Regeneration (16 page)

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.

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.

10

__________

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?’

Willard raised himself on to one elbow. It was extraordinary the impression he created, that mixture of immobility and power. Like a bull seal dragging itself across rocks. ‘You think I’m malingering.’

‘I know you’re not.’

‘But you’ve just said I am.’

‘No.’

‘If there’s no injury to the spine, then why can’t I walk?’

‘I think you know why.’

Willard gave a short, hissing laugh. ‘I know what you want me to say. I can’t walk because I don’t want to go back.’ He glared at Rivers. ‘Well, I won’t say it. It would be tantamount to an admission of cowardice.’

Rivers picked up his cap and cane. ‘Not in my book.’ He was aware of Willard watching him. ‘It’s true paralysis occurs because a man wants to save his life. He doesn’t want to go forward, and take part in some hopeless attack.
But neither is he prepared to run away.’
He smiled. ‘Paralysis is no use to a coward, Mr Willard. A coward needs his legs.’

Willard didn’t reply, though Rivers thought he detected a slight relaxation of tension. The bone structure of Willard’s face was strong almost to the point of brutality, and his eyes were a curious shade of pale blue. There was a sheen on his hair and skin like the gloss on the coat of an animal. He’d been something of an athlete before the war, though Rivers suspected he had never been remarkable for depth of intelligence. ‘Your wife’s coming to see you this afternoon, isn’t she?’

Willard’s eyes went to the photograph on his washstand. ‘Yes.’

‘Why don’t you get dressed? There’s no reason for you to be in bed. And if you got dressed you could go out into the grounds. It’d be a lot pleasanter for your wife.’

Willard thought about it, reluctant to concede anything that might suggest his illness was not purely physical. ‘Yes, all right.’

‘Good. I’ll send an orderly in to help you with your boots.’

Sassoon arrived at the Conservative Club about ten minutes early. ‘Captain Rivers isn’t here yet, sir,’ the porter said. ‘But if you’d like to wait in the morning room, I’m sure he won’t be long. Up the stairs and first right.’

The staircase was of twisting marble, almost too imposing for the size of the hall, like a Roman nose on an unprepossessing face. As Sassoon climbed, he passed portraits of Edinburgh worthies of the past, men with white beards and wing collars, whose gold watch-chains and fobs nestled on swelling abdomens. His first thought on entering the morning room was that somebody with a taste for practical jokes had cut the Edinburgh worthies out of their frames and stuck them in chairs all over the room. Everywhere saurian heads and necks peered out of wing armchairs, looking at the young man in the doorway with the automatic approval his uniform evoked, and then – or was he perhaps being oversensitive? – with a slight ambivalence, a growing doubt, as they worked out what the blue badge on his tunic meant. Perhaps it
was
just oversensitivity, for you saw that same look of mingled admiration and apprehension, wherever you went. Old men were often ambivalent about young men in uniform, and rightly so, when you considered how very ambivalent the young men felt about them.

The chairs, which looked uncomfortable, were very comfortable indeed. Sassoon, glad to be away from the boiled cabbage and custard smells of the Craiglockhart dining room, sank back and closed his eyes. Further along, at a table by the window, two old men were nattering about the war. Both had sons at the front, it seemed, or was it only one? No, the other was trapped in England, apparently, on a training course. He listened to the rumble of their voices and felt a well-practised hatred begin to flow. It needed only a slighting remark about the courage of the
German Army to rouse him to real fury, and very soon it came. He was aware of something sexual in this anger. He looked at the cloth straining across their broad backs, at the folds of beef-pink skin that overlapped their collars, and thought, with uncharacteristic crudity,
When did you two last get it up?

Gordon’s death had woken him up, there was no doubt. That moment when he’d come down to breakfast, glanced at the casualty lists and seen Gordon’s name had been a turning point of sorts, though he didn’t yet know in which direction he would turn. It seemed to him that his first month at Craiglockhart had been spent in a kind of sleep. Too much steam pudding, too much putting little balls into holes. Looking round the room, he knew why he felt sickened by himself, why his fuming against elderly men with sons at the front no longer satisfied him. It was because he’d given in, lapsed, pretended to himself that he was still actively protesting whereas in reality he’d let himself be pacified, sucked into the comforting routine, the uneventfulness of Craiglockhart life. As Rivers had meant him to be.

He got up and began looking at the pictures that lined the walls. The portraits here were not of the professional men and civic dignitaries of the recent past, but of the landed gentry of generations before that, shown, for the most part, either setting off to, or returning from, the hunt. He was obviously not destined to get away from memories of Gordon and hunting today. Walking from picture to picture, he remembered the notebook he’d taken with him into the trenches on his first tour of duty. It had contained nothing but bare details of past hunts, where they’d found, how far he’d run, whether they’d killed. On and on. A terribly meaningless little set of squiggles it would have seemed to anybody else, but for him it had contained the Sussex lanes, the mists, the drizzle, the baying of hounds, clods flying from under the horses’ feet, staggering into the house, bones aching, reliving the hunt over dinner, and then, after dinner, shadows on the wall of the old nursery and Gordon’s face in the firelight, the scent of logs, the warmth, his whole face feeling numbed and swollen in the heat. His mind switched to his last few hours in France when, already wounded in the shoulder, he’d careered along a German trench, slinging
Mills bombs to left and right, shouting, ‘View halloa!’
That
was the moment, he thought. That was when the old Sassoon had cracked wide open and something new had stepped out of the shell.
Bless you, my dear
, Eddie Marsh had written, when he told him about it.
Never take it more seriously than that
. But Eddie had missed the point. Hunting had always been serious. Every bit as serious as war.