He’d sat with other boys — his father’s pupils — underneath that picture for many a long hour, stumbling over the consonants of his own language, remembering to hold down the back of his tongue, project his breath in an even flow, etc., etc. Sometimes his father would walk with him up and down the room, since he believed the measured pace helped to regulate the flow of breath. Rivers hadn’t been the star pupil in those classes, not by any means. If anything he’d made rather less progress than the rest, in spite of — or because of? — having his teacher with him all the time. The house was full of stammering boys, any age from ten to nineteen, and at least it meant he was not the only one. It had had another advantage too, he remembered. While the boys were there, the Reverend Charles Dodgson stayed away. Mr Dodgson didn’t like boys. As soon as they left at Christmas or in the summer holidays, he arrived, taking lessons every evening after dinner. Rivers, from long exposure to other people’s speech impediments, could sum up the main features of a stammer almost as quickly as his father. Dodgson found m difficult, and p in consonant combinations, particularly in the middle of words, but his arch enemy was hard c.
During the day there were boating trips on the river. Dodgson and the four Rivers children, himself, Charles, Ethel and — Dodgson’s favourite — Katharine. He’d never enjoyed those trips much, and neither, he thought, had Charles, though probably that was no more than the slight pique of two Victorian schoolboys, finding themselves, for the first time in their lives, not of the preferred sex. Afterwards, during those apparently endless summer evenings, there would be croquet on the lawn, Rivers’s father and Dodgson playing, the children watching. There was a photograph of them on the desk, doing just that, he and Charles leaning back against the garden roller, no doubt getting grass stains on their white shirts, the two little girls, his sisters, under the shade of the beech tree. If he tried hard, he could recall the feel of the roller against his shoulder blades, the heat of the sun on the back of his neck.
He had one other memory of Dodgson. One evening he’d crept close to the open window of his father’s study, sat down with his back to the wall and listened to the lesson in progress. Why he’d done this he couldn’t now remember, except that it hadn’t felt like eavesdropping, since he knew nothing private was likely to be said. Perhaps he’d just wanted to hear Dodgson put through the same routine he and the other boys were put through. Perhaps he’d wanted to see him cut down to size. Dodgson had just embarked on the sentence about the careful cat catching the mouse — a simple enough tale, but already, in Dodgson’s mouth, threatening to become an epic. Rivers listened to his father’s advice, the same advice, basically, that he got, though conveyed without that peculiar note of fraught patience. He thought suddenly, this is nonsense. It doesn’t help to remember to keep your tongue down, it doesn’t help to think about the flow of breath. So he’d thought, sweeping away his father’s life work in a single minute as twelve-year-old boys are apt to do. He’d raised his head very cautiously above the window sill, and seen his father sitting behind the desk — this desk — his back to the window, clean pink neck showing above clean white collar, broad shoulders straining the cloth of his jacket. He stared at the back of his neck, at the neck of the man whom he had, in a way, just killed, and he didn’t feel sad or guilty about it at all. He felt glad.
Later that summer he’d given a talk to the speech therapy group on monkeys. M was to him what c was to Dodgson, but he was interested in monkeys, and still more interested in Darwin’s theory of evolution, which by this time had achieved acceptance in some circles. Knowles Bank was not among them. His father had been furious, not because Rivers had stumbled over every single m without exception — though indeed he had — but because he’d dared suggest that Genesis was no more than the creation myth of a Bronze Age people. Dinner that night was a strained occasion. Father angry, mother upset, Charles covertly sympathetic, sisters goggle-eyed and making the most of it, Rivers himself outwardly subdued, inwardly triumphant. For the first time in his life, he’d forced his father to listen to what he had to say, and not merely to the way he’d said it.
And yet, Rivers thought, running his hands across the scarred leather of the desk top, the relationship between father and son is never simple, and never over. Death certainly doesn’t end it. In the past year he’d thought more about his father than he’d done since he was a child. Only recently it had occurred to him that if some twelve-year-old boy had crept up to his window at Craiglockhart, as he’d done to his father’s window at Knowles Bank, he’d have seen a man sitting at a desk with his back to the window, listening to some patient, with a stammer far worse than Dodgson’s, try and fail to reach the end of a sentence. Only that boy would not have been his son.
The unfinished letter to Siegfried lay on the desk. He’d got as far as a comment on the weather, and there the letter had ground to a halt. What he did so easily in conversation, always nudging Siegfried gently in the same direction, and yet always avoiding any suggestion of pressure, was a feat he apparently could not perform on paper. Perhaps he was just too tired. He told himself the letter could wait till morning.
He picked up the lamp, pushed aside the heavy dark red curtains and opened the window. A big dizzy moth flew in, with pale wings and a fat, furry body, and began bumping against the ceiling. He leant out of the window, smelling roses he couldn’t see. The wind had fallen completely now, giving way to a breathless hush. Faintly, over dark hedges and starlit fields, came the soft thud-thud of the guns. When he’d first arrived, suffering from the usual medley of physical and neurasthenic symptoms — headaches, dry mouth, pounding heart — he’d confused that sound with the throbbing of blood in his head. Then one night, lying sleepless, he’d heard the water jug vibrating in the bowl, and realized what it was that he kept hearing. Siegfried must have heard it in June when he was at home convalescing from his wound.
Perhaps he’d better write tonight after all. He closed the window, and sat down at the desk. The moth’s huge shadow, flickering over the walls and ceiling, darkened the page, as, drawing the pad towards him, he tore off the sheet and started again. My dear Siegfried…
‘What draft is this?’
‘Lost count,’ Owen said. ‘You did tell me to sweat my guts out.’
‘Did I really? What an inelegant expression. “What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?” I see we got to the slaughterhouse in the end.’ Sassoon read through the poem. When he’d finished, he didn’t immediately comment.