The Eye in the Door (26 page)

Suddenly, he started to cry. Wiping the back of his hand across his mouth, he sniffed and said, ‘Sorry.’

‘That’s all right.’

‘You know what finally put the kibosh on my Jekyll and Hyde performance, no, listen, this is funny. I got a new second in command. Pinto. Absolute jewel. But the first time I met him he was reading
Counter-Attack
, and he looked up and said, “Are you the same Sassoon?” My God, Rivers, what a bloody question. But of course I said, “Yes.” What else could I say? And yet do you know I think that’s when things started to unravel.’ A marked change in tone. ‘It was when I faced up to how bloody stupid it was.’

Rivers looked puzzled. ‘What was?’

‘My pathetic little formula for getting myself back to France.’ He adopted a mincing, effeminate tone. ‘“I’m not going back to kill people. I’m only going back to look after some men.”’ His own voice. ‘Why didn’t you
kick me in the head, Rivers? Why didn’t you put me out of my misery?’

Rivers made himself answer. ‘Because I was afraid if you started thinking about that, you wouldn’t go back at all.’

He might as well not have spoken. ‘You’ve only got to read the training manual. “A commander must demand the impossible and not think of sparing his men. Those who fall out must be left behind and must no more stop the pursuit than casualties stopped the assault.” That’s it. Expendable, interchangeable units. That’s what I went back to “
look after
”.’ A pause. ‘All I wanted was to see them through their first tour of duty and I couldn’t even do that.’

‘Pinto’s there,’ Rivers said tentatively.

‘Oh, yes, and he’s good. He’s really good.’

Siegfried’s face and neck were running with sweat. ‘Shall I open the window?’ Rivers asked.

‘Please. They keep shutting it, I don’t know why.’

Rivers went to open the window. Behind him, Siegfried said, ‘I’m sorry you don’t like my lovely soldier lads.’

‘I didn’t say I didn’t
like
them. I said you shouldn’t
send
them.’

‘There was one in particular.’

‘Jowett,’ said Rivers.

‘I wrote a poem about Jowett. Not that he’ll ever know. He was asleep. He looked as if he were dead.’ A silence. ‘It’s odd, isn’t it, how one can feel fatherly towards somebody, I mean,
genuinely
fatherly, not exploiting the situation or even being tempted to, and yet there’s this other current. And I don’t think one invalidates the other. I think it’s perfectly possible for them both to be genuine.’

‘Yes,’ said Rivers, with the merest hint of dryness, ‘I
imagine so.’ He came back to the bed. ‘You say things “started to unravel”?’

‘Yes, because I’d always coped with the situation by blocking out the killing side, cutting it off, and then suddenly one’s brought face to face with the fact that, no, actually there’s only one person there and that person is a potential killer of Huns. That’s what our CO used to call us. It had a very strange effect. I mean, I went out on patrol, that sort of thing, but I’ve always done that, I’ve never been able to sit in a trench, it’s not courage, I just can’t do it, but this time it was different because I wasn’t going out to kill or even to test my nerve, though that did come into it.
I just wanted to see
. I wanted to see the other side. I used to spend a lot of time looking through the periscope. It was a cornfield. Farmland. Sometimes you’d see a column of smoke coming up from the German lines, but quite often you’d see nothing.’ A pause, then he said casually, ‘I went across once. Dropped down into the trench and walked along, and there were four Germans standing by a machinegun. One of them turned round and saw me.’

‘What happened?’

‘Nothing. We just looked at each other. Then he decided he ought to tell his friends. And I decided it was time to leave.’

A tense silence.

‘I suppose I should have killed him,’ Siegfried said.

‘He should certainly have killed you.’

‘He had the excuse of surprise. You know, Rivers, it’s no good encouraging people to know themselves and… face up to their emotions, because out there they’re better off not having any. If people are going to have to kill, they need to be brought up to expect to have to do it. They need to be trained
not to care
because if you don’t…” Siegfried gripped Rivers’s hand so tightly that
his face clenched with the effort of concealing his pain. ‘It’s too cruel.’

