A cold, unused room. All the farm paperwork was done in the kitchen. He decided to take his letter along and finish it there, but then lingered, fingering the leather of the desk top and looking at the picture that hung above the empty grate. At Knowles Bank it had hung in the same position, above the fireplace, in his father’s study. As a picture it could hardly have been more appropriate to his father’s dual role as priest and speech therapist, since it showed the Apostles at Pentecost immediately after they had received the gift of tongues. There they sat, each under his own personal flame, rendered in an instant fluent, persuasive and articulate, not merely in their own language but in all known tongues. Rivers remembered the bishop’s sermon one Pentecost when he’d explained that the gift of tongues as bestowed upon the Apostles had absolutely nothing to do with ‘the gift of tongues’ as bestowed regularly every Sunday on uneducated riff-raff in various tin-roofed chapels about the diocese. The gift of Pentecost had made the Apostles comprehensible in all known languages. And there they sat still, looking, Rivers couldn’t help thinking, most unchristianly smug about it all.
He’d sat with other boys – his father’s pupils – underneath that picture for many a long hour, stumbling over the consonants of his own language, remembering to hold down the back of his tongue, project his breath in an even flow, etc., etc. Sometimes his father would walk with him up and down the room, since he believed the measured pace helped to regulate the flow of breath. Rivers hadn’t been the star pupil in those classes, not by any means. If anything he’d made rather less progress than the rest, in spite of – or because of? – having his teacher with him all the time. The house was full of stammering boys, any age from ten to nineteen, and at least it meant he was not the only one. It had had another advantage too, he remembered. While the boys were there, the Reverend Charles Dodgson stayed away. Mr Dodgson didn’t like boys. As soon as they left at Christmas or in the summer holidays, he arrived, taking lessons every evening after dinner. Rivers, from long exposure to other people’s speech impediments, could sum up the main features of a stammer almost as quickly as his father. Dodgson found m difficult, and p in consonant combinations, particularly in the middle of words, but his arch enemy was hard c.
During the day there were boating trips on the river. Dodgson and the four Rivers children, himself, Charles, Ethel and – Dodgson’s favourite – Katharine. He’d never enjoyed those trips much, and neither, he thought, had Charles, though probably that was no more than the slight pique of two Victorian schoolboys, finding themselves, for the first time in their lives, not of the preferred sex. Afterwards, during those apparently endless summer evenings, there would be croquet on the lawn, Rivers’s father and Dodgson playing, the children watching. There was a photograph of them on the desk, doing just that, he and Charles leaning back against the garden roller, no doubt getting grass stains on their white shirts, the two little girls, his sisters, under the shade of the beech tree. If he tried hard, he could recall the feel of the roller against his shoulder blades, the heat of the sun on the back of his neck.
He had one other memory of Dodgson. One evening he’d crept close to the open window of his father’s study, sat down with his back to the wall and listened to the lesson in progress. Why he’d done this he couldn’t now remember, except that it hadn’t felt like eavesdropping, since he knew nothing private was likely to be said. Perhaps he’d just wanted to hear Dodgson put through the same routine he and the other boys were put through. Perhaps he’d wanted to see him cut down to size. Dodgson had just embarked on the sentence about the careful cat catching the mouse – a simple enough tale, but already, in Dodgson’s mouth, threatening to become an epic. Rivers listened to his father’s advice, the same advice, basically, that he got, though conveyed without that peculiar note of fraught patience. He thought suddenly, this is nonsense. It doesn’t help to remember to keep your tongue down, it doesn’t help to think about the flow of breath. So he’d thought, sweeping away his father’s life work in a single minute as twelve-year-old boys are apt to do. He’d raised his head very cautiously above the window sill, and seen his father sitting behind the desk – this desk – his back to the window, clean pink neck showing above clean white collar, broad shoulders straining the cloth of his jacket. He stared at the back of his neck, at the neck of the man whom he had, in a way, just killed, and he didn’t feel sad or guilty about it at all. He felt glad.
Later that summer he’d given a talk to the speech therapy group on monkeys. M was to him what c was to Dodgson, but he was interested in monkeys, and still more interested in Darwin’s theory of evolution, which by this time had achieved acceptance in some circles. Knowles Bank was not among them. His father had been furious, not because Rivers had stumbled over every single m without exception – though indeed he had – but because he’d dared suggest that Genesis was no more than the creation myth of a Bronze Age people. Dinner that night was a strained occasion. Father angry, mother upset, Charles covertly sympathetic, sisters goggle-eyed and making the most of it, Rivers himself outwardly subdued, inwardly triumphant. For the first time in his life, he’d forced his father to listen to what he had to say, and not merely to the way he’d said it.
And yet, Rivers thought, running his hands across the scarred leather of the desk top, the relationship between father and son is never simple, and never over. Death certainly doesn’t end it. In the past year he’d thought more about his father than he’d done since he was a child. Only recently it had occurred to him that if some twelve-year-old boy had crept up to his window at Craiglockhart, as he’d done to his father’s window at Knowles Bank, he’d have seen a man sitting at a desk with his back to the window, listening to some patient, with a stammer far worse than Dodgson’s, try and fail to reach the end of a sentence. Only that boy would not have been his son.
