Regeneration

  Rivers was taken back. ‘I want you to say—’

  ‘Well, I really don’t think they were. I suppose it is possible someone might find being locked up in a loony bin a fairly emasculating experience?’

  ‘I think most people do.’ Though not many said so. ‘I want you to say what you think.’

  No response.

  ‘You say you woke up vomiting?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I wonder why? I mean I can quite see the sight of me in a post-mortem apron might not be to everybody’s taste—’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What was the most frightening thing about the dream?’

  ‘The snake.’

  A long silence.

  ‘Do you often dream about snakes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Another long silence. ‘Well, go on, then,’ Anderson exploded at last. ‘That’s what you Freudian Johnnies are on about all the time, isn’t it? Nudity, snakes, corsets. You might at least try to look grateful, Rivers. It’s a gift.’

  ‘I think if I’d made any association at all with the snake – and after all what possible relevance can my associations have? – it was probably with the one that’s crawling up your lapel.’

  Anderson looked down at the caduceus badge of the RAMC which he wore on his tunic, and then across at the same badge on Rivers’s tunic.

  ‘What the er snake might suggest is that medicine is an issue between yourself and your father-in-law?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not at all?’

  ‘No.’

  Another long silence. Anderson said, ‘It depends what you mean by an issue.’

  ‘A subject on which there is habitual disagreement.’

  ‘No. Naturally my time in France has left me with a certain level of distaste for the practice of medicine, but that’ll go in time. There’s no issue. I have a wife and child to support.’

  ‘You’re how old?’

  ‘Thirty-six.’

  ‘And your little boy?’

  Anderson’s expression softened. ‘Five.’

  ‘School fees coming up?’

  ‘Yes. I’ll be all right once I’ve had a rest. Basically, I’m paying for last summer. Do you know, at one point we averaged ten amputations a day? Every time I was due for leave it was cancelled.’ He looked straight at Rivers. ‘There’s no doubt what the problem is. Tiredness.’

  ‘I still find the vomiting puzzling. Especially since you say you feel no more than a mild disinclination for medicine.’

  ‘I didn’t say mild, I said temporary.’

  ‘Ah. What in particular do you find difficult?’

  ‘I don’t know that there is anything particular.’

  A long silence.

  Anderson said, ‘I’m going to start timing these silences, Rivers.’

  ‘It’s already been done. Some of the younger ones had a sweepstake on it. I’m not supposed to know.’

  ‘Blood.’

  ‘And you attribute this to the ten amputations a day?’

  ‘No, I was all right then. The… er… problem started later. I wasn’t at Étaples when it happened, I’d been moved forward – the 13th CCS. They brought in this lad. He was a Frenchman, he’d escaped from the German lines. Covered in mud. There wasn’t an inch of skin showing anywhere. And you know it’s not like ordinary mud, it’s five, six inches thick. Bleeding. Frantic with pain. No English.’ A pause. ‘I missed it. I treated the minor wounds and missed the major one.’ He gave a short, hissing laugh. ‘Not that the minor ones were all that minor. He started to haemorrhage, and… there was nothing I could do. I just stood there and watched him bleed to death.’ His face twisted. ‘It pumped out of him.’

  It was a while before either of them stirred. Then Anderson said, ‘If you’re wondering why that one, I don’t know. I’ve seen many worse deaths.’

  ‘Have you told your family?’

  ‘No. They know I don’t like the idea of going back to medicine, but they don’t know why.’

  ‘Have you talked to your wife?’

  ‘Now and then. You have to think about the practicalities, Rivers. I’ve devoted all my adult life to medicine. I’ve no private income to tide me over. And I do have a wife and a child.’

  ‘Public health might be a possibility.’

  ‘It doesn’t have much… dash about it, does it?’

  ‘Is that a consideration?’

  Anderson hesitated. ‘Not with me.’

  ‘Well, we can talk about the practicalities later. You still haven’t told me when you said enough.’

  Anderson smiled. ‘You make it sound like a decision. I don’t know that lying on the floor in a pool of piss counts as a decision.’ He paused. ‘The following morning. On the ward. I remember them all looking down at me. Awkward situation, really. What do you do when the doctor breaks down?’

