The Charioteer: A Novel

14

IN THE BED WHERE the old man had died there was another one, who seemed to be having the same treatment for the same disease, and talked much more about it, his monologue from behind the screens making them, indeed, almost redundant. But the boy Mervyn was delighted at Laurie’s return, and he was glad that at the last moment he hadn’t forgotten.

“Here; I’ve brought you something for tea.”

“Coo. What a super birthday cake.”

“Wedding.”

“Go on. You been and got married?” Good manners struggled with disesteem in his face; it was a much better color, mauve-pink instead of blue.

“No—my mother has.” He could say it, he found, as if it were years ago, as indeed it seemed.

“No kidding, Spud?” He considered Laurie gravely, then said, with a mature kind of tact, “Have an acid drop.”

“Thanks very much. You look better.”

“I’ve been having the Wonder Drug. Honest. The doctor said. What sort of a night did you have last night?”

“What did you say?”

“I said what sort of a night did you have. You look kind of tired. I thought you might have had a noisy one, like what we had here.”

“Oh. Was there a raid?”

“Was there a raid? We had an incendiary right on the roof. One of the doctors put it out.”

“Did he? Good show.”

“I reckon, with the moon like it is now, we’ll have another tonight, don’t you?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Probably not.” He realized now that the child was a little too bright and cocky to be quite true. “If there is, we’ll just have to tell each other the story of our lives to pass the time, eh?”

“Bags you tell yours first, then.”

Laurie got into bed and, opening a book, tried to think quietly behind its screen. Soon it fell from his hand and, with the clatter of the ward work all around him, he slept like the dead. Later with the noise his dreams grew restless; he thought he was back at Dunkirk, but this time responsible for everything, so that he had to crawl about the beach dragging his broken leg. He heard his name being called, but he couldn’t go any faster; he muttered, “All right, I’m coming, all right.”

“Easy does it. It’s only me.”

He started awake; the lights were on and the blackout up; a doctor in a white coat was standing by his bed. He blinked and saw that it was Alec.

“I can’t really stop. I’ve got to assist with an emergency in ten minutes, but I couldn’t leave you in here any longer without saying hello.” He pulled out the stool from under the bed and sat down, looking just as all the housemen did when they came to take patients’ histories; one half expected him to bring out a patella hammer or a stethoscope. He chatted vaguely about his work, and how to keep on the right side of the Sister; it was all rather dim and dutiful, and Laurie, who was still muzzy with sleep, began to wish he’d go. But he got out the X-rays from the box on the bed-rail, and started holding them up to the light. Laurie was used to seeing doctors enthralled by this pastime; but after saying, “Good Lord, you were lucky with that callus,” Alec became a little absent. He glanced over his shoulder, dropped his voice, and said, “I ran into Ralph for a minute today, just after he left you here.”

“Oh, yes, did you?” He didn’t feel in a state to deal with it, and hoped his face had given nothing away. The reserves which Ralph had broken down felt, in reaction, shy and raw at the approach of anyone else.

Alec looked around for a moment under his brown eyelids, with his disarming throw-away smile. “I didn’t keep him. He was looking incandescent and elevated, like a candle burning at both ends.” After a faintly hesitant pause, he added, “Don’t keep him on a string too long, he hasn’t the temperament.”

Laurie didn’t answer. He was violently embarrassed and, in any case, could think of nothing to say. Alec looked at the X-ray again.

“He hasn’t been talking. But I know him pretty well.”

“Yes,” said Laurie. “Of course. I hear you got it quite heavy here last night.”

Alec gave him another swift neutral glance. “We’ve had worse. Sandy got a third-degree burn on the arm from an incendiary, picking it up with a coal shovel. It’s making us very short on Casualty. Well, I must go. See you sometime.”

Laurie shut his eyes again, to protect himself from conversation. He felt oppressed and dejected. He didn’t blame Ralph, at least not consciously. As if a few threads of contact still linked them like the streamers that cling to departing ships, he felt what must have happened: Alec had offered felicitations, Ralph, out of sensitiveness or superstition, had been driven to qualify them a little. As Alec had remarked, they had known each other very well. Laurie wondered whether he had had time to give the news to Sandy yet.

