Pat Barker - Regeneration

‘Your mam get off all right, then?’ Lizzie asked, as they were walking down the stairs to the basement workroom.

‘Got the seven o’clock. She’ll be back by midnight, so it’s not so bad.’

‘How did it go?’

Sarah pulled a face. ‘All right. You know, I swore I wasn’t gunna tell her about Billy, but she winkled it all out of me.’

‘Well, she is your mam. She’s bound to be worried.’

‘Hm. All I could get out of her was: “What does he see in you ?” ’S a nice thing to say to your daughter, isn’t it? I says, “A breath of fresh air.” As far as I can make out they’re all disappearing up their own arseholes up there.’

‘Long as it’s only their own,’ Lizzie said.

‘They’re not all like that,’ Sarah said.

‘Biggest part are,’ said Madge. ‘Place I used to work before the war, the son were like that. Oh, and when they found out you should’ve heard Missus. She stomped and she shrieked. Chandelier were going like that, I thought bugger were coming down. But you know he had no sisters, so he never met lasses that way. Goes to school, no lasses. Goes to university — no lasses. Time he finally claps eyes on me, it’s too late, isn’t it? It’s gelled. And even the ones that aren’t like that, they take one look at the Missus and bugger off round the Club.’ Madge strutted along the basement corridor with a finger held be low her nose, saying in a strangled, public school accent, ‘“I shall be dining at the Club tonight, m’dear. Don’t bother to wait up.’ Then he staggers in at two o’clock and flops out on bed in dressing room. Beats me how they breed.’

Raucous laughter from the other women as they spilled into the work room and sat down at the benches. The supervisor, a round-faced, bespectacled, crop-haired lady in a severely tailored suit, bore down upon them. ‘Do you girls ever intend to start work?’

They watched her walk away. ‘Eeh, I hope a man never tries to shove anything up her flue,’ Lizzie said. ‘Be cruelty to moths.’

Sarah pulled the first belt towards her and started to work. No reason at all why they couldn’t talk, since the task here required no concentration. It was intended as a break from the very demanding work on detonators, and from other jobs too, where masks had to be worn. Rather badly fitting masks. On more than one occasion Sarah had pulled hers away from her face and shaken out the yellow dust that had collected inside it. She remembered her mother’s strictures on her appearance, the broad hints she’d dropped about handing in her notice and going home to help with the tea hut. But I like it here, Sarah thought. And then she corrected herself. You like it now because Billy’s here. You mightn’t be so keen when he’s gone.

She turned, cautiously, to avoid attracting the supervisor’s attention, and looked round. The women sat at small tables, each table forming a pool of light under a low-hanging bulb. Apart from the work surfaces, the room was badly lit and so vast that its far end disappeared into shadow. All the women were yellow-skinned, and all, whatever their colouring, had a frizz of ginger hair peeping out from under the green cap. We don’t look human, Sarah thought, not knowing whether to be dismayed or amused. They looked like machines, whose sole function was to make other machines.

Sarah’s eyes fell on the next table, where the girls were close enough to be identified. After a while she looked puzzled and leant across the table to whisper to Lizzie. ‘Where’s Betty?’

‘You may well ask,’ Lizzie said. She sniffed and remained silent, enjoying the moment of power.

‘I am asking.’

Lizzie glanced round quickly. ‘You know she’s missed four times?’

All the girls nodded.

‘Tried everything,’ Lizzie said. ‘She was supping Dr Lawson’s Cure as if it was lemonade.’

‘It is,’ said Sarah.

‘Well, she must’ve got desperate, because she stuck summat up herself to bring it on. You know them wire coat hangers?’

Nods all round.

‘One of them. She straightened the curved bit and —’

‘We get the picture,’ Sarah said.

‘Yeh, well it’s worse than that. Silly little cow shoved it in her bladder.’

‘Aw no.’ Madge turned away as if she were going to vomit.

‘She was in agony. And you know she kept begging them not to send her to the hospital, because like she knew she hadn’t come all right. But anyway the girl she’s lodging with got that frightened she went and fetched the landlady. Well of course she took one look. She more or less says, “Sorry, love, you’re not dying here.” Took her in. And the irony of it is she’s still pregnant. She looks awful.’

‘You mean you’ve been to see her?’ Sarah asked.

‘Why aye. Went last night. You know, her face is all…’ Lizzie dragged her cheeks down. ‘Oh, and she says the doctor didn’t half railroad her. She was crying her eyes out, poor lass. He says, “You should be ashamed of yourself,” he says. “It’s not just an inconvenience you’ve got in there,” he says. “It’s a human being.”’

Sarah and Madge were eager to know more, but the supervisor had noticed the pause in Lizzie’s work and came striding towards them, though when she reached the table she found only silence and bowed heads and feverishly working fingers flicking machine-gun bullets into place inside the glittering belts.

On the night before a Board, Rivers took longer than usual over his rounds, since he knew the patients whose turn it was to be boarded would be feeling particularly tense. He was worried about Pugh, who had somehow managed to convince himself, in spite of repeated reassurances to the contrary, that he was to be sent back to France.

Sassoon, Rivers left till last, and found him lying on the bed in his new room, wrapped in his British warm coat. It was needed. The room was immediately beneath the tower and so cold that, in winter, patients who’d sweated their way through a succession of nightmares often woke to find the bedclothes stiff with frost. Siegfried seemed to like it, though, and at least now he had the privacy he needed to work. Rivers took the only available chair, and stretched out his legs towards the empty grate. ‘Well, how do you feel about tomorrow?’

‘All right. Still nothing from the War Office?’

‘No, I’m afraid not. You’ll just have to trust us.’

‘Us? You’re sure you don’t mean “them”?’

‘You know I’ll go on doing anything I can for you.’

‘Oh, I know that. But the fact is once they’ve got me out of here they can do what they like. Pen-pushing in Bognor, here I come.’

Rivers hesitated. ‘You sound rather down.’

‘No-o. Missing Robert. Don’t know why, we came quite close to quarrelling.’

‘About the war?’

‘I don’t know what about. Except he was in a peculiar mood.’ Sassoon stopped, then visibly decided to continue. ‘He had a bit of bad news recently.’

Rivers was aware of more going on in this conversation than he could identify. Sassoon had been distinctly reserved with him recently. He’d noticed it yesterday evening particularly, but he’d put it down to pre-Board nerves, and the worry of not hearing from the War Office. ‘From France?’

‘Oh, no, something quite different. I did ask if he’d mind my telling you, so I’m not breaking a confidence. Friend of his — a boy he knew at school and was very fond of — in an entirely honourable, platonic Robert-like way — got arrested for soliciting. Outside a barracks, actually not very far away from the school. As far as I can make out, Robert feels…’ Sassoon came to a halt. ‘Well. Rather as you might feel if you were… walking down a pleasant country road and suddenly a precipice opened at your feet. That’s how he sees it. Devastated. Because, you see, this… this abominable thing must’ve been there all the time, and be didn’t see it. He’s very anxious to make it clear that… the has no such disgusting feelings himself. We-ell.’