He expected an argument, but the wardress withdrew immediately.
‘The voice of authority, Billy.’
Mucus clung to the corners of her lips when she spoke, as if her mouth were seldom opened.
He moved closer to the bed. ‘I hear you’ve been ill.’
‘Flu. Everybody’s had it.’
He remained standing, as if he needed her permission to sit. She nodded towards the chair.
‘I’ve been doing what I can,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid it doesn’t amount to much. I was hoping Mac might be able to help, but –’
A chest movement that might have been a laugh. ‘Not where he is. You know where they’ve sent him, don’t you? Wandsworth.’
‘You see, you did shelter deserters. They think you’d do it again.’
She hoisted herself up the bed. ‘Bloody right ‘n’ all. I might look like a bloody scarecrow but in here’ – she tapped the side of her head – ‘I’m the same.’
Outside the door the wardress coughed.
‘You remember a lad called Brightmore?’
‘No.’
‘Go on, you do.’
He didn’t, but he nodded.
‘Lovely lad. They sent him to Cleethorpes. Twelve months’ detention. ‘Course he went on refusing to obey orders so he got twenty-eight days solitary and what they did they dug a hole, and it was flooded at the bottom and they put him in that. Couldn’t sit down, couldn’t lie down. Nothing to look at but clay walls. Somebody come to the top of the pit and told him his pals had been shipped off to France and shot, and if he didn’t toe the line the same thing’d happen to him. He thought his mind was going to give way. Then it started pissing down and the hole flooded and the soldiers who were guarding him were that sorry for him they took him out and let him sleep in a tent. They didn’t half cop it when the CO found out. Next day he was back in the pit. If one of them soldiers hadn’t given him a cigarette packet to write on, he’d’ve died in there. As it was they got a letter smuggled out –’
‘And the officers who did it were court-martialled. Beattie, there’s a million men in France up to their dicks in water. Who’s going to get court-martialled for that?’
‘Every bloody general in France if I had my way. You’re not the only one who cares about them lads, what do you think this is about if it’s not about them?’ A pause. ‘What I was trying to say was compared with a hole in the ground this is a fucking palace. And I’m lucky to be here.’
He looked at her, seeing her heart beat visibly under the thin shift. ‘Have you seen Hettie?’
‘Twice. Fact, she’s due today. I gather we’ve got you to thank for that?’
‘It’s nothing.’
‘No, it’s not nothing, Billy. It’s a helluva lot.’ She hesitated. ‘One thing I should tell you – I’m not saying I believe it, mind – our Hettie thinks it was a bit too much of a coincidence Mac getting picked up the way he was. She…’ Beattie shook her head. ‘She thinks you told them where to go.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘No, I know it’s not. It’s all right, son, I’ll talk to her.’
He put his hand on her bare arm and felt the bone. ‘I’ve got to go,’ he said.
He went to the door and knocked. ‘I’ll see you again,’ he said, turning back to her.
She looked at him, but didn’t answer.
Following the wardress across the yard, he was hardly aware of the massive walls with their rows of barred windows. He didn’t see Hettie coming towards him, carrying a string bag, accompanied by another wardress, until they were almost level. Then he called her name and, reluctantly, she stopped.
The wardresses stood and watched.
Hettie came towards him. ‘I’m surprised you’ve got the nerve to show your face.’
In spite of the words he bent towards her, expecting a greeting. She spat in his face.
The wardress grasped her arm. Wiping his cheek, slowly, not taking his eyes off Hettie, he said, ‘It’s all right. Let her go.’
Each with an escort, they moved off in opposite directions, toiling across the vast expanse of asphalt like beetles. Hettie turned before the building swallowed her and, in a voice that cracked with despair, she shouted, ‘You bastard. What about Mac?’
Outside, Prior stared up at the building as the blood-and-bandages facade darkened in the light drizzle. Hettie’s spit seemed to burn his skin. He raised his hand and wiped his cheek again, then turned and began walking rapidly towards the station. A refrain beat in his head. With every scuff and slurry of his boots on the gravel, he heard: the bastards have won. The bastards have won. The bastards…
PART THREE
SEVENTEEN
Rivers had cleared the afternoon to finish a report on military training for the Medical Research Council. For days now he’d had infantry-training manuals piled up on his desk, and he spent the first hour immersed in them, before going back to the last sentence he’d written.
