The Charioteer: A Novel

12

THE WARD LOOKED ABOUT thirty feet high. The walls were painted brown for the first seven or eight feet. In the middle stood a towering cast-iron stove of Gothic design. The nurses, intent on mysterious tasks, wore the old-style uniform, tall starched caps, stiff aprons, black stockings and shoes. The Sister, who seemed to have been measured for the ward, stood about six feet in flat heels. Her belt was massively clasped with silver, there was a flat rigid bow under her chin. Laurie and Andrew stood in the doorway, looking at each other. Andrew said, “I’d better not come in.”

He had worked, with much trouble, his night off for last night so as to come with Laurie today. Laurie had known it would be like this, and would far rather have seen him on duty in the ward as usual; but he had lacked the heart to say so. It had all been, he thought, like the kind of deathbed one hopes not to have; going on too long, one’s nearest and dearest doing the right thing with dreadful conscientiousness and stifling guiltily their prayers for the end. He didn’t know which had been worse, Reg’s painful flux of talk or Andrew’s helpless dumbness. Nurse Adrian had lost her nerve at the last, and hidden.

As they faltered at the door, the tall Sister suddenly strode forward. “Are you the new admission?” she asked accusingly. In the end he didn’t even see Andrew go.

They showed him his bed. On one side was a terribly ill-looking boy of nine or ten, propped high on a mound of pillows; on the other, a very old man who seemed to spend nearly all day having things done to him behind screens. After the afternoon’s massage and electrical treatment, the day stretched ahead empty. Laurie realized that if he had persuaded Andrew to stay on, they could have spent most of it together. But it was better like this. He knew it as he lay, later, looking up into the dusty recesses of the ceiling, isolated by the strangeness of the place, in a pause of unlooked-for peace and rest. The first lap of the race was over, not without victory. Words sounded in his mind like winged hoof-beats: “… it sinks down in the midst of heaven, and returns to its own home. And there the charioteer leads his horses to the manger, and puts ambrosia before them, with nectar for their drink. Such is the life of the gods.”

“Hello,” said an infinitely distant voice. “What’s your name?”

Laurie perceived that it came from the next bed, and it was its faintness, rather than his abstraction, which had made it sound remote. Two hollow, inquisitive brown eyes had opened in the boy’s blue-white face. Laurie said, “It’s Spud, what’s yours?”

“Mervyn. Did you get hurt in a raid, or in the war?”

“In France. Have you been stopping a bomb or something?”

“No. I just had an appendix and it burst. Isn’t it a swiz? I say, did you come back from Dunkirk in one of those boats?”

“Just a minute. When was this operation?”

“Middle of last night. But I’ve stopped being sick now.” He had talked himself out of breath already.

“I tell you what; take it easy today and get some sleep, and I’ll tell you about the boats in the morning.”

“You be here in the morning?” he asked suspiciously. He looked like a boy with few illusions.

“Yes, of course I shall.”

“Swear?”

“On my solemn oath.”

“Okay, good enough.” He shut his eyes.

Laurie tried to recapture his private happiness; but a few minutes later a nurse appeared with a letter which had preceded him. It was from his mother. At school, and even at Oxford, she had always sent a letter ahead to welcome him. Touched, he opened it, to find it full of detailed plans for the wedding.

He had only attended two weddings in his life, one as a page of four, the other at Oxford in the first days of the war, a rush affair of close friends wearing their everyday clothes. Now for the first time it started coming home to him: the Best Man, the reception, the archaic vestiges of sacrifice, of capture, and of sale. Great Uncle Edward was coming to give away the bride; she was afraid it would be too much for him, but he had said no, they were a small family and Raymond would have wished it. Raymond was his mother’s only brother, who had been killed at Gallipoli. Mrs. Trevor had written again about the house, and—

“Corporal Odell.”

Laurie nearly sat at attention and said, “Sir?” But it was the six-foot Sister standing over him.

“These have been left for you.” She laid a couple of new novels on the bed. Her voice was somberly reserved. Perhaps she had sampled them and considered them immoral, thought Laurie rather wildly, perhaps she didn’t think N.C.O.s ought to be able to read. When she had gone he opened them and found the note inside.

The last time he had seen a page of Ralph’s writing it had been pinned to the House notice-board. In those days it had been rather precociously formed; it hadn’t changed very much since. The lines straight, the letters slanted a little and pressed on the down-stroke, it had under its regularity a kind of suppressed impatience; one could see how it had been conditioned by the necessity of transmitting vital information, making permanent records, issuing instructions which must not be misunderstood. It was a curiously stiff, shy letter, boyishly conventional, even at times boyishly facetious. There were three more pages and he wondered however Ralph had filled them. He turned over and read, “I was in a pub yesterday when a Pole and a Welshman had a row.” As soon as it became impersonal the letter came to life. The writing had got almost practiced; it had a genuine, natural feel. He remembered Ralph saying, “I used to keep a notebook and write all that nonsense down.”

Something caught his eye. He looked up. The boy in the next bed had thrown all his covers off and swung a leg over the side. He was only wearing a pajama jacket.

“Here,” said Laurie, “what goes on? You don’t get up, do you?”

The boy muttered something about just going outside. Laurie saw he was delirious. All his operation sutures must still be in. Laurie jumped out of bed and eased him back again. The child muttered vaguely and wound his thin arms around Laurie’s neck. He had no idea where he was or who was with him. His hair and skin had a weak, sickly smell.

“What’s this? What are you doing with this patient?”

The Sister stood over him like a hanging judge. Laurie felt a lurch inside him. Had Major Ferguson heard something and written? Was he never to get away from it?

“He was getting out of bed, Sister. I’m sorry.”

“You must call a nurse, Corporal, if you see a patient needing attention—NURSE EVANS!” It was just the note he had been trying in secret to acquire when he had expected to be promoted sergeant. “Come here, Nurse Evans. Do you know that while you were frittering away your time, this boy with peritonitis would have been out of bed if he hadn’t been put back by another patient who hasn’t been more than a few hours in the ward? You must do better than this, Nurse Evans, I assure you. Now give that boy what he was looking for, and get on with your work.”

He didn’t sleep much; the ward was taking in emergencies that week. Two arrived in the night, followed by doctors and relatives and theater trolleys. The boy Mervyn, however, slept well, and by morning had made one of those dramatic improvements peculiar to children. He had taken a shine to Laurie and wouldn’t let him alone. After lunch he demanded the Dunkirk story. Laurie stuck to the sea part, since not much of the land events seemed edifying to youth. You couldn’t be vague on your facts. He was a bright, sharp boy, and seemed to have lived with people who regarded lying to children as the natural means of keeping them quiet. The more he wanted to trust you, the sharper he got.

“A lot of this,” Laurie explained painstakingly, “I don’t remember myself, I heard about it later.”

“Who told you?”

“The man who was commanding the ship told me most of it.”

“The captain did?” Sad suspicion darkened the hollow eyes. “Go on. You’re a corporal.”

“Yes, but we were at school together.”

“You and the captain?” He sighed and sagged on the pillow. “Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah,” said Laurie, reaching the end of his resources. Shortly after, a snuffling, meanly respectable woman came to visit the boy. When he was taken ill she had told him that he wouldn’t have to stay in hospital and that she would be back in a few minutes to fetch him home; now she had come with more lies to explain it. The boy listened apathetically; once his eyes slid around to Laurie with a vague unformed hope. But it was time for massage; he had to leave them to it.

Miss Haliburton had sold her dachshund puppy; but she had brought another, a bull-terrier this time. It gave Laurie a pink wink; the other eye had a black patch like a bruiser’s. It took to Laurie with fervor, and tried to get inside his blouse. Arthur measured him for the new boot.

It was falling dark. The landings and corridors were lit with blue electric bulbs. His ward was in the oldest part of the hospital; everything was huge and dingy, with dust-trapping Victorian joinery. Before him rose the steps to the ward, a dim gaunt sweep of worn stone. He measured it with his eye and stepped forward.

“Hi, Spud. Wait below there, I’ll come down.”

Brisk firm feet rang on the steps; Ralph ran down smiling. It was like the sight of something green on a burnt moor. Laurie knew that his face showed it. Ralph took his arm in a quick hard grip and let go again. Laurie said, “God, it’s nice to see you.”

Ralph said with his swift smile, “Poor old Spud, don’t you like the view? Who’s that lunatic, Alec lent me the book once, couldn’t read above half of it—chap called Kafka. This is just the setup.”

“Or an old German film. There’s nowhere to sit. She won’t have anyone in the ward out of visiting hours.”

“I know where we can go,” Ralph said. “I used to know this place once like the back of my hand.” He steered Laurie around a corner into a short, dimly lit passage which smelt of beeswax. “Have a pew.”

