The Charioteer: A Novel

5

LAURIE WAS ANXIOUS TO get the gramophone out of the ward before it was noticed; he had not forgotten that a former patient had been accustomed to play his against the radio. Under cover of night he passed it to Andrew, who received it with joy; the c.o.s had had only one gramophone among them, and it had broken down. Laurie apologized for the records; but this proved to be quite unnecessary. A few days later the hospital rang with a new and sensational scandal: eight nurses had been found by the matron in the orderlies’ common-room, dancing with the orderlies.

The news soon got to the wards, where it divided opinion as decisively as the Dreyfus affair. The hard core of animosity centered on Neames; his cold resentment, which had seemed temperate at the outset compared with noisier indignations, had outlasted them all. Willis was surprisingly tepid. As for Reg, he was anti-matron before anything else. He spent a happy day imputing to little Derek unimaginable excesses; but these two understood each other perfectly.

It took Laurie some hours of unobtrusive intelligence work to learn that Andrew hadn’t been there. He enjoyed this relief till the evening, when they met, and it turned out that Andrew had merely left before the matron’s arrival, being due on duty.

“It’s very interesting,” he said, fixing Laurie with his candid gray eyes, “very primitive, you know. Subconsciously they feel we’re a biological loss and ought not to have women or propagate ourselves. John in the kitchen said that was sure to happen, but as a matter of principle we shouldn’t submit to it.”

Laurie needed a moment or two to recover from this. “But did you want to have any of them?”

“Oh, not literally.” Andrew looked amused. “I have hopes for John, I must admit; but it’s much too early to say anything.”

“Who did you dance with?” asked Laurie, who had just ordered himself to change the subject.

“Most of them, as far as I remember. I danced with Nurse Adrian twice.”

“Did you find plenty to talk about?”

“Yes, we talked about you.” Andrew smiled, and settled his head back on his arms. “We were in favor of you,” he added sleepily. He had only just got up.

They sat on a bank scattered with old beech-mast. Through a gap in the bronze trees, across the stream, the apples of Eden could be seen, blandly shining. It was like Limbo, Laurie remarked.

“Who is Limbo supposed to be for?” asked Andrew. “I can never remember.”

“The good pagans, to whom the faith was never revealed. Such as Plato, I suppose; Buddha, Socrates, Confucius, and so on. A sort of eternal consolation prize.”

Laurie settled his back into the slope, and lit a cigarette. The stream sounded different from this side, mixed with the dry whisper of the beeches. After a few minutes he said, “How would you feel about your mother marrying again?”

After a pause Andrew said, “I don’t know. I daresay I shouldn’t have cared for it, really. Now, of course, I feel I should be only too glad, if it meant she was alive.”

This caused the inevitable awkwardness and apologies; but a little later he made no difficulty about talking. He had been born into one of those army families where every second or third generation throws off a sport, a musician perhaps, or a brilliant agricultural crank. Andrew’s father had served with distinction through the First World War, and had gone to Germany with the Army of Occupation. Peace had not been signed and the blockade was still on: an undisciplined habit grew up among the Allied troops of giving away their rations to the match-limbed, potbellied German children. An Order of the Day had to be issued about it. In the following week Andrews father, about whom no one had noticed anything odd except a certain taciturnity, resigned from his regiment, arranged his affairs at home in a family atmosphere of shocked silence, joined the Friends’ Ambulance Service, and went back to Germany again. There, some months later, he met and married Andrew’s mother, a lifelong Quaker; they continued working together until she became pregnant. While she was in England awaiting Andrew’s birth, the unit, which was by now in Austria, went to deal with a typhus epidemic. Overworked and under par, Andrew’s father got the disease, and in a couple of days was dead.

Dave had known both his parents, Andrew said. In fact, Dave was almost his only living link with his mother. He had been in charge of the unit, and it had been to Dave that Andrew’s father, in a more or less lucid interval of fever, had dictated his will.

At this point, Laurie was shocked to find his mind centered entirely on the unfair advantage this start had given to Dave, who, Laurie thought, on the strength of all this seemed to have assumed almost proprietary airs; there must be something behind it. But Andrew had noticed his lapse of attention, and evidently feared the story was becoming a bore. He dried up, and it took a couple of minutes to get him going again.

He had been brought up as a Quaker by his mother, to whom, obviously, he had been passionately devoted. If half he said about her was true, she had been an exceptionally gifted saint. When he spoke of her Laurie saw, as he had never seen in him at other times, a strain of fanaticism. She had died very suddenly when he was twelve, leaving no relatives who could do with him. His paternal grandmother, however, had been more than willing. It had been anguish to her all this time to see their good stock running to waste. She had treated him with kindness, and in her way with tact, never slighting his mother’s memory except in the daily implications of the code she taught him. The uncle and aunt, to whom he was passed on at her death a couple of years later, were less tactful. They had tried to send him at fifteen to the family school, which prepared for the army; he had refused to go there; they had insisted; Andrew had written the headmaster a letter which had caused him to turn Andrew down as an unsuitable entrant. There had been a shattering row about it, during some stage of which Andrew had appealed to Dave whom at that time he hardly knew. Dave had turned up, only to be insulted by the uncle and shown the door; but from that time onward, Andrew had kept in touch with him.

Throughout this crisis, Andrew seemed to have behaved, according to the view one was inclined to take of it, with rocklike integrity or mulish obstinacy; in any case, with determination much beyond his years. His face became a different shape when he spoke of it; incongruously, one could now trace the soldier forebears in the set of his jaw. Laurie gathered that during the row something had been said about the mother which Andrew, if he had forgiven it, couldn’t forget; but he never told Laurie what it was.

They had sent him in the end to a moderately progressive school, where he had enjoyed the term and dreaded the holidays. Then his call-up papers had arrived, heralding an explosion fiercer than any that had gone before. He talked of this less easily and Laurie could see that he was still raw from it.

