Regeneration (6 page)

‘I wasn’t going to kill him at all. I said I
felt
like killing him, but it was no use, because they’d only shut me up in a lunatic asylum, “like Richard Dadd of glorious memory”. There you are,
exact words
.’ He looked round the room. ‘Though as things have turned out –’

‘This is
not
a lunatic asylum. You are
not
locked up.’

‘Sorry.’

‘What you’re really saying is that Graves took you too seriously.’

‘It’s not just that. It suits him to attribute everything I’ve done to to to to… a state of mental breakdown, because then he doesn’t have to ask himself any awkward questions. Like why he agrees with me about the war and does nothing about it.’

Rivers waited a few moments. ‘I know Richard Dadd was a painter. What else did he do?’

A short silence. ‘He murdered his father.’

Rivers was puzzled by the slight awkwardness. He was used to being adopted as a father figure – he was, after all, thirty years older than the youngest of his patients – but it was rare for it to happen as quickly as this in a man of Sassoon’s age. ‘“Of
glorious
memory”?’

‘He… er… made a list of old men in power who deserved to die, and fortunately – or or otherwise – his father’s name headed the list. He carried him for half a mile through Hyde Park and then drowned him in the Serpentine in full view of everybody on the banks. The only reason Graves and I know about him is that we were in trenches with two of his great nephews, Edmund and Julian.’ The slight smile faded. ‘Now Edmund’s dead, and Julian’s got a bullet in the throat and can’t speak. The other brother was killed too. Gallipoli.’

‘Like your brother.’

‘Yes.’

‘Your father’s dead too, isn’t he? How old were you when he died?’

‘Eight. But I hadn’t seen much of him for some time before that. He left home when I was five.’

‘Do you remember him?’

‘A bit. I remember I used to like being kissed by him because his moustache tickled. My brothers went to the funeral. I didn’t – apparently I was too upset. Probably just as well, because they came back terrified. It was a Jewish funeral, you see, and they couldn’t understand what was going on. My elder brother said it was two old men in funny hats walking up and down saying jabber-jabber-jabber.’

‘You must’ve felt you’d lost him twice.’

‘Yes. We did lose him twice.’

Rivers gazed out of the window. ‘What difference would it have made, do you think, if your father had lived?’

A long silence. ‘Better education.’

‘But you went to Marlborough?’

‘Yes, but I was
years
behind everybody else. Mother had this theory we were delicate and our brains shouldn’t be taxed. I don’t think I ever really caught up. I left Cambridge without taking my degree.’

‘And then?’

Sassoon shook his head. ‘Nothing much. Hunting, cricket. Writing poems. Not very good poems.’

‘Didn’t you find it all… rather unsatisfying?’

‘Yes, but I couldn’t seem to see a way out. It was like being three different people, and they all wanted to go different ways.’ A slight smile. ‘The result was I went nowhere.’

Rivers waited.

‘I mean, there was the riding, hunting, cricketing me, and then there was the… the other side… that was interested in poetry and music, and things like that. And I didn’t seem able to…’ He laced his fingers. ‘Knot them together.’

‘And the third?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘You said three.’

‘Did I? I meant two.’

Ah. ‘And then the war. You joined up on the first day?’

‘Yes, in the ranks. I couldn’t wait to get in.’

‘Your superior officers wrote glowing reports for the Board. Did you know that?’

A flush of pleasure. ‘I think the army’s probably the only place I’ve ever really belonged.’

‘And you’ve cut yourself off from it.’

‘Yes, because –’

‘I’m not interested in the reasons at the moment. I’m more interested in the result. The effect on you.’

‘Isolation, I suppose. I can’t talk to anybody.’

‘You talk to
me.
Or at least, I think you do.’

‘You don’t say stupid things.’

Rivers turned his head away. ‘I’m pleased about that.’

‘Go on,
laugh.
I don’t mind.’

‘You’d been offered a job in Cambridge, hadn’t you? Teaching cadets.’

Sassoon frowned. ‘Yes.’

‘But you didn’t take it?’

‘No. It was either prison or France.’ He laughed. ‘I didn’t foresee this.’