There was in fact a large yellow pitch-pine pew beside them, stacked with hymn books. They were in the outer lobby of the hospital chapel. They sat down. The place, angled back from the corridor and almost dark, had the nostalgic smell of truancy and escape, like lumber attics and the shut-off wings of old houses. They talked softly, almost in whispers.

When Laurie thanked him for the books, Ralph said, “I didn’t come last night, I thought you’d be settling in.” Laurie realized that he had thought Andrew would be there.

“I didn’t get here till late.” It was, he realized, only a simple way of not mentioning Andrew directly. Laurie still would not let his mind cross the borders of half-knowledge. It was just one thing and another; but it wasn’t possible to talk to Ralph about Andrew any more.

Ralph said, “You’ll know the ropes by tomorrow; ring me up and we’ll try to have supper out.”

“I can’t tomorrow; I’m going home.”

“Home?” said Ralph sharply. “Oh—the wedding. I’d forgotten that was so soon. It won’t be a mad riot for you, Spud.”

“Well, it’s only one day in a lifetime, I suppose.”

“Spud, is—anybody going with you?”

“Good God, no.”

“Why, would you hate that?”

“I hadn’t thought.”

“I’ll go with you if you like.”

Laurie was a moment taking it in. Ralph said, more formally, “I mean, of course, if it wouldn’t annoy your mother, your bringing a stranger along.” Laurie remembered then that his social contacts must have been unconventional for a good many years.

“Good Lord, Mother would love it; you’d probably ruin the wedding for old Straike. But I think I’d better go on my own. You couldn’t get away, anyhow.”

“Oh, yes, I could work thirty-six hours.” His voice dropped half a tone. “Would you like it, Spud?”

At that moment, someone in the corridor shut a door, or switched off a light, plunging them into almost total darkness.

Taking him unaware, the extinction of light filled Laurie with a deep and warm relief. He could see dimly the silhouette of Ralph’s head, quite near, against a faint loom of light from the passage. Everything was going to be taken care of; there was no need to say anything. Then, as if he were waking from sleep, he knew why it was that he mustn’t take Ralph with him.

Collecting himself, he searched among his old good reasons for excuse. “I don’t think I ought to settle down to being sorry for myself, taking people with me for moral support and so on. You’d hate it, too, the relatives are bound to be hell, especially his. I expect I’d better just take it straight. Sometimes things are easier if there isn’t anyone to know how you’re feeling.” In a voice he tried to keep quite unchanged, he added, “Especially if it’s something you ought not to feel.”

There was a little silence. Laurie said to himself, It’s just a state I’m in. It’s just because of the wedding, and leaving Andrew, and being alone in this awful place. It needn’t mean anything if I don’t let it.

“Spuddy. You mustn’t worry the way you do.”

The voice was kind; but there was more than kindness in it. It struck the sounding-board of Laurie’s loneliness and his will died. Ralph’s arm was lying along the back of the pew, but he didn’t move it. Laurie could just feel his shoulder and that was all.

“You mustn’t get so upset about what you feel, Spud. No one’s a hundred per cent consistent all the time. We might like to be. We can plan our lives along certain lines. But you know, there’s no future in screwing down all the pressure valves and smashing in the gauge. You can do it for a bit and then something goes. Sometimes it gets so that the only thing is just to say, ‘That’s what I’d like to feel twenty-four hours a day; but, the hell with it, this is how I feel now.’ ”

Laurie didn’t try to speak. In the pause they heard, half muffled by walls and distance, the thin crying of a child.

Ralph said softly, “Things can happen. It’s not in the blueprint, perhaps. Perhaps it isn’t for ever. But a person who knows you will understand that. No one’s going to hold it against you afterwards.”

“I know, Ralph. It’s all right.” What does that mean, he thought; it doesn’t mean anything. He had known it was necessary to start talking. After a moment he said, “Ralph, I—I don’t really want to go alone. But I think I ought to.”

Ralph’s voice didn’t alter. He stayed just as he was. “Do, then, Spud, if that’s how you feel. It wouldn’t be good to make up your mind for you now.” For a moment Laurie sensed a deep undeclared reserve of confidence, glanced at, considered in the light of experience, and returned to store. “If you feel like company you can ring me up. Ring this number.” With sight better attuned than Laurie’s to the darkness, he got out a pad and scribbled across it: Laurie wondered what more he had been able to see. He tore out the leaf and offered it. Their hands touched. Ralph said, “You mustn’t worry any more, Spud. There’s nothing difficult or complicated or anything. I’m there when you want me. That’s all.”

After a moment Laurie said, “Ralph, you’re too good to people. I’m not worth your taking trouble over. Whatever happened, I never could be worth it.”

“What a silly boy you are.” He spoke as if someone were flirting with him at a party. Outlined in the doorway, Laurie saw him get to his feet. “I was forgetting, they have supper at some ungodly hour here, about a quarter to six. If you don’t go now you’ll miss it.”

As Laurie got up he found he was levering himself on a pile of hymn books; some almost submerged tactile memory remarked, Ancient and Modern, not Songs of Praise.

As they parted at the ward door Ralph said, “You’ve not lost that telephone number, have you, Spud?”

“No,” said Laurie. “It’s here.”

“Good. Don’t worry. God bless.”

He was just in time to catch the supper trolley. Going back to bed with his mug and plate, he found the boy Mervyn being fed by a nurse with a feeding-cup.

“Hello, Spud.”

“Hello, son, feeling better?”

“Look. There’s a navy officer in the door there, waving to you.” As Laurie turned, Ralph gave a valedictory wave and smile and vanished. Mervyn said, “Who’s he?”

“A friend I was at school with. He was at Dunkirk too.”

“You don’t mean,” said Mervyn, “the captain off that ship?”

“Yes.” He had quite forgotten the conversation. Now he realized that Mervyn had experienced a miracle of adult integrity. He was gazing after Ralph as if Michael the Archangel had looked in. Well, thought Laurie, that’s something anyway.

The rest of the evening he spent writing to Andrew. He had meant to talk about the wedding. But now the whole subject had become so entangled with things which couldn’t be told that it confused him, and in the end he didn’t dwell on it very much.

In the middle of the night he woke to hear whispers and movement behind the screens of the old man’s bed. He knew what had happened, as soon as he saw that the blankets had been thrown on the floor. In the morning there was a flat empty bed, like Charlot’s, neatly bisected by the center folds of sheet and counterpane.

He got up and went out some time before his train was due, so that he would have a chance to telephone Andrew before he went off duty. It was wonderful to hear his almost speechless pleasure at recognizing the voice; but considered strictly as a conversation, it was like waving handkerchiefs from a quarter-mile away. Ralph from long practice had always known how to extract humor from the fact that people were overhearing, while at the same time he conveyed with neatness and subtlety almost anything he wished. Laurie could hear Andrew’s sense of inadequacy behind every word, and longed to make him feel easier. “I’m in a call box, I can say what I like; I expect you’re standing in the middle of all the bathroom traffic, aren’t you?”

“Yes, it’s about peak hour. I wish—”

“I know. We’ll work something out when I come back.”

“I hope it won’t be too bad. If I’d only thought, perhaps I could have got my night off then, instead, and gone with you.”

There was a moment’s pause. “I wouldn’t have inflicted that on you. You must come up and meet Mother some other time.”

“I expect your stepfather might think me rather a bad influence.”

“Oh, yes, horrible. If he found Jesus Christ preaching on the village green, he’d have him arrested for blasphemy inside five minutes.”

“Laurie—”

“Sorry. Just a manner of speaking.”

“It’s not that—I wish I could see you before you go.”

It wasn’t till Laurie was sitting in the train that he remembered he had left no message for Reg.

He had not been home since his embarkation leave; and now, seeing from the gate the small, low house, its thick walls blunted at the edges and smoothed as if by the wear of giant hands, the fifty-year-old cedar floating its dark clouds over the lawn striped from the mower, it seemed impossible that change could touch it all, without or within. To gain this moment he had told his mother not to meet him, as she must be busy, but now it was spoilt for him because in his heart he was deeply hurt that she had taken him at his word. As a last charm to bring back the familiar, he gave the special whistle he used for his dog, and, standing behind the blue spruce at the gate, waited to see old Gyp come pottering stiffly out with his ears cocked. But it was his mother who heard and came out instead.

He had known it would sharpen his sense of loss to see her; but he had been unprepared for the bright defensive flutter, the silliness which came from self-consciousness and her unacknowledged sense of guilt toward him. She was determined to believe that he was losing nothing: it made her overinsistent, demanding of him in everything the role she had allotted him in advance to set her mind at rest.