But for the war, he said, changing the subject, he would have been going up to Oxford this autumn. The college he had been entered for was just across the road from Laurie’s, and they reflected solemnly on the fact that they would have missed one another by a matter of a month or two. Quite likely, said Laurie, they would have run into each other somehow or other. Andrew smiled, and said yes, it seemed that they were meant to meet. Laurie lived on these words for the next two days.

The week after, Laurie’s own mother wrote to him, announcing her engagement to Mr. Straike. There is only one kind of shock worse than the totally unexpected: the expected for which one has refused to prepare.

He was still staring at the open letter when he heard Reg creaking and breathing near him, minding his own business with that heavy tact which invites a confidence. Suddenly Laurie craved for those kind flat feet trampling down the sharper edges of his misery. He looked up.

“Cheer up, cock,” said Reg in a leading voice. “All the same in a hundred years.”

“That’s right. Not so hot now, though.”

“How’s that, then?” Reg sat down beside him on the bed.

Laurie told him the news. He did not canvass Reg’s views on Mr. Straike. When Reg said politely “No kidding?” and then “Bit unexpected, like?” there was perfect understanding between them.

“Mind you,” said Reg, “it’s a nice position for her. Nice house and that, too, I daresay.”

Laurie thought of the red, damp Gothic pile of the vicarage, its high, heavy rooms and horrid little lancet windows. He and his mother had lived in their seventeenth-century cottage almost since he could remember. For the first time he realized that this too would have to go.

“Never told you, did I,” said Reg, “our dad nearly got caught, seven year it must be going on for now. Girl young enough to be his daughter. Never forget him bringing her home to tea. Only had to look at her. Well, I mean, you don’t know how to put it, like, to your own dad. Then my brother Len found out she was in the family way by a chap at his works. He had to tell the old man then. Proper broke him up, for a bit; and poor old Len, he didn’t like to show up at home for a couple of months; missed his birthday and all. Well, one thing, you got nothing like that to worry about with your mum. ’S all aboveboard and that.”

“Oh, yes. I think he was keen to get it fixed up before I got home.”

“Ah. On the artful side. Not after your mum’s money, you don’t reckon?”

“She hasn’t got much. It would help, I suppose.”

“Well, one way to look at it, you do know who he is. Not one of these fly-by-nights, mean to say. Mind you, Spud, it’s partly just the idea, like, and you get used to that. Still, got to face it, home’s not the same. Here, Spud. No offense and that, but this girl, now; I wouldn’t let her slip off the hook, not if I was you.”

“Girl?” said Laurie, taken off his guard.

“Come off it, now, you told me about her only the other day.”

“Oh, that. I don’t think that will ever come to much.”

“More fool you, excuse me saying so. Be better off with you than someone with two good legs what kicked her with them Saturday nights, wouldn’t she?”

“I suppose so.”

“Right, then. That’s how you want to keep looking at it.”

Laurie agreed to do so. Meanwhile, there was his mother’s letter to answer. After tearing up two versions which read too revealingly, he urged quite simply a pause for consideration. He sealed, stamped, and addressed it, with a heavy sense of its ultimate uselessness.

The only other person with whom he discussed the news was Nurse Adrian, whom he met at the village post office when he was posting the letter. On the spur of the moment he invited her to tea at one of the rickety tables in the postmistress’s garden, and told her all, or nearly all, about it. It was pleasant, he found, to see her listening, her bare brown arms with their soft down folded on the table, her brown little face, under the straight flaxen hair looped back at the side, looking honest and troubled. At the end she said, “I’ll tell you something if you like I’ve never told anyone. When Bill, he’s my brother, he’s a prisoner of war now, when Bill was engaged two years ago to Vera, who of course is now my sister-in-law, and she really is a terribly nice person, she got pneumonia. I was lying in bed one night and my thoughts were sort of running on, and suddenly I woke up and looked at them, and I realized I’d been planning for when Vera was dead just like one might for the holidays. And she’d always been perfectly nice to me, even when I was in the way. Yet I knew I’d been wishing her dead, can you believe that? So, you see, if a person who’s had such terrible thoughts can get over it, and I have got over it, you’re bound to get over it before long.”

He saw her looking at him with sudden anxiety; after this confession she was clearly prepared to see him turn from her with loathing. Without thinking much about it he leaned out and patted her folded arms.

“Get along with you,” he said. “You know perfectly well if anything had really happened you’d have jumped into the river to pull her out.” Her unguarded eyes looked at him across the crumby little table, in admiration and relief. In them he saw himself reflected, a man, protecting, lightly lifting the burden. It did not seem to him specially ironic. His loneliness had preserved in him a good deal of inadvertent innocence; there was much of life for which he had no formula; it had never even occurred to him that he involved himself in various kinds of effort which, by ruling a few lines around himself, he could have avoided.

She gazed at him with respect, and presently asked his opinion on the probable course of the war. Silly little dumbbell, he thought; but he could not analyze his affectionate amusement. The fact was that he found her a refreshing relief, and was already cutting and fitting himself a special personality to oblige her. He could be no more than three or four years her senior, but it felt like fifteen. Ever since he grew up he had been unobtrusively avoiding girls, whom secretly he imagined to be applying subtle and sophisticated tests to him, and observing the results with hidden scorn. Watching her off, he thought that she wore slacks well, as if she didn’t think about them; she had the right kind of shoes, and moved from the hips. He smiled and waved, and, as he turned away, wondered what the brother was like.

Back in the ward, with the radio blaring “Roll Out the Barrel,” the thought of his mother came back to him, burning with all its implications deeper and deeper in; whole vistas of the future, as he reviewed them, suddenly becoming consumed and blowing away. He longed for the evening which would bring the relief of telling Andrew.

“Been out?” said Reg as they waited for supper.

“Not far. It’s nice outside. Warm.”

