Pat Barker - The Eye in the Door

He was just beginning to drift off when the whistles blew.

By the time the orderly knocked on his door, he was out of bed and fastening his dressing-gown. He followed the man along the corridor to the main ward where Sister Walters greeted him. She was a thin, long-nosed Geordie with a sallow skin and a vein of class-hatred that reminded him of Prior. Oddly enough, it seemed to be directed entirely at her own sex. She hated the VADs, most of whom were girls of good family ‘doing their bit’ with — it had to be admitted — varying degrees of seriousness. She loved her officer patients — my boys, she called them — but the VADs, girls from a similar social background after all, she hated. One night last December, as the guns thudded and the ground shook beneath the direct hit on Vauxhall Bridge, they’d sat drinking cocoa together, and the barriers of rank had come down, enough at least for her to say bitterly, ‘They make me sick, the way they go on. “Oooh! Look at me! I’m dusting!” “I’m sweeping a floor.” Do you know, when I was training we got eight quid a year . That was for a seventy-hour week, and you got your breakages stopped off that.’

Cocoa was being made now and carried round on trays. Rivers went from bed to bed of the main ward. Most of the men were reasonably calm, though jerks and twitches were worse than normal. In the single rooms, where the more seriously disturbed patients were, the signs of distress were pitiful. These were men who had joked their way through bombardments that rattled the tea-cups in Kent, now totally unmanned. Weston had wet himself. He stood in the middle of his room, sobbing, while a nurse knelt in front of him and coaxed him to step out of the circle of sodden cloth. Rivers took over from her, got Weston into clean pyjamas and back into bed. He stayed with him till he was calm, then handed over to an orderly and went in search of Sister Walters.

She handed him his cocoa. ‘Captain Manning’s smoking. Do you think you could —’

‘Yes, of course.’

At Craiglockhart the corridors had reeked of cigarettes, and there the staff had contrived not to notice. Here, with two wards full of paralysed patients, the no-smoking rule had to be enforced. Rivers tapped once and walked in.

Manning was sitting up in bed. ‘Hello,’ he said, sounding surprised.

‘I’m afraid I’ve got to ask you to put that out. Two lifts. Twenty wheelchairs.’

‘Yes, certainly.’ Manning stubbed his cigarette out. ‘Stupid of me. I didn’t know you did nights.’

‘Only at full moons.’

‘I thought that theory of mental illness had been exploded.’

Rivers smiled. ‘You know what I mean.’

‘Sister Walters says they got Vauxhall Bridge twice. Is that right?’

‘Yes. Though we don’t need to worry when they hit it. Only when they miss.’

‘Reminds me of last Christmas. Do you remember that raid? I was staying with Ross, Sassoon was there as well, and it was very funny because it was the first raid I’d experienced, and I was all set to be the cool, collected veteran, calming down the poor nervous civilians. I was a complete bloody wreck. Ross’s housekeeper was better than me. Sassoon was the same. In fact I remember him saying, “All that fuss about whether I should go back or not. I won’t be any bloody good when I do.”’

A ragged sound of singing. ‘Listen,’ Manning said. He began to sing with them, almost under his breath.

Bombed last night

And bombed the night before

Gunna get bombed tonight

If we never get bombed any more.

When we’re bombed we’re scared as we can be…

‘First time I’ve heard that outside France.’ A pause. ‘You know, I’ve been thinking about what you said… about remembering and trying to talk about it.’

Rivers propped his chin on his hands and said, ‘Go on.’ Even as he spoke, he recalled Prior’s wickedly accurate imitation of this position. Damn Prior.

‘You know these attacks I have? Well, they tend to start with a sort of waking dream. It’s nothing very much actually, it’s not horrifying, it’s just a line of men marching along duckboards wearing gas masks and capes. Everything’s a sort of greenish-yellow, the colour it is when you look through the visor. The usual… porridge.’ He swallowed. ‘If a man slips off the duckboard it’s not always possible to get him out and sometimes he just sinks. The packs are so heavy, you see, and the mud’s fifteen feet deep. It’s not like ordinary mud. It’s like a bog, it… sucks. They’re supposed to hold on to the pack of the man in front.’

‘And you say this… dream triggers the attack?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose so.’

‘What in particular?’

Manning tried to answer and then shook his head.

‘If you had to pick out the worst thing, what would it be?’

‘There’s a hand coming out of the mud. It’s holding the duckboard and… nothing else. Everything else is underneath.’

A short silence.

‘Oh, and there’s a voice.’ Manning reached for his cigarettes and then remembered he couldn’t smoke. ‘It’s not coming from anybody. It’s just… there.’

Rivers waited. ‘What does it say?’

‘“Where’s Scudder?’” Manning smiled. ‘It’s a rather nasty, knowing little voice. “Where’s Scudder? Where’s Scudder?’”

‘Do you answer?’

Manning shook his head. ‘No point. It knows the answer.’

Silence, except for the sound of singing, fading now, and then, in the distance, the thudding of the guns.

Rivers said, ‘You know, if we went down to my room you could smoke.’

Manning looked surprised. ‘ Now? ’

‘Why not? Unless you think you can get back to sleep?’

Manning didn’t answer that. There was no need.

‘There,’ Rivers said, putting an ashtray at Manning’s elbow. The lamp created a circle of light around the desk, a world.

‘You don’t, do you?’ Manning said, lighting up.

‘A cigar now and then.’

Manning inhaled deeply, his eyes closed. ‘One of the reasons I don’t talk about it,’ he said, smiling, ‘apart from cowardice, is that it seems so futile.’

‘Because it’s impossible to make people understand?’

‘Yes. Even a comparatively small thing. The feeling you get when you go into the Salient, especially if you’ve been there before and you know what you’re facing. You really do say goodbye to everything. You just put one foot in front of another, one step, then the next, then the next.’

Rivers waited.

‘It’s… ungraspable,’ Manning said at last. ‘I don’t mean you can’t grasp it because you haven’t been there. I mean, I can’t grasp it and I have been there. I can’t get my mind round it.’

‘You were going to tell me about Scudder.’

‘Was I?’

Their eyes met.

Manning smiled. ‘Yes, I suppose I was. He was a man in my company. You know, the whole thing’s based on the idea that if you’ve got the right number of arms and legs and you’re not actually mentally defective you can be turned into a soldier. Well, Scudder was the walking proof that it isn’t true. He was hopeless. He knew he was. The night before we were due to move up, he got drunk. Well, a lot of them got drunk, but he was… legless. He didn’t turn up for parade, and so he was court-martialled. I went to see him the night before. He was being held in a barn, and we sat on a bale of straw and talked. It turned out he’d been treated for shell shock the previous year. With electric shocks. I didn’t know they did that.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Rivers said. ‘They do.’

‘He was at Messines when the mines went up. Apparently he used to dream about mines and blood. And he used to jerk his head and make stupid noises. That’s what the doctor called them. Stupid noises . Anyway it worked, after a fashion. The electric shocks. The night after he had the treatment he didn’t dream about mines. He dreamt he was back in the trenches having electric shock treatment. I stayed with him a couple of hours, I suppose.’ Manning smiled faintly. ‘He was a most unfortunate-looking youth. I mention that in case there’s a doctrinaire Freudian lurking under your desk.’