The house was a last-minute chaos of clothes, luggage, and half-packed crates. He had expected this but hadn’t guessed at the desolation. He had forgotten too to expect Aunt Olive, which was foolish; for she lived for others, and her status as the family drudge was guiltily recognized by all its members. She was always overthanked and underloved, having something unco’ guid about her which led her always to do a little more than people wanted done. She was really only a cousin of Mrs. Odell’s. When Laurie went upstairs for a bath and a moment’s quiet, he found her packing his room.

He had known he must do this before he went, but had reckoned on finding it still intact. It looked as if it had been ransacked by gangsters. The divan was stripped, the chair uncovered showing its ancient scars, the cupboard open and all its contents strewed on the floor. Aunt Olive sat beside a wooden tea-chest, surrounded by books which she appeared to be dusting. The Oxford Book of French Verse was in her hand, and she was carefully shaking out the pages.

Taking a grip on himself, he thanked her profusely and said that he would finish now, as she must be cold.

“Goodness, I’m never still long enough for that! Now you’re here I can ask you the little things I wasn’t sure about. Now for instance here, all these bits of paper and things I’ve found stuck in books, I thought you’d better see them before I threw them away.”

He looked with horror at the heap beside her knees. Some were merely markers, but some were not. He said, “Oh, just burn them.”

“No, I’d rather you looked first, one never really knows. Now what about this, for instance?”

She held up a bit of cardboard. Next moment he recognized it. It had been cut, not very expertly, from the center of a First Eleven cricket group. The cut had sliced through four out of the five heads in the square. Ralph’s was the one in the middle. The picture had been taken a week before he left.

“Aha!” said Aunt Olive. “You see! Raves, we used to call them, but I’m sure you didn’t use such sissy expressions! Now you must look at everything, or goodness knows what precious trophies might go up in smoke.”

“I will in a minute. Please don’t bother about it.”

“Now don’t forget. I know what you boys are, you mean well, till some other absorbing activity comes along! Now, this.” She plunged into the mouth of the cupboard, and emerged waving a fencing foil.

Laurie relieved her of it. It was strange to feel it lie so easily in the hand, to feel the body remembering its response as though, at the word, it would still obey as lightly as ever.

Hamlet had been the set play for School Certificate, so following custom the form had enacted it in the autumn term. Laurie had played Laertes. He had had, in those days, the kind of looks you would think of casting for Laertes rather than Horatio, for instance. The School Certificate Shakespeare play was an annual joke, but that year people said that at least the fencing bout had something. Treviss had coached it, and Lanyon had strolled in sometimes during practices to watch. Once Treviss had been sick and he had taken the practice himself. Laurie remembered now, how clearly, the sensation of seeing him walk in at the door instead of Treviss, and pull his jacket off. Once he had taken the foil from Hamlet to demonstrate something in the last passage, and there they were, as Laurie had phrased it to himself at the time, facing one another across the cold steel. After a pass or two Lanyon had broken off and said, “Come along, come along, Odell. You’re supposed to know this foil’s poisoned: for the Lord’s sake fence as if you cared whether you get hit or not.” Everyone said that when Lanyon went up to Cambridge he would be sure to fence for the University.

“You see,” said Aunt Olive, “it’s too long for a packing-case and so awkward for a trunk. I was wondering what you’d like to do with it?”

“I can’t imagine. What would you do with it if you were me?”

He saw her neck go pink between the wisps of hair. He knew he would despise himself later, so added unwillingly in a kinder voice, “Perhaps the scouts could use it in some of their shows.”

“Yes, dear.” She fidgeted a little, collecting herself. “That is a good idea. We must ask your father about it when he comes.” She added archly, “Though perhaps we shouldn’t say that until tomorrow.”

After a short interval Laurie said, “I’m so sorry, but I was thinking of taking a bath.” After she had gone clucking out, his first action was to throw off all his clothes, with some furious thought of confronting her if she tried to get in again.

Afterwards he flung the things from the cupboard back to see to later, and went through the papers. There was a note from Charles; notes had been one of his accomplishments. Laurie tore it across, and picked up the photograph again.

Even in the first embarrassed glance, he had been aware of making some discovery about it; and now he saw what it was. It had been taken at a moment when Ralph must have got bored by the preliminaries and started thinking of something else; the shutter had caught a moment of preoccupation, of some serious private thought. Now Laurie realized that in the first instant he had recognized in it not Ralph but Andrew. It wasn’t really like him, but as a poor likeness it would almost have passed, except for the eyes. Once one began to think of it, one realized that the whole structure of the head was very similar, and the hair, though Ralph’s was straighter, grew in much the same way from the brow. Without the picture Laurie would never have thought of it; Ralph had altered, he saw now, more than one supposed.

Staring at the portrait he thought how sometimes, when he looked at Andrew, he had felt glimmerings of a mysterious recognition. He had wondered sometimes, secretly, whether it was possible that they had met in a former life.

It was not till he was brushing his hair that he noticed the black hairpins on the dressing-table. Then he remembered that, since the little house had no spare room, Aunt Olive would be sleeping here tonight, and he on the living-room divan. He, in fact, had invaded her bedroom, not she his; you could say that she had won after all. He could think of nowhere to hide the photograph, so put it in his breast pocket.

There was a number of odd jobs still to be done about the place, and he was thankful for the occupation. Once or twice at odd moments he went into the garden to look for Gyp, but he hadn’t come back. He was an independent dog and often went for miles by himself, ratting and rabbiting, though not so much in the last few years since he had got rheumatic. Laurie thought to himself that when he went looking for digs, the first thing must be to make some arrangements for Gyp. His mother, though kindness itself, wasn’t good with dogs and never trained him at all; and it would be just like Straike, Laurie thought, to expect the poor old thing to learn new rules like a puppy and crack down on him when he was slow and confused. Anyway, just for once, sleeping downstairs tonight one could have him in, even if he did smell a bit. He didn’t fidget, or conduct violent flea-hunts in the small hours. He was so glad to be there, the thought of it seemed to last him all night.

It was just after tea, when Laurie had persuaded his mother to have one of her rare cigarettes, that, without knocking, Mr. Straike walked in.

Laurie hadn’t believed it could happen. He knew they mustn’t meet on the wedding morning, and his wishes, rather than his reason, had covered this evening with the same immunity. He sat fixed with his cigarette in his hand, without the wit to rise, for some instants; at once he sensed that this was just what Mr. Straike would have expected of his normal manners. He got up; but now his mother (having first put out her cigarette with a shy guilty look) had got up first, and Mr. Straike was kissing her warmly.

For a moment Laurie felt he was being subjected to an obscene outrage which would be recognized as such anywhere in the civilized world. He waited for his mother to protest and remind Mr. Straike that he was there. Then he saw Aunt Olive looking sentimental, and understood that it would go on happening, probably, for years, and that when it stopped he ought to be sorry.

His mother sat down with a pretty, flattered look; Mr. Straike, pressed, accepted tea. He then devoted himself for several minutes to Laurie, making himself emphatically pleasant. Laurie looked at the raw, red hand, close to his mother’s on the table; it was like a rough thumb rubbing a wound. He felt that none of this was really addressed to him. He imagined Mr. Straike saying, “Observe how I am being nice to your ill-mannered, sulky, and (I suspect) neurotic son. It is for your sake I am doing this so much against the grain. I trust it is appreciated.”

“No doubt you’re enjoying the, hrrm, relative lenities of civil hospital routine?”

“Well, they seem rather strong on discipline so far. After all they’re the regulars, in a way.”

“Ah, yes, I do seem to remember at the other place there were certain signs of improvisation.” (The teacups, Laurie thought.) “In fact, I well recall saying to your mother in the train that if conchies must be employed to wait upon war casualties, possibly in the hope of arousing some vestigial sense of shame, they might at least be kept where they need not affront the eye, in suitable activities such as scrubbing latrines, and so on.”

A bright spinning anger seemed to press outward against Laurie’s temples and eyes. He felt light, as in the first stage of drink. He said coolly, “How did you guess? When I met my best friend he was doing that very thing.”

Mr. Straike said, “Urhm,” and decided not to see the point. “Then no doubt his reaction to their arrival was ‘For this relief, much thanks.’ ” It was a tactical error; it gave the enemy time.

“Oh, well,” said Laurie pleasantly, “we all reacted to their arrival, of course. But actually, we found persecuting Christians awfully overrated. Perhaps we needed lions or something. Perhaps we ought to have tried burning them alive. Perhaps we just needed to be civilians and not soldiers. I wouldn’t know.”

Mr. Straike wore his dog-collars large; but the creased red skin of his neck had become tinged with purple, and Laurie saw a large Adam’s apple surface twice.

“Laurie, my dear.”

