Pat Barker - Regeneration

One of the paradoxes of the war — one of the many — was that this most brutal of conflicts should set up a relationship between officers and men that was… domestic. Caring. As Layard would undoubtedly have said, maternal. And that wasn’t the only trick the war had played. Mobilization. The Great Adventure. They’d been mobilized into holes in the ground so constricted they could hardly move. And the Great Adventure — the real life equivalent of all the adventure stories they’d devoured as boys — consisted of crouching in a dugout, waiting to be killed. The war that had promised so much in the way of ‘manly’ activity had actually delivered ‘feminine’ passivity, and on a scale that their mothers and sisters had scarcely known. No wonder they broke down.

In bed, he switched off the light and opened the curtains. Rain, silvery in the moonlight, streaked the glass, blurring the vista of tennis courts and trees, gathering, at the lower edge of the pane, into a long puddle that bulged and overflowed. Somebody, on the floor below, screamed. Rivers pulled the curtains to, and settled down to sleep, wishing, not for the first time, that he was young enough for France.

Sarah watched the grey trickle of tea creep up the sides of her cup. The tea-lady looked at it, doubtfully. ‘That strong enough for you, love?’

‘It’ll do. Long as it’s warm and wet.’

‘My God,’ Betty Hargreave said. ‘Virgin’s pee. I can’t drink that.’

Madge nudged Sarah sharply in the ribs. ‘No, well, it wouldn’t be very appropriate, would it?’

‘Hey up, you’ll make us spill it.’

They went to the far end of the top trestle table and squeezed on to the bench. ‘Come on, move your bums along,’ Madge said. ‘Let two little ’uns in.’

Lizzie collected her Woodbines and matches, and shuffled along. ‘What happened to your young man, then, Sarah?’

‘Didn’t bloody show up, did he? I was sat an hour on Sunday all dolled up and nowhere to go.’

‘Aw ,’ Lizzie said.

‘Probably just as well,’ said Madge. ‘At least now you know what he was after.’

‘I knew what he was after. I just want to know why he’s not still after it.’

‘Didn’t get it, then?’ Betty said, bringing her cup to the table.

‘No, he bloody did not.’

‘He was good-looking, though, wasn’t he?’ said Madge.

‘All right, I suppose.’

Betty laughed. ‘Better fish in the sea, eh, Sarah?’

‘Aye, and they can stop there ’n’ all. Not interested.’

A whoop of incredulity. Sarah buried her nose in her cup and then, as soon as she felt their attention had been withdrawn, looked at the window. You couldn’t really see what it was like outside because the glass was frosted, but here and there raindrops clung to the panes, each with its crescent moon of silver. She wished she was outside and could feel the rain on her face. It would have been nice to have gone to the seaside yesterday, she thought. Bugger him, why didn’t he show up?

The others were talking about Lizzie’s husband, who’d thrown her into a state of shock by announcing, in his last letter, that he was hoping to come home on leave soon.

‘I haven’t had a wink of sleep since,’ said Lizzie.

‘You’re getting yourself into a state about nothing,’ Betty said. ‘First of all he mightn’t get it, and second, they sometimes only give them a few days. Ten to one, he’ll get no further than London.’

‘Aye, and he’ll be pissed as a newt.’

‘Well, better pissed down there than up here.’

‘Don’t you want to see him?’ asked Sarah.

‘I do not. I’ve seen enough of him to last me a lifetime. Aye, I know what you’re thinking. You think I’m hard, don’t you? Well I am hard and so would you be.’ Lizzie’s yellow face showed two bright spots of colour on the cheekbones. ‘Do you know what happened on August 4th 1914?’

Sarah opened her mouth.

‘I’ll tell you what happened. Peace broke out. The only little bit of peace I ’ve ever had. No, I don’t want him back. I don’t want him back on leave. I don’t want him back when it’s over. As far as I’m concerned the Kaiser can keep him.’ She lowered her chin, brooding. ‘I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to get meself some false teeth, and I’m going to have a bloody good time.’

‘Yes, well, you want to,’ said Betty.

‘She’s been on about them teeth as long as I’ve known her.’ said Madge. ‘You want to stop talking about it, and go and do it. You can afford it. All this won’t last, you know.’ She jerked her thumb at the room full of overall-clad women. ‘It’s too good to last.’

‘It’s not the money that bothers me.’

‘He’d give you gas,’ said Madge. ‘You’re never going to look anything while you’ve got them in your mouth. And you’re never going to feel right either for the simple reason you’re swallowing all the corruption.’

‘Yeh, I know. I will go.’

‘Time, ladies,’ the supervisor said. ‘Time.’

‘Eeh, it never is,’ said Lizzie. ‘Do you know, I’m bloody sure they fix that clock!’

‘Three hours down,’ said Sarah. ‘Nine to go.’

All over the room yellow-skinned women were dragging themselves to their feet. As they were going up the stairs, Sarah fell into line beside Betty. Lizzie had nipped into the toilet to finish her cigarette.

‘You think she’s hard, don’t you?’ said Betty.

‘Well, yes, I do a bit. When you think what he’s going through.’

‘Yes, well. You know when I was a kid we used to live next door to them, and it was thump thump thump half the bloody night, you’d’ve thought she was coming through the wall. Oh, and you used to see her in the yard next morning, and her face’d be all swelled up. “I fell over the coal scuttle,” she used to say. Well that used to get me Mam. “He knocks you about,” she says, “and you go round apologizing for it,” she says. “Where’s the justice in that?” And mind you, she was right, you know.’

Willard lay face down on his bed, naked. His thighs and buttocks were trenched with purple scars, some just beginning to silver. These injuries had been sustained when his company was retreating across a graveyard under heavy fire, and several tombstone fragments had become embedded in his flesh. ‘You want to try it,’ he said. ‘Lying two months on your belly in a hospital bed with Requiescat in Pace stuck up your arse.’

This remark was ostensibly addressed to the orderly, so Rivers was able to ignore it. ‘They’ve healed well,’ he said, moving down the bed.

Willard looked across his shoulder. ‘The flesh wounds have. There’s still the injury to the spine.’

‘Let’s have you on your back.’

The orderly came forward to help, but Willard waved him away. His whole upper body was massively powerful, though inevitably running to flab. By heaving and twisting, he could just manage to drag the wasted legs over, though they followed the bulk of his body, passively, like slime trails after a snail. The orderly bent down and straightened his feet.

Rivers waited until Willard was covered up, then nodded to the orderly to leave. After the door had closed, he said, ‘There was no injury to the spine.’

Willard lay back against the pillows, his jaw stubbornly set.

‘If you believe your spine was damaged, how do you account for the fact that so many doctors have examined you and told you that it isn’t?’ He watched Willard’s face closely. ‘Do you think they’re all incompetent? All of them? Or do you think they’re in some kind of conspiracy to convince you you can walk when in fact you can’t?’