The unfinished letter to Siegfried lay on the desk. He’d got as far as a comment on the weather, and there the letter had ground to a halt. What he did so easily in conversation, always nudging Siegfried gently in the same direction, and yet always avoiding any suggestion of pressure, was a feat he apparently could not perform on paper. Perhaps he was just too tired. He told himself the letter could wait till morning.
He picked up the lamp, pushed aside the heavy dark red curtains and opened the window. A big dizzy moth flew in, with pale wings and a fat, furry body, and began bumping against the ceiling. He leant out of the window, smelling roses he couldn’t see. The wind had fallen completely now, giving way to a breathless hush. Faintly, over dark hedges and starlit fields, came the soft thud-thud of the guns. When he’d first arrived, suffering from the usual medley of physical and neurasthenic symptoms – headaches, dry mouth, pounding heart – he’d confused that sound with the throbbing of blood in his head. Then one night, lying sleepless, he’d heard the water jug vibrating in the bowl, and realized what it was that he kept hearing. Siegfried must have heard it in June when he was at home convalescing from his wound.
Perhaps he’d better write tonight after all. He closed the window, and sat down at the desk. The moth’s huge shadow, flickering over the walls and ceiling, darkened the page, as, drawing the pad towards him, he tore off the sheet and started again. My dear Siegfried…
‘What draft is this?’
‘Lost count,’ Owen said. ‘You did tell me to sweat my guts out.’
‘Did I really? What an inelegant expression. “What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?” I see we got to the slaughterhouse in the end.’ Sassoon read through the poem. When he’d finished, he didn’t immediately comment.
‘It’s better, isn’t it?’
‘Better? It’s transformed.’ He read it again. ‘Though when you look at the sense… You do realize you’ve completely contradicted yourself, don’t you? You start by saying there is no consolation, and then you say there is.’
‘Not consolation. Pride in the sacrifice.’
‘Isn’t that consolation?’
‘If it is, it??
?s justifiable. There’s a point beyond which —’
‘I don’t see that.’
‘There’s a point beyond which you can’t press the meaninglessness. Even if the courage is being abused, it’s still…’
Owen leapt up, went to the drawer of his washstand and produced the typescript Sassoon had lent him. He began leafing quickly but carefully through it. Sassoon, watching, thought, he’s getting better. No stammer. Quick, decisive movements. The self-confidence to contradict his hero. And the poem had been a revelation.
‘Look, you do exactly the same thing,’ Owen said, coming across with the sheet he wanted.
O my brave brown companions, when your souls
Flock silently away, and the eyeless dead
Shame the wild beast of battle on the ridge,
Death will stand grieving in that field of war
Since your unvanquished hardihood is spent.
And through some mooned Valhalla there will pass
Battalions and battalions, scarred from hell;
The unreturning army that was youth;
The legions who have suffered and are dust.
‘What’s that if not pride in the sacrifice?’
‘Grief? All right, point taken. I just don’t like the idea of… making it out to be less of a horror than it really is.’ He looked down at the page. ‘I think you should publish this.’
‘You mean in the Hydra?’
‘No, I mean in the Nation. Give me a fair copy and I’ll see what I can do. You’ll need a different title, though. “Anthem for…”’ He thought for a moment, crossed one word out, substituted another. ‘There you are,’ he said, handing the page back, smiling. ‘“Anthem for Doomed Youth.”’
The main corridor of the hospital stretched the whole length of the building, with wards opening off on either side. From one of these came an unpleasant smell which Madge said was gangrene, though Sarah didn’t believe she knew. Ward Fourteen was overcrowded, the beds packed close together, men sitting up and staring with interest at the two girls hesitating just inside the door. Most of them looked reasonably well and cheerful. The trouble was that with their cropped heads and hospital blue uniforms, they also looked exactly alike.
‘I won’t recognize him,’ Madge said in a frantic whisper.
‘Go on,’ Sarah said, giving her a shove.
They started to walk up the ward. Madge stared from bed to bed with a dazed look. She really mightn’t recognize him at this rate, Sarah thought, but then a voice cried, ‘Madge!’ A dark-haired man with a gingery moustache was sitting up, waving and looking delighted to see her. Madge walked forward cautiously, located the bandaged left arm, checked to see that the swelling beneath the counterpane was the right length and breadth to consist of two legs. He looked all right. He planted a smacking kiss on Madge’s lips, and Sarah looked away in embarrassment, only to realize she was herself the object of amused appreciation from all parts of the ward.
‘Eh, look, I’ve brought you these,’ Madge said. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m all right. Went right through,’ he said. ‘Just here.’ He pointed to his biceps. ‘No gangrene, no nothing.’
‘You were lucky.’
‘I’ll say. I’m gunna be in here two weeks they reckon, and then I’ll have a bit of leave before I go back.’
‘This is Sarah,’ Madge said.
‘Pleased to meet you.’
