The Charioteer: A Novel

9

“HERE, SPUD.”

“HELLO,” SAID Laurie, peering into the bathroom from which Reg’s voice had come.

“Thought I recognized your step. Have to listen for it now. Just a bit heavy on the one foot, that’s all.”

“Want any help?” asked Laurie, coming in. Reg hadn’t needed any since the days of the airplane splint, but he had heard from Madge that morning and Laurie had seen his face as he read the letter.

“That’s it,” said Reg. He shut the bathroom door. They sat down on the large wooden board which, placed over the bath, made a table for scrubbing mackintoshes. Their embarrassment was enhanced by the precarious nature of their privacy. Laurie said, “Let’s have a fag on it,” and then, “I suppose I can guess.”

“No prizes offered,” said Reg with bitterness.

“It’s a damned shame,” Laurie said.

For a moment they were linked in a vague nostalgic coziness. Then Reg cleared his throat, and consciousness fell between them. Laurie said, “Same chap again?”

“That’s right. Offered her a job in his business now. Cooked meats and fish bar. Edgware way.”

“Not much future in that. Can’t you stop her?”

“Well, see, Spud, that’s it. Don’t hardly like to ask, but can you lend me seventeen and a tanner till next month?”

“I could.” As a matter of fact he was very short. “But what about asking the Major? Urgent private affairs?”

“Won’t wait till tomorrow,” said Reg, staring at the wooden bath mat. Laurie realized he hadn’t been told everything.

“French leave?” he said.

“I had about enough, Spud. I’m going today and fix it.”

Laurie looked at his face. “With the chap, you mean?”

“I’m going to fix it. Never mind the rest.”

Laurie took another look. The glasshouse, he thought, if nothing worse. Absurdly, the fact that he couldn’t spare the money kept obscuring his judgment; he felt he was being mean.

He said, “Reg, honestly. I wouldn’t do it.”

Reg leaned rather elaborately across the bath to throw his ash into the space behind. “Well, Spud, maybe not. It’s all according, see what I mean?”

His face was crimson. Laurie saw what he meant.

He was overcome by a sudden, stifling claustrophobia. Charles’s and Sandy’s friends had tried to lock the door on him from inside. Now Reg was doing it from out in the street. There was a difference: he liked Reg much better.

“Look, Reg, I’m not taking that.”

Reg stared at him in mute horror. “What you mean, Spud? Not taking me up wrong, I hope?”

“And what a hope. Not bloody likely. Now look, Reg, there’s nothing fancy about this, I know what you feel, like anyone else. It’s people that matter; if not, what are you worrying about, what’s Madge got that you can’t have for a bob against the railings? You care about someone and they let you down. It can happen to anyone; where’s the difference?” As soon as he had said it he knew that it wasn’t a hundred per cent honest argument, and perhaps didn’t deserve to succeed.

“That’s right,” said Reg slowly. “That’s true enough, Spud, you got something there. Forget what I said. Half silly with worry, that’s what.”

“I know.” He considered. No, he thought; Reg is the sort that prison would do something to forever, and she isn’t worth it. “Trouble is, Reg, now I think, I doubt if I’ve got seventeen and six, till I hear from home. I spent a bit in town.”

“That’s all right, Spud. Forget it.” To his surprise he saw a struggling respect fighting the disappointment in Reg’s face. “You hang on to that. Got to be independent. Make ’em think all the more of you.”

Suddenly Laurie got it. Christ, he said to himself, has Reg really been thinking … But he won and it was Reg who dropped his eyes. “Hell, Reg, what do you think I am?”

“You’re okay, Spud.” He knew it wasn’t the apology Reg minded, it was the exposure. “Knew that all along. Shoving my oar in. No offense meant, honest to God.”

At least, he thought, one could do something for Reg out of this ephemeral ascendancy. “Tell you what. Leave it for today. It can’t make all that difference.” He couldn’t help that, and Reg hadn’t spirit enough to resent it. “I’m going to do a bit of thinking. Okay?”

“Okay, then.” Laurie knew he had rushed Reg into this, chiefly by terror of what he might say next. They got up from the bath cover. Laurie stood holding the door, to make sure it didn’t swing back against Reg’s arm. Reg cleared his throat. He hung back. “ ’S okay, Spud. Shan’t be a minute.”

Reg’s prudery being what it was, there might have been many reasons for this; but this time something arrested Laurie and illumination struck him. Oh, no, but no, he thought in helpless protest: it really was, at last, too much; suddenly it collapsed into an outrageous joke. He stood in the doorway and rocked with laughter. “But it’s—” he gasped. He gazed at Reg and imagined him creeping coyly out after a discreet delay, like a femme galante at a houseparty. It was excruciating.

Reg was grinning sheepishly. He looked curiously comforted and relieved.

Laurie leaned in at the door. “I shouldn’t worry, Reg. If you like, I’ll give you a certificate.”

