The Eye in the Door (25 page)

His manner
was
different, Rivers thought. Talkative, restless, rapid speech, and he was looking directly at Rivers, something he almost never did, particularly at the beginning of a meeting. But he seemed perfectly rational, and the changes were within normal bounds. ‘Why won’t they let you see anybody?’

‘It’s because of Sunday, everybody came, Robert Ross, Meicklejon, Sitwell, oh God, Eddie Marsh, and they were all talking about the book and I got excited and –’ He raised his hands to his forehead. ‘
FIZZLE
.
POP
. I had a bad night, kept everybody awake, and they put me in here.’

‘How was
last
night?’

Siegfried pulled a face. ‘Bad. I keep thinking how big it is, the
war
, and how impossible it is to write about, and how useless it is to get angry, that’s such a trivial reaction, it doesn’t, it just doesn’t do any sort of justice to the to the to the tragedy, you know you spend your entire life out there obsessed with this tiny little sector of the Front, I mean
thirty yards
of sandbags, that’s the war, you’ve no conception of anything else, and now I think I can see all of it, vast armies, flares going up,
millions
of people,
millions, millions
.’

Rivers waited. ‘You say you see it?’

‘Oh, yes, it just unfolds.’ A circling movement of his arms. ‘And it’s marvellous in a way, but it’s terrible too and I get so frightened because you’d have to be Tolstoy.’ He gripped Rivers’s hand. ‘I’ve got to see Ross, I don’t care about the others, but you’ve got to make them let me see him, he looks awful, that
bloody bloody bloody
trial. Do you know Lord Alfred Douglas called him “the leader of all the sodomites in London”? Only he said it in the witness-box, so Robbie can’t sue.’

‘Just as well, perhaps.’

‘
And
he’s been asked to resign from all his committees, I mean he offered, but it was accepted with alacrity.
I’ve got to see him
. Apart from anything else he brings me the reviews.’

‘They’re good, aren’t they? I’ve been looking out for them.’

‘
Most
of them.’

Rivers smiled. ‘You can’t write a controversial book
and
expect universal praise, Siegfried.’

‘Can’t I?’

They laughed, and for a moment everything seemed normal. Then Siegfried’s face darkened. ‘Do you know we actually sat in dug-outs in France and talked about that trial? The papers were full of it, I think it was the one thing that could have made me
glad
I was out there, I mean, for God’s sake, the Germans on the Marne, five thousand prisoners taken and all you read in the papers is who’s going to bed with whom and are they being blackmailed?
God
.’

‘I’ll see what I can do about Ross.’

‘Do you think they’ll listen to you?’

Rivers hesitated. ‘I think they might.’ Obviously Siegfried didn’t know he’d been called in professionally. ‘How’s the head?’

A spasm of contempt. ‘It’s a scratch. I should never’ve let them send me back, do you know that’s the last thing I said to my servant, “I’m coming back.” “Back in three weeks,” I yelled at him as I was being driven away. And then I let myself be corrupted.’

‘
Corrupted?
That’s a harsh word, isn’t it?’

‘I should’ve refused to come back.’

‘Siegfried, nobody would have listened to you if you had. Head injuries have to be taken seriously.’

‘But don’t you see, the timing was perfect? Did you see my poem in the
Nation?
“I Stood with the Dead”. Well, there you are. Or there I was rather, perched on the top-most bough, carolling away.
BANG
! Oops! Sorry. Missed.’

‘I’m glad it did.’

A bleak sideways glance from Siegfried. ‘I’m not.’

Silence.

‘I feel amputated. I don’t belong here. I keep looking
at all this…’ The waving hand took in fruit, flowers, chocolates. ‘I just wish I could parcel it up and send it out to them. I did manage to send them a gramophone. Then I got… ill.’

‘You know, what I don’t understand,’ Rivers said, ‘is how you could possibly have been wounded there.’

‘I was in No Man’s Land.’

‘No, I meant
under the helmet
.’

‘I’d taken it off.’ An awkward pause. ‘We’d been out to lob some hand-grenades at a machine-gun, two of us, they were getting cheeky, you see, they’d brought it too far forward, and so we…” He smiled faintly. ‘Reestablished dominance. Anyway, we threw the grenades, I don’t think we hit anybody – by which I mean there were no screams – and then we set off back and by this time it was getting light, and I was so
happy
.’ His face blazed with exultation. ‘Oh, God, Rivers, you wouldn’t
believe
how happy. And I stood up and took the helmet off, and I turned to look at the German lines. And that’s when the bullet got me.’