He turned at the sound of her voice, suddenly shaken as if after physical violence. Anger might have toughened and braced him; but he saw something worse, a cloudy misgiving. He knew that by her own standards she was fully committed, and would be quite unequal in any case to the ordeal of escape; that if he urged it on her she would deny with conviction that any such thought had touched her mind. They sat looking at each other across the used tea things, gagged and helpless. Laurie got to his feet.

“I’m sorry,” he said with difficulty. “We got to know these chaps and like them. I oughtn’t to have been rude about it. Will you excuse me, Mother? I’ll just go out and look for Gyp.” As he got to the door he thought his mother called after him; but he pretended not to hear.

It was twilight. He walked up behind the house to the warren, needing his stick but thinking that if you were with a dog, a stick didn’t show. He gave his special whistle and called, “Come on, boy, come on.”

It was lonely and quiet on the warren, in the lee of the firs. The colonnades opened into deep tunnels of dusk, till over a rise he saw a lake of gold sky and a lace of birches.

Childe Maurice hunted the silver wood,

He whistled and he sang,

“I think I see the woman coming

That I have lovèd lang.”

He had known Childe Maurice by heart for years. The tale of this young outlaw, the hidden love-child whom his stepfather murdered, taking him for the lover instead of the son, had always gripped Laurie’s imagination. He had never wondered why.

He could not find Gyp, and the unfamiliar jerk of walking downhill made his leg ache. When he got back the blackout was up, and his mother waiting for him in the porch. As soon as they had looked at each other, he knew what it was she had to say.

“Mother. Where’s Gyp?”

“Laurie darling. Oh, dear, I am sorry. It was dreadful of me not to have told you before.”

He stared at her, stonily. Part of him refused it entirely; the rest said bitterly that she should have no help with this.

“Where is he? It’s late. It’s his dinnertime. Do you know where he is?”

“Darling.” She had only looked at him for a moment. “Poor old dog. You know, he was …”

Laurie walked past her, through the hall to the corner under the turn of the stairs. The basket was gone. There was only a large crate labelled GLASS WITH CARE.

He turned around. “What did he die of? You didn’t tell me he was sick.”

His mother tucked in her lower lip, and he saw that she was beginning to have a sense of injury. “Dear, one doesn’t write worrying letters to people in hospital.”

“But Gyp was mine. He was my dog.” Like a child he said helplessly, “He was a birthday present, he belonged to me.”

“Dear, of course I know, but you’ve not been home for a long time” (Gyp must have noticed that too, Laurie thought), “and we had to do what we thought best.”

“We?”

“Laurie,” said his mother with grieved gentle dignity, “you’re not trying to make me unhappy, are you?”

“He wasn’t sick at all, was he? You had him put down.” She didn’t answer. “He was all right when I was here. You had him put down because that—” Carefully he said, “because that man didn’t want to be bothered with him.”

Now he knew that in his absence she had been reviewing the scene at the tea-table and protecting herself against its meaning. “Laurie, dear, I know you’re upset, but that is a very unfair, unkind thing to say.”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t like to be unkind.” He must have known, Laurie thought. Dogs always do. He must have wondered what it was he’d done.

“Laurie!” He must have been staring through her.

He said, “You would never have done this before. Did you decide he’d be better off that way?”

He saw her eyes, frightened behind their anger as she recognized what she had hidden from herself. “Mother—”

“Aha! So there you both are!” Aunt Olive came tripping out of the kitchen, a fall of fine pearl-gray trailing from her arm.

“Oh, Olive, dear, how good of you. Did it need pressing again?” He saw that this intolerable interruption had come to her as a rescue.

“Mother, please could we—”

“Later, dear, not just now. Look at poor Olive doing everything by herself. Be a dear boy and just see if there’s room in there for the air-twist glasses.”

He got out the case from the recess under the stairs, remembering how he had trained Gyp to sleep there when he was three months old. The first night he had cried a good deal, but Laurie had known it wouldn’t do to give in to him and fetch him upstairs. He had gone down himself, wrapped in his eiderdown, and Mrs. Timmings had found them both asleep there in the morning; but of course, he had only been at his prep school then.

Afterwards he made up the living-room divan for himself. Sometimes on cold nights he used to take off the mattress and put it by the fire, but nowadays it was firelight or ventilation. On his embarkation leave, he had looked around his room thinking he would probably never sleep there again; but he had guessed the wrong reason.

Soon after, his mother came in. He must be good to her, he thought, as if she were going into hospital with something worse than she knew. He found some sherry and they sat down to village gossip by the fire. It wasn’t, he thought, an ill wind for everyone; for she would make a good vicar’s wife if she were allowed to get on with it, unintrusive and kind. She was happy to find that he had stopped being difficult; they chatted quite gaily till, remembering something he had meant to ask before, he said, “By the way, Mother, what are you doing about the house?”

“Well, dear, really! You don’t mean to say that you’ve not written to the Trevors yet? It’s not fair, you know, to be unbusinesslike with friends, and they depend on it so much. As you didn’t write back about it, I naturally assumed you’d no objection.”

“Me? Whyever should they mind what I think?”

“Laurie! Didn’t you read my letter? Surely you do know this house belongs to you now?”

As she spoke it began to come back to him. It had been fifteen years ago, and he had forgotten with the deep forgetfulness which is not an accident. He had been just old enough to understand that it would be in the nature of things for him to outlive her; his grandfather’s death had been a terrible reminder of her mortality. He had thrown his arms round her and said, “But you’re not going to die or get married, so you’ll have it for ever.”

Now he didn’t know what he felt. For the present it was an empty possession; even if war regulations had allowed him to keep it as a weekend place, he couldn’t easily have used it with the vicarage a quarter-mile off. But it was something of his own, a fragment of the past that couldn’t utterly be snatched away. No one could cut down the damson or the cedar. “I’ll write straight away,” he said when they had discussed the business. “I’m sorry I left it.”

He was writing the letter when Aunt Olive, who had answered the telephone, snatched pencil and paper and began to take down a wire, her manner becoming tinged with gloomy importance.

“I’ll read it you word for word.” She cleared her throat. “ ‘Sharp attack last night doctor vetoes travel very sincere regrets and heartfelt wishes for your happiness Edward Lethbridge.’ ”

“Oh!” said Mrs. Odell. “Oh, dear. I was so afraid … I asked him if he really felt equal to it, but after what he said about Raymond … Besides—”

Laurie said, “I’m sorry he’s ill.” His wits moved slowly. Aunt Olive gave him a bright, nonreproachful look.

“Well, how lucky it is, isn’t it, that you’re here and able to step into the breach!”

Without quite looking at either of them, his mother said, “Of course I know it’s considered correct, but perhaps …”

Yes, he had read that part of the letter. He remembered now why Great-Uncle Edward had been so important. As soon as he became capable of thought again, he realized that there was, in fact, nobody else now.

“Would you like me to give you away, Mother? Unless someone’s coming who’d be better?”

“Who could be, darling? I know it’s rather sudden for you; it’s because we’re such a small family. At least,” she said, in the comfortable voice with which she had smoothed the minor crises of his schooldays, “you won’t have to worry about clothes.”

“I wish I could have put up a pip for you.”

“Darling, everyone can see why it was you didn’t have time for that.”

Yes, he thought, of course. He tried to remember how long the aisle was. It was quite a big church. “It won’t look too good. I mean I’m awkward to walk with, rather.”

“I shan’t find you awkward.” She got up from her chair and kissed him. “We must let Mrs. Joyce know about Uncle Edward at once; she was putting him up.”

“I’ll go,” he said; but it ended with the two women going together. The house was quite near, Mrs. Joyce buoyant and reassuring.

There was still the big cupboard in his room to be cleared for the Trevors. If he didn’t do it tonight, he would have to come back to the empty house tomorrow. It could be dealt with quite simply by throwing everything away.

He got a dust-sheet and began tossing things into it. It was something of a massacre, for he had eliminated the rubbish when he joined the army, with the idea of sparing his mother a depressing job if he got killed; what was left had all had value for him as little as a year ago. When he came to the fencing foil again, he thought it wouldn’t hurt to leave this in the bottom of the cupboard; it took up almost no room, and the Trevors wouldn’t fuss. Then he remembered that out of all that was here, this was the thing he had least occasion to keep.

He was sitting awkwardly on the floor, doing the kind of job for which it is natural to kneel, or squat on the heels. Suddenly he felt run to a standstill under the accumulated weight of the day’s wretchedness. He struggled to his feet, the foil still in his hand, its lightness coaxing his wrist and the heavy boot dragging at his foot. The guard rang dully as he let it fall.

Laertes, you but dally, I pray you pass with your best violence; I am afear’d you make a wanton of me. …

Laurie walked over to the window-seat. The curtains were gone, only the blackout stuff was left. He went and switched off the light. Now the night sky glimmered behind the damson-tree, and as his eyes cleared of dazzle, the stars appeared.

