The Ghost Road

But then his father had come to the station to see him off – first time in four years – and he’d to get out of bed to do it, because he was on nights, and he was wearing his Sunday suit, and he’d shaved, and he was sober. Jesus Christ, Prior had thought, all we need is the wreath.

  A small hard pellet of dismay lodged in his throat. Premonition? No-o, nothing so portentous. A slight sense of pushing his luck, perhaps. This was the fourth time, and four was one too many.

  ‘I expect they’ll invite you over.’

  Sarah smiled. ‘I think I’ll wait till you get back.’

  He glanced covertly at his watch. Where was the bloody train? And then he saw it, in the distance, crawling doubtfully along, trailing its plume of steam. No sound yet, though as he stepped closer to the edge of the platform he felt or sensed a vibration in the rails. He turned to face Sarah, blocking her view of the train.

  She was looking up at the rafters. ‘Have you seen them?’

  He followed her gaze and saw that every rafter was lined with pigeons. ‘The warmth, I suppose,’ he said vaguely.

  The roar of the approaching train startled the birds. They rose as one, streaming out from under the glass roof in a great flapping and beating of wings, wheeling, banking, swooping, turning, a black wave against the smoke-filled sky. Prior and Sarah watched, open-mouthed, drunk on the sight of so much freedom, their linked hands slackening, able, finally, to think of nothing, as the train steamed in.

  Six

  After tea he took Kath’s photograph album up to her room. He usually brought snapshots of family and friends with him on these visits, because he knew how much pleasure they gave her. She was sitting up in bed, faded brown hair tied back by a blue ribbon, a pink bed jacket draped around her shoulders. Blue and pink: the colours of the nursery. He took the tray off her lap and gave her the album and the photographs.

  She seized on a group of staff at the Empire Hospital. ‘You’ve got your usual I-don’t-want-to-be-photographed expression,’ she said, holding it up to the light.

  ‘Well, I didn’t.’

  She was already busy pasting glue on to the back. ‘Is it true the natives think the camera steals their souls?’

  ‘Some of them. The sensible ones.’

  She pressed her handkerchief carefully around the edges of the photograph, catching the seepage of glue. ‘It’s a good one of Dr Head.’

  ‘Oh, Henry isn’t worried, he hasn’t got a soul.’

  ‘Will.’

  He looked at the tray. ‘You haven’t eaten much.’

  ‘I’m glad Ethel’s having a break. It’s been a shocking year.’

  Ramsgate had been bombed heavily, a great many civilians, mainly women and children, killed. As a result Kath’s health, which had long given cause for concern, had dramatically deteriorated. Ethel, who’d looked after their father in his old age, and then after this invalid younger sister, had begun to show signs of strain herself, and the brothers had decided something must be done. A holiday was out of the question, ruled out by Ethel herself – she could not and would not go – but she had agreed to stay with friends for a long weekend.

  ‘I think that’s the car now,’ Rivers said. ‘I’d better get the suitcase down.’

  He found Ethel in the hall, pinning on her hat.

  ‘Now,’ she said, unable to let go, ‘you’ve got the telephone number?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re sure you’ve got it?’

  ‘Yes.’ He pushed her gently towards the door.

  ‘No, listen, Will. If you’re worried, don’t hesitate, call the doctor.’

  ‘Ethel, I am a doctor.’

  ‘No, I mean a proper doctor.’

  He was still smiling as he went back upstairs.

  ‘Is she gone?’

  ‘Yes, I had to push her out of the door, but she’s gone. Have you finished sticking them in?’

  He took the album from her and began turning the pages, pausing at a photograph of himself and the other members of the Torres Straits expedition. Barefoot, bare-armed, bearded, sun-tanned, wearing a collection of spectacularly villainous hats, they looked for all the world like a low-budget production of The Pirates of Penzance. The flower of British anthropology, he thought, God help us. He turned a few more pages, stopping at a snapshot from his days in Heidelberg. What on earth made him think those side whiskers were a good idea?

  ‘I knew you’d stop there,’ Katharine said. ‘It’s her, isn’t it? The stout one.’

