‘Blood.’
‘And you attribute this to the ten amputations a day?’
‘No, I was all right then. The… er… problem started later. I wasn’t at Étaples when it happened, I’d been moved forward — the 13th CCS. They brought in this lad. He was a Frenchman, he’d escaped from the German lines. Covered in mud. There wasn’t an inch of skin showing anywhere. And you know it’s not like ordinary mud, it’s five, six inches thick. Bleeding. Frantic with pain. No English.’ A pause. ‘I missed it. I treated the minor wounds and missed the major one.’ He gave a short, hissing laugh. ‘Not that the minor ones were all that minor. He started to haemorrhage, and… there was nothing I could do. I just stood there and watched him bleed to death.’ His face twisted. ‘It pumped out of him.’
It was a while before either of them stirred. Then Anderson said, ‘If you’re wondering why that one, I don’t know. I’ve seen many worse deaths.’
‘Have you told your family?’
‘No. They know I don’t like the idea of going back to medicine, but they don’t know why.’
‘Have you talked to your wife?’
‘Now and then. You have to think about the practicalities, Rivers. I’ve devoted all my adult life to medicine. I’ve no private income to tide me over. And I do have a wife and a child.’
‘Public health might be a possibility.’
‘It doesn’t have much… dash about it, does it?’
‘Is that a consideration?’
Anderson hesitated. ‘Not with me.’
‘Well, we can talk about the practicalities later. You still haven’t told me when you said enough.’
Anderson smiled. ‘You make it sound like a decision. I don’t know that lying on the floor in a pool of piss counts as a decision.’ He paused. ‘The following morning. On the ward. I remember them all looking down at me. Awkward situation, really. What do you do when the doctor breaks down?’
At intervals, as Rivers was doing his rounds as orderly officer for the day, he thought about this dream. It was disturbing in many ways. At first he’d been inclined to see the post-mortem apron as expressing no more than a lack of faith in him, or, more accurately, in his methods, since obviously any doctor who spends much time so attired is not meeting with uniform success on the wards. This lack of faith he knew to be present. Anderson, in his first interview, had virtually refused treatment, claiming that rest, the endless pursuit of golf balls, was all that he required. He had some knowledge of Freud, though derived mainly from secondary or prejudiced sources, and disliked, or perhaps feared, what he thought he knew. There was no particular reason why Anderson, who was, after all, a surgeon, should be well informed about Freudian therapy, but his misconceptions had resulted in a marked reluctance to reveal his dreams. Yet his dreams could hardly be ignored, if only because they were currently keeping the whole of one floor of the hospital awake. His room-mate, Featherstone, had deteriorated markedly as the result of Anderson’s nightly outbursts. Still, that was another problem. As soon as Anderson had revealed that extreme horror of blood, Rivers had begun tentatively to attach another meaning to the post-mortem apron. If Anderson could see no way out of returning to the practice of a profession which must inevitably, even in civilian life, recall the horrors he’d witnessed in France, then perhaps he was desperate enough to have considered suicide? That might account both for the post-mortem apron and for the extreme terror he’d felt on waking. At the moment he didn’t know Anderson well enough to be able to say whether suicide was a possibility or not, but it would certainly need to be borne in mind.
The smell of chlorine became stronger as they reached the bottom of the stairs. Sassoon felt Graves hesitate. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I could do without the smell.’
‘Well, let’s not bother—’
‘No, go on.’
Sassoon pushed the door open. The pool was empty, a green slab between white walls. They began to undress, putting their clothes on one of the benches that lined the end wall.
‘What’s your room-mate like?’ Graves asked.
‘All right.’
‘Dotty?’
‘Not visibly. I gather the subject of German spies is best avoided. Oh, and I’ve found out why there aren’t any locks on the doors. One of them killed himself three weeks ago.’
Graves caught sight of the scar on Sassoon’s shoulder and stopped to look at it. It was curiously restful to submit to this scrutiny, which was prolonged, detailed and impersonal, like one small boy examining the scabs on another’s knee. ‘Oh, very neat.’
‘Yes, isn’t it? The doctors kept telling me how beautiful it was.’
‘You were lucky, you know. An inch further down—’
‘Not as lucky as you.’ Sassoon glanced at the shrapnel wound on Graves’s thigh. ‘An inch further up—’
‘If this is leading up to a joke about ladies’ choirs, forget it. I’ve heard them all.’
Sassoon dived in. A green, silent world, no sound except the bubble of his escaping breath, no feeling, once the shock of cold was over, except the tightening of his chest that at last forced him to the surface, air, noise, light, slopping waves crashing in on him again. He swam to the side and held on. Graves’s dark head bobbed purposefully along at the other side of the pool. Sassoon thought, we joke about it, but it happens. There’d been a boy in the hospital, while he was lying there with that neat little hole in his shoulder. The boy — he couldn’t have been more than nineteen — had a neat little hole too. Only his was between the legs. The dressings had been terrible to witness, and you had to witness them. No treatment in that overcrowded ward had been private. Twice a day the nurses came in with the creaking trolley, and the boy’s eyes followed them up the ward.
Sassoon shut the lid on the memory and dived for Graves’s legs. Graves twisted and fought, his head a black rock splintering white foam. ‘Lay off,’ he gasped at last, pushing Sassoon away. ‘Some of us don’t have the full complement of lungs.’
The pool was beginning to fill up. After a few more minutes, they climbed out and started to dress. Head muffled in the folds of his shirt, Graves said, ‘By the way, I think there’s something I ought to tell you. I’m afraid I told Rivers about your plan to assassinate Lloyd George.’
Rivers’s round as duty officer ended in the kitchens. Mrs Cooper, her broad arms splashed with fat from giant fryingpans, greeted him with an embattled smile. ‘What d’ y’ think of the beef stew last night, then, sir?’
‘I don’t believe I’ve ever tasted anything quite like it.’
Mrs Cooper’s smile broadened. ‘We do the best we can with the materials available, sir.’ Her expression became grim and confiding. ‘That beef was walking.’
Rivers got to his room a few minutes after ten and found Sassoon waiting, his hair damp, smelling of chlorine. ‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ Rivers said, unlocking the door. ‘I’ve just been pretending to know something about catering. Come in.’ He waved Sassoon to the chair in front of the desk, tossed his cap and cane to one side, and was about to unbuckle his belt when he remembered that the Director of Medical Services was due to visit the hospital some time that day. He sat down behind the desk and drew Sassoon’s file towards him. ‘Did you sleep well?’
‘Very well, thank you.’
‘You look rested. I enjoyed meeting Captain Graves.’
‘Yes, I gather you found it quite informative.’
‘Ab.’ Rivers paused in the act of opening the file. ‘You mean he told me something you’d rather I didn’t know?’