“You mustn’t worry any more, Spud.”

There would be frost soon on the pane. Laurie pressed his forehead to the icy glass and shut his eyes. He didn’t know why memories which had lain with his mind’s lumber for so many years, waking no more than a dim nostalgia, should return now to charge the present with so unbearable a weight of longing. On a stricken field littered with the abandoned trophies of his lifetime, he remembered a victory which had once seemed beyond the furthest reach of the most secret aspiration. But he only said to himself that he must have someone to talk to.

He put on the light and looked at his watch. His mother had only been gone fifteen minutes. Mrs. Joyce was a great gossip; half an hour would be the least.

He went down to the telephone, called Trunks, and waited. There might be a raid on somewhere, he thought, it might take an hour. He found he had got hold of a loose bit of trimming on the chair-arm and was pulling it off.

He had made it a personal call; he didn’t want to hear voice after voice saying that Mr. Lanyon couldn’t be found. There were women’s voices outside, already, at the gate. But they were village voices, and passed on.

“Have they answered yet?”

“No. Will you try again, please, it’s urgent.”

“The line has been busy but I am trying to connect you.” A bit of wire many miles off crackled and whispered.

“Hello, Spud.”

Laurie’s heart jerked violently, then steadied like a car settling into top gear.

“Hello, Ralph. How on earth did you know it would be me?”

“Never mind. Where are you speaking from?”

“Home.”

“Well, Spud, how is it? Not madly gay?”

“Well, so-so. Everyone’s out; back any minute, I expect.”

“Spud, relax. Forget it’s a telephone. We’re on our own. Loosen up, and tell me about it. House packed up?”

“Yes; I’ve been doing my room.”

“How long had you lived there?”

“About fourteen years.”

“God. Oh, Spud, about the dog. If you want to bring him away, I think I can fix him up at the Station for a bit.”

“Thanks. I expect he’d have liked it. He’s been liquidated, only they forgot to tell me.”

“What? What happened?”

“He was getting on a bit. I had him all the time I was at school He was eleven.”

“Spuddy. I’m very sorry.”

“I’d rather have seen to it myself, that’s all. You can give them sleeping pills first, then they don’t know.”

“What time is this wedding?”

“Two.”

“Village church, I suppose?”

“Yes. It’s his church. Great-Uncle Edward’s had an attack, so he won’t be coming.”

“Oh? Your mother very upset?”

“Well, he was giving her away. It’s a good job I’m here, isn’t it?”

“What? Oh, no, Spud, nonsense. No, they can’t make you do that.”

“No one’s actually making me. But it’s hardly a job you can hand over to the churchwarden, when it comes to the point.”

“Spud, why the hell didn’t you let me come with you?”

“I can’t think, now.”

Almost as he spoke, he heard the sound of the front door shutting, and voices in the hall.

“Spud, can you hear me?”

“Sorry, here comes the family.”

“All right, Spud. Don’t worry, good night. I’ll be seeing you.”

Laurie started to say “I’ll be back by—” But the line had died.

A few minutes later, he remembered the unfinished job upstairs. But it was almost suppertime. In the end he bundled everything back in the cupboard again. It would have to be tomorrow, after all. He hadn’t meant to take the second night’s leave if he could catch the four-forty; but if he missed it, it couldn’t be helped.

At ten o’clock, Aunt Olive remarked on the busy day they had had; told Mrs. Odell that she must have an early night; then blushed a congested dark red and changed the conversation. After this Laurie and his mother sat up for another twenty minutes, painfully discussing family friends and the war news. Aunt Olive seemed anxious to leave them together; but they both clung to her company, which must have pleased her, Laurie thought.

Later, when he was ready for bed, he raked out the fire, and opened the blackout. The stars looked frosty; it was too early for the moon. It would have been cheerful to keep in the fire, pull up the mattress to it and read; but his mother would have been shocked to find no windows open, when she came down to say good night.

When he heard her, he got up from the bed where he had been sitting and moved out into the room. She walked straight on toward the bed and did not see him until he spoke.

“Not in bed yet, dear?” On any other night she would have said “I came to tuck you up,” but tonight she didn’t say it. She felt his dressing-gown and said, “This is so thin, darling, don’t catch cold.”

He put his arm around her waist and kissed her, trying to think of absolutely nothing. “God bless you, Mother dear. Be very happy.”

“Laurie darling; you must … you will try to get on with him, won’t you?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“All these years, all the time you were little, I’ve thought of no one but you.”

“I know, dearest. Of course, I know.”

“You must never repeat this to anyone, but Colonel Ramsay asked me to marry him, when you were at school. But I didn’t like the idea of giving you a stepfather when you were just at the difficult age. Now I’m not young any more; and next year, or the year after, when you want to get married, I should be all alone.”

“Mother. I don’t want to get married. If that’s all, I … I don’t think I’ll ever want to. It’s just something I feel. If you don’t want to go through with it, I …”

“Darling, but of course I do! Whatever put such an idea into your head? At this stage, too.”

“Sorry, dear. It’s only that …”

“You must never say such a thing to me again, it’s not kind, it’s very silly indeed.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t really mean it.”

“I don’t suppose you remember your father, now?”

“A bit here and there. Not very well.”

“I wasn’t unhappy with him, you know, till I found out how he was deceiving me. You know, dear, a woman gets, well, used to being married. I haven’t told you, but sometimes I’ve been rather lonely.”

Once she had come to see him in hospital, before the bone infection had gone down. He had been in great pain but hadn’t wanted to tell her; he had lain watching the clock when she wasn’t looking, and praying silently, “Go away. Please go away.” He withdrew his arm, now, gently and as if by accident, and said, “Well, you be happy, dear, God knows you deserve it.”

“I’ll have your room all ready for you; all your things, and the books put out.”

“I’ll have to stay somewhere near a library, for a bit. You can’t read much in hospital. Don’t unpack the books yet, I might have to send for them.”

“Don’t stay away too long, darling.” He felt that she had dreaded his early arrival in her heart, and was relieved.

He said, “There’s going to be a frost tonight,” hoping that she would go. He had used his leg a good deal, doing odd jobs and climbing the hill; even with the altered boot it had been too much.

“Laurie, darling. Don’t go quite away from me.”

There was space behind him, he could turn his back to the little light there was; he had been right not to stay in bed, trapped against the wall. “If ever you need me,” he said, “ever, wherever I am.”

“But, darling, I shall always need you, just the same as ever.” He had made her doubts too articulate; she would escape from him now. “What am I doing,” she cried, “keeping you up in the cold, just out of hospital? Good night, darling, we shall all be so busy tomorrow, try to sleep well. Good night.”

The light from the door grew narrow behind her, turning to a strip, to a line, to a memory drawn on a slab of darkness. Now he could see that the faint glimmer they had been standing in came partly also from the stars.

In the old days, if one slept downstairs, after the house was quiet Gyp would get cautiously out of his basket, and one would hear his claws on the flags in the hall. He would put his nose to the crack under the door, and make a faint whistly snuffle till it was opened. For a big dog, he took up very little room.

Laurie fell asleep between two and three in the morning. The moon had risen by then, and frost was growing up the window-glass, opening pointed leaves and flowers to the light.

For the last hour he had tried to think of nothing, and in the end had almost succeeded. But nature abhors a vacuum, and it was impossible to empty the mind entirely. So at last he thought of what was next to nothing, the recollection of a dream, which tomorrow need not be remembered. A cold pool of moonlight trickled over to where he lay; but by then he was out of reach, his eyes pressed down on the pillow, and one arm thrown over it in a gesture which, even in the relaxation of sleep, looked abrupt and possessive.

In the morning, as soon as he was awake, it became increasingly like getting ready for a general inspection, except that he himself had been promoted to C.S.M. Almost before he had time to brush himself down, his mother was being dressed by Aunt Olive and people were arriving. Relations whom he felt he had seen quite recently, and who seemed to him very little changed, exclaimed with wonder at not finding him still a schoolboy. Others asked him if he was on leave. Suddenly they all began disappearing; in what seemed no time at all the house was empty even of Aunt Olive; there was only a stray caterer’s man arguing with Mrs. Timmings, and then the car was at the door. Hurrying upstairs he nearly fell, recovered with his heart in his mouth, precipitated himself into his mother’s room after a perfunctory knock, and came face to face with her in her wedding dress.

“How do I look, darling?”

“You look lovely. Everyone who doesn’t know will think I’m your brother.”

For a moment united as one, each was silently begging the other, “Take it quickly, take it lightly, God forbid we should go through that again.”

Softly and musically, the clock in the hall struck two. Time is, time was, time is past.

“We must go.” She made a little movement toward her ivory-and-gold prayer-book.

