The Ghost Road (2 page)

'Didn't see any, sir.
If I had I'd certainly have drunk it.'

'So what
were
your symptoms?'

'I was mute, sir. Some people found it an improvement
on the basic model.'

But Mather was reading, not listening. 'W. H. R.
Rivers,' he said. 'I knew him. He was two years ahead of me at Bart's.
Paralytic stammer.'

Prior looked puzzled. 'No.'

'Ah? Got
his own
voice back
too. He must be good.' He tapped a sheet of paper. 'The discharge
report says asthma'.

'I had two attacks while I was there.'

'Hm.' Mather
smiled.
'Any problems with the nerves now?'

'No.'

'Appetite?'

'I could eat
more than I get.'

'So could
we
all, laddie. Sleeping all right?'

'Not last night.
Bloody tent leaks.'

'Generally?'

'I sleep all
right.'

Mather sat back
in his chair. 'How did you get in?'

'Through the
flap.'

Mather's
forefinger shot up. 'Watch it,
laddie.
How did you get into the
army?'

A brief struggle
with temptation, ending as Prior's struggles with temptation usually did. 'I
lied to the doctor, Doctor.'

Surprisingly, Mather
laughed, a short bark.

'Everybody
lied,'
Prior
said.

'So they did, I
remember it well. I saw men who'd climbed out of the window of the workhouse
infirmary to come and enlist.
Syphilis, epilepsy,
tuberculosis, rickets.
One lad—little squeaky voice, not a hair on his
chin, fourteen, if that—looked me straight in the eye and swore on his mother's
life he was nineteen.' Mather smiled, revealing brown teeth. 'Not one of them
got past me.'

Oh fuck.

'Gas training,'
Mather said.

Silence.

'Well?'

'Terribly
good idea,'
Prior
said earnestly.

'Did you go
through the huts?'

'No.'

'You must be affected at very low concentrations?'

'I was known as the battalion canary, sir.
Partly that.
Partly my pleasant, cheerful
personality.'

Mather looked at him. 'Get dressed.'

'The point is I managed perfectly well
for three
years.
I didn't
once
report sick with
asthma
or
the effects of gas.'

'Yes, laddie.'
Mather looked unexpectedly compassionate. 'And it
might be said you've done your bit.'

A twitch of the pale, proud face.
'Not by me.'

'And the asthma never played you up in France?'

'Never.'

'Two attacks in Craiglockhart.
None
in France.
I wonder why?'

'Open-air life suited my chest, sir.'

'We're not running a sanatorium, laddie. Go on, get
dressed. Then you go left along the corridor, turn left at the end, and you'll
see a row of chairs. Wait there.'

Mather went into the adjoining room and started on his
next victim. Prior dressed, pausing to wipe the sweat off his upper lip. Like
going over the top, he thought. No, it wasn't. Nothing was like that. Civilians
seemed to use that expression all the time now. I went a bit over the top last
night, they said, meaning they'd had a second glass of port. Prior peered into
the small looking-glass behind the washbasin, checking the knot in his tie. If
they didn't send him back he was going to be awfully lonely, marooned among
civilians with their glib talk. His reflection jeered,
Lonely?
You?
Oh, c'mon, duckie. You can always split in two.
At least the Board didn't know about
that.
Or rather they
didn't, provided Rivers hadn't written to them.
A
paralytic
stammer.

Not just any old stammer.
Paralytic.
Interesting, Prior thought, letting himself out of the room.

The place smelled like a barracks. Well, it was a
barracks, but the Clarence Gardens Hotel, after months of army use, had not
smelled anything like this. His nose twitched, identifying armpits, feet,
socks, oil, boot-polish, carbolic soap, the last blown in bubbles between the
raw fingers of a boy scrubbing the floor. Rear-end like a truck and a face to
match, but Prior produced a charming smile, nevertheless, because he owed it to
himself, and strode on, leaving a trail of muddy footprints across the wet
floor.

One man waiting.
Owen.

'The O's and the P's again,' Owen said, picking up a
pile of
John Bulls
from the vacant chair and dumping them on the floor.
They'd last waited together like this at Craiglockhart, at their final board.

Prior jerked his head at the door. 'Who's in?'

'Nesbit.
He's been in thirty minutes.'

'What's taking so long?'

Owen hesitated,
then
mouthed,
'Clap.'

Well
,
Prior
thought, that was one
way of getting out of it. And then he thought,
You
uncharitable bastard, how do you know he got it deliberately? And then he
thought, Well, I
am
an uncharitable bastard.

'I won't take long,' Owen said. 'I'm GS already.'

'Then why are you here?'

'Irregular heartbeat.
I added my name to the draft, but when I had the
final medical they promptly took it off again.'

'You added your name to the draft? Sure it's your
heart
that's wrong?'

Owen laughed, and looked away. 'I'd just heard Sassoon
was wounded. It seemed the only thing to do.'

Yes,
Prior
thought, it would.
He remembered them at Craiglockhart: the incongruous pair, Sassoon so tall,
Owen so short, the love Owen hadn't been able, or hadn't bothered, to disguise.

