Pat Barker - The Ghost Road

Bloody mad.'

'No, the battle was mad. The football was sane. Whoever ordered them to do that was a very good psychologist.'

'Ah!'

'But I know what you mean. It's become the kind of incident one can't take seriously any more. Only I'm not sure that's right, you see. I suppose what one should be asking is whether an ideal becomes invalid because the people who hold it are betrayed.'

'If holding it makes them into naïve idiots, yes .'

'Were they?'

If they were, I can't talk. I m going back.

Rivers smiled. 'So you don't want my football?'

'On the contrary, I think it's a brilliant idea. I'll send you the half-time score.'

Rivers handed him his greatcoat, examining it first. 'I'm impressed.'

'So you should be at the price.' Prior started to put it on. 'Do you know you can get these with scarlet silk linings?'

'Army greatcoats?'

'Yes. Saw one in the Café Royal. On the back of one of my old intelligence colleagues. Quite a startling effect when he crossed his legs, subtle , you know, like a baboon's bottom. Apparently he's supposed to sit there and "attract the attention of anti-war elements"'

'Was he?'

'He was attracting attention. I don't know what their views on the war were. Another thing that made me glad to be getting out of it.' He held out his hand. 'Don't come down.'

Rivers took him at his word, but went through to the bedroom window and looked out, lifting the curtain an inch to one side. Miss Irving's voice, a laughing farewell, and then Prior appeared, foreshortened, running down the steps.

On Vao there was a custom that when a bastard was born some leading man on the island adopted the child and brought him up as his own. The boy called him father, and grew up surrounded by love and care and then, when he reached puberty, he was given the honour, as befitted the son of a great man, of leading in the sacrificial pig, one of the huge-tusked boars in which the wealth of the people was measured. He was given new bracelets, new necklaces, a new penis wrapper and then, in front of the entire community, all of whom knew what was about to happen, he led the pig to the sacrificial stone, where his father waited with upraised club. And, as the boy drew near, he brought the club down and crushed his son's skull.

In one of his father's churches, St Faith's, at Maidstone, the window to the left of the altar shows Abraham with the knife raised to slay his son, and, below the human figures, a ram caught in the thicket by his horns. The two events represented the difference between savagery and civilization, for in the second scenario the voice of God is about to forbid the sacrifice, and will be heeded. He had knelt at that altar rail for years, Sunday after Sunday, receiving the chalice from his father's hands.

Perhaps, Rivers thought, watching Prior's head bob along behind the hedge and disappear from view, it was because he'd been thinking so much about fathers and sons recently that the memory of the two sacrifices had returned, but he wished this particular memory had chosen another moment to surface.

29 August 1918

Bought this in a stationer's just off Fleet Street quite a long time ago. I've been carrying it round with me ever since unused, mainly because it's so grand. I bought it for the marbled covers and the thick creamy pages and ever since then the thick creamy pages have been saying, Piss off, what could you possibly write on us that would be worth reading? It's a marvellous shop, a real old-fashioned stationer's. Stationers', second-hand bookshops, ironmongers'. Feel a great need at the moment to concentrate on small pleasures. If the whole of one's life can be summoned up and held in the palm of one hand, in the living moment, then time means nothing. World without end, Amen.

Load of crap. Facts are what we need, man. Facts.

Arrived in London to find no porters, no taxis, and the hotels full. Charles Manning on the platform (the train was so late I was sure he'd've gone home), offering, as a solution, the room he rents in Half Moon Street, Tor the nights when he works late at the office and doesn't want to disturb the household'. Oh, c'mon, Charles, I wanted to say. It's me, remember? I was all for trudging round a few more hotels, but he was limping badly and obviously in pain and pissed off with me for going back when I could have been comfortably established in the Min of Mu chasing bits of paper across a desk, like him. (He'd go back to France tomorrow if they'd have him.)

When we got to Half Moon Street we went straight upstairs and he produced a bottle of whisky. Not bad (but not what he drinks himself either) and I waited for him to do what everybody else would do in the circumstances and collect the rent. He didn't, of course. I'm plagued with honourable people. I thought, Oh, for Christ's sake, if you haven't got the gumption to ask for it bloody do without. I was feeling tired and sticky and wanted a bath. After ten minutes of swishing soapy water round my groin and whisky round my guts I started to feel better. I had a quiet consultation with myself in the bathroom mirror, all steamy and pink and conspiratorial, and went back in and said, Right let's be having you. Over the end of the bed. He likes being dominated, as people often do who've never had to raise their voice in their lives to get other people running after them.

Then we went out to dinner, came back, Charles stayed a while, long enough to introduce me to Ross — extraordinary man, rather Chinese-looking, and not just physically, a sense of a very old civilization. I shook his hand and I thought I'm shaking the hand that… Well, there is the connection with Wilde. And I felt at home in this rather beleaguered little community. Beleaguered, because Ross thinks he's going to be arrested, he thinks the utterly disgusting Pemberton Billing affair has given them carte blanche to go ahead and do it. He may be exaggerating the risk, he looks ill, he looks as if he goes to bed and broods, but one or two people there, including Manning, don't seem to rule out an arrest. A comfortable atmosphere in spite of it. Soldiers who aren't militarists, pacifists who aren't prigs, and talking to each other. Now there's a miracle.

But then — Birtwhistle. He's a don at Cambridge, very clever, apparently. Curiously, he actually prides himself on having a broader grasp of British society than the average person, i.e. he pokes working-class boys' bottoms. Might even be true, I suppose, though the heterosexual equivalent doesn't pride itself on broadening its social experience whenever it nips off for a knee-wobbler in Bethnal Green. Ah, but these are relationships , Birtwhistle would say. Did say. Lurve, no less. And yet he spoke of his working-class lover — his WC — in tones of utter contempt. And he didn't succeed in placing me, or not accurately enough. So much for the broader grasp. I played a rather cruel convoluted game with him afterwards. Which satisfied me a great deal at the time, but now I feel contaminated, as I wouldn't have done if I'd kicked him in the balls (which would also have been kinder).

Manning — after we'd had sex — became very strange. Great distances opened up. Partly because he hadn't intended it to happen — or didn't think he had — and partly just because I'm going back and he isn't. Two inches of sheet between us— miles miles. I was glad when he went and I'm even more glad he's not here now. Very few pleasures in sex are any match for a narrow bed and cool, clean sheets. (A post-coital reflection if ever I heard one.)

30 August