Regeneration (8 page)

The dream had not merely posed a problem, it had suggested a solution. ‘Why don’t you try it?’ Henry had said. Rivers felt he’d got there first, that the dream lagged behind his waking practice: he was already experimenting on himself. In leading his patients to understand that breakdown was nothing to be ashamed of, that horror and fear were inevitable responses to the trauma of war and were better acknowledged than suppressed, that feelings of tenderness for other men were natural and right, that tears were an acceptable and helpful part of grieving, he was setting himself against the whole tenor of their upbringing. They’d been trained to identify emotional repression. as the essence of manliness. Men who broke down, or cried, or admitted to feeling fear, were sissies, weaklings, failures. Not
men
. And yet he himself was a product of the same system, even perhaps a rather extreme product. Certainly the rigorous repression of emotion and desire had been the constant theme of his adult life. In advising his young patients to abandon the attempt at repression and to let themselves
feel
the pity and terror their war experience inevitably evoked, he was excavating the ground he stood on.

The change he demanded of them – and by implication of himself – was not trivial. Fear, tenderness – these emotions were so despised that they could be admitted into consciousness only at the cost of redefining what it meant to be a man. Not that Rivers’s treatment involved any encouragement of weakness or effeminacy. His patients might be encouraged to acknowledge their fears, their horror of the war – but they were still expected to do their duty and return to France. It was Rivers’s conviction that those who had learned to know themselves, and to accept their emotions, were less likely to break down again.

In a moment or two an orderly would tap on the door and bring in his tea. He put the notebook and pencil back on the bedside table. Henry would be amused by that dream, he thought. If wish fulfilment had been involved at all, it was surely one of Henry’s wishes that had been fulfilled. At the time of the nerve regeneration experiments, they’d done a series of control experiments on the glans penis, and Henry had frequently expressed the desire for a reciprocal application of ice cubes, bristles, near-boiling water and pins.

6

__________

Prior sat with his arms folded over his chest and his head turned slightly away. His eyelids looked raw from lack of sleep.

‘When did your voice come back?’ Rivers asked.

‘In the middle of the night. I woke up shouting and suddenly I realized I could talk. It’s happened before.’

A Northern accent, not ungrammatical, but with the vowel sounds distinctly flattened, and the faintest trace of sibilance. Hearing Prior’s voice for the first time had the curious effect of making him
look
different. Thinner, more defensive. And, at the same time, a lot tougher. A little, spitting, sharp-boned alley cat.

‘It comes and goes?’

‘Yes.’

‘What makes it go?’

Another shrug from the repertoire. ‘When I get upset.’

‘And coming here upset you?’

‘I’d have preferred somewhere further south.’

So would I. ‘What did you do before the war?’

‘I was a clerk in a shipping office.’

‘Did you like it?’

‘No. It was
boring.
’ He looked down at his hands and immediately up again. ‘What did
you
do?’

Rivers hesitated. ‘Research. Teaching.’

‘Did
you
like it?’

‘Yes, very much. Research more than teaching probably, but…’ He shrugged. ‘I enjoy teaching.’

‘I noticed. “Two l’s in physically, Mr Prior.”’

‘What an insufferable thing to say.’

‘I thought so.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Prior didn’t know what to say to that. He looked down at his hands and mumbled, ‘Yes, well.’

‘By the way, your file arrived this morning.’

Prior smiled. ‘So you know all about me, then?’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t say
that.
What
did
become clear is that you had a spell in the 13th Casualty Clearing Station in…’ He looked at the file again. ‘January. Diagnosed neurasthenic.’

Prior hesitated. ‘Ye-es.’

‘Deep reflexes abnormal.’

‘Yes.’

‘But on that occasion no trouble with the voice? Fourteen days later you were back in the line. Fully recovered?’

‘I’d stopped doing the can-can, if that’s what you mean.’

‘Were there any remaining symptoms?’

‘Headaches.’ He watched Rivers make a note. ‘It’s hardly a reason to stay out of the trenches, is it?
“Not tonight, Wilhelm. I’ve got a headache”
?’