The post office was only ten minutes down the road. He pulled a telegraph form from the string-tied pad. Reg had had a couple of leaves in between operations; Laurie had written and forwarded letters, and knew the address by heart.

“Your husband’s condition grave please come immediately.” He signed it with the name of the hospital; Madge wouldn’t notice a thing like that.

An hour or two later, when it was too late to undo all this, he did what he had known he must, and went to warn the Sister. He would have thought poorly of her if she hadn’t been angry. “I’ve never known a patient take such a thing upon himself, never in all my years of nursing. Perhaps you’ll pay more attention to Major Ferguson in the morning. You’ve been here too long and you’ve got thoroughly above yourself.”

“Yes, Sister. I’m sorry.”

Luckily it was in the Staff Nurse’s duty period that Ralph rang up.

When the message came through he hesitated, wondering whether to send word by someone that he had just gone out. He hadn’t expected to hear from Ralph again.

On the morning after their last meeting Ralph had telephoned. They had been evasively facetious till it had stuck in both their throats; Ralph had approached the question of next Tuesday with awkward casualness; Laurie had said that he was sorry, this time he would have to get back. Ralph had taken it very quietly; there was no way of knowing what Bunny’s story had been. Now, to know that he had rung again, and was waiting, was full of excitement and inevitability, like a suspense story with a happy ending; but, he thought, still hesitating by his bed, there could be nothing but sadness in these perfunctory gestures of farewell. Involuntarily he felt at the leg-pocket of his battle-dress; he had got into the way of keeping the Phaedrus there again, as he had in the south coast training camp and afterwards in France. Now it no longer stood for something rounded off and complete, but for confusion and uncertainty and pain and compassion, and all the tangle of man’s mortality. And yet, he thought again, it was for such a world that it had been written.

“Hello, Ralph. I’m sorry I kept you waiting.”

“Just a minute,” Ralph said. Laurie heard the telephone laid down, and a sound like a door shutting. “Sorry, all right now. Well, Spud, how are you?”

“Fine.” Yes, he thought, it was going to be that kind of conversation. “How about you?”

“Fine. Look, Spud, will it be all right if I pick you up this afternoon after the treatment, and run you back? I’d like to have a word with you, and that way it won’t hold you up. One can’t say much on this line.”

“Of course. Thanks very much.” Bunny must have kept his story for a day or two, cooking. Now, it seemed, Ralph had decided to have it out. It would have to be got through. … “Odell. Lanyon wants you in his study after prayers.”

He said, “I’ll wait on the same bench as I did before.”

“Good.” There was a short pause. “There’ll be no one else coming.”

“All right.” It must certainly be trouble. “Five-fifteen, then. Goodbye.”

“Spud, just a minute.”

“Yes?”

“Don’t worry about anything.” The line went dead.

Before he left for Bridstow, he wrote a letter. It was for Madge, and was ostensibly an apology for the trouble he had given her. He wrote it with the incident of the Wurlitzer request program held steadfastly before his eyes. Afterwards he read it over to himself, with a kind of fascinated nausea. The thought that Madge might not destroy it, that it might continue to exist, even, by way of ultimate horror, that she might show it to the Major, who would accept it as a fair sample of his style—all this crept in his stomach and in the hair on his neck. The secret of its peculiar gruesomeness was that it wasn’t pure invention. Under the shaming sentimentality, the awful all-jolly-good-sorts-together, it was quite sincere.

He stuck it down quickly before he had time to dilute it, and gave it to the Sister when he went to catch his bus. She glared at him; but she had made herself his accomplice. She hadn’t told Reg anything.

Miss Haliburton’s puppy was noticeably bigger. The department was rather less busy than last week and she spent more time with him, asking questions about the leg. Something he said, which hadn’t seemed to him of the slightest significance, seemed to excite her. She whipped him out of the apparatus, put the boot on his bare foot and leg, and made him walk around the cubicle. To his extreme embarrassment she got down and, as he moved, followed on hands and knees; it was like being investigated by an Old English sheepdog. The bare leg with the boot on it already seemed to him pure Salvador Dali; he felt that, even for hospital, the macabre was being overstressed. He could hear her tut-tutting under her breath. The puppy waddled beside her, breathing eagerly.

“Who made this?” she barked suddenly. He presumed that it wasn’t the leg to which she was referring, and replied that it had been made by a small man with cross eyes and thick glasses, whose name he didn’t know.

Miss Haliburton called a senior student to her, and made a speech. “… everything so slapdash. No conscience about their work. Look at it, Miss Cardew. Look at this rotation here. Put your hand on the peroneus. (Just walk a few steps again, Odell.) There, feel that. And when the boy gets pain, first they give him aspirin three times a day and then they order faradism. Really, sometimes one despairs. How does a government like that expect to win a war?” Almost before he knew what was happening, she had him out of the boot again, drew lines on it with chalk, and, to his alarm, handed it over to a deliberate old character with a walrus mustache, who poked it with a blunt pencil, explained why he wouldn’t be able to make a right job of it, and took it away.

