pool edge, thin, pale, his body where the uniform had hidden it starkly white. Sharp collar-bones, bluish shadows underneath. He was going to lie down in the overgrown goldfish pool with its white lilies and golden insects fumbling the pale flowers. His toes curled round the mossy edge as he gingerly lowered himself, gasping as the water hit his balls.

  They strolled across the tall grass towards him and stood looking down. Legs bloated-looking under water, silver bubbles trapped in his hair, cock slumped on his thigh like a seal hauled out on to the rocks. He looked up at them lazily, fingers straying through his bush, freeing the bubbles.

  ‘Enjoying yourself?’ Prior asked, nodding at the hand.

  Hallet laughed, shielding his eyes with his other hand, but didn’t move.

  ‘I’d be careful if I were you,’ Owen said, in a tight voice. ‘I expect those fish are ravenous.’

  And not just the fish, Prior thought.

  ‘Anybody want some wine?’ Potts asked, going into the house.

  They drank it on the terrace, Hallet lying in the pond, till it grew too cold.

  ‘You know they might leave us here,’ Owen said, squinting up into the sun.

  ‘Shut up!’ Potts said.

  Everybody touched wood, crossed fingers, groped for lucky charms: all the small, protective devices of men who have no control over their own fate. No use, Prior thought. Somewhere, outside the range of human hearing, and yet heard by all of them, a clock had begun to tick.

  11 September 1918

  I don’t think it helps Owen that I’m here. And it certainly doesn’t help me that he’s here. We’re both walking a tightrope and the last thing either of us wants or needs is to be watched by somebody who knows the full terror of the fall.

  At Craiglockhart we avoided each other. It was easy to do that there, in spite of the overcrowding. The labyrinth of corridors, so many turnings, so many alternative routes, you need never meet anybody you didn’t want to meet except, now and then, in Rivers’s room or Brock’s, yourself.

  Two incidents this week. We were all in town together and we saw wounded being rushed through the streets – some of them quite bad. Hallet and Potts stared at them, and you could see them thinking, That could be me, in a few days or weeks. Looking at the bandages, trying to imagine what was underneath. Trying not to imagine. Fear: rational, proportionate, appropriate fear. And I glanced at Owen and he was indifferent. As I was. I don’t mean unsympathetic, necessarily. (Though it’s amazing what you leave behind when the pack’s heavy.)

  The other was at supper last night. Hallet was cockahoop because he’d found some flypaper on one of those stalls in the cathedral square. Ever since we arrived we’ve been plagued by enormous wasps – Owen thinks they’re hornets – and by flies, great, buzzing, drunk, heavy, angry, dying bluebottles. And Hallet had solved it all.
There was this flypaper buzzing above our heads, revolving first one way, then the other, with its cargo of dead and dying. The sound of summer on the Somme.

  I stuck it as long as I could, then climbed up on to the table and took it down, carried it right to the end of the garden and threw it away as far as I could. A pathetic effort – it described a shallow arc and fluttered to the ground. Hallet was quite seriously offended, and of course completely bewildered.

  ‘Don’t blame me if you all get tummy upsets,’ he said.

  Owen started to laugh, and I joined in, and neither of us could stop. Hallet and Potts looked from one to the other, grinning like embarrassed dogs. They obviously thought we’d cracked. The trouble is neither of us can be sure they aren’t right. When I noticed the absence of red roses, I looked at Owen and saw him noticing that I’d noticed. It’s no use.

  My servant, Longstaffe

  I chose him at bayonet practice. He was running in with blood-curdling yells, stabbing, twisting, with-drawing, running on. I thought, My God, textbook. Nothing of the sort – I’ve realized since that what he was actually doing was once-moreing unto the breach at Agincourt.

  I had a word with him. He knew why, of course, and he wanted the job. Not a bad life, officer’s servant, if you have to be here at all. He told me he’d been a gentleman’s gentleman before the war and that clinched it. Later, when we were waiting for the train to Amiens, he owned up. He was an actor. The nearest he’d ever got to being a gentleman’s gentleman was playing a butler at the Alhambra, Bradford. A larger part than it sounded, he was anxious to point out, because in this particular production the butler did it – a departure from convention that so little pleased the inhabitants of Bradford that the play had to be taken off after seventeen days.

  Perhaps he was sure of me by then. Actually I found all that even more irresistible. Phoney gentleman’s gentleman, but then I’m a fairly phoney gentleman myself.

  An ironing board of a body, totally flat. Interesting gestures, though. He’s the only man I’ve ever known to open doors with his hips. Perfectly plain, nondescript features. No Wanted poster would ever find him, but also this curious feeling that his face could be anything he wanted it to be, even beautiful, if the part required it. And burningly ambitious. Knows tracts of Shakespeare off by heart. A curious, old-fashioned romantic patriot, though I don’t know why I say that, there’s plenty of them about. Hallet, for instance. But then they don’t all quote, ‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,’ as he did, quite without embarrassment, the other night while I was getting ready for bed. I said very sourly indeed that a more appropriate quotation for this stage of the war might be: ‘I am in blood stepped in so far that should I wade no more …’ His leap across the room was rather remarkable. He’d slapped a hand across my mouth, and we were staring at each other, dumb-struck, before either of us had time to think, his face chalk-white and I suspect mine as well, each trying to remember what the penalty is for smacking an officer in the gob. Quite possibly death.

  Since then we’ve both gone very quiet, retreating behind the barriers of rank, which are as necessary to his protection as to mine, though not retreating quickly enough. Like the French lines at Agincourt, the barriers have been thoroughly breached.

  Friday, the 13th September (No bloody comment)

  We’re not going to join the battalion. The battalion’s coming here to join us. I suppose this explains this curious out-of-time holiday we’ve been having. Ended today, anyway. Rode round inspecting billets.

