The Eye in the Door by Pat Barker Read Free Book Online

from the door. ‘Why’s the bucket there?’ he asked.
    ‘Because some poor bloody cow drowned herself in her own piss.’
    ‘My God.’ He stared at her. ‘You’re not as bad as that, are you?’
    ‘No, I keep going. Trouble is, you’re punished if you go on hunger strike, so I can’t have any visitors. I haven’t seen our Hettie for… oh, I don’t know, it must be two months.’
    ‘I’ll see what I can do.’
    ‘That’s what Spragge said. When I told him about not being able to get Tommy across to Ireland, he says, “I’ll see what I can do.”’
    ‘The difference is I’m not asking for anything back.’
    She touched his sleeve. ‘We were close once, Billy. You were like a son to me.’ She waited. ‘I’m not going to ask whose side you’re on because you mightn’t tell me the truth, and if you did, I wouldn’t believe you.But just tell me this. Do you know whose side you’re on?’
    He looked at her and smiled, but didn’t reply.

FOUR
    The Ministry of Munitions was housed in the Hotel Metropole. The reception desk, now guarded by armed police, had once been manned by smooth-faced young men, trained not to look surprised when the sixth couple in succession turned out to be called Smith, or when prosperous-looking gentlemen, entertaining their curiously unprosperous-looking nephews, requested a double room. No such innocent frolics now, Prior thought, crossing the foyer. Goodness how the moral tone had declined.
    On the third floor he tapped on Major Lode’s door. Lode looked up from the file he was reading, dabbing, as he always did when confronted by a new situation, at the outer corners of his large, silky, red-gold moustache. In defiance of biology, Prior saw this moustache as a feminine adornment: perhaps because it seemed to require so much protection from the outside world.
    ‘How did it go?’ Lode asked.
    ‘Quite well, I think. She was… fairly hostile to begin with, but I think towards the end she was starting to open up.’
    ‘Did you mention MacDowell?’
    ‘Only in passing. I thought it better not to… focus on him.’
    ‘Hmm, yes, quite right. So what’s the next step?’
    ‘I’d like to see Hettie Roper. The younger daughter. You remember she was walking out with MacDowell?’
    Lode smiled. ‘Walking out? Yes. I was just thinking, what a quaint expression. But I thought that was over? That’s what she told the police.’
    ‘I don’t believe it. They were too close.’
    ‘Yes, well, do what you need to do. Good.’
    And now, Prior thought, closing the door quietly behind him, you can fumigate your fucking office. ‘What a quaint expression.’ I could buy and sell you , he told the closed door. Lode had no idea . He’d spent his entire adult life – boyhood too, for that matter – in uniformed, disciplined, hierarchical institutions, and he simply couldn’t conceive of the possibility that other people might function differently. It was all a great big chessboard to him. This rag-bag collection of Quakers, socialists, anarchists, suffragettes, syndicalists, Seventh Day Adventists and God knows who else was merely an elaborate disguise, behind which lurked the real anti-war movement, a secret, disciplined, highly efficient organization dedicated to the overthrow of the state as surely and simply as Lode was dedicated to its preservation. And on the other side of the board, at the head of the opposing army, elusive, tenacious, dangerous: the Black King himself, Patrick MacDowell. It wasn’t complete nonsense, of course. Mac was certainly a more effective opponent of the war than most, if only because he was not in love with suffering. Poor Mac, he’d had enough of that by the time he was ten.
    Prior walked down the corridor to his own room, tiny in comparison with Lode’s, hardly more than a cupboard. Evidently, in pre-war days this room had been reserved for those obliged to sin on a budget. He felt dirty, physically dirty, after the long train journey,and