Free The Eye in the Door by Pat Barker Page B

wanting to complain about the Belgian refugees on the second floor whose failure to understand the extent of the food shortages was making her life a misery. When that subject was exhausted, there were the raids to be discussed. Wasn’t it scandalous they’d been kept awake all night and not a word about it in The Times? Then there was her daughter, who’d been summoned back from France, ostensibly because her mother was ill, in fact because she was incapable of sorting out herservant problems. Girls kept leaving her employ on the flimsy excuse that they could earn five times as much in the munition factories. There was no accounting for modern girls, she said. And Frances was so moody .
    At last Mrs Irving was called away, by Frances presumably, at any rate by a young woman with braided hair who gave Rivers a cool, amused, sympathetic smile before she closed the door of the drawing-room.
    ‘I hope she’s letting you live rent free,’ Prior said.
    They walked up the stairs together. Rivers paused on the second floor to look down into the garden. The laburnum, he said, was particularly fine. Prior didn’t believe in this sudden interest in horticulture. The pause was to give him time to get his breath back. His chest was tighter than it had been on his last visit, and Rivers would have noticed that. Damn Rivers, he thought, knowing the response was utterly unfair. Whenever he needed Rivers he became angry with him, often to the point where he couldn’t talk about what was worrying him. He mustn’t let that happen tonight.
    Normally Prior took a long time to get started, but this evening he was no sooner settled in his chair than he launched into an account of his visit to Mrs Roper. What emerged most vividly was the eye in the door. He reverted to this again and again, how elaborately painted it had been, even to the veins in the iris, how the latrine bucket had been placed within sight of it, how it was never possible to tell whether a human eye was looking through the painted one or not. It was clear from Prior’s expression, from his whole demeanour, that he was seeing the eye as he spoke. Rivers was always sensitive to the signs of intense visualization in other people, since this was a capacity in which he himself was markedly deficient, a state of affairs which had once seemed simple and now seemed very complicated indeed. He switchedhis attention firmly back to Prior, asked a few questions about his previous relationship with Mrs Roper, then listened intently to his account of the nightmare. ‘Whose eye was it?’ he asked, when Prior had finished.
    Prior shrugged. ‘ I don’t know. How should I know?’
    ‘It’s your dream.’
    Prior drew a deep breath, reluctant to delve into a memory that could still make his stomach heave. ‘I suppose Towers is the obvious connection.’
    ‘Had you been thinking about that?’
    ‘I remembered it when I was in the cell with Beattie. I… I actually saw it for a moment. Then later I remembered I used to go and buy gob-stoppers from Beattie’s shop.’ He paused. ‘I don’t know whether you remember, but when I picked up Towers’s eye, I said, “What shall I do with this gob-stopper?”’
    ‘I remember.’
    A long silence.
    Rivers said slowly, ‘When one eye reminded you of the other, was that just the obvious connection? I mean, because they were both eyes?’
    Prior produced one of his elaborate shrugs. ‘I suppose so.’
    Silence.
    ‘I don’t know. It was in the prison, but later… I don’t know. I knew I was going to have a bad night. You you you just get to know the the feeling. I felt sorry for Beattie. And then I started thinking about William — that’s the son — and… you know, naked in his cell, stone floor, snow outside…’ He shook his head. ‘It was… quite powerful, and I… I think I resented that. I resented having my sympathies manipulated. Because it’s nothing, is it?’ A burst of anger. ‘ I lost three men with frost-bite .