Everything about the poem suggested that Sassoon’s attitude to his war experience had been the opposite of what one normally encountered. The typical patient, arriving at Craiglockhart, had usually been devoting considerable energy to the task of forgetting whatever traumatic events had precipitated his neurosis. Even if the patient recognized that the attempt was hopeless, he had usually been encouraged to persist in it by friends, relatives, even by his previous medical advisers. The horrors he’d experienced, only partially repressed even by day, returned with redoubled force to haunt the nights, giving rise to that most characteristic symptom of war neurosis: the battle nightmare.
Rivers’s treatment sometimes consisted simply of encouraging the patient to abandon his hopeless attempt to forget, and advising him instead to spend some part of every day remembering. Neither brooding on the experience, nor trying to pretend it had never happened. Usually, within a week or two of the patient’s starting this treatment, the nightmares began to be less frequent and less terrifying.
Sassoon’s determination to remember might well account for his early and rapid recovery, though in his case it was motivated less by a desire to save his own sanity than by a determination to convince civilians that the war was mad. Writing the poems had obviously been therapeutic, but then Rivers suspected that writing the Declaration might have been therapeutic too. He thought that Sassoon’s poetry and his protest sprang from a single source, and each could be linked to his recovery from that terrible period of nightmares and hallucinations. If that was true, then persuading Sassoon to give in and go back would be a much more complicated and risky business than he had thought, and might well precipitate a relapse.
He sighed and put the poems back in the envelope. Looking at his watch, he saw that it was time to start his rounds. He’d just reached the foot of the main staircase when he saw Captain Campbell, bent double and walking backwards, emerge from the darkened dining room.
‘Campbell?’
Campbell spun round. ‘Ah, Captain Rivers, just the man.’ He came up to Rivers and, speaking in a discreet whisper that was audible the length and breadth of the corridor, as Campbell’s discreet whispers tended to be, said, ‘That fella they’ve put in my room.’
‘Sassoon. Yes?’
‘Don’t think he’s a German spy, do you?’
Rivers gave the matter careful consideration. ‘No, I don’t think so. They never call themselves “Siegfried”.’
Campbell looked astonished. ‘No more they do.’ He nodded, patted Rivers briskly on the shoulder, and moved off. ‘Just thought I’d mention it,’ he called back.
‘Thank you, Campbell. Much appreciated.’
Rivers stood for a moment at the foot of the stairs, unconsciously shaking his head.
4
‘I was walking up the drive at home. My wife was on the lawn having tea with some other ladies, they were all wearing white. As I got closer, my wife stood up and smiled and waved and then her expression changed and all the other ladies began to look at each other. I couldn’t understand why, and then I looked down and saw that I was naked.’
‘What had you been wearing?’
‘Uniform. When I saw how frightened they were, it made me frightened. I started to run and I was running through bushes. I was being chased by my father-in-law and two orderlies. Eventually they got me cornered and my father-in-law came towards me, waving a big stick. It had a snake wound round it. He was using it as a kind of flail, and the snake was hissing. I backed away, but they got hold of me and tied me up.’
Rivers detected a slight hesitation. ‘What with?’
A pause. In determinedly casual tones Anderson said, ‘A pair of lady’s corsets. They fastened them round my arms and tied the laces.’
‘Like a strait-waistcoat?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then?’
‘Then I was carted off to some kind of carriage. I was thrown inside and the doors banged shut and it was very dark. Like a grave. The first time I looked it was empty, but then the next time you were there. You were wearing a post-mortem apron and gloves.’
It was obvious from his tone that he’d finished. Rivers smiled and said, ‘It’s a long time since I’ve worn those.’
‘I haven’t recently worn corsets.’
‘Whose corsets were they?’
‘Just corsets. You want me to say my wife’s, don’t you?’
Rivers was taken back. ‘I want you to say—’
‘Well, I really don’t think they were. I suppose it is possible someone might find being locked up in a loony bin a fairly emasculating experience?’
‘I think most people do.’ Though not many said so. ‘I want you to say what you think.’
No response.
‘You say you woke up vomiting?’
‘Yes.’
‘I wonder why? I mean I can quite see the sight of me in a post-mortem apron might not be to everybody’s taste—’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What was the most frightening thing about the dream?’
‘The snake.’
A long silence.
‘Do you often dream about snakes?’
‘Yes.’
Another long silence. ‘Well, go on, then,’ Anderson exploded at last. ‘That’s what you Freudian Johnnies are on about all the time, isn’t it? Nudity, snakes, corsets. You might at least try to look grateful, Rivers. It’s a gift.’
‘I think if I’d made any association at all with the snake — and after all what possible relevance can my associations have? — it was probably with the one that’s crawling up your lapel.’
Anderson looked down at the caduceus badge of the RAMC which he wore on his tunic, and then across at the same badge on Rivers’s tunic.
‘What the er snake might suggest is that medicine is an issue between yourself and your father-in-law?’
‘No.’
‘Not at all?’
‘No.’
Another long silence. Anderson said, ‘It depends what you mean by an issue.’
‘A subject on which there is habitual disagreement.’
‘No. Naturally my time in France has left me with a certain level of distaste for the practice of medicine, but that’ll go in time. There’s no issue. I have a wife and child to support.’
‘You’re how old?’
‘Thirty-six.’
‘And your little boy?’
Anderson’s expression softened. ‘Five.’
‘School fees coming up?’
‘Yes. I’ll be all right once I’ve had a rest. Basically, I’m paying for last summer. Do you know, at one point we averaged ten amputations a day? Every time I was due for leave it was cancelled.’ He looked straight at Rivers. ‘There’s no doubt what the problem is. Tiredness.’
‘I still find the vomiting puzzling. Especially since you say you feel no more than a mild disinclination for medicine.’
‘I didn’t say mild, I said temporary.’
‘Ah. What in particular do you find difficult?’
‘I don’t know that there is anything particular.’
A long silence.
Anderson said, ‘I’m going to start timing these silences, Rivers.’
‘It’s already been done. Some of the younger ones had a sweepstake on it. I’m not supposed to know.’