Rivers was so angry he knew he had to get away. He walked across to the window and stared, unseeing, at the road, the railings, the distant glitter of the Serpentine under the summer sun. He had been lying to himself, he thought, pretending this was merely one more crisis in a busy working day. This anger stripped all pretence away from him. ‘
Why?
’ he said, turning back to Siegfried.

‘I wanted to see them.’

‘You mean you wanted to get killed.’

‘No.’

‘You stand up in the middle of No Man’s Land, in the morning, the sun rising, you take off your helmet, you turn to face the German lines, and you tell me you weren’t trying to get killed.’

Siegfried shook his head. ‘I’ve told you, I was happy.’

Rivers took a deep breath. He walked back to the bed, schooling himself to a display of professional gentleness. ‘You were happy?’

‘Yes, I was happy most of the time, I suppose mainly because I’ve succeeded in cutting off the part of me that hates it.’ A faint smile. ‘Except when writing poems for the
Nation
. I was… There’s a book you ought to read. I’ll try to dig it out, it says something to the effect that a man who makes up his mind to die takes leave of a good many things, and is, in some sense,
dead already
. Well, I had made up my mind to die. What other solution was there for me? But making up your mind to die isn’t the same as trying to get killed. Not that it made much difference.’ He touched the bandage tentatively. ‘I must say, I thought the standard of British sniping was higher than this.’

‘
British
sniping?’

‘Yes, didn’t they tell you? My own NCO. Mistook me for the German army, rushed out into No Man’s Land shouting, “Come on, you fuckers,” and shot me.’ He laughed. ‘God, I’ve never seen a man look so horrified.’

Rivers sat down by the bed. ‘You’ll never be closer.’

‘I’ve
been
closer. Shell landed a foot away. Literally. Didn’t explode.’ Siegfried twitched suddenly, a movement Rivers had seen many thousands of times in other patients, too often surely for it to be shocking.

‘You can’t get shell-shock, can you?’ Siegfried asked. ‘From a shell that doesn’t explode?’

Rivers looked down at his hands. ‘I think that one probably did a fair amount of damage.’

Siegfried looked towards the window. ‘You know, they’re going on a raid soon, Jowett, five or six of the others,
my
men, Rivers,
my men
, men
I
trained and I’m not going to be there when they come back.’

‘They’re not your men now, Siegfried. They’re somebody else’s men. You’ve got to let go.

“I can’t.’

Rivers had been invited to dinner with the Heads, and arrived to find the Haddons and Grafton Elliot Smith already there. No opportunity for private conversation with Henry or Ruth presented itself until the end of the evening, when Rivers contrived that he should be the last to leave. It was not unusual after a dinner with the Heads for him to stay behind enjoying their particular brand of unmalicious gossip, well aware that his own foibles and frailties would be dissected as soon as he left, and sure enough of their love for him not to mind.

Not that he was inclined to gossip tonight. As soon as they were alone, he told them about Siegfried, clarifying his own perception of the situation as he spoke.

‘Excited, you say?’ Henry asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Manic?’

‘Oh, no, nowhere near. Though there was a hint of… elation, I suppose, once or twice, particularly when he was talking about his feelings immediately before he was wounded. And the afternoons
are
his best time. Apparently the nights are bad. I’ve promised I’ll go back. In fact, I ought to be going.’ He stood up. ‘I’m not
worried
. He’ll be all right.’

‘Does he regret going back?’ Ruth asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Rivers said. ‘I haven’t asked.’

After seeing Rivers off, Head came back into the living-room to find Ruth gazing reflectively into the fire.

‘No, well, he wouldn’t, would he?’ she said, looking up.

‘He might think there wasn’t much point,’ Henry said, sitting down on the other side of the fire.

A long, companionable silence. They were too replete with company and conversation to want to talk much, too comfortable to make the move for bed.

‘He came to see me last year, you know,’ Henry said. ‘Almost a sort of consultation. He got himself into quite a state over Sassoon.’

‘Yes, I know. I didn’t realize he’d talked to you about it.’