  At intervals, as Rivers was doing his rounds as orderly officer for the day, he thought about this dream. It was disturbing in many ways. At first he’d been inclined to see the post-mortem apron as expressing no more than a lack of faith in him, or, more accurately, in his methods, since obviously any doctor who spends much time so attired is not meeting with uniform success on the wards. This lack of faith he knew to be present. Anderson, in his first interview, had virtually refused treatment, claiming that rest, the endless pursuit of golf balls, was all that he required. He had some knowledge of Freud, though derived mainly from secondary or prejudiced sources, and disliked, or perhaps feared, what he thought he knew. There was no particular reason why Anderson, who was, after all, a surgeon, should be well informed about Freudian therapy, but his misconceptions had resulted in a marked reluctance to reveal his dreams. Yet his dreams could hardly be ignored, if only because they were currently keeping the whole of one floor of the hospital awake. His room-mate, Featherstone, had deteriorated markedly as the result of Anderson’s nightly outbursts. Still, that was another problem. As soon as Anderson had revealed that extreme horror of blood, Rivers had begun tentatively to attach another meaning to the post-mortem apron. If Anderson could see no way out of returning to the practice of a profession which must inevitably, even in civilian life, recall the horrors he’d witnessed in France, then perhaps he was desperate enough to have considered suicide? That might account both for the post-mortem apron and for the extreme terror he’d felt on waking. At the moment he didn’t know Anderson well enough to be able to say whether suicide was a possibility or not, but it would certainly need to be borne in mind.

  The smell of chlorine became stronger as they reached the bottom of the stairs. Sassoon felt Graves hesitate. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I could do without the smell.’

  ‘Well, let’s not bother—’

  ‘No, go on.’

  Sassoon pushed the door open. The pool was empty, a green slab between white walls. They began to undress, putting their clothes on one of the benches that lined the end wall.

  ‘What’s your room-mate like?’ Graves asked.

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Dotty?’

  ‘Not visibly. I gather the subject of German spies is best avoided. Oh, and I’ve found out why there aren’t any locks on the doors. One of them killed himself three weeks ago.’

  Graves caught sight of the scar on Sassoon’s shoulder and stopped to look at it. It was curiously restful to submit to this scrutiny, which was prolonged, detailed and impersonal, like one small boy examining the scabs on another’s knee. ‘Oh, very neat.’

  ‘Yes, isn’t it? The doctors kept telling me how beautiful it was.’

  ‘You were lucky, you know. An inch further down—’

  ‘Not as lucky as you.’ Sassoon glanced at the shrapnel wound on Graves’s thigh. ‘An inch further up—’

  ‘If this is leading up to a joke about ladies’ choirs, forget it. I’ve heard them all.’

  Sassoon dived in. A green, silent world, no sound except the bubble of his escaping breath, no feeling, once
the shock of cold was over, except the tightening of his chest that at last forced him to the surface, air, noise, light, slopping waves crashing in on him again. He swam to the side and held on. Graves’s dark head bobbed purposefully along at the other side of the pool. Sassoon thought, we joke about it, but it happens. There’d been a boy in the hospital, while he was lying there with that neat little hole in his shoulder. The boy – he couldn’t have been more than nineteen – had a neat little hole too. Only his was between the legs. The dressings had been terrible to witness, and you had to witness them. No treatment in that overcrowded ward had been private. Twice a day the nurses came in with the creaking trolley, and the boy’s eyes followed them up the ward.

  Sassoon shut the lid on the memory and dived for Graves’s legs. Graves twisted and fought, his head a black rock splintering white foam. ‘Lay off,’ he gasped at last, pushing Sassoon away. ‘Some of us don’t have the full complement of lungs.’

  The pool was beginning to fill up. After a few more minutes, they climbed out and started to dress. Head muffled in the folds of his shirt, Graves said, ‘By the way, I think there’s something I ought to tell you. I’m afraid I told Rivers about your plan to assassinate Lloyd George.’

