‘Love.’
‘I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t think so. We all hate it. I’ve no way of knowing whether I hate it more, because we don’t talk about it. It’s just a bloody awful job, and we get on and do it. I mean, you split enormous parts of yourself off, anyway.’
‘Is that what you did?’
‘I suppose so.’ For a moment it seemed he was about to go on, then he shook his head.
When he was sure there’d be no more, Rivers said, ‘You know we are going to have to talk about the war, Charles.’
‘I do talk about it.’
Silence.
‘I just don’t see what good it would do to churn everything up. I know what the theory is.’ He looked down at his hands. ‘My son Robert, when he was little … he used to enjoy being bathed. And then quite suddenly he turned against it. He used to go stiff and scream blue murder every time his nurse tried to put him in. And it turned out he’d been watching the water go down the plug-hole and he obviously thought he might go down with it. Everybody told him not to be stupid.’ Manning smiled. ‘I must say it struck me as an eminently reasonable fear.’
Rivers smiled. ‘I won’t let you go down the plughole.’
At dinner the talk was all of the Pemberton Billing trial. Everybody was depressed by the medical evidence, since this was the first time psychologists had been invited to pronounce in court on such a subject. ‘What do we get?’ somebody asked. ‘Serrel Cooke rambling on about monsters and hereditary degeneracy. The man’s a joke.’
If he is, I’ve lost my sense of humour, Rivers thought.
After dinner he was glad to escape from the hospital and go for a stroll round the square. London had become a depressing place. Every placard, every newsboy’s cry, every headline focused on the trial. Lord Alfred Douglas was in the witness-box now, apparently blaming England’s poor showing in the war on the plays of Oscar Wilde. Any serious consideration of the terrible state of affairs in France was pushed into second place by the orgy of irrational prejudice that was taking place at the Old Bailey. Manning was quite right of course, people didn’t want reasons, they wanted scapegoats. You saw it in the hospital too, where hostility to the pacifist orderlies mounted as the news from France grew worse, but there was some element of logic in that. Men were being whipped back into line. Into the Line. Unless he were suffering from the complaint Jane Manning had diagnosed, of being incapable of seeing his own sex as peripheral to anything. But no, he thought Manning was right. Maud Allan was in the firing line almost by accident. The real targets were men who couldn’t or wouldn’t conform.
Rivers’s thoughts turned to Sassoon. Manning’s experience clearly showed that every member of Robert Ross’s circle was at risk, liable to the same treatment as Ross himself. It didn’t help that Ross was opposed to the war, though he had not approved of Sassoon’s protest, arguing — quite rightly in River’s opinion — that it would destroy Sassoon without having any impact on the course of events. Ross’s own method of opposition, according to Manning, was to show photographs of mutilated corpses to any civilian who might benefit from the shock. Rivers was glad Sassoon was well away from Ross, and the trial.
Once, at Craiglockhart, he’d tried to warn Sassoon of the danger. As long ago as last November he’d told him about the cabinet noir, the Black Book, the 47,000 names of eminent men and women whose double lives left them open to German blackmail.
— Relax, Rivers. I’m not eminent.
— No, but you’re afriend of Robert Ross, and you’ve publicly advocated a negotiated peace. That’s enough! You’re vulnerable, Siegfried. There’s no point pretending you’re not.
— And what am I supposed to do about it? Toe the line, tailor my opinions… But what you’re really saying is, if I can’t conform in one area of life, then I have to conform in the others. Not just the surface things, everything. Even against my conscience. Well, I can’t live like that. Nobody should live like that.
It had been pleasant talking to Manning about Siegfried. Apart from Robert Graves, whom Rivers saw occasionally, Manning was the only acquaintance they had in common.
The square was deserted. On nights of the full moon people hurried back to the safety of their cellars. Rivers’s footsteps seemed to follow him, echoing along the empty pavement. The moon had drifted clear from the last gauzy wrack of cloud, and his shadow stretched ahead of him, the edges almost as sharp as they would have been by day.
So calm, so clear a night. We’re in for it, he thought. That was one thing he’d never had to cope with at Craiglockhart: bombs falling within earshot of patients who jumped out of their skins if a teaspoon rattled in a saucer. He turned and began to walk rapidly towards the dark and shuttered building.
THIRTEEN
Head is the one awake inside the sleeping hospital. Masked and gowned, a single light burning above his head, he stands beside a dissecting table on which a man lies, face upwards, naked, reeking of formaldehyde. The genitals are shrivelled, the skin the dingy gold of old paper. Head finishes drawing an outline on the shaven head, says, ‘Right then,’ and extends his gloved hand for the drill. But something’s wrong. Even as the drill whirs, the golden-skinned man stirs. Rivers tries to say, ‘Don’t, he’s alive,’ but Head can’t, or won’t, hear him. A squeak of bone, a mouth stretched wide, and then a hand grasps Head’s hand at the wrist, and the cadaver in all its naked, half-flayed horror rises from the table and pushes him back.
The corridor outside Rivers’s room is empty, elongated, the floor polished and gleaming. Then the doors at the end flap open with a noise like the beating of wings and the cadaver bounds through, pads from door to door, sniffs, tries to locate him more by smell than sight. At last it finds the right door, advances on the bed, bends over him, thrusts its anatomical drawing of a face into his, as he struggles to wake up and remember where he is.
Christ. He lay back, aware of sweat on his chest and in his groin. He was in a hospital bed, too high, too narrow, the mattress covered with rubber that creaked as he moved. He could see that ruin of a face bending over him. In these moments between sleep and waking, he was able to do — briefly — what other people take for granted: see things that were not there.
Quickly, before the moment passed, he began to dissect the images of which the dream was composed. The dissecting-room in the dream had not been the room at the Anatomical Institute where he’d watched Head at work that morning, but the anatomy theatre at Bart’s, where he had trained.