Head hesitated. ‘I think he suddenly realized he was using… his professional skills, if you like, to defuse a situation that wasn’t…
medical
. There’s really nothing else you can do if you’re a doctor in the army in wartime. There’s always the possibility of conflict between what the army needs and what the patient needs, but with Sassoon it was… very sharp. I told him basically not to be silly.’

Ruth gave a surprised laugh. ‘Poor Will.’

‘No, I meant it.’

‘I’m sure you did, but you wouldn’t have said it to a patient.’

‘I told him Sassoon was capable of making up his own mind, and that his influence probably wasn’t as great as he thought it was. I thought he was being… I don’t know. Not vain –’

‘Over-scrupulous?’

‘Frankly, I thought he was being neurotic. But I’ve seen him with a lot of patients since then, and I’m not so
sure. You know how you get out of date with people if you haven’t seen them for a while? I think I was out of date. Something happened to him in Scotland. Somehow or other he acquired this enormous power over young men, people generally perhaps, but particularly young men. It really is amazing, they’ll do anything for him. Even get better.’

‘Even go back to France?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

Ruth shrugged slightly. ‘I don’t see the change. But then I suspect he’s always shown a slightly different side to me anyway.’ She smiled. ‘I’m very fond of him, but –’

‘He is of you.’

‘I sometimes wonder why we even
like
each other, you know. When you think how it started. You going to Cambridge every weekend so he could stick pins in your arm. I never had a weekend with you the whole of the first year we were married.’

‘It wasn’t as bad as that. Anyway, you got on all right.’

‘Do you think he still thinks Sassoon went back because of him?’

Head hesitated. ‘I think he knows the extent of his influence.’

‘Hmm,’ Ruth said. ‘Do you think he’s in love with him?’

‘He’s a patient.’

Ruth smiled and shook her head. ‘That’s not an answer.’

Head looked at her. ‘Yes, it is. It has to be.’

Siegfried was sitting up in bed, pyjama jacket off, face and chest gleaming with sweat. ‘Is it hot, Rivers?’ he asked, as if their conversation had never been interrupted. ‘Or is it just me?’

‘Warm.’

‘I’m
boiling
. I’ve been sitting here simmering like a kettle.’

Rivers sat down beside the bed.

‘I’ve been writing to Graves. In verse. Do you want to read it?’

Rivers took the notepad and found himself reading an account of his visit that afternoon. The pain was so intense that for a moment he had to keep quite still. ‘Is that how you see me?’ he said at last. ‘Somebody who’s going to make you go back to France till you break down altogether?’

‘Yes,’ Sassoon said cheerfully. ‘But that’s all right, I want you to. You’re my external conscience, Rivers, my father confessor. You can’t let me down now, you’ve
got
to make me go back.’

Rivers read the poem again. ‘You shouldn’t send this.’

‘Why not? It took me ages. Oh, I know what it is, you don’t think I should say all that about the lovely soldier lads. Well, they are lovely. You think Graves is going to be shocked. Frankly, Rivers, I don’t care; shocking Graves is one of my few remaining pleasures. I wrote to him – not to shock him – just an ordinary letter, only I made the mistake of talking with enthusiasm about training in one paragraph, and in the next paragraph I said what a bloody awful business the war was, and what do I get back? A lecture on consistency, oh, and some very pathetic reproaches about not terrifying your friends by pretending to be mad, I thought that was particularly rich. I’ve done
one
totally consistent, totally
sane
thing in my life, and that was to protest against the war. And who stopped me?’

Graves, Rivers thought. But not only Graves. It was true, he saw it now, perhaps more clearly than he had at
the time, that whatever the
public
meaning of Siegfried’s protest, its private meaning was derived from a striving for consistency, for singleness of being in a man whose internal divisions had been dangerously deepened by the war.

‘You mustn’t blame Graves. He did what –’

‘I don’t blame him, I’m just not prepared to be lectured by him. I survive out there by being two people, sometimes I even manage to be both of them in one evening. You know, I’ll be sitting with Stiffy and Jowett –
Jowett is beautiful
– and I’ll start talking about wanting to go and fight, and I’ll get them all fired up and banging the table and saying, yes, enough of training, time to get stuck in to the real thing. And then I leave them and go to my room and think how young they are. Nineteen, Rivers.
Nineteen
. And they’ve no bloody idea. Oh, God, I hope they live.’