Pat Barker - The Eye in the Door

I was seated one day at the organ

Weary and ill at ease.

Prior gave an incredulous yelp of laughter, one or two of the others sniggered, Mac guffawed. The piano faltered into silence. Horton stood up, summoned Mac to the front of the room and invited him to share the joke. ‘Well?’ said Horton. ‘I’m sure we could all do with being amused.’

‘I don’t think you’d think it was funny, sir.’

Mac was savagely caned. Prior was let off. Horton had heard Prior laugh too, he was sure of it, but Prior, thanks to his mother’s skrimping and saving, was always well turned out. Shirts ironed, shoes polished, he looked like the sort of boy who might get a scholarship, as indeed he did, thanks partly to Father Mackenzie’s more robust approach to organ playing. Bastard , Prior thought, as Horton’s arm swung.

Years later, after witnessing the brutalities of trench warfare, he still thought: Bastard .

At the time he had been determined on revenge. Angrier on Mac’s behalf than he would ever have been on his own.

Horton was a man of regular habits. Precisely twenty minutes before the bell rang for the end of the dinner break, he could be seen trekking across the playground to the masters’ lavatory. Not for him the newspaper the boys had to make do with. Bulging from one side of his jacket, like a single tit, was a roll of toilet-paper. He marched across the yard with precise military tread, almost unnoticed by the shouting and running boys. Humour in the playgrpund was decidedly scatological, but Horton’s clockwork shitting was too old a joke to laugh at.

One dinnertime, posting Mac where he could see the main entrance to the school, Prior went in on a recce. Next day he and Mac slipped into the lavatory and locked the door of one of the cubicles. Prior lit a match, applied it to the wick of a candle, shielded the flame with both hands until it burned brightly, and fixed it in its own wax to a square of plywood.

Prompt to the minute, Mr Horton entered. He was puzzled by the locked cubicle. ‘Mr Barnes?’

Prior produced a baritone grunt of immense effort and Horton said no more. Not even that constipated grunt tempted them to giggle. Horton’s beatings were no laughing matter. They waited in silence, feeling the rise and fall of each other’s breath. Then, slowly, Prior lowered the candle into the water that ran beneath the lavatory seat. It was one long seat, really, though the cubicles divided it. The candle flickered briefly, but then the flame rose up again and burnt steadily. Prior urged it along the dark water, and it bobbed along, going much faster than he’d thought it would. Mac was already unbolting the door. They ran across the playground, to where a game of High Cockalorum was in progress (by arrangement) and hurled themselves on top of the heap of struggling boys.

Behind them, candle flame met arse. A howl of pain and incredulity, and Horton appeared, gazing wildly round him. No use him looking for signs of guilt. He inspired such terror that guilt was written plain on every one of the two hundred faces that turned towards him. In any case there was dignity to be considered. He limped across the playground and no more was heard.

Once he was safely out of sight, Prior and Mac went quietly round the corner to the forbidden area by the pile of coke and there they danced a solemn and entirely silent dance of triumph.

And why am I bothering to recall such an incident in so much detail, Prior asked himself. Because every memory of friendship I come up with is a shield against Hettie’s spit in my face, a way of saying of course I couldn’t have done it. What surprised him now was how innocent he’d felt when Beattie first mentioned Hettie’s belief that he’d betrayed Mac. ‘I didn’t do it,’ he’d said automatically, with total assurance, for all the world as if he could answer for every minute of his waking life. Only on the train coming back to London had he forced himself to accept that it was possible he’d betrayed Mac. Or at any rate that it was impossible for him to deny it.

Since then he’d gained one fact from Rivers that filled him with fear. He now knew that in the fugue state he’d denied that his father was his father. If he was prepared to deny that — a simple biological fact after all — what chance did pre-war friendships have? Rivers had hesitated visibly when telling him what his other state had said, and yet Prior’s reaction to it had been more complicated than simple rejection or denial. To say that one had been born in a shell-hole is to say something absurdly self-dramatizing. Even by my standards, Prior thought wryly. Yet if you asked anybody who’d fought in France whether he thought he was the same person he’d been before the war, the person his family still remembered, the overwhelming majority — no, not even that, all of them, all of them would say no. It was merely a matter of degree. And one did feel at times very powerfully that the only loyalties that actually mattered were loyalties forged there. Picard clay was a powerful glue. Might it not, applied to pre-war friendships with conscientious objectors, be an equally powerful solvent?

Not in this state, he reminded himself. In this state he’d risked court martial for Beattie’s sake, copying out documents that incriminated Spragge. But then Beattie was a woman, and couldn’t fight. His other self might be less tolerant of healthy strapping young men spending the war years trying to disrupt the supply of ammunition on which other lives depended.

But Mac , he thought. Mac.

He did eventually drift off to sleep, and woke three hours later, to find the room full of sunshine. He peered sleepily at his watch, then reached for his dressing-gown. Rivers, already shaved and fully dressed, was sitting over the remains of breakfast. ‘It seemed better to let you sleep,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid the coffee’s cold.’

‘Did you get back to sleep?’

‘Yes.’

Lying hound, thought Prior. He drank the cold coffee as he shaved and dressed. Rivers was waiting by the desk. For a moment Prior felt rebellious, but then he looked at Rivers and saw how tired he was and thought, my God, if he can manage, it, I can. He sat down, and the familiar position, the light falling on to Rivers’s face, made him aware that he’d taken a decision. ‘I’m going to see Mac,’ he said.

Silence. ‘I think the reason I’m not making any progress is that… there’s a there’s th-there’s oh, for Christ’s sake .’ He threw back his head. ‘There’s a barrier, and I think it’s something to do with him.’

‘Finding out one fact about your behaviour over the past few weeks isn’t going to change anything.’

‘I think it might.’

Another long silence. Rivers shifted his position, ‘Yes, I do see that.’

‘And although I see the point, I mean, I see how important it is to get to the root of it, I do need to be functioning now . Somehow going over what happened with my parents just makes me feel like a sort of lifelong hopeless neurotic. It makes me feel I’ll never be able to do anything.’

‘Oh, I shouldn’t worry about that,’ Rivers said. ‘Half the world’s work’s done by hopeless neurotics.’

This was accompanied by an involuntary glance at his desk. Prior laughed aloud. ‘Would you like me to help you with any of it?’

Rivers smiled. ‘I was thinking of Darwin.’

‘Like hell. Why don’t you let me do that?’ Prior asked, pointing to a stack of papers on the desk. ‘You’re just typing it out, aren’t you? You’re not altering it.’

‘It’s very kind of you, but you couldn’t read the writing. That’s why I have to type it. My secretary can’t read it either.’