“Sharp frost this morning. Nice now, is it?”

“Yes, nice out of the wind.”

“Here, Spud. No offense and that.”

“Uh?” Laurie went deep into his locker after a cigarette.

“Well, see, Spud, I know how it is. No one here can’t say you ever done any highbrow act. But what I mean, these lads come along, college boys like yourself, reading literary books and that. Well, stands to reason, ordinary, you have to keep a lot of your thoughts to yourself. I watched you when you didn’t know it, time and again.”

Laurie came crimson out of the locker, where he longed to remain. “Christ, Reg, the bull you talk.” They sat, not looking at each other. Laurie knew his protest had been too weak; it should have been something more like “What would I want with that bunch of sissies?” Why, he wondered, was it the people one held in the most innocent affection who so often demanded from one the most atrocious treachery?

“They interest me,” he said, doing his best. “You can’t help wondering what’s at the bottom of it, whether they just don’t like the idea of getting hurt, or what. Well, having seen a bit of them I don’t think it’s that. It may be with some of them; but not this lot.”

“Ah, go on, Spud, don’t tell me you’ve been this long working that one out. I could have told you that, first day they come here. I watched them, I never said nothing. Not even Neames don’t think they’re yellow, no matter what he gives out. It’s just the idea, like, that gets him. Same as what it does me, and that’s a fact”

“Fair enough, so it does me in a way. But as people, you know—”

“That kid that does the ward at night, the young one, properly took to you, hasn’t he?”

“Me?” said Laurie. He went back quickly into the locker again. “Can’t say I’ve noticed it specially.”

“What I’m getting at, Spud, you want to watch it. No offense.”

“Come again?” said Laurie into the locker.

“I mean the law,” said Reg with deliberation, “that’s what I mean.” He paused to push back the wet shreds into the end of his cigarette. “ ’Course, Spud, if you can talk some sense into him, good enough. But if he tries to start in on you, that’s where you want to watch it. Because that’s an offense. Seducing His Majesty’s troops from their allegiance. High treason, that is. Got to look out for yourself in this world, ’cause no one won’t do it for you.”

“That’s right,” said Laurie. He took a long steadying draw on his cigarette. “I appreciate it, Reg. Don’t worry, I guarantee that if any seducing goes on it’ll be done by me.” He held his breath. Look out you don’t cut yourself, Reg had once said.

Reg said, approvingly, “Ah. That’s more like it. That’s all a lad like that wants, someone to make a man of him.”

After a restless night, he was awake in time for the six o’clock news. It seemed to him to contain more than the usual number of euphemisms and it occurred to him that fresh ones were steadily being coined, which met with less and less resistance. One by one the short bloody words, which kept the mind’s eye alive, were vanishing: a man-killing bomb was an anti-personnel bomb now. He remarked upon this to Neames, who was standing beside him.

Neames hitched his dressing-gown, giving Laurie a hard sideways glance. The two of them were always getting involved in arguments; but, as the only men in the ward who acknowledged the rules of logic in debate, they put up with each other for the sake of conversation. “Morale’s a munition of war,” Neames said.

“Morale’s just another blanket-word. What does it mean? Courage, or bloody-mindedness, or not asking awkward questions, or does it mean whatever we’re told it means from day to day?”

Neames’s dressing-gown was a faded purple; it made his rather sallow face look yellow. He hitched the girdle again. “I’m afraid that’s too intellectual for me,” he said. “You’d better talk to your friends about it.” He turned his shoulder, and walked away.

Laurie felt a little sinking jolt. He remembered, now, seeing last night the little group gathered around Willis in a corner. Luckily, Andrew had been in the next ward, and hadn’t heard.

He was still thinking about it while he made Reg’s bed. Reg couldn’t do it for himself, and patients whose beds were made by the staff had to be waked an hour earlier. Feeling a twitch on the opposite side of the blanket, he looked up expecting to see Reg back from the bath; but is was Dave, who must have come early on duty as he often did. He made beds with mechanical efficiency, like a trained nurse. When he caught Laurie’s eye he smiled without speaking. Often as he worked he seemed occupied with his own thoughts.

“I can manage, thank you,” said Laurie politely. “I expect you’re busy.”

“Not for the moment,” said Dave. He flicked back a corner expertly, flattened it, and tucked it in.

At the end of the ward, Andrew came in pushing the breakfast trolley. He steered it carefully around the center table at the bottom of the ward. As soon as this tricky bit was done his eyes came over toward Laurie as they always did. This time he felt rather than saw it, for he did not look. He was rather slow with his side of the bed, and Dave had to wait, which he did very patiently.

As they moved up to the top end of the sheet, Laurie looked up. He said, “You’re one of the organizers, aren’t you?”

“Not exactly, but I won’t split hairs if there’s anything I can do.” Dave picked up the pillow and slapped it into shape.

“It’s nothing much really.” They shook out the top sheet. “But the other day I was talking with one of your people, getting his angle and so on. Afterwards someone said it could have landed him in trouble, treason or some nonsense. I suppose that’s just a lot of—I mean there isn’t anything in it?”

Dave mitered a corner. “I suppose,” he said easily, “that would be Andrew.”

“Yes. Yes, Andrew Raynes.”

“I doubt whether Andrew would say anything technically treasonable. He knows the rules. He didn’t urge you to desert, for instance, or refuse to obey orders?”

“Oh, God, no. He just explained things.”

“Well, knowing Andrew, I should say the position probably is that you could make trouble for him if you wanted to, but it would depend on you.”

“Seeing I started it, that’s hardly likely.”

“That’s what I thought.”

Laurie picked up the counterpane on which ugly stencilled flowers, in a hard red and prussian blue, wound around a black trellis. Studying this pattern carefully, he said, “I suppose he told you more or less what we talked about.”