Rivers had been with Siegfried for over an hour and so far nothing had been said that might not equally well have been dealt with at some more convenient time of day. But now, his excitement began to increase, words tripped him up, his mind stumbled along in the wake of his ideas, trying desperately to catch up. He spoke of the vastness of the war, of the impossibility of one mind encompassing it all. Again and again he spoke of the need to train boys to kill; from earliest childhood, he said, they must be taught to expect nothing else and they must never never be allowed to question what lies ahead. All this was mixed in with his anxieties about the raid Jowett and the others were going on. He spoke so vividly and with so much detail that at times he clearly believed himself to be in France.

There was no point arguing with any of this. It took Rivers three hours to calm him down and get him to sleep. Even after his breathing had become steady, Rivers went on sitting by the bed, afraid to move in case the withdrawal of his hand should cause him to wake. Long hairs on the back of Siegfried’s forearm caught the light. Rivers looked at them, too exhausted to think clearly, remembering the experiments he and Head had done on the pilomotor reflex. Head’s hairs had become erect every time he read a particular poem. The holy shiver, as the Germans call it. For Head it was awakened by poetry; for Rivers, more than once, it had been the beauty of a scientific hypothesis, one that brought into unexpected harmony a whole range of disparate facts. What had intrigued Rivers most was that human beings should respond to the highest mental and spiritual achievements of their culture with the same reflex that raises the hairs on a dog’s back. The epicritic grounded
in the protopathic, the ultimate expression of the unity we persist in regarding as the condition of perfect health. Though why we think of it like that, God knows, since most of us survive by cultivating internal divisions.

Siegfried was now deeply asleep. Cautiously, Rivers withdrew his hand, flexing the fingers. It had grown colder and Siegfried had fallen asleep outside the covers. Rivers went to shut the window, and stood for a moment attempting to arrange the story he’d been told into a coherent pattern, but that wasn’t possible, though the outline was clear enough. Siegfried had always coped with the war by being two people: the anti-war poet and pacifist; the bloodthirsty, efficient company commander. The dissociation couldn’t be called pathological, since experience gained in one state was available to the other. Not just
available
: it was the serving officer’s experience that furnished the raw material, the ammunition, if you liked, for the poems. More importantly, and perhaps more ambiguously, that experience of bloodshed supplied the moral authority for the pacifist’s protest: a
soldier’s
declaration. No wonder Pinto’s innocent question had precipitated something of a crisis.

Though he would have broken down anyway this time, Rivers thought. He had gone back hating the war, turning his face away from the reality of killing and maiming, and as soon as that reality was borne in upon him, he had found the situation unbearable. All of which might have been foreseen. Had been foreseen.

Night had turned the window into a black mirror. His face floated there, and behind it, Siegfried and the rumpled bed. If Siegfried’s attempt at dissociation had failed, so had his own. He was finding it difficult to be both involved and objective, to turn steadily on Siegfried both sides of medicine’s split face. But that was
his
problem. Siegfried need never be aware of it.

It was still dark. A light wind stirred the black trees in the park. He took his boots off and climbed on to the other bed, not expecting to be able to sleep, but thinking that at least he might rest. He closed his eyes. At first his thoughts whirred on, almost as active as Siegfried’s and not much more coherent. For some reason the situation reminded him of sleeping on board the deck of a tramp steamer travelling between the islands of Melanesia. There, one slept in a covered cabin on deck, on a bench that left vertical stripes down one’s back, surrounded by fellow passengers, and what a motley assemblage they were. He remembered a particular voyage when one of his companions had been a young Anglican priest, so determined to observe holy modesty in these difficult conditions that he’d washed the lower part of his body underneath the skirt of his cassock, while Rivers stripped off and had buckets of water thrown over him by the sailors who came up to swab the deck.

His other companion on that trip had been a trader who rejoiced in the name of Seamus O’Dowd, though he had no trace of an Irish accent. O’Dowd drank. In the smoky saloon after dinner, belching gin and dental decay into Rivers’s face, he had boasted of his exploits as a blackbirder, for he’d started life kidnapping natives to work on the Queensland plantations. Now he simply cheated them. His most recent coup had been to convince them that the great Queen (nobody in the Condominion dared tell the natives Victoria was dead) found their genitals disgusting, and could not sleep easy in her bed at Windsor until they were covered by the long johns that Seamus had inadvertently bought as part of a job lot while even more drunk than usual.

