The Eye in the Door (20 page)

‘Go on. You say you thought –’

‘I thought he was clumsy. And then after this talk I watched him, I watched him at bayonet practice, running in and lunging and…
missing
. You know, the thing’s this big, and he was missing it. And suddenly I realized it was nothing to do with clumsiness. He couldn’t switch off. He couldn’t… turn off the part of himself that minded. I’m quite certain when he finally got the bayonet in, he saw it bleed. And that’s the opposite of what should be happening. You know I saw men once… in close combat, as the manuals say, and one man was reciting the instructions.
Lunge
, one, two:
twist
, one, two,
out
, one, two… Literally, killing by numbers. And that’s the way it has to be. If a man’s properly trained he’ll function on the day almost like an automaton. And Scudder was the opposite of that. Somehow
the whole thing had gone into reverse. I think probably because of the breakdown, because I can see the same sort of thing happening to me. Like red – the colour red – whatever it is, even if it’s a flower or a book – it’s always blood.’

Rivers had gone very still. He waited.

‘When I was out there, I could be in blood up to the elbows, it didn’t bother me. It’s almost as if instead of normal feelings being cut off, there aren’t any divisions left at all. Everything washes into everything else. I don’t know if that makes sense.’

‘Very much so.’

A pause. ‘Anyway, we moved forward. It was raining. I don’t know why I bother to say that. It was always raining. The heavens had opened. And we were told to report to
the graveyard
.’ Manning laughed, a genuine full-blooded laugh. ‘I thought, my God somebody’s developed a sense of humour. But it was absolutely true. We were
billeted
in the graveyard. And it was extraordinary. All the tombs had been damaged by shells and you could see through into the vaults, and this was in an area where there were corpses everywhere. The whole business of collecting and burying the dead had broken down. Wherever you looked there were bodies or parts of bodies, and yet some of the younger ones – Scudder was one – were fascinated by these vaults. You’d come across them lying on their stomachs trying to see through the holes, because the vaults were flooded, and the coffins were floating around. It was almost as if these people were
really
dead, and the corpses by the road weren’t. Any more than we were really alive.

‘We were shelled that night. Three men wounded. I was organizing stretcher-bearers – not easy, as you can imagine – and I’d just finished when Hines walked up and said, “Scudder’s gone.” He’d just got up and walked
away. The other men thought he’d gone to the latrine, but then he didn’t come back. We got together a search-party. I thought he might have fallen into one of the vaults, and we crawled round calling his name, and all the time I knew he hadn’t. I decided to go after him. I know, not what a company commander ought to have done, but I had a very good second in command and I knew he couldn’t have got far. You see, everything was coming forward for the attack, and the road was absolutely choked. I hoped I could get to him before the military police picked him up. He’d have been shot. We were far enough forward for it to count as desertion in the face of the enemy. I was struggling and floundering along, and it really was almost impossible, and then I saw him. He hadn’t got very far. When I caught up with him, he didn’t even look at me. Just went on walking. And I walked beside him and tried to talk to him, and he obviously wasn’t listening. So I just pushed him off the road, and we slithered down and stopped on the rim of a crater. There’s always gas lingering on the water. When you get close your eyes sting. He was blue. And I tried to talk to him. He said, “This is mad.” And I said, “Yes, I know, but we’ve all got to do it.” In the end I simply named people. Men in his platoon. And I said, “
They’ve
got to do it. You’ll only make it harder for them.” In the end he just got up and followed me, like a little lamb.’

Manning stirred and reached for another cigarette. ‘We went forward almost as soon as we got back. The orders were full of words like “trenches” and “attacking positions”. There weren’t any trenches. The attacking position was a line of sticks tied with bits of white ribbon. We were late arriving, and it was getting light. If we hadn’t been late, we’d’ve crawled straight past them in the dark. The “line” was a row of shell-craters,
filled with this terrible sucking mud. And you just crouched beneath the rim, and… waited. We advanced. No close work, but machine-guns directly ahead up the slope. A
lot
of casualties.
A lot
, and no hope of getting them back. It was taking the stretcher-bearers a couple of hours to go a hundred yards. So there we were, crouched in another row of shell-holes exactly like the first. And all hell was let loose. As soon as it died down a bit, I tried to crawl from one hole to another. It took me an hour to crawl between two holes. And in the other hole I found four men, none of them wounded, and I thought, thank God, and then suddenly one of them said, “Where’s Scudder?” Well, there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t move, the shelling was so heavy. And then there was a lull, and we heard a cry. It seemed to be coming from a crater slightly further back, not far, and we crawled along and found him.

