The Charioteer: A Novel

8

“RIGHT, THEN, ABOUT FIVE-FIFTEEN tomorrow. Don’t wait about in the street bitching up the knee before we start. Sit in the Out-Patient Department and I’ll come for you there.”

Laurie began to say, “Do you know where it is?” but remembered in time that Ralph must know the hospital very well. “I’ll do that,” he said.

“Was this all right, my ringing up again?”

“Yes, Sister’s off duty.”

“The other men in the ward don’t think anything, I suppose?”

“Life’s too short to spend flapping about that sort of thing. I shan’t be here much longer, anyway.”

“What? Sorry, what was that?”

“I said they’ll be discharging me, anyway, as soon as this electrical treatment’s finished.”

“Oh, yes. Of course. How long’s that going to be?”

“Discipline would go to pieces if they told us things like that.”

It was much colder this evening; but when he got back to bed, he found someone had put a hot-water bottle in it.

“Did you get this, Reg?”

“Nurse Adrian done it.” Busily intent on tidying his locker, Reg added, “I reckon that girl’s going to miss you, when you go.”

He had never referred, even obliquely, to last Friday’s conversation; but life had become a tight-rope walk for both of them. Laurie would have given anything to be able to repay Reg’s overture with some grateful confidence; Reg himself would have given anything to recall it. Laurie guessed that this forced remark about Nurse Adrian was an invitation to pretend nothing had happened. It was, indeed, the only tolerable solution; he accepted it with relief. “I’m more likely to do the missing. Rodgers must be blind, saying she’s got no sex appeal.”

Reg accepted the modus vivendi with transparent thankfulness. He would never, Laurie knew, have ventured so far into the open if the thing hadn’t already been openly discussed.

That day the first breath of winter had reached the shrinking flesh of a continent at war. It had a message for Laurie as well as for the rest. He still hadn’t a greatcoat; Dunkirk had been a summer disaster. For the first time that day, walking with Andrew, he had found he couldn’t move fast enough to keep warm. Walking patients in the square had thrown blankets or dressing-gowns over their shoulders, or a civilian coat lent by one of the c.o.s; but to go outside the gates one must be properly dressed. He had got a cramp in his knee almost at once, and they had had to turn back, more than half an hour before the usual time.

Andrew said, “There’s a stove in our hut. This time of day there’s hardly anyone there.”

“Better not. It might make trouble.”

“Well, listen, I know what we can do another time. I’ve got an old carriage-rug from home on my bed, it’s enormous. I’ll bring that, and we can take it to that dip in the beechwood, and roll ourselves up in it.”

Like an actor who dries up on the crucial cue for which the scene is waiting, Laurie could think of absolutely nothing to say. He ordered and implored himself; he could hear, as exactly as the click of a time-fuse, the moment when the pause became remarkable. The impulse to look up was like the impulse people feel to throw themselves off towers, or under trains. He looked up. Andrew was scarlet to the roots of his hair. It was all up, thought Laurie, as suddenly and simply as this, only through a moment’s lack of resource. Then he realized that Andrew’s embarrassment was acutely social, and that he hadn’t had time yet to see beyond it.

“You must think,” Laurie managed, “that I’ve a horrible mind. The trouble is, I’ve got a pretty good idea what the Staff Sergeant’s is like.”

“Yes,” said Andrew. He swallowed. “Lucky you thought. Sorry.”

“That’s the army for you.”

“I shouldn’t really have been as dumb as that, because a boy at my school was actually expelled for it, though most of us didn’t know till afterwards.”

In spite of himself Laurie had to ask, “What was he like?”

“Not very nice. He used to bully the little boys, and terrify them into doing what he wanted.”

“No; he doesn’t sound very nice at all.”

Andrew said, “Well, if we give it a bit of thought there must be somewhere to go. Never mind, it will probably be much warmer tomorrow.”

“Yes. I’m afraid I shan’t be here, though.”

“Of course. I was forgetting. Will you be back on the six-thirty bus?”

“No, not this time. I’ve got a pass.” He said quickly, “God, it’s freezing, isn’t it? We’ll have to get in. See you tonight.” As he limped to the gate he could feel Andrew looking after him, but it was useless to turn back.

Later that evening, it occurred to him that it would be possible to represent Ralph as an object of pity, in a way which would reconcile Andrew at once to the whole situation. Laurie glanced at the idea and at once found it revolting. Since this had been the only thing left to say on the subject, he gave up the attempt to say anything. They tried, in this way and that, to make signals of confidence in each other across the No Man’s Land which both avoided.

It was shortly after this that Ralph had telephoned. When Laurie went back to bed, he could tell by Reg’s breathing that he wasn’t asleep; but neither he, nor anyone else of those who might be awake and watching, made a sound.

Miss Haliburton at the hospital remembered him at once. When she produced from some cache or other a two-months dachshund puppy and let him nurse it, he knew that she had favorites. He usually got on with strong-minded old maids, and it was one of his wry private jokes that they so unawarely waived their misanthropy on his behalf. He found himself confiding not only the life-history of his elderly airedale at home, but how the knee had been behaving and what brought on the pain. She put on a crepe bandage to keep it warm; on the way he had bought a pullover to wear under his uniform, and began to feel under a slightly less medieval servitude to winter. When she had done with him, he went down to wait for Ralph.

The out-patient departments of general hospitals do not conduce to a thoughtless optimism. Beside him a thin, overworked woman described to a very old one the three operations that hadn’t cured her trouble; a mentally defective girl appeared, six months pregnant; male syphilitics, with an air of indescribable seediness, were queuing for treatment; there was another queue of skin cases, with dirty bandages and patches of gentian-violet paint. The smell of antiseptics, sick bodies, and old clothes pervaded everything. Amid all this Laurie sat and wondered, with rapidly decreasing confidence in each successive answer, what he was going to do with his life. The surrounding climate of shabbiness, dejection, and failure seemed to subdue all possible futures to itself. It was in the midst of such thoughts that he saw Ralph walk briskly in at the street door.

The contrast was dazzling. His energy and precision stood out among the sick, worried people, slumped on the benches waiting their turn, as bright steel stands out in a heap of scrap iron. His well-fitting, well-pressed uniform would have shone against the dingy clothing, even without the gold on the sleeves. The cleanness of the hospital staff was functional, a reminder of the human ills against which it was directed; Ralph’s was personal and aristocratic. In spite of the glove he seemed a foreign visitor here; and as if to emphasize this he was carrying, for show, the other glove of the pair. Watching him come nearer, Laurie realized what a confused memory of the other night he had brought away, for he had thought of Ralph as looking quite five years older than this. Even from across the hall, you could see that his eyes were blue. He raked the benches swiftly and systematically, saw Laurie, smiled, and came forward. The devitalized figures in the gangway seemed to melt out of his path.

“Hello, Spud, am I late, have you been browned off waiting here?”

As they left, nearly all the faces at that end of the hall turned to gaze after them. The looks were not of the kind that Laurie had come to fear just lately. He could feel a wistful envy in them. He had been one of them all with his stick and his white card, and now in a moment he had become a person while they were cases still. Watching these young men meet as if in a street or a hotel, they were downcast or cheered according to their natures by the invasion of life, by Ralph’s happiness and the sudden lightening of Laurie’s anxious face.

“Too early for a drink,” Ralph said. “How about a drive before it gets dark?”

The sun was still up, warm and clear. Ralph headed for the hills, not talking much. Presently they came out at a famous view-spot; parked in it was a closed saloon car with people sitting inside reading magazines. They both laughed. Ralph said, “Can you put up with four counties instead of five?”

Behind them, when he stopped, the crown of the hill rose from a tonsure of trees; below were the patched colors of stubble and roots and grape-purple plowland, streams picked out with thorn and willow, a puff of wool from a toy train, a silver band of Severn water on the horizon. It was a sight, in the autumn of 1940, to evoke special emotions. They were almost silent for some minutes, except perfunctorily to point out some landmark. Laurie had a feeling that the conversation had no need to be filled in with words at every stage.

“I always find,” said Ralph presently, “that the further I go away, the more patriotic I get. Believe it or not, in Adelaide once I had quite a heated argument with some local who spoke lightly of the English public-school system.” He blew a puff of smoke into the soft West-country air and added, “I’m not used to doing such a long stretch of home and beauty.”

Laurie said, “I don’t blame you.”

Ralph looked around at him for a moment, then returned to his cigarette. Suddenly he said, “For God’s sake, you’re not trying to fix me up with a grievance against society, are you? There wouldn’t be the least justification for it. All that gives me a pain in the neck.” The expression he used was a good deal coarser.

“I should think there’d be plenty of justification.”

“Now, Spud, come. You ought to know better than that by this time, with a couple of stripes up too. If you’re talking about school, as I suppose you are, I can see of course that you had it all rather sprung on you at the time.” He turned to flick his ash out of the car. “But don’t tell me it never occurred to you later, when you were a prefect yourself for instance, that people who abuse a position of trust have to be got rid of. At least, I should hope it did.”

He’s lecturing me, Laurie thought; first with surprise, then in some amusement, till without warning he found himself almost unbearably touched and sad. Collecting himself, he said, “I hardly knew enough to make snap judgments like that, did I?”

A sheet of cirrus cloud was beginning to be flecked on its underside with crimson; the horizon was darkening to blue. Looking away at it, Ralph said, “You must have given me the benefit of every conceivable doubt.”

“Well, of course. I had every reason to.”

“Nice of you,” said Ralph briskly, “but even so it doesn’t add up.” His head, against the flamboyant sky, looked remote and severe. “I suppose you could make out some sort of case for me as an individual. But for a pillar of the institution, the only possible justification was never to get found out. I deserved the sack for my judgment of character if for nothing else.” He examined some afterthought here, and laughed shortly.

“It was a good job for Hazell his people took him away.”