  ‘Alma? Of course it isn’t.’ His sisters had teased him mercilessly at the time, because he’d happened to be standing next to Alma in a snapshot. ‘Anyway, she wasn’t stout, she was … comfortable.’

  ‘She was stout. We really did think you were going to marry her, you know. She was the only woman we ever saw you with.’

  ‘That’s not true either. Remember all the young ladies mother used to invite to tea?’

  ‘I remember you sloping off upstairs to get away from them. You were just like Mr Dodgson. He used to do that.’

  Kath sometimes combined with childlike innocence a child’s sharpness of perception.

  ‘Like Dodgson? God forbid.’

  ‘You didn’t like him, did you?’

  He hesitated. ‘No.’

  ‘You were jealous. You and Charles.’

  ‘Yes, I think we were. Ah, this is the girl I’m looking for,’ he said, holding up a photograph of a little girl in a white dress. Even in faded sepia it was possible to tell what an exceptionally beautiful child she’d been.

  Light from the standard lamp fell on the side of Dodgson’s face as he opened the book.

  ‘S-shouldn’t we wait f-for K-K-K-Kath?’ he asked, the name clotting on his tongue.

  Sitting on the sofa beside Charles, Will thought, That’s because it’s the same sound as hard c. C was Dodgson’s worst consonant. F and m were his.

  ‘No, I think we should start,’ his father said. ‘It’s not fair to keep everybody waiting, just because Kath’s late.’

  ‘She’ll be here soon,’ Mother said. ‘Her stomach’s a good clock.’

  ‘Aren’t you w-w-w-w-w-woorr …?’

  ‘Not really. She knows she mustn’t leave the grounds.’

  Will intercepted a glance between his parents. Mother shouldn’t have completed Mr Dodgson’s sentence for him like that. You were supposed to let people flounder, no matter how long it took.

  Mr Dodgson stammered less when he read. And why was that? Because he knew the words so well he didn’t have to think about them? Or because, although his voice was loud, he was really just reading to Ethel, who sat curled up in the crook of his arm, where she could see the pictures? He never stammered much when he was talking to the girls. Or was it because these were his words, and he was determined to get them out, no matter what? It certainly wasn’t because he was thinking about the movements of his tongue, which was what father said you should do.

  ‘The rabbit hole,’ Mr Dodgson read, or rather recited, for he was not looking at the page but at the top of Ethel’s head, ‘went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep –’

  Kath burst in, hot, dirty, dishevelled, trailing her hat by its long blue ribbon, raspberry stains round her mouth, grubby hands streaked with cuckoo spit. She went straight to Mr Dodgson and gave him a bunch of flowers whose stalks had wilted in the heat and flopped over the back of her hand.

  He took them from her and sat looking stupid, not knowing where to put them, when his attention was caught. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘you’ve g-g-got a l-l-l-ladybird in your h-hair.’

  Kath stood, breathing through her mouth with concentration, as he teased the strands of hair apart and persuaded the insect on to the tip of his finger. He showed it to her, then carefully stood up, meaning to carry it to the window, but the scarlet shards parted, the black wings spread, and the insect sailed out,
a dark speck on the blue air.

  Dodgson sat down, drew Katharine on to his lap, folded his other arm round Ethel again, and picked up the book.

  ‘– well,’ he said, and everybody laughed.

  ‘Do you remember how he hated snakes?’ Kath said, leaning back against the pillows with the sunlight on her greying hair.

  ‘Yes, I remember.’

  He was thinking that the whole course of Kath’s life had been constriction into a smaller and smaller space. As children they’d both had a hundred acres of safe woods and fields to roam in, but from that point on his life had expanded: medical school, round the world as a ship’s doctor, Germany, the Torres Straits, India, Australia, the Solomon Islands, the New Hebrides. And over the same period the little girl who’d rambled all day through woods and fields had become the younger of the two Miss Rivers, scrutinized by her father’s parishioners, the slightest breach of decorum noted, and then, after father’s retirement, a small house in Ramsgate, deteriorating health, confinement to the house, then to the bedroom, then to the bed. And yet she was no more intrinsically neurasthenic than he was himself. But a good mind must have something to feed on, and hers, deprived of other nourishment, had fed on itself.