‘It might be. It rather depends how bad they were.’ He waited for a reply, but Prior remained obstinately silent. ‘You were back in the 13th CCS in April. This time unable to speak.’

‘I’ve told you, I don’t remember.’

‘So the loss of memory applies to the later part of your service in France, but the early part – the first six months or so – is comparatively clear?’

‘Ye-es.’

Rivers sat back in his chair. ‘Would you like to tell me something about that early part?’

‘No.’

‘But you do remember it?’

‘Doesn’t mean I want to talk about it.’ He looked round the room. ‘I don’t see why it has to
be
like this anyway.’

‘Like what?’

‘All the questions from
you
, all the answers from
me.
Why can’t it be both ways?’

‘Look, Mr Prior, if you went to the doctor with bronchitis and he spent half the consultation time telling you about his lumbago, you would not be pleased. Would you?’

‘No, but if I went to my doctor
in despair
it might help to know he at least understood the
meaning
of the word.’

‘Are you in despair?’

Prior sighed, ostentatiously impatient.

‘You know, I talk to a lot of people who
are
in despair or very close to it, and my experience is that they don’t
care
what the doctor feels. That’s the whole point about despair, isn’t it? That you turn in on yourself.’

‘Well, all I can say is I’d rather talk to a real person than a a strip of empathic wallpaper.’

Rivers smiled. ‘I like that.’

Prior glared at him.

‘If you feel you can’t talk about France, would it help to talk about the nightmares?’

‘
No.
I don’t think talking
helps.
It just churns things up and makes them seem more real.’

‘But they are real.’

A short silence. Rivers closed Prior’s file. ‘All right. Good morning.’

Prior looked at the clock. ‘It’s only twenty past ten.’

Rivers spread his hands.

‘You can’t refuse to talk to me.’

‘Prior, there are a hundred and sixty-eight patients in this hospital, all of them wanting to get better, none of them getting the attention he deserves. Good morning.’

Prior started to get up, then sat down again. ‘You’ve no right to say I don’t want to get better.’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘You implied it.’

‘All right.
Do
you want to get better?’

‘Of course.’

‘But you’re not prepared to co-operate with the treatment.’

‘I don’t agree with the treatment.’

Deep breath.
‘What methods of treatment do you favour?’

‘Dr Sanderson was going to try hypnosis.’

‘He doesn’t mention it in his report.’

‘He was. He told me.’

‘How did you feel about that?’

‘I thought it was a good idea. I mean
you
’re more or less saying: things are real, you’ve got to face them, but how
can
I face them when I don’t know what they are?’

‘That’s rather an unusual reaction, you know. Generally, when a doctor suggests hypnosis the patient’s quite nervous,
because he feels he’ll be… putting himself in somebody else’s power. Actually that’s not quite true, but it does tend to be the fear.’

‘If it’s not true, why don’t you use it?’

‘I do sometimes. In selected cases. As a last resort. In your case, I’d want to know quite a lot about the part of your war service that you
do
remember.’

‘All right. What do you want to know?’

Rivers blinked, surprised by the sudden capitulation. ‘Well, anything you want to tell me.’

Silence.

‘Perhaps you could start with the day before you went into the CCS for the first time. Do you remember what you were doing that day?’

Prior smiled. ‘Standing up to my waist in water in a dugout in the middle of No Man’s Land being bombed to buggery.’

‘Why?’

‘Good question. You should pack this in and join the general staff.’

‘If there wasn’t a reason, there must at least have been a rationale.’

‘There was that, all right.’ Prior adopted a strangled version of the public school accent. ‘The pride of the British Army requires that absolute dominance must be maintained in No Man’s Land at all times.’ He dropped the accent. ‘Which in
practice
means… Dugout in the middle of No Man’s Land. Right? Every forty-eight hours two platoons crawl out – nighttime, of course – relieve the poor bastards inside, and provide the Germans with another forty-eight hours’ target practice. Why it’s thought they need all this target practice is beyond me. They seem quite accurate enough as it is.’ His expression changed. ‘It was flooded. You stand the whole time. Most of the time in pitch darkness because the blast kept blowing the candles out. We were packed in so tight we couldn’t move. And they just went all out to get us. One shell after the other. I lost two sentries. Direct hit on the steps. Couldn’t find a thing.’