Rivers watched him staring round the room. ‘You can’t bear to be safe, can you?’ He waited for a reply. ‘Well, you’ve got twelve weeks of it.
At least.
If you go on refusing to serve, you’ll be safe for the rest of the war.’

Two red spots appeared on Sassoon’s cheekbones. ‘Not
my
choice.’

‘I didn’t say it was.’ Rivers paused. ‘You know you reacted then as if I were attacking you, and yet all I did was to point out
the facts.
’ He leant forward. ‘If you maintain your protest, you can expect to spend the remainder of the war in a state of Complete. Personal. Safety.’

Sassoon shifted in his seat. ‘I’m not responsible for other people’s decisions.’

‘You don’t think you might find being safe while other people
die
rather difficult?’

A flash of anger. ‘Nobody else in this
stinking
country seems to find it difficult. I expect I’ll just learn to live with it. Like everybody else.’

∗

Bums stood at the window of his room. Rain had blurred the landscape, dissolving sky and hills together in a wash of grey. He loathed wet weather because then everybody stayed indoors, sitting, around the patients’ common room, talking, in strained or facetious tones, about the war the war the war.

A sharper gust of wind blew rain against the glass. Somehow or other he was going to have to get out. It wasn’t forbidden, it was even encouraged, though he himself didn’t go out much. He got his coat and went downstairs. On the corridor he met one of the nurses from his ward, who looked surprised to see him wearing his coat, but didn’t ask where he was going.

At the main gates he stopped. Because he’d been inside so long, the possibilities seemed endless, though they resolved themselves quickly into two.
Into
Edinburgh, or away. And that was no choice at all: he knew he wasn’t up to facing traffic.

For the first few stops the bus was crowded. He sat on the bench seat close to the door of the bus. People smelling of wet wool jerked and swayed against him, bumping his knees, and he tensed, not liking the contact or the smell. But then at every stop more and more people got off until he was almost alone, except for an old man and the clippie. The lanes were narrower now; the trees rushed in on either side. A branch rattled along the windows with a sound like machine-gun fire, and he had to bite his lips to stop himself crying out.

He got off at the next stop, and stood, looking up and down a country lane. He didn’t know what to do at first, it was so long since he’d been anywhere alone. Raindrops dripped from the trees, big, splashy, persistent drops, finding the warm place between his collar and his neck. He looked up and down the lane again. Somewhere further along, a wood pigeon cooed monotonously. He crossed over and began climbing the hill between the trees.

Up, up, until his way was barred by a fence whose wire twitched in the wind. A tuft of grey wool had caught on one of the barbs. Burns blinked the rain out of his eyes. He pressed two strands of wire apart and eased himself through, catching his sleeve, and breaking into a sweat as he struggled to free it.

Trembling now, he began to scramble along the edge of the ploughed field, slipping and stumbling, his mud-encumbered
boots like lead weights pulling on the muscles of his thighs. His body was cold inside the stiff khaki, except for a burning round the knees where the tight cloth chafed the skin.

He was walking up the slope of a hill, tensing himself against the wind that seemed to be trying to scrape him off its side. As he reached the crest, a fiercer gust snatched his breath. After that he kept his head bent, sometimes stopping to draw a deeper breath through the steeple of his cupped hands. Rain beat on to his head, dripping from the peak of his cap, the small bones of nose and jaw had started to sing. He stopped and looked across the field. The distance had vanished in a veil of rain. He didn’t know where he was going, or why, but he thought he ought to take shelter, and began to run clumsily along the brow of a hill towards a distant clump of trees. The mud dragged at him, he had to slow to a walk. Every step was a separate effort, hauling his mud-clogged boots out of the sucking earth. His mind was incapable of making comparisons, but his aching thighs remembered, and he listened for the whine of shells.

When at last he reached the trees, he sat down with his back to the nearest, and for a while did nothing at all, not even wipe away the drops of rain that gathered on the tip of his nose and dripped into his open mouth. Then, blinking, he dragged his wet sleeve across his face.

