‘About you? If he is, it’ll be something to your advantage.’
‘You mean you know and you’re not going to tell me?’
Ruth laughed. ‘That’s right.’
By Spaniard’s Road, men in blue hospital uniforms sat in wheelchairs, waiting for someone to come and push them away. Ruth was silent for a while after they’d walked past. ‘You know there was something I didn’t say last night.’ She looked up at him. ‘I think Sassoon’s absolutely right.’
‘Oh dear, I was hoping I might be able to introduce you. But if you’re going to be a bad moral influence —’
‘Seriously.’
‘All right, seriously. Suppose he is right? Does that mean it’s a good idea to let him go ahead and destroy himself?’
‘Surely it has to be his choice?’
‘It is his choice.’
Ruth smiled and shook her head.
‘Look,’ Rivers said, ‘I wear the uniform, I take the pay, I do the job. I’m not going to apologize for that.’
‘I’m not suggesting you should. All the same,’ she said, turning to look at him, ‘you’re tearing yourself in pieces as well as him.’
They walked in silence for a while. Rivers said, ‘Is that what Henry thinks?’
Ruth laughed. ‘Of course not. You want perception, you go to a novelist, not a psychiatrist.’
‘I’m sure you’re right.’
‘No, you’re not. You don’t believe a word of it.’
‘At any rate, I’m too cowed to disagree.’
That evening, left alone with Henry after dinner, Rivers watched him massage the triangle of skin between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. ‘Does that still bother you?’
‘A bit. Cold weather. Do you know, I don’t think I’d have the courage to do that now.’
‘No, I look back sometimes, and… I’m amazed. What are you doing these days?’
‘Gross injuries to the spinal cord. We’ve got a lot of interesting material.’ Head’s mouth twisted. ‘As we call the poor sods.’
Rivers shook his head. He’d seen Head too often on the wards to believe him capable of that particular kind of research-orientated callousness.
‘It’s an interesting atmosphere,’ Head said. ‘Dealing with physical trauma and war neurosis in the same hospital. You’d like it.’
‘I’m sure I would.’ A trace of bitterness. ‘I’d like London.’
‘There’s a job going if you want it.’
‘You mean there’s a vacancy?’
‘No, I mean there’s a job for you if you want it. I’ve been asked to sound you out. Psychologist with the Royal Flying Corps. At the Central Hospital, Hampstead.’
‘Ah. I wondered why Ruth was so keen on the Heath.’
‘I imagine you’d find it interesting? Apparently there are some quite striking differences between the rate of breakdown in pilots and in other branches of the service.’
‘It sounds marvellous.’ He raised his hands and let them drop. ‘I just don’t see how I can.’
‘Why not? You’d be closer to your family, your friends, your research contacts, you’d be able to get back to Cambridge at weekends. And… I don’t suppose it matters, but we’d be able to work together again.’
Rivers buried his face in his hands. ‘O-o-o-oh. “Get thee behind me, Satan.”’
‘I am behind you. I was thinking of giving you a shove.’
‘I couldn’t leave Bryce.’
Head looked incredulous. ‘You mean, your CO?’
‘He’s in a difficult situation. We’re in for a general inspection, and… it all goes back a long way. Bryce is determined this time he’s not going to play their game. He’s not going to parade the patients, or polish the bottoms of the frying-pans, or pretend to be anything other than just an extremely busy, overcrowded and I think bloody good hospital.’
‘What do they want?’
‘They want a barracks. It’s got all the makings of a really nasty confrontation. I think Bryce may have to go.’
‘Well, I hate to sound harsh, but wouldn’t that rather solve the problem? Your problem, I mean.’
‘If it happened. Meanwhile, I think I can be… of some use to him.’
‘When is this inspection?’
‘End of the month.’
‘We’d need to know about the job… Well. Three weeks?’
‘I’ll think about it.’
‘Good. And don’t be too altruistic, will you? You’re isolated up there, it’s not good for you.’
‘I don’t know about isolated. I never have a minute to myself.’
‘Precisely. Come on, let’s find Ruth.’
15
Aldeburgh was the end of the line, but the train, as if reluctant to accept this, produced, as Rivers stepped down on to the platform, an amazing burst of steam. He stood, looking up and down, as the train’s hissing subsided into grunts, and the steam cleared. Burns had promised to meet him, but his memory wasn’t good, and, faced with the empty platform, Rivers was glad he had the address. But then, just as Rivers was resigning himself to finding the house on his own, Burns appeared, a tall, emaciated figure wearing a coat of stiff herringbone tweed that reached almost to the ground. He’d obviously been running, and was out of breath. ‘Hello,’ he said. Rivers tried to judge whether Burns looked better or worse. It was hard to tell. His face in the light of the naphtha flares was as expressionless as beaten bronze.
‘How are you?’ they asked simultaneously, and then laughed.
Rivers decided he should be the one to answer. ‘A lot better, thanks.’
‘Good,’ Burns said. ‘It’s walking distance,’ he added across his shoulder, already striding off. ‘We don’t need a taxi.’
They came out of the station and began walking downhill, through the quiet cold fringes of the town, past the church, through streets of huddled houses, and out on to the front.
The sea was calm, almost inaudible, a toothless mouth mumbling pebbles in the darkness. Instead of walking along the path, Burns struck out across the shingle and Rivers followed, to where the tide had laid bare a thin strip of sand. The crunch and slither of shingle under their feet blotted out all other sounds. Rivers turned, and saw the bones of Burns’s face gleaming in the moonlight. He wondered what he made of the tangles of barbed wire that ran along the beach, with only two narrow channels left for fishing boats and for the lifeboat to come and go. But Burns seemed not to see the wire.
They stood together at the water’s edge, two black shadows on the pale shingle, and small waves creamed over at their feet. Then the moon came out from behind a bank of dark cloud, and the fishermen’s huts, the boats lined up in two short rows behind the wire, and the heaped nets, cast shadows behind them almost as sharply edged as day.
They returned to the path and began walking along the terrace of houses, which here and there had gaps. Many of the houses were shuttered and had sandbags piled against the front doors. ‘The sea’s been known to pay visits,’ Burns said, following the direction of Rivers’s gaze. ‘I was here once when it flooded.’ Evidently sandbags brought back no other memories.
‘This is it,’ he said a few minutes later, stopping in front of a tall but extremely narrow house. At this end of the foreshore the sea was much closer, turning and turning in the darkness. Rivers looked out and caught a glint of white. ‘What’s along there?’
‘The marshes. More shingle. I’ll show you tomorrow.’
They groped their way into the hall, closing the door carefully behind them before Burns switched on the light. His face, deeply shadowed from the unshaded bulb, peered anxiously at Rivers. ‘I expect you’d like to go upstairs,’ he said. ‘I think I’ve given you a towel…’ He looked like a child trying to remember what it was that grown-ups said to newly arrived guests. He also looked, for the first time, deranged.