Pat Barker - Regeneration

‘Which way’s your lodgings?’

She giggled. ‘Won’t do you any good,’ she said. ‘My landlady’s a dragon. Fifty times worse than me Mam.’

‘Shall we go for a walk, then? I don’t fancy saying goodnight, just yet, do you?’

‘All right.’

They turned away from the lighted pavements, into the darkness of a side street. He put his arm around her, inching his hand further up until his fingers rested against the curve of her breast. She was tall for a woman, and they fitted together, shoulder and hip. He hardly had to shorten his stride. As they walked, she glanced down frequently at her shoes and stockings, admiring herself. He guessed she more usually wore boots.

They came upon a church with a small churchyard around it. Gravestones leant together at angles in the shadow of the trees, like people gossiping. ‘Shall we go in there for a bit?’

He opened the gate for her and they went in, into the darkness under the trees, treading on something soft and crunchy. Pine needles, perhaps. At the church door they turned and followed the path round, till they came to a tall, crumbling, ivy-covered wall. There, in the shadows, he pulled her towards him. He got her jacket and blouse unbuttoned and felt for her breast. The nipple hardened against his palm, and he laughed under his breath. She started to say something, but he covered her mouth with his own, he didn’t want her to talk, he didn’t want her to tell him things. He would have preferred not even to know her name. Just flesh against flesh in the darkness and then nothing.

‘I know what you want,’ she said, pulling away from him.

Instantly he let her go. ‘ I know what I want. What’s wrong with that? I’ve never forced anybody.’ He turned away from her and sat on a tombstone. ‘And I don’t go on about it either.’

‘Then you’re a man in a million.’

‘I know.’

‘Big-headed bugger.’

‘Don’t I even get a cuddle?’ He patted the tombstone. ‘No harm in that.’

She came and sat beside him, and after a while he got his arms around her again. But he didn’t feel the same way about it. Now, even as he lowered his head to her breast, he was wondering whether he wanted to play this particular game. Whether it was worth it. He tugged gently at her nipple, and felt her thighs loosen. Instantly, his doubts vanished. He pressed her back on to the tombstone and moved on top of her. Cradling her head on his left arm, he began the complicated business of raising her skirts, pulling down her drawers, unbuttoning his breeches, all while trying to maintain their position on a too-short and sloping tombstone. At the last moment she cried ‘No-o-o’ and shoved him hard off the tombstone into the long grass. He sat for a while, his back against the stone, picking bits of lichen off his tunic. After a while he yawned and said, ‘Short-arsed little buggers, the Scots.’

She looked down at the tombstone, which did seem rather small. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Everybody was shorter in them days.’ You could just make out the word ‘Beloved’, but everything else was covered in lichen or crumbled away. She traced the word with her fingertip. ‘I wonder what they think.’

‘Down there? Glad to see a bit of life, I should think. Not that they’ve seen much.’

She didn’t reply. He turned to look at her. Her hair had come down, way past her shoulders, he was glad she didn’t wear it short, and there was still that amazing contrast of the dark brown velvety mass and its halo of copper wire. He was being stupid. She’d let him have it in the end, and the more he bellyached about it now, the longer he’d have to wait. He said, ‘Come on, one kiss, and I’ll walk you home.’

‘Hm.’

‘No, I mean it.’

He gave her a teasingly chaste kiss, making sure he was the first to pull away. Then he helped her dust down her skirt and walked her back to her lodgings. On the way she insisted they stop in the doorway of a shop, and she crammed her hair up into her hat, with the help of the few hairpins she’d managed to retrieve. ‘There’d be eyebrows raised if I went in like this.’

‘Can I see you again?’

‘You know where I live. Or you will do.’

‘I don’t know your times off.’

‘Sunday.’

‘I’ll come over on Sunday, then, shall I? If I come mid morning, we could have a bit to eat in Edinburgh and then go somewhere on the tram.’

She looked doubtful, but the thought of being collected from her lodgings by an officer was too much for her. ‘All right.’

They walked on. She stopped outside the door and raised her face. Oh, no, he thought. No fumbling on doorsteps. He lowered his head until his forehead rested against hers. ‘Goodnight, Sarah Lumb.’

‘Goodnight, Billy Prior.’

After a few paces he turned and looked back. She was standing on the step, watching him walk away. He raised his hand, and she waved slightly. Then he turned and walked briskly on, looking at his watch and thinking, Christ. Even if he found a taxi immediately he still couldn’t be back at Craiglockhart before the main doors were locked. Oh well, he thought, I’ll just have to face it.

‘Aren’t you going to start?’

‘I imagine Major Bryce has dealt with the matter?’

‘You could say. He’s confined me to the hospital for a fortnight.’

Rivets made no comment.

‘Don’t you think that’s rather severe? ’

‘It wasn’t a simple matter of being late back, was it? Matron says she saw you in town, and you were not wearing your hospital badge.’

‘I wasn’t wearing the badge because I was looking for a girl. Which — as you may or may not know — is not made easier by going around with a badge stuck on your chest saying I AM A LOONY.’

‘I gather you also made some rather disrespectful remarks about Matron. Everything from the size of her bosom to the state of her hymen. If you make remarks like that to the CO, what do you think is going to happen?’

Prior didn’t reply, though a muscle throbbed in his jaw. Rivers looked at the pale, proud, wintry face and thought oh God, it’s going to be another one of those.

Prior said, ‘Aren’t you going to ask me if I got one?’

‘One what?’

‘Girl. Woman.’ When Rivers didn’t immediately reply, Prior added, ‘Wo-man?’

‘No, I wasn’t going to ask.’

‘You amaze me. I should’ve thought that was par for the course.’

Rivers waited.

‘Questions. On and on and bloody on.’

‘Would you like to leave it for today?’

‘No.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Quite sure.’

‘All right. We’d got to the time immediately following the April 23rd attack. Have you made any progress beyond that?’

‘No.’

‘Nothing at all?’

‘No.’ Prior’s hands were gripping the arms of his chair. ‘I don’t want to talk about this.’

Rivers decided to humour him. ‘What do you want to talk about?’

‘Something you said earlier on. It’s been bothering me ever since. You said officers don’t suffer from mutism.’

‘It’s rare.’

‘How many cases?’

‘At Craiglockhart? You, and one other. At Maghull, where I was treating private soldiers, it was by far the commonest symptom.’

‘Why?’

‘I imagine… Mutism seems to spring from a conflict between wanting to say something, and knowing that if you do say it the consequences will be disastrous. So you resolve it by making it physically impossible for yourself to speak. And for the private soldier the consequences of speaking his mind are always going to be far worse than they would be for an officer. What you tend to get in officers is stammering. And it’s not just mutism. All the physical symptoms: paralysis, blindness, deafness. They’re all common in private soldiers and rare in officers. It’s almost as if for the… the labouring classes illness has to be physical. They can’t take their condition seriously unless there’s a physical symptom. And there are other differences as well. Officers’ dreams tend to be more elaborate. The men’s dreams are much more a matter of simple wish fulfilment. You know, they dream they’ve been sent back to France, but on the day they arrive peace is declared. That sort of thing.’