Regeneration Trilogy 02 - The Eye in the Door Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE EYE IN THE DOOR

  ‘Constantly surprising. Superb’ A. S. Byatt

  ‘A humane, compassionate study of the pain to which people subject

  themselves’ Jonathan Coe

  ‘A startlingly original work of fiction. Spellbinding’ Sunday Telegraph

  ‘A sequel every bit as unwaveringly intense and intelligent as its

  predecessor’ Sunday Times

  ‘Gripping, moving, beautifully constructed and profoundly intelligent.

  It has revelatory – and still relevant – things to say about Britain, yet it

  is bursting with energy and darkly funny’ Independent on Sunday

  ‘The Eye in the Door is, in every way, an inventive, original and

  individual book’ Philip Hensher, Guardian

  ‘Shockingly good: as powerful an indictment of the First World War

  as the earlier novel’ New Statesman

  ‘The sequel to the dazzling and disturbing Regeneration is exhilaratingly

  readable; an original and impressive achievement’

  The Times Literary Supplement

  ‘A novel of formidable energy and integrity. It confirms Barker’s status

  as one of the most rewarding writers to have emerged in recent years’

  London Review of Books

  ‘In a narrative of rare power, Barker displays enormous respect for

  language itself. This is a brave, honest book’ Irish Times

  ‘One of the strongest and most interesting novelists of her generation’

  Guardian

  ‘Few English writers now can match Barker’s narrative poise, and she

  remains peerless in her articulation of the unspoken word’ Observer

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Pat Barker was born in Thornaby-on-Tees in 1943. She was educated at the London School of Economics and has been a teacher of history and politics. Her books include Union Street (1982), winner of the 1983 Fawcett Prize, which has been filmed as Stanley and Iris; Blow Your House Down (1984); Liza’s England (1986), formerly The Century’s Daughter; The Man Who Wasn’t There (1989); the highly acclaimed Regeneration trilogy, comprising Regeneration, The Eye in The Door, winner of the 1993 Guardian Fiction Prize, and The Ghost Road, winner of the 1995 Booker Prize for Fiction and Another World. Her latest novel is Life Class.

  Pat Barker is married and lives in Durham.

  PAT BARKER

  THE EYE IN THE DOOR

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Viking 1993

  First published in Penguin Books 1994

  This edition published 2008

  1

  Copyright © Pat Barker, 1993

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

  to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

  re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s

  prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in

  which it is published and without a similar condition including this

  condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  978-0-14-190644-7

  For David

  It was on the moral side, and in my own person, that I learned to recognize the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both…

  The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

  – R. L. Stevenson

  PART ONE

  ONE

  In formal beds beside the Serpentine, early tulips stood in tight-lipped rows. Billy Prior spent several moments setting up an enfilade, then, releasing his companion’s arm, seized an imaginary machine-gun and blasted the heads off the whole bloody lot of them.

  Myra stared in amazement. ‘You barmy bugger.’

  He shook his head sadly. ‘Five months in a loony bin last year.’

  ‘Go on.’

  She didn’t believe him, of course. Smiling, he came back and offered her his arm. They had been wandering along beside the lake for an hour, but now the afternoon was waning. A coppery light, more like autumn than spring, slanted across the grass, turning the thorned twigs of rose bushes into strips of live electric filament that glowed, reddish, in the dusk.

  Prior, always self-conscious, was aware of approving glances following them as they passed. They made a romantic picture, he supposed. The girl, young and pretty, clinging to the arm of a man in uniform, a man, moreover, wearing a greatcoat so grotesquely stained and battered it had obviously seen a good deal of active service. As indeed it had, and was about to see more, if only he could persuade the silly bitch to lie on it.

  ‘You’re cold,’ he said tenderly, unbuttoning the greatcoat. ‘Put your hand in here. You know, we’d be warmer under the trees. We’d be out of the wind.’

  She paused, doubtfully, for by the lake it was still light, whereas the avenue of trees he was pointing to smoked darkness. ‘All right,’ she said at last.

  They set off across the grass, their shadows stretching ahead of them, black, attenuated figures that reached the trees and began to climb before they were anywhere near. In the darkness they leant against the trunk of one of the trees and started to kiss. After a while she moaned, and her thighs slackened, and he pressed her back against the fissured bark. His open greatcoat shielded them both. Her hands slid round him, underneath his tunic, and grasped his buttocks, pulling him hard against her. She was tugging at his waistband and buttons and he helped her unfasten them, giving her free play with his cock and balls. His hands were slowly inching up her skirt. Already he’d found the place where the rough stockings gave way to smooth skin. ‘Shall we lie down?’

  Her hands came up to form a barrier. ‘What, in this?’

  ‘You’ll be warm enough.’