Through the blanket he had pulled around his ears he could hear the evening mouth-washes being poured out. Muffled like this, the clink and splash and talk sounded like party noises. He could imagine the party conversation as well. “Goodness, where have you been, you’re weeks behind. Why, that’s deader than the Alec affair. Bunny’s with Peter now and Ralph’s with this Laurie boy. No, you wouldn’t have, he’s new, Sandy picked him up in the street originally; he’s the boy Sandy and Alec had that row about. Funny boy, a cripple, awkward about mixing. However, Ralph’s madly in love with him at the moment. I thought everyone knew.”

You don’t get away from it, thought Laurie; once you’re really in, you never get away. You get swept along the road with the refugees, till you find you’ve been carried through the gates without noticing, and you’re behind the wire for the duration. The closed shop. Nous autres.

It would never be like that with Andrew, he thought. Talking in the hospital kitchen at night, they had felt special only in their happiness, and separate only in their human identities. How good it would be to see him now! At least one could write; and getting down into the bedclothes, he spent comfortingly in this way the next half-hour. It was not till he reread it that he realized how far it was falsified by what had been left out, and by that time it was too late to write it again, without missing the early morning post.

He was asleep when the sirens went. Used at the other hospital not to associate their sound with very much urgency, his subconscious mind dismissed it and let him sleep on. But the guns were linked with other memories, and waked him at once; the bombs began a few minutes later.

The other patients said at first that it wasn’t as bad as last night; then they seemed to decide that comparisons were odious, and made no more. Laurie remembered how in France, before he was wounded, he had begun to get his second wind, helped by the stimulus of action and the comradeship around him. It hadn’t been so good lying passively on the beach with the Stukas coming over, after one had had a sample already; but the morphia had helped most of the time. It had been light, too. Hearing two old gaffers joking together on the other side of the ward, he realized he was much more frightened than they were; and he remembered with shame Ralph, who hadn’t been too drunk that night to know what he was doing, falling asleep in Bunny’s deep chair. When he had set the wheels moving for Laurie’s transfer from the country, he would scarcely have considered small inconveniences like this. Accustomed to communicate his own courage to those around him, no doubt he believed most people to be braver than they really were.

“Spud. You awake?”

“Hello,” said Laurie, sitting up. “Yes, I am, but I didn’t think you were. Do they still wake you up at two for the Wonder Drug?”

“No, only ten now. But it’s a bit noisy to sleep, isn’t it?”

Indeed, no one was attempting to do so, and the nurses had sensibly decided that it was better to keep the patients cheerful than quiet. But children will sleep through almost anything, and Mervyn’s stillness had been deceptive. He looked feverish, Laurie thought, and it would be partly that which was making him shiver. Laurie lit himself a cigarette, and got up.

“Let’s talk instead. I’ll come and sit on your bed to save shouting. Just let me put my boot on, in case the nurses want me to do anything.”

They had an acid drop, and later Mervyn had a draw at Laurie’s cigarette. It would probably, Laurie thought, with these associations, make a nonsmoker of him for life.

When one of the windows blew in, Mervyn said, without removing his cold fingers from Laurie’s hand, “I suppose this isn’t nearly as bad as Dunkirk, is it?”

“Well, not for me, because I can get about now. You’re fixed more like I was then.”

“If I had to walk would my stomach burst open?”

“I doubt it; but I could carry you.”

“I weigh six stone eleven.”

“Yes, I could manage that.”

After a long awkward pause, as if he were making up his mind to confess to something, Mervyn said, “My Aunt Edie’s house was hit by a bomb, week before last.”

“Oh, bad luck. Was she all right?”

“No, she was killed. And Uncle Ted, and Mr. Robbins that lived with them, and their dog, he was called Smoky, he was half a spaniel. And the baby.”

“That’s too bad. I’m having another cigarette; want to light it? Watch out Nurse isn’t looking.”

This time it made him cough; they transferred the cigarette in guilty haste.

“Mum said Aunt Edie and Uncle Ted had gone to Canada, she said not to go round there because there was bad people come to live in the house. Only one of the boys at school said, that lives in their street. So I went and the lady next door told me.”

