Pat Barker - The Eye in the Door

Prior returned to London to find the city sweltering in sticky, humid, thundery heat. Major Lode was more difficult than ever, and not merely because of the weather. An attempt was under way to centralize the intelligence services under the control of the War Office, and Lode was fighting for the survival of the unit. The change was being pushed through at an exalted level and very little filtered down to Prior, but he observed Lode daily becoming fiercer, the blue eyes more vulnerable, the moustache in ever greater need of protective dab-bings and strokings, as his empire collapsed around him. The files, ‘the brain cells of the unit’ Lode proclaimed (God help it, thought Prior), were to be transferred to the War Office. The task of ‘tidying them up’ before they were transferred was allotted to Prior. At first he took this to be merely a routine clerical task, perhaps designed to keep him out of trouble, but it quickly became clear that Lode wanted ‘sensitive material’ referred to him. In other words, evidence for the worst of the unit’s cock-ups was to be removed. The job, though huge — the files numbered more than eight hundred — suited Prior very well, since it solved what had hitherto been his main problem: how to get enough access to past files to compile a dossier on Spragge.

He was busy and, within reason, happy, though he did not feel particularly well. Then, four days after his return, something disturbing happened.

He’d gone out to lunch in a nearby pub, bought himself a pint of beer and opened The Times , as he always did, at the casualty lists. The name leapt out at him.

Hore, Captain James Frederick. Killed in action on the 5th April, dearly beloved younger son …

Jimmy Hore. They’d met on a riding course, trotting round a ring with their stirrups crossed in front of them, their hands clasped behind their heads. Acquiring the correct seat. The seat of gentlemen. Prior, who’d already experienced the realities of trench warfare, had been angry and amused, though he kept both reactions to himself, since he was convinced nobody else could appreciate the idiocy of the situation as he did. Certainly not this blank-faced moron trotting towards him, but then, as they trotted past each other, he caught Jimmy’s eye and realized his face wasn’t blank at all, but rigid with suppressed laughter. That glance of shared amusement had been too much for Jimmy, who burst out laughing and fell off his horse.

Prior looked round the pub. Prosperous-looking men in pin-striped suits jostled at the bar, chinking coins, bestowing well-oiled smiles on the pretty, chestnut-haired barmaid. And Jimmy was dead. All the poor little bugger had ever wanted to do was get married to… whatever her name was. And work in a bank. Prior would have liked nothing better, at that moment, than for a tank to come crashing through the doors and crush everybody, the way they sometimes crushed the wounded who couldn’t get off the track in time. The violence of his imaginings — he saw severed limbs, heard screams — terrified him.

He couldn’t eat. He would just drink up and go. But when he lifted his glass, his attention was caught by the amber lights winking in the beer. Sunlight, shining through the glass, cast a ring of shimmering gold on the surface of the table that danced when his hand moved. He started to play with it, moving his hand to and fro.

He was back at his desk. No interval. One second he was in the pub, the next sitting behind his desk. He looked across at the closed door. Blinked. Thought, I must’ve gone to sleep. He felt relaxed, but without the clogged feeling that follows midday sleep. He’d been reading The Times… Jimmy Hore was dead . He couldn’t remember leaving the pub. He must have walked all the way back in a complete dream. He looked at his watch, and his brain struggled to make sense of the position of the hands. Ten past four.

Three hours had passed since he broke for lunch, and of that he could account for perhaps twenty to twenty-five minutes. The rest was blank.

He made himself work until six. After all, in France he’d done paperwork on a table that kept jumping several feet into the air. He could surely manage to ignore a little disturbance like this. Though, as file after file passed across his desk, he was aware, somewhere on the fringes of his consciousness, that it was not ‘a little disturbance’. Something catastrophic had happened.

Shortly after six he thought he recognized voices, and went out of his room and a little way along the corridor. Major Lode and Lionel Spragge were deep in conversation by the lifts. It was not possible to hear what they were saying, but he noticed that Lode shook Spragge’s hand warmly as the lift arrived. Prior slipped back into his room, but left the door open.

He was ready to produce some small query that would bring Lode into his room, but in the event he didn’t need to. Lode stood in the doorway, grinning. ‘Just seen Spragge,’ he said in his clipped, staccato voice. ‘What have you been doing to him?’

‘Me? Nothing.’

‘Says you offered him a job.’

‘I didn’t offer him anything. Wishful thinking, I’m afraid.’

‘Well, he certainly seems to think you did. I had to tell him there was nothing doing. Nap poo .’ Lode looked at him for a moment, then said in a menacing, nannyish singsong, ‘He’s got it in for you .’

Bastard, Prior thought, as Lode closed the door behind him. It’s not my fault your frigging unit’s being closed down.

Towards six it began to thunder, a desultory grumble on the horizon, though the sun still shone. Prior worked for a further half hour, then gave up. He’d been having bad headaches ever since he got back to London and blamed them on the weather, though in fact he knew they’d started after his fall into the children’s trench. He would go somewhere fairly reasonable to eat. Cosset himself.

A sudden downpour began just as he reached the main steps. He looked up, trying to judge how long it would last. A white sun shone through a thin layer of cloud, but there were darker clouds massing over Nelson’s Column. He went back upstairs to fetch his greatcoat. As he passed Lode’s room, he heard an unfamiliar voice say, ‘Do you think he believed it?’

Lode replied, ‘Oh, I think so. I don’t see why he shouldn’t.’

Prior went along to his own room, shrugged himself into the heavy greatcoat, and walked back to the lift. For once it arrived immediately in a great clanking of cables and gates. He told himself there was no reason to connect the overheard conversation with himself, but he found it difficult not to. The atmosphere in the unit was rather like that. Plots and counterplots, many of them seemingly pointless. So far he’d managed to hold himself aloof.

The underground was crowded. Currents of hot, dead air moved across his face as he waited on the edge of the platform. He couldn’t carry his greatcoat — that was forbidden — and the sweat streamed down his sides. He found himself wondering whether this reaction was not excessive, whether he was not really ill. A subterranean rumbling, and the train erupted from the tunnel. He found himself a seat near the door and glanced at the girl beside him. Her hair was limp, her neck had a creased, swollen whiteness, and yet she was attractive in her rumpled skirt and white blouse. He glanced at her neckline, at the shadow between her breasts, then forced himself to look away. He found that rumpled look in women amazingly attractive.

He ate at a small café not far from Marble Arch. It wasn’t as pleasant as it had looked from the outside: the walls had faded to a sallow beige, the windows streamed with condensation, blasts of steamy air belched from the swing doors into the kitchen as waitresses banged in and out. After his meal he lit a cigarette, drank two cups of hot, sweet, orange-coloured tea and persuaded himself he felt better.