Pat Barker - The Eye in the Door

Who needed Marx when they had Tite Street Board School, Prior thought, stubbing out his cigarette carefully between strips of golden straw. Still absorbed in memories of the past, he got to his feet and started to walk up and down. The moon had risen; its light was bright enough to cast his shadow across the floor. His-first awareness of Mac was of a shadow growing beside his own, then the touch of a hand on his shoulder, and a light amused voice asking, ‘Am I to understand you’ve been up my mother?’

Prior turned. ‘What makes you say that?’

‘All that stuff about “Thank God for an honest man”, I don’t know what else it could mean.’

‘Now would I do that?’

‘I don’t know. Before the war you’d’ve fucked a cow in a field if you could’ve found one to stand still for you.’

And the bull. ‘Mac, I swear —’

‘Aw, forget it. If I was sensitive about that I’d’ve croaked years ago.’ Mac was smiling. This was almost, but not quite, a joke.

Prior said, ‘Shall we sit down?’

They sat on bales of straw a few feet apart, united and divided by the rush of memory. They could see clearly enough, by moonlight and the intermittent glow of cigarettes, to be able to judge each other’s expression.

‘It was you in the kitchen, then,’ Prior said. ‘I thought it was.’

‘Why, who’d you think it might be?’

Prior hesitated. ‘I was afraid it might be some poor frightened little sod of a deserter, I was afraid he’d —’

‘What would you have done?’

‘Turned him in.’

Mac looked at him curiously. ‘Even though he’s “a poor frightened little sod”?’

‘Yes . What about the poor frightened little sods who don’t desert?’

‘Well, at least we know where we stand.’

‘I don’t want to start by telling you a pack of lies.’

Mac laughed. ‘You told Hettie a few. That girl in the filing department, the one who got you the files, my God, Billy, you must be ringing her bell.’

‘Say it, Mac.’

‘All right, I’ll say it. It strikes me you’d be a bloody good recruit, for them . You with your commission and your posh accent, and your…’ With a kind of mock delicacy, Mac touched his own chest. ‘Low friends. Officers’ mess one night, back streets of Salford the next. Equally at home or…’ He smiled, relishing the intimacy of his capacity to wound. ‘Equally not at home, in both.’

‘Whereas you of course are firmly embedded in the bosom of a loving proletariat? Well, let me tell you, Mac, the part of the proletariat I’ve been fighting with — the vast majority — they’d string you up from the nearest fucking lamp-post and not think twice about it. And as for your striking munition workers…’ Prior swept the shed with a burst of machine-gun fire.

There was a moment’s shocked silence, as if the childish gesture had indeed produced carnage.

‘And don’t think they wouldn’t do it, they would. I know them. ’

Mac said, ‘I’m surprised you feel quite so much pleasure at the idea of the workers shooting each other.’

‘No pleasure, Mac. Just facing reality.’ Prior produced a flask from his tunic pocket and handed it over. ‘Here, wash it down.’

Mac unscrewed the cap, drank, blinked as his eyes watered, then passed the flask back, its neck unwiped. After a moment’s hesitation Prior drank, thinking, as he did so, that the sacramental gesture was hollow. Milk in unwiped lemonade bottles was a lifetime away.

‘You still haven’t explained,’ Mac said.

‘About the files? I work in the Intelligence Unit.’

Mac made a slight, involuntary movement.

‘They’d’ve been here by now.’

Mac smiled. ‘Must be quite nice, really. A foot on each side of the fence. Long as you don’t mind what it’s doing to your balls.’

‘They’re all right, Mac. Worry about your own.’

‘Oh, I see . I wondered when that was coming. Men fight, is that it?’

‘No. I can see it takes courage to be a pacifist. At least, I suppose it does. You see, my trouble is I don’t know what courage means. The only time I’ve ever done anything even slightly brave, I couldn’t remember a bloody thing about it. Bit like those men who bash the wife’s head in with a poker. “Everything went black, m’lud.”’

Mac nodded. ‘Well, since you’re being honest, I think a load of fucking rubbish’s talked about how much courage it takes to be a pacifist. When I was deported from the Clyde, they came for me in the middle of the night. One minute I was dreaming about a blonde with lovely big tits and the next minute I was looking up at six policemen with lovely big truncheons. Anyway, they got me off to the station and they started pushing me around, one to the other, you know, flat-of-the-hand stuff, and they were all grinning, sort of nervous grins, and I knew what was coming, I knew they were working themselves up. It’s surprising how much working up the average man needs before he’ll do anything really violent. Well, you’d know all about that.’

‘Yes,’ Prior said expressionlessly.

‘I was shitting meself. And then I thought, well. They’re not going to blind you. They’re not going to shove dirty great pieces of hot metal in your spine, they’re not going to blow the top of your head off, they’re not going to amputate your arms and legs without an anaesthetic, so what the fuck are you worried about? If you were in France you’d be facing all that. And of course there’s always the unanswered question. Could you face it? Could you pass the test? But where I think we differ, Billy, is that you think that’s a Very Important Question, and I think it’s fucking trivial.’

Prior glanced sideways at him. ‘No, you don’t.’

‘All right, I don’t.’

‘You could always say you’re showing moral courage.’

‘No such thing. It’s a bit like medieval trial-by-combat, you know. In the end moral and political truths have to be proved on the body , because this mass of nerve and muscle and blood is what we are.’

‘That’s a very dangerous idea. It comes quite close to saying that the willingness to suffer proves the rightness of the belief. But it doesn’t . The most it can ever prove is the believer’s sincerity. And not always that. Some people just like suffering.’

Mac was looking round the shed. He said, ‘I don’t think I do,’ but he seemed to have tired of the argument, or perhaps the whisky had begun to soften his mood. ‘I often think about those days.’

Prior waited. ‘You can trust me, you know.’

‘I trusted Spragge.’

‘You didn’t have pissing competitions with Spragge.’

‘Oh, that’s it, is it? Piss brothers?’

Prior laughed. ‘Something like that.’

A long silence. ‘What do you want?’

‘I want you to tell me about Spragge.’

Mac gave a choking laugh. ‘He’s your fucking employee.’

‘Not any more. The trial blew his cover.’

‘Good.’

‘He was with you, wasn’t he, the night before?’

‘I sent him there.’

Mac must find that almost intolerable, Prior thought. His debt to the Ropers was total. Without Beattie, he’d’ve been a scabby, lousy, neglected kid, barely able to read and write, fit only for the drovers’ road and the slaughterhouse. Beattie had taken him in. By the age of thirteen he’d been living more with her than with his own mother. As soon as the older boys in the street gang stopped speculating about sex and started climbing Lizzie’s stairs in search of more concrete information, Mac had found his own home unbearable. He’d disappeared altogether for a time, going up the drovers’ road one summer, returning, older, harder, the first traces of cynicism and deadness round his mouth and eyes. Then Beattie took charge. ‘What the hell’s the matter with you?’ she asked. ‘You can read, can’t you? Just ‘cos the teachers think you’re stupid, doesn’t mean you are. Some of them aren’t too bright. Here, read this. No, go on, read it . I want to know what you think.’