“You’ll have to have a new one, of course,” she said as he was watching it vanish. “But this will help meanwhile.”

At first he could think of nothing but the delay. It was nearly five-fifteen already; he felt he could bear anything except that Ralph should think he had run out on him, with things as they were; and he knew hospital too well to suppose there was any possibility of sending a message. It was only gradually that he began to understand what she was still trying to tell him. Hope trickled slowly, through a half-choked channel, into his mind. Pain had become as inevitable to him in these last weeks as any of the body’s natural demands, differing from them in being insatiable. Even now he wouldn’t trust himself to anticipation, but he remembered to thank her.

“Don’t thank me, my dear boy; I’m saving myself trouble in the long run. Now this bit of intensive treatment we’re starting will really do something for you. Ah, here’s Arthur. Now we’ll see.”

It was after five-thirty. He was almost too worried to notice what Arthur had done to the boot, which was largely a matter of altering the tilt of the thickened sole. It felt odd for the first moment, then very quickly seemed natural. He thanked everyone again and escaped.

When he couldn’t see Ralph anywhere in the hall, a wave of such misery struck him that he stood stock-still where he was, saying to himself stubbornly that it wasn’t true. He looked around again, refusing the facts, and, as if created by his act of will, Ralph was there after all. He was sitting on one of the benches, his back turned, listening attentively to what looked like a long story from a very old man. When Laurie had approached within a couple of yards he saw him, smiled, and motioned him to wait. Laurie heard him say at the end, “Well, sir, I can see I’ve missed a lot not shipping with you. I’ve enjoyed this very much.”

He fell into step beside Laurie, telling him, as if they hadn’t been separated for more than an hour, the old man’s story: the start in sail, the wool-clipper, the Chinese pirates, the torpedoing in 1917. Out of the tail of his eye Laurie saw the ancient captain, a stocky figure in a shiny old blue suit, look after Ralph with an old man’s sour approval, before settling down again to his long wait.

“Thanks for waiting. I was afraid you’d write me off.”

“Good Lord, I know hospital. I shouldn’t have started worrying for another hour. Did they tell you anything?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, this time they did.” He explained about the boot; he was getting used to the feel of it now, and it did begin to seem more comfortable than before. Ralph listened carefully and at the end said, “Nothing else?”

“Well, not yet.” This reserve reminded Laurie of the caution he had urged upon himself. “They wouldn’t say much more till they’ve seen how it works.”

“Good luck to it, anyhow.” They had got to the car. When they were in, he hesitated a moment. “I suppose you’ve not got time for a quick turn round the Downs?”

“Oh, I think so.”

Ralph drove in silence through the pink stone streets, took a half-turn around the Downs, and pulled off the road at the spot where cars stop to admire the gorge. Twilight was falling and no other cars were there. The steep side of the gorge with its sheer faces was out of sight below them: opposite were wooded slopes, with a scoop of quarry. The ebb-tide river flowed sluggishly at the bottom, a muddy thread between two long slopes of slime.

“It’s all right, Spud. I told you, there’s nothing to worry about.”

“I wasn’t worrying.”

“I brought you up here to tell you a bit of news, just in case it makes any difference to anything. Bunny’s gone.”

What had he done? With what clumsiness had he floundered in other people’s complex and dimly comprehended business? Playing for time, he asked, “Has he been posted?”

“Oh, no,” said Ralph coolly. “As a matter of fact he hasn’t even left his room. I can hardly expect him to, seeing what he’s spent on the fittings. I shall find another myself, as soon as I can. Still, he’s gone, in a manner of speaking.”

“Ralph, I—I’m most terribly sorry.”

“Sorry? Don’t be ridiculous.”

“You mean it’s my fault. There doesn’t seem very much to say. Except that I’d give anything for it not to have happened.”

“Oh, come, Spud, don’t make yourself out a bigger fool than you are. Bunny was a long hangover after a short drunk. Far too long.”

The relief of this was at first enormous. Then he wondered what, exactly, had happened, and whether it hadn’t made Ralph a good deal more unhappy than he cared to admit. “I’m glad if that’s how it is.”

“By the way,” Ralph said in an almost impersonal voice, “I owe you an apology for last time.”

“If you mean about driving me back, you don’t. I can tell you now.” With more satisfaction than he liked to admit to himself, he explained about the water-jug.

“Good God, what a corny one to have fallen for.” He laughed, but Laurie already felt ashamed. He lit cigarettes in silence and for a minute or so neither spoke.

“I have a feeling,” Ralph said presently, “that a few other apologies may also be due. He did actually deliver you at the hospital, I suppose?”

“Oh, yes.”

