This was what he had not understood, until the war: that all men were of one blood, embedded from king to serf in a perfectly rigid formalism and all quietly abstracting themselves from it. The men did it with fighting and cheap women, the officers with theater and costly ones. Alone in his mind each man knew himself free as a king, while the King alone knew himself enslaved. Alistair felt euphoric. This was the great joke, and until the war he hadn’t got it.
These insights were coming to him continuously, and with terrific effervescence, after yesterday’s god-awful low. He laughed at himself. There was no reason to fret about it: why should one expect to feel the same every day, in a world that was rearranging itself by the hour? He was pleased with this formulation, and said so to himself. He was pleased with . . . in fact no, it was gone—his thoughts were coming so quickly—but no matter. He was pleased with . . . well, he was just pleased.
The doctor called him in after ten minutes. He was a portly man with side whiskers, in a white cotton jacket with gold insignia—the effect, to Alistair’s eye, falling somewhere between avuncular surgeon and cruise ship ma?tre d’. The man remained seated behind his desk, not looking up when Alistair came in.
“Heath?” he said.
“Doctor.”
“Be seated. Nothing the matter, I hope?”
“Nothing,” said Alistair.
“No aches, pains, unscheduled loss of limbs?”
“I find I don’t much care for seafood.”
“Good man,” said the doctor, inking his rubber stamp.
Holding it poised over Alistair’s paper, he looked up for the first time. “And how’s morale?”
“Mine, or the men’s?”
“Isn’t it the same thing?”
“Morale is fine,” said Alistair.
“France, wasn’t it, and then back across from Dunkirk?”
“Awful little town. Not one fish-and-chip shop.”
“No inflections of mood, no irritability, no anxiety?”
“No.”
“Any shell shock, jellification of the spine, malingering hottentottery?”
“Hardly.”
The doctor thumped down his stamp and slid the paper over. “First class. Give this to the C/O when you get back to barracks. I daresay you’ll be posted soon?”
“Looks that way.’
“Good luck. Take quinine if it’s Cairo, take salt if it’s the desert, take precautions if it’s a local girl. Avoid gin unless good tonic is available, smoke no more than one pack, and keep anything made of metal on the outside of your skin. Dismiss.”
“Thank you,” said Alistair, standing.
“Very good.”
Alistair hesitated in the doorway. “There is one thing.”
“Yes?’ The doctor was fanning the papers on his desk, looking for the next fellow’s.
“A few of the chaps I was friendly with . . . well, they didn’t make it back from France. And now . . . well, I do seem to keep myself to myself, rather.”
“Quite right,” said the doctor. “Take it steady until you feel brighter.”
But Alistair still hesitated, wondering if there was a better way to put it. The men were good at calling the war a bastard and laughing at the mess it made of one’s nerves. But it didn’t do to be familiar with the men, and with his brother officers he could not trust himself to keep within bounds. He would find himself coming to, as if from a trance, to hear himself saying something like, “. . . and I didn’t see him after that.” Which imposed on the others the burden of restoring the talk to a more pleasant level. People were good-humored and patient but of course one hated to be a weight, and so he tended to take himself away.
But now he was making a fuss. It was hardly a medical condition, was it? One could live with a little loneliness. Men lived with ruptured gonads, with missing limbs. Men lived with their mothers-in-law, for pity’s sake. He laughed, which was better.
The doctor glanced up at him and sighed. “Look, old man, it’s war. There isn’t a pill. Find a sweet girl and forget it.”
“Thanks,” said Alistair, and went down into the street rather pleased with his prescription. He really ought to pay more attention to the whole business of courting. Even in war you were still more likely to be struck by a woman than by a bullet.
It was noon, which meant he was already late to meet Tom for lunch. He headed for Hyde Park and found that he was hurrying, which was surely a good sign. He hoped he would seem his old self to Tom—that they could pick it up where they had left off. And he was intrigued to finally meet Mary, and this friend Hilda with whom he was to be set up.