‘Yes.’
‘Manic?’
‘Oh, no, nowhere near. Though there was a hint of… elation, I suppose, once or twice, particularly when he was talking about his feelings immediately before he was wounded. And the afternoons are his best time. Apparently the nights are bad. I’ve promised I’ll go back. In fact, I ought to be going.’ He stood up. ‘I’m not worried. He’ll be all right.’
‘Does he regret going back?’ Ruth asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Rivers said. ‘I haven’t asked.’
After seeing Rivers off, Head came back into the living-room to find Ruth gazing reflectively into the fire.
‘No, well, he wouldn’t, would he?’ she said, looking up.
‘He might think there wasn’t much point,’ Henry said, sitting down on the other side of the fire.
A long, companionable silence. They were too replete with company and conversation to want to talk much, too comfortable to make the move for bed.
‘He came to see me last year, you know,’ Henry said. ‘Almost a sort of consultation. He got himself into quite a state over Sassoon.’
‘Yes, I know. I didn’t realize he’d talked to you about it.’
Head hesitated. ‘I think he suddenly realized he was using… his professional skills, if you like, to defuse a situation that wasn’t… medical. There’s really nothing else you can do if you’re a doctor in the army in wartime. There’s always the possibility of conflict between what the army needs and what the patient needs, but with Sassoon it was… very sharp. I told him basically not to be silly.’
Ruth gave a surprised laugh. ‘Poor Will.’
‘No, I meant it.’
‘I’m sure you did, but you wouldn’t have said it to a patient.’
‘I told him Sassoon was capable of making up his own mind, and that his influence probably wasn’t as great as he thought it was. I thought he was being… I don’t know. Not vain —’
‘Over-scrupulous?’
‘Frankly, I thought he was being neurotic. But I’ve seen him with a lot of patients since then, and I’m not so sure. You know how you get out of date with people if you haven’t seen them for a while? I think I was out of date. Something happened to him in Scotland. Somehow or other he acquired this enormous power over young men, people generally perhaps, but particularly young men. It really is amazing, they’ll do anything for him. Even get better.’
‘Even go back to France?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
Ruth shrugged slightly. ‘I don’t see the change. But then I suspect he’s always shown a slightly different side to me anyway.’ She smiled. ‘I’m very fond of him, but —’
‘He is of you.’
‘I sometimes wonder why we even like each other, you know. When you think how it started. You going to Cambridge every weekend so he could stick pins in your arm. I never had a weekend with you the whole of the first year we were married.’
‘It wasn’t as bad as that. Anyway, you got on all right.’
‘Do you think he still thinks Sassoon went back because of him?’
Head hesitated. ‘I think he knows the extent of his influence.’
‘Hmm,’ Ruth said. ‘Do you think he’s in love with him?’
‘He’s a patient.’
Ruth smiled and shook her head. ‘That’s not an answer.’
Head looked at her. ‘Yes, it is. It has to be.’
Siegfried was sitting up in bed, pyjama jacket off, face and chest gleaming with sweat. ‘Is it hot, Rivers?’ he asked, as if their conversation had never been interrupted. ‘Or is it just me?’
‘Warm.’
‘I’m boiling. I’ve been sitting here simmering like a kettle.’
Rivers sat down beside the bed.
‘I’ve been writing to Graves. In verse. Do you want to read it?’
Rivers took the notepad and found himself reading an account of his visit that afternoon. The pain was so intense that for a moment he had to keep quite still. ‘Is that how you see me?’ he said at last. ‘Somebody who’s going to make you go back to France till you break down altogether?’
‘Yes,’ Sassoon said cheerfully. ‘But that’s all right, I want you to. You’re my external conscience, Rivers, my father confessor. You can’t let me down now, you’ve got to make me go back.’
Rivers read the poem again. ‘You shouldn’t send this.’
‘Why not? It took me ages. Oh, I know what it is, you don’t think I should say all that about the lovely soldier lads. Well, they are lovely. You think Graves is going to be shocked. Frankly, Rivers, I don’t care; shocking Graves is one of my few remaining pleasures. I wrote to him — not to shock him — just an ordinary letter, only I made the mistake of talking with enthusiasm about training in one paragraph, and in the next paragraph I said what a bloody awful business the war was, and what do I get back? A lecture on consistency, oh, and some very pathetic reproaches about not terrifying your friends by pretending to be mad, I thought that was particularly rich. I’ve done one totally consistent, totally sane thing in my life, and that was to protest against the war. And who stopped me?’
Graves, Rivers thought. But not only Graves. It was true, he saw it now, perhaps more clearly than he had at the time, that whatever the public meaning of Siegfried’s protest, its private meaning was derived from a striving for consistency, for singleness of being in a man whose internal divisions had been dangerously deepened by the war.
‘You mustn’t blame Graves. He did what —’
‘I don’t blame him, I’m just not prepared to be lectured by him. I survive out there by being two people, sometimes I even manage to be both of them in one evening. You know, I’ll be sitting with Stiffy and Jowett — Jowett is beautiful — and I’ll start talking about wanting to go and fight, and I’ll get them all fired up and banging the table and saying, yes, enough of training, time to get stuck in to the real thing. And then I leave them and go to my room and think how young they are. Nineteen, Rivers. Nineteen. And they’ve no bloody idea. Oh, God, I hope they live.’
Suddenly, he started to cry. Wiping the back of his hand across his mouth, he sniffed and said, ‘Sorry.’
‘That’s all right.’
‘You know what finally put the kibosh on my Jekyll and Hyde performance, no, listen, this is funny. I got a new second in command. Pinto. Absolute jewel. But the first time I met him he was reading Counter-Attack, and he looked up and said, “Are you the same Sassoon?” My God, Rivers, what a bloody question. But of course I said, “Yes.” What else could I say? And yet do you know I think that’s when things started to unravel.’ A marked change in tone. ‘It was when I faced up to how bloody stupid it was.’
Rivers looked puzzled. ‘What was?’
‘My pathetic little formula for getting myself back to France.’ He adopted a mincing, effeminate tone. ‘“I’m not going back to kill people. I’m only going back to look after some men.”’ His own voice. ‘Why didn’t you kick me in the head, Rivers? Why didn’t you put me out of my misery?’
Rivers made himself answer. ‘Because I was afraid if you started thinking about that, you wouldn’t go back at all.’
He might as well not have spoken. ‘You’ve only got to read the training manual. “A commander must demand the impossible and not think of sparing his men. Those who fall out must be left behind and must no more stop the pursuit than casualties stopped the assault.” That’s it. Expendable, interchangeable units. That’s what I went back to “look after”.’ A pause. ‘All I wanted was to see them through their first tour of duty and I couldn’t even do that.’