‘And you had forty-eight hours of that?’

‘Fifty. The relieving officer wasn’t in a hurry.’

‘And when you came out you went straight to the CCS?’

‘I didn’t go, I was carried.’

A tap on the door. Rivers called out angrily, ‘I’m with a patient.’

A short pause as they listened to footsteps fading down the corridor. Prior said, ‘I met the relieving officer.’

‘In the clearing station?’

‘No, here. He walked past me on the top corridor. Poor bastard left his Lewis guns behind. He was lucky not to be court-martialled.’

‘Did you speak?’

‘We nodded. Look,
you
might like to think it’s one big happy family out there, but it’s not. They
despise
each other.’

‘You mean you despise yourself.’

Prior looked pointedly across Rivers’s shoulder. ‘It’s eleven o’clock.’

‘All right. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

‘I thought of going into Edinburgh tomorrow.’

Rivers looked up. ‘At
nine.
’

‘I can guess what Graves said. What a fine upstanding man I was until I fell among pacifists. Isn’t that right? Russell used me. Russell wrote the Declaration.’

‘No, he didn’t say that.’

‘Good. Because it isn’t true.’

‘You don’t think you were influenced by Russell?’

‘No, not particularly. I think I was influenced by my own experience of the front. I am capable of making up my own mind.’

‘Was this the first time you’d encountered pacifism?’

‘No. Edward Carpenter, before the war.’

‘You read him?’

‘Read him. Wrote to him.’ He smiled slightly. ‘I even made the Great Pilgrimage to Chesterfield.’

‘You must’ve been impressed to do that.’

Sassoon hesitated. ‘Yes, I…’

Watching him, Rivers perceived that he’d led Sassoon unwittingly on to rather intimate territory. He was looking for a way of redirecting the conversation when Sassoon said, ‘I read a book of his.
The Intermediate Sex.
I don’t know whether you know it?’

‘Yes. I’ve had patients who swore their entire lives had been changed by it.’

‘Mine was. At least I don’t know about “changed”. “Saved”, perhaps.’

‘As bad as that?’

‘At one point, yes. I’d got myself into quite a state.’

Rivers waited.

‘I didn’t seem able to feel… well. Any of the things you’re supposed to feel. It got so bad I used to walk all night sometimes. I used to wait till everybody else was in bed, and then I’d just… get out and walk. The book was a life-saver. Because I suddenly saw that… I wasn’t just a freak. That there was a positive side. Have you read it?’

Rivers clasped his hands behind his head. ‘Yes. A long time ago now.’

‘What did you think?’

‘I found it quite difficult. Obviously you have to admire the man’s courage, and the way he’s… opened up the debate. But I don’t know that the concept of an intermediate sex is as helpful as people think it is when they first encounter it. In the end nobody wants to be
neuter.
Anyway, the point is Carpenter’s pacifism doesn’t seem to have made much impression?’

‘I don’t know if I was aware of it even. I didn’t think much about politics. The next time I encountered pacifism was Robert Ross. I met him, oh, I suppose two years ago. He’s totally opposed to the war.’

‘And that didn’t influence you either?’

‘No. Obviously it made things easier at a
personal
level. I mean, frankly, any middle-aged man who Believed in The War would…’Sassoon skidded to a halt. ‘Present company excepted.’

Rivers bowed.

‘I didn’t even bother showing him the Declaration. I knew he wouldn’t go along with it.’

‘Why wouldn’t he? Out of concern for you?’

‘Ye-es. Yes, that certainly, but… Ross was a close friend of Wilde’s. I suppose he’s learnt to keep his head below the parapet.’

‘And you haven’t.’

‘I don’t like holes in the ground.’

Rivers began polishing his glasses on his handkerchief. ‘You know, I realize Ross’s caution probably seems excessive. To you. But I hope you won’t be in too much of a hurry to dismiss it. There’s nothing more despicable than using a man’s private life to discredit his views. But it’s very frequently done, even by people in my profession. People you might think wouldn’t resort to such tactics. I wouldn’t like to see it happen to you.’