  Weather also changed, which makes the other changes somehow more tolerable. Wind and rain, lowering grey clouds.

  Saturday, 14 September

  Watched the Manchesters march in, streaming rain, wet capes. Shattered faces, bloodshot eyes. Been having a bad time. One or two faces I recognized from last year. Before that? I don’t think so. Nobody talks about the losses. What they moaned about, sitting on bales of straw, peeling socks off bloody feet, was the absence of fags. They’d been rolling their own in bits of paper, torn-up envelopes, anything, no tobacco of course, had to smoke weeds they picked by the side of the road and dried by tying them to their packs whenever the sun shone. I’ve written to Mam and Sarah and everybody else I can think of, begging for Woodbines.

  Sunday, 15 September

  Joined battalion. Adjutant a nice worried-looking man who suggested I might be battalion Gas Officer (which reveals a sense of humour not otherwise apparent). Marshall-of-the-Ten-Wounds was there, striding up and down, talking loudly. Everything about him – skin, gestures, expression, posture, voice – bold, free, coarse. Unscrupulous? Perhaps, I don’t know, at any rate he doesn’t care. Enjoys life, I think. By temperament and training a warrior. Bold, cunning, ruthless, resolute, quick of decision, amazingly brave – and if that’s a human being then a human being isn’t what I am. He’s spent his entire adult life gravitating towards fighting – impossible to imagine him leading any other sort of life.

  Last night, our last night in Amiens, there was a great storm, flashes of sheet lightning, wind buffeting and slogging the house.

  I’d just got to bed when I heard a strange rumbling from above. Hallet appeared in the doorway, white-faced and staring. Only starlight to see by and the whole house with its broken windows so draughty the candle kept being blown out. We got an oil-lamp from the kitchen. Hallet said, ‘Is it the guns?’ I said, ‘Of course it bloody isn’t, it’s coming from upstairs.’

  The stairway leading to the upper floor and the nursery is narrow. We got to the nursery door, paused, looked at each other. Hallet’s face illuminated from below had bulges under the eyes like a second lid. I pushed the door open and a blast of cold wind from the broken window hit me. All I saw at first was movement at the far end of the room and then I started to laugh because it was just the rocking-horse rocking. The wind was strong enough to have got it going, I can’t think of any other explanation, and its rockers were grinding away on the bare wooden floor.

  It ought to have been an anti-climax, and at first I thought it was. We moved the thing away from the window, out of the draught, and went downstairs still laughing, telling Potts, who peered round the door of his room, there was nothing to worry about, go back to sleep, but in my own room with the lamp out I lay awake and all night long that rumbling went on in my head.

  Ten

  They didn’t have to wait long for their proper death.

  Ngea was a strong, vigorous man, the most powerful chief on the island after Rembo. Everything to live for, apparently, and yet, as one saw so often in Melanesia, he was not putting up a fight. He lay in his hall, watching the scare ghost turn and turn in the draught, and his life lay, it seemed to Rivers, like a dandelion clock on the palm of his open hand.

  His condition was so bad that, at one point, Emele, his wife, and the other women began to wail, the long, drawn out, throbbing, musical wail of the women, but then the sick man rallied slightly and the wailing was abandoned.

  Rivers said goodbye to him, promised to see him again tomorrow, though he knew he wouldn’t, and walked back to the tent. It was dark by the time he got back, and the green canvas of the tent glowed with the light of the lamp inside it. Hocart’s shadow, sharply black and elongated, reached hugely over the roof. Rivers pushed a heavy weight of damp washing aside and went in.

  Hocart was sitting cross-legged on the ground, with a pencil held sideways in his mouth, typing up his notes. ‘I had to retreat because of the midges.’

  ‘Midges?’

  ‘Whatever.’

  Hocart was careless with quinine, careless with the mosquito nets. Rivers threw himself down on his bed, clasped his hands behind his head and watched him. After a few seconds Hocart pulled his shirt over his head, and fanned himself with a sheaf of blank pages. As always the heat of the day was trapped inside the tent, and their bodies ran with sweat.

  ‘You’ve lost weight,’ Rivers said, looking at the shadows between Hocart’s ribs. ‘Rakiana, that’s the word for yo
u.’

  ‘Well,’ Hocart said, round the pencil. ‘Just as long as your pal Njiru doesn’t start trying to put me out of my misery …’

  ‘Is he my pal?’

  A quick glance. ‘You know he is.’

  They worked for a couple of hours, ate some baked yam pudding that Namboko Taru had made for them, worked again, then turned off the lamp.

  An hour or so later Rivers heard the sound of footsteps approaching the tent. Hocart had fallen asleep, one raised arm shielding his eyes, the pressure of the pillow pushing his cheek and mouth out of shape. Enough moonlight filtered through the canvas for the shadow of the passer-by to stalk across the inside of the tent. A minute later another, taller shadow followed.

  Mali? Mali was a girl of thirteen who’d recently retired to the menstrual hut for the first time. When she’d re-emerged, five days later, arrangements for her defloration were already well in hand. A young man, Runi – he’d be about eighteen – had paid her parents the two arm rings that entitled him to spend twenty consecutive nights with her, and had decided – it was his decision, the girl had no say in the matter – to share the privilege with two of his friends.

  Runi was considered a bit of a pest. Only the other day he and his two closest friends – presumably the two he’d invited to share Mali – had climbed some kanarium trees and pelted their unfortunate owners with unripe nuts. Rivers had been reminded of Rag Week. The old people grumbled, and then said, what can you expect, young men cooped up on the island sitting about like old women, instead of being off in their canoes, as they ought to have been, burning villages and taking heads.