“I’m sure he’d agree with you. He’s in Hollywood now, didn’t you know?”

“Good God, is he? Who with?”

“Really, Spud! I didn’t think you had that much bitchery in you. Of course you’re perfectly right.” He related Hazell’s success story.

In seven years, thought Laurie, every cell in one’s body has been replaced, even our memories live in a new brain. That is not the face I saw, and these are not the eyes I saw with. Even our selves are not the same, but only a consequence of the selves we had then. Yet I was there and I am here; and this man, who is sometimes what I remember and sometimes a stranger I met at a party the other day, is also to himself the I who was there: his mind in its different skull has travelled back to a place his living feet never visited; and the pain he felt then he can feel again.

“What is it, Spud?” said Ralph softly.

Laurie remembered the voice from the other day, it was charming and intimate and too experienced and left you in doubt. “I was just thinking about Hazell, and all that.”

“Oh, Hazell,” said Ralph slowly. That he should have read the words as a question embarrassed Laurie greatly. No one could be expected to talk of such things except to strangers. Strangers are a distorting mirror, and hold things off. But Ralph spoke first, before he could change the subject.

“Hazell was generally underrated, you know. He was really rather a clever little boy. All that Dostoievsky was largely put on: it worked quite well.”

“He used to get away with murder.” One of Ralph’s burnt-straw-colored eyebrows shot up intimidatingly into the peak of his cap. But ancient resentment had suddenly revived, and Laurie faced it out.

Ignoring it, Ralph went on, “Of course, if you took him up at all and seemed sympathetic, he used to play down the idiocy and let his intelligence be glimpsed; not obviously, just so that one felt he’d been given a bit of confidence. Perhaps it really was that, partly. It can’t have been quite as calculated as it seems to look back on, I realize that.”

“He was easily scared,” said Laurie, trying to sound detached.

“The thing was, there was no doubt about him. Obviously, most people at school who get caught up in it are either going through a phase, or merely in the position of cattle who if you don’t give them salt will lick it off the ground. I gave a lot of thought to this in my last year; there hadn’t been so much time when I was working for Cambridge. It wasn’t everybody one felt justified in taking a chance with. Side-tracking them, or something, perhaps; one couldn’t know. I used to look round, and try to decide whether there was anyone I could feel as sure about as I did about myself.”

The sky was now a great sheet of rose fire, rippled like ebb-tide sands. It would be gone in a matter of minutes; already a long arm of shadow, cast by something on the horizon, was stealing across.

Ralph broke off his thoughts with a visible jerk of impatience, and threw the stub of his cigarette away. Silently Laurie gave him another. Ralph said, “Did it ever strike you about Hazell, at the time?”

“No. I just thought he was a bit bats, I suppose.”

“He hated you,” said Ralph in a light, cool voice. “Didn’t you know why?”

Odd, thought Laurie, that whatever one’s contempt for the hater this news is never quite without its sting. “I had awfully little to do with him. Didn’t he ever say?”

“I didn’t ask him,” said Ralph shortly.

“Nobody could imagine afterwards,” Laurie ventured presently, “how you managed to meet without getting caught.”

“In the prop room mostly. That’s why the stage has the most elaborate lighting panel for its size in the British Isles. It was the only thing I knew something about that would get me inside the place. He leaned toward the Old Vic in those days; he used to hint sometimes that I’d saved his genius from being pushed over the thin line into madness. Can you imagine me falling for that?”

Yes, thought Laurie; but he supposed this was the wrong answer.

“I was a fool whichever way you look at it. I must have known really, of course; he was all a mess from cellar to attic. His sexual tendencies were just a minor symptom. He didn’t like reality, and he didn’t like doing anything for himself that he could get done for him. He had a great talent for being appreciative, of course. Really I think I fell for the corniest gag of the lot, the great esprit-de-corps racket. Esprit de corpse, Spud. Every time they try to slip it over on you, just say to yourself, ‘The lower they go, the tighter they hang together.’ ”

“The trouble is, how else are you to meet people you’re sure about, if it’s only to talk to? After all, it’s the way you and I met again.”

“I don’t forget that, Spud, believe me. No, of course we all have to use the network sometime. Don’t let it use you, that’s all. Ours isn’t a horizontal society, it’s a vertical one. Plato, Michelangelo, Sappho, Marlowe; Shakespeare, Leonardo, and Socrates if you count the bisexuals—we can all quote the upper crust. But at the bottom—Spud, believe me, there isn’t any bottom. Never forget it. You’ve no conception, you haven’t a clue, how far down it goes.”

Laurie almost said that he had picked up one or two clues at the party; but something in Ralph’s face told him he would be making a fool of himself, so he kept his mouth shut. Presently he said, “Don’t you think it’s mostly a matter of how sorry for themselves people are? I mean, whether one wants to be let off everything like a sick child, or—well, one could feel that one owes the race something, rather than the other way. It seems more logical.”

“Ah. I might have guessed I’ve been saving this for the last person who’d need it.”

“God, no,” said Laurie. “You’re wrong there.” Ralph made a gentle interrogative noise. “Oh, I don’t know. You get a bit tied up, making your own rules and trying to piece it all together.”

“Yes, I know.” The sky was fading, and the sun going down into a belt of mist. In the valley it was dark already, but up here a thin copper sunlight fell flat on their faces still. “There it is, Spud. When all’s said and done, the best way to be independent is to have all you need at home.”

Laurie looked away. He had wondered when Ralph was going to mention Bunny. Not to have done so would have seemed unfriendly; yet now it had happened Laurie found that he had no real wish to pursue the subject. He said, “Yes, I suppose it is,” but he couldn’t put as much feeling into it as he would have liked, and realized his inadequacy when Ralph failed to follow it up. He said, “You never finished telling me about Hazell.”

As if he had introduced some irrelevant new subject, Ralph looked vague and drew his brows together. “There isn’t much more to tell. What did you want to know?”

Thus confronted with the unspoken question in his mind, Laurie said at once, “Well, nothing specially.”

“Unfair to Spud,” said Ralph, suddenly laughing. “Sorry.” Snapping open his case he said, “Have one of mine,” and lit two. With an obscure pleasure, Laurie perceived that this wasn’t one of the things in which practice had made him perfect. “I never told you how it ended, did I?”

“Well, no one in their right mind would have thought of asking.”

“Why not? Ancient history. Hazell and I fell out on a matter of discipline in the end. By the way, when you said just now that he used to get away with murder, were you in point of fact referring to me?”

“No,” said Laurie, losing his nerve. “Of course not.”

“Well, he was a responsibility in any House, even Jeepers had the wit to see that. I believe he tried to get rid of him several times, but the Head took the view that he was a plow the School had put its hand to. Anyway, there he was, and one had to use a bit of discretion. Then this began, and at first one seemed to be helping him find his feet and really making something of him. I suppose some of that might even have been genuine. Quite soon he began to be tiresome in various ways, trying to take advantage. I remember I had a long talk with him, explaining in words of one syllable why that would be bad for both of us. When that got nowhere, I told him that the next time he came up to me for a beating, that would be what he’d get. He could see I meant it. I was surprised when he turned up a couple of days later. I thought he was calling my bluff. Perhaps that’s what he thought himself. I don’t know. Anyway he’d left me no choice. I hated the whole business, I don’t know when I’ve hated anything more, so I got down to it without wasting time. And afterwards I was just about to say, ‘Well, that’s that, don’t let it happen again and now let’s forget about it.’ And then I realized.”

Laurie waited and then said, “He couldn’t take it, you mean?”

“Well, no. Just the opposite. If you don’t know it doesn’t matter.”

“Oh,” said Laurie. He thought how lightly he would have read all this, stripped of its human reality, in a psychological handbook.

“I think I just stood there and looked at him. Of course one sees if he was like that he couldn’t help himself, poor swine. It wasn’t the kind of thing I’d ever expected to find myself mixed up in, that’s all. I’d have liked to see him dead, so long as I hadn’t got to touch him. I suppose he saw it. It may be he went to Jeepers out of revenge, but I don’t think so. I think he was scared, and it made him a bit hysterical. He told it reversing the point of the final episode, if you see what I mean. I didn’t see very much future in arguing about it.”

“God, how little we all knew. How awful for you.”

“For him too,” said Ralph, “I suppose.” For a minute or two he didn’t speak, but tapped with his fingers on the top of the car door, a broken rhythm like Morse. “The thing is, sooner or later one has to think it out, one can’t just leave it there. I realized afterwards, some time afterwards, a perfectly normal person wouldn’t have been so angry. He was sick, after all. But that, really, was it. That was what I had against him. I’d been trying to work up what I was into a kind of religion. I thought I could make out that way. He made me see it as just a part of what he was.” His hand moved absently over the dashboard; suddenly the narrowed pencil of the masked headlamps shone out into the empty air of the valley, tracing paths of pale vapor in which midges danced like sparks. He swore under his breath and switched them off.

“Well, we have to face that sooner or later, of course.” Now that the sudden light had gone it could be felt that the neutrality of twilight was over; it was almost dark. There was a moment of extreme quiet in which the distant shunting of a train, a car on the road behind them, the chirr of a night bird, were like differently colored silences. Ralph said, with a basic simplicity, “You see, Spud, don’t you? That was why.”

“Yes,” said Laurie, “of course I see.” He was too much moved to narrow his thoughts down to any one point of the story. He strained for better, more expressive words, which would not come. It was at this moment that the approaching car turned in and parked beside them. Inside it girls’ voices were already giving provocative twitters of protest; whispers of giggling reproof pointed out that strangers were present. Ralph switched on the engine and, with carefully managed ease, put in the gear.

