Regeneration (33 page)

The words echoed along the white corridor. Abruptly the dream changed. He was in the electrical room, a pharyngeal electrode in his hand, a man’s open mouth in front of him. He saw the moist, pink interior, the delicately quivering uvula, the
yellowish, gramy surface of the tongue, and the tonsils, like great swollen, blue-purple eggs. He slipped the tongue depressor in, and tried to apply the electrode, but the electrode, for some reason, wouldn’t fit. He tried to force it. The man struggled and bucked beneath him, and, looking down, he saw that the object he was holding was a horse’s bit. He’d already done a lot of damage. The corners of the man’s mouth were raw, flecked with blood and foam, but still he went on, trying to force the bit into the mouth, until a cry from the patient woke him. He sat up, heart pounding, and realized he had himself cried out. For a second the dream was so real that he went on seeing the chair, the battery, the tortured mouth. Then, nothing. Gradually, his heart beat returned to normal, though when he got out of bed and went across to sit by the window the small effort made it pound again.

No raid tonight. It was ironic that on this one quiet night he should have woken himself up with a nightmare. As with all nightmares, the horror lingered. He was still inclined to accuse himself. That, he thought – self-reproach – had been the dominant affect. At first he was inclined to connect it with the quasi-sexual imagery of the dream, for the dream action had been both an accurate representation of Yealland’s treatment and uncomfortably like an oral rape. He didn’t feel, however, that the underlying conflict had been sexual.

The manifest content came from his visit to Queen Square, and was present with relatively little transformation. There was no doubt that the visit had been rife with opportunities for conflict. From the beginning he’d felt a tension between, on the one hand, his sympathy for the patients, his doubts about the quality of the treatment they were receiving, and on the other, the social and professional demands on him to be reasonably polite. As the day had gone on, this conflict had certainly deepened. Over lunch Yealland had told him about an officer patient of his who stammered badly, and whom Yealland had cured in – as usual – one session. Rivers – to his own amusement and exasperation – had responded to the story by beginning to stammer rather badly. And whenever he’d hesitated over a word, he’d sensed Yealland calculating the voltage. All nonsense of course. He’d been more amused by the situation than anything
else, but nevertheless the worsening of his stammer did point to an underlying conflict that might well find expression in a dream.

The man in the corridor with the spinal contracture seemed to represent Sassoon, since he’d quoted the Declaration, though it was difficult to imagine anybody more physically unlike Sassoon than that deformed, pseudo-dwarf. And the expression of antagonism – that certainly didn’t correspond with anything in the real Sassoon’s attitude towards him. But then there was no reason why it should. The dream action is the creation of the dreamer. The mood of this dream, a mood so powerful he could still not shake it off, was one of the most painful self-accusation. The man’s expression need reflect no more than
his
feeling that Sassoon, perhaps, had grounds for antagonism.

He hadn’t been able to see the face of the second patient, and had no clear sense of who it was. The obvious candidate was Callan, since it was Callan he’d watched being treated. And Callan had been working with horses when he became mute, which might account for the bit. And yet he was fairly certain the dream patient had not been Callan.

On the wards he’d been struck by a slight facial resemblance between Callan and Prior, who had also been mute when he arrived at Craiglockhart. He remembered an incident shortly after Prior’s arrival when he’d dragged a teaspoon across the back of his throat, hoping that the choking reflex would trigger the return of speech. This did sometimes happen. He’d seen more than one patient recover his voice in that way. But he’d tried it while in a state of acute irritation with Prior, and the choking had occasioned a momentary spasm of satisfaction. Very slight, but enough to make him feel, in retrospect, discontented with his own behaviour. Mute patients
did
arouse exasperation, particularly, as with both Prior and Callan, when their satisfaction with their condition was hardly at all disguised. Perhaps the dream patient was a composite figure, part Callan, part Prior, the combination suggested by his application of a teaspoon to Prior’s throat and Yealland’s application of an electrode to Callan’s.