They wore them on their heads, Rivers remembered. It had been a feature of the island in that first autumn of the war, naked young men wearing long johns elaborately
folded on their heads. They looked beautiful. Meanwhile, in England, other young men had been rushing to don a less flattering garb.

Drifting between sleep and waking, Rivers remembered the smells of oil and copra, the cacophony of snores and whistles from the sleepers crammed into the small cabin on deck, the vibration of the engine that seemed to get into one’s teeth, the strange, brilliant, ferocious southern stars. He couldn’t for the life of him think what was producing this flood of nostalgia. Perhaps it was his own experience of duality that formed the link, for certainly in the years before the war he had experienced a splitting of personality as profound as any suffered by Siegfried. It had been not merely a matter of living two different lives, divided between the dons of Cambridge and the missionaries and headhunters of Melanesia, but of being a different person in the two places. It was his Melanesian self he preferred, but his attempts to integrate that self into his way of life in England had produced nothing but frustration and misery. Perhaps, contrary to what was usually supposed, duality was the stable state; the attempt at integration, dangerous. Certainly Siegfried had found it so.

He raised himself on his elbow and looked at Siegfried, who was sleeping with his face turned to the window. Perhaps the burst of nostalgia was caused by nothing more mysterious than this: the attempt to sleep in a room where another person’s breathing was audible. Sleeping in the same room as another person belonged with his Melanesian self. In England it simply didn’t happen. But it was restful, the rise and fall of breath, like the wash of waves round the prow of the boat, and gradually, as the light thinned, he drifted off to sleep.

He woke to find Siegfried kneeling by his bed. The window was open, the curtains lifting in the breeze. A trickle of bird-song came into the room.

In a half-embarrassed way, Siegfried said, ‘I seem to have talked an awful lot of rubbish last night.’ He looked cold and exhausted, but calm. ‘I suppose I had a fever?’

Rivers didn’t reply.

‘Anyway, I’m all right now.’ Diffidently, he touched Rivers’s sleeve. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you.’

A week later Rivers was sitting in his armchair in front of the fire, feeling physically tired in an almost sensuous way. This was a rare feeling with him, since most days produced a grating emotional exhaustion which was certainly not conducive to sleep. But he had been flying, which always tired him out physically, and he’d seen Siegfried a lot calmer and happier than he had recently been, though still very far from well.

Prior was the mystery. Prior had missed an appointment, something he’d never done before, and Rivers wasn’t sure what he should do about it. There was little he
could
do except drop Prior a line expressing his continued willingness to help, but there had been some suggestion that Prior worried about the degree of his dependence. If he had decided to break off the association there was nothing Rivers could – or should – do about it. He wouldn’t come now. He was over two hours late.

Rivers was just thinking he really must make the effort to do something when there was a tap on the door, and the maid came in. ‘There’s a Mr Prior to see you,’ she said, sounding doubtful, for it was very late. ‘Shall I tell him–’

‘No, no. Ask him to come up.’

He felt very unfit to cope with this, whatever it was,
but he buttoned his tunic and looked vaguely around for his boots. Prior seemed to be climbing the stairs very quickly, an easy, light tread quite unlike his usual step. His asthma had been very bad on his last visit. He had paused several times on the final flight of stairs and even then had entered the room almost too breathless to speak. The maid must have misheard the name, that or –

Prior came into the room, pausing just inside the door to look round.

‘Are you all right?’ Rivers asked.

‘Yes. Fine.’ He looked at the clock and seemed to become aware that the lateness of the hour required some explanation. ‘I had to see you.’

Rivers waved him to a chair and went to close the door.

‘Well,’ he said, when Prior was settled. ‘Your chest’s a lot better.’

Prior breathed in. Testing. He looked hard at Rivers, and nodded.

‘You were going to go to the prison last time we spoke,’ Rivers said. ‘To see Mrs Roper. Did you go?’