They drove for some time in silence. Soon they got down into traffic again; and it was then that he became aware of Ralph’s increasing irritability. The small misdoings of other drivers seemed to infuriate him; after keeping up for some miles a profane running commentary, he started to address the offenders direct. Laurie put it down to the gears at first, till it occurred to him that Ralph hadn’t had a drink yet this evening. He sat quiet, to avoid attracting the lightning, till a youth on a bicycle wobbled across in front of the car. Ralph pulled up and stayed to deliver a reprimand. For a moment it was funny to see the youth clinging paralyzed to the hedge like a monkey fascinated by a python; but when it was over he could see that Ralph was depressed and angry with himself, so at the next pub they passed he said, “What about stopping for a quick one?”

“No,” said Ralph shortly. “Won’t be time.” He accelerated. About a quarter of a mile on, he said quite pleasantly, “If we’re too late, everything fit to eat will be off.”

In one of their silent pauses Laurie found himself wishing it were possible, without telling Andrew too much, to get a sensible idea of Ralph into his head. It was the first time he had ever thought of Andrew in terms of criticism, even such gentle criticism as this.

“Usually the food’s a bit less filthy here than anywhere.” The hotel Ralph stopped at was Edwardian, shabby, clean, and restful. To Laurie’s relief, after the third double Ralph made a move to the dining room. By that time he had started to talk again.

“I must say, Spud, you’re remarkably well balanced for the offspring of divorce. Quite often being queer is the least of it.”

“Well, my mother’s pretty well balanced,” Laurie began. Then it all came back to him. Ralph looked at his face and said gently, “Come on, Spud.” With an awkwardness gradually superseded by relief, Laurie brought it out.

Ralph didn’t urge him to see the best in Mr. Straike. He sounded, Ralph said, a bloody-minded old so-and-so. Rather like the first captain he had served under, he added almost as an afterthought. He was an old so-and-so if you like; if he had ever come down off the bridge in a gale someone would undoubtedly have tipped him overboard. But one trip he had taken his old woman along, and she seemed to think he was God’s gift, it oozed out all over her. You couldn’t account for women.

Laurie found this rough comfort, but did his best not to show it. “I expect it’ll work out,” he said.

“Have I been unnecessarily brutal, Spud? I’m sorry, I wouldn’t know. I’m not much of an authority on family relationships. None of my girl friends went in for that sort of thing, either.” He looked at Laurie and laughed. “Come, now, Spuddy, let it go at a raised eyebrow. That stunned expression isn’t very flattering.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“No, but joking apart, you don’t want to have written off half the human race at your time of life. I don’t mean this unkindly, but perhaps you’re having the navel-cord cut in the nick of time. Look at it that way and don’t be too upset about it.”

There was an odd unexpected relief in this hard handling. “All the same, I doubt if mothers will ever need to lock their daughters up when they see me coming.”

“Oh, perhaps not, I didn’t mean that so much. It’s more an attitude of mind than anything. What I always feel—”

This opened a conversation that went on for most of the meal. Once or twice Ralph would have changed it, but Laurie kept it going, not for the sake of the advice, which he couldn’t feel would ever be important to him, but to make Ralph talk about himself. So it turned out, for after dismissing the soup and remarking that they seemed to have used shark’s tripes, he said, “I did two years of women, when I first went to sea.” He said it very much as sailors say they have done two years in tankers, or two years in sail.

“Did you?” said Laurie. “Why?”

“Oh, for almost every reason except the real one. I’d had rather a sickener of the other side. Once people know about you at sea, they want you to be too obliging. It’s not so good in peacetime starting lower deck with the wrong accent and so on. I didn’t want to give them anything on me. Besides, when I found I could if I gave my mind to it, I thought I might become naturalized, so to speak. Some people seem to take an inordinate pride in never having made the attempt, but I don’t see it myself. I decided I’d give it the two years, anyway.”

He broke off to attend to his food. Laurie saw that though he could use the left hand well enough, the padded fingers of the glove were clumsy and got in his way. It was impossible to guess how much he felt all this.

“Did it make any difference?” Laurie asked him.

“Well, yes, it did in a sense, of course. It’s bound to do something for one’s self-confidence, if nothing else. I think one year would have been enough. Funny thing, you know, it didn’t feel at all like going straight. More like trying to cultivate some fashionable vice that never quite becomes a habit. I served out the contract, though. No, let’s be honest, I broke out a week short of the time. I happened to meet someone and I’d have been at sea a week later. All I can remember thinking is ‘Thank the Lord, back to normal at last.’ Well, there it is. Some people make a go of it. I don’t think it was a complete waste of time, though; it stops one getting too parochial. Now and again I’ve even had a woman since; I’ve met one who reminded me of one of the early ones, or something. I don’t know why, really. Vanity very likely. You look thoughtful, Spud. Do I sound very unfeeling?”

“No,” said Laurie. He felt a fool and looked away.

“Well, I only managed to get along with real bitches, and none of them complained. Good women are definitely not my cup of tea.”

This seemed reasonable in the circumstances, and Laurie hardly knew what it was that made him ask why.

“Probably because they’re the cruellest of the carnivora. Give me the bloody Nazis, any day.”

He had used the voice that closes a subject. Laurie, who had never gone in for forcing people’s confidence, thought afterwards that it must have been the gin which had made him behave so uncharacteristically. It did not occur to him that there is a degree of emotional insecurity, in which he had been living for some weeks now, where the need for reassurance can produce almost the same effects as the desire for power. The coffee came and Ralph ordered brandy with it. Laurie led the conversation round in a circle and tried again.

“Well, Spud, you see, I shouldn’t have said what I did just now. Don’t know why I said it. Cheap and nasty, I’ve been seeing too much of the wrong people lately. I can’t very well tell you after that … No, I mean look at it for yourself, once you start passing the buck to the previous generation, where do you step off? I suppose Eve put Cain’s nose out of joint by petting his little brother. You can flannel out of anything.”

“It doesn’t matter. Sometimes it helps to know about other people.”

“Well, Christ, it’s nothing. It happens every day. What do you think it is, the secret of Glamis or what? See, now. My mother was a good woman, only she saw something nasty in the woodshed. She couldn’t help what she felt about it. Her parents were Plymouth Brethren.”

“But what did she see?”

“Well, me of course. Oh, waiter, two more brandies. What a flop this story’s going to be after the build-up you’ve given it. She saw me aged six, and the little girl next door aged seven, rather solemnly discussing anatomy. I imagine the same thing’s going on at this moment in about five million woodsheds from China to Peru. However, it was apparently the filthiest crime that had ever touched my mother’s life. She found it quite hard to talk about, so by the time she’d done, I took away some dim idea that carnal knowledge of women would cause one’s limbs to rot and fall off, like leprosy.” With an unconscious tic which Laurie had noticed in him once or twice before, he touched as if for reassurance his spotless white collar. “She got my father to do the beating; he told me it was about time I went to school to learn a clean life. Rather horrible precocious child I must have been, I suppose. Finish your brandy, Spud, you’re one behind.”

Laurie could see that if he wanted more of the story than this, it would be necessary to ask for it. He finished his brandy. “I see now,” he said, “that last day at school, why it was you said you were going straight to Southampton.”

There was a short pause. Then Ralph said, “Did I? Well, that was what I ought to have done.”

After this, Laurie learned without much surprise, soon after, that Ralph had had nothing to do with women since leaving hospital. He offered no comment on this; but it would fit well with his conception of them, Laurie thought, to expect that they would punish him with his deformity.

Suddenly he seemed to remember the text of his earlier sermon, and laughed. “No, all I mean is, Spud, don’t have a closed mind about it. I can’t remember who those cranks are who say you mustn’t think negatively; but they’ve got something, you know. About the most boring conversation this world affords—and I don’t say this lightly, Spud, I’ve been in ships that took passengers, and sat with them at meals, and still I’ve heard nothing to touch a bunch of queers trying to prove to each other that the grapes are sour.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Well, look at Shakespeare’s girl friend in the Sonnets, who was probably the bitch of all hell, yet she gives the thing what you might call body.”

“Yes, but the thing about Shakespeare is that he was normal plus, not minus.”

“Good Lord. Well, if you’re prepared to admit that without a struggle, I’ve just been wasting your time. Have a cigarette.”

As in this public place they took and lit their own, Laurie found they were exchanging the shadow of a smile, and he couldn’t be sure afterwards which of them had smiled first.

“There’s always this,” Ralph said. “If one hasn’t accepted too many limitations, one can pay one’s final choice the compliment of—”

“Your brandy, sir,” said the waiter.

Shortly after this Ralph looked at his watch and said, “Well, we’ve got an hour or so in hand; let’s go round to my place.”

“Surely there won’t be time?”

“What? Oh, not the Station, I’ve got a room in town. Very utilitarian. There’s a nice old square outside, but you won’t see that for the blackout. Never mind.”

The argument over the bill, about which Ralph was inclined at first to be imperious, ended amicably in a draw. Laurie scarcely noticed that his side of the discussion only made sense if they assumed that they were going to see a good deal more of one another.

The house was later than the one where Alec and Sandy lived; probably mid-Victorian. You couldn’t say of this one that the proportions were good. It still came within the great period of the town’s wealth; Ralph’s torch picked out door-frames and banisters hideously carved, but made of solid teak. The landlady had summarily settled the blackout problem by removing the light bulbs from the hall and staircase. It was a narrow house: as one came in one could almost feel the squeeze of the walls. There were two flights of stairs, but Laurie began the climb without misgiving; Miss Haliburton’s machine was still doing him good. The first landing was quite dark and silent, without even a crack of light under a door.

“Are you all right, Spud?”

“Yes, fine.”

The blackout in the room was still open. Irregular blots of darkness surrounded a tall glimmering rectangle of night sky. From the doorway, Laurie caught an indefinable, strangely familiar and nostalgic smell of shabbiness and simplicity. It was the combination of these two things, so often divorced, that stirred the memory, as much by what was absent as what was there: a positive kind of cleanness which lacked the institutional sour undertaste, a smell of scrubbed wood and beeswax and books.

