In a moment or two an orderly would tap on the door and bring in his tea. He put the notebook and pencil back on the bedside table. Henry would be amused by that dream, he thought. If wish fulfilment had been involved at all, it was surely one of Henry’s wishes that had been fulfilled. At the time of the nerve regeneration experiments, they’d done a series of control experiments on the glans penis, and Henry had frequently expressed the desire for a reciprocal application of ice cubes, bristles, near-boiling water and pins.
6
Prior sat with his arms folded over his chest and his head turned slightly away. His eyelids looked raw from lack of sleep.
‘When did your voice come back?’ Rivers asked.
‘In the middle of the night. I woke up shouting and suddenly I realized I could talk. It’s happened before.’
A Northern accent, not ungrammatical, but with the vowel sounds distinctly flattened, and the faintest trace of sibilance. Hearing Prior’s voice for the first time had the curious effect of making him look different. Thinner, more defensive. And, at the same time, a lot tougher. A little, spitting, sharp-boned alley cat.
‘It comes and goes?’
‘Yes.’
‘What makes it go?’
Another shrug from the repertoire. ‘When I get upset.’
‘And coming here upset you?’
‘I’d have preferred somewhere further south.’
So would I. ‘What did you do before the war?’
‘I was a clerk in a shipping office.’
‘Did you like it?’
‘No. It was boring.’ He looked down at his hands and immediately up again. ‘What did you do?’
Rivers hesitated. ‘Research. Teaching.’
‘Did you like it?’
‘Yes, very much. Research more than teaching probably, but…’ He shrugged. ‘I enjoy teaching.’
‘I noticed. “Two l’s in physically, Mr Prior.”’
‘What an insufferable thing to say.’
‘I thought so.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Prior didn’t know what to say to that. He looked down at his hands and mumbled, ‘Yes, well.’
‘By the way, your file arrived this morning.’
Prior smiled. ‘So you know all about me, then?’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that. What did become clear is that you had a spell in the 13th Casualty Clearing Station in…’ He looked at the file again. ‘January. Diagnosed neurasthenic.’
Prior hesitated. ‘Ye-es.’
‘Deep reflexes abnormal.’
‘Yes.’
‘But on that occasion no trouble with the voice? Fourteen days later you were back in the line. Fully recovered?’
‘I’d stopped doing the can-can, if that’s what you mean.’
‘Were there any remaining symptoms?’
‘Headaches.’ He watched Rivers make a note. ‘It’s hardly a reason to stay out of the trenches, is it? “Not tonight, Wilhelm. I’ve got a headache”?’
‘It might be. It rather depends how bad they were.’ He waited for a reply, but Prior remained obstinately silent. ‘You were back in the 13th CCS in April. This time unable to speak.’
‘I’ve told you, I don’t remember.’
‘So the loss of memory applies to the later part of your service in France, but the early part — the first six months or so — is comparatively clear?’
‘Ye-es.’
Rivers sat back in his chair. ‘Would you like to tell me something about that early part?’
‘No.’
‘But you do remember it?’
‘Doesn’t mean I want to talk about it.’ He looked round the room. ‘I don’t see why it has to be like this anyway.’
‘Like what?’
‘All the questions from you, all the answers from me. Why can’t it be both ways?’
‘Look, Mr Prior, if you went to the doctor with bronchitis and he spent half the consultation time telling you about his lumbago, you would not be pleased. Would you?’
‘No, but if I went to my doctor in despair it might help to know he at least understood the meaning of the word.’
‘Are you in despair?’
Prior sighed, ostentatiously impatient.
‘You know, I talk to a lot of people who are in despair or very close to it, and my experience is that they don’t care what the doctor feels. That’s the whole point about despair, isn’t it? That you turn in on yourself.’
‘Well, all I can say is I’d rather talk to a real person than a a strip of empathic wallpaper.’
Rivers smiled. ‘I like that.’
Prior glared at him.
‘If you feel you can’t talk about France, would it help to talk about the nightmares?’
‘No. I don’t think talking helps. It just churns things up and makes them seem more real.’
‘But they are real.’
A short silence. Rivers closed Prior’s file. ‘All right. Good morning.’
Prior looked at the clock. ‘It’s only twenty past ten.’
Rivers spread his hands.
‘You can’t refuse to talk to me.’
‘Prior, there are a hundred and sixty-eight patients in this hospital, all of them wanting to get better, none of them getting the attention he deserves. Good morning.’
Prior started to get up, then sat down again. ‘You’ve no right to say I don’t want to get better.’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘You implied it.’
‘All right. Do you want to get better?’
‘Of course.’
‘But you’re not prepared to co-operate with the treatment.’
‘I don’t agree with the treatment.’
Deep breath. ‘What methods of treatment do you favour?’
‘Dr Sanderson was going to try hypnosis.’
‘He doesn’t mention it in his report.’
‘He was. He told me.’
‘How did you feel about that?’
‘I thought it was a good idea. I mean you’re more or less saying: things are real, you’ve got to face them, but how can I face them when I don’t know what they are?’
‘That’s rather an unusual reaction, you know. Generally, when a doctor suggests hypnosis the patient’s quite nervous, because he feels he’ll be… putting himself in somebody else’s power. Actually that’s not quite true, but it does tend to be the fear.’
‘If it’s not true, why don’t you use it?’
‘I do sometimes. In selected cases. As a last resort. In your case, I’d want to know quite a lot about the part of your war service that you do remember.’
‘All right. What do you want to know?’
Rivers blinked, surprised by the sudden capitulation. ‘Well, anything you want to tell me.’
Silence.
‘Perhaps you could start with the day before you went into the CCS for the first time. Do you remember what you were doing that day?’
Prior smiled. ‘Standing up to my waist in water in a dugout in the middle of No Man’s Land being bombed to buggery.’
‘Why?’
‘Good question. You should pack this in and join the general staff.’
‘If there wasn’t a reason, there must at least have been a rationale.’
‘There was that, all right.’ Prior adopted a strangled version of the public school accent. ‘The pride of the British Army requires that absolute dominance must be maintained in No Man’s Land at all times.’ He dropped the accent. ‘Which in practice means… Dugout in the middle of No Man’s Land. Right? Every forty-eight hours two platoons crawl out — nighttime, of course — relieve the poor bastards inside, and provide the Germans with another forty-eight hours’ target practice. Why it’s thought they need all this target practice is beyond me. They seem quite accurate enough as it is.’ His expression changed. ‘It was flooded. You stand the whole time. Most of the time in pitch darkness because the blast kept blowing the candles out. We were packed in so tight we couldn’t move. And they just went all out to get us. One shell after the other. I lost two sentries. Direct hit on the steps. Couldn’t find a thing.’