The Ghost Road (12 page)

'Why?'

'You know why.
Two months ago you were having memory lapses. Rather bad ones actually. Anyway
this is purely hypothetical. Wasn't my decision
—'

Prior leant
forward. 'I was afraid you'd write.'

'It never
occurred to me anybody would think of sending you back.'

'I think the MO
was against it. Well, that was my impression anyway. How would I know? As for
the Board, well, they wanted to send me back. I wanted to go.'

'What did they
ask you about?
Nerves?'

'No, not
mentioned. They don't believe in shell-shock. You'd be surprised how many army
Medical Boards don't.'

Rivers snorted.
'Oh, I don't think I would. Anyway, you're going back. You've got what you
wanted.'

'At the moment I
can't wait to see the back of England.'

'Any particular
reason?'

'It's nothing
really. I just had my fur rubbed up the wrong way.' He hesitated. 'Manning took
me to meet Robert Ross. I don't know whether you've met him?

Through
Sassoon?'

'Briefly.'

'I liked him, he
was charming—I wasn't equally keen on some of his friends.'

Rivers waited.

'One in particular.
Apparently he'd
been stood up by his boyfriend—he'd been expecting an amorous weekend—and the
poor chap had decided it wasn't worth the train fare from Leeds. And this man—
Birtwhistle, his name is—was saying, "Of course one can't rely on them. Their
values are totally different from ours. They're a different species, really.
The WCs."
Smirk, smirk.'

Rivers looked
puzzled.

'Working
classes.
Water-closets.
The men who're
getting their ballocks shot off so he can go on being the lily on the dung
heap. God, they make me sick.'

'I'm sure you
more than held your own.'

'No, I didn't,
that's what bothers me. It all got tangled up with being a guest and being
polite.
To Ross, of course, not him.
Anyway I decided
to give this prat a run for his money so we adjourned upstairs afterwards.'

'You and
Manning?'

'No, me and
Birtwhistle.
Birtwhistle and I.'

'It doesn't
sound much like a punishment.'

'Oh, it was.
Nothing like
sexual
humiliation, Rivers.
Nobody ever forgets that.'

Rivers looked
into the trustless eyes, and thought, My
God,
I
wouldn't want to cross you. Though he had crossed him many times, in the course
of therapy,
and
refused more than one invitation to 'adjourn upstairs'.

'I just wish
your last evening had been pleasanter.'

Prior shrugged.
'It was all right. It just... he
happens to represent
everything in England that
isn't
worth fighting for.
Which made him a
rather bracing companion.
' He glanced at his watch. 'I'd better be
going. I'm catching the midnight train.'

Rivers
hesitated. 'Please don't think because I
personally
would have
recommended another three months in England that I don't have every confidence
in your ability to... to...'

'Do my duty to
King and country.'

'Yes.'

'Rivers, you
don't think I should be going back at all.

Rivers
hesitated. 'The Board at Craiglockhart recommended permanent home service and
that wasn't because of your nerves, it was on the basis of your asthma alone. I
haven't seen anything to make me change my mind.'

Prior looked at
him, smiled, and slapped him on both arms. 'I've got to go.'

Rivers said
slowly, as he went to get Prior's coat, 'Do you remember saying something to me
once about the the the ones who go back b-being the
real
test cases? From
the point of view of finding out whether a particular therapy works?'

'Yes, I
remember.'
Another smile.
'I was getting at you.'

'You always
were. Well, it just occurs to me you're actually rather better equipped than
most people to observe that process. I think you have great powers of
detachment.'

'"Cold-blooded
little bastard,'" Prior translated, then thought for a moment. 'You're
giving me a football to kick across, aren't you? You remember that story? The
Suffolk's kicking a football across No Man's Land when the whistles blew on the
Somme?

Bloody mad.'

'No, the battle
was mad. The football was sane. Whoever ordered them to do that was a very good
psychologist.'

'A
h!'

'But I know what
you mean. It's become the kind of incident one can't take seriously any more.
Only I'm not sure that's right, you see. I suppose what one
should
be asking is
whether an ideal becomes invalid because the people who hold it are betrayed.'

'If holding it
makes them into naïve idiots,
yes
.'

'Were they?'

If they were, I
can't talk.
I m going back.

Rivers smiled.
'So you don't want my football?'

'On the
contrary, I think it's a brilliant idea. I'll send you the half-time score.'

Rivers handed
him his greatcoat, examining it first. 'I'm impressed.'

'So you should be
at the price.' Prior started to put it on. 'Do you know you can get these with
scarlet silk linings?'

'Army
greatcoats?'

'Yes. Saw one in
the Café Royal.
On the back of one of my old intelligence
colleagues.
Quite a startling effect when he crossed his legs,
subtle
, you know, like
a baboon's bottom. Apparently he's supposed to sit there and "attract the
attention of anti-war elements"'

'Was he?'

'He was
attracting attention. I don't know what their views on the war were.
Another thing that made me glad to be getting out of it.'
He
held out his hand. 'Don't come down.'