Ralph’s shoulder jutted sharply against the window. “Take a look if you like, but you can’t see much.”

Laurie came over, feeling his way along a table. They were on the upper side of the square, which sloped with the slope of the town. Beyond the houses opposite, a gray expanse of distance merged into the sky.

“Where are you, Spud?”

“Here.” He put out his hand and touched the stiff cold braid on Ralph’s moving sleeve.

“You can’t see anything. It must have been pretty, when they had the lights.”

“I expect it’s nice in the daytime.”

Laurie narrowed his eyes at the invisible horizon. A curtain, made of some harsh stuff, brushed his hand. He was scarcely aware of it, or of what he was looking at. In a flash of recognition, he had identified the smell of the room. It was like school: not like the corridors and classrooms, which smelled of gritty boards and pencil shavings and ink and boys, but like the Head Prefect’s study. He might have thought of this sooner, since it had been his own for a year; but just at this moment he didn’t feel it as ever having been his. His perceptions, to everything else so dull, were full of this special feeling of the room, and, growing out of it, an intense awareness of Ralph standing close and silent beside him, not in serge and braid but in gray flannel; it seemed to him that he could even feel the cloth again. It all took him suddenly and with bewildering force; his next immediate reaction was a panic fear of having somehow betrayed himself. He had a dim impression that Ralph had made some movement and that this must mean he had noticed something. With Andrew so much on his mind, Laurie had become unreasoningly nervous; he obeyed a chain of reflexes with scarcely an intelligible thought. He turned quickly from the window, said, “Shout when you’ve done the blackout and I’ll do the light,” and made for the door. Haste made him clumsy; he collided with a chair and struck it hard with his knee, the wrong one.

It was very bad and seemed to go on for some time; he was only distantly conscious of Ralph speaking to him and couldn’t answer; but by the time Ralph had done the blackout and got over to the light, he was able to say, “Sorry. All right now.”

“Sit down,” said Ralph. He used what Laurie thought of as his court-martial voice. He guided Laurie to an armchair; even at this moment there was some dim reminiscence in the fact that it was the only one in the room. Having settled him there, he stood looking down at him for a moment, then walked sharply across to the cupboard. Laurie had been longing to be let alone, but had had just enough control not to say so. The, first white flash of pain had sunk to a red smolder; confusedly he recalled that he had had a silly mood of some kind, which had caused him to go blundering about the room in the dark; but this crude sensation had effaced it, the image of it was gone.

Ralph came up with a glass. “Here. Get this down.”

“What is it?”

“Navy rum. Tip it down. It’ll fix you up all right. They’d have taken off your leg with it in Nelson’s day.”

“I wish they bloody well had,” said Laurie bitterly. He looked at the glass. “And if I drank that, I should think they could. God, what do you think my head’s made of?”

“It’s only a double tot. Just enough to make you happy.”

The pain now was no worse than it had been several times before. Suddenly Ralph looked touching, standing there in anxious muddled kindness with the rum. “No, it’d make it worse. Tip it back, go on. All I need’s three aspirin and some army char.”

“Tea?” said Ralph blankly, and then, “Of course, my dear. If the mice haven’t had it.”

From the bottom of the cupboard he produced a tin kettle. This also must be where the rum had come from, for Laurie could hear him pushing aside some bottles. This must have been one of the servants’ rooms when the house was new; the teak joinery didn’t reach so high. The cupboard, the shoes, the kettle, would still have been like the study; but the faint clunk of the bottles had snapped the thread of illusion and now it wasn’t like school any more.

Ralph had extracted the kettle from the back of the cupboard; he stood up. Mixed with the weakness of physical shock Laurie felt a strange complex of emotions. He said, “You shouldn’t let me make such a nuisance of myself.”

Ralph came up to the chair, changing the kettle over from his right hand to his left. For a few moments he stood there silent, then he touched Laurie’s shoulder. “Spud.”

“Yes?” said Laurie, looking up.

Ralph’s face changed. He said in his officer’s voice, “You damned fool, why didn’t you have that drink? You look like death.”

“I’d rather have tea.”

“Lie down over there.” It was an order. He held out his hand; obediently Laurie took it and was lifted up. This, he found, was what he wanted. He felt tired and sick and it was wonderful not to be obliged to think, or to be in charge of himself. Ralph half carried him across the room, taking the weight easily: his face was older than his years, but he moved like an athletic boy in hard training and one remembered then that he was only twenty-six. He pulled the cotton counterpane off the bed and settled Laurie’s head on the pillow. Afterwards he folded the counterpane neatly, edges together, not fussily but as if it wouldn’t have occurred to him not to do this. He sat down beside Laurie and said, “I think we should look at this knee before you walk on it again.”

“Oh, it’s all right, I’d feel it if anything had gone.”

“You might not. Better let’s look. Every ship I’ve been in for years that hasn’t carried a doctor, I’ve always done this job. I won’t hurt you.”

“All right,” said Laurie relaxing. Suddenly he felt free of it all. It had been taken over. He had been quite long enough in hospital to know that even a surgeon wouldn’t swear to anything without X-rays, yet this knowledge seemed curiously irrelevant to his passive trust. He untied his boot and dropped it on the floor, and lay in an irresponsible peace while Ralph undid the bandage, and with an intent grave gentleness manipulated the joint. It was evident that he had some experience and knew what he was looking for. Laurie, who was used to the detached curiosity of doctors, felt something different here: Miss Haliburton had it, but in her it was overlaid with a complex technique, and in becoming mechanically perfect lost something of its nature. In Ralph it was direct and human, as it used to be in the old country bone-setters who came to their trade with nothing but an instinct in their hands of tactile sympathy with pain.

Laurie thought: At school, we were always discussing him. The thing about Lanyon is that he’s this, or that. That’s how he manages to do that, or this. And all the time no one knew anything.

“You ought to have been a doctor,” he said.

“I’ve only had to cope sometimes when there wasn’t anyone better. While I was living with Alec I did try to read up a bit of anatomy and so on; but he told me unqualified people messing about were a menace to society, and of course he was quite right.”

“Ralph. If you’d gone up to Cambridge and everything, what were you going to have done?”

“Some sort of geographical survey work, I rather thought. There are quite a few odd corners still left to do.”

“Yes,” said Laurie. “Yes, of course.”

By now, he would have fulfilled his destiny. He wouldn’t have struggled for it; it would have come to him inevitably from a course of knowing first what needed doing, and doing it rather sooner and more thoroughly than anyone else; from an accumulation of confidence which would have been forced on him by the trust of other people, such as F.R.G.S.s and porters and village priests. His profound happiness in it wouldn’t have come often into his conscious mind. He wasn’t made to accept his limitations without trying to compensate; being what he was he could only have done it on some such scale as this. He could have worked out his salvation, if they had let him alone; all he had ever asked had been to work his passage. You’d think, after seven years, they might have let him keep his ship, said Laurie to himself; he used the soldier’s “they,” having been long enough an infantryman to find the disposing powers—Divisional Headquarters, the Government, God—all very remote and hard to isolate one from another.

“I’m not as handy as I used to be,” Ralph said. “Excuse bad pun.”

“You’ve got a lot of grip in it, so soon after.”

“One has to practice it. Have a rest while I make this tea.”

He picked up his glove from the floor. Laurie said, “Don’t be silly.”

“Oh, I always wear it. Might meet the old woman outside. They told me at the hospital it would harden up quicker if I didn’t cover it; but I went into a pub and a tart who’d had a drink or two got it in focus rather suddenly, and shot a foot in the air before she could stop herself. No point in upsetting people.”

“All right. But I’m not drunk and I’m not a woman.”

“I know,” said Ralph at the door. He smiled unexpectedly and charmingly, and went out with the kettle.

Laurie sat up and rebandaged his knee. For the first time he had a feeling of its being no longer in the foreground of his self-portrait. He turned on his face, which as usual did a certain amount of good.

They talk about realism, thought Laurie, burying his face in the blanket, which smelt faintly of the cyanide with which ships are fumigated. As if only the outside were real. This is a very ugly room, and I’ve sat for my portrait for a handbook on war surgery; I expect Ralph has too. When he comes back, I think I’ll tell him about Andrew; I don’t know why I haven’t done it long ago. I’ve wished so often I could talk about it to someone who’d know.

The corner of the blanket, which was hanging out, had the label of a shop in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Slipping from under the displaced pillow a pair of pajamas showed, made of the thin silk sold in Indian stores; with instinctive curiosity Laurie fingered its foreign texture. He was lying like this, face forward, when the door opened.

He rolled over quickly, furious with himself for being taken by surprise: he was always careful not to be caught looking, he thought, as if one had been having a good cry. To remove all suspicion of this he began at once to say, “I was just looking at your pajamas.” At the moment of reaching the end of the sentence, he took in the fact that it wasn’t Ralph.

He hadn’t a moment’s doubt of who it must be. The situation wasn’t one which would easily yield to words: it could only depend on the kind of person Bunny was, so he looked to see. But it was impossible to notice anything about him, initially, except his conspicuous good looks and the confidence that went with them; it was like trying to read something printed on a bright surface which dazzled the eye. He did not, however, appear angry, and this at once seemed to Laurie like a gesture of prodigality from someone who can well afford it; he had a moment of feeling rather dejected and down-at-heel, before remembering to be glad that Ralph had done as well for himself as this.

Bunny stood easily just inside the door with his hands in his pockets; he looked thoughtful, and this gave his boyish face a certain pathos as if he were carrying a burden beyond his years. This grave moment gave to the smile that followed an irresistible sincerity.

“Now don’t tell me who you are. I know I’m right. Laurie Odell.”

“Yes. You’re Bunny, aren’t you? Ralph was telling me.”

