Regeneration

  ‘What do you feel when you see them?’

  Sassoon shrugged. ‘I don’t feel anything. At the time.’

  ‘You’re not frightened?’

  ‘No. That’s why I said they weren’t nightmares.’

  ‘Afterwards?’

  ‘Guilt.’

  ‘Do they look reproachful?’

  Sassoon thought about it. ‘No. They just look puzzled. They can’t understand why I’m here.’

  A long silence. After a while, Sassoon roused himself. ‘I wrote about it. I’m sorry, I know you hate this.’

  Rivers took the sheet of paper: ‘I don’t hate it. I just feel inadequate.’

  When I’m asleep, dreaming and drowsed and warm,

  They come, the homeless ones, the noiseless dead.

  While the dim charging breakers of the storm

  Rumble and drone and bellow overhead,

  Out of the gloom they gather about my bed.

  They whisper to my heart; their thoughts are mine.

  ‘Why are you here with all your watches ended?

  ‘From Ypres to Frise we sought you in the line.’

  In bitter safety I awake, unfriended;

  And while the dawn begins with slashing rain

  I think of the Battalion in the mud.

  ‘When are you going back to them again?

  ‘Are they not still your brothers through our blood?’

  Sassoon, who’d got up and walked across to the window, turned round when a movement from Rivers seemed to indicate he’d finished. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘Don’t feel you have to say something.’

  But Rivers was not capable of saying anything. He’d taken off his glasses and was dabbing the skin round his eyes. Sassoon didn’t know what to do. He pretended to look out of the window again. At last Rivers put his glasses on again and said, ‘Does the question have an answer?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I’m going back.’

  A long indrawn breath. ‘Have you told anybody else yet?’

  ‘No, I wanted you to be the first.’

  ‘Your pacifist friends won’t be pleased.’

  ‘No, I know. I’m not looking forward to that.’ He was looking at Rivers with an extraordinary mixture of love and hostility. ‘You are, though, aren’t you? You’re pleased.’

  ‘Oh, yes. I’m pleased.’

  Part 4

  __________________

  17

  __________

  Ada Lumb arrived on the nine o’clock train. Sarah met her at the station, and they spent the morning looking round the shops. Or rather Sarah looked round the shops, while her mother, by a mixture of bullying, wheedling, cajoling, questions, speculations, wild surmises and sudden, bitter silences, extracted the whole story of Sarah’s relationship with Billy Prior. By twelve, Sarah was glad to rest her feet, if not her ears, in a café, where they sat at a table for two by the window and ordered ham and chips. The alternative was steak and kidney pie, but Ada was having none of that. ‘You can’t trust anything with pastry wrapped round it,’ she said. ‘What they find to put in it, God knows. You’ve only got to look in the butchers to see there is nowt.’

  Sarah was not deceived. She knew once the waitress was out of earshot she was in for a dollop of advice on rather more serious matters. She wiped a hole in the condensation on the window. Outside the people were moving shadows, the pavements of Princes Street jumped and streamed with rain. ‘Just in time,’ she said.

  ‘I suppose you let him in?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You don’t say “what”, Sarah. You say “pardon”.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said, I suppose you let him in?’

  ‘Isn’t that my business, Mam?’

  ‘Would be if you were gunna cope with the consequences.’

  ‘There aren’t going to be any consequences.’

  ‘You think you know it all, don’t you? Well, let me tell you something, something you don’t know. In every one of them factories there’s a bloke with a pin. Every tenth one gets a pin stuck in it. Not every other one, they know we’re not fools. Every tenth.’

  ‘Nice work, if you can get it.’

  ‘Easier than bringing up the kid.’ Ada speared a chip. ‘The point is you gotta put a value on yourself. You don’t, they won’t. You’re never gunna get engaged till you learn to keep your knees together. Yeh, you can laugh, but men don’t value what’s dished out free. Mebbe they shouldn’t be like that, mebbe they should all be different. But they are like that and your not gunna change them.’

  The waitress came to remove their plates. ‘Anything else, madam?’