“Oh,” said Laurie helplessly. “I see.” A descending bomb whistled loudly. He leaned across the child, but the windows only rattled this time. Mervyn said, “Is it right you can’t hear the one that hits you?”

“That’s what they say. You’re all slipping down the bed, it’s bad for the stitches.” He settled his back against the rail, and the boy’s head against his shoulder. It felt heavy; if things eased off for even a few minutes he would probably sleep. “Mothers will do it, I can’t think why. I suppose they’d sooner think we can’t take it than feel we don’t need them any more. The more they’re fond of you, the worse it seems to be. Only way you can look at it is, women are like that.”

“Are they? Is your mum?”

“She used to be. You can’t go hurting their feelings about it. The only thing is just to put up with it and think your own thoughts.”

The raid was tailing off a little. Two casualties had just been carried in. He wondered if Andrew was safe, and whether Ralph’s Station was a target for tonight. He thought that if Mervyn had been five years older one could have tried him with:

The sorrows of our proud and angry dust

Are from eternity, and shall not fail.

Bear them we can, and if we can, we must—

But he looked a little fragile, yet, to shoulder tonight’s sky; and besides, he had fallen asleep.

Pressed by the double weight, the bed-rail was boring into Laurie’s shoulder; but he didn’t want to risk waking the child before the All Clear. For the same reason, he couldn’t reach the cigarettes. He had just given up trying when a lit one appeared, smoking, under his nose. He looked up. In the subterranean glimmer (almost all the lights had had to be put out, because of the broken window) a small leathery man, who looked like a retired jockey, gave him one of those caustic grins by which some people believe sentiment to be impenetrably concealed. He made a comic shushing gesture, and padded on in his gent’s natty dressing-robe to the lavatory.

The Night Sister did a round soon afterwards. Laurie saw her with alarm. He was breaking a rule; the nurses had winked at it; now there would be trouble. Sure enough she paused beside him. But she only removed the top pillow from his empty bed, and with a smile slipped it behind his shoulder.

Laurie sat smoking, with the boy’s mouse-brown hair under his chin. He felt a warm, kindly solidarity with the Night Sister and the nurses and the horsy little man. It wasn’t till some ten minutes later, when he had been half asleep himself, that he even remembered it would have been possible to misunderstand his situation. His neighbors’ basic assumptions had been his own. Suddenly he pictured one of Sandy’s friends passing by just now; the discreet lifted eyebrow, or snigger, or cough; the not-so-cryptic phrase, meant to pass over the boy’s head, which would ensure that there would never again be perfect innocence between them. It wouldn’t take so very long for that kind of consciousness to settle under one’s skin. We sign the warrant for our own exile, he thought. Self-pity and alibis come after.

It was as if Andrew had walked up and looked at him, and in a moment made everything clear.

For a few minutes, this decision brought him great relief and calm. Then he began to think how he was going to tell Ralph.

He hoped that to sleep on it would help; but perhaps the sleep wasn’t long enough, even though he dropped off before the All Clear and had to be steered back in a daze to his own bed. He could write, of course; it would be kinder not only to himself, but probably to Ralph as well; only it wasn’t the sort of kindness Ralph would ever understand. Deciding this, he tried to put out of his mind the confusing relief it brought him, and the feeling that an unbearable finality had been made not only less immediate, but in some undefined way less real.

If you wanted an evening out, you waited till Sister was off duty and then had a quiet word with the Staff Nurse. That would be tomorrow. He rang the Station, but they didn’t know where Mr. Lanyon was and asked if it was urgent. Thankfully he said no, and left a message. After that he rang Andrew, for he was clear of his promise now and they could arrange to meet. But Derek, who would have fetched him without fuss, wasn’t there, only a new silly nurse who didn’t know anything. There was a queue for the call box, and he had to leave it till next day.

Alec did not reappear; he worked for a surgeon whose cases went mainly elsewhere, and had seldom any real business in the ward. There wasn’t a raid that night; Laurie slept for nearly eight hours, in spite of everything.