“I know I wasn’t very discreet that evening; did he make a scene about it?”

“No.”

“Something happened. All right, never mind; I expect it was embarrassing enough without being cross-examined on it.” Laurie let this go, hoping he would drop it. He did in fact fall silent for a couple of minutes. Just as Laurie had opened his mouth to change the subject, he said abruptly, “Look, Spud, this is shooting blind, but he didn’t try anything else on, by any chance, did he?”

Laurie had been thinking, the moment before, that after all some partings are only final for the first forty-eight hours; provided, that is, that no one interferes. Now neither truth nor lying seemed quite justified. In his irresolution he waited too long.

“Well,” said Ralph. “I see.” He spoke with a curious, precise flatness; he sounded almost bored. Yes, Laurie thought: all that about a short drunk is what he’d like to feel now. God, there’s no need to rub his face in it.

“It wasn’t serious, you know. I think it was just a sort of experiment to see how one would behave.”

After a pause Ralph said, in the same colorless and exactly pitched voice, “I suppose it’s all for the best that I didn’t know this sooner.” He took the cigarette out of his mouth, examined it, and put it back again. Speaking now conversationally, he remarked, “We began with a minor disagreement, and one thing led to another.”

“Yes?” Laurie said. He was feeling that he had managed badly. Knowing Bunny, one could have been sure that the showdown hadn’t been as complete as Ralph imagined, and that all sorts of things could still come out.

“Well, Spud, there it is. You saw enough for yourself: there’s no point in prettying it over. About all I can say is that I never told myself many lies about it; and whether that’s a recommendation or not depends on the point of view. Main thing is, it’s finished. Do you feel like believing that?”

“If you say so, of course.” And now, he thought, perhaps it really is my fault. No one who knew so little had the right to do this.

Ralph turned and adjusted the windscreen wiper, which was out of true and took him some minutes. Still fidgeting with it, he said, “Well, now, about this appointment of yours. I don’t know how urgent it is. I thought possibly you might just be feeling you’d seen enough of my domestic ménage. If I’m wrong, or if you still feel the same way about it, let it go and we’ll be on our way.”

“Oh,” said Laurie. He had completely forgotten. Ralph’s eye caught his and all at once they were smiling. “Well, I’ve not got a late pass, but it’s no more urgent than that … I did rather feel he and I might get in each other’s hair if we met again.”

“He’s on duty this evening, so you won’t do that. How long have we?”

“If you can lift me back, about an hour and a half.”

“Come on, then, let’s go.”

The strict room was wearing a half-smile of hospitality; there was a cloth on the table, and a plate of sandwiches bought ready cut and sealed in wax paper. There was something very comforting to Laurie in the matter-of-fact way Ralph made no bones about having expected him. There was a feeling of being looked after, a feeling almost of home. Ralph mixed a couple of drinks, lifted his glass, and seemed to hesitate. In the end he just said, “Happy days.”

“Happy days,” said Laurie smiling. If only he had got a late pass he could have kept Ralph company for the rest of the evening. At a time like this one would remember little things that had been harmless and happy and which one had expected always to remember with pleasure, and they would seem to look at one with a sneer. Laurie would have worked hard to make himself good company, if that had been necessary, but in fact they had plenty to talk about and the meal was quite gay. When they were washing up and making coffee in the little hole of a kitchen, Ralph said, looking up from his plate and tea-towel, “This is better, isn’t it, Spud?”

“Yes,” said Laurie, “of course it is.” If only he hadn’t outstayed his pass so recently. He hated the thought of leaving Ralph alone.

The popping blue gas fire had warmed to a spreading glow. Beyond the hooded reading lamp’s small orbit it touched the room with dusky gold and rose. Laurie sat as he was bidden in the armchair; he had learned to accept such things simply, like the old. Ralph, curled easily on the old hooked-wool rug, would have looked incongruous there to no one, probably, except to Laurie, who found ancient habits of precedence still haunting his mind. The senior studies at school had had gas fires. He looked down at Ralph; except for being seen from the wrong angle, he, too, in this mellowing dimness seemed very little changed. He had nice hair, Laurie thought; it still had that freshly washed look, and the neat cut was the same. Fine, light, and straight, it had a kind of innocence; it would be pleasant to touch. Then he remembered how this thought had come to him seven years ago, at the moment when Ralph was saying goodbye to him.

He said, “Do you still like your toast done thin and crisp? I feel I ought to be making it.”

Ralph looked up, his face turning from the light. In the deep shadow it could only be seen that he was smiling; his face was a dark brightness edged with fire.

“What do you know about it? You never fagged for me. I say, Spud.”

“Yes?”

“I’ve got a bit of good news I’ve been saving up for you. When you hear it officially, don’t forget to look surprised.”

“Of course I won’t.” He couldn’t imagine what it could possibly be and fell back into a trusting blankness. Perhaps a new secret weapon was about to appear which would end the war in a week. “Well, come on, what is it?”

