Pat Barker - Regeneration

‘Do you mind if I smoke?’

‘No, go ahead.’ Rivers pushed an ashtray across the desk.

The match flared behind Prior’s cupped hands. ‘First for three weeks,’ he said. ‘God, I feel dizzy.’

Rivers tried not to say, but said, ‘It’s not really a good idea with asthma, you know.’

‘You think it might shorten my life? Do you know how long the average officer lasts in France?’

‘Yes. Three months. You’re not in France.’

Prior dragged on the cigarette and, momentarily, closed his eyes. He looked a bit like the boys you saw on street corners in the East End. That same air of knowing the price of everything. Rivers drew the file towards him. ‘We left you in billets at Beauvois.’

‘Yes. We were there, oh, I think about four days and then we were rushed back into the line. We attacked the morning of the night we moved up.’

‘Date?’

‘April the 23rd.’

Rivers looked up. It was unusual for Prior to be so accurate.

‘St George’s Day. The CO toasted him in the mess. I remember because it was so bloody stupid.’

‘You were in the casualty clearing station on the…’ He glanced at the file. ‘29th. So that leaves us with six days unaccounted for.’

‘Yes, and I’m afraid I can’t help you with any of them.’

‘Do you remember the attack?’

‘Yes. It was exactly like any other attack.’

Rivers waited. Prior looked so hostile that at first Rivers thought he would refuse to go on, but then he raised the cigarette to his lips, and said, ‘All right. Your watch is brought back by a runner, having been synchronized at headquarters.’ A long pause. ‘You wait, you try to calm down anybody who’s obviously shitting himself or on the verge of throwing up. You hope you won’t do either of those things yourself. Then you start the count down: ten, nine, eight… so on. You blow the whistle. You climb the ladder. Then you double through a gap in the wire, lie flat, wait for everybody else to get out — those that are left, there’s already quite a heavy toll — and then you stand up. And you start walking. Not at the double. Normal walking speed.’ Prior started to smile. ‘In a straight line. Across open country. In broad daylight. Towards a line of machineguns.’ He shook his head. ‘Oh, and of course you’re being shelled all the way.’

‘What did you feel?’

Prior tapped the ash off his cigarette. ‘You always want to know what I felt.’

‘Well, yes. You’re describing this attack as if it were a — a slightly ridiculous event in —’

‘Not “slightly”. Slightly, I did not say.’

‘All right, an extremely ridiculous event — in somebody else’s life.’

‘Perhaps that’s how it felt.’

‘Was it?’ He gave Prior time to answer. ‘I think you’re capable of a great deal of detachment, but you’d have to be inhuman to be as detached as that.’

‘All right. It felt…’ Prior started to smile again. ‘Sexy.’

Rivers raised a hand to his mouth.

‘You see?’ Prior said, pointing to the hand. ‘You ask me how it felt and when I tell you, you don’t believe me.’

Rivers lowered his hand. ‘I haven’t said I don’t believe you. I was waiting for you to go on.’

‘You know those men who lurk around in bushes waiting to jump out on unsuspecting ladies and — er-um — display their equipment? It felt a bit like that. A bit like I imagine that feels. I wouldn’t like you to think I had any personal experience.’

‘And was that your only feeling?’

‘Apart from terror, yes.’ He looked amused. ‘Shall we get back to “inhuman detachment”?’

‘If you like.’

Prior laughed. ‘I think it suits us both better, don’t you?’

Rivers let him continue. This had been Prior’s attitude throughout the three weeks they’d spent trying to recover his memories of France. He seemed to be saying, ‘All right. You can make me dredge up the horrors, you can make me remember the deaths, but you will never make me feel.’ Rivers tried to break down the detachment, to get to the emotion, but he knew that, confronted by the same task, he would have tackled it in exactly the same way as Prior.

‘You keep up a kind of chanting. “Not so fast. Steady on the left!” Designed to avoid bunching. Whether it works or not depends on the ground. Where we were, it was absolutely pitted with shell-holes and the lines got broken up straight away. I looked back…’ He stopped, and reached for another cigarette. ‘I looked back and the ground was covered with wounded. Lying on top of each other, writhing. Like fish in a pond that’s drying out. I wasn’t frightened at all. I just felt this… amazing burst of exultation. Then I heard a shell coming. And the next thing I knew I was in the air, fluttering down…’ He waved his fingers in a descending arc. ‘I know it can’t’ve been like that, but that’s what I remember. When I came to, I was in a crater with about half a dozen of the men. I couldn’t move. I thought at first I was paralysed, but then I managed to move my feet. I told them to get the brandy out of my pocket, and we passed that round. Then a man appeared on the other side of the crater, right at the rim, and, instead of crawling down, he put his hands to his sides, like this, and slid down on his bottom. And suddenly everybody burst out laughing.’

‘You say “came to”? Do you know how long you were unconscious?’

‘No idea.’

‘But you were able to speak?’

‘Yes, I told them to get the brandy.’

‘And then?’

‘Then we waited till dark and made a dash for the line. They saw us just as we got to our wire. Two men wounded.’

‘There was no talk of sending you to a CCS when you got back?’

‘No, I was organizing other people there.’ He added bitterly, ‘There was no talk of sending anybody anywhere. Normally you go back after heavy losses, but we didn’t. They just left us there.’

‘And you don’t remember anything else?’

‘No. And I have tried.’

‘Yes, I’m sure you have.’

A long silence. ‘I suppose you haven’t heard from the CO?’

‘No, I’d tell you if I had.’

Prior sat brooding for a while. ‘Well, I suppose we go on waiting.’ He leant forward to stub his cigarette out. ‘You know, you once told me I had to win.’ He shook his head. ‘You’re the one who has to win.’

‘This may come as a shock, Mr Prior, but I had been rather assuming we were on the same side.’

Prior smiled. ‘This may come as a shock, Dr Rivers, but I had been rather assuming that we were not.’

Silence. Rivers caught and held a sigh. ‘That does make the relationship of doctor and patient rather difficult.’

Prior shrugged. Obviously he didn’t think that was his problem. ‘You think you know what happened, don’t you?’ Rivers said.

‘I’ve told you I don’t remember.’

The antagonism was startling. They might’ve been back at the beginning, when it had been almost impossible to get a civil word out of him. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t make myself clear. I wasn’t suggesting you knew, only that you might have a theory.’

Prior shook his head. ‘No. No theory.’

A short, dark-haired man sidled round the door, blinking in the sudden blaze of sunlight. Sassoon, sitting on the bed, looked up from the golf club he’d been cleaning. ‘Yes?’

‘I’ve b-brought these.’

A stammer. Not as bad as some, but bad enough. Sassoon exerted himself to be polite. ‘What is it? I can’t see.’

Books. His book. Five copies, no less. ‘My God, a reader.’