The Charioteer: A Novel

15

IT WAS THE TALL Sister who brought Laurie the news that he was for discharge in ten days’ time. She added that he might go out walking if he wished; making, as he learned later, a virtue of necessity, for his new boot was ready and she had been told that he was to test it.

The next few evenings all merged for him later into a common memory and he thought of them almost as one. They walked for the first hour, usually in the old town by the river, among the ships’ chandlers and tattooing shops which looked as if they hadn’t changed hands in a couple of centuries, or the steep streets of flaking Adam houses that leaned above the Wells. Then they would drop into some small local for a drink, and join in the talk if it was a talkative pub. If Ralph had had any idea of showing Laurie that he could “pass,” he must have forgotten about it almost immediately. Places like this had been the stuff of his daily life too long for him to be conscious of his assimilation. He was more than ever himself when he fell in with some merchant mate or master, picking up the loose-ended gossip of the sea: “… They had to fly out a second engineer to Rangoon, and from what I heard when she berthed next to us at Colombo …” Sometimes Laurie would feel himself almost forgotten; but in the middle of it Ralph would look at his watch; the blackout would reseal itself behind them; in the dim street he would smile and say, “Let’s go home.”

When they got in, Ralph would fix the blackout while Laurie got the fire going. Usually they never put on the light at all. As Ralph said, the room looked much better without it.

These nights were dark and clouded. The bombers stayed away, but they would be back. It wasn’t a time for rushing to meet one’s problems: one puts off mending clothes that may have to be thrown away. Ralph had no problem, only a purpose; but Laurie was living each day as though the world would end tomorrow. Ralph must have known this. He never discussed the future; he never mentioned Andrew; he never tried to make Laurie admit any change of heart. If there was something in this of kindness, and something of common sense, no doubt there was something too of pride. Laurie had no trouble in guessing that scenes of jealousy were relegated in Ralph’s mind to a special category, along with bracelets and eyeshadow; he had his private vanities, and was sensitive about them. There was something almost formidably perfect in his manners on this point; but though he didn’t touch upon the future, in compensation he talked, and got Laurie to talk, a good deal about the past. All Laurie’s most difficult period of self-discovery had been got through alone, except for the unhelpful intrusion of Charles. Though there could be no very useful purpose in telling anyone about it now, there could be a good deal of emotional satisfaction; and Ralph saw to it that there was. After these long retrospective confidences, exchanged under the conditions best suited of all to unreserve, the feeling that they were deeply rooted in each other’s lives seemed to Laurie as old as the events they had been reviving.

The boy Mervyn, at whom Ralph had once waved from the ward doorway, had decided to worship him. He never arrived till after visiting hours, so their acquaintance ripened on signals and smiles. It gave satisfaction to Mervyn, however; and there was an understanding that the next time the Sister was out of the way, Ralph should somehow be smuggled in. Meanwhile, Ralph sent him as a present a very old spare copy of the East Africa Pilot. Laurie thought it an odd choice; but Ralph had remembered the years of hunger for factual information. Mervyn spent, reverently, his waking hours upon it.

Andrew hadn’t written for some days. He had said he would let Laurie know when he could get over. The orderlies’ days off were worked out among themselves, and it took a certain amount of shuffling to get a night orderly relieved; Laurie guessed that he must have put off writing from day to day, expecting to hear something definite. The two hospitals were so closely linked that, as Laurie now realized, neither could be bombed without the news travelling around the other in a flash. He had expected Andrew to write oftener; his first letter had been dashed off like a daily journal to be continued very soon. Laurie knew that in other circumstances, this silence would have been a grief to him. Now, because it put off the day when he must write back an account of himself which would be false in every significant thing, he was relieved.

He had reached a point of no return when he could see neither help nor virtue in anticipation. It would cost him his integrity to protect Andrew now; but this didn’t present itself to him as a choice, only as a debt he had run up and would have to pay. There was no clean way out; confession would only lift the weight from his own shoulders to Andrew’s. It would be impossible for him to know about Laurie now without turning the knowledge on himself.

