The Ghost Road (13 page)

Manning—after
we'd had sex—became very strange.
Great distances opened up. Partly because he hadn't
intended it to happen—or didn't think he had—and partly just because I'm going
back and he isn't.
Two inches of sheet between us—
miles miles.
I was glad when he went and I'm even
more glad
he's
not here now. Very few pleasures in sex are any match for a narrow bed and
cool, clean sheets. (A post-coital reflection if ever I heard one.)

30 August

Collected my
coat today.
I'm not even going to write down how much it cost,
but it's warm and light and it looks good, and I need all of that.

Mooched round
the rest of the day doing nothing very much.
Dinner at Half Moon Street in my room.
Saw Rivers
afterwards. Had made up my mind not to ask what he thought about my going
back—and
specifically not to ask if he thought I was
fit—then asked anyway and was predictably irritated by the answer.

I had a very clear
perception while we were talking—I suppose because I've been away for a
while—that his power over people, the power to heal if you like, springs
directly from some sort of wound or deformity in him. He has a lot of
strengths, but he isn't working from strength. Difficult to say this without
sounding patronizing,
which isn't how I feel.
In fact
for me it's the best thing about him—well the only thing that makes him
tolerable, actually—that he
doesn't
sit behind the desk implicitly setting
himself
up as some sort of standard of mental health. He
once said to me half the world's work's done by hopeless neurotics, and I think
he had himself in mind.
And me.

Got to the
station with an hour to spare and Manning showed up.
I wished he
hadn't but there he was and of course we had one of these awful station
conversations. The ripples between those going out and those staying behind are
so bloody awful the whole thing's best avoided. However, we got through it,
looked at each other through the window with mutual relief and then away we
went. Or I went.

Arrived here
(Folkestone) in the middle of the night, exhausted. There's something about
railway stations, and I've been in a lot of them recently. The goodbyes all get
trapped under the roof and suck the oxygen out of the air. No other reason for
me to feel like this.

Saturday, 31 August

Woke tired.
But got up
anyway, not wasting time—'wasting time', 'killing time' start to be phrases you
notice—lying in bed, and sat on the balcony for a while
watching the sun come up and decided to do what people always think about
doing, and then think again and go back to sleep: I decided to swim before
breakfast.
So down to the beach.
Hovered
on the shingle by the waterline, told myself not to be so feeble, etc., and
plunged in.
Water pearly grey, absolutely bloody freezing, but, after
the first shock, total exhilaration. I stood for a while afterwards up to my
knees, feeling the surge and suck round my legs, neither in the sea nor on the
land.
Marvellous.
Still the slanting
light of early morning.
Worm casts on the beach very prominent, the sun
casting vast shadows from little things, and I thought of the beach outside
Edinburgh where I made love to Sarah for the first time. Went straight back and
wrote to her. Then walked through town, giving myself small treats, chocolates,
etc. and avoiding other officers.

Saw Hallet with
his family, looking quite desperate. All of them, but I meant Hallet. Poor
little bugger's had a station goodbye that's lasted for
days.
I waved and
passed on.

On board

People playing
cards below deck, but there's quite a heave on the sea, and I'd rather be out
here watching it. Great bands of pale green in the wake, laced with thick foam,
and terns hovering, riding rather—only the most fractional adjustment of their
wings needed to keep them motionless. And they come quite close.

Watched the cliffs
disappear. Tried to think of something worthy of the occasion and came up with:
The further out from England the nearer is to France,
and then
couldn't get rid of the bloody thing, it just ran round and round my head.

Hallet came up
and stood a few yards away, not wanting to intrude on what he took to be a fond
farewell to the motherland. In the end I gave in, we sat down and talked.
Full of idealism.
I'd rather have had the Walrus and the
Carpenter.

It's very
obvious that Hallet's adopted me. Like one of those little pilot fish or the
terns for that matter. He thinks because I've been out three times before I
know what's going on.
Seems a bright enough lad.
I
wonder how long it'll take him to work out that
nobody
knows what's
going
on?

Sunday, 1 September

Étaples
marginally less brutal than I remember it, though still a squad of men passed
me running the gauntlet of the canaries, who yelled abuse in their faces much
as they always did. And you think
,
All right it has to
be brutal—think what they're being toughened up
for
—but actually
that misses the point. It's the
impersonality
that forms the biggest part of the sheer fucking
nastiness of this place. Nobody knows anybody. You marshal men around—they
don't know you, don't trust you (why should they?) and you don't invest
anything in them.

Same feeling, in
a milder form, between the officers.
We sleep in dormitories, and it's the same feeling
you get on big wards in hospitals—privacy sacrificed without intimacy being
gained.

Hallet's in the
next bed. He sat on his bed this evening and showed me a photograph of his
girl— fiancée, I should say. His parents think he's too young to marry, which
he fiercely objects to, pointing out that he's old enough for
this.
Of course I
don't think he's old enough for
this
either, but I don't say so. Instead I told him I'd
got engaged too and showed
him a photograph of Sarah.
And then we sat smiling at each other inanely, feeling like complete idiots.
Well, I did.

