Prior was lying on his bed, reading. He was a thin, fair-haired young man of twenty-two with high cheekbones, a short, blunt nose and a supercilious expression. He looked up as Rivers came in, but didn’t close the book.
‘Sister tells me you had a bad night?’
Prior produced an elaborate shrug. Out of the corner of his eye Rivers saw Sister Rogers’s lips tighten. ‘What did you dream about?’
Prior reached for the notepad and pencil he kept beside his bed and scrawled in block capitals, ‘I DON’T REMEMBER.’
‘Nothing at all?’
Prior hesitated, then wrote, ‘NO.’
‘Does he talk in his sleep, sister?’
Rivers was looking at Prior as he asked the question, and thought he detected a flicker of uneasiness.
‘Nothing you can get hold of.’
Prior’s lips curled, but he couldn’t hide the relief.
‘Could you get me a teaspoon, sister?’ Rivers asked.
While she was out of the room, Prior went on staring at Rivers. Rivers, trying to keep the meeting from becoming a confrontation, looked around the room. Sister Rogers came back. ‘Thank you. Now I just want to have a look at the back of your throat.’
Again the pad came out. ‘THERE’S NOTHING PHYSICALY WRONG.’
‘Two l’s in “physically”, Mr Prior. Open wide.’
Rivers drew the end of the teaspoon, not roughly, but firmly, across the back of Prior’s throat. Prior choked, his eyes watered, and he tried to push Rivers’s hand away.
‘There’s no area of analgesia,’ Rivers said to Sister Rogers.
Prior snatched up the pad. ‘IF THAT MEANS IT HURT YES IT DID.’
‘I don’t think it hurt, did it?’ Rivers said. ‘It may have been uncomfortable.’
‘HOW WOULD YOU KNOW?’
Sister Rogers made a clicking noise with her tongue.
‘Do you think you could give us ten minutes alone, sister?’
‘Yes, of course, doctor.’ She glared at Prior. ‘I’ll be in my room if you need me.’
After she’d gone, Rivers said, ‘Why do you always write in block capitals? Because it’s less revealing?’
Prior shook his head. He wrote, ‘CLEARER.’
‘Depends on your handwriting, doesn’t it? I know, if I ever lost my voice, I’d have to write in capitals. Nobody can read mine.’
Prior offered the pad. Rivers, feeling like a schoolboy playing noughts and crosses, wrote: ‘Your file still hasn’t arrived.’
‘I SEE WHAT YOU MEAN.’
Rivers said, ‘Your file still hasn’t arrived.’
Another elaborate shrug.
‘Well, I’m afraid it’s rather more serious than that. If it doesn’t show up soon, we’re going to have to try to get a history together — like this. And that’s not going to be easy.’
‘WHY?’
‘Why do we have to do it? Because I need to know what’s happened to you.’
‘I DON’T REMEMBER.’
‘No, not at the moment, perhaps, but the memory will start to come back.’
A long silence. At last Prior scribbled something, then turned over on his side to face the wall. Rivers leant across and picked the pad up. Prior had written: ‘NO MORE WORDS.’
‘I must say it makes Dottyville almost bearable,’ Sassoon said, looking up and down the station platform. ‘Knowing you don’t have to be vomited over at every meal. I’d eat out every night if I could afford it.’
‘You’ll have to spend some time in the place, Sass.’ No reply. ‘At least you’ve got Rivers.’
‘And at least Rivers doesn’t pretend there’s anything wrong with my nerves.’
Graves started to speak and checked himself. ‘I wish I could say the same about mine.’
‘What can I say, Robert? Have my bed. You live with a herd of lunatics. I’ll go back to Liverpool.’
‘I hate it when you talk like that. As if everybody who breaks down is inferior. We’ve all been’ — Graves held up his thumb and forefinger — ‘that close.’
‘I know how close I’ve been.’ A short silence, then he burst out, ‘Don’t you see, Robert, that’s why I hate the place? I’m frightened.’
‘Frightened? You? You’re not frightened.’ He craned round to see Sassoon’s expression. ‘Are you?’
‘Evidently not.’
They stood in silence for a minute.
‘You ought to be getting back,’ Graves said.
‘Yes, I think you’re right. I don’t want to attract attention to myself.’ He held out his hand. ‘Well. Give everybody my regards. If they still want them.’
Graves took the hand and pulled him into a bear hug. ‘Don’t be so bloody stupid, Siegfried. You know they do.’
Alone and shivering on the pavement, Sassoon thought about taking a taxi and decided against it. The walk would do him good, and if he hurried he could probably make it back in time. He threaded his way through the crowds on Princes Street. Now that Robert was gone, he hated everybody, giggling girls, portly middle-aged men, women whose eyes settled on his wound stripe like flies. Only the young soldier home on leave, staggering out of a pub, dazed and vacant-eyed, escaped his disgust.
Once he’d left the city behind, he began to relax and swing along as he might have done in France. He remembered the march to Arras behind a limber whose swaying lantern cast huge shadows of striding legs across a white-washed wall. Then… No more walls. Ruined buildings. Shelled roads. ‘From sunlight to the sunless land.’ And for a second he was back there, Armageddon, Golgotha, there were no words, a place of desolation so complete no imagination could have invented it. He thought of Rivers, and what he’d said that morning about finding safety unbearable. Well, Rivers was wrong, people were more corruptible than that. He was more corruptible than that. A few days of safety, and all the clear spirit of the trenches was gone. It was still, after all these weeks, pure joy to go to bed in white sheets and know that he would wake. The road smelled of hot tar, moths flickered between the trees, and when at last, turning up the drive into Craiglockhart, he stopped and threw back his head, the stars burst on his upturned face like spray.
A nightly bath had become essential to Rivers, a ritual that divided his meagre spare time from the demands of the hospital. He was already pulling his tunic off as he crossed the bedroom. Naked, he sat on the edge of the bath, waiting for it to fill. The hot tap was shiny; the cold, misted over, dewed with drops of condensed steam. Absent-mindedly, he played with the drops, making them run together to form larger pools. He was thinking about Prior, and the effect he was having on his room-mate, Robinson, and wondering whether it was worse than the effect Anderson was having on Featherstone. In any event, no single room was available. One solution to the Prior problem was to move Robinson into a room at present shared by two patients, although if the overcrowding were not to prove intolerable, the patients would have to be very carefully selected. He was still running through possible combinations as he bathed.
By his bed was the current issue of Man, still in its envelope. He hadn’t managed even to glance through it yet. And suddenly he was furious with the hospital, and Prior, and overcrowding and the endless permutations of people sharing that were made necessary by nightmares, sleep-walking, the need of some patients for night-lights and others for absolute darkness.
His irritation, groping for an object, fastened on Sassoon. Sassoon made no secret of his belief that anybody who supported the continuation of the war must be actuated by selfish motives, and yet if Rivers had allowed such motives to dominate, he’d have wanted the war to end tonight. Let the next generation cope with the unresolved problem of German militarism, just get me back to Cambridge and research. He flicked through the journal, but he was too tired to concentrate, and, after a few minutes, he switched off the light.