Regeneration (29 page)

Sassoon looked at his watch again. Even allowing for the fact that nobody in their right mind could take long to decide whether Pugh was fit for duty, he couldn’t hope to be out of the place before six. He was supposed to have tea with the Sampsons at four thirty. Even if he left now and caught a tram immediately, he still wouldn’t be on time. It was too bad. People who were prepared to die had at least the right not to be kept waiting. He closed his eyes again. He was so tired he really thought if it wasn’t for Pugh and that dreadful jerking, he might have managed to nod off. He’d hardly slept at all last night.

In his breast pocket was a letter from Joe Cotterill, the Battalion Quartermaster. Sassoon knew it almost off by heart. Joe’s journey to Polygon Wood with the rations, the ground as full of holes as a pepperpot lid, nothing but mud and dead trees as far as the eye could see. They’d spent the night in a shell-hole, lost, under heavy fire. Several of the ration party had been killed. But, said Joe, the battalion got their rations. Reading that, Sassoon had wanted to rush back to France at once, but then, right at the end of the letter, Joe had said:
Buck up and get out of there. Go to Parliament. Surely they can’t keep you there against your will?
The trouble was, Sassoon thought, sighing and looking at his watch, that Joe’s anonymous ‘they’ was his Rivers.

Thorpe arrived. ‘D-d-d-do w-w-w-wwe kn-kn-know wwhwhat’s t-t-t-t-taking s-s-so l-l-long?’ he asked after a while.

Sassoon shook his head. Pugh shook his head too, though whether in answer to the question it was difficult to tell. And suddenly Sassoon had had enough. ‘And I for one don’t intend to stay and find out.’

He had a fleeting impression of Thorpe and Pugh with their mouths open, and then he was striding out of the room, down the corridor, through the swing doors and away.

‘Pugh next, I think?’ said Bryce.

‘Hang on, old chap,’ Huntley said. ‘Got to pump ship.’

The door closed behind him. Bryce said, ‘Where do you suppose he finds these nautical expressions?’ Receiving no reply, he turned to Rivers.

‘Why we had to take an hour over
that
I shall never know.’

‘Prior didn’t help himself much, did he?’

Rivers didn’t answer.

‘And at least you got what you wanted. In the end.’

The major came back, buttoning his breeches. ‘All right, all right,’ he said, as if
he
’d been waiting for
them.
‘Let’s get on.’

Pugh was quick and distressing. Since the orderly had gone off to have dinner, Rivers himself went into the waiting room to summon Sassoon. Thorpe was sitting there alone. ‘Have you seen Sassoon?’

‘He’s…’ Thorpe went into one of his paroxysms. ‘G-g-g-g-g-gone.’

‘G-g-?’ Deep breath.
‘Where
has he gone?’

Thorpe economized with a shrug. Rivers walked along to the patients’ common room and looked for Sassoon there, and instead found Prior, sitting at the piano picking out a few notes. Prior looked up. Rivers, thinking it was a long time to wait till the result was officially announced, stuck his thumb in the air and smiled.

‘All right, Thorpe,’ he said, going back to the ante-room. ‘You’d better come in.’

Rivers came out of Thorpe’s Board to find Sassoon still missing and Sister Duffy hovering in the corridor, wanting to talk about Prior. ‘Crying his eyes out,’ she said. ‘I thought he’d
got
permanent home service?’

‘He did.’

Rivers went up to Prior’s room and found him sitting on the bed, not crying now, though rather swollen about the eyes.

‘I suppose I’m expected to be grateful?’

‘No.’

‘Good. Because I’m not.’

Rivers tried to suppress a smile.

‘I told you I
didn’t want it.
’

‘It’s not a question of what you
want
, is it? It’s a question of whether you’re fit.’

‘I was all right. It never stopped me doing anything the others did.’

‘Now that’s not quite true, is it? You told me yourself you were excused running through the gas huts, because on the one
occasion you tried it, you collapsed. Your participation in gastraining exercises was restricted to listening to lectures. Wasn’t it?’

No response.

‘It’s all very well to joke about being the battalion canary, but it’s true, isn’t it? You
would
be overcome by gas at much lower concentrations than most people, and that could be very dangerous.
And not just for you.’

Prior turned away.