  He said slowly, ‘I think what I remember most is endless croquet.’ Oh God, he remembered, hours and hours of it, a vast red sun hanging above the trees, Dodgson’s body forming a hoop round Kath’s, his hands enclosing hers, the click of mallets on balls, and mother’s voice drifting across the lawn asking how much longer were they going to be? It was time for Kath to come in. ‘Mathematical croquet,’ Rivers said. ‘Nobody could win.’

  ‘I used to win.’

  ‘He helped you cheat.’

  ‘Yes.’ A faint smile. ‘I know he did.’

  Once, on the river, Dodgson had tried to pin up Kath’s skirts so she could paddle. He’d done it often enough before, indeed he carried safety-pins in his lapels specifically for the purpose, but this time she’d pushed him away. Some intensity in his gaze? Some quality in his touch? Their mother had spoken sharply to her, but Dodgson had said, ‘No, leave her alone.’

  ‘It’s a pity we lost his letters,’ Rivers said.

  ‘Oh, and the drawings. There was a whole crate of things went missing. I’m sure that painting of Uncle Will went at the same time –’

  ‘I don’t remember that.’

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  ‘Where was it?’

  ‘At the top of the stairs. You couldn’t put it in the drawing-room, it was too horrible.’

  ‘What was it of?’

  ‘Uncle William having his leg cut off. And there was somebody waiting with a sort of cauldron full of hot tar ready to pour it over the stump.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘You didn’t like it. When we all went downstairs in the morning I used to see you not looking at it. You were like this.’ She turned her head to one side.

  ‘Well, you have surprised me.’

  A modestly triumphant smile. ‘I remember more than you do.’

  Though, even as she spoke, he had a faint, very faint, recollection of Father lifting him up to look at something. A curious exposed feeling at the nape of his neck. ‘Father tried very hard with Charles and me. Didn’t he?’

  ‘You more than Charles.’

  ‘Ah, well, yes, I was the guinea-pig, wasn’t I? The first child always is.’ A greater bitterness in his voice than he knew how to account for. He brushed it aside. ‘I’ll make us some cocoa, shall I? And then I think you should try and get some sleep.’

  – Do you remember how he hated snakes?

  – Yes, I remember.

  That’s the trouble, Rivers thought, taking off his shirt in the spare bedroom that had once been his father’s study, I remember her childhood better than my own. Though another person’s life, observed from outside, always has a shape and definition that one’s own life lacks.

  It was odd he couldn’t remember that picture, when Kath, ten years younger, remembered it so clearly. He’d certainly have been shown it, many many times. He was named after William Rivers of the Victory, who, as a young midshipman, had shot the man who shot Lord Nelson. That was the family legend anyway. And the great man, dying, had not indulged in any effete nonsense about kissing Hardy, nor had he entrusted Lady Hamilton to the conscience of a grateful nation. No, his last words had been, ‘Look after young Will Rivers for me.’ And young Will Rivers had needed looking after. He’d been wounded in the mouth and leg, and the leg had had to be amputated. Without an anaesthetic, since there were no anaesthetics, except rum. And then hot tar to cauterize the spurting stump. My God, it was a wonder any of them survived. And throughout the ordeal – family legend again – he had not once cried out. He’d survived, married, had children, become Warden of Greenwich Hospital. There was a portrait bust of him there, in the Painted Hall.

  Now that he did remember being taken to see. Was that the occasion on which his father had lifted him up to look? No, he’d have been eight or nine.

  And then he remembered. Quite casually, a bubble breaking on the surface. He’d had his hair cut, he’d just been breeched, yes, that was it, his neck felt funny, and so did his legs. And he was crying. Yes, it was all coming back. He’d embarrassed his father in the barber’s shop by howling his head off. Bits of him were being cut off, bits of him were dropping on to the floor. His father shushed him, and when that didn’t work, slapped his leg. He gasped with shock, filled his lungs with air, and howled louder. So being shown the picture was a lesson? You don’t behave like that, you behave like this. ‘He didn’t cry,’ his father had said, holding him up. ‘He didn’t make a sound.’