Many of those who pass unscathed through modern warfare do so because of the sluggishness of their imaginations, but if imagination is active and powerful, it is probably far better to allow it to play around the trials and dangers of warfare than to carry out a prolonged system of repression…
A tap on the door. Captain Bolden had attacked a nurse. Rivers did a disguised run along the corridor, saw the lift was in the basement and took the stairs three at a time. He found a group of nurses and two orderlies clustered round Bolden’s door. Apparently he was refusing to let them in. From a babble of indignant chatter he managed to extract the information that Bolden had thrown a knife at Nurse Pratt. Not a very sharp knife, and it hadn’t hit her, but still a knife. Nurse Pratt was one of the oldest and most experienced nurses on the ward. Unfortunately her experience had been gained on the locked wards of large Victorian lunatic asylums, where in any altercation between a member of staff and a patient the patient was automatically and indisputably wrong. One could see it so clearly from both points of view. Bolden resorted to violence quickly and easily, but then he had spent the past four years being trained to do exactly that. Nurse Pratt was being asked, for the first time in a working life of thirty years, to handle patients who were as accustomed to giving orders as to taking them.
Rivers handed his stick to an orderly and tapped on the door. ‘Can I come in?’
A grunt, not definitely discouraging. Rivers opened the door and walked in. Bolden was standing by the window, still angry, sheepish, ashamed. Rivers, who was taller than Bolden, sat down, allowing Bolden to tower over him. Bolden was a very frightened man. ‘Now then. What is it this time?’
‘I told her the beef was inedible. She said I should think myself lucky to have it.’
‘So you threw a knife?’
‘I missed, didn’t I?’
They talked for half an hour. Then Rivers stood up to go.
‘I’ll tell her I’m sorry,’ Bolden said.
‘Well, that would be a start. As long as you don’t get irritated by her response.’
‘I do try,’ Bolden said, glowering at him.
‘I know you do. And you’re right about the beef. I couldn’t eat it either.’
Rivers had a word with Sister Walters, hoping she could persuade Nurse Pratt to receive the apology graciously, and then thought he might as well have a word with Manning, since he was on the ward anyway. He set off towards Manning’s room, then checked, remembering Manning was more likely to be on the neurological ward where he had struck up a firm friendship with Lucas and a couple of other chess fanatics. Manning was making good progress. He was almost ready to go home.
They were playing chess. Entirely silent and absorbed. He was standing beside them before they looked up.
Now that the discharge from Lucas’s wound had stopped, his hair was growing back, and it covered the white scalp in a dark fuzz. Rather touching. He looked like some kind of incongruous, ungainly chick. ‘How’s it going?’ Rivers asked, directing the question at Manning.
>
‘I’m being trounced,’ Manning said cheerfully. ‘19-17 in his favour.’
Lucas pointed to the board. ‘20–17,’ he gurgled and grinned.
He certainly knew his numbers, Rivers thought, smiling as he walked away. In an unscreened bed further down the ward one of the pacifist orderlies was cleaning up an incontinent patient. Viggors’s legs circled continuously in an involuntary stepping movement, and it really needed two people to change him, one to clean him up, the other to hold his legs. He was getting liquid excrement on his heels, and spreading it all over the bottom sheet. Martin, the orderly, was red-faced and flustered, Viggors white with rage and shame.
Rivers stopped by the bed. ‘Have you heard of screens?’ he asked.
Martin looked up. ‘Wantage said he was going to get them.’
Wantage was lounging in the doorway of the staff-room, smoking a cigarette, clearly in no hurry to rescue a conchie orderly from an impossible position. His eyes widened. ‘I was just –’
‘I know exactly what you’re doing. Screens round that bed. Now. And get in there and help.’ He called over his shoulder as he walked off. ‘And put that cigarette out.’
Rivers was still shaking with anger when he got back to his desk. He made himself concentrate on the uncompleted sentence.