“No,” he said. “You have to keep him waiting.”

Her hand in its pearl-gray glove, resting on his arm, looked small and naïvely formal, the hand of a Du Maurier child who has watched fans and trains from the top of the stairs.

“… not by any to be enterprised, nor taken in hand, unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly …”

Laurie gazed at the line of little gray buttons that ran down the back of his mother’s dress. He was glad, after all, that he had come, that circumstances had presented him with no excuse. She had needed him, a thing which in his hurt pride and abandonment he had forgotten to expect. He couldn’t think, indeed, how she would have managed without him.

“… and, forsaking all other, keep thee only to her, as long as ye both shall live?”

In a round, announcing voice, Mr. Straike said, “I will.”

The full realization of his physical presence hit Laurie like a blow. He stared at the floor and reminded himself that he was in church. But church had become a smell of hassocks and furnace coke and, ubiquitously, of Mr. Straike. It was an extension of him.

“Wilt thou obey and serve him, love, honor, and …”

Oh, God, make her say no.

“I will.”

He heard Aunt Olive behind him give a satisfied sigh.

“Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?”

“I do,” Laurie said. Now that it had come he could feel nothing at all, except a proud determination to do it properly. He took a measured pace forward and handed his mother to Canon Rosslow to hand to Mr. Straike. He fell a pace back again. With a dry, empty relief, he realized that this was all. He had spoken his line; he could get back into the chorus. There was his place ready for him, beside Aunt Olive in the corner of the front pew. He moved toward it.

Aunt Olive put away her handkerchief, and seemed to cross an invisible threshold to festivity. The moment the psalm had started she nudged him and whispered, “Beautiful.”

She had been very kind to his mother. He nodded sociably.

“You did very well, most correct and dignified.”

He made a deprecating face, and applied himself to his prayer-book; but she was touching his arm.

“Just look quickly, dear, and tell me who—”

He looked quickly, being sure that she wouldn’t let him alone till he did. It was a big church, and the bride’s friends sat with plenty of elbow-room. The parishioners, with the modesty of country people, had left several empty pews in the middle. Laurie had no trouble in following Aunt Olive’s eye to the stranger in the seventh row.

He was singing from the book, standing very straight and correctly, as if he were at ship’s prayers, and not looking about him. But he must have felt Laurie turn, for their eyes met at once. Ralph’s narrowed in a brief smile, then returned to the page. Laurie became aware of Aunt Olive’s expectancy; he whispered, “Friend of mine.”

“Very nice,” said Aunt Olive, nodding vigorously.

The psalm ended. Laurie, who would never pray on his knees again, leaned forward and covered his face.

“… and forgive us our trespasses,” muttered the congregation; a drowsy, absent-minded sound like the sound of scuffling feet. Laurie looked down through his fingers at a piece of oak smoothed by the hands of six generations, and, the terms of his self-deceit forgotten, thought, I ought not to have sent for him. He knew that he had refused to expect this result, only because that would permit him to make it certain.

Having accepted this knowledge, he allowed it almost at once to drift out of sight. There is much anodyne to a painful thought in mere lack of concentration. He said to himself, as far as he said anything plainly, that Ralph was here now, that it was more than kind of him to have come, that to be glad to see him was only common decency. Beyond this moment, the future was still free and undetermined.

Canon Rosslow had what is slanderously called the Oxford accent. He made the Homily sound like a piece of respectable cant. Laurie found it all slipping by him like Monday morning chapel at school. Everything he was capable of feeling about this event had been exhausted; he was empty, waiting only for something different to happen. He was, though he didn’t know this, in the state which at funerals inspires the wake.

It was over. The bride and groom were on their way to the vestry. Remembering his duty, he got up and followed them.

He signed the register and kissed his mother. As if she were covered with an impalpable veil, he could feel only that he was kissing a bride. He saw Mr. Straike advancing and wondered for one dislocated minute whether he would expect to be kissed too. But all was well, Mr. Straike gave him a manly handclasp, two hands to Laurie’s one. Soon they were all going back into the church again, and the organ was playing his mother and her husband down the aisle.

He knew he ought to follow, and did so at first; but the organist had set a good cracking pace, and Mr. Straike couldn’t be expected to remember. The best man, though thirty years Laurie’s senior, had a better turn of speed. People were coming out of the pews and he slid into the stream. He wasn’t much held up by civilities, for everyone was hurrying to see the departure outside. Ralph was waiting for him just inside the pew.

“Ralph! How did you manage it?” Admitting the wish but not the expectation, he struck a compromise by which Ralph would not be hurt, nor he himself wholly committed; but he did not think of it like this.

The bridal couple vanished through the west door. Ralph looked him in the eyes and smiled. Someone was here now for whom he came first: it was like a well in the desert.

“Don’t bother about me,” Ralph said, “you’ve got people to see to out there. Get along and get on with it. I’ll follow the crowd.”

“It’s only just down the road. I’ll walk with you.”

“Don’t be silly,” said Ralph briskly. “You’ve got to be there ahead; you’re the host, he isn’t. Get a move on, I’ll see you presently.”

There had been photographs outside for the county paper; so no one had missed him. When he walked into the village hall, he knew that his mother’s new life had begun already. If she had been marrying anyone else, the reception would have been at the George. The boards felt gritty underfoot, there were notices about the Guides and the Mothers’ Union. The venerable hired waiters looked like lay helpers at a Sunday-school tea. All this, of course, set the parochial note in which everything centered upon the vicar.

Some Straike relatives had arrived. They seemed to Laurie rather hard-eyed, the kind of people one envisages quarrelling over wills, and their overconventionality struck him as faintly vulgar. He stood close to his mother, observing how much bigger Mr. Straike’s family was than theirs. Seeing Aunt Olive appear in a travelling coat (he remembered now that she had to get an early train) he decided she was a great deal nicer than any of them. He fussed over her and found her food. In the midst of all this Ralph walked in.

He must have waited till now when the bride and groom had ceased to receive at the door, hoping to be inconspicuous; but in a gathering where the younger element was mostly in the forties, his entrance had drawn eyes from all over the room. He looked around for Laurie and went over to him at once. With the tail of his eye, Laurie saw that Mr. Straike had noticed.

You would have thought that an introduction to Aunt Olive was the one thing Ralph had been hoping for. Laurie remembered suddenly a remark of Bunny’s about Christmas in the orphanage; but he didn’t want to think about Bunny any more.

It would be untrue to say that Aunt Olive had grown suddenly pretty, because women who employ no make-up miss it at such moments, and it inhibits them; but her self-esteem had climbed steeply. Suddenly she gave an arch little squeak of discovery and delight. “I know!” she cried. “I couldn’t think where I’d seen you! Now I remember!”

Ralph’s charming smile became just a little less casual. He said, as if he wanted to get in first, “I expect you saw me somewhere about the place at school.” As he spoke, he looked around to see who was in earshot, but so unobtrusively that even Laurie only just noticed it.

“School!” cried Aunt Olive in triumph. “I was right!” This time no one interrupted her. She turned to Laurie. “Your mother always tells me what a memory for faces I have. He’s the boy in the photograph!”

She must have taken the short silence that followed as a tribute to her gifts, for she smiled radiantly.

In the next few minutes, before she left, Laurie had time to think. It had been obvious to him from the first that Andrew couldn’t have come here without the risk of being exposed to insult. It must, he thought, be a symptom of the way his generation had been torn from its roots, that he hadn’t till now perceived the risk to Ralph.

The Head and the staff had tried, naturally, to hush his expulsion up. It was possible, though unlikely, that they even thought they had succeeded. The fact was, of course, that Hazell’s hysterical confidences had made it the most resounding scandal in the history of the School. The sensation had been proportionate to Ralph’s immense, and rather romantic, prestige; and it was a certainty that there hadn’t been a single boy, down to the lowest and most friendless fag, who hadn’t known at least something about it.

Although Laurie still felt very close to these events, it was in a purely inward and personal way. Externally, seven years was half a lifetime. He had grown in them from a boy to a man; he had met pain and fear, love and death; his comrades had been men for whom his old world had not at any time existed. Now, looking at the guests around him who had been adults longer than he had been alive, he saw that for most of them seven years must be only the other day. It was unlikely that Ralph hadn’t thought of it. The people who are vulnerable to these things are less absent-minded about them.

When Aunt Olive had gone Ralph lifted one eyebrow, smiled at Laurie, and murmured, “Whew!”

“You’ve not had a drink yet.” Laurie gave him one, and as they drank tried to thank him in a glance; but the glance didn’t turn out exactly as he had meant. He said quickly, “Come along and meet my mother.” As they went he saw, for the second time, Mr. Straike turning from his conversation with Canon Rosslow to eye Ralph with curiosity.