“You won’t find he’s like that.” Dave moved the center fold more to the middle. “I remember his saying some time ago that he found you easy to talk to. I didn’t warn him to be careful; it didn’t strike me as being necessary.”

“Well,” said Laurie, “thanks.” There was a curious moment in which the small space around the bed contained two different kinds of silence. It was broken by the rattle of the breakfast trolley behind them. As they turned Andrew looked from one to the other, his pleasure in their amity as plain as print.

Over his bacon and tea, Laurie felt that the only comfort would be found in full-time, party-line, nondeviationist hatred. One could warm oneself with a good thick hate by shutting all the windows and doors; but he knew, unfortunately, beforehand, that the snugness would not last, and the fug would drive him out into the cold again, gasping for air.

About a week later, on the day when Reg was liberated from his airplane splint, Laurie got his surgical boot.

He was sent into the Sister’s office to try it on. There it was, with an ordinary boot for the left foot all complete; black, shiny, hitting the floor with a clump. He had not foreseen that the design of the upper would be quite so ugly, nor the sole so thick, but after all, a cripple’s boot was a cripple’s boot. Perhaps after the war …

“Comfy, son? Because now’s the time to say. You’ve got to live with it, remember.”

“Yes,” said Laurie. “I know.” He felt sure the bootmaker’s man had meant well.

Out in the corridor he clumped stiffly up and down: it felt heavy and seemed to shift the weight to a different muscle which was unused to it; but it was pleasant to walk again without a sideways lurch. It was going to be a bit tiring at first, but this was an adaptation he would have every day of a lifetime to make. In a few years it would be like spectacles to a myope, he would only notice its absence. He walked on, toward the ward, getting ready the bit of clowning which would ease him over his entrance. One might as well learn to laugh it off, because this was not transitional like the crutch or the stick. This, henceforward, was Laurie Odell.

He walked in, ostentatiously not using the stick, twirling it like a drum major.

For the day of this event he had a firm date with Reg of several weeks’ standing. He could in fact have applied for a cinema pass before, but the airplane splint had made Reg as awkward in crowds as an antlered stag, and Laurie had waited with little enough impatience; he and Andrew took it for granted now that they would meet every evening unless something prevented it.

The bus got them into town just at opening time, a party of six. Reg and Laurie stood drinks, in honor of their emancipation. Then a civilian, who was several drinks ahead, insisted on standing pints all round, and on the strength of it decided to make a speech. He had a fine carrying voice, which reached to every corner of the bar.

“What do our lads ask?” he demanded, repeating it several times, and then pausing to savor the respectful silence. “Not a medal. Lads like these two here”—he made a large expanded gesture at Laurie and Reg—“they don’t ask to go up to Bucknam Palace and shake King George by the hand. They don’t want no disabled badge to wear, they don’t need it. Anyone only got to look at these two lads, he can see for himself. And what do they ask, that’s what I ask you? What do they ask? Only a square deal, a square deal for rich and poor alike. …”

He turned to harangue the crowd on his other side. Laurie pulled at Reg’s sleeve. Reg gave a swift repining glance at the froth halfway up his mug, and nodded. They slipped out. The pale street of sky above the blacked-out shops reflected a dim glimmer on the oily wet street below.

“Got away before the collection,” Reg said.

“That’s right.”

“Funny, how some chap’ll get stinking in a pub, and if he carries on in that certain voice, no one don’t listen no more than if he was talking Dutch.”

“I suppose not.”

“Know how I look at it, Spud? Got to get used to people. Sometime we all got to. Mean to say, if it’s not one thing it’s another. Take some other chap, say. Got trouble at home, maybe. Silly muggers sticking their oar in, only making it worse. See what I mean?”

“Yes, I know, Reg.”

“Well, then. What I mean, they say put yourself in the other chap’s place. But what I reckon, it’s more of a knack, see, and not many people got it. Now you got it, Spud. You got it more than anyone I know. So stands to reason, you expect it back, that’s human nature. Well, you’re out of luck, Spud, that’s all. That’s life and you got to face it, may as well face it first as last. See what I mean?”

“Ah, cut it out, Reg, it was just for laughs. Let’s drop in somewhere and have the other half.”

“Over the road’s a nice one. Quiet.”

As they stepped onto the opposite curb, a cloud of warm scent steamed over them, mixed with the smell of cheap fur.

“Hiya, fellers.” The voice was fake Hollywood, spread thinly over urban Wessex. “Where’s the big hurry? Remember us?”

“Ah?” said Reg noncommittally. He peered into the gloom. Laurie felt a swift nudge and realized that the pause had been for appraisal rather than identification. He knew that Reg’s marriage vow was, on his side, intact; what this meant to his conscience was unknown, but Laurie had a good idea of what it meant to his self-respect, and as a talking-point. All this Reg was prepared to offer up in the cause of taking Laurie out of himself. He suspected that the sacrifice wasn’t looking to Reg absolutely intolerable. Embarrassment robbed him momentarily of all presence of mind.

“You guys still fond of dancing?” the girl said.

Reg took a step backward. “Pardon me,” he said formally. “You’re making a mistake, Miss. Me and my friend haven’t had the pleasure. Got to be going now. Good night.”

“Ooh! La-di-dah!” The second girl emerged from the shadows. She was very young, seventeen at most. “Don’t be soppy. No need to dance for a good time.” She giggled.

It wasn’t fair, Laurie thought reluctantly, to leave it all to Reg. “Sorry, girls,” he said. “We’re on our way to a date.”

At the sound of his voice the first girl diverted, suddenly, her attention from Reg to him. He was enabled to see in the gloom the pancake make-up on her bad skin, and the large generous mouth painted over the little mean one. Their eyes met. Then she swung around on her three-inch heel.

“Oh, come on, Doreen, what you waiting for? Sorry, boys, I’m sure. You’re all right, so long as you got each other.” She tittered shrilly. “Bye-bye, both. Enjoy yourselves.”