  Ada switched to her genteel voice. ‘Yes, we’d like to see the menu, please.’ She waited till the waitress had gone, then leant forward to deliver the knock-out blow. ‘No man likes to think he’s sliding in on another man’s leavings.’

  Sarah collapsed in giggles. ‘Mam.’

  ‘Aye, well, you can laugh.’ She looked round the café, then down at the table, smoothing the white table cloth with brown-spotted hands. ‘Nice, isn’t it?’

  Sarah stopped giggling. ‘Yeh, Mam, it’s nice.’

  ‘I wish you worked somewhere like this.’

  ‘Mam, the wages are rubbish. That girl didn’t live at home, she wouldn’t eat.’

  ‘She’s not bright yellow, though, is she?’

  ‘She not bright anything. She looks anaemic to me.’

  ‘But you meet nice people, Sarah. I mean I know some of the women you work with, and I’m not saying they’re not good sorts – some of them – but you got to admit, Sarah, they’re rough.’

  ‘I’m rough.’

  ‘You could’ve been a lady’s maid if you’d stuck in. That’s what gets me about you, you can put it on as well as anybody when you like, but it’s too much bloody bother.’

  The waitress returned with the menu.

  ‘I don’t think I could eat anything else, Mam.’

  Ada looked disappointed. ‘Aw, go on. It’s not often I get a chance to spoil you.’

  ‘All right, then. I’ll have the tapioca, please.’

  Sarah ate in silence for a while, aware of her mother watching her. At last, she said, ‘Trouble is, Mam, the block chipped and you don’t like it.’

  Ada shook her head. It was true all the same, Sarah thought. Ada, ox-jawed, determined, ruthless, had struggled to bring up her two girls alone, and yet, when it came to teaching the girls, she’d tried to encourage all the opposite qualities. Prettiness, pliability – at least the appearance of it – all the arts of pleasing. This was how women got on in the world, and Ada had made sure her daughters knew it. As little girls, Cynthia and Sarah had gone to the tin-roofed chapel at the end of the road, but as soon as their bodices revealed curves rather than straight lines, Ada had called them to her and announced their conversion to Anglo-Catholicism. The Church of St Edmund, King and Martyr, served a very nice neighbourhood. There, Cynthia had obediently ogled the young men in the choir, while Sarah, missing the point completely, had fallen in love with the Virgin Mary. Ada’s ambition was to see her daughters go down that aisle in white, on the arm of some young man with a steady income. If, subsequently, early widowhood left them with the income and not the man, then they were indeed blessed. Whether Ada was a widow or not, Sarah didn’t know. It had never been made clear whether her father had departed this life, the town, or merely his marriage. Certainly black bombazine figured prominently in Ada’s wardrobe, but then it was a material that conferred an air of awesome respectability at minimal cost. A dispiriting way to bring girls up, Sarah thought; to make marriage the sole end of female existence, and yet deny that love between men and women was possible. Ada did deny it. In her world, men loved women as the fox loves the hare. And women loved men as the tapeworm loves the gut. Nor did this view of life generate much sympathy for other women. Ada despised the hares, those who ‘got caught’. If a girl came into the shop crying, she might sell her Dr Lawson’s Cure, the Sovereign R
emedy for Female Blockages and Obstructions (ninepence a bottle, and totally useless), but her sympathy ended there. The business of her life was scratching a living together; her recreation was reading romances, which she devoured three or four at a time, sitting in her rocking chair by the fire, sucking mint humbugs and laughing till her ribs ached.

  ‘How’s the tea hut going, Mam?’ Sarah asked, pushing her plate away.

  ‘Fine. I’m up there every day now.’

  Ada had taken to selling tea to soldiers, young conscripts who did their six weeks’ training in one of the local parks before being shipped out to France. The hut, which in peace time had been the boating lake ticket office, she’d turned into a small café.

  ‘How much do you charge?’

  ‘Fivepence.’

  ‘My God.’

  Ada shrugged. ‘No competition.’