‘He’d either slipped or been blown down the slope. Blown, I suspect, because he’d got quite a way in. He was already up to his chest. We tried to get him out, but even forming a line and holding out a rifle we couldn’t reach him. He could just get the tips of his fingers on the butt, but his hands were slippery with mud and they kept sliding off. I could see if we went on trying somebody else was going to slip in. And Scudder was panicking and…
pleading
with us to do something. I have never seen anything like his face. And it went
on
and
on
. He was slipping away all the time, but
slowly
. I knew what I had to do. I got the men lined up and told him we were going to try again, and while he was looking at the others I crawled round the other side, and fired.’ Manning closed his eyes. ‘I missed. And that was terrible, because then he knew what was happening. I fired again, and this time I didn’t miss.

‘We spent the rest of the night there, in that hole. It
was very odd. You know, I don’t think any of the men would have said, “You did the wrong thing. You should have let him die slowly.” And yet nobody wanted to talk to me. They kept their distance.’

A long silence. ‘His mother wrote to me in hospital. To thank me. Apparently Scudder had written to her and told her I’d been kind to him.’

Rivers said firmly, ‘You were.’

Manning looked at him and then quickly away. ‘We were relieved the following night. I reported back to Battalion HQ and they expressed extreme displeasure. Apparently we’d been a bulge in the line. We’d been sitting in the wrong shell-holes. They were having dinner, veal and ham pie and red wine, and suddenly I realized they weren’t even going to offer us a fucking drink. I had Hines with me, he was dead on his feet. So I leant across the table, took two glasses, gave one to Hines and said, “Gentlemen, the King.” And of course they all had to struggle to their feet.’ He laughed. ‘And then we got the hell out of it before they could work out how to put an officer on a charge for proposing the loyal toast. We staggered down that road giggling like a pair of schoolboys. We were still laughing when the shell got us. I got this. Poor old Hines… I crawled across to him. And he looked straight at me and said, “I’m all right, Mum.” And died.’

Rivers stirred. He was about to speak when he heard bugles in the streets. ‘Let’s have the curtains open, shall we?’ he said.

He pulled the heavy curtains back, and grey dawn light flooded into the room. Manning flinched. He got up and joined Rivers by the window, and was just in time to see a taxi drive along the other side of the square. Rivers opened the windows, and the sound of birdsong filled the room.

‘You know,’ Manning said, ‘when Ross told me they sounded the all-clear by driving boy scouts with bugles round the streets in taxis, I didn’t believe him.’

They watched the taxi leave the square. Manning said, ‘I used to find a certain kind of
Englishness
engaging. I don’t any more.’

Sarah was coming. The thought buoyed Prior up as he walked along the Bayswater Road to the underground station. Only when he was on the train, staring sightlessly at his reflection in the black glass, did his thoughts turn to Spragge. He hadn’t seen him face to face since that evening in the park, but he’d suspected more than once that Spragge was following him. Possibly it was just nerves. His nerves
were
bad, and the intolerable sticky heat didn’t help. The gaps in his memory were increasing both in length and frequency, and they terrified him.

Like the undiscovered territory on medieval maps, Rivers said.
Where unknown, there place monsters
. But a better analogy, because closer to his own experience, was No Man’s Land. He remembered looking down a lane in France. The lane had a bend in it, and what was beyond the bend was hidden by a tall hedge. Beyond that was No Man’s Land. Beyond that again, the German lines. Full of men like himself. Men who ate, slept, shat, blew on their fingers to ease the pain of cold, moved the candle closer, strained their eyes to read again letters they already had by heart. He knew that, they all knew it. Only it was impossible to believe, because the lane led to a country where you couldn’t go, and this prohibition
alone meant that everything beyond that point was threatening. Uncanny.