Slowly, as he steadied his mind, Laurie became aware that Reg was swearing. He was making a speech to the vanishing girls on the lines of “state the alternative preferred, with reasons for your choice.”

“Steady on, Reg,” he said. He managed to keep his voice even, but knew he could not look at Reg even in the blackout, so didn’t try.

“Lost me temper.” Reg fell into step beside him. He, too, looked ahead. “Dirty-minded little cats. Make you sick. Well, we missed a lovely evening with those little bits of sunshine. And how. Lucky you made up your mind quick, Spud. I reckon you’re a better picker than what I am.”

The film of the evening was all singing, all dancing, and in Technicolor; so Reg had taken for granted from the first that there was no other possible film to see. The rest of the hospital contingent was all there too. Laurie was glad to get inside; in the queue his leg suddenly started to ache very badly. It must be the boot, because the pain was in a different place. He supposed it would settle down in a few days. Meanwhile he tried to forget it by attending to the film. The star was young, and highly groomed to resemble in face, figure, and range of expression a pin-up in Esquire. Laurie could feel the men around him soaking her up through the pores. She was the perennial eidolon, the clean pampered harlot, the upper-class luxury article, reduced in some magic bargain-basement to a price within each man’s means. The music had occasional moments of narcotic charm; it was relaxing, when not too loud, like a warm bath with colored bath-salts. Laurie’s mind withdrew, after a time, to a middle distance behind his eyes, where he thought about Andrew. He solved no problems, nor attempted it; he made no plans. He was twenty-three: he received infinite consolation and joy merely from the contemplation of Andrew’s being.

They were about halfway back when the first of the sirens went. First came a single deep moan; then the mounting, ragged chorus of inhuman howls and wails. The bus was old and noisy, and one could not hear whether planes were about; the usual lugubrious voice announced that one was following them home. Shortly after this, when they were nearly there, a new sound began: the tinny warble of the Imminent Danger siren, which always sounded different after dark.

Laurie shoved at the bus with his will, urging it on. Every minute he waited to see fire spring up beyond the hedges: he imagined the bus arriving to find a rescue squad at work, a covered stretcher passing. “All the men okay. Only one casualty. The night orderly, Raynes. …” They reached the gates without incident, two or three minutes later.

As they walked up the covered way, shrapnel rattled like flung stones on the iron roof above them. Something emerged from the background of night noises, a kind of throbbing in the air, a sensation more than a sound at first, then the rhythmic bumbling of a bomber’s engines, getting nearer. A small isolated battery, not far off, began to cough and bark; a searchlight fumbled about among the stars, fingering patches of cloud and dropping them and fidgeting off again.

A couple of nurses whom he knew were on the bus; though he was good for little more than moral support, it seemed kind to escort them back to their hut. As he returned toward the ward he saw that two more searchlights were flicking around. The plane was buzzing now like a fly caught on a windowpane; the guns kept swatting at it. A big lump of shrapnel came rattling and scraping down a nearby roof, and fell just beyond him; he stepped back under cover again. Suddenly a tiny silver cross glittered in one of the beams overhead. At once all the others swooped over and closed in. The pursued mote made for another bit of cloud, like a bird for a bush; they lost it again, but the guns banged more eagerly. It was then, as he looked down for a moment to rest the back of his neck, that he saw Andrew standing out in the grass, unsheltered, looking up.

“Hello, there,” Laurie said. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Hello,” said Andrew. He walked toward Laurie, but didn’t come under the roof. Laurie limped angrily over the rough grass toward him.

“For the Lord’s sake, come in out of there.”

“I will in a minute. I couldn’t see properly.” Laurie could see his face now. He was smiling. His fair hair, in the glimmer of moonlight, had a faint pale shine. He glowed dimly like a memory or a ghost.

Of all that Laurie felt there was nothing he could release but anger. He gripped the handle of his stick and pushed it viciously into the earth. “You bloody fool. Do you want a chunk of shrapnel in your brain? If you have one? Christ, are you deaf, you can hear it now.”

Andrew said, good-humoredly, “You go on to bed, or Nurse Sims’ll be after you. I’ll come in a minute and tuck you up.” There was something different about him, elated and defiant, like a schoolboy breaking bounds.

In a controlled voice Laurie said, “Don’t they issue you with tin hats?”

“There’s a couple hanging up somewhere. Don’t they you?”

“Why should they? We’ve got sense enough to take cover.”

“What are you doing messing about here, then?” said Andrew gaily.

The guns bickered again, but the shrapnel went somewhere else. Then they heard the bomber coming back. It sounded lower, and one of the engines was cutting, Laurie thought.

“That plane’s been hit,” he said. “Listen to it. It’s just about due to unload everything it’s got left. Are you half-witted or what?”

“I don’t suppose that roof would keep out much of a bomb, do you?”

The faint light from the sky caught the outlines of his face, his loose, thin boyish shoulders. He looked intolerably vulnerable and unsecured. Laurie’s tension suddenly snapped. “Oh, don’t be so bloody pleased with yourself. If you’d ever been under fire you wouldn’t think it so funny.”

There was a moment’s silence.

“I’m sorry,” Andrew said. He walked past Laurie onto the covered way. Laurie swung around on his stick and limped after him. “Good night,” said Andrew. He began to walk off.

“Come back,” said Laurie breathlessly. He reached out, almost losing his balance, and gripped Andrew’s shoulder. They faced each other in the almost black shadow beside the deserted office hut.

“For God’s sake, Andrew. What do you take me for? You know damn well I didn’t mean it like that.”

“The more fool you,” said Andrew in a flat strained voice. “You ought to have.”

“I was in a hurry to get in, that’s all. We’re a bit of a jittery lot, you know.”

Andrew looked around at him. “You can afford that. I shouldn’t bother.”

