The Eye in the Door by Pat Barker

Author:Pat Barker
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780141906447
Publisher: Penguin Group UK
Published: 2008-06-07T16:00:00+00:00

When Prior finally left – it had been a long, exhausting session – Rivers switched off the desk lamp, went to sit in his armchair by the fire, and indulged in some concentrated, unobserved eye-rubbing. Did he do it ‘when something touched a nerve’? It was possible, he supposed. If there was a pattern, Prior would certainly have spotted it. On the other hand, Prior was equally capable of making the whole thing up.

He didn’t regret the decision to give Prior what he’d always claimed he wanted – to change places – because in the process he’d discovered an aspect of Prior that mightn’t have been uncovered in any other way. Not so much the ‘extra tuition’ – though that was interesting, particularly in view of Prior’s habit of aggressive flirtation – as the assumption that Rivers’s loss of visual memory must have some totally traumatic explanation. That had revealed more about Prior than he was aware of.

Though Prior had been a formidable interrogator. Whatever it was, you blinded yourself so you wouldn’t have to go on seeing it… You put your mind’s eye out. Simply by being rougher than any professional colleague would ever have been, Prior had brought him face to face with the full extent of his loss. People tended to assume he didn’t know what he’d lost, but that wasn’t true. He did know, or glimpsed at least. Once, in the Torres Straits, he’d attended a court held by the British official in collaboration with the native chiefs, and an old woman had given evidence about a dispute in which she was involved. As she spoke, she’d glanced from side to side, clearly reliving every detail of the events she was describing, and very obviously seeing people who were not present in court. And he had looked at her, this scrawny, half-naked, elderly, illiterate woman, and he had envied her. No doubt he’d encountered Europeans who had visual memories of equal power, but his own deficiency had never before been brought home to him with such force.

It was a loss, and he had long been aware of it, though he had been slow to connect it with the Brighton house experience. Slower still to recognize that the impact of the experience had gone beyond the loss of visual memory and had occasioned a deep split between the rational, analytical cast of his mind and his emotions. It was easy to overstate this: he had, after all, been subject to a form of education which is designed to inculcate precisely such a split, but he thought the division went deeper in him than it did in most men. It was almost as if the experience – whatever it was – had triggered an attempt at dissociation of personality, though, mercifully, not a successful one. Still, he had been, throughout most of his life, a deeply divided man, and though he would once have said that this division exercised little, if any, influence on his thinking, he had come to believe it had determined the direction of his research.

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