Pat Barker - Regeneration

In the clearing station he sat down, Logan beside him. Lying on the floor was a young man wounded in the back who seemed hardly to know that they were there. From time to time he moaned, ‘I’m cold, I’m cold,’ but when the doctor came in, he shook his head and said there was nothing he could do. ‘There’s no need for you to stay,’ he said to Logan. ‘He’ll be all right.’ So they shook hands and parted. He sat down on the bench again and tried to think back over the events that had brought him there, but found he could remember very little about them. Two of his men were dead, he remembered that. Nothing else. Like the speechlessness, it seemed natural. He sat on the bench, his clasped hands dangling between his legs, and thought of nothing.

Rivers watched the play of emotions on Prior’s face as he fitted the recovered memory into his past. He was unprepared for what happened next.

‘Is that all?’ Prior said.

He seemed to be beside himself with rage.

‘I don’t know about all ,’ Rivers said. ‘I’d’ve thought that was a traumatic experience by any standards.’

Prior almost spat at him. ‘It was nothing.’

He put his head in his hands, at first, it seemed, in bewilderment, but then after a few moments he began to cry. Rivers waited a while, then walked round the desk and offered his handkerchief. Instead of taking it, Prior seized Rivers by the arms, and began butting him in the chest, hard enough to hurt. This was not an attack, Rivers realized, though it felt like one. It was the closest Prior could come to asking for physical contact. Rivers was reminded of a nanny goat on his brother’s farm, being lifted almost off her feet by the suckling kid. Rivers held Prior’s shoulders, and after a while the butting stopped. Prior raised his blind and slobbery face. ‘Sorry about that.’

‘That’s all right.’ He waited for Prior to wipe his face, then asked, ‘What did you think happened?’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘Yes, you did. You thought you knew.’

‘I knew two of my men had been killed. I thought…’ He stopped. ‘I thought it must’ve been my fault. We were in the same trenches we’d been in when I first arrived. The line’s terrible there. It winds in and out of brick stacks. A lot of the trenches face the wrong way. Even in daylight with a compass and a map you can get lost. At night… I’d been there about a week, I suppose, when a man took out patrol to see if a particular dugout was occupied at night. Compasses don’t work, there’s too much metal about. He’d been crawling round in circles for God knows how long, when he came upon what he thought was a German wiring party. He ordered his men to open fire. Well, all hell was let loose. Then after a while somebody realized there were British voices shouting on both sides. Five men killed. Eleven injured. I looked at his face as he sat in the dugout and he was… You could have done that and he wouldn’t’ve blinked. Before I’d always thought the worst thing would be if you were wounded and left out there, but when I saw his face I thought, no. This is the worst thing. And then when I couldn’t remember anything except that two of my men had been killed, I thought it had to be something like that.’ He looked up. ‘I couldn’t see what else I’d need to forget.’

‘Then you must be relieved.’

‘Relieved?’

‘You did your duty. You’ve nothing to reproach yourself with. You even finished cleaning the trench.’

‘I’ve cleaned up dozens of trenches. I don’t see why that would make me break down.’

‘You’re thinking of breakdown as a reaction to a single traumatic event, but it’s not like that. It’s more a matter of… erosion. Weeks and months of stress in a situation where you can’t get away from it.’ He smiled. ‘I’m sorry to sound so impersonal. I know how you hate being “the patient”.’

‘I don’t mind in the least. I just want to understand why it happened. You see what I find so difficult is… I don’t think of myself as the kind of person who breaks down. And yet time and time again I’m brought up hard against the fact that I did.’

‘I don’t know that there is “a kind of person who breaks down”. I imagine most of us could if the pressure were bad enough. I know I could.’

Prior gazed round the room in mock amazement. ‘Did the wallpaper speak?’

Rivers smiled. ‘I’ll tell them to give you a sleeping tablet.’

At the door Prior turned. ‘He had very blue eyes, you know. Towers. We used to call him the Hun.’

After making sure Prior got his sleeping tablet, Rivers went upstairs to his own room and began to undress. He tugged at his tie, and as he did so caught sight of himself in the looking-glass. He pulled down his right lid to reveal a dingy and blood-shot white. What am I supposed to do with this gob-stopper? He released the lid. No need to think about that. If he went on feeling like this, he’d have to see Bryce and arrange to take some leave. It’d reached the point where he woke up in the morning feeling almost as exhausted as he had done when he went to bed. He sat on the edge of the bath and began to take his boots off. Ye will surely say unto me this proverb. Physician, heal thyself. One of his father’s favourite texts. Sitting, bored and fidgety, in the family pew, Rivers had never thought it an odd choice, though now he wondered why it cropped up as frequently as it did. Fathers remain opaque to their sons, he thought, largely because the sons find it so hard to believe that there’s anything in the father worth seeing. Until he’s dead, and it’s too late. Mercifully, doctors are also opaque to their patients. Unless the patient happens to be Prior.

Rivers finished undressing and got into the bath. He lay back, eyes closed, feeling the hot water start to unravel the knots in his neck and shoulders. Not that Prior was the only patient to have found him… Well. Rather less than opaque. He remembered John Layard, and as always the memory was painful, because his treatment of Layard had ended in failure. He told himself there was no real resemblance between Layard and Prior. What made Prior more difficult was the constant probing. Layard had never probed. But then Layard hadn’t thought he needed to probe. Layard had thought he knew.

Lying with his eyes closed like this, Rivers could imagine himself back in St John’s, hearing Layard’s footsteps coming across the court. What was it he’d said? ‘I don’t see you as a father , you know.’ Looking up from the rug in front of the fire. Laughing. ‘More a sort of… male mother.’ He was like Prior. The same immensely shrewd eyes. X-ray eyes. The same outrageous frankness.

Why should he remember that? It was because of that ridiculous image of the nanny goat that had flashed into his mind while Prior was butting him in the stomach. He disliked the term ‘male mother’. He thought he could remember disliking it even at the time. He distrusted the implication that nurturing, even when done by a man, remains female, as if the ability were in some way borrowed, or even stolen, from women — a sort of moral equivalent of the couvade. If that were true, then there was really very little hope.

He could see why Layard might use the term. Layard’s relationship with his father had been difficult, and he was a young man, without any personal experience of fathering. Though fathering, like mothering, takes many forms beyond the biological. Rivers had often been touched by the way in which young men, some of them not yet twenty, spoke about feeling like fathers to their men. Though when you looked at what they did. Worrying about socks, boots, blisters, food, hot drinks. And that perpetually harried expression of theirs. Rivers had only ever seen that look in one other place: in the public wards of hospitals, on the faces of women who were bringing up large families on very low incomes, women who, in their early thirties, could easily be taken for fifty or more. It was the look of people who are totally responsible for lives they have no power to save.