The Ghost Road

  Hmm, Prior thought. Charles Manning’s congratulations had also been brief, though in his case the brevity might be excused, since he’d had to take Prior’s cock out of his mouth to be able to say anything at all. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Have you fixed a date?’

  ‘Next August. We met in August, we got engaged in August, so …’

  ‘And when do you leave for France?’

  ‘Tonight. I’m glad to be going.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Prior smiled. ‘Do you think I’m ready to go back?’

  A slight hesitation. ‘I think I’d be happier if you did another twelve weeks’ home service. Which would still,’ he persisted across Prior’s interruptions, ‘get you back to France by the end of November.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You know why. Two months ago you were having memory lapses. Rather bad ones actually. Anyway this is purely hypothetical. Wasn’t my decision –’

  Prior leant forward. ‘I was afraid you’d write.’

  ‘It never occurred to me anybody would think of sending you back.’

  ‘I think the MO was against it. Well, that was my impression anyway. How would I know? As for the Board, well, they wanted to send me back. I wanted to go.’

  ‘What did they ask you about? Nerves?’

  ‘No, not mentioned. They don’t believe in shell-shock. You’d be surprised how many army Medical Boards don’t.’

  Rivers snorted. ‘Oh, I don’t think I would. Anyway, you’re going back. You’ve got what you wanted.’

  ‘At the moment I can’t wait to see the back of England.’

  ‘Any particular reason?’

  ‘It’s nothing really. I just had my fur rubbed up the wrong way.’ He hesitated. ‘Manning took me to meet Robert Ross. I don’t know whether you’ve met him? Through Sassoon?’

  ‘Briefly.’

  ‘I liked him, he was charming – I wasn’t equally keen on some of his friends.’

  Rivers waited.

  ‘One in particular. Apparently he’d been stood up by his boyfriend – he’d been expecting an amorous weekend – and the poor chap had decided it wasn’t worth the train fare from Leeds. And this man – Birtwhistle, his name is – was saying, “Of course one can’t rely on them. Their values are totally different from ours. They’re a different species, really. The WCs.” Smirk, smirk.’

  Rivers looked puzzled.

  ‘Working classes. Water-closets. The men who’re getting their ballocks shot off so he can go on being the lily on the dung heap. God, they make me sick.’

  ‘I’m sure you more than held your own.’

  ‘No, I didn’t, that’s what bothers me. It all got tangled up with being a guest and being polite. To Ross, of course, not him. Anyway I decided to give this prat a run for his money so we adjourned upstairs afterwards.’

  ‘You and Manning?’

  ‘No, me and Birtwhistle. Birtwhistle and I.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound much like a punishment.’

  ‘Oh, it was. Nothing like sexual humiliation, Rivers. Nobody ever forgets that.’

  Rivers looked into the trustless eyes, and thought, My God, I wouldn’t want to cross you. Though he had crossed him many times, in the course of therapy, and refused more than one invitation to ‘adjourn upstairs’.

  ‘I just wish your last evening had been pleasanter.’

  Prior shrugged. ‘It was all right. It just … he happens to represent everything in England that isn’t worth fighting for. Which made him a rather bracing companion.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I’d better be going. I’m catching the midnight train.’

  Rivers hesitated. ‘Please don’t think because I personally would have recommended another three months in England that I don’t have every confidence in your ability to … to …’

  ‘Do my duty to King and country.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Rivers, you don’t think I should be going back at all.’

  Rivers hesitated. ‘The Board at Craiglockhart recommended permanent home service and that wasn’t because of your nerves, it was on the basis of your asthma alone. I haven’t seen anything to make me change my mind.’

  Prior looked at him, smiled, and slapped him on both arms. ‘I’ve got to go.’

  Rivers said slowly, as he went to get Prior’s coat, ‘Do you remember saying something to me once about the the the ones who go back b-being the real test cases? From the point of view of finding out whether a particular therapy works?’

  ‘Yes, I remember.’ Another smile. ‘I was getting at you.’