  ‘I bloody won’t. I’m nithered now.’ To emphasize the point she pressed her hands into her armpits and rocked herself.

  ‘All right,’ he said, his voice hardening. ‘Let’s go back to the flat.’ He’d wanted to avoid doing that, because he knew his landlady would be in, and watching.

  She didn’t look at him. ‘No, I think I’d better be getting back.’

  ‘I’ll take you.’

  ‘No, I’d rather say goodbye here, if you don’t mind. Me mother-in-law lives five doors down.�
�

  ‘You were keen enough the other night.’

  Myra smiled placatingly. ‘Look, I had a woman come nosying round. The voluntary police, you know? They can come into your house, or anything, they don’t have to ask. And this one’s a right old cow. I knew her before the war. She was all for women’s rights. I says, “What about my rights? Aren’t I a woman?” But there’s no point arguing with ‘em. They can get your money stopped. And anyway it isn’t right, is it? With Eddie at the Front?’

  Prior said in a clipped, authoritative voice, ‘He was at the Front on Friday night.’ He heard the note of self-righteousness, and saw himself, fumbling with the fly buttons of middle-class morality. Good God, no. He’d rather tie a knot in it than have to live with that image. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I’ll walk you to the station.’

  He strode towards Lancaster Gate, not caring if she followed or not. She came trotting breathlessly along beside him. ‘We can still be friends, can’t we?’

  He felt her gaze on his face.

  ‘Can’t we?’

  He stopped and turned to face her. ‘Myra, you’re the sort of girl who ends up in a ditch with her stockings round her neck.’

  He walked on more slowly. After a while, her hand came creeping through his arm, and, after a moment’s hesitation, he left it there.

  ‘Have you got a girl?’ she said.

  A brief struggle. ‘Yes.’

  She nodded, satisfied. ‘Thought you had. Lying little git, aren’t you? Friday night, you said you hadn’t.’

  ‘We both said a bellyful on Friday night.’

  At the underground station he bought her ticket, and she reached up and kissed his cheek as if nothing had happened. Well, he thought, nothing had happened. On the other side of the barrier she turned, and looked as if she might be regretting the evening they’d planned, but then she gave a little wave, stepped out on to the moving staircase and was carried smoothly away.

  Outside the station he hesitated. The rest of the evening stretched in front of him and he didn’t know what to do. He thought about going for a drink, but rejected the idea. If he started drinking as early as this and in this mood, he’d end up drunk, and he couldn’t afford to do that; he had to be clear-headed for the prison tomorrow. He drifted aimlessly along.

  It was just beginning to be busy, people hurrying to restaurants and bars, doing their best to forget the shortages, the skimped clothes, the grey bread. All winter, it seemed to Prior, an increasingly frenetic quality had been creeping into London life. Easily justified, of course. Soldiers home on leave had to be given a good time; they mustn’t be allowed to remember what they were going back to, and this gave everybody else a magnificent excuse for never thinking about it at all.

  Though this week it had been difficult to avoid thinking. Haig’s April 13th Order of the Day had appeared in full in every newspaper. He knew it off by heart. Everybody did.

  There is no other course open to us but to fight it out. Every position must be held to the last man: there must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight on to the end.

  Whatever effect the Order had on the morale of the army, it had produced panic among civilians. Some women, apparently, were planning in all seriousness how they should kill themselves and their children when the Germans arrived. Those atrocity stories from the first months of the war had done the trick. Rather too well. Nuns with their breasts cut off. Priests hung upside-down and used as clappers to ring their own bells. Not that there hadn’t been atrocities, but prisoners of war were always the main victims, and the guilt was more evenly distributed than the press liked to think.

  There were times – and tonight was one of them – when Prior was made physically sick by the sight and sound and smell of civilians. He remembered the stench that comes off a battalion of men marching back from the line, the thick yellow stench, and he thought how preferable it was to this. He knew he had to get off the streets, away from the chattering crowds and the whiffs of perfume that assaulted his nostrils whenever a woman walked past.

  Back in the park, under the trees, he began to relax. Perhaps it was his own need that coloured his perceptions, but it seemed to him that the park on this spring evening was alive with desire. Silhouetted against the sunset, a soldier and his girl meandered along, leaning against each other so heavily that if either had withdrawn the other would have fallen. It made him think of himself and Sarah on the beach in Scotland, and he turned away sharply. No point thinking about that. It would be six weeks at least before he could hope to see her again. Further along towards Marble Arch the figures were solitary. Army boots tramped and slurred along the paths or, in the deepest shadow, jetted sparks.