Rivers sighed. ‘You realize the other man who got permanent home service is throwing a party tonight?’

‘Good for him. I hope it’s a good party.’

‘Why do you hate it so much?’

Silence. After a while, Prior said, ‘I suppose I’m not your patient any more, am I?’

‘No.’

‘So I don’t have to put up with
this?
’

It was on the tip of Rivers’s tongue to point out that the relief was mutual, but he looked at the swollen eyes and restrained himself. ‘What don’t you have to put up with?’

‘The blank wall. The silences. The
pretending.’

‘Look. At the moment you hate me because I’ve been instrumental in getting you something you’re ashamed of wanting. I can’t do much about the hatred, but I do think you should look at the shame. Because it’s not really anything to be ashamed
of
, is it? Wanting to stay alive? You’d be a very strange sort of animal if you didn’t.’

Prior shook his head. ‘You don’t understand.’

‘Tell me, then.’

‘I’ll never know now, will I? About myself…’

‘But you do know. You were a perfectly satisfactory officer, until –’

‘Until the strain got to me and I stopped being
a perfectly satisfactory officer.
Where does that leave me?’

‘With the whole of your life ahead of you and other challenges to face.’

‘If
you
were a patient here, don’t you think you’d feel ashamed?’

‘Probably. Because I’ve been brought up the same way as
everybody else. But I hope I’d have the
sense
, or – whatever it is – the intelligence to see how unjustified it was.’

Prior was shaking his head. ‘Not possible. The hoop’s there, you jump through it. If you question it, you’ve failed. If it’s taken away from you, you’ve failed.’

‘No, I don’t see that. If it’s taken away, it’s out of your hands. You didn’t
ask
for permanent home service. You were
given
it, on the basis of Eaglesham’s report.
Not my report.
There’s nothing in your psychological state to prevent your going back.’

Prior didn’t answer. Rivers said gently, ‘Everybody who survives feels guilty. Don’t let it spoil everything.’

‘It’s not that. Well, partly. It’s just that I’ve never let the asthma stop me. I was
ordered
to stay out of those gas huts,
I
was quite prepared to go through them. Even as a – a child I was
determined
it wasn’t going to stop me. I could do anything the others did, and not only that, I could
beat
them. I’m not suggesting this is peculiar to me, I – I think most asthmatics are like that. My mother was always pulling the other way. Trying to keep me in. I shouldn’t criticize the poor woman, I think she probably saved my life, but she did
use
it. She wanted me in the house away from all the
nasty rough boys.
And then suddenly here
you are
…’ He raised his hands. ‘Doing exactly the same thing.’ He looked at Rivers, a cool, amused, mocking, affectionate, highly intelligent stare. ‘Probably why I never wanted you to be
Daddy.
I’d got you lined up for a worse fate.’

Rivers, remembering the manny goat, smiled. He was rather glad Prior didn’t have access to his thoughts.

‘Thanks for putting up with me.’

This was muttered so gracelessly Rivers wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly.

‘I was an absolute pig.’

‘Never.’

Prior hesitated. ‘Would you mind if I looked you up after the war?’

‘Mind?
I’d be delighted. Though I don’t see why you have to wait till after the war. You can always write to me here. If – if I’ve moved on, they’ll know where I am.’

‘Thanks. I will write.’

At the door Rivers turned. ‘If I don’t see you again before you go, good luck.’

It was an effort to talk at dinner, partly tiredness, partly, Sassoon’s empty place. By now it was clear he’d deliberately skipped the Board. He’d left the Sampsons at six o’clock, but hadn’t yet returned to the hospital. It was possible he was having dinner at the Club, putting off the moment when he’d have to face Rivers, but he was impetuous enough, and perhaps desperate enough, to take the train for London and launch himself into some further crackpot scheme to stop the war. Rivers knew the full extent of the dilemma that would face him if Sassoon
had
deserted and
did
make another public protest. He would be asked to take part in declaring him insane; they would never court-martial him. Not now. The casualty lists were too terrible to admit of any public debate on the continuation of the war.

