Pat Barker - The Eye in the Door

A twisting flight of stairs led down to his basement flat. The dustbins from all the apartments in the house were kept in the small forecourt outside his living-room window. The smell of rotting cabbage lingered. At night there were rustlings that he tried to convince himself were cats. He put his key in the lock and walked in. The hall was dark, but not cool. He threw his briefcase and coat down on to a chair, then, pulling his tie off, went along the corridor to the bathroom, ran a cold bath and nerved himself to get in. His skin under the water looked bloated, and there were lines of silver bubbles trapped in his pubic hair. He ran his fingers through, releasing them, then clasped the edges of the bath and lowered his head beneath the water.

He got out, wrapped himself in a towel, opened the french windows into the small yard and lay down on the bed. Despite the open windows there was no decrease in stuffiness. The only way you could get a movement of air through the place was to have the french windows and the front door open. But then you let the smell of cabbage in as well.

His head was aching. He turned and looked at the photograph of Sarah by his bed. She was sitting on the bottom step of some kind of monument, younger, plump, though not fat, with her hair dressed low so that it almost covered her forehead. She was pretty, but he thought she looked more ordinary than she did now, when her cheekbones had become more prominent, and she wore her hair back from the high rounded forehead. Her smile was different too. In the photograph it looked friendly, confiding, almost puppyish. Now, though still warm, it always kept something back. She was coming to see him sometime in the next few weeks, or at least it seemed almost certain that she was. He was afraid to count on it. He was afraid to picture her in the flat, because he knew that if he did the emptiness when her imagined presence failed him would be intolerable.

What he needed was to get out. These days he tried to circumvent the nightmares by going for a long walk early in the evening and then having three very large whiskies before bed. He’d reluctantly come to the conclusion that Rivers was right: sleeping draughts stopped working after the first few weeks, and when they stopped the nightmares returned with redoubled force. At least with the walk and the whisky he could count on a few good hours before they started.

Walking the city streets on a hot evening, he seemed to feel the pavements and the blank, white terraces breathe the day’s stored heat into his face. His favourite walks were in Hyde Park. He liked the dusty gloom beneath the trees, the glint of the Serpentine in the distance. Close to, by the water’s edge, there was even the whisper of a breeze. He stopped and watched some children paddling, three little girls with their dresses tucked into their drawers, then switched his attention to two much bigger girls, who came strolling along, arm in arm, but they read the hunger in his eyes too clearly and hurried past, giggling.

He felt restless, and, for once, the restlessness had nothing to do with sex. He had a definite and very strange sensation of wanting to be somewhere, a specific place, and of not knowing what that place was. He began to stroll towards the Achilles Monument. This was a frequent objective on his evening walks, for no particular reason except that its heroic grandeur both attracted and repelled him. It seemed to embody the same unreflecting admiration of courage that he found in ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, a poem that had meant a great deal to him as a boy, and still did, though what it meant had become considerably more complex. He stared up at the stupendous lunging figure, with its raised sword and shield, and thought, not for the first time, that he was looking at the representation of an ideal that no longer had validity.

Feeling dissatisfied, as if he’d expected the walk to end in something more than this routine encounter with Achilles, he turned to go, and noticed a man staring at him from under the shadow of the trees. We-ell. Young men who linger in the park at dusk can expect to be stared at. Deliberately, he quickened his pace, but then the back of his neck began to prickle, and a second later he heard his name called.

Lionel Spragge came lumbering up to him, out of breath and plaintive. ‘Where are you going?’ he demanded.

‘Home.’

At that moment a gang of young people, five or six abreast, came charging along the path, arms linked, broke round Spragge like a river round a stone, and swept on. Two more boys, running to catch up, elbowed him out of the way. Under cover of this disturbance, Prior walked away.

‘Hey, hang on,’ Spragge came puffing up behind him. ‘You can’t just go walking off like that.’

‘Why not?’

Spragge tapped his watch. ‘Achilles. Nine o’clock.’

‘Well?’

Spragge looked genuinely bewildered. ‘Why make the appointment if you don’t want to talk?’

Prior was beginning to feel frightened. ‘I came out for a walk.’

‘You came to see me.’

‘Did I? I don’t think so.’

‘You know you did.’ He stared at Prior. ‘Well, if this doesn’t take the biscuit. You said, “I can’t talk now. Statue of Achilles, nine o’clock.” What’s the point of denying it? I mean what is the point?’

Spragge stank. His shirt was dirty, there was three days’ growth of stubble on his chin, he’d been drinking, his eyes were bloodshot, but the bewilderment was genuine .

Prior said, ‘Well, I’m here now anyway. What do you want?’

‘If you hadn’t turned up I’d’ve come to your house.’

‘You don’t know where I live.’

‘I do. I followed you home.’

Prior laughed. A bark of astonishment.

‘I was behind you on the platform. I sat three seats away from you on the train.’ Spragge waggled his finger at his temple. ‘You want to watch that. First step to the loony bin.’

‘Piss off.’

Spragge caught his arm. ‘Don’t you want to know what I’ve got to say?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘Yes, you do,’ Spragge said confidingly, leaning close, breathing into his face. ‘Come on. Sit down.’

They found a place. At the other end of the bench an elderly woman sat, feeding a squirrel on nuts. Prior watched the animal’s tiny black hands turning the nut delicately from side to side. ‘Make it quick, will you?’

‘I’ve remembered where I saw you.’

‘Have you?’

‘Meeting in Liverpool. You were speaking for the war, your father was speaking against.’

‘Get to the point.’

‘Oh, I know a lot about you. It’s amazing what you can find out when you try, and finding out things was my job, wasn’t it? When I had a job.’

‘You didn’t find things out,’ Prior said crisply. ‘You made them up.’

‘You and the Ropers. You were like this.’ Spragge jabbed his crossed fingers into Prior’s face. ‘Thick as thieves. And MacDowell.’

‘That’s why I got the job.’

‘Oh, yeh, chuck me out and push you in.’

‘I came a year after you left.’

‘You told me I’d got a job.’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Yes, you did. I went straight back home and told the wife. And then when I didn’t hear anything I went to see Lode, and he threw me out. Bloody laughed at me.’ Spragge turned his downwards-slanting turquoise eyes on Prior. ‘You were just pumping me. Trying to make out I put the old cunt up to it.’

Prior got up. ‘Wash your mouth out.’

‘I thought that’d get you. You and her, you were —’

Prior crossed his fingers. ‘Like this?’

Spragge stared at him, a vein standing out at his temple, like a worm under the clammy skin. ‘People don’t change.’