“Oh, was he? It’s all very well for him to keep telling people about each other and never to let them meet.” He came in and sat on the edge of the table, swinging one leg. “I hear you’ve been having a pretty tough time in hospital. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s not much nowadays. A rest soon fixes it.” He leaned down and reached for his boot. At the back of his mind hovered a feeling that Bunny was taking it almost too well. In his place, Laurie thought, he himself wouldn’t have guaranteed to be charming at a moment’s notice. But then, he reflected, in Bunny’s place, one would feel pretty solid; it would take more than that to shake one. Ralph had said something: that the best way of being independent was to have all you needed at home. This easy and careless trust; not like Sandy; it was heartening to know that it did actually happen.

“Is Ralph anywhere about?” Bunny was asking. “I wonder I didn’t meet him on the stairs.”

“He can’t be far. He went to put on the kettle for some tea.”

“For some what?” asked Bunny, staring. Laurie had no time to be analytical or to put a name to the hard flippancy in the smiling eyes. “Well, well, that’s definitely a new one for old Ralph. Now me, I’m a proper old auntie for the stuff. Up at the Station we’re always … Oh, hello, sweetie. Here I am back after all, with my gay evening in ruins.”

The door had been open, so Ralph must have heard their voices as he crossed the landing. He stood in the doorway with a cool, cheerful look, and nodded at Bunny as if he had half expected him.

“Why, hello, Bunny, what happened to the party?”

“My dear, I couldn’t be more furious. I’ll swear by anything you like that Binky told me it was today. Now he says it’s tomorrow. He was rushing out somewhere and didn’t even stop to offer me a drink. Never mind, I shall have some of your delicious tea, instead.”

Ralph said, “Here’s the aspirin,” and added, “I was downstairs getting some milk.” It had a certain note, not of apology, of giving an explanation which one owes. He was carrying the milk in a little gray aluminum jug; he must have been to the basement to beg it from the landlady. Laurie felt foolish because he hadn’t anticipated this difficulty. “You shouldn’t have bothered, I don’t mind it without.”

“I do, though,” said Bunny boyishly. He got up. “Well, dears, why on earth are we all sitting about up here?” He spoke as if it were something temporary done in preoccupation, like loitering in the hall or kitchen. “Come along downstairs and get comfortable, and we’ll have it out of proper cups and saucers, like ladies and gentlemen.” He gave Ralph a flashing smile and added, “I bet you were going to give it him in a toothglass, weren’t you?”

Ralph said, “We’ll come if you’ve got some fresh tea. I don’t trust this lot.” His manner was very light and easy; it had been like this during the first part of Sandy’s party. He put out the light and they groped their way across the landing to the stairs. About halfway down, Ralph said, “All right, Spud?” and put an arm quickly around his shoulders, as if to steady him. The gesture had a helpless, almost a childish tenderness, like that of a small boy who has got his little brother into a scrape. But there below was Bunny’s room, and he was hospitably waving them in.

It was hard to believe one was in the same building. The room had been, one could say, interior-decorated. There was a single picture, which was vorticist of a kind and had patently been chosen to match the color scheme. A large number of glossy magazines were strewn about; but such books as could be seen looked as if people had left them behind and never missed them. The furniture was very low, with that overstated lounginess which rarely turns out to be physically comfortable. It was all very bright and sleek, and had the look of being kept under dust-sheets except when open to the public.

Bunny threw open a glittering cocktail cabinet lined with looking-glass; this seemed to be an automatic gesture like switching on the radio, which he did at the same time. Talking brightly against it, he went to a cupboard and got out a red-and-black tea set. Ralph walked over to the radio and, without permission or apology, switched it off.

“Oh, you,” said Bunny coquettishly. He arranged cups on a gold lacquer tray. “It’s so nice to meet a fellow addict. Sit here, Laurie, then you’ll have this little table.” The chair seats were a few inches off the ground and there was nothing to do with one’s legs but stick them straight out before one. Laurie settled himself, feeling conspicuous and vulnerable. Ralph hovered uncertainly for a few seconds, and then took the next chair.

Bunny held up a tea tin and shook it playfully. He looked at Ralph, who was lighting a cigarette and seemed not to notice.

“I should think that old kettle of yours must be boiling madly. Run along, do, sweetie, my tongue’s hanging out.”

It is possible, in a very low chair, to adopt a posture which makes getting up look like a physical impossibility. Ralph had settled himself like this, his legs crossed and extended, his hands in his pockets, the cigarette tilted at the corner of his mouth.

“No. You’re the tea expert. You make it.” One might have called his manner a colorless extract of decision.

Laurie saw their eyes meet. Although he had brought to this occasion a number of preconceived ideas, he was too keenly interested to let his powers of observation sleep. He knew at once that the air of cozy family bickering was a thin façade, that Bunny had had a surprise and was only beginning, yet, to be angry. Ralph lounged in the chair, giving him the straight look which hadn’t changed essentially in all the years that Laurie remembered. It would be odd if by this time Bunny weren’t equally used to it; yet, seeing these two men in uniform confronting one another, Laurie had a suspicion that he wasn’t used to it at all, that finding the challenge suddenly removed into the field of man to man, he felt something like outrage, as if Ralph had won on a foul.

He carried it off, however, quite well, making as he got up a whimsical face at Laurie and murmuring, “You see? Just an Eastern slave.” He had after all, thought Laurie, met a difficult situation, just now, in a civilized manner, and in the matter of the kettle Ralph was demonstrably in the wrong. In any case, thought Laurie, it wasn’t his business. Now that he was alone with Ralph he felt a dead weight of constraint; the glossy magazines made him think of a dentist’s waiting room. After nearly a minute’s silence Ralph said awkwardly, “Bunny’s fixed himself up nicely down here. I’m a dead loss at interiors and all that myself.”

“Me too.” He suspected that Ralph wished without disloyalty to disclaim the standard of taste around him. A leisured view of the room yielded so many awful little superfluities, so many whimsies and naughty-naughties, tassels and bits of chrome, that one recalled one’s gaze shamefaced as if one had exposed the straits of the poor. Laurie remembered the room upstairs: the absence of all loose ornament, the mantelpiece firmly packed with books, the little shelf fixed to the wall over the bed; the smell of scrubbing-soap, the wood and brass polished as a seaman, not a landlady, does it; the single eighteenth-century color print of a frigate under all sail. As tactfully as he could, he said, “I expect he likes to feel as unnautical as possible when he isn’t at sea.”

“Bunny isn’t a sailor.” Just for a moment, before he covered it, Laurie saw that he had wanted to laugh. “He’s attached to the navy for instructional purposes in this thing we’re doing. He was in the same sort of line commercially, before the war.”

“Oh. Does he instruct you?” Laurie found he resented it deeply. Then it struck him that Ralph might take it for a cheap joke. But Ralph said simply, “He did at first. I’ve moved up to another class now.” It was just then that Bunny came in with the tea.

For some time Laurie had been telling himself there was nothing remarkable about the smooth cool surface Ralph had presented ever since Bunny appeared: the more he felt, the less would be on display; you could be certain of that, Laurie thought. Now, however, he stopped snubbing his own instincts; he knew that all wasn’t well in this household, though, no doubt, the flaw was passing and trivial; he had blundered in at a delicate moment, and almost certainly complicated whatever trouble there was. In some anxiety he waited for Bunny to speak.

Bunny only surveyed the tray with his head on one side, and the naïve boyish look of one who will surely turn out to have forgotten something, but hopes for the best. “Well, now! Who’s going to be mother and pour out?” He put the tray at Laurie’s elbow and smiled confidingly. “Miss Odell?”

Laurie said equably, “All right, if you like.” A course of Charles’s friends had inured him to this kind of humor. He began putting milk in the cups. When he reached the third Ralph said, “Not for me, thanks,” and went over to the cocktail cabinet, where he got himself a pink gin.

Laurie poured out for Bunny and himself. In the lower ranks of the army, brewing tea has few feminine associations; to an ex-merchant seaman, he thought, the joke wasn’t likely to be excruciating either. Probably it was this which had irritated Ralph. He had come back with his drink and Laurie found himself thinking of him with vague perturbation. Imagining him ideally happy with Bunny had had a peaceful kind of remoteness. Now, as soon as one began wondering what could be wrong and why, one began to have new and disturbing thoughts and to resent Bunny more than was reasonable. Laurie got exasperated with himself and revolted against emotion altogether. With a decision which his habitual fear of boring people made rare in him, he embarked on a conversation about the war.

Ralph flung himself into it with transparent relief, and displayed a grasp of naval strategy which was practical and lively, if not profound. Used as Laurie was to considering the prospect of invasion in terms of what was to be done about the Germans when they arrived, he found it stimulating to be rapped smartly over the knuckles for assuming that they could arrive at all. At the back of Ralph’s mind, he suspected, was the thought that an emergency on this scale might get him back on the bridge of a fighting ship; but they didn’t discuss it. The conversation, begun as an expedient, soon became absorbing to both of them; some minutes of it passed before Laurie realized the fact that it was a dialogue. He looked up to see Bunny absorbed in his own reflections; not resentful it seemed but resigned, like someone who is used to not being considered much.

For the first time, Laurie admitted to himself that it was a mistake to have come. In anyone he had liked and trusted less, he would have suspected by this time that he was being used to bring Bunny to heel. But it was simple enough, he thought; Ralph had felt bored and depressed, perhaps because Bunny had arranged to go to a party without him, and had wanted someone to talk to and pass the time. And why not?

Just then he saw Bunny glance at Ralph’s glass which he had just emptied, pick it up, and refill it. Laurie watched the process out of the tail of his eye; the tot of gin was very small, the bitters helped to color it, the rest came from the water-jug. It shed quite a new and different light on Bunny, and made Laurie resolve to be very tactful indeed.

Just after this, the doorbell rang and Bunny went to answer it. Ralph applied himself to his drink in silence. Laurie had wondered whether he would take the opportunity of making it up to strength, but he was too preoccupied to notice anything.