  ‘You’re a war profiteer you are, Mam. In a small way.’

  ‘Wouldn’t be small if I could get me hands on some money. You could do soup and all sorts, specially with the winter coming on. But it’s the same old story. You need money to make money.’

  Ada paid the bill, counting out the coppers with those thin, lined hands that Sarah could never see without pain.

  ‘You know Billy?’ Sarah asked suddenly.

  ‘No, I don’t, Sarah. I’ve not had the pleasure of an introduction.’

  ‘Well if you’ll just listen. If he gets slung out the hospital this time, he’ll have a bit of leave, and we thought we might… We thought we might drop in on you.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Is that all you can say?’

  ‘What am I supposed to say? Look, Sarah, he’s an officer. What do you think he wants you for?’

  ‘How should I know? Breath of fresh air, perhaps.’

  ‘Bloody gale.’

  ‘If he does come, you will be all right with him, won’t you?’

  ‘If he’s all right with me, I’ll be all right with him.’ Ada slipped a penny under the saucer. ‘But you’re a bloody fool.’

  ‘Why am I?’

  ‘You know why. Next time he starts waving his old doo-lally around, you think about that pin.’

  Sassoon arrived late to find Graves sitting by himself in the bar. ‘Sorry I’m late.’

  ‘That’s all right. Owen was keeping me amused, but then he had to go. Somebody coming to see the printer.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. I’d forgotten that.’

  ‘Good game?’

  ‘Not bad.’ Sassoon detected, or thought he detected, a slight chill. ‘It’s the only thing that keeps me sane.’

  ‘Last time you wrote you were complaining about playing golf with lunatics.’

  ‘Ssh, keep your voice down. One of them’s just behind you.’

  Graves turned round. ‘Seems fairly normal to me.’

  ‘Oh, Anderson’s all right. Throws a temper tantrum whenever he looks like losing half a crown.’

  ‘You’ve been known to do that yourself.’

  ‘Only because you were fooling around with a niblick instead of playing properly.’ He raised a hand to summon the waiter. ‘Have you had time to look at the menu?’

  ‘I’ve had time to memorize it, Siegfried.’

  At the table Graves said, ‘What do you find to talk to Owen about? He says he doesn’t play golf. And I don’t suppose for a moment he hunts.’

  ‘How acute your social perceptions are, Robert. No, I shouldn’t think he’d been on a horse in his life before he joined the army. Poetry, mainly.’

  ‘Oh, he writes, does he?’

  ‘No need to say it like that. He’s quite good. Matter of fact, I’ve got one here.’ He tapped his breast pocket. ‘I’ll show you after lunch.’

  ‘He struck me as being a bit shaky.’

  ‘Did he? I don’t think he is.’

  ‘I’m just telling you how he struck me.’

  ‘He can’t be all that shaky. They’re throwing him out at the end of the month. He was probably just overawed at meeting another Published Poet.’

  A slight pause.

  ‘Aren’t you due to be boarded soon?’

  ‘The end of the month.’

  ‘Have you decided what you’re going to do?’

  ‘I’ve told Rivers I’ll go back, provided the War Office gives me a written guarantee that I’ll be sent back to France.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought you were in much of a position to bargain.’

  ‘Rivers seems to think he can wangle it. He didn’t say “wangle” of course.’

  ‘So it’s all over? Thank God.’

  ‘I’ve told him I won’t withdraw anything. And I’ve told him it’s got to be France. I’m not going to let them put me behind a desk filling in forms for the rest of the war.’

  ‘Yes, I think that’s right.’

  ‘Trouble is I don’t trust them. Even Rivers. I mean, on the one hand he says there’s nothing wrong with me and they’ll pass me for general service overseas – there’s nothing else they can do – and then in the next breath he tells me I’ve got a very powerful “anti-war complex”. I don’t even know what it means.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what it means. It means you’re obsessed. Do you know, you never talk about the future any more? Yes, I know what you’re going to say. How can you? Sass, we sat on a hill in France and we talked about the future. We made plans. The night before the Somme, we made plans. You couldn’t do that now. A few shells, a few corpses, and you’ve lost heart.’