  Rivers’s round as duty officer ended in the kitchens. Mrs Cooper, her broad arms splashed with fat from giant fryingpans, greeted him with an embattled smile. ‘What d’ y’ think of the beef stew last night, then, sir?’

  ‘I don’t believe I’ve ever tasted anything quite like it.’

  Mrs Cooper’s smile broadened. ‘We do the best we can with the materials available, sir.’ Her expression became grim and confiding. ‘That beef was walking.’

  Rivers got to his room a few minutes after ten and found Sassoon waiting, his hair damp, smelling of chlorine. ‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ Rivers said, unlocking the door. ‘I’ve just been pretending to know something about catering. Come in.’ He waved Sassoon to the chair in front of the desk, tossed his cap and cane to one side, and was about to unbuckle his belt when he remembered that the Director of Medical Services was due to visit the hospital some time that day. He sat down behind the desk and drew Sassoon’s file towards him. ‘Did you sleep well?’

  ‘Very well, thank you.’

  ‘You look rested. I enjoyed meeting Captain Graves.’

  ‘Yes, I gather you found it quite informative.’

  ‘Ab.’ Rivers paused in the act of opening the file. ‘You mean he told me something you’d rather I didn’t know?’

  ‘No, not necessarily. Just something I might have preferred to tell you myself.’ A moment’s silence, then Sassoon burst out, ‘What I can’t understand is how somebody of Graves’s intelligence can can can have such a shaky grasp of of rhetoric.’

  Rivers smiled. ‘You were going to kill Lloyd George rhetorically, were you?’

  ‘I wasn’t going to kill him at all. I said I felt like killing him, but it was no use, because they’d only shut me up in a lunatic asylum, “like Richard Dadd of glorious memory”. There you are, exact words.’ He looked round the room. ‘Though as things have turned out –’

  ‘This is not a lunatic asylum. You are not locked up.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘What you’re really saying is that Graves took you too seriously.’

  ‘It’s not just that. It suits him to attribute everything I’ve done to to to to… a state of mental breakdown, because then he doesn’t have to ask himself any awkward questions. Like why he agrees with me about the war and does nothing about it.’

  Rivers waited a few moments. ‘I know Richard Dadd was a painter. What else did he do?’

  A short silence. ‘He murdered his father.’

  Rivers was puzzled by the slight awkwardness. He was used to being adopted as a father figure – he was, after all, thirty years older than the youngest of his patients – but it was rare for it to happen as quickly as this in a man of Sassoon’s age. ‘“Of glorious memory”?’

  ‘He… er… made a list of old men in power who deserved to die, and fortunately – or or otherwise – his father’s name headed the list. He carried him for half a mile through Hyde Park and then drowned him in the Serpentine in full view of everybody on the banks. The only reason Graves and I know about him is that we were in trenches with two of his great nephews, Edmund and Julian.’ The slight smile faded. ‘Now Edmund’s dead, and Julian’s got a bullet in the throat and can’t speak. The other brother was killed too. Gallipoli.’

  ‘Like your brother.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Your father’s dead too, isn’t he? How old were you when he died?’

  ‘Eight. But I hadn’t seen much of him for some time before that. He left home when I was five.’

  ‘Do you remember him?’

  ‘A bit. I remember I used to like being kissed by him because his moustache tickled. My brothers went to the funeral. I didn’t – apparently I was too upset. Probably just as well, because they came back terrified. It was a Jewish funeral, you see, and they couldn’t understand what was going on. My elder brother said it was two old men in funny hats walking up and down saying jabber-jabber-jabber.’

  ‘You must’ve felt you’d lost him twice.’

  ‘Yes. We did lose him twice.’

  Rivers gazed out of the window. ‘What difference would it have made, do you think, if your father had lived?’

  A long silence. ‘Better education.’

  ‘But you went to Marlborough?’

  ‘Yes, but I was years behind everybody else. Mother had this theory we were delicate and our brains shouldn’t be taxed. I don’t think I ever really caught up. I left Cambridge without taking my degree.’

  ‘And then?’

