The Ghost Road (28 page)

My nerves are in perfect working order. By which I
mean that in my present situation the only sane thing to do is to run away, and
I will not do it. Test passed?

Yours

Billy Prior

A chilly little note to send to someone who's done so
much for me.
Wrong tone
completely, but there isn't time to get it right.

I daren't think about Sarah.

3 November

We're packed so tight in this cellar my elbow's
constantly being jogged by people on either side. Cigarette smoke stings my
eyes,
I honestly believe if you ran out of fags here you'd
just need to breathe deeply. But I've got enough to last, even after my spasm
of generosity on the canal bank. Which this morning I reread, tore out and
burned. Another canal bank meeting awaits—but this time the sort people approve
of.

Curious day—it seems to have gone on for ever. We had
another briefing at a farmhouse further along the lane. We were greeted by a
little yapping terrier, still a puppy, black and white and full of himself,
tucking one of his legs up as he ran so that at first I thought he was
crippled, but the children in the house said no, he always runs like that. He
quietened down a bit, but then got excited and started yapping again. Winterton
nodded at me, and said, 'We can't have that.'

I shot it myself. I'm proud of that. In the trenches
sometimes you'd be watching through a periscope and you'd see a German
soldier—generally well back in the support lines—walking along believing
himself to be safe, and he'd drop his breeches and settle down for a nice
contented crap. You don't want to shoot him because there's something about the
vulnerability of that bare
arse,
you feel the draught
up your own crack, a moment of basic human empathy. So you point him out to the
sentry and order the sentry to shoot him. That lets everybody off the hook—you
haven't shot him, the sentry has, but only under orders.

But I shot the dog myself. I took him into the barn
holding on to his collar. He knew something bad was going to happen, and he
rolled over on to his back and showed me his puppy-pink tummy and widdled a
bit, quite certain these devices for deflecting aggression would work. I
tickled him behind his ear and said, 'Sorry, old son. I'm human—we're not like
that.'

And I'm glad of the fug of human warmth in here, and
not just because it keeps out the wind and rain. Those who've bagged themselves
seats by the fire have steam rising from their boots and puttees. The rest of
us just wiggle our toes and make do.

Having said I daren't think about Sarah, I think about
her all the time. I remember the first time we met—that ludicrous wrestling
match on a tombstone which in retrospect seems a rather appropriate start for a
relationship so hedged in by death. And before that in the pub, plying her with
port to get her knickers off, and she wanted to talk about Johnny's death and I
didn't want to listen. Loos, she said. I remember standing by the bar and
thinking that words didn't mean anything any more. Patriotism honour courage
vomit
vomit vomit. Only the names meant anything. Mons,
Loos, the Somme, Arras, Verdun, Ypres.

But now I look round this cellar with the candles
burning on the tables and our linked shadows leaping on the walls, and I
realize there's another group of words that still mean something. Little words
that trip through sentences unregarded: us, them, we,
they
,
here, there. These are the words of power, and long after we're gone, they'll
lie about in the language, like the unexploded grenades in these fields, and
any one of them'll take your hand off.

Wyatt sleeps like a baby, except that no baby ever
snored like that. Hoggart's peeling potatoes. Mugs of chlorine-tasting tea
stand round. And somebody's chopping wood and feeding it to the fire, though
it's so damp every fresh stick produces darkness, sizzling, a temporary
shadowing of faces and eyes and then the flames lick round it, and the fire
blazes up again. We need a good fire. Everybody's coughing and wheezing, a
nasty cold going the rounds. I'm starting to feel a tickle in my throat, hot
and shivery at the same time. I think of rats on the canal bank with long naked
tails and the thought of that cold water is definitely not inviting. But we
sing, we tell jokes and every joke told here is funny. Everybody's amazingly
cheerful. The word I'm trying not to use is fey. There
is
an element of that. We all know what the chances are.

And soon I shall turf Wyatt out of that bunk and try
to get some sleep.

Five months ago Charles Manning offered me a job at
the Ministry of Munitions and I turned it down, and said if I was sent back to
France... 'If if if
if—I
shall sit in a dug-out and look back to this afternoon, and I shall think,
"You
bloody
fool."'

I remember sitting on the stiff brocade sofa in his
drawing-room as I said it.

Well, here I am, in what passes for a dug-out. And I
look round me at all these faces and all I can think is: What an utter bloody
fool I would have been not to come back.

CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN

Brown fog enveloped the hospital. Coils of sulphurous
vapour hung in the entrance hall, static, whirled into different patterns
whenever somebody entered or left the building. He'd gone out himself earlier
in the evening to buy a paper from the stand outside Victoria Station, a brisk
ten-minute walk there and back, a chance to get some air into his lungs, though
air these days scorched the throat. The news was good. At any moment now, one
felt, the guns would stop and they would all be released into their private
lives. They all felt it—and yet it almost seemed not to matter. The end that
everybody had longed for was overshadowed by the Spanish influenza epidemic
that had the hospital in its grip. If somebody had rushed along the corridor
now opening doors and shouting, 'The war's over,' he'd have said, 'Oh, really?'
and gone back to writing up notes.

He looked at his watch and stood up.
Time to go up to the ward.