The callers were Alec and Sandy. Laurie felt very awkward; but it was made clear to him at once by both that a new leaf had been turned and that his name was on it. It was the first time Laurie had observed them both together; he realized quite soon that Sandy regarded Alec as belonging to a superior order of beings, and was childishly proud of him. Perhaps it was admiration that caused him to commit such violent assaults on Alec’s emotions, as a small child will pummel an adult, not believing that it can really hurt him. As for Alec, one would have supposed that he and Bunny were the best of friends. Laurie thought this reasonable but decided that he himself would never have been equal to it. Tea things were swept away and Bunny dispensed drinks; he went on looking after Ralph’s glass as before, choosing moments when his attention was divided. Certainly it made one look at the pink mirror coffee tables with a gentler eye.

For the last few minutes, Ralph had been watching Alec, not talking much. Suddenly he said, “Has something happened?”

“Yes,” said Alec. “It’s Bim. I thought, as we were passing … I wasn’t sure if you’d heard.”

Ralph said “No.” He stared at the glass in his hand, and drank as if it were a routine duty he was absently carrying out. “No, I’d not heard. How was it?”

“Over Calais somewhere. He was seen to hit the ground; he hadn’t baled out. There seems no doubt about it.”

Ralph didn’t speak. It was Bunny who said gently, “Poor old Bim. I ran into him only the other day. It seems like a few hours.”

“He had a long life,” said Sandy, “as it’s going now.” Laurie could see that he was really distressed; his face was sharpened with it. Today he and Alec seemed closer and their friendship no longer unlikely. They reminisced together for a few minutes about Bim.

Bunny said, in the same gentle sickroom voice, “You met him, didn’t you, Laurie? At Alec’s the other night?”

“Yes. Only for a few moments.”

“No, of course I remember, he didn’t stay long. You swept him off, didn’t you, Ralph, to get some rest?”

Ralph said abruptly and rather loudly, “Well, someone had to. He was ill. He ought to have been in hospital.”

“Oh, I know,” said Bunny earnestly. Seeing Ralph about to get another drink, he took his glass and gave him one. “I remember you saying, Alec, if Ralph hadn’t taken over, Bim would have folded up in a couple of hours. It seems like fate, doesn’t it?”

“No,” said Alec in his clinical voice, “I didn’t say so. I’ve had training enough not to make that sort of cocksure prognosis.”

Staring at Bunny and forgetting to care if anyone noticed it, Laurie thought: How stupid he is; how does Ralph bear it? Of course he’s very good-looking, and I suppose … “I suppose,” he said, “the skies over Britain are full just now of fighter pilots who ought to be in nursing homes if they had their rights.”

“I’m surprised, really, they hadn’t grounded him,” Bunny said. “I expect they would have if he’d gone round the bend any further. What do you think, Alec?”

“I’ll save him the trouble of telling you,” said Ralph. His face had a heavy stiffness and his voice had gone flat and hard. “He thinks untrained people should mind their own—business, don’t you, Alec?”

Laurie looked at him puzzled. If it hadn’t been so clearly impossible—for the last three gins Bunny had given him would hardly have added up to one good double—one would have sworn he was getting drunk.

Alec didn’t rise to it. He had brownish eyelids with long dark lashes, under which his eyes slid around to look at Bunny for a moment. He spoke however to Ralph, with pleasant detachment. “Not in this instance, my dear. At least, I can assure you, you did precisely what I should have done if I’d had any influence with Bim, which I hadn’t.”

“Well,” said Ralph, “it seems that night he knew what he needed better than anyone else did. Too bad he got pushed around.” He gave Bunny his glass and said, “Not so much bloody bitters this time, Boo.”

Boo, thought Laurie. He looked at Ralph, who was beginning to have a fixed stare when he was not actually speaking. Boo. Well, good God, what business is it supposed to be of mine? He looked at his watch and got up.

“It’s on the half-landing,” said Ralph, rousing himself.

“Yes, I know, but I won’t come up again, I’ll have to catch my bus. Don’t get up, it’s all right.”

Ralph said, “What in blazes are you talking about? I’m driving you home.” He stared at Laurie as if he had been insulted and were waiting for an apology.

How can he be drunk? thought Laurie. I could take what he’s had myself and hardly feel it. He replied calmingly that of course Ralph wasn’t to turn out and that the bus went to the door.

“Sit down,” said Ralph, “and don’t talk crap. I’m driving you home and that’s the end of it.”

Laurie hesitated. As he did so, Bunny caught his eye and said, “Don’t worry, Laurie; it’ll be all right.” He sounded both kindly and confident. After all, thought Laurie, he should know.

On his way to the half-landing, where he retreated for a brief escape from all the tension upstairs, he knew that he was relieved not to be going yet. He hadn’t realized, till it came to the moment of saying goodbye, how much he had hated leaving Ralph after this news; in this awful flash room it was like abandoning him in a strange town or in a desert. One had to keep reminding oneself how very far from strange to him it really was, and that he wasn’t alone, either.

When Laurie got back, they were all discussing a recent blackmail case. Sandy and Alec had met someone who knew the victim, and had all the details, which were sordid enough. Remembering long discussions at Oxford, Laurie remarked that the present state of the law seemed to encourage that sort of thing; it was unenforceable, and merely created racketeers.

“I agree,” said Alec. “You could add that it gives the relatively balanced type, who makes some effort to become an integrated personality, a quite false sense of solidarity with advanced psychopaths whom, if they weren’t all driven underground together, he wouldn’t even meet.” He caught Sandy’s eye fixed on him reverently, and, as if he were giving way to a suppressed irritation, added, “Not that I can feel much pity for anyone who’ll submit to blackmail, myself.”

Sandy said at once, “No, really, that’s a bit sweeping, Alec. What about his job, what about dependents, what if his mother’s got a weak heart and the news will kill her? It’s not like you to be so rigid.”

“Oh, Sandy, we’ve been over this so often. It’s a matter of what your self-respect’s worth to you, that’s all. Isn’t that so, Ralph? In the first place, I didn’t choose to be what I am, it was determined when I wasn’t in a position to exercise any choice and without my knowing what was happening. I’ve submitted to psychoanalysis; it cured my stutter for me, which was very useful as far as it went. All right. I might still be a social menace, like a child-killer, and have to be dealt with whether I was responsible or not. But I don’t admit that I’m a social menace. I think that probably we’re all part of nature’s remedy for a state of gross overpopulation, and I don’t see how we’re a worse remedy than modern war, which from all I hear in certain quarters has hardly begun. Anyway, here we are, heaven knows how many thousand of us, since there’s never been a census. I’m not prepared to accept a standard which puts the whole of my emotional life on the plane of immorality. I’ve never involved a normal person or a minor or anyone who wasn’t in a position to exercise a free choice. I’m not prepared to let myself be classified with dope-peddlers and prostitutes. Criminals are blackmailed. I’m not a criminal. I’m ready to go to some degree of trouble, if necessary, to make that point.”

Sandy looked quickly around the room for applause. “I only mean,” he said, “that you can’t always know what other people are up against. Of course, if normal sex were ever made illegal, you’d get decent married couples meeting each other in brothels and dives and getting tarred with the same brush.”

Ralph stirred, in what seemed a sudden uncontrollable annoyance. “Well, for Christ’s sake, don’t let’s make blasted ostriches of ourselves. Anyone would think, to hear you and Alec talk, that being normal was immaterial, like whether you like your eggs scrambled or fried.”

“I didn’t say that,” said Alec temperately.

“That’s how you expect to be treated. Even civilized people had better hang on to a few biological instincts.” He had had to slow himself down to manage the last sentence without stumbling.

“It’s time they learned to be a bit more tolerant,” Sandy said.

“They’ve got children and they want grandchildren. Make you sick, the dirty bastards. So what? They’ve learned to leave us in peace unless we make public exhibitions of ourselves, but that’s not enough, you start to expect a medal. Hell, can’t we even face the simple fact that if our fathers had been like us, we wouldn’t have been born?”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Laurie. “In Athens we could have been.”

“Good old Spud,” said Ralph slowly and distinctly. “You’ll get yourself lynched if you don’t look out.” He leaned forward and tapped Laurie solemnly on the knee. “A lot of bull is talked about Greece by people who’d just have been a dirty laugh there. Not you, Spuddy. I’m not talking about you. You’d have got by.”

Alec shot a glance at Bunny and said swiftly, “Yes, well, we know under the social system the women were illiterates in semi-purdah, and most of the men were bisexual from choice. Hence Socrates, though probably not Plato. I think that supports my argument rather than yours.” His concern for the debate had something perfunctory about it.

“All right,” said Ralph rather thickly. “They were tolerant in Greece and it worked. But, Christ, there was something a bit different to tolerate. There was a standard; they showed the normal citizen something. There was Aris—” He stuck on the name; either he couldn’t pronounce it or he didn’t remember it. He looked at Laurie, as if he were issuing an order.

“Aristogeiton,” Laurie said.

“And the Sacred Band. In fact they took on the obligations of men in their friendships instead of looking for bluebirds in a fun-fair; and if they didn’t, they bloody well weren’t tolerated, and a good job too.”

Laurie didn’t realize how completely Bunny had been forgotten until he moved. He had been sitting on a tartan divan with his patient left-out look, as if a group of mathematicians had overlooked his presence and started to discuss relativity. Laurie had had enough of this and hadn’t glanced at him again. Now he got up gracefully and took away the glass with which Ralph had been tapping for emphasis on the arm of his chair.

“You’ll break it.” He smiled brightly across at Laurie. “I bet he handed you out some canings at school, didn’t he?”

“About the usual number,” said Laurie, rather coldly.

Bunny put his head on one side and looked down at Ralph with an indulgent smile. “It did something to him, you know. Scratch old Ralph after a couple of drinks, and you’ll always find an unfrocked scoutmaster.”

