Pat Barker - The Ghost Road

'Potts and Owen are upstairs.'

Prior went to the window and looked out at the houses opposite, fingering the lace curtains that were stiff with dried rain and dirt. 'This is all right, isn't it?' he said suddenly, turning into the room.

They grinned at each other.

'Bathroom's just opposite,' Hallet said, pointing it out like a careful host.

'You mean it works?'

'Well, the bucket works.'

Prior sat down abruptly on the floor and yawned. He was too tired to care where he was. They lit cigarettes and shared a bar of chocolate, Prior leaning against the wall, Hallet sitting cross-legged on his sleeping-bag, both of them staring round like big-eyed children, struggling to take in the strangeness.

It'll wear off, Prior thought, lighting a candle and venturing across the landing to find a room of his own. It'll all seem normal in the morning.

* * *

But it didn't. Prior woke early, and lay lazily watching the shadows of leaves on a wall that the rising sun had turned from white to gold. He was just turning over to go back to sleep, when something black flickered across the room. He waited, and saw a swallow lift and loop through the open window and out into the dazzling air.

On that first morning he looked out on to a green jungle of garden, sun-baked, humming with insects, the once formal flower-beds transformed into brambly tunnels in which hidden life rustled and burrowed. He rested his arms on the window-sill and peered out, cautiously, through the jagged edges of glass, at Owen and Potts, who were carrying a table from one of the houses across the road. He shouted down to them, as they paused for breath, and they waved back.

He would have said that the war could not surprise him, that somewhere on the Somme he had mislaid the capacity to be surprised, but the next few days were a constant succession of surprises.

They had nothing to do. They were responsible for no one. The war had forgotten them.

There were only two items of furniture that went with the house. One was a vast carved oak sideboard that must surely have been built in the dining-room, for it could never have been brought in through the door; the other was a child's painted rocking-horse on the top floor of the house, in a room with bars at the window. Everything else they found for themselves. Prior moved in and out of the ruined houses, taking whatever caught his eye, and the houses, cool and dark in the midday heat, received him placidly. He brought his trophies home and arranged them carefully in his room, or in the dining-room they all shared.

In the evenings he and Hallet, Owen and Potts lit candles, sitting around the table that was Owen's chief find, and with the tall windows, the elaborately moulded ceilings, the bowls of roses and the wine created a fragile civilization, a fellowship on the brink of disaster.

And then ruined it by arguing about the war. Or Potts and Hallet argued. Potts had been a science student at Manchester University, bright, articulate, cynical in the thorough-going way of those who have not so far encountered much to be cynical about. The war, he insisted loudly, flushed with wine, was feathering the nests of profiteers. It was being fought to safeguard access to the oil-wells of Mesopotamia. It had nothing, absolutely nothing , to do with Belgian neutrality, the rights of small nations or anything like that. And if Hallet thought it had, then Hallet was a naive idiot. Hallet came from an old army family and had been well and expensively educated to think as little as possible; confronted by Potts, he floundered, but then quickly began to formulate beliefs that he had hitherto assumed everybody shared.

Prior and Owen exchanged secretive smiles, though neither probably could have said of what the secret consisted. Owen was playing with the fallen petals of roses he'd picked that afternoon. Pink, yellow, white roses, but no red roses, Prior saw.

'What do you think?' Potts asked, irritated by Prior's silence.

'What do I think? I think what you're saying is basically a conspiracy theory, and like all conspiracy theories it's optimistic. What you're saying is, OK the war isn't being fought for the reasons we're told, but it is being fought for a reason. It's not benefiting the people it's supposed to be benefiting, but it is benefiting somebody. And I don't believe that, you see. I think things are actually much worse than you think because there isn't any kind of rational justification left. It's become a self-perpetuating system. Nobody benefits. Nobody's in control. Nobody knows how to stop.'

Hallet looked from one to the other. 'Look, all this just isn't true. You're — no, not you— people are letting themselves get demoralized because they're having to pay a higher price than they thought they were going to have to pay. But it doesn't alter the basic facts. We are fighting for the legitimate interests of our own country. We are fighting in defence of Belgian neutrality. We are fighting for French independence. We aren't in Germany. They are in France.' He looked round the table and, like a little boy, said pleadingly, 'This is still a just war.'

'You say we kill the Beast,' Owen said slowly. 'I say we fight because men lost their bearings in the night.' He smiled at their expressions, and stood up. 'Shall we open another bottle?'

Alone that night, the smell of snuffed-out candle lingering on the air, Prior remembered the bowl of pink and gold and white roses, but did not bother to recall Potts's and Hallet's arguments. This house they shared was so strange in terms of what the war had hitherto meant that he wanted to fix the particular sights and sounds and smells in his mind. He felt enchanted, cocooned from anything that could possibly cause pain, though even as the thought formed, a trickle of plaster leaked from the ceiling of the back bedroom where a shell had struck, the house bleeding quietly from its unstaunchable wound.

* * *

In the mornings he went into town, wandering round the stalls that had been set up in front of the cathedral to sell 'souvenirs'. So many souvenirs were to be found in the rubble of the bombed city that trade was not brisk. Prior saw nothing that he wanted to buy, and anyway he had a shelf of souvenirs at home, mainly collected on his first time in France. He'd thought of them often at Craiglockhart as Rivers probed his mind for buried memories of his last few weeks in France. Souvenirs, my God. When the mind will happily wipe itself clean in the effort to forget.

On the way home he saw Owen and Potts ahead of him, and hurried to catch them up. Owen had found a child's lace-trimmed surplice in the rubble near the cathedral and wore it as a scarf, the cloth startlingly white against his sunburnt neck. Potts hugged a toby-jug to his chest, stoutly refusing to admit it was hideous. They turned off the road and cut through the back gardens, entering a world that nobody would have guessed at, from the comparative normality of the road.

A labyrinth of green pathways led from garden to garden, and they slipped from one to another, over broken walls or through splintered fences, skirting bramble-filled craters, brushing down paths overgrown with weeds, with flowers that had seeded themselves and become rank, with overgrown roses that snagged their sleeves and pulled them back. Snails crunched under their boots, nettles stung their hands, cuckoo spit flecked a bare neck, but the secret path wound on. Hundreds of men, billeted as they were in these ruined houses, had broken down every wall, every fence, forced a passage through all the hedges, so that they could slip unimpeded from one patch of ground to the next. The war, fought and refought over strips of muddy earth, paradoxically gave them the freedom of animals to pass from territory to territory, unobserved. And something of an animal's alertness too, for just as Owen pushed aside an elderberry branch at the entrance to their own garden, his ears caught a slight sound, and he held up his hand.