In the morning he had his first letter from Andrew. The round young-looking script was deceptive: in writing, Andrew revealed maturities which, in talk, his diffidence often hid. It was a swiftly written, unstudied letter, easy with confidence, the crossings-out light and unconcealing. Near the end Andrew said, “I ought to get over next week with any luck, and we’ll find somewhere to talk. The telephone is rather diminishing, isn’t it? In a way Morse would be better, because it doesn’t pretend to be conversation. I know you felt the same, so don’t feel obliged to ring for fear that I’ll take umbrage or anything. I ring the lodge every day to ask after you, though, of course, they won’t put me through to the ward.” Not for the first time, Laurie reflected that Andrew was the realist of them both, or had the courage of his realism perhaps. There was a postscript: “Your bed is still empty. I have got a sense of guilt in advance toward the man they put in it; I don’t know when I’ve resented a perfectly innocent person so much.”

When Laurie opened his locker drawer to put the letter away, the first thing he saw was Ralph’s note, the one that had come with the books.

He took it out, and opened it. The speculations of his first reading seemed strange to him now. The awkwardness, the reserve, were no longer enigmatic; they were like certain tones in a voice whose every inflection one knows. He put the letter back, thinking, I ought never to forgive myself for this as long as I live.

Ralph’s new room was a little nearer the hospital than the old one. He rang the bell at the strange door, thinking that with its tall squeezed bay windows it was a tight-mouthed sun-shy house, predestined to misery and unhappy leave-takings. But then the dark window opened above his head and Ralph’s voice, brisk and warm, said, “Just walk up, Spud. First floor.”

The stairs were narrow and rather steep; Ralph must have thought he’d prefer to do them without spectators.

The door of the first-floor front opened as Laurie reached it, and shut behind him. He had meant, in some confused unhistrionic way, to give his entrance a kind of significance which would warn Ralph from the first. Now it seemed unbelievable not to have known it would be like this. To administer a rebuff in this first moment would have been possible, Laurie vaguely supposed, to some other and better person: it wasn’t possible to him. In a moment or so, however, Ralph looked at his face and said quietly, “Well, come and sit down.”

Laurie had time now to notice the room, which was what the rest of the house would have led him to expect, full of frowsty comfort and solid vulgarity. Ralph had removed all the pictures and ornaments, which had given it the air of a commercial hotel. Where his old room had extended his personality, this flung it back so that all his reality was concentrated in himself.

“You see,” he said, “two chairs. Which shall we sit on?”

They were huge overstuffed ones covered in tapestry. Ralph sat on the arm beside him. “All right, Spud, all right. I know this is going to be difficult. Just be quiet for a minute. It’s been so long.”

It wasn’t what Laurie had planned. There had not been time to discover, till now, the sensation of coming home again which is one of the more stable by-products of physical love. One can see sometimes in a crowded railway carriage at night two lovers, lethargic, travel-grimed, and bored, weary beyond the dimmest stirrings of desire, but by instinct comfortably adapting their bodies to cushion and support each other, making a little refuge from the crush while the strangers or even friends around them rub elbows and knees, stiff with apologetic constraint and inward resentment. It was with almost a shock that, after a minute or two, Laurie felt Ralph get up abruptly and move away. He crossed over to the other chair and said, “All right, then, Spud, let’s have it. Well, come along, shoot.”

Wakened harshly out of the illusion that the conversation which had just taken place had somehow explained everything, Laurie now realized that since the moment of entering the room he had scarcely uttered a word.

Stumblingly, he began saying the things he had planned. But much of it seemed impossible now, much had to be qualified or softened; there was much that he could no longer imagine having ever meant to say. “Ralph, don’t ever think it was because I didn’t care enough. I—”

“Don’t be silly, Spud. I know you love me, and so do you.”

Laurie looked up. Ralph’s blue eyes were fixed on his face, but not in doubt or entreaty. They were watching him: closely, carefully, with absolute concentration. He understood now how sentimental and unreal had been his picture of Ralph as a passive victim whom his rejection would instantly crush. He was looking into the face of a resolute quick-thinking man used to authority, to measuring other men’s strength and asserting his own, to a swift reaction in moments of danger. He stood on the bridge now, going into action: and, as long as Laurie’s resolution held, it was he who was the enemy.

“Don’t waste time, Spud. It’s childish to start an argument about whether we love each other, the moment I go and sit on the other side of the room. Get down to brass tacks. What does all this rigmarole add up to, really? You met me at Sandy’s party and you can’t forget it. You surely don’t still think I went there for the conversation, do you?”