If you knew as much as Laurie had learned by now, you might perhaps get as far as a speculation about Ralph; but even then you wouldn’t be sure. He had reviewed his own weaknesses early in life, and with untender determination trained them as one bends a tree; the resolution this had demanded had stamped his face with most of the lineaments of strength. The fastidious severity of his dress and carriage hid, no doubt, a personal vanity by no means extinct; but it had the air of a fine, unconscious arrogance. Laurie, as he walked beside him up the hall, was looking at Mr. Straike and thinking, He’d have liked to be the one who brought him here, to put me in my place. Too bad he belongs to me.

At the last moment, Laurie’s mother was caught up by friends, and Mr. Straike came to meet them instead.

The next few minutes did Laurie a world of good. He discovered at once that Ralph hadn’t lost the famous manner; perhaps if one had known him well one might have detected a crease or two and a whiff of moth-balls; but it was more than good enough for Mr. Straike. “By the greatest good luck we happened to run into each other at Dunkirk” (he made it sound rather cosmopolitan, like Shepheard’s or the Long Bar at Shanghai), “so we were able to pick up the threads again.”

“Now I think of it,” said Mr. Straike suddenly, “I can’t recall that I ever asked your mother the name of your House, Laurence. Very remiss of me.”

“Stuart’s,” Laurie said. It had been Stuart’s when he first went there.

“Stuart’s, Stuart’s. That has some association for me. Wait, I have it. That’s the House that was taken over by a school contemporary of my own, dear old Mumps Jepson. Surely that would be within your time?”

“Yes. Mr. Jepson took it over when I was fairly senior, but you know how the old name sticks.” Almost unconsciously, he had closed his shoulder up to Ralph’s as if they were in battle.

“Ah, interesting. I wonder what impression he made on you. Poor old Mumps, he was something of a hypochondriac; I remember thinking he had scarcely the requisite—hrm—guts for the job. We’ve lost touch, I’m afraid. But I did meet him, at an Old Boys’ Dinner, if I remember, a year or two after he took up his appointment; he was very full then of his trials and his responsibilities, very full indeed. Would it be in ’33? It might even have been in ’35.” He looked at Ralph again. “I’m afraid I heard your name very imperfectly; Langham, did you say?”

There was a short and, for Laurie, terrifying pause. He didn’t look at Mr. Straike because he had, in a sense, forgotten about him; and he did not look around because he dared not, for he had felt the finger of some past evasion touch Ralph and dim him, like a quick smudge.

“No,” said Ralph. “It’s Lanyon.”

“M-m, no. I fancy it would be a little after your—”

“Laurie, darling.” It was the measure of Laurie’s feelings that he had been unaware of his mother’s arrival. For the last ten minutes people had been assuring her of her happiness; she had had a glass of champagne; she was expanding like a rose in a warm room. “This is delightful. How could you not tell me that you’d asked the R. R. Lanyon to come? Were you keeping him as a surprise?”

“Yes,” said Laurie, “as a matter of fact I was.” He presented him.

“Well, my dear boy—because I shall never think of you as more than eighteen even when you’re an admiral—you mustn’t laugh at me, but, really, I can hardly believe you’re true, it’s like meeting a unicorn. Of course, I know it’s all worlds away now to both of you, but to me it seems yesterday when Laurie used to bring home legends about you, just like my generation with the Prince of Wales.”

“You must let him live it down,” said Ralph, “after all this time.”

“Hrm,” said Mr. Straike. “Lucy, my dear …” Laurie realized that the healths were about to begin.

His response for the bride was one of the things that had kept him awake till the small hours. But now he had forgotten all about it, and came to it fresh, with a suddenly revived self-confidence. While the guests were still clapping, and his mother looking at him with pride, he was wondering already whether Ralph had thought it was all right.

Few men were there and no other young ones; he and Ralph were kept busy. For ten or fifteen minutes they scarcely met. There was probably no moment of this time when, if he had been asked where Ralph was, he couldn’t have given the answer without looking. At last somebody broke a folding chair. With an air of conscientious helpfulness, Laurie went over to the corner where it was and tinkered about with it. Ralph came up and steadied the chair for him, and they bent over the brown varnished wood with their backs to the room.

“This is what you’re looking for.” Ralph handed him a wing nut from the floor. Laurie couldn’t answer. He had heard in Ralph’s voice that secret overtone only half of which is created by the one who speaks, the other half by the one who listens, and which says in any language, “By and by all these people will have gone.”

After a while, Laurie said, “This is a hell of a party for you to drive all this way for.”

“I’m sorry about that just now, Spud. I only hope nothing serious comes of it.”

“You’re sorry?” Laurie looked up. There were still people fairly near; he only looked for a moment.

“I should have said it was Langham. What if he runs into Jeepers again before he forgets? You’ll be the one to get the backwash.”

“So I ought to be.”

“No, I shouldn’t have done it. It was just a rather tarty bit of exhibitionism, really.”

Laurie looked at the nut in his hand and slid it unseeingly over the worn screw. “You know why you did it. Because I wanted you to.”

When Ralph spoke again it was so quietly that no one else could have heard at all; but he only said, “Did you?”

Laurie fixed the nut to an unworn scrap of thread at the bottom, and heard the soft wood crunch faintly. Staring down at it, he said, “Yes.”

“Laurence, my dear boy, if I may make a suggestion.”

Laurie knew that in the moments of Mr. Straike’s approach they had been silent; he clung to this certainty, and quite soon was able to look around.

Later, while he was perambulating with sausage rolls, it occurred to him to wonder why Mr. Straike called him Laurence with such determination, when he must long have known that no one else did so. He realized that in Mr. Straike’s considered opinion Laurie was a sissy name, such as would be wished by a woman on a fatherless boy. He was being rechristened as a bracer. With this thought, he looked around for his mother, and couldn’t find her. She had gone to change into her going-away things.

For a moment he thought of following her home, so that he could say goodbye to her alone. But if she had wanted it, he thought, she would have told him where she was going; and he oughtn’t to leave the guests for so long. He gave up the idea, with a relief for which these reasons seemed enough. The house he had inherited was waiting for him. It wasn’t fitting any longer that he should encounter her in it.

At the other side of the hall Ralph had stopped to talk to a girl. She was a Straike guest, a Wren in uniform. Looking at his face, Laurie could tell that he was talking service shop with a conventional garnish of sex which he had found to be expected. They both seemed to be enjoying it. For a moment Laurie felt sharply jealous; but almost at once the feeling became unreal, and he went on watching Ralph with a tolerance in which pleasure was barely concealed. The girl had become a shadowy figure to him, a demonstrator of something in which she had no rights.

He had a sudden memory, heightened and colored by his present emotions, of how at Alec’s party he had watched Ralph standing in the crowd, and had felt his essential isolation. He had been like a solitary outpost standing fast in a rout. He had courage, the catalyst without which pride and truth cannot combine. Almost all the others had sold out truth for vanity; or, in the more fashionable phrase, they had flaming inferiority complexes. But Ralph had been willing to lay on his pride the burden of self-knowledge, and carry it with his shoulders straight. How has he managed all these years, thought Laurie; where has he gone, who has he talked to? But now voices at the door were telling his mother how charming she looked, and almost at once someone was crying, “The car’s here!”

The grape-purple feather on the little hat tickled Laurie’s cheek, he smelt the fragile bloom of powder and violets; then she seemed carried away from him as if he had been trying to hold her against a river flowing strongly to sea. Voices laughed and called, the noise of the rapids; the car vanished, swirled away around the bend of the stream.

He had a feeling, not of grief, but of absolute full stop and aimlessness. He turned, and Ralph was beside him.

For a moment so short that it was over almost as their eyes met, Ralph looked at him with great tenderness, understanding, and reassurance; then said with cheerful conventionality, “Come over here and talk to Babs Whitely, she says you don’t know each other yet.”

He steered Laurie over to the girl and plunged him into the thick of a conversation. She was amusing, full of little party tricks which repetition might make tiresome, but which were diverting the first time. They all had some more champagne. They were the only people there under thirty, and all in uniform; unconsciously they reacted to their elders’ reflected image of them, young, brave, and gay. Ralph had taken Babs’s measure quickly; she was unexacting in spite of her façade, with that display of bawdiness on safe occasions often found in women who are not highly sexed, but long to be taken for rakes. As the champagne took effect one could see that she was very good-natured, and liked men, as some people say of dogs, in their place. Laurie reflected that if it hadn’t been for Ralph he would have run away from her.

When she left them, in a cloud of warm nebulous resolves to meet again, the party was breaking up at the edges, though a hard clinging core remained. As they returned to their duties, Laurie said, in one of those flashes of high illumination which champagne produces, “Ralph, you’re much more briefed up on all this than I am. You’ve been at a wedding before.”

