Pat Barker - Regeneration

‘He’s…’ Thorpe went into one of his paroxysms. ‘G-g-g-g-g-gone.’

‘G-g-?’ Deep breath. ‘Where has he gone?’

Thorpe economized with a shrug. Rivers walked along to the patients’ common room and looked for Sassoon there, and instead found Prior, sitting at the piano picking out a few notes. Prior looked up. Rivers, thinking it was a long time to wait till the result was officially announced, stuck his thumb in the air and smiled.

‘All right, Thorpe,’ he said, going back to the ante-room. ‘You’d better come in.’

Rivers came out of Thorpe’s Board to find Sassoon still missing and Sister Duffy hovering in the corridor, wanting to talk about Prior. ‘Crying his eyes out,’ she said. ‘I thought he’d got permanent home service?’

‘He did.’

Rivers went up to Prior’s room and found him sitting on the bed, not crying now, though rather swollen about the eyes.

‘I suppose I’m expected to be grateful?’

‘No.’

‘Good. Because I’m not.’

Rivers tried to suppress a smile.

‘I told you I didn’t want it. ’

‘It’s not a question of what you want , is it? It’s a question of whether you’re fit.’

‘I was all right. It never stopped me doing anything the others did.’

‘Now that’s not quite true, is it? You told me yourself you were excused running through the gas huts, because on the one occasion you tried it, you collapsed. Your participation in gastraining exercises was restricted to listening to lectures. Wasn’t it?’

No response.

‘It’s all very well to joke about being the battalion canary, but it’s true, isn’t it? You would be overcome by gas at much lower concentrations than most people, and that could be very dangerous. And not just for you.’

Prior turned away.

Rivers sighed. ‘You realize the other man who got permanent home service is throwing a party tonight?’

‘Good for him. I hope it’s a good party.’

‘Why do you hate it so much?’

Silence. After a while, Prior said, ‘I suppose I’m not your patient any more, am I?’

‘No.’

‘So I don’t have to put up with this? ’

It was on the tip of Rivers’s tongue to point out that the relief was mutual, but he looked at the swollen eyes and restrained himself. ‘What don’t you have to put up with?’

‘The blank wall. The silences. The pretending.’

‘Look. At the moment you hate me because I’ve been instrumental in getting you something you’re ashamed of wanting. I can’t do much about the hatred, but I do think you should look at the shame. Because it’s not really anything to be ashamed of , is it? Wanting to stay alive? You’d be a very strange sort of animal if you didn’t.’

Prior shook his head. ‘You don’t understand.’

‘Tell me, then.’

‘I’ll never know now, will I? About myself…’

‘But you do know. You were a perfectly satisfactory officer, until —’

‘Until the strain got to me and I stopped being a perfectly satisfactory officer. Where does that leave me?’

‘With the whole of your life ahead of you and other challenges to face.’

‘If you were a patient here, don’t you think you’d feel ashamed?’

‘Probably. Because I’ve been brought up the same way as everybody else. But I hope I’d have the sense , or — whatever it is — the intelligence to see how unjustified it was.’

Prior was shaking his head. ‘Not possible. The hoop’s there, you jump through it. If you question it, you’ve failed. If it’s taken away from you, you’ve failed.’

‘No, I don’t see that. If it’s taken away, it’s out of your hands. You didn’t ask for permanent home service. You were given it, on the basis of Eaglesham’s report. Not my report. There’s nothing in your psychological state to prevent your going back.’

Prior didn’t answer. Rivers said gently, ‘Everybody who survives feels guilty. Don’t let it spoil everything.’

‘It’s not that. Well, partly. It’s just that I’ve never let the asthma stop me. I was ordered to stay out of those gas huts, I was quite prepared to go through them. Even as a — a child I was determined it wasn’t going to stop me. I could do anything the others did, and not only that, I could beat them. I’m not suggesting this is peculiar to me, I–I think most asthmatics are like that. My mother was always pulling the other way. Trying to keep me in. I shouldn’t criticize the poor woman, I think she probably saved my life, but she did use it. She wanted me in the house away from all the nasty rough boys. And then suddenly here you are …’ He raised his hands. ‘Doing exactly the same thing.’ He looked at Rivers, a cool, amused, mocking, affectionate, highly intelligent stare. ‘Probably why I never wanted you to be Daddy. I’d got you lined up for a worse fate.’

Rivers, remembering the manny goat, smiled. He was rather glad Prior didn’t have access to his thoughts.

‘Thanks for putting up with me.’

This was muttered so gracelessly Rivers wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly.

‘I was an absolute pig.’

‘Never.’

Prior hesitated. ‘Would you mind if I looked you up after the war?’

‘Mind? I’d be delighted. Though I don’t see why you have to wait till after the war. You can always write to me here. If — if I’ve moved on, they’ll know where I am.’

‘Thanks. I will write.’

At the door Rivers turned. ‘If I don’t see you again before you go, good luck.’

It was an effort to talk at dinner, partly tiredness, partly, Sassoon’s empty place. By now it was clear he’d deliberately skipped the Board. He’d left the Sampsons at six o’clock, but hadn’t yet returned to the hospital. It was possible he was having dinner at the Club, putting off the moment when he’d have to face Rivers, but he was impetuous enough, and perhaps desperate enough, to take the train for London and launch himself into some further crackpot scheme to stop the war. Rivers knew the full extent of the dilemma that would face him if Sassoon had deserted and did make another public protest. He would be asked to take part in declaring him insane; they would never court-martial him. Not now. The casualty lists were too terrible to admit of any public debate on the continuation of the war.

Rivers roused himself to take part in the conversation to find Major Huntley riding one of his hobby horses again. Racial degeneration, this time. The falling birth rate. The need to keep up what he called ‘the supply of heroes’. Did Rivers know that private soldiers were on average five inches shorter than their officers? And yet it was often the better type of woman who chose to limit the size of her family, while her feckless sisters bred the Empire to destruction. Rivers listened as politely as he could to the major’s theories on how the women of Britain might be brought back to a proper sense of their duties, but it was a relief when dinner was over, and he could plead pressure of work and escape to his own room.

He’d left a message with Sister Duffy that Sassoon was to be sent to him as soon as he got back, no matter how late that might be. It was very late indeed. He came in, looking penitent and sheepish.

Rivers said, ‘Sit down.’

Sassoon sat, folded his large hands in his lap, and waited. His demeanour was very much that of a keen, and basically decent, head boy who knows he’s let the headmaster down rather badly, and is probably in for ‘a bit of a wigging’, but expects it to be all right in the end. Nothing could have been more calculated to drive Rivers to fury. ‘I’m sure you have a perfectly satisfactory explanation.’