  ‘How many corpses?’

  ‘The point is…’

  ‘The point is 102,000 last month alone. You’re right, I am obsessed. I never forget it for a second, and neither should you. Robert, if you had any real courage you wouldn’t acquiesce the way you do.’

  Graves flushed with anger. ‘I’m sorry you think that. I should hate to think I’m a coward. I believe in keeping my word. You agreed to serve, Siegfried. Nobody’s asking you to change your opinions, or even to keep quiet about them, but you agreed to serve, and if you want the respect of the kind of people you’re trying to influence – the Bobbies and the Tommies – you’ve got to be seen to keep your word. They won’t understand if you turn round in the middle of the war and say “I’m sorry, I’ve changed my mind.” To them, that’s just bad form. They’ll say you’re not behaving like a gentleman – and that’s the worst thing they can say about anybody.’

  ‘Look, Robert, the people who’re keeping this war going don’t give a damn about the “Bobbies” and the “Tommies”. And they don’t let “gentlemanly behaviour” stand in the way either when it comes to feathering their own nests.’ He made a gesture of despair. ‘And as for “bad form” and “gentlemanly behaviour” – that’s just suicidal stupidity.’

  Over coffee, the conversation changed tack.

  ‘There’s something I didn’t tell you in June,’ Graves said.

  ‘Do you remember Peter?’

  ‘I never met him.’

  ‘No, but you remember him? You remember about him? Well, he was arrested. Soliciting outside the local barracks. Actually not very far away from the school.’

  ‘Oh, Robert, I’m sorry. Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘How could I? You were in no state to think about anybody else.’

  ‘This was in July, was it?’

  ‘Same post I got your Declaration in.’ Graves smiled. ‘It was quite a morning.’

  ‘Yes, I can imagine.’

  Graves hesitated. ‘It’s only fair to tell you that… since that happened my affections have been running in more normal channels. I’ve been writing to a girl called Nancy Nicholson. I really think you’ll like her. She’s great fun. The… the only reason I’m telling you this is… I’d hate you to have any misconceptions. About me. I’d hate you to think I was homosexual even in thought. Even if it went no further.’

  It was difficult to know what to say. ‘I’m very pleased for you, Robert. About Miss Nicholson, I mean.’

 
‘Good, that’s all right, then.’

  ‘What happened to Peter?’

  ‘You’re not going to believe this. They’re sending him to Rivers.’

  This was a bigger, and nastier, shock than Sassoon knew how to account for. ‘Why?’

  ‘What do you mean, “Why?”? To be cured, of course.’

  Sassoon smiled faintly. ‘Yes. Of course.’

  The munitions factory at night looked like hell, Sarah thought, as she toiled down the muddy lane towards it, and saw the red smouldering fires reflected from a bank of low cloud, like an artificial sunset. At the gate she fell in with the other girls all walking in the same direction, all subdued, with that clogged, dull look of people who’d just switched to night shift and hadn’t yet managed to adjust.

  In the cloakroom, donning ankle-length green overalls, pulling on caps, dragging at a final cigarette, were thirty or forty women. Smells of sweat, lily-of-the-valley, setting lotion. After a while conversations sprang up, the women appeared more normal, even jolly for a time, until the supervisor appeared in the doorway, jabbing her finger at the clock.

  ‘Your mam get off all right, then?’ Lizzie asked, as they were walking down the stairs to the basement workroom.

  ‘Got the seven o’clock. She’ll be back by midnight, so it’s not so bad.’

  ‘How did it go?’

  Sarah pulled a face. ‘All right. You know, I swore I wasn’t gunna tell her about Billy, but she winkled it all out of me.’

  ‘Well, she is your mam. She’s bound to be worried.’

  ‘Hm. All I could get out of her was: “What does he see in you?” ’S a nice thing to say to your daughter, isn’t it? I says, “A breath of fresh air.” As far as I can make out they’re all disappearing up their own arseholes up there.’