… if imagination is active and powerful, it is probably far better to allow it to play around the trials and dangers of warfare than to carry out a prolonged system of repression by which morbid energy may be stored so as to form a kind of dump ready to explode on the occurrence of some mental shock or bodily illness.
Exploding ammunition dumps had become a cliche, he supposed. Still, Bolden did a very good imitation of one. He wasn’t doing too badly himself.
A tap on the door. ‘No,’ Rivers said. ‘Whatever it is, no.’
Miss Rogers smiled. ‘There was a telephone call, while you were up on the ward. About a Captain Sassoon.’
Rivers was on his feet. ‘What about him?’
‘He’s in the American Red Cross Hospital at Lancaster Gate with a head wound, they said. Would you go and see him?’
‘How bad is it?’
‘I don’t know. They didn’t say.’
In the taxi going to Lancaster Gate, Rivers’s own words ran round and round in his head. If imagination is active and powerful, it is probably far better to allow it to play around… He looked out of the window, shaking his head as if to clear it. It wasn’t even as if the advice were appropriate. He didn’t need imagination, for Christ’s sake. He was a neurologist. He knew exactly what shrapnel and bullets do to the brain.
The ward was a large room with ornate plasterwork, and tall windows opening on a view of Hyde Park. Two of the beds were empty. The others contained lightly wounded men, all looking reasonably cheerful. On a table in the centre of the ward a gramophone was playing a popular love song. You made me love you.
A nurse came bustling up to him. ‘Who were you –’
‘Captain Sassoon.’
‘He’s been moved to a single room. Didn’t they tell you? Another two floors, I’m afraid, but I don’t think he’s allowed…” Her eye fell on his RAMC badges. ‘Are you Dr Rivers?’
‘Yes.’
‘I think Dr Saunders is expecting you.’
Dr Saunders was waiting outside the door of his room, a small man with pouched cheeks, receding ginger hair and blue eyes ten years younger than the rest of his face. ‘They sent you to the main ward,’ he said, shaking hands.
Rivers followed him into the room. ‘How bad is he?’
‘The wound – not bad at all. In fact, I can show you.’ He took an X-ray from a file on his desk and held it to the light. Sassoon’s skull stared out at them. ‘You see?’ Saunders pointed to the intact bone. ‘The bullet went right across there.’ He indicated the place on his own head. ‘What he’s got is a rather neat parting in the scalp.’
Rivers breathed out. ‘Lucky man,’ he said, as lightly as he could.
‘I don’t think he thinks so.’
They sat at opposite sides of the desk. ‘I got a rather garbled message, I’m afraid,’ Rivers said. ‘I wasn’t clear whether you’d asked me to see him or – ‘
‘It was me. I saw your name on the file and I thought since you’d dealt with him before you might not mind seeing him again.’ Saunders hesitated. ‘I gather he was quite an unusual patient.’
Rivers looked down at his own signature at the end of the Craiglockhart report. ‘He’d protested against the war. It was…’ He took a deep breath. ‘Convenient to say he’d broken down.’
‘Convenient for whom?’
‘The War Office. His friends. Ultimately for Sassoon.’
‘And you persuaded him to go back?’
‘He decided to go back. What’s wrong?’
‘He’s… He was all right when he arrived. Seemed to be. Then he had about eight visitors all at his bed at the one time. The hospital rules say two. But the nurse on duty was very young and apparently she felt she couldn’t ask them to leave. She won’t make that mistake again. Anyway, by the time they finally did leave he was in a terrible state. Very upset. And then he had a bad night – everybody had a bad night – and we decided to try a single room and no visitors.’
‘Is he depressed?’
‘No. Rather the reverse. Excitable. Can’t stop talking. And now he’s got nobody to talk to.’
Rivers smiled. ‘Perhaps I’d better go along and provide an audience.’
Deep-carpeted corridors, gilt-framed pictures on the wall. He followed Saunders, remembering the corridors of Craiglockhart. Dark, draughty, smelling of cigarettes. But this was oppressive too, in its airless, cushioned luxury. He looked out of a window into a deep dark well between two buildings. A pigeon stood on a window-sill, one cracked pink foot curled round the edge of the abyss.