“Oh, hell. Look here—”

A bright moving illumination had fallen on the huts, around each tuft of grass wheeled a black swinging shadow. Andrew ran out, and paused; Laurie checked a stumble with a hand on his shoulder. They looked up. A streaming torch was crossing the sky above them, in a steep path like a comet’s. It passed out of sight beyond the roofs. There was an instant when the light went out in perfect stillness; the ground under their feet shook with a heavy jar; last came the detonation. The plane must have had most of its bomb-load still on board.

Laurie let go of Andrew and said, “Well, that’s that.” Doors began to open in the wards; nurses and patients peered out. Now, finding nothing (the guns had stopped, the searchlights dispersed), they all went in again. “Not bad,” said Laurie, “for a little popgun like that.”

Andrew didn’t reply for a moment or two. Then he said, “How many men do those bombers carry?”

“I don’t know. I suppose six or eight.” There was silence again. This division was a reminder to him of all separation. Blindly he resisted it. “Hell, that was self-defense if anything could be. If they hadn’t been stopped, they might have wiped out a block of working-men’s flats by now, or the children’s ward at the City Hospital. Wouldn’t you have been sorrier about that?”

Andrew turned around and looked at him, mutely and painfully, searching for words. At last he said, “They were dying up there. If they had innocent blood on their hands it was worse for them to die. I ought to have—I was just thinking about myself.”

“It’s a filthy business,” said Laurie awkwardly. “I don’t say it isn’t.”

“You showed me up to myself,” said Andrew slowly. “You’ve got the decency of your own convictions. And you’ve the courage of your convictions, too.”

“Oh, come off it, relax. So’ve you, we all know that.”

“No,” said Andrew looking away. “I haven’t the courage of mine, not always. I thought so. But I didn’t know then what it meant.”

“Andrew. Andrew, look here. If you only knew what I really—”

There was the sound of a door opening. “Odell! Are you out there? Odell!”

“Coming, Nurse. Shan’t be a minute. If there’s anyone who ought to be—”

“Do come along at once, Odell, please. I’m trying to get the ward settled.”

“Sorry, Nurse, I’m on my way. Look, Andrew my dear—”

“I must go in too. I shouldn’t be here. I’ll walk with you.”

“She’s only fussing; no one’ll settle till the All Clear. Silly bitch. All this is my fault, you’d have been all right on your own.”

“That doesn’t arise.”

“I don’t—”

“Well—I was waiting for you. I saw you taking the nurses back. I—”

“Odell! If you don’t come straight in I’m going to report you.”

“Yes, Nurse, coming. Andrew, we must—”

“You must go, she meant that.”

“But—”

“Please. I’ll be seeing you in the ward.”

As he went in he heard the thin, steady shrilling of the All Clear.

Laurie looked up from his home letter to say, “Don’t you wish your name was Gareth, Reg?”

“Eh? Wish it was how much?”

“Gareth. That’s what my stepfather-elect’s called. I suppose he was conceived with Tennyson in limp suede sitting on the po-cup-board.”

Reg coughed repressively. Habit had made of the standard nouns and adjectives in his own vocabulary something merely conventional, like italics or points of exclamation. He sometimes found Laurie’s conversation highly obscene, and would have voiced his disapproval to anyone he had liked less. “Comes from Wales, I reckon. I had a girl called Gwynneth once. Have a Gold Flake. Ah, come on, got the best part of a packet left. Chap in our unit was called Jutland Jellicoe Clark. Course, being called Clark, that was a help to him. Always got called Nobby, barring when anyone wanted to nark him.”

“I might try Uncle Nobby. I’ve got to call him something.”

“You want to go careful at first with a parson. Nice day, today. Lovely the trees look, now they’ve turned. We always took our holiday August, to get the social life. Never knew it got so pretty. Evenings it gives you the pip, though. Makes you miss home, and that.”

“Yes,” said Laurie. He remembered how, in other autumns, he and his mother had roasted chestnuts, sitting on a sheepskin rug before the fire.

“Afternoons is the time, though. Lovely it is then.”

“How’s Madge keeping?” asked Laurie quickly. He was afraid Reg was about to suggest a walk, and today he felt that at any cost he must get away alone.

The declining sun was ripe and warm. Hips and haws shone like polished beads in the hedgerows; the damp mats of fallen leaves had a smoky, rusty smell. There was a bridle-path running between brambles, and a stile he had taught himself to manage. It was all right when no one was about.

The blackberries tasted of frost and faint sun and smoke and purple leaves: sweet, childish, and sad. Soon came the wood, with light edges of coppice, full of birds, and birches beyond; the golden leaves shook like sequins against the sky. Presently the path opened into a field of stooked barley. Along its border he found his old place, a smooth bank running up to a big elm. He lowered himself down, carefully. It had been a long pull up and the knee had hurt him, but it was worth it.

He hadn’t been here since two operations back, before he had met Andrew. The barley had been standing in the ear then, dipping and shivering silkily under the running breeze. It was caught now, its fancies were ended. He had brought, he remembered, Herrick to read.

The sun slanted deep into the wood, making hidden birds sing softly. The touch of autumn struck from his youth that cosmic sadness, which time will tame like the bite of spring. Under the pale sun, beauty and fate and love and death ached through him. After a while he sighed, and took out his book.

He found that the sea water hadn’t soaked in beyond the notes at the back. The front cover unfortunately recalled the butcher’s order book which his mother used to keep, fastidiously, apart from the others; but though the tops of the pages were stained, they parted easily, and inside they were clean. He turned them to and fro, remembering other places where he had read them: in a punt moored to a willow by Magdalen Bridge, on a packing-case behind a Nissen hut; and the first time of all, in a sunny clearing with a stream running through it, a short way from his home. It had struck him with religious awe to find Phaedrus leading Socrates almost, it might have been, to the very spot. The spreading tree, the green bank to lean on, the water cold to the foot: nothing had been wanting, except the votive offerings and the shrine. “Give me to be beautiful within,” Socrates had prayed, “and for me let outward and inward things be reconciled together.”

