Pat Barker - The Ghost Road

'The rabbit hole,' Mr Dodgson read, or rather recited, for he was not looking at the page but at the top of Ethel's head, 'went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep—'

Kath burst in, hot, dirty, dishevelled, trailing her hat by its long blue ribbon, raspberry stains round her mouth, grubby hands streaked with cuckoo spit. She went straight to Mr Dodgson and gave him a bunch of flowers whose stalks had wilted in the heat and flopped over the back of her hand.

He took them from her and sat looking stupid, not knowing where to put them, when his attention was caught. 'Look,' he said, 'you've g-g-got a l-l-l-ladybird in your h-hair.'

Kath stood, breathing through her mouth with concentration, as he teased the stands of hair apart and persuaded the insect on to the tip of his finger. He showed it to her, then carefully stood up, meaning to carry it to the window, but the scarlet shards parted, the black wings spread, and the insect sailed out, a dark speck on the blue air.

Dodgson sat down, drew Katharine on to his lap, folded his other arm round Ethel again, and picked up the book.

'—well,' he said, and everybody laughed.

* * *

'Do you remember how he hated snakes?' Kath said, leaning back against the pillows with the sunlight on her greying hair.

'Yes, I remember.'

He was thinking that the whole course of Kath's life had been constriction into a smaller and smaller space. As children they'd both had a hundred acres of safe woods and fields to roam in, but from that point on his life had expanded: medical school, round the world as a ship's doctor, Germany, the Torres Straits, India, Australia, the Solomon Islands, the New Hebrides. And over the same period the little girl who'd rambled all day through woods and fields had become the younger of the two Miss Rivers, scrutinized by her father's parishioners, the slightest breach of decorum noted, and then, after father's retirement, a small house in Ramsgate, deteriorating health, confinement to the house, then to the bedroom, then to the bed. And yet she was no more intrinsically neurasthenic than he was himself. But a good mind must have something to feed on, and hers, deprived of other nourishment, had fed on itself.

He said slowly, 'I think what I remember most is endless croquet.' Oh God, he remembered, hours and hours of it, a vast red sun hanging above the trees, Dodgson's body forming a hoop round Kath's, his hands enclosing hers, the click of mallets on balls, and mother's voice drifting across the lawn asking how much longer were they going to be? It was time for Kath to come in. 'Mathematical croquet,' Rivers said. 'Nobody could win.'

'I used to win.'

'He helped you cheat.'

'Yes.' A faint smile. 'I know he did.'

Once, on the river, Dodgson had tried to pin up Kath's skirts so she could paddle. He'd done it often enough before, indeed he carried safety-pins in his lapels specifically for the purpose, but this time she'd pushed him away. Some intensity in his gaze? Some quality in his touch? Their mother had spoken sharply to her, but Dodgson had said, 'No, leave her alone.'

'It's a pity we lost his letters,' Rivers said.

'Oh, and the drawings. There was a whole crate of things went missing. I'm sure that painting of Uncle Will went at the same time—'

'I don't remember that.'

'Yes, you do.'

'Where was it?'

'At the top of the stairs. You couldn't put it in the drawing-room, it was too horrible'.

'What was it of?'

'Uncle William having his leg cut off. And there was somebody waiting with a sort of cauldron full of hot tar ready to pour it over the stump.'

'Are you sure?'

'You didn't like it. When we all went downstairs in the morning I used to see you not looking at it. You were like this.' She turned her head to one side.

'Well, you have surprised me.'

A modestly triumphant smile. 'I remember more than you do.'

Though, even as she spoke, he had a faint, very faint, recollection of Father lifting him up to look at something. A curious exposed feeling at the nape of his neck. 'Father tried very hard with Charles and me. Didn't he?'

'You more than Charles.'

'Ah, well, yes, I was the guinea-pig, wasn't I? The first child always is.' A greater bitterness in his voice than he knew how to account for. He brushed it aside. 'I'll make us some cocoa, shall I? And then I think you should try and get some sleep.'

* * *

— Do you remember how he hated snakes?

— Yes, I remember.

That's the trouble, Rivers thought, taking off his shirt in the spare bedroom that had once been his father's study, I remember her childhood better than my own. Though another person's life, observed from outside, always has a shape and definition that one's own life lacks.

It was odd he couldn't remember that picture, when Kath, ten years younger, remembered it so clearly. He'd certainly have been shown it, many many times. He was named after William Rivers of the Victory , who, as a young midshipman, had shot the man who shot Lord Nelson. That was the family legend anyway. And the great man, dying, had not indulged in any effete nonsense about kissing Hardy, nor had he entrusted Lady Hamilton to the conscience of a grateful nation. No, his last words had been, 'Look after young Will Rivers for me.' And young Will Rivers had needed looking after. He'd been wounded in the mouth and leg, and the leg had had to be amputated. Without an anaesthetic, since there were no anaesthetics, except rum. And then hot tar to cauterize the spurting stump. My God, it was a wonder any of them survived. And throughout the ordeal — family legend again — he had not once cried out. He'd survived, married, had children, become Warden of Greenwich Hospital. There was a portrait bust of him there, in the Painted Hall.

Now that he did remember being taken to see. Was that the occasion on which his father had lifted him up to look? No, he'd have been eight or nine.

And then he remembered. Quite casually, a bubble breaking on the surface. He'd had his hair cut, he'd just been breeched, yes, that was it, his neck felt funny, and so did his legs. And he was crying. Yes, it was all coming back. He'd embarrassed his father in the barber's shop by howling his head off. Bits of him were being cut off, bits of him were dropping on to the floor. His father shushed him, and when that didn't work, slapped his leg. He gasped with shock, filled his lungs with air, and howled louder. So being shown the picture was a lesson? You don't behave like that , you behave like this. 'He didn't cry,' his father had said, holding him up. 'He didn't make a sound:

And I've been stammering ever since, Rivers thought, inclined to see the funny side. Though what had it meant — Trafalgar, the Napoleonic wars — to a four-year-old for whom a summer's day was endless? Nothing, it could have meant nothing. Or, worse, it had meant something fearfully simple. The same name, the slapped leg, being told not to cry. Had he perhaps looked at the picture and concluded that this was what happened to you if your name was William Rivers?

He'd avoided looking at it, Kath said, even turning his head away so that he could not glimpse it by mistake as he went past. Had he also deliberately suppressed the visual image of it, making it impossible for himself to see it in his mind's eye? Prior, told that Rivers attributed his almost total lack of visual memory to an event in his childhood that he had succeeded in forgetting, had said brutally, 'You were raped or beaten… Whatever it was, you put your mind's eye out rather than have to go on seeing it. Is that what happened, or isn't it?' Yes, Rivers had been obliged to admit, though he'd argued very strongly for a less dramatic interpretation of events. It could have been something quite trivial, he'd said, though terrifying to a child. Something as simple as the fearsome shadow of a dressing-gown on the back of the nursery door. Small children are not like adults, he'd insisted. What terrifies them may seem trivial to us.