Wednesday, 4 September

Time passes
quickly here.
Enough to do during the day, and a fair amount
of free time.
But the atmosphere's awful. The mess has scuffed no-colour
lino—the colour of misery, if misery has a colour— and a big round table in the
middle, covered with dog-eared copies of
Punch
and
John Bull
, exactly like a
dentist's waiting-room.
The same pervasive fear.
The
same reluctance to waste time on people you're probably never going to see
again anyway.

I get out as
often as I can. Walked miles today, great windswept sandy foothills, and a long
line of stunted pines all leaning away from the sea.

Saturday, 7 September

Posted to the
2nd Manchesters.
We leave tomorrow.

It's evening
now, and everybody's scribbling away, telling people the news, or as much of
the news as we're allowed to tell them. I look up and down the dormitory and
there's hardly a sound except for pages being turned, and here and there a pen
scratching. It's like this every evening. And not just letters either.
Diaries.
Poems.
At least two
would-be poets in this hut alone.

Why?
you
have to ask yourself. I think it's a way of claiming
immunity. First-person narrators can't die, so as long as we keep telling the
story of our own lives we're safe. Ha bloody fucking Ha.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Rivers turned to
watch the sun swelling and reddening as it sank, a brutal, bloody disc, scored
by steeples and factory chimneys, obscured by a haze of drifting brown and
yellow smoke.

He'd come out to
walk on Hampstead Heath because he was feeling ill, and needed to clear his
head before settling down to an evening's work, but it wasn't helping. With
every step he felt worse, muscles aching, throat sore, eyes stinging, skin
clammy. By the time he got back to his lodgings, he'd decided to miss dinner
and go straight to bed. He knocked on the door of Mrs Irving's private
apartments, told her he wasn't feeling well and wouldn't be in to dinner, and
glimpsed through the open door the portrait of her dead son that hung above the
mantelpiece, with flowers beneath it and candlesticks on either side.

Going slowly
upstairs, pausing frequently to lean on the banister, Rivers thought about what
he'd just seen: the portrait, the flowers.
A shrine.
Not fundamentally different from the skull houses of Pa Na Gundu where he'd
gone with Njiru.
The same human impulse at work.
Difficult to know what to make of these flashes of cross-cultural
recognition.
From a strictly professional point of view, they were
almost meaningless, but then one didn't have such experiences as a disembodied
anthropological intelligence, but as a man, and as a man one had to make some
kind of sense of them.

Once in bed he
started to shiver. The sheets felt cold against his hot legs. He slept and
dreamt of the croquet lawn at Knowles Bank, his mother in a long white dress
coming out to call the children in, the sun setting over the wood casting very
long, fine shadows across the lawn. The shadows of the hoops were particularly
long and fearful. He'd been awake for several minutes before he realized he was
trying to remember the rules of mathematical croquet, as devised by Dodgson,
and actually feeling
distressed
because he couldn't remember them. Then he realized
that although he was now fully awake he could still see the lawn, which meant
his temperature was very high. Always, in a high fever, his visual memory
returned, giving him a secret, obscurely shameful pleasure in being ill. He
wouldn't sleep again—he was far too hot—so he simply lay and let his newly
opened mind's eye
roam
.

On the
Southern Cross,
on the voyage
to Eddystone, he'd stood on deck, watching the pale green wake furrow the dark
sea, reluctant to exchange the slight breeze for the stuffy heat below deck.

At one of the
stops a group of natives got on, the men wearing cast-off European suits, the
women floral-print dresses. A few of the women had naked breasts, but most were
obviously missionized. A pathetic little remnant they looked, squatting there,
part of the small army of uprooted natives who drifted from one island to the
next, one mission station to the next, and belonged nowhere. At first sight all
mission stations seemed to be surrounded by converts, and the uninitiated
always assumed these were converts from
that
island. Only
later did one become aware of this uprooted population, travelling from one
station to the next, most of them from islands where the impact of western
culture had been particularly devastating.

He squatted down
beside them, and, as he expected, found enough knowledge of pidgin to make
conversation possible. He'd devised a questionnaire that he used on occasions
when it was necessary to extract the maximum amount of information quickly. The
first question was always: Suppose you were lucky enough to find a guinea, with
whom
would you share it? This produced a list of
names, names which he would then ask them to translate into kinship terms. And
from there one could move to virtually any aspect of their society.

When he sensed
they were getting tired he paid them their tobacco sticks and stood up to go,
but then one of the women caught his arm and pulled him down again. Poking him
playfully in the chest, she retrieved two words of English from her small
store: 'Your turn.'

The questions
were posed again and in the same order. When he told them that, since he was
unmarried and had no children, he would not necessarily feel obliged to share
his guinea with anybody, they at first refused to believe him. Had he no
parents living? Yes, a father.
Brothers and sisters?
One brother, two sisters.
Same mother, same father? Yes. But
he would not
automatically
share the guinea with them, though he might
choose
to do so.