But there was no comparison in the amount of pain inflicted. On the face of it he seemed to be congratulating himself on
dealing with patients more humanely than Yealland, but then why the mood of self-accusation? In the dream he stood in Yealland’s place. The dream seemed to be saying, in dream language, don’t flatter yourself. There
is
no distinction.

A horse’s bit.
Not an electrode, not a teaspoon. A bit. An instrument of control. Obviously he and Yealland were both in the business of controlling people. Each of them fitted young men back into the role of warrior, a role they had – however unconsciously – rejected. He’d found himself wondering once or twice recently what possible meaning the restoration of mental health could have in relation to his work. Normally a cure implies that the patient will no longer engage in behaviour that is clearly self-destructive. But in present circumstances, recovery meant the resumption of activities that were not merely self-destructive but positively suicidal. But then in a war nobody is a free agent. He and Yealland were both
locked in
, every bit as much as their patients were.

Bits. The scold’s bridle used to silence recalcitrant women in the Middle Ages. More recently, on American slaves. And yet on the ward, listening to the list of Callan’s battles, he’d felt that nothing Callan could say could have been more powerful than his silence. Later, in the electrical room, as Callan began slowly to repeat the alphabet, walking up and down with Yealland, in and out of the circle of light, Rivers had felt that he was witnessing the
silencing
of a human being. Indeed, Yealland had come very close to saying just that. ‘You must speak, but I shall not listen to anything you have to say.’

Silencing, then. The task of silencing somebody, with himself in Yealland’s place and an unidentified patient in the chair. It was possible to escape still, to pretend the dream accusation was general. Just as Yealland silenced the unconscious protest of
his
patients by removing the paralysis, the deafness, the blindness, the muteness that stood between them and the war, so, in an infinitely more gentle way,
he
silenced
his
patients; for the stammerings, the nightmares, the tremors, the memory lapses, of officers were just as much unwitting protest as the grosser maladies of the men.

But he didn’t believe in the general accusation. He didn’t believe this was what the dream was saying. Dreams were
detailed, concrete, specific: the voice of the protopathic heard at last, as one by one the higher centres of the brain closed down. And he knew who the patient in the chair was. Not Callan, not Prior. Only one man was being silenced in the way the dream indicated. He told himself that the accusation was unjust. It was Sassoon’s decision to abandon the protest, not his. But that didn’t work. He knew the extent of his own influence.

He went on sitting by the window as dawn grew over the Heath, and felt that he was having to appeal against conviction in a courtroom where he himself had been both judge and jury.

23

__________

Head’s room was very quiet. The tall windows that overlooked the square were shrouded in white net. Outside was a day of moving clouds and fitful sunlight, and whenever the sun shone, the naked branches of plane trees patterned the floor. So Head’s patients must sit, hour after hour, with those bright, rather prominent eyes fixed on them, while elsewhere in the house doors banged and a telephone started to ring. But there the normality of the ‘consultation’ ended, for Head would never, not even under the most extreme provocation, have told a
patient
that he was talking a load of self-indulgent rubbish. Rivers opened his mouth to protest and was waved into silence.

‘All right,’ Head swept on. ‘He’s muddle-headed, immature, liable to fits of enthusiasm, inconsistent. All of that. But…
And
he virtually had no father
and
he’s put you in his father’s place.
But
, he’s also’ – ticking off on his fingers – ‘brave, capable of resisting any amount of pressure – the mere fact he protested at all in the present climate tells us that – and above all – no, let me finish – he has
integrity.
Everything you’ve told me about him suggests he was always going to go back, as soon as he knew the protest was useless, simply because there’s no way he can
honourably
stay in Craiglockhart taking up a bed he doesn’t need.’

Rivers smiled. ‘What are friends for if not letting you off the hook?’

‘Well, let me get you off the other hook while I’m about it. You and Yealland doing
essentially the same thing.
Good God, man, if you really believe that it’s the first sign of dementia. I can’t imagine anybody less like Yealland – methods, attitudes, values – everything. The whole attitude to the patient. And in spite of all this
self-laceration
, I can’t help thinking you know that. Who would you rather be sent to if you were the patient?’