Staring into the fire, Laurie remembered wishing that his love for Andrew could be divided, leaving only the part Andrew could happily share. The fire, settling, threw up a dim transparent flame; there was a faint resurgence of light on the fair hair beside him. It was a Delphic answer, he thought, to an impossible petition; you could see the smile behind the smoke.

“What is it?” asked Ralph, always at these times instantly aware when Laurie withdrew from a common consciousness to thoughts of his own. He replied only with a violent demonstration of love; and guessed, from a certain quality of comfort and forgiveness in the response, that Ralph had divined the sense of guilt behind it. For Laurie couldn’t pretend to himself that even this last loyalty of the heart to Andrew was innocent. It was withheld at the expense of someone who on his side had withheld nothing, and whose need of love was in its kind no less. The idealist and romantic in Ralph, reviving late and left for dead, felt its own wants with the greater urgency; and it had lived too hard, too close to the ground, to be deceived.

It was on the morning of the fifth day that Laurie awoke to a sense of anxiety about Andrew, so fully formed that he must have been reasoning it out in his sleep. He counted the days since Andrew had written. Suddenly Laurie’s mind cleared; he knew this silence was utterly uncharacteristic. Andrew was essentially gentle and considerate; if he was having trouble in getting a night off he would write to say so. When he had told Laurie not to telephone, it had been because he had meant to write in any case, instead. Something was wrong.

Laurie looked at the clock. It was half-past five in the morning and still quite dark. The nurses were scurrying about in the busiest rush hour of a busy surgical ward. Less than at any other time of day was he likely to be missed. He counted his small change, got up, and made his bed. Mervyn, no longer a “heavy dressing” to be done early, was still asleep. Laurie bundled his uniform together, hid it under his dressing-gown, and changed in the bathroom. The quiet empty streets of the city, in which only the first workers were stirring, rang with frost under his feet; he could hear echoed back from the tall buildings on the other side the clump of his thicksoled boot.

He got through from the telephone box very quickly. He could hear the bell ringing in the ward, and tried to picture Andrew hurrying to answer it; but the picture wouldn’t form, and when the answering voice came, it wasn’t Andrew’s.

“Is that Ward B?”

“Yes?”

“Who is that speaking?”

“This is the ward orderly, Roger Curds.” Then, after a pause, “Do you want to inquire for someone?”

It was very cold in the telephone box, which had a missing pane that let in the wind. Laurie felt his palms filmed with an icy moisture. “Doesn’t Andrew Raynes work on Ward B any more?”

“No. Andrew Raynes went to London yesterday.”

“To London?” His mind was a blind scramble of conjecture under a cold sky of fear. “Do you know how long he’s likely to be away?”

“I’m afraid not.” The rather high, pleasant voice paused tentatively; then, “Is that Laurie Odell speaking?”

“Yes. It is. Did Andrew leave a message for me?”

“Not with me; but that will mean he must have written. You’ve not changed your address lately?”

“No.”

“Well, I expect you’ll have a letter when the post comes in. I know you’re a friend of Andrew’s; I’m sure he wouldn’t move without letting you know.”

“Move?” The cold seemed to have gone through to his bones, not numbly but with a sharp eating pain. “Aren’t you expecting him back?”

“Well, not at present, I think. If you don’t hear by this morning’s post, you could always ring here in the daytime; I haven’t his address and I can’t leave the ward now, but you could easily get it then.”

“Thank you.” He rang off.

When he got back the ward seemed just the same, as if it had been fixed in an enchanted sleep through disastrous decades. Mechanically, Laurie undressed again, went into the sluice-room, and with a couple of other walking patients carried out his usual morning job, giving enamel bowls of water to such bed patients as could wash themselves.