  ‘You always were. Well, it just occurs to me you’re actually rather better equipped than most people to observe that process. I think you have great powers of detachment.’

  ‘“Cold-blooded little bastard,’” Prior translated, then thought for a moment. ‘You’re giving me a football to kick across, aren’t you? You remember that story? The Suffolk’s kicking a football across No Man’s Land when the whistles blew on the Somme? Bloody mad.’

  ‘No, the battle was mad. The football was sane. Whoever ordered them to do that was a very good psychologist.’

  ‘Ah!’

  ‘But I know what you mean. It’s become the kind of incident one can’t take seriously any more. Only I’m not sure that’s right, you see. I suppose what one should be asking is whether an ideal becomes invalid because the people who hold it are betrayed.’

  ‘If holding it makes them into naïve idiots, yes.’

  ‘Were they?’

  ‘If they were, I can’t talk. I’m going back.’

  Rivers smiled. ‘So you don’t want my football?’

  ‘On the contrary, I think it’s a brilliant idea. I’ll send you the half-time score.’

  Rivers handed him his greatcoat, examining it first. ‘I’m impressed.’

  ‘So you should be at the price.’ Prior started to put it on. ‘Do you know you can get these with scarlet silk linings?’

  ‘Army greatcoats?’

  ‘Yes. Saw one in the Café Royal. On the back of one of my old intelligence colleagues. Quite a startling effect when he crossed his legs, subtle, you know, like a baboon’s bottom. Apparently he’s supposed to sit there and “attract the attention of anti-war elements”.’

  ‘Was he?’

  ‘He was attracting attention. I don’t know what their views on the war were. Another thing that made me glad to be getting out of it.’ He held out his hand. ‘Don’t come down.’

  Rivers took him at his word, but went through to the bedroom window and looked out, lifting the curtain an inch to one side. Miss Irving’s voice, a laughing farewell, and then Prior appeared, foreshortened, running down the steps.

  On Vao there was a custom that when a bastard was born some leading man on the island adopted the child and brought him up as his own. The boy called him father, and grew up surrounded by love and care and then, when he reached puberty, he was given the honour, as befitted the son of a great man, of leading in the sacrificial pig, one of the huge-tusked boars in which the wealth of the people was measured. He was given new bracelets, new necklaces, a new penis wrapper and then, in front of the entire community, all of whom knew what was about to happen, he led the pig to the sacrificial stone, where his father waited with upraised club. And, as the boy drew near, he brought the club down and crushed his son’s skull.

  In one of his father’s churches, St Faith’s, at Maidstone, the window to the left of the altar shows Abraham with the knife raised to slay his son, and, below the human figures, a ram caught in the thicket by his horns. The two events represented the difference between savagery and civilization, for in the second scenario the voice of God is about to forbid the sacrifice, and will be heeded. He had knelt at that altar rail for years, Sunday after Sunday, receiving the chalice from his father’s hands.

  Perhaps, Rivers thought, watching Prior’s head bob along behind the hedge and disappear from view, it was because he’d been thinking so much about fathers and sons
recently that the memory of the two sacrifices had returned, but he wished this particular memory had chosen another moment to surface.

  PART TWO

  Seven

  29 August 1918

  Bought this in a stationer’s just off Fleet Street quite a long time ago. I’ve been carrying it round with me ever since unused, mainly because it’s so grand. I bought it for the marbled covers and the thick creamy pages and ever since then the thick creamy pages have been saying, Piss off, what could you possibly write on us that would be worth reading? It’s a marvellous shop, a real old-fashioned stationer’s. Stationers’, second-hand bookshops, ironmongers’. Feel a great need at the moment to concentrate on small pleasures. If the whole of one’s life can be summoned up and held in the palm of one hand, in the living moment, then time means nothing. World without end, Amen.

  Load of crap. Facts are what we need, man. Facts.

