Pat Barker - The Eye in the Door

That night he’d woken up, hot and sticky, knowing he was going to be sick. He started to cry and after a long time his father came in, blundering round and stubbing his toes before he found the light. He looked up at him, the huge man, looming over the bed. Then, slowly, erupting from his mouth, the jelly babies returned — intact, or very nearly so — while his father stood and gaped.

It must have been quite a sight, Prior thought, helping Sarah out of the cab and turning to pay the driver. Like watching a sea-horse give birth.

Once inside the flat he lit the gas fire and made two mugs of strong sweet tea, while Sarah went to take off her wet clothes. She came back wearing his dressing-gown, shivering from the cold. He sat her down between his knees and towelled her hair.

‘You know you were saying about the bit you liked best? For me it’s your hair,’ he said, feeling his tongue thick and unwieldy, getting in the way of his teeth. ‘It was the first thing I noticed. The different colours.’

‘You told me,’ she said, twisting round. ‘And you needn’t make it sound so romantic. You were wondering which colour was down there. Weren’t you?’

He smiled. ‘Yes.’

They sat sipping their tea. She said, ‘Well, are you going to tell me?’

‘Yes.’ He picked up two handfuls of hair and tugged on them. ‘But it’s worse than you think. I need you to tell me what happened.’

‘When?’

‘On the boat.’

Her eyes widened, but she didn’t argue. ‘You gave your seat to that woman and got a cup of tea and then you went and stood over by the bar. I didn’t see what happened then, I was looking at the bank. Then the sun came out and some of the girls went out on deck and this woman thought she ought to go and keep an eye on them. So next time you came back there was a seat next to me. I asked you which bridge we were going under and you didn’t answer. I could see you were in one of your moods. So I left you to it. Then when we got out, that man in the Palm House was waiting at the top of the steps. He said something about me — I honestly didn’t hear what it was — and you hit him. He came back at you, and you lifted your cane and you were obviously going to brain him, so he backed off. He went across the bridge, and you got hold of me and dragged me into the Abbey. I kept saying, “What’s the matter?” I couldn’t get an answer, so I thought, sod it. And I went off and looked at things on me own.’ She waited. ‘Are you telling me you don’t remember all that?’

‘I remember the first bit.’

‘You don’t remember hitting him?’

‘No.’

‘Who is he?’

‘Doesn’t matter.’

‘It does bloody matter.’

‘It’s got nothing to do with you.’

Her face froze.

As she pulled away, he said, ‘No, look, I didn’t mean it like that.’ He buried his head in his hands. ‘I’ll tell you all about him if you like, but that’s not the bit that matters. What matters is that I can’t remember.’

‘It’s happened before?’

‘It’s been happening for oh… two months.’

He could see her mind busily at work, trying to minimize the significance. ‘But you lost your memory once before, didn’t you? I mean, when you came back from France you said you couldn’t remember anything.’ She switched to a tone of condemnation. ‘You’ve let yourself get run down, that’s what you’ve done.’

‘Look, I need you to tell me about it.’ He tried to sound light-hearted. ‘You’re the first person who’s met him.’

‘Don’t you mean “me”? Well, it is you, isn’t it?’

Prior shook his head. ‘You don’t understand.’ He leapt up and took a piece of paper out of the top drawer of the sideboard. ‘Look.’

Sarah looked down and read: Why don’t you leave my fucking cigars alone?

‘I found some cigars in my pocket. I threw them away.’

‘But it’s your writing.’

‘YES. How can I say “I” about that?’

Sarah was thinking. ‘When I said it was you, I didn’t just mean… the obvious. I meant I… I meant I recognized you in that mood. Do you remember the first time we went out together? That day on the beach.’

‘Yes, of—’

‘Well, you were like that then. Hating everybody. You were all right on the train, but once we were on the beach, I don’t know what happened, you just went right away from me and I couldn’t reach you. I could feel the hatred coming off you. It was like anybody who hadn’t been to France was rubbish . Well, you were like that on the boat. And there’s no talking to you when you’re in that mood. You just despise everybody.’ She hesitated. ‘Including me.’

‘It’s not a mood, Sarah. People remember moods.’

In bed that night, coiled round her, he kissed all along her spine, gently, so as not to wake her, his lips moving from one vertebra to the next.

Stepping stones to sanity.

But the day after tomorrow, she would be gone.

Sarah left early on the Monday morning. They clung together by the barrier at King’s Cross, breathing in coke fumes, and did not say goodbye.

He worked late, putting off the moment when he’d have to face the empty flat. On his way home he kept telling himself it wouldn’t be too bad, or at least it wouldn’t be as bad as he expected.

It was worse.

He wandered from room to room, searching for traces of her, trying to convince himself a dent in the sofa cushion was where her head had rested. He sat down and put his own head there, but this simply provided a more painful vantage point from which to survey the emptiness of the room.

It’ll get better, he told himself.

It didn’t.

He took to walking the streets at night in an effort to get tired enough to sleep. London by night fascinated him. He walked along the pavements, looking at place-names: Marble Arch, Piccadilly, Charing Cross, Tottenham Court Road. All these places had trenches named after them. And, gradually, as he walked through the streets of the night city, that other city, the unimaginable labyrinth, grew around him, its sandbag walls bleached pale in the light of a flare, until some chance happening, a piece of paper blown across the pavement, a girl’s laugh, brought him back to a knowledge of where he was.

He got a letter from Sarah and put it on the mantelpiece, under a small china figure of a windblown girl walking a dog, where he would see it as soon as he came through the door.

Often, on his night-time walks, he thought about Spragge, and the more he thought the more puzzled he became. The man’s whole sweaty, rumpled, drink-sodden appearance suggested a down-and-out, a man blundering through life, and yet the effort required to watch the flat and follow him all the way to Kew revealed a considerable degree of persistence. It didn’t make sense.

One obvious explanation was that he was working for Lode, but Prior distrusted the idea. The atmosphere in the Intelligence Unit was such that baseless suspicions were mistaken for reality at every turn. It was like a trick picture he’d seen once, in which staircases appeared to lead between the various floors of a building. Only very gradually did he realize that the perspective made no sense, that the elaborate staircases connected nothing with nothing.

His landlady, Mrs Rollaston, turned up on the doorstep, cradling her bosom in her arms as women do when they feel threatened. ‘I thought you’d like to know there’s somebody coming to do the bins. I know I said Monday, but I just couldn’t get anybody.’

She was obviously continuing a conversation.

Prior nodded, and smiled.

He could recall no occasion on which he’d spoken to Mrs Rollaston about the bins.