The giving out of the patients’ mail was one of the Sister’s sacred cows. A royal prerogative, it gave way to every more urgent duty but was never delegated. Laurie could remember the letters coming around as late as eleven-thirty. He felt too sick to eat breakfast, though after the early hospital supper he was usually ravenous.

Mervyn, well on toward convalescence, was in the mood when boys are endurable only to one another, entranced with elementary jokes and building on them vast structures of silly elaboration. Laurie lost his temper at last and shut him up. He looked hurt, but not very badly; he knew already that no one keeps a sense of humor much after sixteen.

The letters came around rather earlier than usual, at about a quarter to nine. There were two for him. One was from his mother, a picture postcard of the hotel, her window marked with a cross. The other was from Andrew.

Laurie sat with the unopened letter in his hand, trying to think of somewhere to go. The nurses would be working in the bathroom; there was only one lavatory, never free for long; in a word, there was nowhere. He hid behind yesterday’s paper, and opened the letter against the middle page. Andrew’s round, young writing stood like an inset on the day’s score-card of dead pilots and fallen planes.

Dear Laurie,

Forgive me for not writing before. You will guess why, from what Ralph will have told you, but that’s no excuse. I have begun two or three letters, but they weren’t honest enough to send. Tomorrow I am going to London to work, which I think you will see is the only logical thing; so I must write today, and I find now that I can. I want you to know …

“Odell! Do put that paper down, we want to tidy the bed.”

“Sorry.”

“Sister hates newspapers about. We’ll throw it out now if you’ve done with it.”

“No, please. Not yet.”

“Well, do have the bed tidy for Mr. Sutcliffe’s round.”

I want you to know it is true if he says that when I hit him it wasn’t even self-defense. There is a belief, which I expect he shares, that a pacifist who has behaved like this must see at once his ideas were wrong. I should have thought there could hardly be a better way of proving they were right. But if that were all I had to tell you, of course I could have written days ago.

Dave says this about temptation, that in itself it is nothing but an opportunity for choice; so it is rather defeatist to feel very guilty about it, as though one were half ready to commit the sin. If I say I have had feelings about you it would have been wrong to act on, you know enough to see what I mean. As a rule it seemed not to matter very much. Often before when I have been fond of people I have got somehow caught up in it all round; but I am such an average person, it must be quite common I thought. With you it was more, sometimes you must have noticed I was difficult; but I got over that and it came to seem more like a smile when one is happy. It is the happiness one thinks about and not the smile. Toward the end I thought you felt the same. I knew I oughtn’t to be so glad of this, since it might be my fault, yet often it seemed good, in fact the only thing. Only I found that I couldn’t see things so clearly when I was alone, and I should have taken notice of that because it is the real test of everything.

Well, about Ralph. He isn’t like I imagined, so I found it hard to picture you and him as great friends. When he told me it was much more than that, I felt—I don’t know a better way of expressing this—as if I’d had an anonymous letter. I got one once, after my Board. It is like something from another world, but it has touched you, and the touch is real. So then he said why did I pretend to be shocked when I was only jealous; and that was when I hit him.

He didn’t hit me back, he just laughed and walked off. He had a right to. I knew before he was even out of sight that there could be only one reason for what I did. What he had said about me was true. He wanted to see what I would do, I suppose, and I did what he expected. But it taught me something. The thing you want to kill is really in yourself. That is why people become cruel in war, because they are doing what I did.

I don’t know what more there is to say, except this: that since one can’t refuse to know oneself, and it must have happened eventually, I would rather it was through you than anyone else.

I shall apply to do ambulance work in the line, as soon as such a thing exists again. Meanwhile, London seems the next best. I know what you will think, that I am starting to patch up my self-respect at a rather primitive level. But I find I have to do this before going on. That is another thing about me which had to be faced sometime. I daresay my father would have understood. Anyway, you will.

