‘I think it must be. Something like that.’
‘So if I could do it and tell myself to remember in theory that would fill in the gaps. All the gaps, because I’d bring all the memories back with me.’
‘I don’t know if that’s the right thing to do.’
‘But in theory it would work.’
‘If you could become sufficiently aware of the process, yes.’
Prior was lost in thought. ‘Is it just remembering?’
‘I don’t think I know what you mean.’
‘If I remember is that enough to heal the split?’
‘No, I don’t think so. I think there has to be a moment of… recognition. Acceptance. There has to be a moment when you look in the mirror and say, yes, this too is myself.’
‘That could be difficult.’
‘Why should it be?’
Prior’s lips twisted. ‘I find some parts of me pretty bloody unacceptable even at the best of times.’
The sadism again. ‘There was nothing I saw or heard last night that would lead me to believe anything… terrible might be happening.’
‘Perhaps you’re just not his type.’
‘“Mister Prior.’”
A reluctant smile. ‘All right.’
Rivers stood up. ‘I think we’ve got as far as we can for the moment. Don’t spend the day brooding, will you? And don’t get depressed. We’ve made a lot of progress. It’ll do you much more good to have a break. Here, you’ll need this.’ Rivers went to his desk, opened the top drawer, and took out a key. ‘I’ll tell the servants to expect you.’
TWENTY
Prior woke with a cry and lay in the darkness, sweating, disorientated, unable to understand why the grey square of window was on his right, instead of opposite his bed as it should have been. He’d been with Rivers for over a fortnight and yet he still had these moments when he woke and couldn’t remember where he was. Footsteps came padding to his door.
‘Are you all right?’ Rivers’s voice.
‘Come in.’ Prior put the lamp on. ‘I’m sorry I woke you.’
‘You cried out. I couldn’t think what it was.’
‘Yes, I know, I’m sorry.’
They looked at each other. Prior smiled. ‘Shades of Craiglockhart.’
‘Yes,’ Rivers said. ‘We’ve done this often enough.’
‘You were on duty then. Go on, get back to bed. You need the rest.’
‘Will you be able to get back to sleep?’
‘Oh, yes, I’ll be all right.’ He looked at Rivers’s exhausted face. ‘And you certainly should. Go on, go back to bed.’
The dream had been about Mac, Prior thought, as the door closed behind Rivers. He couldn’t remember it clearly, only that it had been full of struggling animals and the smell of blood. Rivers seemed to think it was a good sign that his nightmares had moved away from the war, back into his childhood, but they were no less horrifying, and in any case they were still about the war, he knew they were. Rivers made him talk endlessly about his childhood, particularly his early childhood, the rows between his parents, his own fear, the evenings he’d spent at the top of the stairs, listening, words and blows burnt into him till he could bear it no longer, and decided not to be there. He could still not remember what happened in the childhood gaps, though now he remembered that there had been gaps, though only when he was quite small. Once, in sheer exasperation, he’d asked Rivers how he was getting on with his own gap, the darkness at the top of his own stairs, but Rivers had simply smiled and pressed on. One always thought of Rivers as a gentle man, but Prior sometimes wondered why one did. Relentless might have been a better word.
The nightmares, though, were not about the rows between his parents. The nightmares were about Mac. And that was strange because most of his memories of Mac were pleasant.
An expanse of gritty asphalt. A low building with wire cages over the windows. Smells of custard and sweaty socks. The singing lesson, Monday morning, straight after Assembly, with Horton prowling up and down the aisles, swishing his cane against his trouser leg, listening for wrong notes. His taste had run to sentimental ballads, ‘The Lost Chord’ a firm favourite. This was the time Mr Hailes was inculcating a terror of masturbation, with his lectures on Inflamed Organs and the exhaustion which followed from playing with them. Horton sat down at the piano and sang in his manly baritone:
I was seated one day at the organ
Weary and ill at ease.
Prior gave an incredulous yelp of laughter, one or two of the others sniggered, Mac guffawed. The piano faltered into silence. Horton stood up, summoned Mac to the front of the room and invited him to share the joke. ‘Well?’ said Horton. ‘I’m sure we could all do with being amused.’
‘I don’t think you’d think it was funny, sir.’
Mac was savagely caned. Prior was let off. Horton had heard Prior laugh too, he was sure of it, but Prior, thanks to his mother’s skrimping and saving, was always well turned out. Shirts ironed, shoes polished, he looked like the sort of boy who might get a scholarship, as indeed he did, thanks partly to Father Mackenzie’s more robust approach to organ playing. Bastard, Prior thought, as Horton’s arm swung.
Years later, after witnessing the brutalities of trench warfare, he still thought: Bastard.
At the time he had been determined on revenge. Angrier on Mac’s behalf than he would ever have been on his own.
Horton was a man of regular habits. Precisely twenty minutes before the bell rang for the end of the dinner break, he could be seen trekking across the playground to the masters’ lavatory. Not for him the newspaper the boys had to make do with. Bulging from one side of his jacket, like a single tit, was a roll of toilet-paper. He marched across the yard with precise military tread, almost unnoticed by the shouting and running boys. Humour in the playgrpund was decidedly scatological, but Horton’s clockwork shitting was too old a joke to laugh at.
One dinnertime, posting Mac where he could see the main entrance to the school, Prior went in on a recce. Next day he and Mac slipped into the lavatory and locked the door of one of the cubicles. Prior lit a match, applied it to the wick of a candle, shielded the flame with both hands until it burned brightly, and fixed it in its own wax to a square of plywood.
Prompt to the minute, Mr Horton entered. He was puzzled by the locked cubicle. ‘Mr Barnes?’
Prior produced a baritone grunt of immense effort and Horton said no more. Not even that constipated grunt tempted them to giggle. Horton’s beatings were no laughing matter. They waited in silence, feeling the rise and fall of each other’s breath. Then, slowly, Prior lowered the candle into the water that ran beneath the lavatory seat. It was one long seat, really, though the cubicles divided it. The candle flickered briefly, but then the flame rose up again and burnt steadily. Prior urged it along the dark water, and it bobbed along, going much faster than he’d thought it would. Mac was already unbolting the door. They ran across the playground, to where a game of High Cockalorum was in progress (by arrangement) and hurled themselves on top of the heap of struggling boys.
Behind them, candle flame met arse. A howl of pain and incredulity, and Horton appeared, gazing wildly round him. No use him looking for signs of guilt. He inspired such terror that guilt was written plain on every one of the two hundred faces that turned towards him. In any case there was dignity to be considered. He limped across the playground and no more was heard.
Once he was safely out of sight, Prior and Mac went quietly round the corner to the forbidden area by the pile of coke and there they danced a solemn and entirely silent dance of triumph.