He waited, as if expecting a reply; a disciplinary trick so old and simple that no doubt he was scarcely aware of using it.

“I went because I was on the town, like everyone else in the room. Yes, that includes Alec too, you don’t know as much about Alec as you think. Surely Sandy told you it was a queer party before you went there; you knew what it meant?”

“Yes, of course.”

“I don’t just mean that queers would be there. A queer party: something between a lonely hearts club and an amateur brothel. You expected that, didn’t you?”

Much of that evening had been a surprise to Laurie, but he didn’t want to sound pious, so he said, “Yes.”

“And are you going to tell me you’d have gone yourself if you’d been happy and satisfied, even if you did know I’d be there?”

“Yes. I’d have gone to see you.”

“Would you, Spud?” Ralph’s face had softened; there was a kind of respect in it too. “After all those years. Yes; I expect you would.”

He lit two cigarettes, gave Laurie one, and stood for a while looking down at him in silence.

“I’m not romantic,” he began. From his lack of emphasis Laurie saw that he believed this to be true. “When I saw you lying on the deck in all the muck and dunnage, I don’t know what I felt, really. You had a two-day beard, you were dirty, you smelt worse than the others because your wound was going bad. I suppose you stood to me for something or other. When you sent me up, I was almost too busy to think about it at the time; but it seemed to sink in later, when I was lying in hospital with nothing to do. So I wrote, because one can’t swear to every impression one picks up on a day like that, and I wanted to settle it one way or another. When I heard you were dead, it seemed inevitable, somehow. And after that, so did everything else.”

He had spoken in the intent, rather muddled way of a man who is defining his thoughts to himself as he goes along. He had done better for himself, it seemed, than he wanted; for when he saw Laurie’s face his own hardened at once.

“Well, that’s past history.” He added, with the clear colorless decision that told nothing, except that the subject was closed, “You can leave that out of it. None of that could happen again.” Laurie remembered suddenly the contempt with which he had gazed down at Sandy on the bathroom floor.

“I wasn’t thinking that.”

“Well, seeing some of the things you do think …” As if it were unnatural for him to meet an emergency except on his feet, he took a quick turn across the room, came back to the hearth, and stood there, poised to move again, looking out across Laurie’s head. Laurie could feel how the walls of the room were cramping his eyes. He looked at him, measuring his own resolve against Ralph’s courage and his pride, and scarcely realizing that there had been a subtle reorientation. He was feeling now that if he weakened Ralph would respect him less.

Suddenly Ralph smiled, and came back across the room again. As if for the exchange of confidences, he settled himself cozily on the chair-arm. His voice wasn’t insistent any longer, but intimate, reassuring, a voice Laurie remembered all too well. “Relax, Spuddy. Don’t be so tense. How you like to make things difficult, don’t you? We weren’t long enough together, that’s where the trouble is. Dashing off after a few hours and leaving you to mill over all the reaction and everything by yourself. This bloody war! It won’t always be like that. I like you the way you are, Spud; why would I want to make you less yourself? I’m not attracted to people I can push around.”

Laurie gathered himself together with a hard, unwilling effort; it felt like dragging oneself up from a warm sea onto a harsh rocky shore. He said, “But you’re trying to do it now.”

Looking at Ralph’s face he saw how quickly the man on the bridge resumed command. “No. You’re about to make a decision. I’m putting the facts on which you’ve to make it.”

With painful determination Laurie said, “Half the facts. You don’t know the other half.”

Ralph was silent for a moment; but his face hardly altered. He said quietly, “That’s true; I’m putting the half I know. But I’ve a right to do that.”

“Yes,” said Laurie. “I know you have.”

“Spud,” said Ralph softly, “you break me up when you look like that. What are we fighting over? What nonsense it all is.”

“Sometimes I—I wish there were nothing else but this. But—”

“Spud.”

“But there is, and if I don’t do what seems right to me, it won’t be any good in the end.”

“And if you do, and it turns out to be wrong, that won’t be any good either. I can do with a drink, and I should think you could.”