You will probably be amazed and embarrassed after this when I ask you to write to me. Not to answer the kind of thing I have been telling you, no one could expect that. It is only this, because I can’t see you again and shall often be thinking about you. Will you please tell me yourself that there is nothing in what he said about you and him? Of course I know there isn’t. But somehow it has got a hold on me; I can’t get it out of my mind. It will be all right as soon as I hear from you. I can get rid of it then and keep the rest. There is much more I should like to say, but now I shall never be able to say it. You know I shall remember you all my life.

Love,

Andrew

He had written an address at the bottom, somewhere in the neighborhood of the docks.

“Spud. I say, Spud. You done with the outside bit of the paper?”

Some mechanical residue in him detached the outer sheet and handed it over.

“Coo, Spud. See about that Hurricane pilot? Spud, you know what, I saw a real ace once. Honest. He came to our school about War Savings. He was wizzo. I say, Spud—”

Confused in his own darkness, Laurie turned to the boy and said as if to a contemporary, “Don’t talk to me now.”

Mervyn looked from his face to the letter which was showing and said, quite quietly, “Okay, Spud. Sorry.” He folded the paper neatly and turned on his other side to read it.

The surgeon of the day came, did a round with his students, and left. Patients relaxed, milled their beds about for comfort, talked to each other across the ward. The stir of activity seemed to release Laurie from a paralysis of the will. He got out of bed, and once more took his clothes out of the locker.

“Going out, Spud?”

Laurie looked at the boy. His thin face was sharply intelligent; loyal and shy.

“Yes. I’ve got to, something’s happened I have to see about. I shan’t be back all day. Don’t say anything, will you, or ask them where I am?”

“Okeydoke, I won’t talk. Won’t she miss you at dinner, though?”

“I can’t help that. See you tonight.”

He was just in time to get the mid-morning express, and was at Paddington two and a half hours later. So completely had his thoughts absorbed him that he walked almost through the military police, and scarcely realized they had been there till he was in the underground. Perhaps his indifference had bluffed him through, perhaps they had other fish to fry, perhaps they saw his boot and didn’t trouble. He got out of the underground in a wide, crowded East End thoroughfare, asked the way and was told to take a tram. It put him off at the end of a long street of smoke-black villas, paired like Siamese twins. Old gray lace curtains framed lean aspidistras in Benares pots; the gardens had starved privet behind twisty cast-iron railings, or little straggly beds of London Pride edged with tile. If you touched the railings your hand came away thick with grime. It was the kind of place where there should have been children playing in the street, but they were mostly gone. The seventh pair of villas had been laid open all down the front, like a child’s dollhouse. You could see the dark squares on the wallpaper where the pictures had hung. But these were Nos. 84 and 86, and Laurie was looking for No. 50.

No. 50 had The Beeches over the door, engraved elegantly in cement which had once been painted cream. The curtains were casement cloth dyed pink, streakily, at home. There was even an aspidistra, though it looked a little seedy. The door was open. Laurie stepped into the hall. It had an embossed dado with chocolate varnish, and linoleum patterned like parquet and worn into holes, showing the boards. There was a smell of cabbage-water and carbolic soap. He listened; just out of sight, at the back of the house, someone was moving. He had just opened his mouth to call “Andrew!” when a door at the end opened and Dave came out.

“Hello, Laurie.” He sounded, as always before, unexcited, attentive, and kind; but he had dropped his voice, and Laurie knew beforehand what he was going to say. “Come in the kitchen, will you, there are people asleep upstairs.”

The kitchen was a small dingy room, warm from its black iron range and, it seemed, from the stored vitality of the families whose hub of existence it must have been. A yellow varnished paper on the walls affected wood-graining. The scrubbed table in the middle was covered with clean newspaper, there were rolls of surgical lint and gauze on it, and piles of cut and folded dressings. An iron pot of porridge was simmering on the range, and a big kettle. Dave pulled up an old bentwood chair and said, “Sit down, Laurie, I’m just going to make some tea.”

