Pat Barker - The Eye in the Door

The wardress grasped her arm. Wiping his cheek, slowly, not taking his eyes off Hettie, he said, ‘It’s all right. Let her go.’

Each with an escort, they moved off in opposite directions, toiling across the vast expanse of asphalt like beetles. Hettie turned before the building swallowed her and, in a voice that cracked with despair, she shouted, ‘You bastard. What about Mac? ’

Outside, Prior stared up at the building as the blood-and-bandages facade darkened in the light drizzle. Hettie’s spit seemed to burn his skin. He raised his hand and wiped his cheek again, then turned and began walking rapidly towards the station. A refrain beat in his head. With every scuff and slurry of his boots on the gravel, he heard: the bastards have won. The bastards have won. The bastards…

Rivers had cleared the afternoon to finish a report on military training for the Medical Research Council. For days now he’d had infantry-training manuals piled up on his desk, and he spent the first hour immersed in them, before going back to the last sentence he’d written.

Many of those who pass unscathed through modern warfare do so because of the sluggishness of their imaginations, but if imagination is active and powerful, it is probably far better to allow it to play around the trials and dangers of warfare than to carry out a prolonged system of repression…

A tap on the door. Captain Bolden had attacked a nurse. Rivers did a disguised run along the corridor, saw the lift was in the basement and took the stairs three at a time. He found a group of nurses and two orderlies clustered round Bolden’s door. Apparently he was refusing to let them in. From a babble of indignant chatter he managed to extract the information that Bolden had thrown a knife at Nurse Pratt. Not a very sharp knife, and it hadn’t hit her, but still a knife. Nurse Pratt was one of the oldest and most experienced nurses on the ward. Unfortunately her experience had been gained on the locked wards of large Victorian lunatic asylums, where in any altercation between a member of staff and a patient the patient was automatically and indisputably wrong. One could see it so clearly from both points of view. Bolden resorted to violence quickly and easily, but then he had spent the past four years being trained to do exactly that. Nurse Pratt was being asked, for the first time in a working life of thirty years, to handle patients who were as accustomed to giving orders as to taking them.

Rivers handed his stick to an orderly and tapped on the door. ‘Can I come in?’

A grunt, not definitely discouraging. Rivers opened the door and walked in. Bolden was standing by the window, still angry, sheepish, ashamed. Rivers, who was taller than Bolden, sat down, allowing Bolden to tower over him. Bolden was a very frightened man. ‘Now then. What is it this time?’

‘I told her the beef was inedible. She said I should think myself lucky to have it.’

‘So you threw a knife?’

‘I missed, didn’t I?’

They talked for half an hour. Then Rivers stood up to go.

‘I’ll tell her I’m sorry,’ Bolden said.

‘Well, that would be a start. As long as you don’t get irritated by her response.’

‘I do try,’ Bolden said, glowering at him.

‘I know you do. And you’re right about the beef. I couldn’t eat it either.’

Rivers had a word with Sister Walters, hoping she could persuade Nurse Pratt to receive the apology graciously, and then thought he might as well have a word with Manning, since he was on the ward anyway. He set off towards Manning’s room, then checked, remembering Manning was more likely to be on the neurological ward where he had struck up a firm friendship with Lucas and a couple of other chess fanatics. Manning was making good progress. He was almost ready to go home.

They were playing chess. Entirely silent and absorbed. He was standing beside them before they looked up.

Now that the discharge from Lucas’s wound had stopped, his hair was growing back, and it covered the white scalp in a dark fuzz. Rather touching. He looked like some kind of incongruous, ungainly chick. ‘How’s it going?’ Rivers asked, directing the question at Manning.

‘I’m being trounced,’ Manning said cheerfully. ‘19–17 in his favour.’

Lucas pointed to the board. ‘ 20 –17,’ he gurgled and grinned.

He certainly knew his numbers, Rivers thought, smiling as he walked away. In an unscreened bed further down the ward one of the pacifist orderlies was cleaning up an incontinent patient. Viggors’s legs circled continuously in an involuntary stepping movement, and it really needed two people to change him, one to clean him up, the other to hold his legs. He was getting liquid excrement on his heels, and spreading it all over the bottom sheet. Martin, the orderly, was red-faced and flustered, Viggors white with rage and shame.

Rivers stopped by the bed. ‘Have you heard of screens?’ he asked.

Martin looked up. ‘Wantage said he was going to get them.’

Wantage was lounging in the doorway of the staff-room, smoking a cigarette, clearly in no hurry to rescue a conchie orderly from an impossible position. His eyes widened. ‘I was just —’

‘I know exactly what you’re doing. Screens round that bed. Now . And get in there and help.’ He called over his shoulder as he walked off. ‘And put that cigarette out.’

Rivers was still shaking with anger when he got back to his desk. He made himself concentrate on the uncompleted sentence.

… if imagination is active and powerful, it is probably far better to allow it to play around the trials and dangers of warfare than to carry out a prolonged system of repression by which morbid energy may be stored so as to form a kind of dump ready to explode on the occurrence of some mental shock or bodily illness.

Exploding ammunition dumps had become a cliche, he supposed. Still, Bolden did a very good imitation of one. He wasn’t doing too badly himself.

A tap on the door. ‘ No ,’ Rivers said. ‘Whatever it is, no .’

Miss Rogers smiled. ‘There was a telephone call, while you were up on the ward. About a Captain Sassoon.’

Rivers was on his feet. ‘What about him?’

‘He’s in the American Red Cross Hospital at Lancaster Gate with a head wound, they said. Would you go and see him?’

‘How bad is it?’

‘I don’t know. They didn’t say.’

In the taxi going to Lancaster Gate, Rivers’s own words ran round and round in his head. If imagination is active and powerful, it is probably far better to allow it to play around … He looked out of the window, shaking his head as if to clear it. It wasn’t even as if the advice were appropriate. He didn’t need imagination, for Christ’s sake. He was a neurologist. He knew exactly what shrapnel and bullets do to the brain.

The ward was a large room with ornate plasterwork, and tall windows opening on a view of Hyde Park. Two of the beds were empty. The others contained lightly wounded men, all looking reasonably cheerful. On a table in the centre of the ward a gramophone was playing a popular love song. You made me love you .

A nurse came bustling up to him. ‘Who were you —’

‘Captain Sassoon.’

‘He’s been moved to a single room. Didn’t they tell you? Another two floors, I’m afraid, but I don’t think he’s allowed…” Her eye fell on his RAMC badges. ‘Are you Dr Rivers?’

‘Yes.’

‘I think Dr Saunders is expecting you.’

Dr Saunders was waiting outside the door of his room, a small man with pouched cheeks, receding ginger hair and blue eyes ten years younger than the rest of his face. ‘They sent you to the main ward,’ he said, shaking hands.