  Arrived in London to find no porters, no taxis, and the hotels full. Charles Manning on the platform (the train was so late I was sure he’d’ve gone home), offering, as a solution, the room he rents in Half Moon Street, ‘for the nights when he works late at the office and doesn’t want to disturb the household’. Oh, c’mon, Charles, I wanted to say. It’s me, remember? I was all for trudging round a few more hotels, but he was limping badly and obviously in pain and pissed off with me for going back when I could have been comfortably established in the Min of Mu chasing bits of paper across a desk, like him. (He’d go back to France tomorrow if they’d have him.)

  When we got to Half Moon Street we went straight upstairs and he produced a bottle of whisky. Not bad (but not what he drinks himself either) and I waited for him to do what everybody else would do in the circumstances and collect the rent. He didn’t, of course. I’m plagued with honourable people. I thought, Oh, for Christ’s sake, if you haven’t got the gumption to ask for it bloody do without. I was feeling tired and sticky and wanted a bath. After ten minutes of swishing soapy water round my groin and whisky round my guts I started to feel better. I had a quiet consultation with myself in the bathroom mirror, all steamy and pink and conspiratorial, and went back in and said, Right let’s be having you. Over the end of the bed. He likes being dominated, as people often do who’ve never had to raise their voice in their lives to get other people running after them.

  Then we went out to dinner, came back, Charles stayed a while, long enough to introduce me to Ross – extraordinary man, rather Chinese-looking, and not just physically, a sense of a very old civilization. I shook his hand and I thought I’m shaking the hand that … Well, there is the connection with Wilde. And I felt at home in this rather beleaguered little community. Beleaguered, because Ross thinks he’s going to be arrested, he thinks the utterly disgusting Pemberton Billing affair has given them carte blanche to go ahead and do it. He may be exaggerating the risk, he looks ill, he looks as if he goes to bed and broods, but one or two people there, including Manning, don’t seem to rule out an arrest. A comfortable atmosphere in spite of it. Soldiers who aren’t militarists, pacifists who aren’t prigs, and talking to each other. Now there’s a miracle.

  But then – Birtwhistle. He’s a don at Cambridge, very clever, apparently. Curiously, he actually prides himself on having a broader grasp of British society than the average person, i.e. he pokes working-class boys’ bottoms. Might even be true, I suppose, though the heterosexual equivalent doesn’t pride itself on broadening its social experience whenever it nips off for a knee-wobbler in Bethnal Green. Ah, but these are relationships, Birtwhistle would say. Did say. Lurve, no less. And yet he spoke of his working-class lover – his WC – in tones of utter contempt. And he didn’t succeed in placing me, or not accurately enough. So much for the broader grasp. I played a rather cruel convoluted game with him afterwards. Which satisfied me a great deal at the time, but now I feel contaminated, as I wouldn’t have done if I’d kicked him in the balls (which would also have been kinder).

  Manning – after we’d had sex – became very strange. Great distances opened up. Partly because he hadn’t intended it to happen – or didn’t think he had – and partly just because I’m going back and he isn’t. Two inches of sheet between us – miles miles. I was glad when he went and I’m even more glad he’s not here now. Very few pleasures in sex are any match for a narrow bed and cool, clean sheets. (A post-coital reflection if ever I heard one.)

  30 August

  Collected my coat today. I’m not even going to write down how much it cost, but it’s warm and light and it looks good, and I need all of that.

  Mooched round the rest of the day doing nothing very much. Dinner at Half Moon Street in my room. Saw Rivers afterwards. Had made up my mind not to ask what he thought about my going back – and specifically not to ask if he thought I was fit – then asked anyway and was predictably irritated by the answer.

  I had a very clear perception while we were talking – I suppose because I’ve been away for a while – that his power over people, the power to heal if you like, springs directly from some sort of wound or deformity in him. He has a lot of strengths, but he isn’t working from strength. Difficult to say this without sounding patronizing, which isn’t how I feel. In fact for me it’s the best thing about him – well the only thing that makes him tolerable, actually – that he doesn’t sit behind the desk implicitly setting himself up as some sort of standard of mental health. He once said to me half the world’s work’s done by hopeless neurotics, and I think he had himself in mind. And me.