Rivers took him
at his word, but went through to the bedroom window and looked out, lifting the
curtain an inch to one side.
Miss
Irving's voice, a laughing farewell, and then Prior appeared, foreshortened,
running down the steps.

On Vao there was
a custom that when a bastard was born some leading man on the island adopted
the child and brought him up as his own. The boy called him father, and grew up
surrounded by love and care and then, when he reached puberty, he was given the
honour, as befitted the son of a great man, of leading in the sacrificial pig,
one of the huge-tusked boars in which the wealth of the people was measured. He
was given new bracelets, new necklaces, a new penis wrapper and then, in front
of the entire community, all of whom knew what was about to happen, he led the
pig to the sacrificial stone, where his father waited with upraised club. And,
as the boy drew near, he brought the club down and crushed his son's skull.

In one of his
father's churches, St Faith's, at Maidstone, the window to the left of the
altar shows Abraham with the knife raised to slay his son, and, below the human
figures, a ram caught in the thicket by his horns. The two events represented
the difference between savagery and civilization, for in the second scenario
the voice of God is about to forbid the sacrifice, and will be heeded. He had
knelt at that altar rail for years, Sunday after Sunday, receiving the chalice
from his father's hands.

Perhaps, Rivers
thought, watching Prior's head bob along behind the hedge and disappear from
view, it was because he'd been thinking so much about fathers and sons recently
that the memory of the two sacrifices had returned, but he wished this
particular memory had chosen another moment to surface.

PART TWO

CHAPTER SEVEN

29 August 1918

Bought this in a
stationer's just off Fleet Street quite a long time ago. I've been carrying it
round with me ever since unused, mainly because it's so grand. I bought it for
the marbled covers and the thick creamy pages and ever since then the thick
creamy pages have been saying,
Piss
off, what could
you
possibly write
on
us
that would be worth reading? It's a marvellous shop,
a real old-fashioned stationer's.
Stationers', second-hand
bookshops, ironmongers'.
Feel a great need at the moment to concentrate
on small pleasures. If the whole of one's life can be summoned up and held in
the palm of one hand,
in the
living
moment,
then time means nothing.
World
without end, Amen.

Load of crap.
Facts are what we need, man.
Facts.

Arrived in
London to find no porters, no taxis, and the hotels full.
Charles Manning
on the platform (the train was so late I was sure he'd've gone home), offering,
as a solution, the room he rents in Half Moon Street, Tor the nights when he
works late at the office and doesn't want to disturb the household'. Oh, c'mon,
Charles, I wanted to say. It's
me,
remember? I was all for trudging round a few more
hotels, but he was limping badly and obviously in pain
and
pissed off with
me for going back when I could have been comfortably established in the Min of
Mu chasing bits of paper across a desk, like him. (He'd go back to France
tomorrow if they'd have him.)

When we got to
Half Moon Street we went straight
upstairs and he
produced a bottle of whisky. Not bad (but not what he drinks himself either)
and I waited for him to do what everybody else would do in the circumstances
and collect the rent. He didn't, of course. I'm plagued with honourable people.
I thought, Oh, for Christ's sake, if you haven't got the gumption to ask for it
bloody
do
without. I was feeling tired and sticky and
wanted a bath. After ten minutes of swishing soapy water round my groin and
whisky round my guts I started to feel better. I had a quiet consultation with
myself in the bathroom mirror, all steamy and pink and conspiratorial, and went
back in and said, Right let's be having you.
Over the end of
the bed.
He likes being dominated, as people often do who've never had
to raise their voice in their lives to get other people running after them.

Then we went out
to dinner, came back, Charles stayed a while, long enough to introduce me to
Ross—extraordinary man, rather Chinese-looking, and not just physically, a
sense of a very old civilization. I shook his hand and I thought I'm shaking
the hand that... Well, there
is
the connection with Wilde. And I felt at home in this
rather beleaguered little community. Beleaguered, because Ross thinks he's
going to be arrested, he thinks the utterly disgusting Pemberton Billing affair
has given them
carte blanche
to go ahead and do it. He may be exaggerating the
risk, he looks ill, he looks as if he goes to bed and broods, but one or two
people there, including Manning, don't seem to rule out an arrest.
A comfortable atmosphere in spite of it.
Soldiers
who aren't militarists, pacifists who aren't prigs, and
talking
to each other.
Now
there's
a miracle.

But
then—Birtwhistle.
He's a don at Cambridge,
very
clever, apparently. Curiously, he actually prides himself on having a broader
grasp of British society than the average person, i.e. he pokes working-class
boys' bottoms. Might even be true, I suppose, though the heterosexual
equivalent doesn't pride itself on broadening its social experience whenever it
nips off for a knee-wobbler in Bethnal Green. Ah, but these are
relationships
, Birtwhistle
would say.
Did say.
Lurve, no less.
And yet he spoke of his working-class lover—his WC—in tones of utter contempt.
And he didn't succeed in placing me, or not accurately enough.
So much for the broader grasp.
I played a rather cruel
convoluted game with him afterwards. Which satisfied me a great deal at the
time, but now I feel contaminated, as I wouldn't have done if I'd kicked him in
the balls (which would also have been kinder).