Rivers waited. ‘You say you see it?’
‘Oh, yes, it just unfolds.’ A circling movement of his arms. ‘And it’s marvellous in a way, but it’s terrible too and I get so frightened because you’d have to be Tolstoy.’ He gripped Rivers’s hand. ‘I’ve got to see Ross, I don’t care about the others, but you’ve got to make them let me see him, he looks awful, that bloody bloody bloody trial. Do you know Lord Alfred Douglas called him “the leader of all the sodomites in London”? Only he said it in the witness-box, so Robbie can’t sue.’
‘Just as well, perhaps.’
‘And he’s been asked to resign from all his committees, I mean he offered, but it was accepted with alacrity. I’ve got to see him. Apart from anything else he brings me the reviews.’
‘They’re good, aren’t they? I’ve been looking out for them.’
‘Most of them.’
Rivers smiled. ‘You can’t write a controversial book and expect universal praise, Siegfried.’
‘Can’t I?’
They laughed, and for a moment everything seemed normal. Then Siegfried’s face darkened. ‘Do you know we actually sat in dug-outs in France and talked about that trial? The papers were full of it, I think it was the one thing that could have made me glad I was out there, I mean, for God’s sake, the Germans on the Marne, five thousand prisoners taken and all you read in the papers is who’s going to bed with whom and are they being blackmailed? God.’
‘I’ll see what I can do about Ross.’
‘Do you think they’ll listen to you?’
Rivers hesitated. ‘I think they might.’ Obviously Siegfried didn’t know he’d been called in professionally. ‘How’s the head?’
A spasm of contempt. ‘It’s a scratch. I should never’ve let them send me back, do you know that’s the last thing I said to my servant, “I’m coming back.” “Back in three weeks,” I yelled at him as I was being driven away. And then I let myself be corrupted.’
‘Corrupted? That’s a harsh word, isn’t it?’
‘I should’ve refused to come back.’
‘Siegfried, nobody would have listened to you if you had. Head injuries have to be taken seriously.’
‘But don’t you see, the timing was perfect? Did you see my poem in the Nation? “I Stood with the Dead”. Well, there you are. Or there I was rather, perched on the top-most bough, carolling away. BANG! Oops! Sorry. Missed.’
‘I’m glad it did.’
A bleak sideways glance from Siegfried. ‘I’m not.’
Silence.
‘I feel amputated. I don’t belong here. I keep looking at all this…’ The waving hand took in fruit, flowers, chocolates. ‘I just wish I could parcel it up and send it out to them. I did manage to send them a gramophone. Then I got… ill.’
‘You know, what I don’t understand,’ Rivers said, ‘is how you could possibly have been wounded there.’
‘I was in No Man’s Land.’
‘No, I meant under the helmet.’
‘I’d taken it off.’ An awkward pause. ‘We’d been out to lob some hand-grenades at a machine-gun, two of us, they were getting cheeky, you see, they’d brought it too far forward, and so we…” He smiled faintly. ‘Reestablished dominance. Anyway, we threw the grenades, I don’t think we hit anybody — by which I mean there were no screams — and then we set off back and by this time it was getting light, and I was so happy.’ His face blazed with exultation. ‘Oh, God, Rivers, you wouldn’t believe how happy. And I stood up and took the helmet off, and I turned to look at the German lines. And that’s when the bullet got me.’
Rivers was so angry he knew he had to get away. He walked across to the window and stared, unseeing, at the road, the railings, the distant glitter of the Serpentine under the summer sun. He had been lying to himself, he thought, pretending this was merely one more crisis in a busy working day. This anger stripped all pretence away from him. ‘Why?’ he said, turning back to Siegfried.
‘I wanted to see them.’
‘You mean you wanted to get killed.’
‘No.’
‘You stand up in the middle of No Man’s Land, in the morning, the sun rising, you take off your helmet, you turn to face the German lines, and you tell me you weren’t trying to get killed.’
Siegfried shook his head. ‘I’ve told you, I was happy.’
Rivers took a deep breath. He walked back to the bed, schooling himself to a display of professional gentleness. ‘You were happy?’
‘Yes, I was happy most of the time, I suppose mainly because I’ve succeeded in cutting off the part of me that hates it.’ A faint smile. ‘Except when writing poems for the Nation. I was… There’s a book you ought to read. I’ll try to dig it out, it says something to the effect that a man who makes up his mind to die takes leave of a good many things, and is, in some sense, dead already. Well, I had made up my mind to die. What other solution was there for me? But making up your mind to die isn’t the same as trying to get killed. Not that it made much difference.’ He touched the bandage tentatively. ‘I must say, I thought the standard of British sniping was higher than this.’
‘British sniping?’
‘Yes, didn’t they tell you? My own NCO. Mistook me for the German army, rushed out into No Man’s Land shouting, “Come on, you fuckers,” and shot me.’ He laughed. ‘God, I’ve never seen a man look so horrified.’
Rivers sat down by the bed. ‘You’ll never be closer.’
‘I’ve been closer. Shell landed a foot away. Literally. Didn’t explode.’ Siegfried twitched suddenly, a movement Rivers had seen many thousands of times in other patients, too often surely for it to be shocking.
‘You can’t get shell-shock, can you?’ Siegfried asked. ‘From a shell that doesn’t explode?’
Rivers looked down at his hands. ‘I think that one probably did a fair amount of damage.’
Siegfried looked towards the window. ‘You know, they’re going on a raid soon, Jowett, five or six of the others, my men, Rivers, my men, men I trained and I’m not going to be there when they come back.’
‘They’re not your men now, Siegfried. They’re somebody else’s men. You’ve got to let go.
“I can’t.’
EIGHTEEN
Rivers had been invited to dinner with the Heads, and arrived to find the Haddons and Grafton Elliot Smith already there. No opportunity for private conversation with Henry or Ruth presented itself until the end of the evening, when Rivers contrived that he should be the last to leave. It was not unusual after a dinner with the Heads for him to stay behind enjoying their particular brand of unmalicious gossip, well aware that his own foibles and frailties would be dissected as soon as he left, and sure enough of their love for him not to mind.
Not that he was inclined to gossip tonight. As soon as they were alone, he told them about Siegfried, clarifying his own perception of the situation as he spoke.
‘Excited, you say?’ Henry asked.