“I rather thought they’d have told you today. As a matter of fact, Alec’s been pulling a few strings for you. He’s rather a pet of the old girl who does your massage.” (So it was that, Laurie thought, which had started her on the boot. Suddenly he noticed that the leg hadn’t begun aching yet; he was about to communicate this good news, but Ralph hadn’t finished.) “She thought you ought to be coming oftener, and she takes a dim view of E.M.S. hospitals anyway; so she put the recommendation straight in. They’re going to transfer you to the hospital here in a day or two. That’ll be better, won’t it?”

Laurie didn’t answer the question, because he hadn’t heard it. The first shock was too great either for protest or disguise. He sat for many long seconds, fixed in the dull astonishment and slow comprehension of a mortal wound, his face naked and forgotten in the light of the fire.

He became aware presently of something outside the shell of his own pain. Ralph was kneeling beside the chair, gripping his arm and staring at him. He tried to get his face in order.

“Spud. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” said Laurie stupidly. He put the back of his hand across his eyes; the light felt too bright. “I expect it’s gone through by now.” Dimly he knew that this was unkind, perhaps more; but he had been injured beyond his strength and had to struggle with himself to keep from being much more cruel than this.

There was a long silence after he had spoken. Then Ralph said, with the crudity of deep feeling, “You’ve got someone there.”

“Yes,” Laurie said. Voices came through the shell now; kindness and loyalty tapped remindingly on the walls. He said dully, “But you couldn’t have known that.”

“I could have thought.”

Ralph’s face was still turned from the light, but it ran along his shoulder and arm and caught the edge of his glove, and Laurie, for whom everything was etched as hard and sharp as silverpoint, saw that the padded fingers had become oddly separate in their limpness, quite dissociated from the rest of the hand. “You’ve been there since June, and you—Christ Almighty, I should think anybody could have thought of it.”

“I meant to have told you last time.” Laurie spoke with apology; he felt exhibited now and ashamed. “I was going to tell you here, but there were too many people.”

Ralph said in a neat, quiet voice, “That’s been the trouble, hasn’t it? Too many people.”

He should have asked me first, thought Laurie. It was all beginning now to burn down into his imagination: he could fill with their lost content the stolen days. He’d only met me twice; why should he assume that I’d told him everything? He takes too much on himself; he acts like God.

With all this, he gave no sign of what he thought; for the near presence of great anguish touched some instinct in him, though he was too confused to recognize it except as a phantasm projected on his surroundings by his own pain.

“It was my fault. I ought to have told you. I talked so much, I told you everything but that. I didn’t talk like a person who’s keeping something back.”

“For God’s sake why should you?” Ralph looked down and seemed to notice the clenched hand in the limp glove; there was a kind of distaste in the movement with which he straightened it. “Some people never learn, and it seems I’m one of them.”

“Don’t,” said Laurie, “please.” In the shadows he could feel, more than see, Ralph’s eyes looking into his. “It’s not like you think. It wouldn’t have been any good, ever.”

Ralph said, “The first night we met, in the car. You said something about this.”

“Not really. I talked as if it were years ago. It is my fault, you see.”

“Of course you talked as if it were years ago. So would anyone who—God, you hardly knew me. Just because I’ve been spending my time with a lot of nattering queens—you even told me, and I had to do this to you.”

“Look, Ralph, this had to happen quite soon. It’s better to get it over with.”

Ralph said, looking down at his hands, “Like dying tomorrow instead of next week.”

“Not only like that. It’s been getting risky. You see, he—I think he quite likes me, and he mustn’t ever know. It would spoil his life, and there’s no need. I wonder if this wasn’t meant to happen. One gives oneself away without meaning to. It’s much more important he should be all right.”

He became aware of Ralph staring at him. He couldn’t see the eyes, except as curved reflecting surfaces in a mask of darkness. “Spud, for God’s sake. Stop it. It’s like a ghost.”

“What?” asked Laurie, confused.

“Nothing. Sorry. Well, tell me about him, who is he, what’s he like? Well, come on.”

“Oh, he”—Laurie stared into the fire—“he’s—”

“Well,” said Ralph, his voice suddenly gentle, “he’s a soldier, I suppose?”

“No. No, he works there. He’s a Quaker; a c.o.”

Ralph said, “Jesus Christ.”

“If you met him, you’d understand.”

“Yes, of course. I’m sorry, Spud. You don’t get anything like that at sea.”

“His name’s Andrew. Andrew Raynes.”

“That’s a nice name.”

“He’s younger than I am, quite a bit.”

“Yes. I mean, is he?”

“He’s fair, with gray eyes. … I’m sorry I’ve not got a photograph to show you.”

“You must bring one another day.”

“The thing about him is, he wouldn’t know how to run away from it.”