Laurie turned the pages gently; they separated at the top with a crisp little sound. He found the part he was looking for and smoothed it open.

… and so it is with the followers of the other gods. Each man in his life honors, and imitates as well as he can, that god to whose choir he belonged, while he is uncorrupted in his first incarnation here; and in the fashion he has thus learned, he bears himself to his beloved as well as to the rest. So, then, each chooses from among the beautiful a love conforming to his kind; and then, as if his chosen were his god, he sets him up and robes him for worship. …

Laurie looked up at the barley; if any of the beautiful and ruthless Olympians had owned him they had lost him, he thought.

… and this striving to discover the essence of their proper god, by tracing him in themselves, is rewarded; for they are forced to look on the god without flinching, and when their memory holds him, his breath inspires them, and they share his attributes and his life, as far as man can enter godhead. And for these blessings they thank the loved one, loving him even more dearly. …

Laurie put down the book and folded his arms behind his head. He was not analytical enough yet to have discovered that there are certain loves, and certain phases of love, which bring perfect happiness only in their pauses and intervals, as water grows clear when one’s progress has ceased to stir it.

… and it fills the soul of the beloved also …

As he read on, a cock pheasant made easy by his stillness came picking within a few yards of his feet.

He is in love, therefore, but with whom he cannot say; he does not know what has become of him, he cannot tell. He sees himself in …

The pheasant, startled, burst up almost into Laurie’s face and whirred away; but he scarcely noticed it.

… he sees himself in his lover as if in a mirror, not knowing whom he sees. And when they are together, he too is released from pain, and when apart, he longs as he himself is longed for; for reflected in his heart is love’s image, which is love’s answer. But he calls it, and believes it, not love but friendship; though he too—

That book must be good,” said Andrew. “What is it?”

Laurie felt his heart jerk like a shot deer. An uncontrollable reflex, as he sat up, made him slap the book shut and lean his hand on it.

“Good Lord, Andrew,” he said breathlessly, “you made me jump half out of my skin.”

Andrew came out of the wood behind him, from the footpath he had forgotten.

“Well, I needed that to make me believe you weren’t cutting me on purpose. You looked too absorbed to be true.”

Something in his voice made Laurie look up at him. His air of ease had not come easily; he was acting; it surprised Laurie to see that he could do it so well. More, he looked tired; for the first time since he had gone on night duty there were dark smears under his eyes.

“Sit down, you’re giving me a crick in the neck.” Straining not to betray himself or to sound unwelcoming, Laurie could feel himself striking a note of appalling heartiness, like a housemaster on sports day. “What a desperate character you are, turning day into night like this. It’s only ten to three. What happened?”

“Nothing.” Andrew sat down on the grass beside him. “I felt like a walk.”

“If I’d known I’d have waited for you. How did you know where to look?”

“I asked Reg Barker, of course. I always do.”

“Do you?” He did not add that Reg had never mentioned it. “Have some blackberries.” He had picked a leafful on the way.

Andrew ate one and, turning the next one over, said, “I thought you might—I mean, if you’d rather be on your own do tell me. Honestly, I shall quite—”

The lovers of the innocent must protect them above all from the knowledge of their own cruelty. “You know I never want you to go.”

“Well, you did say that as if you meant it.”

“Thanks for the few flowers,” said Laurie, unable to prevent himself.

“You never do take me seriously, do you?”

Laurie never, perhaps, came nearer to a disastrous self-betrayal than in that moment of almost pure exasperation. It passed, and he perceived that Andrew was almost rigid with embarrassment, as people are who realize that they have let something slip out. “That was only a joke,” he added, with the fatal error of timing that destroys all credibility.

“Try sending it to the New Yorker. It’s too sophisticated for Punch.” There was a pause.

“Sorry. You were better off with a good book.”

“Andrew.” There was silence. “Look—what is the matter?”

“Nothing.” He had been staring before him, his arms around his knees; suddenly he scrambled to his feet. “I think I’ll go back to bed. I don’t seem fit to be with anyone. Thanks for putting up with me, but I don’t see why you should have to. I don’t know what’s come over me, to make me behave like this.”

“Sit down,” said Laurie. He had suppressed just in time the hopeless attempt to jump up too. Andrew sat down again: he picked a long, tough stem of grass and pulled it apart. Laurie said, “You want some sleep, that’s all.” He looked down unseeingly at the book he was still holding. “You’re not in half as filthy a mood as I always am if I miss a night.”

“Do you often?”

“Not me, I always shout for dope.”

Andrew made an irresolute movement, as if to go after all. Perhaps it’s better, Laurie thought.

“What were you reading before I interrupted you? Can I see?”

Laurie kept his hand on the book covering the title. In his imagination the pages were printed not with their own paragraphs only, but with all that he himself had brought to them: it seemed as though he must be identified and revealed in them, beyond all pretense of detachment, as if they were a diary to which he had committed every secret of his heart.

Andrew moved back looking awkward and constrained, and Laurie suddenly wondered whether he supposed it was something pornographic; after all in a free country there are very few reasons for hiding books. He tossed it over.

Andrew picked it up and said, “I haven’t read this one. I thought it was the Phaedo for a minute, we did that at school. What’s it about?”

Laurie remembered in the nick of time to say, “Well, primarily, it’s about the laws of rhetoric.”

“Are you interested in rhetoric? If I were asked to choose the least likely person I could think of, it would be you.”

“Actually I suppose people read it most for the sample speeches.” Andrew waited expectantly. Laurie felt the held-in feeling in his chest easing off. “There are three, but the first is rather a dull one, just put up to be knocked down. Socrates recomposes it as he thinks it ought to be done. Then he decides it ought not to be done at all because it isn’t true. So he does another of his own on the same subject.”

