The Ghost Road Read Free

in. Prior sat listening to the murmur of voices, thinking what bloody
awful luck it was to have got Mather. Some MOs would send a corpse back
if you propped one up in front of them, particularly now when every man was
needed for the latest in a long line of 'one last pushes'. Abruptly, before he
was ready, the door opened and Owen came out. Owen started to speak and then,
realizing the Board's secretary had followed him, raised a thumb instead. From
which Prior concluded that Owen's chances of ending the year deaf, blind, dumb,
paralysed, doubly incontinent, insane, brain damaged or—if he were lucky—just
plain dead had enormously increased. We're all mad here, he thought, following
the secretary into the room, saluting, sitting down in the solitary chair
facing the long table, meeting every eye confidently but not too confidently. And really, amidst the general insanity, was it fair to penalize a
man merely because in conditions of extreme stress he tended to develop two
separate personalities? You could argue the army was getting a bargain.
    After the first few questions he began to relax. They
were concentrating on his asthma and the risks of exposure to gas, and to those
questions he had one totally convincing answer: he had been out to France three
times and on none of these occasions had he been invalided back to base or home
to England because of asthma. Trench fever, yes; wound, yes; shell-shock, yes. Asthma, no.
    When the last question had been asked and answered,
Mitchell drew the papers together in front of him, and patted them into shape.
Prior watched the big white hands with their sprinkling of age spots and the
shadowing of hair at the sides.
    'Right,' Mitchell said at last. 'I think that's all...'
    The pause was so long Prior began to wonder whether he would ever speak again.
    'Your asthma's worse than you're letting on, isn't
it?' He tapped the discharge report. 'According to this
anyway.'
    'It was bad at Craiglockhart, sir. But I can honestly say it was
worse there than it ever was in France.'
    'Well,' Mitchell said. 'Results posted this
afternoon.' He smiled briskly. 'You won't have long to wait.'

 
    CHAPTER
TWO
     
    Crude copies of Tenniel's drawings from Alice in
Wonderland decorated one end of Ward Seven, for in peacetime this
had been a children's hospital. Alice, tiny enough to swim in a sea of her own
tears; Alice, unfolding like a telescope till she was nine feet tall; Alice,
grown so large her arm protruded from the window; and, most strikingly, Alice
with the serpent's neck, undulating above the trees.
    Behind Rivers, a creaking trolley passed from bed to
bed: the patients' breakfast dishes were being cleared away.
    'Come on, Captain McBride, drink up,' Sister Roberts
said, crackling past. 'We've not got all day, you know.'
    This was said loudly, for his benefit. He'd arrived
on the ward too early, before they were ready for him.
    'You knew him, didn't you?' Elliot Smith said, coming
up to him, looking over his shoulder.
    Rivers looked puzzled.
    'Lewis Carroll.'
    'Oh, yes. Yes.'
    'What was he like?'
    Rivers spread his hands.
    'Did you like him?'
    'I think I wanted him very much to like me. And he
didn't.' A slight smile. 'I'm probably the last person
to ask about him.'
    Elliot Smith pointed to the snake-neck. 'That's
interesting, isn't it?'
    'Ready now, Captain Rivers,' Sister Roberts said. They
watched her march off.
    '"Captain" ' Elliot Smith murmured.
    'I'm in the dog house,' Rivers said. 'I only get
"Dr" when she approves of me.'
    Behind the screens Ian Moffet lay naked from the waist
down. He looked defiant, nervous, full of fragile,
ungrounded pride. His skin had a greenish pallor, though that might merely be
the reflection of light from the green screens that surrounded his bed,
creating a world, a rock pool full of secret life. Rivers pushed one screen
back so that light from the window flooded in. Now Moffet's legs, stretched out
on the counterpane, were the dense grey-white of big,