After a while he got to his feet and began stumbling, almost blindly, between the trees, catching his feet in clumps of bracken. Something brushed against his cheek, and he raised his hand to push it away. His fingers touched slime, and he snatched them back. He turned and saw a dead mole, suspended, apparently, in air, its black fur spiked with blood, its small pink hands folded on its chest.

Looking up, he saw that the tree he stood under was laden with dead animals. Bore them like fruit. A whole branch of moles in various stages of decay, a ferret, a weasel, three magpies, a fox, the fox hanging quite close, its lips curled back from bloodied teeth.

He started to run, but the trees were against him. Branches clipped his face, twigs tore at him, roots tripped him. Once he was sent sprawling, though immediately he was up again, and running, his coat a mess of mud and dead leaves.

Out in the field, splashing along the flooded furrows, he heard Rivers’s voice, as distinctly as he sometimes heard it in dreams:
If you run now, you’ll never stop.

He turned and went back, though he knew the voice was only a voice in his head, and that the real Rivers might equally well have said:
Get away from here.
He stood again in front of the tree. Now that he was calmer, he remembered that he’d seen trees like this before. The animals were not nailed to it, as they sometimes were, but tied, by wings or paws or tails. He started to release a magpie, his teeth chattering as a wing came away in his hand. Then the other magpies, the fox, the weasel, the ferret and the moles.

When all the corpses were on the ground, he arranged them in a circle round the tree and sat down within it, his back against the trunk. He felt the roughness of the bark against his knobbly spine. He pressed his hands between his knees and looked around the circle of his companions. Now they could dissolve into the earth as they were meant to do. He felt a great urge to lie down beside them, but his clothes separated him. He got up and started to get undressed. When he’d finished, he looked down at himself. His naked body was white as a root. He cupped his genitals in his hands, not because he was ashamed, but because they looked incongruous, they didn’t seem to belong with the rest of him. Then he folded his clothes carefully and put them outside the circle. He sat down again with his back to the tree and looked up through the tracery of branches at grey and scudding clouds.

The sky darkened, the air grew colder, but he didn’t mind. It didn’t occur to him to move. This was the right place. This was where he had wanted to be.

By late afternoon Burns’s absence was giving cause for concern. The nurse who’d seen him walk out, wearing his coat, blamed herself for not stopping him, but nobody else was inclined to blame her. The patients, except for one or two who were known to be high suicide risks, were free to come and go as they pleased. Bryce and Rivers consulted together at intervals during the day, trying to decide at what point they should give in and call the police.

Burns came back at six o’clock, walking up the stairs unobserved, trailing mud, twigs and dead leaves. He was too tired to think. His legs ached; he was faint with hunger yet afraid to think of food.

Sister Duffy caught him just as he was opening the door of his room and bore down upon him, scolding and twittering like the small, dusty brown bird she so much resembled. She made him get undressed then and there and seemed to be proposing to towel him down herself, but he vetoed that. She left him alone but came back a few minutes later, laden with hot-water bottles and extra blankets, still inclined to scold, though when she saw how tired he looked, lying back against the pillows, she checked herself and only said ominously that Dr Rivers had been informed and would be up as soon as he was free.

I suppose I’m for it, Burns thought, but couldn’t make the thought real. He folded his arms across his face and almost at once began drifting off to sleep. He was back in the wood, outside the circle now, but able to see himself inside it. His skin was tallow-white against the scurfy bark. A shaft of sunlight filtered through leaves, found one of the magpies, and its feathers shone sapphire, emerald, amethyst. There was no reason to go back, he thought. He could stay here for ever.

When he opened his eyes, Rivers was sitting beside the bed. He’d obviously been there some time, his glasses were in his lap, and one hand covered his eyes. The room was quite dark.

Rivers seemed to feel Burns watching him, because after a few moments he looked up and smiled.

‘How long have I been asleep?’

‘About an hour.’

‘I’ve worried everybody, haven’t I?’

‘Never mind that. You’re back, that’s all that matters.’

All the way back to the hospital Burns had kept asking himself why he was going back. Now, waking up to find Rivers sitting by his bed, unaware of being observed, tired and patient, he realized he’d come back for this.

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