He had always been lean, but lately he had grown much thinner. There were deep furrows in his cheeks, half hidden by the edges of the grizzled beard. He had on a worn leather golf jacket and stained, shabby flannel slacks. He spooned tea from a cocoa-tin into a brown teapot, and tipped the heavy kettle to fill it.

Laurie had had no food today but a cardboardy meat pie at the station. The tea smelt good. Some dim memory stirred in his mind of sitting with the maid in his grandmother’s kitchen when he was very small; he felt a sudden nostalgia, piercing and forlorn. He said, “Is Andrew here?”

“Yes,” said Dave. “He’s asleep with the others. Last night was fairly quiet, but he was still a bit tired, and we may be busy later.” He poured out tea in thick white china cups; you could have thought Laurie had dropped in from next door. “Sugar? We’ve got plenty, Andrew and Tom don’t take it.”

“Please. I wanted to see him about something rather important. I’m sorry he’s tired, but I think he’d rather see me.”

“I’ll call him presently,” said Dave, “if you want him called.” He sugared the tea from a Woolworth glass basin. “I’ve been half expecting you, difficult as it must have been for you to get away.”

“I’m absent without leave. I’ve had a letter from Andrew. I have to see him, there’s something I want to explain.”

Dave looked at him. “You look worn out,” he said simply. He went to the deal dresser, fetched a cloth out of the drawer, spread it on Laurie’s end of the table and set a plate and knife.

“Please don’t bother,” Laurie said. “I couldn’t eat anything.”

“We’ve some beef dripping this week. I’m going to make some toast.” He got a loaf from the bin, sliced it, and speared the bread on a wire fork. “You can do this one.”

Dully, Laurie turned his chair and held the fork to the bars of the range. The glow was comforting; it sheltered his eyes which flinched from being looked at any more. Dave pulled up the other chair and sat down beside him, with his slice of bread on a bent carving fork. They both kept their eyes on the fire, and shifted the toast about, because of the bars.

“Do you ever think,” said Dave, “that retribution seems to spread itself very unevenly? It’s often seemed so to me. But I think one must take the analogy of the body. A gangrened limb is quite insensitive. Only the living tissues feel pain.”

There was a pause, during which a hot coal dropped from the bars onto the hob and bounced down into the ash-pan. Laurie said, “Andrew told you.”

“Well, I was rather unfair to him. I didn’t warn him I could fill in a certain amount between the lines. I mean, from experience.” He added, not defensively, but kindly, as though Laurie had asked for reassurance, “That was a good many years ago.”

His toast was crumbling on the fork; he speared it gingerly in a fresh place. “I’ve felt now and then—if I’m wrong, stop me before I go any further, won’t you—that you’ve had a mistaken idea about my feelings for Andrew.” When Laurie said nothing, he went on, “Not that I’ve any right to resent it. But I’ve often wished I could set your mind at rest.”

Laurie looked at his toast, and turned it over. “I didn’t think that, exactly.”

“No,” said Dave. “I know. Not exactly. I know what you thought and I don’t really blame you. Every religious body has a few. With most of them it’s woolly thinking, rather than hypocrisy. I had the wool pulled off when I was about Andrew’s age, as a matter of fact.”

He got up, fetched Laurie’s tea from the table and stood it on the steel fender in reach of his hand. Laurie said, “Thanks,” and then, with difficulty, “It might not be a bad thing now for him to know that.”

“Well, I told him. He’d have thought of it himself in a short time, of course.”

Laurie shifted the toast and said, “Yes, of course. He’d better have someone he can trust to be straight with him.”

Dave looked up. “He isn’t a fool. You know that better than anyone. He knows why he wasn’t told everything, if he wasn’t. That’s not the sort of thing he has on his mind.”

“I know. That’s why I came.”