  And I’ve been stammering ever since, Rivers thought, inclined to see the funny side. Though what had it meant – Trafalgar, the Napoleonic wars – to a four-year-old for whom a summer’s day was endless? Nothing, it could have meant nothing. Or, worse, it had meant something fearfully simple. The same name, the slapped leg, being told not to cry. Had he perhaps looked at the picture and concluded that this was what happened to you if your name was William Rivers?

  He’d avoided looking at it, Kath said, even turning his head away so that he could not glimpse it by mistake as he went past. Had he also deliberately suppressed the visual image of it, making it impossible for himself to see it in his mind’s eye? Prior, told that Rivers attributed his almost total lack of visual memory to an event in his childhood that he had succeeded in forgetting, had said brutally, ‘You were raped or beaten … Whatever it was, you put your mind’s eye out rather than have to go on seeing it. Is that what happened, or isn’t it?’ Yes, Rivers had been obliged to admit, though he’d argued very strongly for a less dramatic interpretation of events. It could have been something quite trivial, he’d said, though terrifying to a child. Something as simple as the fearsome shadow of a dressing-gown on the back of the nursery door. Small children are not like adults, he’d insisted. What terrifies them may seem trivial to us.

  Was this the suppressed memory? He didn’t know. Was it trivial? Well, yes, in a way, compared with Prior’s lurid imaginings. A smack on the leg, a lesson in manliness from an over-conscientious but loving father. It’s a long way from sadistic beatings or sexual assault. And yet it wasn’t as trivial as it seemed at first. That silence – for him now that was the centre of the picture – not the blood, not the knife, but that resolutely clenched mouth. Every day of his working life he looked at twitching mouths that had once been clenched. Go on, he said, though rarely in so many words, cry. It’s all right to grieve. Breakdown’s nothing to be ashamed of – the pressures were intolerable. But, also, stop crying. Get up on your feet. Walk. He both distrusted that silence and endorsed it, as he was bound to do, he thought, being his father’s son.

  He went to Greenwich by train, visited the portrait bust in the Painted Hall, then continued his journey by steamer, arriving at Westminster steps in the late afternoon. The underground was crowded, he couldn’t find a taxi, and by
the time he turned the corner of Holford Road Prior was already there, standing on the steps. ‘Have you knocked?’ Rivers asked.

  ‘No, I saw you coming. Been at the hospital?’

  ‘No, I’ve just got back from Ramsgate.’ He fitted his key into the lock. ‘Now if we tiptoe across the hall …’

  Prior smiled, having encountered Rivers’s landlady many times in the past.

  ‘All clear,’ Rivers said.

  They walked upstairs side by side, Rivers noticing how easily Prior was breathing. Sometimes, during the past summer, he’d listened to Prior’s step on these stairs and counted the pauses. He’d never gone out on to the top landing to greet Prior as he did with all his other patients because he knew how intolerable he would find it to be seen fighting for breath. But now his chest was remarkably clear, a reflection perhaps of the satisfaction he felt at going back to France. Rivers opened the door of his rooms, and stood aside to let Prior enter.

  Somehow or other he had to prevent this meeting becoming a confrontation, as consultations with Prior still tended to do. Prior would enjoy the skirmish at the time – there was nothing he liked better – but he’d regret it later. ‘Well, sit yourself down,’ Rivers said, taking Prior’s coat and pointing to a chair by the fire. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Quite well. Chest works. Tongue works.’

  ‘Nightmares?’

  ‘Hmm … a few. I had one where the faces on the revolver targets – you know, horrible snarling baby-eating boche – turned into the faces of people I love. But only after I’d pulled the trigger, so there was nothing I could do about it. ’Fraid I killed you every time.’

  ‘Ah, so it isn’t a bad nightmare, then?’

  They smiled at each other. Rivers thought Prior was entirely unaware of what he’d said, though that was always a dangerous assumption to make about Prior. Perhaps because he’d recently been thinking about his own father Rivers was more than usually aware of the strong father–son element in his relationship with Prior. He had no son; Prior utterly rejected his natural father. ‘Oh, by the way, congratulations on your engagement.’