Laurie was certain afterwards that if he had had one more drink himself at the time when Bunny said this, he would have got to his feet and struck him. As it was, he was just sober enough to notice Alec looking at him, which brought him to himself. He sat upright in his chair, which wasn’t easy, since it seemed designed for patients under general anesthesia, and looked Bunny in the face.

“We didn’t have a scout troop actually,” he said. “But I think it’s quite good. It keeps boys off the streets. Did you ever join one?”

Oh, God, he thought, that was a bit much. He saw Sandy try to catch Alec’s eye and Alec pretend not to notice; he saw Ralph frowning in forced concentration as if he knew something ought to be dealt with. He looked at Bunny again.

“I should think I did,” said Bunny genially. “I was prepared every minute, but it turned out a terrible flop.”

He spoke as if he had missed the point; but Laurie had seen his face at the moment of impact. While Alec and Sandy hurried to pad the conversation with gossip, Laurie thought: He took that because he couldn’t think of a comeback he felt would be smart enough. That’s what he wants more than anything; cleverness, making things go his way. And he’s just clever enough to suspect sometimes that he’s fundamentally stupid, and it limits even his malice. That must be most frustrating. I suppose Ralph sees the best of him when they’re alone.

It was at this point that the air-raid sirens went.

There were the usual sounds of weary and resigned irritation. Bunny went to the window to fix a dubious bit of blackout; a warden shouted at him from the street for showing a light; there was some moving about in search of a drawing-pin. Laurie bumped the cocktail cabinet and slopped over the cut-glass water-jug, and returned to mop it up with his handkerchief. As he was about to put this back in his pocket something arrested him; he brought it out again and sniffed it Bunny was at the window, and didn’t see.

Ralph heaved on his chair-arms, and got to his feet. “Well, Spud,” he said, “time we were getting you home.”

Bunny came over. In his gentlest voice he said, “Ralph, my dear, really and truly I don’t think you ought to drive.”

“Now look,” said Ralph, “I’ve only—” He frowned again, as if he were trying to remember something.

“Yes, we know all about that.” Bunny’s cozy voice seemed addressed to an engagingly naughty child. “Just you take a little nap till I get home. I’ll see after Laurie.”

Laurie said to Ralph, “It’s all right. Don’t worry.” Ralph took hold of the back of the chair to steady himself, and stared at him with his eyes narrowed, as if he were a bright light. Laurie went up to him. “I enjoyed this evening. Thanks for everything.” It didn’t matter any longer what Bunny thought.

“It’s a pleasure, Spud, any time,” said Ralph, speaking carefully and rather pompously. “Bunny’s right, you know. Bad show, I’m sorry. Comes of mixing them. I shouldn’t have had that rum upstairs.”

“You didn’t have any rum,” Laurie said. He didn’t care whether Bunny heard him or not.

“That’s what I thought too,” said Ralph, nodding solemnly. “Only goes to show.” He sat down again; this time he looked as if he wouldn’t get up so easily. Just then the guns began, crackling and pattering at the other end of the town. Laurie looked around at Bunny. Evidently it would be necessary to speak to him sooner or later.

“You’d better forget about driving me back. You’ll have to get back to the Station, won’t you?”

“Oh, no,” said Bunny soothingly. “That’s all right, I’m not on duty.”

“Won’t you want to run Ralph over?”

“Ralph?” Bunny smiled as if something whimsical had been said. “He’s only on a course. He isn’t responsible for anything.”

Laurie’s hand clenched itself in his pocket; his fingers met in the wet twist of handkerchief he had used to mop the cocktail shelf. Ralph’s eyelids were dropping, he was just in the pose for which the chair had been designed. Laurie said to Alec, “Will you be here?”

“We’re on casualty tonight. We ought to be on our way now. I’m sorry.” His eyes met Laurie’s in a look of open understanding. “I shouldn’t worry, it can’t be helped, you know. Well, thanks for the drink, Bunny. Good night.”

Laurie wondered, as the door shut on them, what their first words would be when they were alone. There was a thump; the bombs had started. He walked back to Ralph’s chair.

“I’m not going,” he said. “Not till this is over.”

“Push off, Spud,” said Ralph drowsily. “I’m going to sleep.” He shut his eyes again.

Laurie walked around him. He wasn’t going to speak to Bunny across him as if he didn’t count. “We can’t,” he said evenly, “just leave him here. What if the house gets a stick of incendiaries?”

Bunny spread his hands in a vaguely mystic gesture, committing them all to the will of Allah.

Laurie breathed sharply through his nose. “Christ—”

He turned at a sound behind him. Ralph had picked himself up from the chair. He stood with his feet apart and his hands dug in his pockets, swaying slightly as if he were giving with a moving deck.

“What in hell’s all this nonsense about? Stop flapping, Spud, and don’t be such a bloody nuisance.”

“All right.” He could feel Bunny watching at his elbow. “Try and stay awake till you see how it goes.”

“See how what goes? What’s eating you, for God’s sake?”

“There’s a raid on.” As he spoke he heard a bracket of bombs go down; it was like heavy feet running a step or two.

“All right, Spud, all right.” He stood there frowning, as if the raid were an obstruction which Laurie had called into being. Suddenly he narrowed his eyes tightly; something came into them, it seemed from an indestructible strong-point far behind. “Look after yourself. I’ll be ringing you. God bless.”

“God bless,” said Laurie, meaning it. The last thing he saw of the room was Ralph settling back in the chair again. As he went out, he saw Bunny go back and take the lighted cigarette out of Ralph’s hand. He’s thinking of his nice carpet, Laurie thought.

They went down without speaking. Laurie heard the dot-and-carry sound of his own feet on the stair-treads, and imagined Bunny in the hall below, hidden by the darkness, standing and listening to it.

Outside in the street Bunny said, “We’ll have to use old Ralph’s car, I’ve lent someone mine this evening.”

They got into the car, which Bunny started with a patronizing kind of carelessness. The guns were still going and a lot of searchlights were out; the streets were almost empty, till they came to one where a house lay half across the road with a rescue squad working, and they had to go another way.

Laurie thought: Andrew wouldn’t judge too quickly. Andrew would say you should get free of yourself and try to understand. For example: Bunny had gone to a good deal of trouble, which only made sense if one assumed that he was much fonder of Ralph than he seemed. It was true that his methods had not been aristocratic; but he had probably had a very unhappy childhood, or something. Very likely he tormented himself as much as Sandy did, but hid it better.

A bomb came down, not very near, somewhere behind them. Laurie thought of Ralph asleep in the deep tilted chair and wondered if it had been close enough to rouse him: but this did not further the effort to understand Bunny.

“I’m afraid this is rather a way for you.” To say he was sorry Bunny had had to turn out would have been too much.

“Oh, no, I adore driving at night, don’t you? Before the war I had one of those huge spotlights on my Riley. It made everything look madly dramatic, just like a color film. People used to look so funny blinking and staring in it, like fish in a tank. You’d love the Riley. I had her done specially, a sort of bronze, with cream upholstery. If I’d only known, I wouldn’t have lent her tonight. I hate doing it really, but this boy helped me out of a rather awkward predicament and saved a lot of unpleasantness, so one could hardly refuse. Of course, it would be tonight. Never mind, you must try her another time.”

“Thanks,” said Laurie reluctantly. One could hardly pick a quarrel in the face of this unexpected civility, unless one had decided never to see Ralph again. After all, he thought, people were patchy; Ralph, who was no fool, had found something in Bunny to love; and there was always the risk of investing one’s snobbery with moral sanctions.

“Most of the excitement seems to be the other side of town. We’ll be out in the country in a minute, then you’ll have to begin showing me the way. I didn’t mean to seem callous about Ralph, just now. I just happen to know that the old dear practically never passes out flat, no matter what he has; and that hag downstairs would wake him at a pinch. She adores him, you know, she thinks he’s a wicked romantic sailor; it would kill you, honestly, to see the way he plays up to her, and she’s such a dim draggle-tailed old thing, Christmas in the orphanage I always call it. My dear, I said, one dark night you’ll find you’ve given her so much self-respect, if that’s what you call it, that she’ll nip up the stairs and into bed with you and then you’ll be sorry. He got so annoyed, I think that must have really happened to him somewhere or other. There’s a lot of funny little kinks about old Ralph.”

“Yes?” said Laurie, whose attention had wandered; he had been watching Bunny drive. Unable to stand it any longer in silence, he said, “You’ll only make the gears worse than they are, slamming them like that.”

“Oh, my dear, the whole bus is just a Palladium turn. I think it originally went by steam, and they modernized it at great expense about 1920. Have you seen it in daylight?”

“Yes.”

“The thing that always astonishes me is to find the lever inside at all, and not sticking out of the mudguard in a brass casing.”

“Ralph seems to manage it pretty well, considering what he’s got left of that hand. It must be a bit of an effort for him.”

“Oh, but you know he adores effort, it’s his thing. He thinks comfort’s absolutely decadent. Now, I’m not a bit like that myself.”

“No,” Laurie said.

“The great thing, I think, is for everyone to be happy. What I always say is, life’s so simple really, if you don’t complicate it. It’s just a matter of live and let live, don’t you think so?”

“For God’s sake, do put the clutch in properly when you’re changing down. If you grind them like that they’ll soon be jamming all the time.”

“It’s all such a nonsense,” said Bunny petulantly. “Well, this is the very last time I lend the Riley.”

Laurie’s hatred faded in spite of him. His mind groped over the personality beside him seeking something to grip on, and everything that had seemed salient resolved itself into a deficiency. He was too tired to be choice with words: Common, he thought inadequately. I thought after Dunkirk that would never mean anything again. How does he keep all this from Ralph?

They were out in the country; the sounds of the raid behind were muted by distance. Less warmly than he would have spoken to a chauffeur, Laurie showed Bunny the way.

