Chapter Text
(1)
This morning, in the paper. A boy in the casualty list—seventeen.
Another one. Among all the other seventeens.
He tells himself at least they’re over sixteen and eats his porridge.
*
Siegfried is good at golf. Anderson mentions it once, saying, “He plays well,” out of the blue. Rivers looks at him. “Golf,” he elaborates. “He’s good at golf.”
Rivers inclines his head and doesn’t say, I know. I’ve seen him.
“Asked my opinion on the iron he should use.” Anderson is looking somewhere to Rivers’ right, at something only he sees. There’s a pause, Anderson still staring until he snaps out of it. His eyes find Rivers again, and he adds, “He’s a good man,” and though it’s unspoken, they both hear it. Despite that Declaration.
This time, Rivers says, “Yes, he is,” because some unspoken things require negation.
It’s only later in bed, when Rivers is almost asleep, that the thought manages to slip into his head, like a stray orphan insistently tugging on his trousers asking for food when all he wants is to keep walking: he had known. When Anderson had used the quite unspecific ‘he,’ Rivers had instantly known it was Siegfried he’d been talking about.
He is asleep before the thought reaches any conclusion.
*
Siegfried is good at golf.
In fact, Siegfried is good at a great number of things: rhetoric, for instance. He knows to choose his words with care and always succeeds, and his voice is strong and pleasant, demanding one’s focus. He has people skills, is adored by his men and easily takes in people who have known him for only a little while. He is made for leadership; he has a flexible, sharp intellect; a great amount (and dangerous kind) of charisma; and much emotional depth.
Perhaps too much of the latter, Rivers thinks to himself privately, as their sessions progress. But this is between them, so it hardly matters.
Siegfried is also good at writing; Rivers found a sheet of paper with a poem in the crack of his door the other day. He didn’t know what to do with it as psychiatrist, but he still uses it, telling himself it’s a medical document serving as written proof of Siegfried’s anti-war complex.
That he kept this one (and others, too; Siegfried keeps slipping him these sheets of paper, and for no reason he can explain Rivers always first looks over his shoulder up and down the corridor before he puts them into his pocket)—well. He kept them in his position as psychiatrist, of course, because he provides medical, psychological aftercare. That’s his function. They might be of some use to him in one of their sessions; they do grant him insight into Siegfried's character, after all.
There’s nothing odd about it, surely.
He doesn’t notice when, after the ninth, he instinctively begins sliding them in between his private papers instead of Siegfried’s medical file.
*
Among all the men at Craiglockhart, Rivers finds something he’s felt was missing all his life. A kind of warmth, he supposes, a kind of kinship. Purpose, maybe. He’s hesitant to pen it down anywhere—he is a gentleman, but wartime tends to wind the present ropes even tighter; he doesn’t fancy his name in a black book, however imaginary—so he keeps it to himself.
The others notice, of course.
Bryce is the first. He passes Rivers in the hallway, and, pausing, says, “Slept well last night?”
Rivers, smiling, frowns. “I did, yes, but—”
“Your face,” Bryce says. “It’s got something clearer about it.”
The next noon, a nurse leans in close, confiding quietly, “Craiglockhart is as happy to have you as you are happy to be here,” and Rivers thanks her, somewhat dumbfounded.
It is only when he walks into the ward the next morning, and there is that moment—something solid, that, shaking, unfolds, taking a gust of coldness with itself—that he thinks, oh.
He looks at all these twitching, paralysed, hysterical men, feels a smile come to his face, and thinks, oh, here we are. Good morning.
He wonders what it says about himself that this is home.
*
Siegfried is different, of course.
He cannot reason with any scientific proof, or any law.
He just flushes, head to toe it seems, and tries to speak around the humiliation in his throat. It’s terrible to watch. The more agitated Siegfried becomes, the more Rivers wants to lean back in his seat and be calm, which agitates Siegfried all the more.
There is an odd imbalance, here: Rivers’ Cambridge don masculine rationality and senior wisdom cool and composed in the face of Siegfried’s increasingly irrational and young passion, so—well, for lack of a better word, so feminine in his reasoning. He doesn’t have science on his side, or law—quite the opposite, really—but he has his heart on his heart on his side, which culminates in emotional reasoning.
There is an odd imbalance here, and Rivers supposes that Siegfried feels it’s about simple binarisms—the usual ones such as superior/inferior, masculine/feminine, Dr./patient, intellect/emotion...—but therapy, really, is a much more dangerous area. Nothing is simple here.
Siegfried probably wouldn’t believe him if he told him that the imbalance between them is the fact that this Mad Jack in a Scots’ loony bin for having thrown his Cross away and gone pacifist by writing declarations won’t learn—and instead makes Rivers, established military psychiatrist, think stupid things:
If saying you’re against the war based purely on not wanting more seventeen year olds dead is feminine, then one has to be that. Then one has to stop being a man. Or else there’s little hope left for us.
Call no man happy until he is dead.
“—will I help them by dying in France? It’s for them that I do this, and nothing will change if I go back only to die. I can do more damage here at home where it counts—”
Siegfried, Rivers thinks, only half-listening, staring at his patient with lowered eyes, is probably one of the few who’s been to France and has come back healthy.
Seeing dead men (occasionally) and having nightmares is almost a side effect of the times they live in.
*
The only thing not healthy about Siegfried is the suicide mission he seems to be on. He’s hell-bent on self-destruction, and the worst of it is—if the war won’t kill him, home will.
It makes Rivers want to cry, sometimes.
The point is—Siegfried is good at golf, good at writing; he’s a bright man, excelled academically (even if the books couldn’t keep him) just as he excelled in the military. He’s good on a horse, good at hunting, has fine manners, and the list goes on and it goes on and it goes on. It seems to be all Rivers is thinking about, these days.
Siegfried is so good he almost shines, as if—
The window rattles in its frame, and Rivers blinks.
It’s night. He’s in his bed. He’s staring wide-eyed at the shadows on the ceiling. His breathing is fast, shallow.
He wasn’t aware he was doing either.
This is the first time it occurs to him, then: who will burn first? Siegfried, flying too high to the sun?
Or Rivers, the moth to his flame?