  Got to the station with an hour to spare and Manning showed up. I wished he hadn’t but there he was and of course we had one of these awful station conversations. The ripples between those going out and those staying behind are so bloody awful the whole thing’s best avoided. However, we got through it, looked at each other through the window with mutual relief and then away we went. Or I went.

  Arrived here (Folkestone) in the middle of the night, exhausted. There’s something about railway stations, and I’ve been in a lot of them recently. The goodbyes all get trapped under the roof and suck the oxygen out of the air. No other reason for me to feel like this.

  Saturday, 31 August

  Woke tired. But got up anyway, not wasting time – ‘wasting time’, ‘killing time’ start to be phrases you notice – lying in bed, and sat on the balcony for a while watching the sun come up and decided to do what people always think about doing, and then think again and go back to sleep: I decided to swim before breakfast. So down to the beach. Hovered on the shingle by the waterline, told myself not to be so feeble, etc., and plunged in. Water pearly grey, absolutely bloody freezing, but, after the first shock, total exhilaration. I stood for a while afterwards up to my knees, feeling the surge and suck round my legs, neither in the sea nor on the land. Marvellous. Still the slanting light of early morning. Worm casts on the beach very prominent, the sun casting vast shadows from little things, and I thought of the beach outside Edinburgh where I made love to Sarah for the first time. Went straight back and wrote to her. Then walked through town, giving myself small treats, chocolates, etc. and avoiding other officers.

  Saw Hallet with his family, looking quite desperate. All of them, but I meant Hallet. Poor little bugger’s had a station goodbye that’s lasted for days. I waved and passed on.

  On board

  People playing cards below deck, but there’s quite a heave on the sea, and I’d rather be out here watching it. Great bands of pale green in the wake, laced with thick foam, and terns hovering, riding rather – only the most fractional adjustment of their wings needed to keep them motionless. And they come quite close.

  Watched the cliffs disappear. Tried to think of something worthy of the occasion and came up with: The further out from England the nearer is to France, and then couldn’t get rid of the bloody thing, it just ran round and round my head.

  Hallet came up and stood a few yards away, not wanting to intrude on what he took to be a fond farewell to the motherland. In the end I gave i
n, we sat down and talked. Full of idealism. I’d rather have had the Walrus and the Carpenter.

  It’s very obvious that Hallet’s adopted me. Like one of those little pilot fish or the terns for that matter. He thinks because I’ve been out three times before I know what’s going on. Seems a bright enough lad. I wonder how long it’ll take him to work out that nobody knows what’s going on?

  Sunday, 1 September

  Étaples marginally less brutal than I remember it, though still a squad of men passed me running the gauntlet of the canaries, who yelled abuse in their faces much as they always did. And you think, All right it has to be brutal – think what they’re being toughened up for – but actually that misses the point. It’s the impersonality that forms the biggest part of the sheer fucking nastiness of this place. Nobody knows anybody. You marshal men around – they don’t know you, don’t trust you (why should they?) and you don’t invest anything in them.

  Same feeling, in a milder form, between the officers. We sleep in dormitories, and it’s the same feeling you get on big wards in hospitals – privacy sacrificed without intimacy being gained.

  Hallet’s in the next bed. He sat on his bed this evening and showed me a photograph of his girl – fiancée, I should say. His parents think he’s too young to marry, which he fiercely objects to, pointing out that he’s old enough for this. Of course I don’t think he’s old enough for this either, but I don’t say so. Instead I told him I’d got engaged too and showed him a photograph of Sarah. And then we sat smiling at each other inanely, feeling like complete idiots. Well, I did.

  Wednesday, 4 September

  Time passes quickly here. Enough to do during the day, and a fair amount of free time. But the atmosphere’s awful. The mess has scuffed no-colour lino – the colour of misery, if misery has a colour – and a big round table in the middle, covered with dog-eared copies of Punch and John Bull, exactly like a dentist’s waiting-room. The same pervasive fear. The same reluctance to waste time on people you’re probably never going to see again anyway.