The bottles had become respectable in a fumed-oak sideboard. Laurie realized that a drink was what he needed badly. While Ralph was seeing to it he looked around at the thick Turkey carpet, the crushed-velvet curtains, the coal fire and brass fender, the patent convertible divan. But he had guessed already that Ralph had been sharing the rent of Bunny’s room and had added the attic when Bunny’s personality got too pervasive; this, no doubt, was costing him less. It was strange how dim, how dead-and-done-with, Bunny seemed.

“Isn’t it a fantasy?” said Ralph. “The love-nest of a city councillor, is my guess.”

Laurie looked at the room again, and couldn’t help laughing. “They called each other Mr. Potter and Miss Smith in bed, like people in an Arno drawing. What were the pictures like?”

Ralph opened the cupboard to show him; the ornaments were there too. In the midst of all the laughing and nonsense Laurie remembered that all this would be ending almost at once; but just then it didn’t seem true. They were still laughing when they drifted back to the chair again. The drink had been one of Ralph’s more generous doubles; it gave Laurie a feeling not exactly of optimism, for he hadn’t had enough to make him silly, but of sentimental living-in-the-moment, a feeling that the future would come fast enough without rushing to meet it. Ralph took his empty glass away and settled beside him. He didn’t speak at first. Laurie sat looking into the fire, remembering what it brought back to him, and wondering how it would feel presently to be walking back alone.

“I want to talk to you, Spud. Now just relax, quietly now; you’re all fiddle-strings today; haven’t you been sleeping? You’re only a couple of days away from me, and look at you, all on edge. That’s better. The thing with you is, you’re too new to it all and you don’t know what to be frightened of. I’ve listened to so many life-histories: I don’t know why, I always seem to pitch up when they’ve had a drink too many, or a knock too many, or something. It’s loneliness that rots them, every time. A starving man won’t notice a dirty plate. You don’t know, Spuddy, I do. When you’re settled with someone real you can forget all that. You can afford friends then, I mean friends, people to talk to, like anyone else.” He added softly, “You know, we do get along together.”

Laurie saw that the time had come: it found him with nothing to say, except, “Why have you made it so hard?” And there was no use in saying that, for Ralph would only reply that he had wanted to make it impossible.

Or one could say, thought Laurie, “I’m sorry, but he comes first and that’s all about it,” which would have, like a shot fired point-blank, the merit of being unanswerable.

“Spud. I don’t ask whether you feel about me what I do about you, it’s such a meaningless question, how would you know? But could you bear, really, for us never to see each other again?”

“Don’t,” said Laurie abruptly. He got up from the chair. Ralph got up too. They faced each other across the heavy fireplace with its brass fender and mahogany overmantel. “I’ve got to bear it. Don’t make it worse. Do you think I’m doing this because I don’t feel anything?”

Ralph leaned his elbow on the empty shelf; the blank wood stirred in Laurie a dim memory which, untraced, slid away. “We don’t need to tell each other what we feel. You know this is murder for both of us, and you’re doing it for nothing.”

He looked proud and brave, without the shame and shabbiness of a person who feels himself rejected; he was like someone suffering for a cause in which he believes.

“You’ll have plenty of time for the other, Spud, without all this butchery. We’ll be separated enough before this war’s over, with me still in the navy and you in a job. Let’s take what we can, God knows we can’t afford to waste it. You don’t know how little there is in the world of what we can give each other.”

Laurie peered into the cloudy future; he tried to re-create what he had felt last night with the child. He clung to a stubborn loyalty where a vision had been. Ralph, who had not ceased all this time to watch him, spoke in the changed voice of a man who has been following up a thought.

“Tell me something, Spud. Supposing after the war this boy, still not knowing the facts of life, asked you to share digs with him. Would you do it?”

“I haven’t thought.” The peacetime world had seemed irrecoverably remote, the horizon bounded by months at most. Ralph said, “Well, think now.”

Laurie thought of the apple orchard and of Limbo; of the kitchen at night. Amid all this intruded the memory of Charlot’s side ward, and the red-shaded light on Andrew’s face. Defiantly he said, “Yes, of course I would.”

Ralph said, quite gently, “You know, even St. Anthony practiced his austerities in the desert. His temptations came to him in dreams, and he just told them to go to hell. You can do that with a dream; it hasn’t any feelings.”