They shook hands. Madge was now sitting by the bed, beginning, cautiously, to bask in the admiration of her restored lover and to plan what they would do on his leave. After this had been going on for a while, Sarah began to feel distinctly green and hairy. ‘I’ll just have a walk round the grounds,’ she said. ‘It’s a bit hot in here.’
‘Yeh, all right,’ Madge said.
‘I’ll see you at the main entrance, then. Half an hour?’
They hardly noticed her go. None of these men was badly wounded, and several of them whistled and clicked their tongues as she walked past. The whole atmosphere of the ward was happy. The general air of relief at being out of it was what chiefly came across, though she supposed there must be other wards where the wounds were not so slight.
Outside, in the corridor, she looked up and down, realizing she didn’t know in which direction the exit lay. She was surrounded by notices directing people to the pharmacy, the path lab, the X-ray department, everywhere except the way out. She tried walking to her left, but her way was blocked by a large notice saying: THEATRES. NO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL BEYOND THIS POINT. She turned right, and shortly afterwards came to a corridor she thought she recognized, and began to walk along it, but the feeling of familiarity soon vanished. The building was enormous, and seemed to have no plan, no structure to it, at all. To add to the sense of unreality most of the notices referred to its civilian use before the war. Maternity, she read, and then the swing doors banged open to reveal beds full of people who were most unlikely ever to give birth.
Obviously she ought to stop and ask somebody, but then everybody seemed to be in such a hurry, and so grim-faced. At last she found a door that led out to the grounds at the back of the hospital, where the tall chimney of an incinerator dribbled brownish-yellow smoke. Here, a huge tent had been erected and this served as another ward. She glanced into the interior, which was golden in the sunlight filtered through the roof, but the atmosphere was close, stifling, a humming darkness in which the clumsiness of bandages and the itch of healing skin must be almost intolerable.
A constant traffic of nurses and orderlies passed between the tent and the main building, and, feeling herself to be in the way, Sarah looked around for somewhere she could find temporary refuge and not bother anybody. There was a conservatory along the side of the hospital, facing east so that at the moment it caught the full warmth of the sun. Shadowy figures sat inside, and the door was open so she thought she might perhaps sit there.
Once across the threshold she became aware of a silence, a silence caused, she suspected, by her entrance. She was still dazzled by the brightness of the light outside and the relative dimness of the interior, and so she had to blink several times before she saw them, a row of figures in wheelchairs, but figures that were no longer the size and shape of adult men. Trouser legs sewn short; empty sleeves pinned to jackets. One man had lost all his limbs, and his face was so drained, so pale, he seemed to have left his blood in France as well. The blue of the hospital uniform looked garish against his skin. They’d been pushed out here to get the sun, but not right outside, and not at the front of the hospital where their mutilations might have been seen by passers-by. They stared at her, but not as the men had stared on the other ward, smiling, trying to catch her eye. This was a totally blank stare. If it contained anything at all, it was fear. Fear of her looking at the empty trouser legs. Fear of her not looking at them. She stood there, unable to go forward, and unable, for a few crucial moments, to turn back, until a nurse bustled up to her and said, ‘Who is it you want to see?’
‘I’m just waiting for a friend. It’s all right, I’ll wait outside.’
She backed out, walking away in the sunlight, feeling their eyes on her, thinking that perhaps if she’d been prepared, if she’d managed to smile, to look normal, it might have been better. But no, she thought, there was nothing she could have done that would have made it better. Simply by being there, by being that inconsequential, infinitely powerful creature: a pretty girl, she had made everything worse. Her sense of her own helplessness, her being forced to play the role of Medusa when she meant no harm, merged with the anger she was beginning to feel at their being hidden away like that. If the country demanded that price, then it should bloody well be prepared to look at the result. She strode on through the heat, not caring where she was going, furious with herself, the war… Everything.
∗
Prior took off his clothes, put on the white hospital gown and sat on the bed to await the arrival of the doctor. This was his second visit. The first time he’d seen Eaglesham,
the consultant, a big, kindly, grizzled bear of a man who’d said very little but whom he’d trusted at once. He’d raised his eyebrows when Prior blew into the Vitalograph or whatever the machine was called, but he hadn’t said what he thought, and Prior had not wanted to ask. It wasn’t going to be Eaglesham today, though. A much younger man with a sallow skin and slick dark hair was popping in and out of the other cubicles. Prior looked down at his thin white legs. He didn’t see why he had to take all his clothes off. Were they trying to cater for some unforeseen medical emergency in which his lungs had slipped into his pelvis? He didn’t like the way the gown fastened at the back. He didn’t mind displaying his wares, if he liked the other person and the time seemed right, but he did like the illusion at least that the act was voluntary. He could hear the doctor’s voice in the cubicle next door, talking to a man who couldn’t complete a sentence without coughing. At last the curtains were pushed aside and the doctor came in, followed by a nurse, clasping a beige file to her bosom. Prior slipped off the robe and stood up to be examined.
‘Second-Lieutenant Prior.’
‘Mister’ he wanted to say. He said, ‘Yes.’
‘I see there’s some question whether you’re fit to go back. I mean apart from the state of your nerves.’
Prior said nothing at all.
The doctor waited. ‘Well, let’s have a look at you.’