‘No, not necessarily. Just something I might have preferred to tell you myself.’ A moment’s silence, then Sassoon burst out, ‘What I can’t understand is how somebody of Graves’s intelligence can can can have such a shaky grasp of of rhetoric.’
Rivers smiled. ‘You were going to kill Lloyd George rhetorically, were you?’
‘I wasn’t going to kill him at all. I said I felt like killing him, but it was no use, because they’d only shut me up in a lunatic asylum, “like Richard Dadd of glorious memory”. There you are, exact words.’ He looked round the room. ‘Though as things have turned out —’
‘This is not a lunatic asylum. You are not locked up.’
‘Sorry.’
‘What you’re really saying is that Graves took you too seriously.’
‘It’s not just that. It suits him to attribute everything I’ve done to to to to… a state of mental breakdown, because then he doesn’t have to ask himself any awkward questions. Like why he agrees with me about the war and does nothing about it.’
Rivers waited a few moments. ‘I know Richard Dadd was a painter. What else did he do?’
A short silence. ‘He murdered his father.’
Rivers was puzzled by the slight awkwardness. He was used to being adopted as a father figure — he was, after all, thirty years older than the youngest of his patients — but it was rare for it to happen as quickly as this in a man of Sassoon’s age. ‘“Of glorious memory”?’
‘He… er… made a list of old men in power who deserved to die, and fortunately — or or otherwise — his father’s name headed the list. He carried him for half a mile through Hyde Park and then drowned him in the Serpentine in full view of everybody on the banks. The only reason Graves and I know about him is that we were in trenches with two of his great nephews, Edmund and Julian.’ The slight smile faded. ‘Now Edmund’s dead, and Julian’s got a bullet in the throat and can’t speak. The other brother was killed too. Gallipoli.’
‘Like your brother.’
‘Yes.’
‘Your father’s dead too, isn’t he? How old were you when he died?’
‘Eight. But I hadn’t seen much of him for some time before that. He left home when I was five.’
‘Do you remember him?’
‘A bit. I remember I used to like being kissed by him because his moustache tickled. My brothers went to the funeral. I didn’t — apparently I was too upset. Probably just as well, because they came back terrified. It was a Jewish funeral, you see, and they couldn’t understand what was going on. My elder brother said it was two old men in funny hats walking up and down saying jabber-jabber-jabber.’
‘You must’ve felt you’d lost him twice.’
‘Yes. We did lose him twice.’
Rivers gazed out of the window. ‘What difference would it have made, do you think, if your father had lived?’
A long silence. ‘Better education.’
‘But you went to Marlborough?’
‘Yes, but I was years behind everybody else. Mother had this theory we were delicate and our brains shouldn’t be taxed. I don’t think I ever really caught up. I left Cambridge without taking my degree.’
‘And then?’
Sassoon shook his head. ‘Nothing much. Hunting, cricket. Writing poems. Not very good poems.’
‘Didn’t you find it all… rather unsatisfying?’
‘Yes, but I couldn’t seem to see a way out. It was like being three different people, and they all wanted to go different ways.’ A slight smile. ‘The result was I went nowhere.’
Rivers waited.
‘I mean, there was the riding, hunting, cricketing me, and then there was the… the other side… that was interested in poetry and music, and things like that. And I didn’t seem able to…’ He laced his fingers. ‘Knot them together.’
‘And the third?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You said three.’
‘Did I? I meant two.’
Ah. ‘And then the war. You joined up on the first day?’
‘Yes, in the ranks. I couldn’t wait to get in.’
‘Your superior officers wrote glowing reports for the Board. Did you know that?’
A flush of pleasure. ‘I think the army’s probably the only place I’ve ever really belonged.’
‘And you’ve cut yourself off from it.’
‘Yes, because —’
‘I’m not interested in the reasons at the moment. I’m more interested in the result. The effect on you.’
‘Isolation, I suppose. I can’t talk to anybody.’
‘You talk to me. Or at least, I think you do.’
‘You don’t say stupid things.’
Rivers turned his head away. ‘I’m pleased about that.’
‘Go on, laugh. I don’t mind.’
‘You’d been offered a job in Cambridge, hadn’t you? Teaching cadets.’
Sassoon frowned. ‘Yes.’
‘But you didn’t take it?’
‘No. It was either prison or France.’ He laughed. ‘I didn’t foresee this.’
Rivers watched him staring round the room. ‘You can’t bear to be safe, can you?’ He waited for a reply. ‘Well, you’ve got twelve weeks of it. At least. If you go on refusing to serve, you’ll be safe for the rest of the war.’
Two red spots appeared on Sassoon’s cheekbones. ‘Not my choice.’
‘I didn’t say it was.’ Rivers paused. ‘You know you reacted then as if I were attacking you, and yet all I did was to point out the facts.’ He leant forward. ‘If you maintain your protest, you can expect to spend the remainder of the war in a state of Complete. Personal. Safety.’
Sassoon shifted in his seat. ‘I’m not responsible for other people’s decisions.’
‘You don’t think you might find being safe while other people die rather difficult?’
A flash of anger. ‘Nobody else in this stinking country seems to find it difficult. I expect I’ll just learn to live with it. Like everybody else.’
∗
Bums stood at the window of his room. Rain had blurred the landscape, dissolving sky and hills together in a wash of grey. He loathed wet weather because then everybody stayed indoors, sitting, around the patients’ common room, talking, in strained or facetious tones, about the war the war the war.
A sharper gust of wind blew rain against the glass. Somehow or other he was going to have to get out. It wasn’t forbidden, it was even encouraged, though he himself didn’t go out much. He got his coat and went downstairs. On the corridor he met one of the nurses from his ward, who looked surprised to see him wearing his coat, but didn’t ask where he was going.
At the main gates he stopped. Because he’d been inside so long, the possibilities seemed endless, though they resolved themselves quickly into two. Into Edinburgh, or away. And that was no choice at alclass="underline" he knew he wasn’t up to facing traffic.
For the first few stops the bus was crowded. He sat on the bench seat close to the door of the bus. People smelling of wet wool jerked and swayed against him, bumping his knees, and he tensed, not liking the contact or the smell. But then at every stop more and more people got off until he was almost alone, except for an old man and the clippie. The lanes were narrower now; the trees rushed in on either side. A branch rattled along the windows with a sound like machine-gun fire, and he had to bite his lips to stop himself crying out.
He got off at the next stop, and stood, looking up and down a country lane. He didn’t know what to do at first, it was so long since he’d been anywhere alone. Raindrops dripped from the trees, big, splashy, persistent drops, finding the warm place between his collar and his neck. He looked up and down the lane again. Somewhere further along, a wood pigeon cooed monotonously. He crossed over and began climbing the hill between the trees.