Saunders said, ‘He seems to have a good patch in the afternoon. He might be asleep.’ He opened the door softly and they went in.
Sassoon was asleep, his face pale and drawn beneath the cap of bandages. ‘Shall I –’ Saunders whispered, pointing to Sassoon.
‘No, leave him. I’ll wait.’
‘I’ll leave you to it, then,’ Saunders said, and withdrew.
Rivers sat down by the bed. There was another bed in the room, but it was not made up. Flowers, fruit, chocolate, books were piled up on the bedside table. He did not intend to wake Siegfried, but gradually some recollection of whispered voices began to disturb the shuttered face. Siegfried moistened his lips and a second later opened his eyes. He focused them on Rivers, and for a moment there was joy, followed immediately by fear. He stretched out his hand and touched Rivers’s sleeve. He’s making sure I’m real, Rivers thought. A rather revealing gesture.
The hand slid down and touched the back of his hand. Siegfried swallowed, and started to sit up. ‘I’m glad to see you,’ he said, offering his hand. ‘I thought for a mo –’ He checked himself. ‘They won’t let you stay,’ he said, smiling apologetically. ‘I’m not allowed to see anybody.’
‘No, it’s all right. They know I’m here.’
‘I suppose it’s because you’re a doctor,’ Siegfried said, settling back. ‘They wouldn’t let Lady Ottoline in, I heard Mrs Fisher talking to her in the corridor.’
His manner was different, Rivers thought. Talkative, restless, rapid speech, and he was looking directly at Rivers, something he almost never did, particularly at the beginning of a meeting. But he seemed perfectly rational, and the changes were within normal bounds. ‘Why won’t they let you see anybody?’
‘It’s because of Sunday, everybody came, Robert Ross, Meicklejon, Sitwell, oh God, Eddie Marsh, and they were all talking about the book and I got excited and –’ He raised his hands to his forehead. ‘FIZZLE. POP. I had a bad night, kept everybody awake, and they put me in here.’
‘How was last night?’
Siegfried pulled a face. ‘Bad. I keep thinking how big it is, the war, and how impossible it
is to write about, and how useless it is to get angry, that’s such a trivial reaction, it doesn’t, it just doesn’t do any sort of justice to the to the to the tragedy, you know you spend your entire life out there obsessed with this tiny little sector of the Front, I mean thirty yards of sandbags, that’s the war, you’ve no conception of anything else, and now I think I can see all of it, vast armies, flares going up, millions of people, millions, millions.’
Rivers waited. ‘You say you see it?’
‘Oh, yes, it just unfolds.’ A circling movement of his arms. ‘And it’s marvellous in a way, but it’s terrible too and I get so frightened because you’d have to be Tolstoy.’ He gripped Rivers’s hand. ‘I’ve got to see Ross, I don’t care about the others, but you’ve got to make them let me see him, he looks awful, that bloody bloody bloody trial. Do you know Lord Alfred Douglas called him “the leader of all the sodomites in London”? Only he said it in the witness-box, so Robbie can’t sue.’
‘Just as well, perhaps.’
‘And he’s been asked to resign from all his committees, I mean he offered, but it was accepted with alacrity. I’ve got to see him. Apart from anything else he brings me the reviews.’
‘They’re good, aren’t they? I’ve been looking out for them.’
‘Most of them.’
Rivers smiled. ‘You can’t write a controversial book and expect universal praise, Siegfried.’
‘Can’t I?’
They laughed, and for a moment everything seemed normal. Then Siegfried’s face darkened. ‘Do you know we actually sat in dug-outs in France and talked about that trial? The papers were full of it, I think it was the one thing that could have made me glad I was out there, I mean, for God’s sake, the Germans on the Marne, five thousand prisoners taken and all you read in the papers is who’s going to bed with whom and are they being blackmailed? God.’
‘I’ll see what I can do about Ross.’
‘Do you think they’ll listen to you?’
Rivers hesitated. ‘I think they might.’ Obviously Siegfried didn’t know he’d been called in professionally. ‘How’s the head?’