Pat Barker - Regeneration

‘Yes, I’ll look something out.’ Sassoon opened the door. ‘Give me a few days. You could bring your poems.’

This was said with such determined courtesy and such transparent lack of enthusiasm that Owen burst out laughing. ‘No, I —’

‘No, I mean it.’

‘All right.’ Owen was still laughing. ‘They are quite short.’

‘No, well, it doesn’t lend itself to epics, does it?’

‘Oh, they’re not about the war.’ He hesitated. ‘I don’t write about that.’

‘Why ever not?’

‘I s-suppose I’ve always thought of p-poetry as the opposite of all that. The ugliness.’ Owen was struggling to articulate a point of view he was abandoning even as he spoke. ‘S-Something to to t-take refuge in.’

Sassoon nodded. ‘Fair enough.’ He added mischievously, ‘Though it does seem a bit like having a faith that daren’t face the facts.’ He saw Owen’s expression change. ‘Look, it doesn’t matter what they’re about. Bring them anyway.’

‘Yes, I will. Thank you.’

Anderson, following Sassoon into the bar of the golf club, knew he owed him an apology. At the seventeenth hole, afraid he was losing, he’d missed a vital shot and in the heat of the moment had not merely sworn at Sassoon, but actually raised the club and threatened to hit him with it. Sassoon had looked startled, even alarmed, but he’d laughed it off. At the eighteenth hole, he’d been careful to ask Anderson’s advice about which iron he should use. Now, he turned to Anderson and said, ‘Usual?’

Anderson nodded. The trouble was, Anderson thought, it looked so much like bad sportsmanship, whereas in reality the apology was being delayed, not by any unwillingness on his part to admit he was wrong, but by the extent of the horror he felt at his own behaviour. He’d behaved like a spoilt child. So do something about it, he told himself. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said, nodding towards the course.

‘’S all right.’ Sassoon turned from the bar and smiled. ‘We all have bad days.’

‘Here’s your half-crown.’

Sassoon grinned and pocketed it. He was thinking, as he turned back to the bar, that if the club had landed on his head he would have been far more seriously injured than he’d been at Arras. He conjured Rivers up in his mind and asked, What was that you were saying about ‘safety’? Nothing more dangerous than playing golf with lunatics. ‘Lunatic’ was a word Sassoon would never have dared use to Rivers’s face, so it gave him an additional pleasure to yell it at his image.

They took their drinks, found a quiet corner, and began their usual inquest on the game. Under cover of the familiar chat, Anderson watched Sassoon — a good-looking, rather blank face, big hands curved round his glass — and thought how little he knew about him. Or wanted to know. It was a matter of tacit agreement that they talked about nothing but golf. Anderson had read the Declaration, but he wouldn’t have dreamt of discussing Sassoon’s attitude to the war, mainly because some return of intimacy would then have been required. He might have had to disclose his own reasons for being at Craiglockhart. His horror of blood. He had a momentary picture of the way Sassoon’s head would have looked if he’d hit him, and his hand tightened on the glass. ‘You’re still not taking your time,’ he said. ‘You’re rushing your shots.’

There were other reasons too why he didn’t want to talk about the war. Inevitably such talk would have strengthened his own doubts, and they were bad enough already. He even dreamt about the bloody war, not just nightmares, he was used to those; he’d dreamt he was speaking at a debate on whether it should go on or not. In his dream he’d spoken in favour of continuing to the point of German collapse, but Rivers’s analysis had left him in no doubt as to how far his horror at the whole business went. He felt safe with Rivers, because he knew Rivers shared the horror, and shared too the conviction that, in spite of everything, it had to go on.

‘I don’t know whether to spend that half-crown or frame it,’ Sassoon was saying. ‘I don’t suppose I’ll ever win another.’

That was to make Anderson feel better about losing his temper on the course. Sassoon was a pleasant companion, there was no doubt about that. He was friendly, modest. But the Declaration hadn’t been modest. What had chiefly struck Anderson about that was its arrogance, its totally outrageous assumption that everybody who disagreed with him was ‘callous’. Do you think I’m callous? he wanted to ask. Do you think Rivers is callous? But there was no point getting worked up. Rivers would soon sort him out.

‘I shan’t be seeing you tomorrow, shall I?’ Sassoon was saying. ‘Your wife’s coming up.’

‘No, I’m afraid she’s had to cancel. So it’s business as usual.’ He took Sassoon’s empty glass and stood up. ‘You can try to make it five bob, if you like.’

Prior watched the amber lights winking in his beer. He was sitting in the shadowy comer of a pub in some sleazy district of Edinburgh. He didn’t know where he was. He’d walked miles that evening, not admitting even to himself what he was looking for, and gradually the winding, insidious streets had led him deeper and deeper into a neighbourhood where washing hung, grey-white, from stacked balconies, and the smell of steak frying reminded him of home.

Remembering the smell, his stomach rumbled. He’d had nothing to eat all evening, except a packet of peanuts. Crumbs of salt still clung to his lips, stinging the cracks where the skin had dried during his asthma attack. It was worth it, though, just to sit quietly, to listen to voices that didn’t stammer, to have his eyes freed from the ache of khaki.

No theory. He’d lied to Rivers about that. It was a point of honour with him to lie to Rivers at least once during every meeting. He drained his glass and went out into the night.

A little way down the street was a café. He’d passed it on his way to the pub and been tempted to go in, but the door had opened and the breath of hot, damp, dirty, dishwater-smelling air had decided him against it. Now, though, he was too hungry to care. He went in, noticing how the inner windows dripped from condensation, how the damp air insinuated itself into the spaces between his uniform and his skin. A short silence fell. Nobody in an officer’s uniform was likely to be inconspicuous or welcome here. He would eat something, fish and chips, quickly and then go.

A group of women was sitting at the next table. Three of them were young, one older, thirty-five, forty perhaps, with blackened stumps for teeth. As far as he could make out from the conversation her name was Lizzie, and the others were Madge, the blonde, pretty one, Betty, who was dark and thin, and Sarah, who had her back to him. Since they all had a slightly yellow tinge to their skin, he assumed they were munitions workers. Munition ettes, as the newspapers liked to call them. Lizzie was keeping the younger girls entertained with a string of stories.

‘There’s this lass and she’s a bit simple and she lived next door to a pro — well you know what a pro is.’ Lizzie glanced at him and lowered her voice. ‘So she’s standing at the door this day, and the pro’s coming up the street, you know, dressed to death. So she says, “Eeh,” she says, “you’re always lovely dressed.” She says, “You’ve got beautiful clothes.” And she says, “I love your hats.” So the pro says, “Well, why don’t you get yourself down the town like I do?” She says, “If a man winks at you, wink back and go with him and let him have what he wants and charge him 7/6. And go to R&K Modes and get yourself a hat.” So the next day the pro’s coming up the street again. “Hello.” “Hello.” She says, “D’ y’ get a hat?” She says, “Nah.” “Well, did you not do as I telled you?” She says, “Why of course I did.” She says, “I went down the town and there was a man winked at us and I winked back. He says, ‘Howay over the Moor.’” So she says, “I gans over the Moor with him,” she says, “and I let him have what he wanted. He says, ‘How much is that?’ I says, ‘7/6.’ He says, ‘Hadaway and shite,’ and when I come back he’d gone.”’