The Eye in the Door (8 page)

‘She’d not notice the difference,’ somebody said.

A good-natured scuffle. Then a new voice: ‘Did you hear the one about Lord Albemarle? Went into the Turf, and said…” A desiccated, aristocratic bleat. ‘“Keep reading in the papers about this Greek chap, Clitoris. Anybody know who he is?”’ They all laughed, the younger lad with braying anguish; it was immediately clear his confusion at least equalled Lord Albemarle’s.

Dundas came back with the tea and two very greasy doughnuts.

‘Not for me, thank you,’ Rivers said, patting his stomach. ‘I have to be careful.’

Dundas nodded uncomprehendingly. Obviously duodenal ulcers and having to be careful were a million miles away from his experience. He ate both doughnuts with every sign of relish. Rivers sipped his tea and tried not to think that if Dundas’s medical records were anything to go by (my God, they’d better be!) he could expect to see the doughnuts again before long.

They didn’t talk much. Dundas was too tense, and
Rivers respected his need for silence. When they’d finished, they walked across to the hangars together. Dundas disappeared inside the first hangar for a moment and came back carrying flying helmets, jackets and gauntlets. Rivers put a jacket on and followed Dundas across to the aeroplane.

‘Here she is,’ Dundas said, patting the fuselage. ‘Terrible old bucket. Can’t think why they’ve given us this one.’

Because it’s the one they can best afford to lose, Rivers thought. He’d intended this reflection as a small private joke, but instead it brought him face to face with his own fear.

‘Right,’ Dundas said. ‘If you’d like to hop in.’

Rivers climbed into the observer’s seat and fastened the harness. Dundas bent over him to check the buckles. A faint smile acknowledged the reversal of the usual caring role. ‘All right?’ he said.

‘Fine.’

‘You’ve done a lot of flying, haven’t you?’

‘I don’t know about a lot. Some.’

‘But you’ve done spins and loops and things?’

‘Yes.’

Dundas smiled. ‘That’s all right, then.’

Something about Dundas’s smile held Rivers’s attention. Suddenly, he felt certain Dundas was withholding something, even perhaps concealing it. Not malingering. In fact, rather the reverse. He thought Dundas might be minimizing his symptoms. It wasn’t a good moment for that particular perception to strike.

Dundas pulled his helmet on, climbed in, exchanged a whole series of shouts and waves with the mechanics. The engine stuttered, began to roar, and then they were taxiing away from the hangar.

Rivers looked round him, at hedgerows thick with
blossom, a sky tumultuous with rising larks; then he snapped his goggles into place, and the splendour contracted to a muddy pond.

He was now definitely afraid. The situation might almost be regarded as a small experiment, with himself as the subject. The healthy reaction to fear in a normal human being is the undertaking of some manipulative activity designed to avoid or neutralize the danger. Provided such activity is available, the individual ought to be unaware of feeling fear. But no such activity was available. Like every other man who sits in the observer’s seat, he was entirely dependent on his pilot. And what a pilot. He had long believed that the essential factor in the production of war neurosis among the two most vulnerable groups, observers and trench soldiers, was the peculiarly passive, dependent and immobile nature of their experience. It isn’t often that a hypothesis conceived in the scientist’s cortex is confirmed by his gut, but his gut certainly seemed to be doing its best to prove this one. He bit his lips to control the pain and concentrated hard on the back of Dundas’s head, at the wisps of reddish-gold hair escaping from beneath the helmet, the pink neck, the edge of white scarf, the brown leather of his flying jacket, scuffed and scarred with wear.

‘ALL RIGHT?’ Dundas yelled.

They had reached their take-off position. The engine raced. Rivers felt himself pushed hard back against the vibrating seat. The plane lifted, bumped, lifted again, and then climbed steeply away from the huddle of buildings.

He looked over the side, shielding his mouth from the wind. The countryside stretched below them, grey striations of lanes and roads, the glitter of a pond, great golden swathes of laburnum, a line of hedgerow white with blossom, blue smoke from a bonfire drifting across a field of green wheat.

A movement from Dundas brought him back to the task in hand. Dundas was making a spinning movement with his hand. The comforting roar of the engine faltered, then became an infuriated mosquito whine as the plane started to spin. Dundas’s eyes were fixed on his instruments. Rivers watched the sun revolve in a great spiral round the falling plane. Abruptly, the sun vanished, and the green fields rushed up to meet them. Dundas pulled on the stick, but something was wrong. The horizon was tilted. Rivers leant forward and tilted his hand to the left. Slowly the horizon straightened.