Laurie looked at him, meditating who knows what appeal; but he saw at once that there would be no armistice.

Ralph said, “Not that I don’t believe in sublimation. I mean, I believe some people have done it. They put it all into climbing mountains, or founding hospitals, or just into prayer. Some say it’s all done with will power, and some think it takes a special temperament. What do you think yourself?”

“All right. You needn’t say it again. But he means something to me I can’t explain: he needs me, I don’t know why. And he trusts me. And there it is.”

Ralph said steadily, “Trusts you for what? It wouldn’t work, Spud. It isn’t you he needs, he doesn’t know you. He needs someone like himself, who wouldn’t have to pretend with him.”

Laurie said violently, “How can you tell? You don’t know anything about him.”

Some instinct was saying that anger would do all he needed, release this intolerable pressure and drug him and give him the impetus to escape. He waited to be angry at what Ralph would say.

But Ralph said, with the greatest quiet and gentleness, “Very well, Spud, if that’s your last word. Let’s part before we make ourselves any more unhappy. We’ve got better things to remember. If this is the finish, let’s have it now.”

He took his arm from the mantelshelf, a slight movement which seemed a gesture of dismissal. Laurie gazed at him, stupidly unprepared. It was like having endured a painful but indecisive illness, and being suddenly told that the end is death.

He took a step forward, for it had always been natural to look to Ralph for help, one would never despair without first having recourse to him. He saw Ralph’s straight blue eyes, tenderly and inflexibly watching: the eyes looking at him with love were the eyes of the man on the bridge, who awaits with delicate precision the moment of convergence when he will say, “Open fire.”

“Goodbye, then, Ralph. I … it doesn’t seem …” Ralph hadn’t moved. It would have to be now. “Goodbye.”

“Are you going away just like that?”

Laurie paused in the moment of turning. Ralph looked at him: a kind relenting look, not quite smiling. It said, “Did you really think I would stand aside and see you suffer?”

Laurie stood silent. He didn’t want to think, there was too much pain in it; only for a moment, resisting foreknowledge, to stand here waiting, his mind’s eyes closed.

“Come here, then,” said Ralph with gentle arrogance. “Come and say goodbye to me.”

Afterwards he said, “Are you going to be angry with me, Spuddy, as soon as you’re alone?”

Laurie shook his head. He didn’t want to talk. Ralph mistook his movement in the dark and said, “Yes, you are.”

“What do you think I am? I can take my own responsibility.”

Ralph said slowly, “You said that to me once before.”

“Did I? It’s a natural thing to say.”

“I’m the one to take it. I know that Perhaps I was wrong, Spuddy; tell me so if you like. When it came to the last I couldn’t help myself, and that’s a fact.”

“I know. It’s all right. Don’t talk now.”

It was a quiet street. The passing cars were so few that each stirred a transient speculation.

“Spuddy.”

“Yes?”

“It’s as I said; before you make up your mind about things you have to see how they are.”

“I know how they are. I knew before.”

“Don’t be unhappy, Spud, and blame yourself. I’d rather you blamed me.”

“It’s not your fault. You thought it would settle something. I knew it wouldn’t, but still I—”

“It should settle something, Spud. I think it should.”

“It makes it more difficult, that’s all.”

“You put too much on yourself. You’re only human.”

“So are we all. So is he.”

“Is he? I wouldn’t know.”

“Don’t, Ralph. What’s the use?”

A clock struck somewhere. Ralph said, “It’s my firewatch tonight, I must go soon.”

“Did you have any trouble in the raid?”

“Nothing that wouldn’t brush off.”

“You never told me.”

“Don’t worry. We ought to be charmed lives at the moment, God knows. There’s only one way of getting death to solve your problems, as a rule.”

“Look after yourself.”

“Would you care?”

“You know.”

“Spud, I’d give anything to ease this up for you. Not just for my own sake, though you think that.”

“No, I don’t. I don’t think that, of course.”

“You only hurt yourself, you don’t know what it does to me. I’ve been around more than you. If you’d only trust me.”

“You can’t eat and breathe for me, or live for me. No one can.”

“It kills me just to stand watching,” Ralph said. “It’s not the way I’m made.”