  He sat on a bench and lit a cigarette, still trying to decide what to do with the stump of his evening. He needed sex, and he needed it badly. Tossing off was no use, because… because it was no use. Prostitutes were out because he didn’t pay. He remembered telling Rivers, who’d been his doctor at Craiglockhart War Hospital, the ‘loony bin’ where he’d spent five months of the previous year, about a brothel in Amiens, how the men, the private soldiers, queued out on to the pavement and were allowed two minutes each. ‘How long do officers get?’ Rivers had asked. ‘I don’t know,’ Prior had said. ‘Longer than that.’ And then, spitting the words, ‘I don’t pay.’ No doubt Rivers had thought it rather silly, a young man’s ridiculous pride in his sexual prowess, his ability to ‘get it’ free. But it was nothing to do with that. Prior didn’t pay because once, some years ago, he had been paid, and he knew exactly how the payer looks to the one he’s paying.

  ‘Got a light?’

  Automatically, Prior began tapping his pockets. At first he hardly registered the existence of the speaker, except as an unwelcome interruption to his thoughts, but then, as he produced the matches, some unconsciously registered nervousness in the other man’s voice made him look up. He had been going to offer the box, but now he changed his mind, took out a match and struck it himself. The rasp and flare sounded very loud. He cupped his hands to shield the flame, and held it out as the other bent towards it. An officer’s peaked cap, dark eyes, a thin moustache defining a full mouth, the face rounded, though not fat. Prior was sure he knew him, though he couldn’t remember where he’d seen him before. When the cigarette was lit, he didn’t immediately move off, but sat further along the bench, looking vaguely around him, the rather prominent Adam’s apple jerking in his throat. His left leg was stretched out awkwardly in front of him, presumably the explanation of the wound stripe on his sleeve.

  Prior could see the problem. This wasn’t exactly the right area, though it bordered upon it, and his own behaviour, though interesting, had not been definitely inviting. He was tempted to tease. Instead he moved closer and said, ‘Have you anywhere to go?’

  ‘Yes.’ The man looked up. ‘It’s not far.’

  The square contained tall, narrow, dark houses, ranged round a fenced-off lawn with spindly trees. The lawn and the surrounding flowerbeds were rank with weeds. Further along, on the right, a bomb had knocked out three houses and partially demolished a fourth, leaving a huge gap. They walked along, not talking much. As they approached the gap, the pavement became gritty beneath their feet, pallid with the white dust that flowed so copiously from stricken houses and never seemed to clear, no matter how carefully the ruin was fenced off. Prior was aware of a distinct sideways pull towards the breach. He’d felt this before, walking past other bombed sites. He had no idea whether this sideways tug was felt by everybody, or whether it was peculiar to him, some affinity with places where the established order has been violently assailed.

  They stopped in front of No. 27. The windows were shuttered. A cat, hunched and defensive, crouched on the basement steps, growling over something it had found.

  Prior’s companion was having trouble with the lock. ‘Part of the damage,’ he said over his shoulder, pulling a face. He jabbed the door with his sh
oulder, then seized the knob and pulled it towards him. ‘It works if you pull, I keep forgetting that.’

  ‘Not too often, I hope,’ said Prior.

  His companion turned and smiled, and for a moment there was a renewed pull of sexual tension between them. He took off his cap and greatcoat, and held out his hand for Prior’s. ‘The family’s in the country. I’m staying at my club.’ He hesitated. ‘I suppose I’d better introduce myself. Charles Manning.’

  ‘Billy Prior.’

  Covertly, they examined each other. Manning had a very round head, emphasized by thick, sleek dark hair which he wore brushed back with no parting. His eyes were alert. He resembled some kind of animal, Prior thought, an otter perhaps. Manning saw a thin, fair-haired man, twenty-three or four, with a blunt-nosed, high-cheekboned face and a general air of picking his way delicately through life. Manning pushed open a door on the left, and a breath of dead air came into the hall. ‘Why don’t you go in? I won’t be a minute.’

  Prior entered. Tall windows shuttered, furniture shrouded in white sheets. A heavy smell of soot from the empty grate. Everything was under dust-sheets except the tall mirror that reflected, through the open door, the mirror in the hall. Prior found himself staring down a long corridor of Priors, some with their backs to him, none more obviously real than the rest. He moved away.

  ‘Would you like a drink?’ Manning asked from the door.

  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘Whisky all right?’

  ‘Fine.’

  Alone, Prior walked across to the grand piano, lifted the edge of the dust-sheet and found himself looking at a photograph of a woman with two small boys, one of them clutching a sailing boat to his chest.

  When Manning came back, carrying a whisky bottle, a jug and two glasses, Prior was staring at a crack above the door. ‘That looks a bit ominous,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, doesn’t it? I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about it, really. One can’t get workmen, so I just come in and look at it now and then.’ He held up the jug. ‘Water?’