Pat Barker - The Eye in the Door

‘Shall we go and sit down?’

Dundas looked towards the canteen, but shook his head. ‘I think I’d just as soon get back, if you don’t mind.’

Rivers’s legs were trembling as they walked back to the car. He was angry with himself for getting into such a state — angry, ashamed and inclined to pretend he’d been less frightened than he knew he had been. He observed this reaction, thinking he was in the state of fatigue and illness that favours the development of an anxiety neurosis, and behaving in the way most likely to bring it about. He was doing exactly what he told his patients not to do: repressing the awareness of fear.

In the car going back to the hospital, Dundas examined his reactions minutely. During the first spin, in addition to the squashed head feeling, he’d felt sick. ‘Not so much sick. More a sort of bulge in my throat. And then during the loop I felt really sick. And faint. The sky went dark.’

‘And in the last spin?’

‘That was terrible. I felt really confused.’

After leaving Dundas in the hospital entrance hall, Rivers went into his room and threw his cap and cane on to the chair. Henry Head came in a moment later. ‘How was he?’

‘Bad.’

‘Sick?’

‘And faint.’

‘Are you all right?’

‘No, I seem to be suffering from terminal stiff upper lip. You know the way I go on about not repressing fear? What did I do?’ He spread his hands.

‘It’s the Public School Factor, Will. We’re all too well trained.’

‘It’s the Silly Old Fool Factor. Too many young men around.’

Head smiled. ‘No, well, I know what you mean. One doesn’t want to seem totally decrepit.’

‘I had this sudden sense that Dundas was hiding something. And that didn’t —’

‘He is.’

Rivers looked surprised.

‘He’s got a bottle of Bumstead’s Gleet Cure in his locker.’

‘Has he?’

‘Sister Mitchell noticed it. Syphilis wouldn’t make him go faint, mind.’

‘Lying awake worrying about it might.’ Rivers sat in silence for a moment. ‘Well. Redirects the investigation a bit, doesn’t it?’

‘Makes it a helluva lot simpler.’ Head dropped into a sergeant-major’s baritone. ‘“Show us yer knob, lad.” Are you coming to dinner?’

‘Yes, and then I must dash. I’m supposed to be seeing somebody at eight.’

Rivers had the top floor of a large house near Hampstead Heath. The house was within a hundred yards of the great gun, and there were times when its proximity showed in every line of his face.

Prior arrived exactly on time, and was about to ring the bell when he saw Rivers walking rapidly up the hill.

‘Have you rung?’ Rivers asked, getting out his key.

‘No, I saw you coming.’

Rivers opened the door and stood aside to let Prior in. Mrs Irving, Rivers’s landlady, was hovering in the hall, wanting to complain about the Belgian refugees on the second floor whose failure to understand the extent of the food shortages was making her life a misery. When that subject was exhausted, there were the raids to be discussed. Wasn’t it scandalous they’d been kept awake all night and not a word about it in The Times? Then there was her daughter, who’d been summoned back from France, ostensibly because her mother was ill, in fact because she was incapable of sorting out her servant problems. Girls kept leaving her employ on the flimsy excuse that they could earn five times as much in the munition factories. There was no accounting for modern girls, she said. And Frances was so moody .

At last Mrs Irving was called away, by Frances presumably, at any rate by a young woman with braided hair who gave Rivers a cool, amused, sympathetic smile before she closed the door of the drawing-room.

‘I hope she’s letting you live rent free,’ Prior said.

They walked up the stairs together. Rivers paused on the second floor to look down into the garden. The laburnum, he said, was particularly fine. Prior didn’t believe in this sudden interest in horticulture. The pause was to give him time to get his breath back. His chest was tighter than it had been on his last visit, and Rivers would have noticed that. Damn Rivers, he thought, knowing the response was utterly unfair. Whenever he needed Rivers he became angry with him, often to the point where he couldn’t talk about what was worrying him. He mustn’t let that happen tonight.

Normally Prior took a long time to get started, but this evening he was no sooner settled in his chair than he launched into an account of his visit to Mrs Roper. What emerged most vividly was the eye in the door. He reverted to this again and again, how elaborately painted it had been, even to the veins in the iris, how the latrine bucket had been placed within sight of it, how it was never possible to tell whether a human eye was looking through the painted one or not. It was clear from Prior’s expression, from his whole demeanour, that he was seeing the eye as he spoke. Rivers was always sensitive to the signs of intense visualization in other people, since this was a capacity in which he himself was markedly deficient, a state of affairs which had once seemed simple and now seemed very complicated indeed. He switched his attention firmly back to Prior, asked a few questions about his previous relationship with Mrs Roper, then listened intently to his account of the nightmare. ‘Whose eye was it?’ he asked, when Prior had finished.

Prior shrugged. ‘ I don’t know. How should I know?’

‘It’s your dream.’

Prior drew a deep breath, reluctant to delve into a memory that could still make his stomach heave. ‘I suppose Towers is the obvious connection.’

‘Had you been thinking about that?’

‘I remembered it when I was in the cell with Beattie. I… I actually saw it for a moment. Then later I remembered I used to go and buy gob-stoppers from Beattie’s shop.’ He paused. ‘I don’t know whether you remember, but when I picked up Towers’s eye, I said, “What shall I do with this gob-stopper?”’

‘I remember.’

A long silence.

Rivers said slowly, ‘When one eye reminded you of the other, was that just the obvious connection? I mean, because they were both eyes?’

Prior produced one of his elaborate shrugs. ‘I suppose so.’

Silence.

‘I don’t know. It was in the prison, but later… I don’t know. I knew I was going to have a bad night. You you you just get to know the the feeling. I felt sorry for Beattie. And then I started thinking about William — that’s the son — and… you know, naked in his cell, stone floor, snow outside…’ He shook his head. ‘It was… quite powerful, and I… I think I resented that. I resented having my sympathies manipulated. Because it’s nothing, is it?’ A burst of anger. ‘ I lost three men with frost-bite . And so I started thinking about that, about those men and… It was a way of saying, “All right, William, your bum’s numb. Tough luck.” Though that’s irrelevant, of course.’ He smiled wryly. ‘It isn’t a suffering competition.’

‘And then you thought about Towers?’

‘Yes. But not in the same way as… as as the other men, I mean, I wasn’t focusing on the horror of it. It was… I don’t know.’ He held out his hand to Rivers, palm upwards. ‘A sort of talisman. Do you know what I mean? If that happens to you…’ The outstretched hand started to shake. ‘There’s no possible room for doubt where your loyalties are.’

Prior looked down at his shaking hand, and seemed to become aware of it for the first time. He swallowed. ‘Sorry, will you excuse me a moment?’

He crashed out of the room. Doors opened and closed as he tried to locate the bathroom. Rivers got up to help, then heard retching, followed by a gush of water, followed by more retching. Prior wouldn’t want to be seen in that condition. He sat down again.