“Oh, yes, I know. You’re an awfully reserved person, aren’t you?”

“I’m afraid I’ve never thought about it.”

“I get terribly bored with people who are just on the surface. They never give you any surprises, do they? That was the thing that first attracted me to Ralph, you know. He didn’t put everything in the shop window. Now, of course, I know him inside out, and it’s not that I’m not terribly fond of him, but—well, I wouldn’t tell just any one this, but it’s different telling you—”

Laurie had to speak twice before he succeeded in interrupting. “I’m sorry; but if you don’t mind, I’d rather not hear about all this.”

“I wouldn’t have told you,” said Bunny in a hurt, sincere voice, “without a very good reason.”

Laurie said abruptly, “Well, you can tell me this, then. Why did you do it?”

“Well, really, my dear, I was more or less swept off my feet. Between ourselves …”

“Tonight, I mean. You gave him about five neat gins straight off. It was in the water-jug.”

“Goodness, you are observant, aren’t you? Or is it an old trick in the army too?”

“I wouldn’t know, I’m not an officer.”

“Of course, it doesn’t work with everybody. If I’d tried it on you, you’d have spotted it straight away. But with hard-drinking types like old Ralph, who’ve got one or two on board already—”

“I asked why you did it, that’s all.”

Bunny stopped the car.

“You awful boy,” he said. “You do believe in playing hard to get.”

It was probably for not more than a second that Laurie was paralyzed by sheer incredulity. It seemed far too long. Though Bunny hadn’t got beyond the arm flung along the back of the seat and the deep intimate gaze, Laurie felt already a nauseous anticipation of contact.

“Look,” he said, “shall we get something straight? I don’t like you. I don’t like you in any possible way that one person could like an other.” He paused for breath. When he remembered everything it didn’t seem enough. “If you were the last human being left alive, I’d sooner—” The phrase with which he finished took him by surprise. It was what Reg had said to the girls in the blackout. Laurie had never supposed that a time would come when he would use it with satisfaction.

“My, my,” said Bunny. “Aren’t we butch?”

Laurie thought, That got through.

“In that case,” said Bunny. He leaned over and snapped at the catch of the door. “I should hate to force my company on anyone who felt like that about it. Good night.”

Something primitive stirred in Laurie, as in a solitary man beset by the creatures of a swamp or forest “Oh, no,” he said.

“I shouldn’t take that tone, if I were you.”

This, thought Laurie, is what he doesn’t tell everyone. The practiced inflection had held many chapters of inadvertent autobiography.

“You know,” he said, “Ralph’s going to wake up before long and ring the hospital to see I got back all right. If I haven’t, what do you expect me to do tomorrow? Back up your story?”

“Why, you little—”

“Yes, all right. You’ve bought this. It’s not even your car. You’re a volunteer for this job. You went to a lot of bother to drive me back. Now you damned well drive me.”

The pain jumped in his knee; he was shaking a little, but not to notice in the dark. He waited.

“Well,” said Bunny, “please don’t let’s have a scene about it in the middle of the road.”

He let in the clutch.

As the car ran on through the cold sweet autumn night, Laurie thought, All that was an impromptu. It wasn’t a deep-laid scheme or anything. He’s just a chancer.

With a cold barren weariness that quenched the dry glow of anger, he thought, What can you do about these people? The terrible thing is, there are such a lot of them. There are so many, they expect to meet each other wherever they go.

Not wicked, he thought: that’s not the word, that’s sentimentality. These are just runts. Souls with congenitally short necks and receding brows. They don’t sin in the sight of heaven and feel despair: they only throw away lighted cigarettes on Exmoor, and go on holiday leaving the cat to starve, and drive on after accidents without stopping. A wicked man nowadays can set millions of them in motion, and when he’s gone howling mad from looking at his own face, they’ll be marching still with their mouths open and their hands hanging by their knees, on and on and on. … No, Andrew wouldn’t like that.

When they got to the hospital, Bunny said, “I suppose you won’t be able to run to Ralph fast enough with all this.”

“You’re afraid of him, really, aren’t you?”

“Don’t make me laugh,” said Bunny shrilly. “He never caned me at school.”

“No,” said Laurie. “Quite.” He got out of the car. “Don’t worry; I shall never mention you to Ralph again if it’s possible to avoid it. He’s a friend of mine. It’s a good old English word and I’m using it in the literal sense, if that conveys anything to you at all. Good night.”

He got back to the ward within seven minutes of the time limit; but Andrew, he found, had finished his work and left.

He had got to see Andrew. He felt a need more imperative than any he had experienced in the keenest crisis of personal love. He wanted to recover his belief in the human status.

The late-pass men who had got off the last bus were still having cocoa in the kitchen; fairly drunk, but sober enough to be solemnly careful of the Night Nurse’s modesty, simmering with the things they had to tell when she had gone. As the door shut behind her, out it came. Laurie didn’t wait. It was no longer supposed, he thought, to be anything to do with him. He knew where Andrew would be: in the next ward, washing up and cleaning the kitchen. There were two night orderlies for four wards. He walked to the outer door; Nurse Sims came out from the linen room as he reached it.

“Odell! Whatever on earth do you think you’re up to?”

“Oh, sorry, Nurse.” He wasn’t in the least embarrassed, only occupied with the certainty that he would do what he had determined. “I’ve got to speak to Andrew Raynes for a moment. You don’t mind, do you? I won’t be long.”

“Well, really, I don’t know. I suppose you’ve got enough sense not to let Sister see you. Don’t be there all night, then, will you? What a pair you two are. I always call you David and Jonathan.”

Ward A kitchen was just the same as the one in Ward B, except that all the fittings were on the opposite sides, which gave one a feeling of stepping through the looking-glass. Andrew was at the sink with the taps running; their noise covered the sound of Laurie’s approach. Moving quietly, he got without being seen almost to Andrew’s elbow. You could tell it was his second lot of washing-up; his hands were red, the front of his hair was loose and limp. He had the look of hard concentration which Laurie recognized as his substitute for worry. Yes, Laurie thought with inexpressible comfort, Andrew was solid. One could imagine oneself being involved with him in utter disagreement, in exasperation even; but one would never chip the facing and find rubble behind. There was a number of demands one could never make on him; but perhaps this, which he had given unasked and unknowing, was in the end the best of all.

“A penny for your thoughts,” Laurie said.

“Why, Laurie!” His look of startled happiness gave Laurie a sense of sudden inadequacy; there was more joy here than his tossed mind was capable of receiving. “Where did you come from?”

“I didn’t want to turn in without saying good night.”

“I thought by the time I could get back you’d be asleep.” He was holding a dish in his hand; he stared at it, smiled, and put it aside. “Is this all right? Don’t get yourself crimed whatever you do.”

“Nurse Sims said I could. She says she always calls us David and Jonathan.”

“Does she? How nice. Did you have a good time?”

“The first part was all right. It got a bit boring later; too many people.”

“How’s Ralph?”

“He got a bit bored too.” It was a silhouette of trouble, flat now and unreal.

Laurie picked up a tea-towel and they began drying the things together.

“Did they tell you?” said Andrew. “Is that why you came?”

“Tell me what?” The moment’s security dissolved; the secret wilderness crept back again, in which no good could be assumed of the unknown.

“You just came,” said Andrew, as if a natural trust had been confirmed. “You don’t know about Dave, then?”

“No, is he ill or something?” His treacherous imagination formed a picture of Andrew spending days at Dave’s bedside, claimed by an older loyalty.

“I hope not, though it’s enough to make him. They sent for him to London. Cynthia’s been killed.”

“Is that his sister?”

Andrew stared at him. “But have I never—surely I—Cynthia’s his wife.”

“His—!” Laurie realized after a moment that stupefaction was a lame response. “I’m most terribly sorry. Was it in a raid?”

“Yes.” He stared at the cup he was rubbing, and added, “Dave’s got to identify her.”

“God, I’m sorry.”

“She was older than Dave. She must have been sixty at least.”

“Have they got any children?”

“They had one who died, and after that she couldn’t. Sometimes I wonder if that’s why Dave’s always been so kind to me.”

Laurie polished the china, thankful that with Andrew it was always possible to be silent.

“I know the same thing’s happening all over the world,” said Andrew. “But I keep thinking about him. He’ll have to go to some gray mortuary and look at whatever there is, and then fill up forms, and when he’s done that someone will read what he’s written and say probably, as they did to another c.o. I knew in similar circumstances—no, he wouldn’t want me to tell anyone, even without the name.”

“Dave’s big enough to take that,” said Laurie helplessly. Yes, he thought, I’m the one who was such good form just now at the gate. And worst of all I can feel the cold draft around my inferiority complex because I learn that he isn’t one of us.

He stayed for another five minutes or so, to the limit of Nurse Sims’s estimated patience. Shortly before he left he said, “I say, Andrew. Do you believe in the proposition that all men are created equal?”

“Not in the fact. Of course not. It would be a bit like believing in a flat earth, wouldn’t it? But I believe in the proposition right enough. It’s what you might call the working hypothesis of Christianity.”

“Simple, isn’t it, after all?” He himself was unsure whether he spoke in irony or not.

The All Clear sounded after he was back in bed. For a little while he lay awake, without quite owning to himself what he was waiting for. He hadn’t really supposed for a moment that Ralph would ring. It had been good enough to scare Bunny.

“Can’t you sleep, Odell? Is it the leg?”

“It’s not too bad, Nurse, thanks. I wouldn’t mind some A.P.C. next time you’re passing.”

The telephone was silent. Laurie thought, He’s been in hospital himself, he knows what an uproar it makes if it rings late. Sensible of him really. Of course, he’s probably still asleep. Bunny will just come in and—

“Oh, thank you, Nurse. No, I’ll be fine. I’ll drop off in a minute.”

The All Clear was a long time going. I wonder what it was like back there. If anything happened to him, there’d be no one to tell me.