Regeneration by Pat Barker Page A

station platform. ‘Knowing you don’t have to be vomited over at every meal. I’d eat out every night if I could afford it.’
    ‘You’ll have to spend some time in the place, Sass.’ No reply. ‘At least you’ve got Rivers.’
    ‘And at least Rivers doesn’t pretend there’s anything wrong with my nerves.’
    Graves started to speak and checked himself. ‘I wish I could say the same about mine.’
    ‘What can I say, Robert? Have my bed. You live with a herd of lunatics. I’ll go back to Liverpool.’
    ‘I hate it when you talk like that. As if everybody who breaks down is inferior. We’ve all been’ – Graves held up his thumb and forefinger – ‘that close.’
    ‘I know how close I’ve been.’ A short silence, then he burst out, ‘Don’t you see, Robert, that’s why I hate the place? I’m frightened.’
    ‘Frightened? You ? You’re not frightened.’ He craned round to see Sassoon’s expression. ‘Are you?’
    ‘Evidently not.’
    They stood in silence for a minute.
    ‘You ought to be getting back,’ Graves said.
    ‘Yes, I think you’re right. I don’t want to attract attention to myself.’ He held out his hand. ‘Well. Give everybody my regards. If they still want them.’
    Graves took the hand and pulled him into a bear hug. ‘Don’t be so bloody stupid, Siegfried. You know they do.’
    Alone and shivering on the pavement, Sassoon thought about taking a taxi and decided against it. The walk would do him good, and if he hurried he could probably make it back in time. He threaded his way through the crowds on Princes Street. Now that Robert was gone, he hated everybody, giggling girls, portly middle-aged men, women whose eyes settled on his wound stripe like flies. Only the young soldier home on leave,staggering out of a pub, dazed and vacant-eyed, escaped his disgust.
    Once he’d left the city behind, he began to relax and swing along as he might have done in France. He remembered the march to Arras behind a limber whose swaying lantern cast huge shadows of striding legs across a white-washed wall. Then… No more walls. Ruined buildings. Shelled roads. ‘From sunlight to the sunless land.’ And for a second he was back there, Armageddon, Golgotha, there were no words, a place of desolation so complete no imagination could have invented it. He thought of Rivers, and what he’d said that morning about finding safety unbearable. Well, Rivers was wrong, people were more corruptible than that. He was more corruptible than that. A few days of safety, and all the clear spirit of the trenches was gone. It was still, after all these weeks, pure joy to go to bed in white sheets and know that he would wake. The road smelled of hot tar, moths flickered between the trees, and when at last, turning up the drive into Craiglockhart, he stopped and threw back his head, the stars burst on his upturned face like spray.
    A nightly bath had become essential to Rivers, a ritual that divided his meagre spare time from the demands of the hospital. He was already pulling his tunic off as he crossed the bedroom. Naked, he sat on the edge of the bath, waiting for it to fill. The hot tap was shiny; the cold, misted over, dewed with drops of condensed steam. Absent-mindedly, he played with the drops, making them run together to form larger pools. He was thinking about Prior, and the effect he was having on his room-mate, Robinson, and wondering whether it was worse than the effect Anderson was having on Featherstone. In any event, no single room was available. One solution to the Prior problem was to move Robinson into a room at present shared by two patients, although if the overcrowding were not to prove intolerable, the patients would have to be very carefully selected. He was still running through possible combinations as he bathed.
    By his bed was the current issue of Man , still in its envelope. He hadn’t managed even to glance through it yet. And suddenly he was furious with the hospital, and