Pat Barker - Regeneration

The smell of chlorine became stronger as they reached the bottom of the stairs. Sassoon felt Graves hesitate. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I could do without the smell.’

‘Well, let’s not bother—’

‘No, go on.’

Sassoon pushed the door open. The pool was empty, a green slab between white walls. They began to undress, putting their clothes on one of the benches that lined the end wall.

‘What’s your room-mate like?’ Graves asked.

‘All right.’

‘Dotty?’

‘Not visibly. I gather the subject of German spies is best avoided. Oh, and I’ve found out why there aren’t any locks on the doors. One of them killed himself three weeks ago.’

Graves caught sight of the scar on Sassoon’s shoulder and stopped to look at it. It was curiously restful to submit to this scrutiny, which was prolonged, detailed and impersonal, like one small boy examining the scabs on another’s knee. ‘Oh, very neat.’

‘Yes, isn’t it? The doctors kept telling me how beautiful it was.’

‘You were lucky, you know. An inch further down—’

‘Not as lucky as you.’ Sassoon glanced at the shrapnel wound on Graves’s thigh. ‘An inch further up—’

‘If this is leading up to a joke about ladies’ choirs, forget it. I’ve heard them all.’

Sassoon dived in. A green, silent world, no sound except the bubble of his escaping breath, no feeling, once the shock of cold was over, except the tightening of his chest that at last forced him to the surface, air, noise, light, slopping waves crashing in on him again. He swam to the side and held on. Graves’s dark head bobbed purposefully along at the other side of the pool. Sassoon thought, we joke about it, but it happens. There’d been a boy in the hospital, while he was lying there with that neat little hole in his shoulder. The boy — he couldn’t have been more than nineteen — had a neat little hole too. Only his was between the legs. The dressings had been terrible to witness, and you had to witness them. No treatment in that overcrowded ward had been private. Twice a day the nurses came in with the creaking trolley, and the boy’s eyes followed them up the ward.

Sassoon shut the lid on the memory and dived for Graves’s legs. Graves twisted and fought, his head a black rock splintering white foam. ‘Lay off,’ he gasped at last, pushing Sassoon away. ‘Some of us don’t have the full complement of lungs.’

The pool was beginning to fill up. After a few more minutes, they climbed out and started to dress. Head muffled in the folds of his shirt, Graves said, ‘By the way, I think there’s something I ought to tell you. I’m afraid I told Rivers about your plan to assassinate Lloyd George.’

Rivers’s round as duty officer ended in the kitchens. Mrs Cooper, her broad arms splashed with fat from giant fryingpans, greeted him with an embattled smile. ‘What d’ y’ think of the beef stew last night, then, sir?’

‘I don’t believe I’ve ever tasted anything quite like it.’

Mrs Cooper’s smile broadened. ‘We do the best we can with the materials available, sir.’ Her expression became grim and confiding. ‘That beef was walking .’

Rivers got to his room a few minutes after ten and found Sassoon waiting, his hair damp, smelling of chlorine. ‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ Rivers said, unlocking the door. ‘I’ve just been pretending to know something about catering. Come in.’ He waved Sassoon to the chair in front of the desk, tossed his cap and cane to one side, and was about to unbuckle his belt when he remembered that the Director of Medical Services was due to visit the hospital some time that day. He sat down behind the desk and drew Sassoon’s file towards him. ‘Did you sleep well?’

‘Very well, thank you.’

‘You look rested. I enjoyed meeting Captain Graves.’

‘Yes, I gather you found it quite informative.’

‘ Ab .’ Rivers paused in the act of opening the file. ‘You mean he told me something you’d rather I didn’t know?’

‘No, not necessarily. Just something I might have preferred to tell you myself.’ A moment’s silence, then Sassoon burst out, ‘What I can’t understand is how somebody of Graves’s intelligence can can can have such a shaky grasp of of rhetoric. ’

Rivers smiled. ‘You were going to kill Lloyd George rhetorically, were you?’

‘I wasn’t going to kill him at all. I said I felt like killing him, but it was no use, because they’d only shut me up in a lunatic asylum, “like Richard Dadd of glorious memory”. There you are, exact words .’ He looked round the room. ‘Though as things have turned out —’

‘This is not a lunatic asylum. You are not locked up.’

‘Sorry.’

‘What you’re really saying is that Graves took you too seriously.’

‘It’s not just that. It suits him to attribute everything I’ve done to to to to… a state of mental breakdown, because then he doesn’t have to ask himself any awkward questions. Like why he agrees with me about the war and does nothing about it.’

Rivers waited a few moments. ‘I know Richard Dadd was a painter. What else did he do?’

A short silence. ‘He murdered his father.’

Rivers was puzzled by the slight awkwardness. He was used to being adopted as a father figure — he was, after all, thirty years older than the youngest of his patients — but it was rare for it to happen as quickly as this in a man of Sassoon’s age. ‘“Of glorious memory”?’

‘He… er… made a list of old men in power who deserved to die, and fortunately — or or otherwise — his father’s name headed the list. He carried him for half a mile through Hyde Park and then drowned him in the Serpentine in full view of everybody on the banks. The only reason Graves and I know about him is that we were in trenches with two of his great nephews, Edmund and Julian.’ The slight smile faded. ‘Now Edmund’s dead, and Julian’s got a bullet in the throat and can’t speak. The other brother was killed too. Gallipoli.’

‘Like your brother.’

‘Yes.’

‘Your father’s dead too, isn’t he? How old were you when he died?’

‘Eight. But I hadn’t seen much of him for some time before that. He left home when I was five.’

‘Do you remember him?’

‘A bit. I remember I used to like being kissed by him because his moustache tickled. My brothers went to the funeral. I didn’t — apparently I was too upset. Probably just as well, because they came back terrified. It was a Jewish funeral, you see, and they couldn’t understand what was going on. My elder brother said it was two old men in funny hats walking up and down saying jabber-jabber-jabber.’

‘You must’ve felt you’d lost him twice.’

‘Yes. We did lose him twice.’

Rivers gazed out of the window. ‘What difference would it have made, do you think, if your father had lived?’

A long silence. ‘Better education.’

‘But you went to Marlborough?’

‘Yes, but I was years behind everybody else. Mother had this theory we were delicate and our brains shouldn’t be taxed. I don’t think I ever really caught up. I left Cambridge without taking my degree.’

‘And then?’

Sassoon shook his head. ‘Nothing much. Hunting, cricket. Writing poems. Not very good poems.’

‘Didn’t you find it all… rather unsatisfying?’

‘Yes, but I couldn’t seem to see a way out. It was like being three different people, and they all wanted to go different ways.’ A slight smile. ‘The result was I went nowhere.’

Rivers waited.

‘I mean, there was the riding, hunting, cricketing me, and then there was the… the other side… that was interested in poetry and music, and things like that. And I didn’t seem able to…’ He laced his fingers. ‘Knot them together.’