Richard Temple. Patrick O’Brian

Richter had given him a handkerchief once, and lumps of bread at several times – two sugar cubes, and an aspirin. God only knew how this sympathy had grown up: they had not exchanged five intelligible words.

      Perhaps the man’s son had been killed. Perhaps his whole family had been wiped out in an air-raid. Temple had no idea of how the war was going. It had been bogged down in Italy when he had been taken; there had seemed no reason why it should ever stop. But he did know that Germany and German Europe was being bombed with tremendous force: even this place had been raided. That was long ago, however, and since those few whistling bombs he had heard nothing: the only sounds of war here were the shrieks of men, a terrible howling, and sometimes the volley of the firing-squad. He had heard other prisoners tapping out messages, at rare intervals, but he had never been able to understand them – he had not even tried very hard, all his energies being used up in his own struggle. Besides, he was not very intelligent, not sharply intelligent, clever and resourceful. His training and the habit of his mind was that of a painter, not called upon to make an intellectual response, and although in this school of war he had learnt to use his brain he still had to keep all his powers for the main issue. His chief quality was that particular sort of endurance that is necessary for a painter, an endurance not incompatible with emotional instability and a tendency to out-run the common range of feeling.

      Richter had given him a piece of meat. It was unlikely to have been in the soup to begin with, though indeed the soup was less disgusting, less rancid than usual. It was made of swedes, stringy cubes filled with an insipid pulp that crushed out, leaving fibre to be chewed. This bloated a man’s stomach, leaving him with a morbid longing for something hard; but today he had this bone and meat, so large that it took several minutes to get it down. The thought of Richter made a disturbance in his mind, however, and it did not die away very soon.

      Now he lay with the meal inside him, as nearly satisfied as he was ever likely to be in a German prison, and he began to compose himself for his long pause. He had learnt that after this meal there was a space of time in which he would be left in the most profound silence, and some internal clock enabled him to measure this period with great accuracy. At all other times he had to keep his attention on the stretch not to be taken unawares: they might come at any other period in the day, and he must have at least a moment’s warning. And although this continual watching was by now almost wholly unconscious (and today irrational) still it was wearing, and still, like an officious dog that could not understand that its zeal was out of place today, it could prevent him from making a total escape. But during this particular time, and above all on this particular day, he could withdraw his sentries, or watch them withdrawing of themselves, and now he could lie still, profoundly still – a stone at the bottom of a well.

      He was neither in ebullience now nor in a marked reaction: he was quiet, and his thoughts were ranging to and fro with an extraordinary and, as it were, a ‘civilian’ liberty, picking up unrelated incidents, visual images, snatches of action and dialogue, colours and the smell of things. He was standing in the rain, a drizzle that swept gently past the street lights in a drifting haze. The black camber of the road shone in the wet, and on his right the Thames flowed continually, black too, but its surface curled with strange unevenness. Before him the embankment lights ran away in a curve that made tears come into one’s eyes, and in the distance a lighted train and its reflection crossed the bridge. A few rare lorries ran fast on the broad road, their headlights driving cones into the mist: a half-seen line of barges slipped down the river on the other side, passing one by one through the red pool of a neon sign. He had been waiting for an hour in anxiety and doubt, and when he saw her coming, hurrying under the pavement lights, his heart lifted up and beat; his whole being was filled with a delighted, fragile elation, and he ran.

      What was her name? Even now he could see her mouth held up and her happy face: there was rain on her hair, innumerable globules of rain like dew, and her mackintosh crinkled under his hands – the fragility of her shoulders under it. But what was her name?

      Then it seemed to him that the young man’s name was as unknown to him now as the girl’s – the young man who had stood there, loving so much in the rain. But if there really was a chance of his living through, he thought, it was essential to re-establish a contact, some conviction of continuity, with that fellow, before it was too late. His sense of realities was damaged and uncertain, and although that had not mattered yesterday, when he might just as well have been a meaningless figure, a gratuitous act in a vacuum, yet now he was to fish up the line that linked himself to himself. Perhaps it was not necessary – perhaps it was not only rhetoric but presumptuous nonsense – but at least today, in celebration of a private victory, he would indulge in preparation for real life: he would determine who he was, and how he came to be that way. He would remember his past.

      It was not easy to see the connection: it was not a connection that was obvious to him. Prison had acted like a forcing-house on his intelligence and cunning; he had been comparatively stupid, slow, unthinking, before he had been caught. It had also acted like the experience of a hard life all concentrated, breeding the mean harsh self-absorption of unhappy age with an unnatural speed. The man that went in (though tolerably experienced even then) was barely recognisable as the man that lay there now. He was barely recognisable to himself and sometimes he looked back with a cold furious contempt at the old weak time-wasting life-eating submissive slob Temple – unbelievably weak, submissive, and silly, silly; and sometimes survivors from the past looked at the present hard, competent animal with dismay and even horror.

       CHAPTER TWO

      Plunging back into these unfrequented memories was something like opening his eyes under water, or coming from a brilliant restaurant into a black street with unconnected lights of varying brilliance in it: quite apart from his ‘professional’ detachment from himself, he had never been a wanderer in the past. He had always lived minute by minute, in the present – a vivid life, in happiness or misery, like an animal’s – and perhaps it was for this reason that he had so little sense of order in time.

      In this first period of hesitation, this question of where to begin, a variety of images presented themselves like glowing balloons that he could reach out for as he chose; and presently he chose one that contained the shape and the colours of his first own room.

      For it was himself as a child that he could remember best, or best recall: there was no difficulty in that backward jump of twenty years or more, nothing alien in that small body and more rounded face. He had been a commonplace and stupid little boy, but in many ways he was a better person then and certainly a more agreeable one to himself than he had ever been since. In spite of his somewhat thievish and mendacious disposition he had, like most other children, a very delicate sense of honour; and in those days he had a great deal of affection in his heart, affection for the asking. His emotions were brilliant, wholehearted and direct: and unless he had some positive cause for sorrow, he was happy most of the time. It is true that punishment often came between him and happiness; yet not all punishment succeeded – far from it, for most of it, after the traditional beating, was imprisonment: ‘Richard, go to your room.’ He had an excellent temperament for that mild confinement, a solitary, idle and unfretting mind; and there was never a pleasanter place of apprenticeship than this room in Plimpton rectory.

      There were thirty-nine bands of lyres and roses on the wall that ran from the door to the window. You could imagine them as the conventional bars of a gaol or the magnified wires of a bird-cage: they could also be seen as an abacus and a calendar. They were strips that his mother had pasted over the old, unsatisfactory blue-grey background for his birthday; the old background had frustrated him for as long as he could remember, with its foolish pattern of vague trellises that did not meet at the joints, and thus became doubly meaningless; but the strips had changed all this. Lyres and roses, and the roses were a lovely roughened crimson. The roses and the yellow lyres, which were entwined with the roses’ leaves, formed a continuous pattern of whorls, now this way and now that; and yet as well as the pattern each rose and each stringed lyre was a thing in itself. In the first band there were forty-eight roses and forty-seven lyres: this treacherous difference put the calculation of the whole number beyond his powers, for