Rivers roused himself to take part in the conversation to find Major Huntley riding one of his hobby horses again. Racial degeneration, this time. The falling birth rate. The need to keep up what he called ‘the supply of heroes’. Did Rivers know that private soldiers were on average
five inches
shorter than their officers? And yet it was often the better type of woman who chose to limit the size of her family, while her feckless sisters bred the Empire to destruction. Rivers listened as politely as he could to the major’s theories on how the women of Britain might be brought back to a proper sense of their duties, but it was a relief when dinner was over, and he could plead pressure of work and escape to his own room.

He’d left a message with Sister Duffy that Sassoon was to be sent to him as soon as he got back, no matter how late that might be. It was very late indeed. He came in, looking penitent and sheepish.

Rivers said, ‘Sit down.’

Sassoon sat, folded his large hands in his lap, and waited. His demeanour was very much that of a keen, and basically decent, head boy who knows he’s let the headmaster down rather badly, and is probably in for ‘a bit of a wigging’, but expects it to be all right in the end. Nothing could have been more calculated to
drive Rivers to fury. ‘I’m sure you have a perfectly satisfactory explanation.’

‘I was late for tea with Sampson.’

Rivers closed his eyes. ‘That’s it?’

‘Yes.’

‘It would have been quite impossible for you to
telephone
Sampson, and
tell
him that you were going to be late?’

‘It didn’t seem… courteous. It —’

‘And what about the courtesy due to Major Bryce? Major Huntley? Don’t you think you at least owed them an
explanation
before you walked out?’

Silence.

‘Why, Siegfried?’

‘I couldn’t face it.’

‘Now that
does
surprise me. Juvenile behaviour I might have expected from you, but never cowardice.’

‘I’m not offering excuses.’

‘You’re not offering anything. Certainly not
reasons.
’

‘I’m not sure there are any. I was fed up with being kept waiting. I thought if I was going to
die
, at least other people could make the effort to be on time. It was…’ A deep breath. ‘Petulance.’

‘So you can’t suggest a reason?’

‘I’ve told you, there aren’t any.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Look, I’ll apologize. I’ll
grovel
if you like.’

‘I’m not interested in your grovelling. I’d rather you told the truth.’

Sassoon wriggled in his chair. ‘All right. I’ve had this idea floating around in my mind, for… oh, for five or six weeks. I thought if I could get myself passed fit and then go to London, I could see somebody like… Charles Mercier.’

‘Dr Mercier?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why on earth would you want to see him?’

‘For a second opinion. He’s all right, isn’t he?’

‘Oh, yes, you couldn’t do better. Except that… if you’d just been passed fit by the Board – why would you need to see Mercier?’

‘So they couldn’t say I’d had a relapse, if I went on with the protest.’

Rivers sat back in his chair. ‘Oh, I see.’

Silence.

‘And had you definitely decided to do that?’

‘I hadn’t definitely decided anything. If you want the
reason
I walked out, that’s probably it. It suddenly struck me that in a few hours’ time I’d be packing and I had no idea where I was going. And then at the back of my mind there was the idea that if I went to Mercier I’d be…’

Rivers waited.

‘Doing the dirty on you.’

‘You could’ve had a second opinion at any time. I’d no idea you wanted it. People whose psychiatrists tell them they’re completely sane don’t usually ask for second opinions.’

‘That
is
what they’d do, though, isn’t it? Say I’d had a relapse?’

‘Yes. Probably. I take it you’ve definitely decided not to go back?’

‘No, I want to go back.’

Rivers slumped in his chair. ‘Thank God. I don’t pretend to understand, but thank God.’ After a while he added, ‘You know the real irony in all this? This morning I had a letter from the War Office. Not exactly an undertaking to send you back, but… signs of progress.’

‘And now I’ve gone and ruined it all by having tea with an astronomer.’

‘Oh, I don’t suppose you have. I’ll write to them tonight.’

Sassoon looked at the clock.

‘Well, we don’t want him hearing it from Huntley, do we? By the way, late as it is, I think Major Bryce would still like to see you.’

Sassoon took the hint and stood up. ‘What do you think he’ll do?’

‘No idea.
Roast
you, I hope.’

19

__________

Prior had never broken into a house before. Not that he was exactly breaking into this one, he reminded himself, though it felt like it, standing cold and shivering in the back yard, in a recess between what must be, he supposed, the coalhouse and the shithouse. He wrapped his coat more tightly round him and craned his neck to see the sky. Light cloud, no moon, stars pricking through, a snap of frost.