Dundas had lost his sense of the horizontal. Already.

‘HOW WAS IT?’ Rivers yelled.

Dundas waved his hand in an incomprehensible gesture, then put one hand on top of his head and pressed repeatedly, indicating he’d felt his head being squashed into his body. He made the spinning movement again. Rivers shook his head and made a looping movement. After a moment’s hesitation, Dundas’s thumb went up.

The plane banked steeply as Dundas turned and made for the city. He was not meant to do this, and Rivers guessed he was trying to make the flight last as long as possible. In a short time he saw beneath him the sulphurous haze of London. This was the view seen by the German pilots as they came in on moonlit bombing raids, following the silver thread of the Thames, counting bridges, watching for the bulge of the Isle of Dogs.

Rivers tapped Dundas on the shoulder. Dundas turned round and nodded. So much of his face was hidden by the goggles it was impossible to read his expression. Rivers sat back and again concentrated on his own sensations. After the fifth loop he began to feel he was loose in his seat, a reaction he remembered from other flights and knew to be a frequent, though not universal, reaction of healthy fliers. They again came out with one
wing down. Dundas leant over the side and retched, but didn’t vomit. Rivers jerked his thumb at the ground, but Dundas ignored him.

With no idea at all now which manoeuvre to expect, Rivers sat back and tried to relax as the plane climbed. The vast blue haze of London fell away beneath the left wing-tip. Higher and colder. Wisps of cloud hid the sun; columns of shadows flitted rapidly across the city. Rivers felt calm, suddenly. There were worse ways to die, and he’d seen most of them.

Again the engine faltered, giving way to the mosquito whine as the plane began to fall. Dundas came out of the spin, white, giddy, confused and clearly finding it difficult to focus on his instruments. Rivers could see him peering at them. He yelled, ‘DOWN!’ and jerked his finger at the ground. Dundas leant out of the plane and was sick.

They had a bumpy landing, though not worse than many others Rivers had experienced. After the plane had taxied to a halt, Dundas stayed in his seat for a few moments before jumping down. He staggered slightly and held on to the wing. Rivers climbed down and immediately went up to him.

‘I’m all right,’ Dundas said, letting go of the wing.

Two mechanics were walking towards the plane. Dundas turned to them and made some comment on the flight. The three went into a huddle, and Rivers walked to one side. Dundas was smiling and talking cheerfully, but then Dundas was a very good actor.

When he came across to join Rivers, he said, ‘Sorry about that.’

‘Shall we go and sit down?’

Dundas looked towards the canteen, but shook his head. ‘I think I’d just as soon get back, if you don’t mind.’

Rivers’s legs were trembling as they walked back to the car. He was angry with himself for getting into such a state – angry, ashamed and inclined to pretend he’d been less frightened than he knew he had been. He observed this reaction, thinking he was in the state of fatigue and illness that favours the development of an anxiety neurosis, and behaving in the way most likely to bring it about. He was doing exactly what he told his patients not to do: repressing the awareness of fear.

In the car going back to the hospital, Dundas examined his reactions minutely. During the first spin, in addition to the squashed head feeling, he’d felt sick. ‘Not so much sick. More a sort of bulge in my throat. And then during the loop I felt really sick. And faint. The sky went dark.’

‘And in the last spin?’

‘That was terrible. I felt really confused.’

After leaving Dundas in the hospital entrance hall, Rivers went into his room and threw his cap and cane on to the chair. Henry Head came in a moment later. ‘How was he?’

‘Bad.’

‘Sick?’

‘And faint.’

‘Are you all right?’

‘No, I seem to be suffering from terminal stiff upper lip. You know the way I go on about not repressing fear? What did I do?’ He spread his hands.

‘It’s the Public School Factor, Will. We’re all too well trained.’

‘It’s the Silly Old Fool Factor. Too many young men around.’

Head smiled. ‘No, well, I know what you mean. One doesn’t want to seem
totally
decrepit.’

‘I had this sudden sense that Dundas was hiding something. And that didn’t —’

‘He is.’

Rivers looked surprised.

‘He’s got a bottle of Bumstead’s Gleet Cure in his locker.’

‘Has he?’

‘Sister Mitchell noticed it. Syphilis wouldn’t make him go faint, mind.’