“I thought it might be.” Dave relieved him of the toast which was beginning to smoke, nicked off a burnt corner, spread it with dripping, salted it, and put the plate on the fender. “Don’t let it get cold,” While Laurie was eating it he went back to the swabs on the table. Presently he said, “You don’t have to worry about me, whatever else you worry about. Do get that into your head, won’t you? For a lot of reasons; one of which, a minor one I like to think nowadays, is that Andrew looks just like his mother. Except in character sometimes, I never see Bertie in him at all.”

It could be perceived that his youth belonged to a decade when Bertie had sounded charming, even perhaps romantic. He pronounced it Bartie. This trifle had on Laurie the effect of a kind of emotional trigger, and for several minutes he could not speak. Dave continued to fold swabs with the reflex precision of a factory hand who has been carrying out the same process for years. He went on, “As soon as Catherine joined us, it became obvious that Bertie was perfectly normal, except in fastidiousness, so I’d done nothing but make a virtue of necessity after all. With Andrew, I don’t know. I mean, I know at the moment of course, but life’s made some rather excessive demands on him lately. He may quite well grow out of it. If so, he’ll largely have you to thank.”

Laurie said, “Not now.”

Dave put some finished swabs away in a cardboard hatbox. “You’ll know what I’m talking about now better than I do. He came here with some doubt about you which he didn’t want to discuss with me or anyone else, and I imagine you’ve come here partly to resolve it. Of course, if you can give him the answer he wants, you have every right to. Indeed, you should, in spite of the fact that it won’t make things any easier for him at first.”

Laurie was silent, looking at the fire. At last he said, “I couldn’t give him the answer he wants.”

He didn’t look up. The rhythmic sound of Dave’s hands folding the swabs—a pause for adjustment, a light smoothing pat, a moment’s pause, and then a flat heavy pat—went on almost unbroken.

Laurie said, “I thought it might make him feel a little better to know that I’m sorry, and that it happened partly because—” He felt his voice about to get out of control, and stopped quickly.

“Of course,” Dave said. His lean knotted hands, seamed with work and scrubbing, paused on a half-folded square of gauze. “This is the worst of all my failures.”

“Yours?” said Laurie. He contracted his brows vaguely.

“Once or twice I thought of talking to you. I said to myself that you might be as innocent as Andrew was, and my interference might be a disaster to both of you; I couldn’t be absolutely sure. So I saved myself a tricky job which would have involved stating my qualifications for taking it on, and I had the pleasure of being right, where Andrew was concerned. But anyone involved in the recoil was just as much my responsibility.”

Laurie’s stillness had changed and become stony. He said, “I shouldn’t waste any worry there, if I were you.”

As if he hadn’t heard, Dave went on, “I took up the work I do largely to teach myself that sort of thing. As you see, I’ve not made much headway. Love is indivisible, Bertie said to me once. He’d only been out of the army a few months, but his instincts were better.”

Laurie looked up from the empty cup into which he had been staring. “If I don’t see Andrew, would you be willing to tell him I came?”

“Yes, of course. You’ve told me what you came here to say. I’ll tell him that, and anything else you want me to.”

The knowledge that he was not going to see Andrew again suddenly came home to Laurie as real. He hadn’t believed it while he was speaking.

Dave said, “It’s not that I think it would be wicked for you to meet. But you’d both suffer more than now, and no good would come out of it.” With a chance inflection which made Laurie able to imagine him as a young man, he added, “He really is awfully tired.”

“Yes,” said Laurie dully. “He must be. We’d better not wake him.”

“When you’re on the way back it won’t seem so bad. You’ll remember it would be all over by then anyway.”

“You people are so practical,” Laurie said.

Dave got up and came to sit on the kitchen table. His personality could be felt at this distance like something tangible. “There’s no need to feel finally cut off. He’ll want to hear from you, of course. Write when you feel he’ll be needing it, not when you feel you must, and it will be all right. Or if you want to know how he is without writing, you can always write to me.”