“That’s always a thing,” said Ralph, in a gentle dead voice. “It makes one feel responsible, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, that’s just it. That’s just how I do feel. There’s no one I could talk about this to, except you.”

“Thank you,” said Ralph. “What about another drink?” He got up and reached for the gin bottle. He still kept his back turned to the fire.

“Yes, I’d like one, please.” Now that the half-seen eyes were no longer there he could bring it out more easily. “You see, when I say there’s no one else I could have told about it, I meant … Those people the other night, for instance. Anything goes. They’d never see it. There was something you did for me once. I expect you’ll have forgotten long ago; but it made all the difference. I just wanted to tell you.” He groped in the leg-pocket of his battle-dress, found what he wanted, and held it out. “Do you remember? You gave me this.”

It must be true, he thought, that Ralph had forgotten; for he stared at it dumbly, almost stupidly, and only reached out to take it just as Laurie was about to put it away again. He carried it over to the table and held it under the shaded reading lamp, standing up so that the light only fell on his hands and on the book. Suddenly Laurie remembered what it had looked like that day in the study, crisp and clean and nearly new. The pool of light was small, but bright and hard: it picked out the bloodstain and the rubbed edges, and the rough whitened patch from the sea. He said, “I’m sorry I’ve not looked after it better.”

“Well,” said Ralph with his back turned, “after all, seven years.” He put the book down on the table, and looked abruptly at his watch. “Look, Spud, I’m sorry, I have to phone the Station now. There’s a man I have to give a message to. It’s all right. I shan’t be long.”

Laurie began to say something, but he had caught up his cap and gone; a few moments later came the slam of the front door, and quick feet on a frosty pavement. Almost as soon as he had gone Laurie noticed the blue topcoat still lying on the bed; but now that he was alone, his own disaster seemed to fill the world, and no one was Ralph’s keeper.

To escape from thought, which told him nothing except that he must bear it, he took down the book nearest to his hand and opened it where it fell apart. He read: … and there shall we see adventures, for so is Our Lord’s will. And when they came thither, they found the ship rich enough, but they found neither man nor woman therein. But they found in the end of the ship two fair letters written, which said a dreadful word and a marvellous: Thou man, which shall enter into this ship, beware thou be in steadfast belief, for I am Faith, and therefore beware how thou enterest, for an thou fail I shall not help thee.

He could take in no more of it; he sat with the open book on his knees and the last sentence ringing in his head like an unanswered bell.

It must have been fifteen minutes or so later when Ralph came back. To Laurie it seemed much more. At first it had been a relief no longer to consider anyone’s feelings but his own; to rest his head in his hands, to be silent. He hardly knew at what point solitude passed into loneliness, and he began to listen for the sound of the door. Footsteps approached and seemed for a moment to be familiar, and came near and were a stranger’s and died away. It was strange, he thought, but true, that even after this catastrophic blunder the instinct still persisted to confide in Ralph and look to him for comfort. Anger was futile and no longer even a relief; it seemed now just a wretched mischance for both of them. His own secretiveness, and Ralph’s weakness for running other people’s lives, had conjoined like adverse stars. Laurie remembered the story of Bim and thought, Poor old Ralph, he does have bad luck.

It was at this point that he heard Ralph coming upstairs; the door opened a second or two later.

It must be a cold night, thought Laurie; not because Ralph looked cold, but because he had clearly been going fast to keep warm, and now, coming in again, he had the bright unfocused eyes and the slight strangeness that people have who suddenly emerge from darkness wide awake. He had turned up the collar of his jacket and forgotten to turn it down again; his eyes were extraordinarily blue. He looked sharp-edged rather than blurred, with a frosty sparkle, a flash of the night about him; he stood in the doorway a little out of breath, narrowing his blue eyes against the soft light as if it were dazzling, and looking at the room as a man might who after a long absence expects to find changes here and there. He was at all times compact and neat, but now there was more than this, a kind of diamond concentration, so that his unconscious pause on the threshold was brilliantly arresting, like a skillfully, produced entrance in a play.

It was a striking reversal, for Laurie, of the mood it had interrupted. If he had remembered his pity, it would have embarrassed him; but he had at once forgotten. First he was simply glad to see Ralph back; and then, as he looked again, there was a sharp stirring of some very old, romantic memory; perhaps of some book illustration he had known as a young boy, of which his very first glimpse of Ralph at school had reminded him before he had even known his name. So strong was this sense of the past that his own feeling, caught up in it, seemed like a memory. He stood looking at Ralph in startled admiration, moved by a dream of mystery and of command, and at the back of his mind was a thought that he wanted this moment not to end and that it was ending. Even as he formed it, Ralph came forward from the doorway into the room.

The first telephone box he came to hadn’t been working, he said. He was sorry he had been so long.

Laurie said, “You’ve been running.”

“It’s cold.”

“You don’t need this now, anyway.” He turned down the collar of Ralph’s jacket.