'Also,'
Owen said, 'I was getting pretty tired of being
regarded as "a twitching Nancy boy from a loony-bin in Scotland"'.

Prior smiled. 'I applied it to myself as well.'

Owen had cut himself shaving, he noticed. Blood in
shiny brown flakes filled the crease between cheek and earlobe.

'Do you think you'll be all right this time?'

Owen said cheerfully, 'Oh, yes, I should think so.
I've been doing a lot of running.'

'I saw.'

The door opened. Nesbit came out, looking distinctly
pale.

Owen stood up. 'Do they want me in?'

'I don't know.'

Owen sat down again. 'Worse than the dentist, isn't
it?' he said, forcing a laugh.

A few minutes later he was called in.
Prior sat listening to the murmur of voices, thinking what bloody
awful luck it was to have got Mather.
Some MOs would send a corpse back
if you propped one up in front of them, particularly now when every man was
needed for the latest in a long line of 'one last pushes'. Abruptly, before he
was ready, the door opened and Owen came out. Owen started to speak and then,
realizing the Board's secretary had followed him, raised a thumb instead. From
which Prior concluded that Owen's chances of ending the year deaf, blind, dumb,
paralysed, doubly incontinent, insane, brain damaged or—if he were lucky—just
plain dead had enormously increased. We're all mad here, he thought, following
the secretary into the room, saluting, sitting down in the solitary chair
facing the long table, meeting every eye confidently but not
too
confidently. And really, amidst the general insanity, was it fair to penalize a
man merely because in conditions of extreme stress he tended to develop two
separate personalities? You
could
argue the army was getting a bargain.

After the first few questions he began to relax. They
were concentrating on his asthma and the risks of exposure to gas, and to those
questions he had one totally convincing answer: he had been out to France three
times and on none of these occasions had he been invalided back to base or home
to England because of asthma. Trench fever, yes; wound, yes; shell-shock, yes.
Asthma,
no.

When the last question had been asked and answered,
Mitchell drew the papers together in front of him, and patted them into shape.
Prior watched the big white hands with their sprinkling of age spots and the
shadowing of hair at the sides.

'Right,' Mitchell said at last. 'I think that's
all...'

The pause was so long
Prior
began to wonder whether he would ever speak again.

'Your asthma's worse than you're letting on, isn't
it?' He tapped the discharge report.
'According to this
anyway.'

'It
was
bad at Craiglockhart, sir. But I can honestly say it was
worse there than it ever was in France.'

'Well,' Mitchell said. 'Results posted this
afternoon.' He smiled briskly. 'You won't have long to wait.'

CHAPTER
TWO

Crude copies of Tenniel's drawings from
Alice in
Wonderland
decorated one end of Ward Seven, for in peacetime this
had been a children's hospital. Alice, tiny enough to swim in a sea of her own
tears; Alice, unfolding like a telescope till she was nine feet tall; Alice,
grown so large her arm protruded from the window; and, most strikingly, Alice
with the serpent's neck, undulating above the trees.

Behind Rivers, a creaking trolley passed from bed to
bed: the patients' breakfast dishes were being cleared away.

'Come on, Captain McBride, drink up,' Sister Roberts
said, crackling past. 'We've not got all day, you know.'

This was said loudly, for
his
benefit. He'd arrived
on the ward too early, before they were ready for him.

'You knew him, didn't you?' Elliot Smith said, coming
up to him, looking over his shoulder.

Rivers looked puzzled.

'Lewis Carroll.'

'Oh, yes. Yes.'

'What was he like?'

Rivers spread his hands.

'Did you like him?'

'I think I wanted him very much to like me. And he
didn't.'
A slight smile.
'I'm probably the last person
to ask about him.'

Elliot Smith pointed to the snake-neck. 'That's
interesting, isn't it?'

'Ready now, Captain Rivers,' Sister Roberts said. They
watched her march off.

'"Captain"
' Elliot Smith murmured.

'I'm in the dog house,' Rivers said. 'I only get
"Dr" when she approves of me.'

Behind the screens Ian Moffet lay naked from the waist
down. He looked defiant, nervous,
full
of fragile,
ungrounded pride. His skin had a greenish pallor, though that might merely be
the reflection of light from the green screens that surrounded his bed,
creating a world, a rock pool full of secret life. Rivers pushed one screen
back so that light from the window flooded in. Now Moffet's legs, stretched out
on the counterpane, were the dense grey-white of big, cheap cod. Muscles flabby
but not wasted, as they would have been in a case of spinal injury, though he'd
been unable to walk for more than three months, an unusually long time for
hysterical paralysis to persist.

The history was, in one sense, simple. Moffet had
fallen down in a 'fainting fit' while on his way to the Front, shortly after
hearing the guns for the first time. When he recovered consciousness he could
not move his legs.

'It was ridiculous to
expect
me to go to the
Front,' he'd said in their first interview. 'I can't stand noise. I've never
been able to stay in the same room as a champagne cork popping.'

You poor blighter, Rivers had thought, startled out of
compassion. More than any other patient Moffet brought the words 'Pull
yourself
together, man' to the brink of his lips.

'Why didn't you apply for exemption?' he'd asked
instead.