The room was getting dark. The first twilight was coming already to the long black street, though in the open, probably, it would still seem to be afternoon. Laurie noticed for the first time, hung on pegs at the side of the dresser as herbs are hung in the country, a bunch of gas masks and a cluster of tin hats.

“May I give you my address?” he said. “If he were—ever ill, or anything. If you wouldn’t mind.”

“Certainly,” said Dave, in the matter-of-fact voice he used in the wards. “Write it on this. I’ll put it in the file, I won’t keep it on me.”

While he was doing this Laurie remembered something. He would have liked to say, “I heard about your wife and I’m very sorry.” But because of the road by which this thought had come to him, he could not bring himself to say it.

Dave said, “This isn’t the day I’d have chosen to give you this advice, Laurie. But don’t think of yourself because of all this as necessarily typed and labelled. Some men could make shift, for a time at least, with any woman out of about ninety per cent they meet. Don’t fly to extremes the moment you discover your own needs are more specialized.”

Laurie waited, ready to say it after all; but Dave didn’t go on, and Laurie realized that his impersonality was in the nature of a human flinching, and that he was willing Laurie not to speak.

“Well, I must go. There’s no sense in getting myself crimed my last week in the army, if I can help it.”

Dave gave a smile which Laurie recognized as partly one of relief. “Don’t try and slip onto the platform by the footbridge, they’ve been on to that for at least twenty-five years.” They both got up. Dave said, “You’d better go out at the back, I think.”

The scullery was tiny, there was hardly room for anything but the copper and the sink. The cement floor had been mixed with unsifted earth so that pebbles stood up in it. There were towels hanging by the sink; this must be where everyone washed.

“Thank you for everything,” Laurie said. “If you’ll tell him … you know what to say. Tell him I …” As if the sensation had come as a message, he felt something usually too familiar for consciousness, a flat heaviness in a pocket. He got out the book and turned it over in his hand, with the feeling that there was something that needed seeing to. Remembering, he tore out the flyleaf, then got out his pen and wrote Andrew’s name on the first page. “Please, will you give him this?”

Dave looked at the lettering on the spine. “You know,” he said, “even the most exalted paganism is paganism none the less.” He took the book, looking at the scored and salt-stained cover, at the blood. Something came into his face which had been there on the day when Laurie had seen him watching the battle in the air and the falling planes. “Yes,” he said. “I’ll give it him with your love.”

He opened the door. A broom which had been leaning behind it fell with a clatter. They both stood still, listening. There was a sound, muffled by the floor above, of a man yawning; then, more clearly, raised to carry through a party wall, Andrew’s voice. “Tom. What time is it?”

Laurie slipped through the door into the scrawny yard. He glanced upward, to ask Dave if the window looked that way. Dave shook his head. Upstairs a sleepy voice talking itself awake said, “Dave’s up, good, that means tea.” Andrew said, “Someone’s with him, I think.”

Laurie stood with one foot on the doorstep, perfectly still. He had heard the false casualness of a reviving hope, which dares not be open even with itself. There was a long, long moment of silence before the voices began again. Then, very softly, Laurie said, “While I’m going could you make a noise? He knows my step.”

Dave nodded and went over to the sink. In the street a lorry was approaching; that would help too. “Goodbye, Dave.”

“Goodbye,” Dave said. “God bless you.” He spoke as he might have said in the ward, “Here’s your blanket”; like a man offering in his hand something solid and real. As Laurie went, he heard him start to clatter the sink with both taps running.

It was not till Laurie had got level with the bombed houses down the street that he became aware of the sheet of paper which, because he couldn’t discard it in the house, he was still holding screwed up in his hand. He tossed it away into the road, where it landed in a little heap of rubble and broken glass. On the crumpled edge which was showing he could see “… anyon” and just below it “… dell.”

When he got out into the wide main street it seemed still quite light, but by the time he reached Paddington it was the latter end of dusk, and you could feel everywhere, in voices and footsteps and the sound of the traffic, the faint resonant overtone of a steady anticipation.