Marsden was trying to catch his eye. He'd had the
impression that morning, during his ward round, that Marsden wanted to ask
something, but had been deterred by the formality of the occasion. Rivers had a
quick word with Sister Roberts—the staffing situation for this duty was
particularly bad—and then went and sat by Marsden's bed, chatting about this
and that while he worked himself up to say whatever it was he wanted to say. It
was quite simple. He'd overheard a junior doctor talking to a colleague at the
foot of his bed and had caught the phrase 'elicited the coital reflex'. Did
this mean
,
Marsden wanted to know, that he would
eventually,
he stressed, hedging his bets, not
now
obviously,
eventually,
be able to have sex again? 'Have sex' was produced in a flat, no nonsense,
all-chaps-together tone. He meant 'make love'. He meant 'have children'. His wife's
photograph stood on his locker. Rivers's neck muscles tensed with the effort of
not
looking
at it. No, he said slowly, it didn't mean that. He explained what it meant.
Marsden wasn't listening, but he needed a smoke-screen of words behind which to
prepare his reaction. He was pleating the hem of the sheet between his
fingertips. 'Well,' he said casually, when Rivers had finished. 'I didn't
really think it meant that.
Just thought I'd ask.'

One incident; one day.

* * *

Faces shadowed by steel helmets, they would hardly
have recognized each other, even if the faint starlight had enable them to see
clearly. Prior, crouching in a ditch beside the
crossroads,
kept looking at the inside of his left wrist where normally his watch would
have been. It had been taken away from him twenty minutes ago to be
synchronized. The usual symptoms: dry mouth, sweaty palms, pounding heart,
irritable bladder, cold feet. What a brutally accurate term 'cold feet' was.
Though 'shitting yourself'—the other brutally accurate term—did
not
apply.
He'd been glugging Tincture of Opium all day, as had several others of the old
hands. He'd be shitting bricks for a fortnight when this was over, but at least
he wouldn't be shitting himself tonight.

He looked again at his wrist, caught Owen doing the
same, smiled with shared irritation,
said
nothing. He
stared at the stars, trying to locate the plough, but couldn't concentrate.
Rain clouds were massing. All we need. A few minutes later a runner came back
with his watch and with a tremendous sense—delusional, of course—of being in
control again he strapped it on.

Then they were moving forward, hundreds of men eerily
quiet, starlit shadows barely darkening the grass. And no dogs barked.

*
* *

The clock at the end of the ward blurred,
then
moved into focus again. He was finding it difficult to
keep awake now that the rounds were done, the reports written and his task was
simply to
be there,
ready for whatever emergencies the night might throw
his way. Sister Roberts put a mug of orange-coloured tea, syrupy with sugar, in
front of him, and he took a gulp. They sat together at the night nurses'
station-there were no night nurses, they were all off with flu—drinking the too
strong, too sweet tea, watching the other end of the ward, where the green
screens had been placed round Hallet's bed. A single lamp shone above his bed
so the green curtains glowed against the darkness of the rest of the ward.
Through a gap between the screens Rivers could see one of the family, a young
boy, fourteen, fifteen years old perhaps, Hallet's young brother, wriggling
about on his chair, bored with the long hours of waiting and knowing it was
unforgivable to be bored.

'I wish the mother would go home and lie down,' Sister
Roberts said. 'She's absolutely at the end
of her
tether.'
A sniff.
'And that girl looks the hysterical type to me.'

She never liked the girls. 'Is she his sister?'

'Fiancée.'

A muttering from behind the screen, but no discernible
words.
Rivers stood
up. 'I'd better have a look.'

'Do you want the relatives out?'

'Please. It'll only take a minute.'

The family looked up as he pushed the screens aside.
They had been sitting round this bed off and on for nearly thirty-six hours,
ever since Hallet's condition had begun to deteriorate. Mrs Hallet, the mother,
was on Hallet's right, he suspected because the family had decided she should
be spared, as far as possible, seeing the left side of Hallet's face. The worst
was hidden by the dressing over the eye, but still enough was visible. The father
sat on the bad side, a middle-aged man, very erect, retired professional army,
in uniform for the duration of the war. He had a way of straightening his
shoulders, bracing himself that suggested chronic back pain rather than a
reaction to the present situation. And then the girl, whose name
was...
Susan, was it? She
sat,
twisting a handkerchief
between her fingers, often with a polite, meaningless smile on her face, in the
middle of the family she had been going to join and must now surely realize she
would not be joining. And the boy, who was almost the most touching of all,
gauche, graceless, angry with everything, his voice sometimes squeaking
humiliatingly so that he blushed, at other times braying down the ward,
difficult, rebellious, demanding attention, because he was afraid if he stopped
behaving like this he would cry.

They stood up when he came in, looking at him in a way
familiar from his earliest days in hospital medicine. They expected him to
do
something. Although they'd been told Hallet was critically ill, they were still
hoping he'd 'make him better'.

Sister Roberts asked them to wait outside and they
retreated to the waiting-room at the end of the main corridor.

He looked at Hallet. The whole of the left side of his
face drooped. The exposed eye was sunk deep in his skull, open, though he
didn't seem to be fully conscious. His hair had been shaved off, preparatory to
whatever operation had left the horseshoe-shaped scar, now healing ironically
well, above the suppurating wound left by the rifle bullet. The hernia cerebri
pulsated, looking like some strange submarine form of life, the mouth of a sea
anemone perhaps. The whole of the left side of his body was useless. Even when
he was conscious enough to speak the drooping of the mouth and the damage to
the lower jaw made his speech impossible to follow. This, more than anything
else, horrified his family. You saw them straining to understand, but they
couldn't grasp a word he said. His voice came in a whisper because he lacked
the strength to project it. He seemed to be whispering now. Rivers bent over
him, listened,
then
straightened up, deciding he must
have imagined the sound. Hallet had not stirred, beyond the usual twitching
below the coverlet, the constant clonus to which his right ankle joint was
subject.