“Oh, thanks. Yes.”

They looked at each other. But their thoughts were set, deeply gripped in the situation that already obsessed them, and which seemed to them as hard and unyielding as stone; they were not aware of having altered it in any way. Laurie’s instinct hid what it had felt, for just then his heart would have rejected it as an outrage. As for Ralph, he had had a trying half-hour, and his perceptions were strained; it cannot be supposed he had subtlety enough to guess that a moment of black courage had given him power unasked, when he had only been seeking strength.

He got a pair of ivory brushes out of the cupboard (Laurie saw how characteristically clean they were) and polished his light hair to its usual smoothness; then he came back to the table, poured a couple of drinks, and said, “Well have to be going soon.”

“Shall we?” He had fancied it was earlier; the thought of breaking the news to Andrew dragged at his heart.

“Not for a bit,” said Ralph. “It’s all right.”

They drank in silence for a minute or two. Laurie said, “I think what I really want is to get drunk.”

“How drunk?” asked Ralph practically. “Blind?”

“I suppose so.”

“You can sleep here if you want.”

“I only meant I’d like to. I’ve got to be back tonight.”

Ralph poured some more tonic in Laurie’s glass. “I suppose you spend hours talking about life and death and God, don’t you?”

“What makes you think that?”

“Well,” said Ralph, not unkindly, “the alternatives are limited, I gather.”

“By the time you’ve done a few months in an E.M.S. hospital, you can do with someone to talk to.”

“You sometimes can even on a freighter. It’s funny we’ve been within a few miles of each other for months without knowing, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is. I wish we had.”

“You’re being almost inhumanly forbearing about all this, Spud; but let’s face it, you’ll never really forgive me, will you?”

“I told you about that. In the end you’ve probably done me an even better turn than you thought you had.”

“Poor old Spud. Does he tell you why his girls are different from all other girls?”

“No. You see, that’s really the hard part.”

Ralph looked up. “No girls?”

“No, none.” He met Ralph’s eye and said, “Yes, I think so. He’s almost told me; but he doesn’t understand what he says.”

Ralph finished his drink and folded his arms on the table.

“Well, for God’s sake, then, if that’s all, why don’t you tell him?”

“Have you ever met any Quakers?”

“Not that I remember. Would he think you were Satan incarnate?”

“It isn’t that,” said Laurie, appealingly. Ralph seemed suddenly shut away and he felt it like an absence. “It would spoil everything for him. He would never do anything about it, and—well, you see, he—he’s an affectionate sort of boy. He’s gone through life so far being fond of one person after another and it seems always to have made him happy. Knowing would poison all that for him, it would never be the same.”

Ralph took another drink. “Well, Spuddy, it’s your life. Will he mind you going away?”

“Yes, he will.”

“As much as you?”

“Oh, well … He will mind, though.”

“If he’s honest with himself, when it comes to the point he’ll know. Why do you want to help him tell himself lies?”

“I don’t. It means something different to him, that’s all.”

“Different my foot. Don’t fool yourself, Spud. He’ll come back in a year or two and tell you all about his boy friend. That one’s a classic, didn’t you know?”

Laurie hadn’t believed he could ever have felt so lonely with Ralph in the same room. He said, “Once you wouldn’t have talked like that.”

Ralph looked at him across the table. For one extraordinary second he seemed about to throw back his head and laugh.

“Wouldn’t I? Well, in the meantime I’ve been around.”

So strong was Laurie’s sense of solitude that for a few moments he stared past the lighted table into the shadows without any self-consciousness, as if physically he were alone.

“Spud.”

It wasn’t the voice that roused him, but Ralph’s hand closing over his on the table. “Spud, cheer up. Come along now, snap out of it.”

He swallowed and said, “It’s all right.”

Ralph got up and went over to the window, standing as if the blackout weren’t up and he could see out.

“You stick to it, Spud, and don’t worry. You don’t want to let people hand you these smart lines of talk. They pick it up at parties and it gets to be a habit and most of the time it doesn’t mean a thing.”

“Didn’t it?”

“Oh, come, be your age. For God’s sake, what does it matter to you what I meant?”

“It does, that’s all. I can’t imagine there ever being a time when it wouldn’t.”

There was a little silence. Then Ralph said, quite quietly and simply, “Of course I didn’t mean it. It was just a line of talk. Forget all about it.”

After this, there was a retreat into commonplaces; then presently Ralph began to talk about the sea. They had returned to the fire, but this time Laurie wouldn’t take the armchair. The rug was comfortable to lie on, sprawling with his chin in his fists. He lay there, getting heavy with the heat and the residual fumes of the gas fire.