‘You.’

Head smiled. ‘No. I don’t say I do a bad job, but I’m not as good with these particular patients as you are.’

‘I suppose I’m worried about him.’

‘Yes. Well…’

‘I think what bothers me more than anything else is this total inability to think about after the war. You see, I think he’s made up his mind to get killed.’

‘All the more reason for you to get it clear whose decision it was that he went back.’ A pause. ‘You know after dinner the other night Ruth was saying how much she thought you’d changed.’

Rivers was looking out of the window.

‘Do you think you have?’

‘I’m probably the last person to know. I can’t imagine going back to the same way of life. But…’ He raised his hands. ‘I’ve been there before. And…’ A little, self-deprecating laugh. ‘Nothing happened.’

‘When was this?’

‘After my second trip to the Solomons.’

Head waited.

‘I don’t know whether you’ve ever had the… the experience of having your life changed by a quite trivial incident. You know, nothing dramatic like the death of a parent, or the birth of a child. Something
so
trivial you almost can’t see
why
it had the effect it had. It happened to me on that trip. I was on the
Southern Cross
– that’s the mission boat – and there was a group of islanders there – recent converts. You can always tell if they’re recent, because the women still have bare breasts. And I thought I’d go through my usual routine, so I started asking questions. The first question was, what would you do with it if you earned or found a guinea? Would you share it, and if so who would you share it
with?
It gets their attention because to them it’s a lot of money, and you can uncover all kinds of things about kinship structure and economic arrangements, and so on. Anyway at the end of this – we were all sitting cross-legged on the deck, miles from anywhere – they decided they’d turn the tables on me, and ask me the same questions. Starting with: What would
I
do with a guinea? Who would I share it with? I explained I was unmarried and that I wouldn’t necessarily
feel obliged to share it with anybody. They were
incredulous.
How could anybody live
like that?
And so it went on, question after question. And it was one of those situations, you know, where one person starts laughing and everybody joins in and in the end the laughter just feeds off itself. They were rolling round the deck by the time I’d finished. And suddenly I realized that
anything
I told them would have got the same response. I could’ve talked about sex, repression, guilt, fear – the whole sorry caboodle – and it would’ve got exactly the same response. They wouldn’t’ve felt a twinge of disgust or disapproval or… sympathy or anything, because it would all have been
too bizarre.
And I suddenly saw that their reactions to my society were neither more nor less valid than mine to theirs. And do you know that was a moment of the most
amazing
freedom. I lay back and I closed my eyes and I felt as if a ton weight had been lifted.’

‘Sexual
freedom?’

‘That too. But it was it was more than that. It was… the
Great White God
de-throned, I suppose. Because we did, we quite unselfconsciously
assumed
we were the measure of all things. That was how we approached them. And suddenly I saw not only that we weren’t the measure of all things, but that
there was no measure.’

‘And yet you say nothing changed?’

‘Nothing changed
in England.
And I don’t know why. I think partly just the sheer force of other people’s expectations.
You
know you’re walking around with a mask on, and you desperately want to take it off and you can’t because everybody else thinks it’s your face.’

‘And now?’

‘I don’t know. I think perhaps the patients’ve… have done for me what I couldn’t do for myself.’ He smiled. ‘You see healing
does
go on, even if not in the expected direction.’

Rivers’s return to Craiglockhart on this occasion was quieter than any previous return had been. There were no boisterous young men playing football with a visitor’s hat; indeed, the whole building seemed quieter, though Brock, whom Rivers sat next to at dinner, said that the change in regime had not been as
striking as had been intended. The wearing of Sam Browne belts was strictly enjoined and offenders relentlessly pursued, but, aside from that, the attempt to run a psychiatric hospital on parade ground lines had been briefly and vociferously tried, then rapidly and quietly abandoned.