Something about the lifeless air of the underground encouraged morbid thoughts. Above ground, in the relatively cool, coke-smelling air of King’s Cross, he felt more cheerful. Please God, he thought, no gaps while Sarah’s here.

He waited by the barrier, sick with excitement. The train slid to a halt, grunted, wheezed, belched, subsided into a series of disgruntled mutters, and then all along its length doors swung open, and people started to get out. The sheer excitement of knowing he was going to see her stopped him seeing her, and for one terrifying moment all the women on the platform were Sarah. Then his mind cleared, and there was only one woman, walking straight towards him.

He caught her in his arms and swung her off her feet. When, finally, he set her down they stared at each other. He noticed the yellow skin, the dark shadows round her eyes, the fringe of ginger hair which was not her own colour, but some effect of the chemicals she worked with.

‘Well?’ she said.

‘You look beautiful. But then you always do.’

He took her bag and steered her towards the taxi rank.

‘Can’t we go on the underground?’ she said, pulling back.

He looked surprised.

‘I’ve never been on it.’

Her face lit up as she stepped out on to the descending staircase. She was too excited to talk until they were on the train, and had stopped at several stations, and the first novelty of hurtling in a lighted capsule through dark tunnels had worn off. Then she turned to him and said, ‘You look a bit tired. Are you all right?’

‘It’s the heat,’ he said. ‘I haven’t been sleeping well.’

‘You will tonight.’

He smiled. ‘I was hoping not to sleep at all tonight.’

But that was too direct. She smiled but looked away.

‘How’s your mother?’

‘The same. The shop’s not doing too well. No demand for second-hand stuff these days.’

‘What about Dr Lawson’s Cure for Female Blockages and Obstructions? I bet she’s doing a roaring trade in that.’

‘Geraway, man. It’s all sixpenny ticklers these days.’

‘
Is it?
’ Prior asked innocently.

She smiled and eventually laughed.

‘How was your trip home?’ she asked after a while.

‘Not bad. I met a few old friends.’

‘Did you tell your mam about me?’

He hesitated.

‘You didn’t,’ she said.

‘I prepared the ground.’

‘
Billy
. You think she won’t like me, don’t you?’

He knew she wouldn’t. He had a very clear idea of the sort of girl his mother wanted him to marry. One of those green-skinned, titless girls who wore white lawn blouses and remembered their handkerchiefs. The Ministry was full of them. The extraordinary thing was he
did
find them attractive, though not in a way he liked. They woke his demons up, just as surely as making love to Sarah put them to sleep. ‘It’s not that,’ he said.

‘Isn’t it?’ She smiled, and he realized she simply didn’t care. ‘What about your dad?’

‘I don’t tell him anything.’

‘Do you think
he’d
like me?’

He’d never thought about it. As soon as he considered it, he knew his father
would
like her, and she’d like him. She wouldn’t
approve
of the old sod, but she’d get on all
right with him. Instantly the idea of taking her home became even less attractive. ‘There’s plenty of time,’ he said.

Leading her down the steps to the basement he was ashamed of the overflowing bins and the smell, but he needn’t have worried. Sarah was delighted with the flat. He realized, as he took her from room to room, that it could have been twice as dark, twice as stuffy, and she would still have been pleased with it. For two days and nights this would be their home, and that was all that mattered.

She ended the tour sitting on the single bed in his room, unselfconsciously bouncing up and down to test the mattress. Then she looked up and found him watching her, and her face was suffused with a blush that banished the yellow from her skin. His breath caught in his throat, and he swallowed hard. ‘If you’d like to get washed or or bathed, it’s next door.’

‘Yes, I–’

‘I’ll get a towel.’

Prior wished sometimes he didn’t
know
what it was like to be groped, to be pounced on before you’re ready. As he pulled a towel out of the airing cupboard, he heard the bathroom door open and then felt her arms come round him and clasp his chest. She pressed her face between his shoulders, her mouth against his spine. ‘Can you feel this?’ she asked. And she began to groan, deep noises, making his spine and the hollows of his chest vibrate with her breath. He pushed her gently away. ‘You must be tired,’ he said.