“… I said, ‘I’m sorry, senhor, but I shipped with you as a passenger to Beira, and I’m not prepared to navigate for you under conditions like that: either your mate’s mad or he isn’t; if he isn’t, you don’t need me, and if he is, you’ll have to put him under restraint even if he is your brother-in-law, because I can’t do with him under my feet in the chartroom weeping and praying and playing about with knives.’ So finally he …”

As he lay listening, Laurie’s whole being seemed to relax in a sigh of mysterious contentment. Even the day’s disaster withdrew into a distance where it was known rather than felt. All the tangles of his life seemed looser and easier to resolve. He didn’t want to take his mind from the story, or disturb with analysis this fragile happiness and security, which were what one might feel if some legend, dear to one’s childhood but long abandoned, were marvelously proved true.

“… these big ocean-going dhows that come over from Arabia with the monsoon. They have a high carved poop like a caravel, and a raked-up bowsprit. There were a lot of them coming into the Old Harbor the way they do, covered in tassels and pennants with the crews singing and dancing on the decks, and beating drums and gongs. Just after we’d passed them …”

The strange feeling of fulfillment touched Laurie again; suddenly he remembered and understood. In the weeks of that summer holiday seven years before, after he had read the Phaedrus by the stream in the wood, he had gone for long walks alone, and, returning, sat in the evening by a September fire, so silent and enclosed that more than once his mother had asked if he was well. It was of this that he had been dreaming.

Involuntarily he moved his hands so that they covered his face, as the dream came back in all the high colors of boyhood: his own room with the fire he had, as a rule, only on the first day of the holidays, furnished as he had thought, then, he would want it when he was older; the flickering light on leather and books; and Ralph’s face at nineteen. In the dream there had always been a pause in which he had looked up and said, “Next time you go away, I’m going with you”; and Ralph, who hadn’t had a first name in those days, had looked down all the same and answered, “Of course.”

“… She was the filthiest ship I ever set foot in, garbage trodden into the decks, Indian kids piddling in the scuppers, the officer on watch was drunk, and the stink was something you could hardly …”

Laurie took his hands from his face and looked up: at the room, the blackout curtains fastened with safety-pins; at the padded fingers of the glove lying on Ralph’s knee; he could feel in his lame leg the pull of the cobbled muscles, and in his heart the bruise that couldn’t be forgotten for long. Life is cruel, he thought; leaving out war and all that wholesale stuff, human life is essentially cruel. Sometimes you can feel a smile. The Greeks felt it. Apollo Loxias at Delphi smiling in the smoke behind the oracle, and saying, “But I don’t mean what you mean.”

“… came tearing up to say it was typhoid they had on board, as if that were something astonishing.”

“Yes?” said Laurie. A part of his mind, which had never lost touch with the story, had become aware of a pause. “Yes, go on, what happened then?”

“Oh, of course that put us all into quarantine, so I missed the job with Union Castle after all. Spud, you shouldn’t lie down flat like that in front of a gas fire, you’ll fill yourself up with carbon monoxide or whatever it is. Are you all right?”

“Yes. Of course I am.”

“Because we’ll have to go now, or you’ll be late back.”

Laurie began to get up, turning himself into a sitting position and catching hold of the chair-arm to pull on. He sat there for a moment, his head beside Ralph’s knees, and this sharp sense of life’s cruelty trembling in him like an arrow that has just struck. “It was such a good story; you might finish it.”

“There isn’t much more, and there’s not time anyway. I thought you’d dropped off.”

“I could have listened all night. Most people get muddled and have to keep going back.”

“I used to keep a notebook and write all that sort of nonsense down. Look at the time, we’ll have to get a move on.”

“I wish I’d got a late pass tonight. I wish I could stay.”

Ralph put the good hand on his shoulder and sat looking down at him with his brows drawn together. “Poor old Spud, what a hell of a day you’ve had.” He rose smartly to his feet and helped Laurie up.

Just as they were starting, he said, “By the way, how about some aspirin?”

“What for?” Laurie asked.

“Why, for the leg, of course.”

“My God,” said Laurie incredulously. “It hasn’t started. I’d forgotten it.”

“Well,” said Ralph briskly, “that’s one of your troubles on the way out.”

He turned off the light and the fire and they began to grope their way down the dark staircase. They had crossed the landing and begun on the lower flight and Ralph was guiding him a little around the turn of the stairs, when suddenly a round white eye of light leaped out, almost in their faces. It held them blinking for a moment and disappeared. There was a pause of complete silence, then a soft laugh.

Later on, it struck Laurie as odd that it should have affected him so strongly. Earlier in the year, he had spent a number of hours lying, helpless and in pain, exposed to the efforts of people openly trying to encompass his death. It was ludicrous to have one’s hair lifted by a mere giggle in the dark.

Ralph said in a cold empty voice, “Good night, Bunny.”

There was a brushing sound against the wall and a whiff of scent. The laugh came again, from the landing above them now.

“Good night, boys. You sillies not to have waited. It’s madly unlucky to pass on the stairs.”