Pat Barker - Regeneration

‘Well, all I can say is I’d rather talk to a real person than a a strip of empathic wallpaper.’

Rivers smiled. ‘I like that.’

Prior glared at him.

‘If you feel you can’t talk about France, would it help to talk about the nightmares?’

‘ No. I don’t think talking helps. It just churns things up and makes them seem more real.’

‘But they are real.’

A short silence. Rivers closed Prior’s file. ‘All right. Good morning.’

Prior looked at the clock. ‘It’s only twenty past ten.’

Rivers spread his hands.

‘You can’t refuse to talk to me.’

‘Prior, there are a hundred and sixty-eight patients in this hospital, all of them wanting to get better, none of them getting the attention he deserves. Good morning.’

Prior started to get up, then sat down again. ‘You’ve no right to say I don’t want to get better.’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘You implied it.’

‘All right. Do you want to get better?’

‘Of course.’

‘But you’re not prepared to co-operate with the treatment.’

‘I don’t agree with the treatment.’

Deep breath. ‘What methods of treatment do you favour?’

‘Dr Sanderson was going to try hypnosis.’

‘He doesn’t mention it in his report.’

‘He was. He told me.’

‘How did you feel about that?’

‘I thought it was a good idea. I mean you ’re more or less saying: things are real, you’ve got to face them, but how can I face them when I don’t know what they are?’

‘That’s rather an unusual reaction, you know. Generally, when a doctor suggests hypnosis the patient’s quite nervous, because he feels he’ll be… putting himself in somebody else’s power. Actually that’s not quite true, but it does tend to be the fear.’

‘If it’s not true, why don’t you use it?’

‘I do sometimes. In selected cases. As a last resort. In your case, I’d want to know quite a lot about the part of your war service that you do remember.’

‘All right. What do you want to know?’

Rivers blinked, surprised by the sudden capitulation. ‘Well, anything you want to tell me.’

Silence.

‘Perhaps you could start with the day before you went into the CCS for the first time. Do you remember what you were doing that day?’

Prior smiled. ‘Standing up to my waist in water in a dugout in the middle of No Man’s Land being bombed to buggery.’

‘Why?’

‘Good question. You should pack this in and join the general staff.’

‘If there wasn’t a reason, there must at least have been a rationale.’

‘There was that, all right.’ Prior adopted a strangled version of the public school accent. ‘The pride of the British Army requires that absolute dominance must be maintained in No Man’s Land at all times.’ He dropped the accent. ‘Which in practice means… Dugout in the middle of No Man’s Land. Right? Every forty-eight hours two platoons crawl out — nighttime, of course — relieve the poor bastards inside, and provide the Germans with another forty-eight hours’ target practice. Why it’s thought they need all this target practice is beyond me. They seem quite accurate enough as it is.’ His expression changed. ‘It was flooded. You stand the whole time. Most of the time in pitch darkness because the blast kept blowing the candles out. We were packed in so tight we couldn’t move. And they just went all out to get us. One shell after the other. I lost two sentries. Direct hit on the steps. Couldn’t find a thing.’

‘And you had forty-eight hours of that?’

‘Fifty. The relieving officer wasn’t in a hurry.’

‘And when you came out you went straight to the CCS?’

‘I didn’t go, I was carried.’

A tap on the door. Rivers called out angrily, ‘I’m with a patient.’

A short pause as they listened to footsteps fading down the corridor. Prior said, ‘I met the relieving officer.’

‘In the clearing station?’

‘No, here. He walked past me on the top corridor. Poor bastard left his Lewis guns behind. He was lucky not to be court-martialled.’

‘Did you speak?’

‘We nodded. Look, you might like to think it’s one big happy family out there, but it’s not. They despise each other.’

‘You mean you despise yourself.’

Prior looked pointedly across Rivers’s shoulder. ‘It’s eleven o’clock.’

‘All right. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

‘I thought of going into Edinburgh tomorrow.’

Rivers looked up. ‘At nine. ’

‘I can guess what Graves said. What a fine upstanding man I was until I fell among pacifists. Isn’t that right? Russell used me. Russell wrote the Declaration.’

‘No, he didn’t say that.’

‘Good. Because it isn’t true.’

‘You don’t think you were influenced by Russell?’

‘No, not particularly. I think I was influenced by my own experience of the front. I am capable of making up my own mind.’

‘Was this the first time you’d encountered pacifism?’

‘No. Edward Carpenter, before the war.’

‘You read him?’

‘Read him. Wrote to him.’ He smiled slightly. ‘I even made the Great Pilgrimage to Chesterfield.’

‘You must’ve been impressed to do that.’

Sassoon hesitated. ‘Yes, I…’

Watching him, Rivers perceived that he’d led Sassoon unwittingly on to rather intimate territory. He was looking for a way of redirecting the conversation when Sassoon said, ‘I read a book of his. The Intermediate Sex. I don’t know whether you know it?’

‘Yes. I’ve had patients who swore their entire lives had been changed by it.’

‘Mine was. At least I don’t know about “changed”. “Saved”, perhaps.’

‘As bad as that?’

‘At one point, yes. I’d got myself into quite a state.’

Rivers waited.

‘I didn’t seem able to feel… well. Any of the things you’re supposed to feel. It got so bad I used to walk all night sometimes. I used to wait till everybody else was in bed, and then I’d just… get out and walk. The book was a life-saver. Because I suddenly saw that… I wasn’t just a freak. That there was a positive side. Have you read it?’

Rivers clasped his hands behind his head. ‘Yes. A long time ago now.’

‘What did you think?’

‘I found it quite difficult. Obviously you have to admire the man’s courage, and the way he’s… opened up the debate. But I don’t know that the concept of an intermediate sex is as helpful as people think it is when they first encounter it. In the end nobody wants to be neuter. Anyway, the point is Carpenter’s pacifism doesn’t seem to have made much impression?’

‘I don’t know if I was aware of it even. I didn’t think much about politics. The next time I encountered pacifism was Robert Ross. I met him, oh, I suppose two years ago. He’s totally opposed to the war.’

‘And that didn’t influence you either?’

‘No. Obviously it made things easier at a personal level. I mean, frankly, any middle-aged man who Believed in The War would…’Sassoon skidded to a halt. ‘Present company excepted.’

Rivers bowed.

‘I didn’t even bother showing him the Declaration. I knew he wouldn’t go along with it.’

‘Why wouldn’t he? Out of concern for you?’

‘Ye-es. Yes, that certainly, but… Ross was a close friend of Wilde’s. I suppose he’s learnt to keep his head below the parapet.’

‘And you haven’t.’

‘I don’t like holes in the ground.’

Rivers began polishing his glasses on his handkerchief. ‘You know, I realize Ross’s caution probably seems excessive. To you. But I hope you won’t be in too much of a hurry to dismiss it. There’s nothing more despicable than using a man’s private life to discredit his views. But it’s very frequently done, even by people in my profession. People you might think wouldn’t resort to such tactics. I wouldn’t like to see it happen to you.’