“Well,” said Ralph calmly, “I’ve been a best man four times in various parts of the world. It’s previous experience they seem to go for, before good references.”

“How long do people usually go on staying?”

“It depends. All night in some places.” Laurie gazed at him blankly, then saw the smile under his lashes. There was a brief and rather breathless pause. “Don’t you know when the mainline trains go?” said Ralph lightly. “That should give you a clue.”

In fact, the London contingent was moving already; the party for the down train would have to go in half an hour. It would be a decisive exodus; the rest who had come by car would hardly outstay it. He told Ralph all this, explaining it carefully. At the end Ralph, who had listened with a kind but searching look, said, “Spuddy. What have you had to eat today?”

“Oh, breakfast and everything.”

“Yes, but what did you actually eat?”

When it was put in this way, Laurie wasn’t sure. Ralph said, “Well, come and eat now, you’re getting tight.”

He had been feeling a little strange, but light and clear, not like a recognizable phase of drink. As they stood by the deserted buffet Ralph said, “How’s the leg holding out?”

“Oh, it’s fine.”

“Tell me if you want to rest and I’ll fix it.”

“There’s nothing you can’t fix, is there?”

“It’s time someone started to look after you.”

“Is it?” He felt subtle and rarefied. He looked up.

“Spud,” said Ralph softly, “you’re drunk. Be careful.”

They held one another’s eyes for a moment, not having meant to.

Perhaps it was only instinct that made Laurie look around, perhaps it was a movement on the edge of his visual field. At the far end of the buffet, one of the decrepit waiters had appeared. Laurie’s gaze travelled out from Ralph’s face to meet a cold, flat, withdrawing eye, glaucous and sunken, the eye of yesterday’s fish rejected by this morning’s buyers, wrinkling on the slab. The face could still be read, as it were, between the lines; faint traces were left in it of a mincing, petulant kind of good looks. The glance, so quickly caught away, lingered on like a smell; it had been a glance of classification. Laurie sensed, without comprehending, the dull application of unspeakable terms of reference; the motiveless calculation proceeding, a broken mechanism jogged on its dump by a passing foot. His eyes, flinching away, met Ralph’s retreating too.

There was a moment’s uncertain pause; then Laurie moved nearer to Ralph, as he had with Mr. Straike. They had a very small island to defend, he thought, a very isolated position.

Going back into circulation, he met people’s good intentions as well as he could. A bride was by definition happy, a stepson not; the balance of proper sentiment was, as he had already found out, too much for most of them. Usually they asked him what he was going to do, in the evident hope that he would produce some fortunate prospect, which would relieve them at once of their concern. Just as it seemed that all this would go on forever, the train party moved off, drawing the lesser bodies cometlike in its tail. He and Ralph were left alone with the gritty wooden hall, the broken meats, the head waiter bowing over the tip, and two spare magnums of champagne. He gave one to the waiters, and they went out and put the other in the car.

It was a soft, damp evening, smelling of black rotten leaves and wood smoke. As they got out at the gate, the scent of the cedar came to meet them. They had hardly spoken, except when Laurie showed Ralph the way.

Leaving the lit hall, it had seemed quite dark outside; but now the clouds had opened, and dusk was discovered looking its last from the depths of the sky. You could see the yellow bronze of the lichen on the roof, the iron lace of the porch threaded with the winter thorns of the roses. Along a crack in the blackout a pulse of firelight was beating. The cedar stretched its great dark hands in the gesture of a wizard commanding sleep.

Ralph said, “So this is your house.”

“Yes. It’s been mine for four hours, now. … It looks different.”

Ralph stood looking in silence, and then said quietly, “It couldn’t be different.”

They went up the path together, not speaking till Ralph said, “You’ll keep this place?”

“If I can.”

“You must. It goes with you. It would be bad luck to sell it.”

Laurie turned, under the black floating planes of the cedar. “Do you believe in luck?”

“I’m a sailor,” Ralph said.

Laurie knew he must have slept, because the fire was dying. Once or twice they had dozed before, but not for long; they had opened their eyes at the dry fall of the settling embers, and thrown into the last flames a handful of fir cones, or some of the sawn spruce trimmings from the stack. Now, under a delicate husk of ash, one drowsy red eye was left which only the dark made visible. He lay for a while sleepily staring into it. It was growing cold, but he was warm enough; and it seemed that if he didn’t move, time would stop also and nothing else need ever exist but this. But sleep ebbed away from him, as little to be commanded as the tide, and he felt how the bright fire, burning so long in a closed room, had drunk up the air. He rolled softly off the edge of the mattress onto the hearth rug, got up, and opened the blackout of the nearest window. Swinging the casement back, he tasted the quick air of the night that moves toward daybreak, piercingly cold and sweet. Everything was drowned in that remote, secret, and solitary moonlight which, rising late on a world already empty, will not set but be extinguished by the dawn. The moon would linger, a pale spent wafer, in the blue morning sky.

To Laurie’s eyes, sensitized by almost perfect darkness, the room behind him seemed now to be only in twilight, patched with white shafts almost as clear as day. In one of these Ralph was lying face upward, his fair hair falling back from his forehead, his arm relaxed and empty. He looked marmoreally calm, as if he had died with his mind at rest.

Stealthily the cold silent night slid around Laurie its noose of solitude. But it was only he who was alone. Ralph lay quiet with the image he had created, the beloved and desired, for whom nothing was good enough, of whom nothing was demanded but to trust and receive.

It can be good to be given what you want; it can be better, in the end, never to have it proved to you that this was what you wanted. But Laurie was unhappy with this thought and pushed it away, for Ralph had been very kind to him. He looked at the upturned face and saw how in sleep it did not sag, but held its strength in a kind of innocent pride. He had asked for nothing, except to give everything. He had made no claims. He had offered all he had, as simply as a cigarette or a drink, for a palliative of present pain. He had been single-hearted; and he slept in peace. It was only Laurie who was awake.

He hadn’t been asked to take any responsibility. He need not accept the knowledge that he had moved to this with instinctive purpose, as animals move toward water over miles of bush. It seemed to him now that he had exploited even the loss of his mother to get, without taking the blame for it, what he must long have been desiring. If his wishes had not been fulfilled with such experienced intuition, he need never, perhaps, have been certain what they were. Now he knew, and must go on knowing.

But that was only the part that concerned himself.

His hunger for compensation, once indulged, had driven him to the insistent egoism of an unwanted child demanding reassurance. Not satisfied with the sufficient evidence of his senses, he had longed to prove that he wasn’t receiving only kindness; he needed the affirmation of power. At some stage of a broken midnight conversation, he had said, “I’ve often had a feeling that there’s nowhere I really belong.” He had hardly known himself what he wanted; but Ralph had said, without a moment’s hesitation, “You belong with me. As long as we’re both alive, this will always be your place before anyone else’s. That’s a promise.” His voice had been free of emotion, almost businesslike. He might have been speaking to his lawyer about his will.

For a moment, it had sobered Laurie into self-knowledge; conquest is intoxicating, but a gift makes you think. Ralph had been concerned to notice him thinking, so early in the night, with the empty room upstairs. It hadn’t taken Ralph long to put a stop to that. He had considerable skill and experience, and his heart was in it.

Now he slept in the deep peace of valor and sacrifice; and Laurie, only half understanding the reproaches of his own nature, thought gropingly: I wanted someone to follow, I wanted him to be brave. But he wants to be brave for me too; and no one can do that.

Facing at last, in the lunar stillness, the thought he had been so long in flight from, he knew that Andrew wouldn’t have tried to do it. Andrew was the only one who hadn’t believed that one could be rescued from all one’s troubles by being taken out of oneself. He had a certain natural instinct for the hard logic of love.

Outside, in the bleaching lye of the moonlight, washed of their distracting colors, the shapes of things burned in archetypal truth. Laurie stood casting his long shadow on the room behind him, silent in a grief and wonder too deep for tears, that life was so divided and irreconcilable, and the good so implacably the enemy of the best.

He felt that his body had grown bitterly cold, and wondered how he had ignored its protests for so long. Returning by the track of the moonlight, he lay down again. Ralph had turned on his side, his closed eyes still smoothed by sleep. Turned by the light to the color of some pale palladian metal, the fair hair, which Laurie had seen for so long only in order and discipline, lay tumbled like a boy’s. A secret thrill of triumph, none the less strong for being mixed with gentler things, drew Laurie irresistibly; he reached out stealthily and touched it. When he moved away, Ralph’s eyes had opened. They were smiling, and with fear Laurie saw in how deep a happiness, too silent and too deep, eating like rust the core of his defenses.

From some great distance, thin and archaic and perilous, the first cock-crow sounded.