  Sassoon shook his head. ‘Nothing much. Hunting, cricket. Writing poems. Not very good poems.’

  ‘Didn’t you find it all… rather unsatisfying?’

  ‘Yes, but I couldn’t seem to see a way out. It was like being three different people, and they all wanted to go different ways.’ A slight smile. ‘The result was I went nowhere.’

  Rivers waited.

  ‘I mean, there was the riding, hunting, cricketing me, and then there was the… the other side… that was interested in poetry and music, and things like that. And I didn’t seem able to…’ He laced his fingers. ‘Knot them together.’

  ‘And the third?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘You said three.’

  ‘Did I? I meant two.’

  Ah. ‘And then the war. You joined up on the first day?’

  ‘Yes, in the ranks. I couldn’t wait to get in.’

  ‘Your superior officers wrote glowing reports for the Board. Did you know that?’

  A flush of pleasure. ‘I think the army’s probably the only place I’ve ever really belonged.’

  ‘And you’ve cut yourself off from it.’

  ‘Yes, because –’

  ‘I’m not interested in the reasons at the moment. I’m more interested in the result. The effect on you.’

  ‘Isolation, I suppose. I can’t talk to anybody.’

  ‘You talk to me. Or at least, I think you do.’

  ‘You don’t say stupid things.’

  Rivers turned his head away. ‘I’m pleased about that.’

  ‘Go on, laugh. I don’t mind.’

  ‘You’d been offered a job in Cambridge, hadn’t you? Teaching cadets.’

  Sassoon frowned. ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you didn’t take it?’

  ‘No. It was either prison or France.’ He laughed. ‘I didn’t foresee this.’

  Rivers watched him staring round the room. ‘You can’t bear to be safe, can you?’ He waited for a reply. ‘Well, you’ve got twelve weeks of it. At least. If you go on refusing to serve, you’ll be safe for the rest of the war.’

  Two red spots appeared on Sassoon’s cheekbones. ‘Not my choice.’

  ‘I didn’t say it was.’ Rivers paused. ‘You know you reacted then as if I were a
ttacking you, and yet all I did was to point out the facts.’ He leant forward. ‘If you maintain your protest, you can expect to spend the remainder of the war in a state of Complete. Personal. Safety.’

  Sassoon shifted in his seat. ‘I’m not responsible for other people’s decisions.’

  ‘You don’t think you might find being safe while other people die rather difficult?’

  A flash of anger. ‘Nobody else in this stinking country seems to find it difficult. I expect I’ll just learn to live with it. Like everybody else.’

  ∗

  Bums stood at the window of his room. Rain had blurred the landscape, dissolving sky and hills together in a wash of grey. He loathed wet weather because then everybody stayed indoors, sitting, around the patients’ common room, talking, in strained or facetious tones, about the war the war the war.

  A sharper gust of wind blew rain against the glass. Somehow or other he was going to have to get out. It wasn’t forbidden, it was even encouraged, though he himself didn’t go out much. He got his coat and went downstairs. On the corridor he met one of the nurses from his ward, who looked surprised to see him wearing his coat, but didn’t ask where he was going.

  At the main gates he stopped. Because he’d been inside so long, the possibilities seemed endless, though they resolved themselves quickly into two. Into Edinburgh, or away. And that was no choice at all: he knew he wasn’t up to facing traffic.

  For the first few stops the bus was crowded. He sat on the bench seat close to the door of the bus. People smelling of wet wool jerked and swayed against him, bumping his knees, and he tensed, not liking the contact or the smell. But then at every stop more and more people got off until he was almost alone, except for an old man and the clippie. The lanes were narrower now; the trees rushed in on either side. A branch rattled along the windows with a sound like machine-gun fire, and he had to bite his lips to stop himself crying out.

  He got off at the next stop, and stood, looking up and down a country lane. He didn’t know what to do at first, it was so long since he’d been anywhere alone. Raindrops dripped from the trees, big, splashy, persistent drops, finding the warm place between his collar and his neck. He looked up and down the lane again. Somewhere further along, a wood pigeon cooed monotonously. He crossed over and began climbing the hill between the trees.