‘Lying awake worrying about it might.’ Rivers sat in silence for a moment. ‘Well. Redirects the investigation a bit, doesn’t it?’

‘Makes it a helluva lot simpler.’ Head dropped into a sergeant-major’s baritone. ‘“Show us yer knob, lad.” Are you coming to dinner?’

‘Yes, and then I must dash. I’m supposed to be seeing somebody at eight.’

Rivers had the top floor of a large house near Hampstead Heath. The house was within a hundred yards of the great gun, and there were times when its proximity showed in every line of his face.

Prior arrived exactly on time, and was about to ring the bell when he saw Rivers walking rapidly up the hill.

‘Have you rung?’ Rivers asked, getting out his key.

‘No, I saw you coming.’

Rivers opened the door and stood aside to let Prior in. Mrs Irving, Rivers’s landlady, was hovering in the hall, wanting to complain about the Belgian refugees on the second floor whose failure to understand the extent of the food shortages was making her life a misery. When that subject was exhausted, there were the raids to be discussed. Wasn’t it scandalous they’d been kept awake all night and not a word about it in
The Times?
Then there was her daughter, who’d been summoned back from France, ostensibly because her mother was ill, in fact because she was incapable of sorting out her
servant problems. Girls kept leaving her employ on the flimsy excuse that they could earn five times as much in the munition factories. There was no accounting for modern girls, she said. And Frances was so
moody
.

At last Mrs Irving was called away, by Frances presumably, at any rate by a young woman with braided hair who gave Rivers a cool, amused, sympathetic smile before she closed the door of the drawing-room.

‘I hope she’s letting you live rent free,’ Prior said.

They walked up the stairs together. Rivers paused on the second floor to look down into the garden. The laburnum, he said, was particularly fine. Prior didn’t believe in this sudden interest in horticulture. The pause was to give him time to get his breath back. His chest was tighter than it had been on his last visit, and Rivers would have noticed that. Damn Rivers, he thought, knowing the response was utterly unfair. Whenever he needed Rivers he became angry with him, often to the point where he couldn’t talk about what was worrying him. He mustn’t let that happen tonight.

Normally Prior took a long time to get started, but this evening he was no sooner settled in his chair than he launched into an account of his visit to Mrs Roper. What emerged most vividly was the eye in the door. He reverted to this again and again, how elaborately painted it had been, even to the veins in the iris, how the latrine bucket had been placed within sight of it, how it was never possible to tell whether a human eye was looking through the painted one or not. It was clear from Prior’s expression, from his whole demeanour, that he was seeing the eye as he spoke. Rivers was always sensitive to the signs of intense visualization in other people, since this was a capacity in which he himself was markedly deficient, a state of affairs which had once seemed simple and now seemed very complicated indeed. He switched
his attention firmly back to Prior, asked a few questions about his previous relationship with Mrs Roper, then listened intently to his account of the nightmare. ‘Whose eye was it?’ he asked, when Prior had finished.

Prior shrugged. ‘
I
don’t know. How should I know?’

‘It’s your dream.’

Prior drew a deep breath, reluctant to delve into a memory that could still make his stomach heave. ‘I suppose Towers is the obvious connection.’

‘Had you been thinking about that?’

‘I remembered it when I was in the cell with Beattie. I… I actually saw it for a moment. Then later I remembered I used to go and buy gob-stoppers from Beattie’s shop.’ He paused. ‘I don’t know whether you remember, but when I picked up Towers’s eye, I said, “What shall I do with this gob-stopper?”’

‘I remember.’

A long silence.

Rivers said slowly, ‘When one eye reminded you of the other, was that just the obvious connection? I mean, because they were both eyes?’

Prior produced one of his elaborate shrugs. ‘I suppose so.’

Silence.

‘I don’t know. It
was
in the prison, but later… I don’t know. I knew I was going to have a bad night. You you you just get to know the the feeling. I felt sorry for Beattie. And then I started thinking about William — that’s the son — and… you know, naked in his cell, stone floor, snow outside…’ He shook his head. ‘It was… quite powerful, and I… I
think
I resented that. I resented having my sympathies manipulated. Because it’s nothing, is it?’ A burst of anger. ‘
I lost three men with frost-bite
. And so I started thinking about that, about those men and… It was a way of saying,
“All right, William, your bum’s numb. Tough luck.” Though that’s irrelevant, of course.’ He smiled wryly. ‘It isn’t a suffering competition.’