“What subject?”

“Love.” Laurie skimmed as lightly as he could over the most treacherous word in the language. “The first speech sets out to prove that a lover who isn’t in love is preferable to one who is. Being less jealous, easier to live with, and generally more civilized.”

“It sounds,” said Andrew with the maddening intolerance of youth, “hardly worth stating the first time, let alone redoing it.”

“Well, maybe, but Socrates’ version is quite amusing. And, as a matter of fact, perfectly true. Only as the whole thing hangs on the definition of love, he’s able to turn it inside out in the refutation, which is the highlight of the piece. It—”

“Read it to me.”

“What? Oh, no. No, I—” It was a moment before he recovered the presence of mind to add, “It’s far too long.”

“Read as much as you can, then.” Andrew lay down on the grass. It could be seen that he was very tired. His voice had the edgy insistence one hears in a child’s who has sat up too long.

“No, I should spoil it.” It and much more, he thought. To keep Andrew quiet he went on, “It’s got the famous myth of the charioteer.”

“I don’t know it. Go on.”

“Well …” He paused. It had been part of his mind’s furniture for years, but he had never spoken of it to anyone before. “He likens the soul to a charioteer, driving two winged horses harnessed abreast.”

“Yes, don’t stop.”

“Each of the gods has a pair of divine white horses, but the soul only has one. The other” (he smiled to himself; he always remembered this part best) “is black and scruffy, with a thick neck, a flat face, hairy fetlocks, gray bloodshot eyes, and shaggy ears. He’s hard of hearing, thick-skinned, and given to bolting whenever he sees something he wants. So the two beasts rarely see eye to eye, but the charioteer has to keep them on the road together. The god driving his well-matched grays is ahead setting the pace; he drives up to a track which encircles the heavens, and is carried around with eternity as it spins, like—”

Andrew, interrupting, said, “ ‘Like a great ring of pure and endless light.’ ”

“Yes. Yes, that will be where Vaughan got it, I suppose.” Both found themselves with nothing to say. And now, thought Laurie, he will ask at any moment, “But what has all this to do with love?”

In fact, however, he said nothing, but picked up the book itself from the grass, where Laurie had forgotten it. Presently he said without turning around, “You’ve had this for quite a time, haven’t you?”

“Yes, I had it at school.”

“And you took it to France with you.”

“All too obviously, I’m afraid. I must get it rebound.”

“I should like to read it. Will you lend it me?”

“Yes. Of course. I’ll let you have it sometime. I’ll try and clean it first, or put on a paper cover or something. It’s really in too filthy a condition to pass around.”

Andrew said, his usually clear voice muffled by the position he was lying in, “You needn’t for me.”

Laurie knew that at this point he should not have allowed another silence to begin. The rustle of a rabbit in the wood echoed like the tread of cattle; the faint sound of a page turning seemed to go through his skin like a cutting edge.

After all it was Andrew who was the first to speak.

“Ralph Ross Lanyon.”

“What?” said Laurie stupidly.

“It’s the name that’s written in the book, before yours.”

“Yes, I know, what about it?”

“Nothing. I only thought, perhaps, it was a present from someone.”

Laurie reached for a cigarette. “What a romantic mind you have,” he said from behind his hands. “It came down to me from a chap who was leaving, that’s all.”

“I only meant,” said Andrew stiffly, “that if it’s a book you’d rather not lend, or anything, it doesn’t matter. I should quite understand.”

He coaxed the cigarette alight, carefully. “Just for the record, I’ve neither seen nor heard anything of Lanyon since the day he left; if I saw him again I probably wouldn’t know him, and it’s even less likely that he’d know me.” He broke off with a vague feeling that he had said more than enough. “Does that cover everything?”

“It should, shouldn’t it? A lot of people would just have told me to mind my own business. Don’t take any more notice of me.” He put the book down, and burrowed his head into his arm as if to sleep. Laurie sat waiting: longing wearily, yet dreading, to be released into loneliness by the coming of this little death. But Andrew’s breathing was quick and silent. He turned and looked up. “I wonder—are you very short of cigarettes, could you spare me one?”

“Sorry, I thought you didn’t smoke.”

“I don’t really. I just felt like it. If you’re sure you’ve enough.” He didn’t move back when he had taken it. “I haven’t a match; give me a light from yours.” He leaned up on his elbow; his tilted head caught a splinter of light from between the branches. One of the gold birch leaves had fallen in his hair.

Laurie drew on the cigarette; a bright ring ran swiftly up the paper. He watched it burn for a moment; turned and began to lean down; then took the cigarette quickly and handed it at arms’ length across. “Thanks,” said Andrew. He got his cigarette lighted, gave Laurie’s back to him, and turned away. Neither spoke; the faint curls of smoke looked blue against the shadows of the wood behind them.

After a few minutes Andrew stubbed out his cigarette and said, “I think I shall sleep here. It’s quieter than the hut. Do you mind?”

“No,” said Laurie. “I can’t think of any objection.”

“I shan’t oversleep, so don’t bother about me. Just go when you have to go. You won’t need to go yet, will you?”

“No. I shan’t be going yet.”

“Just forget about me. You looked so peaceful before I came disturbing you. Now you can get on with your book as if I weren’t here.”

In the lane just outside the hospital gate, Laurie came to a standstill. He had thought that a rest would set the knee right, but on the way back it had started at once, and now he had to admit it was worse than it had ever been; it felt as if it had been transfixed with a hot screw. He stood, a little breathless, making up his mind to go on.

“Evening, Odell.” It was Major Ferguson, whose approach he hadn’t heard. He pulled himself together and saluted. “Good evening, sir.”

“What was the trouble just now, Odell? Not still getting pain with that knee, are you?”

“A bit, sir. Only when I walk on it.”

“Well, that’s what it’s for, after all, isn’t it? Eh?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What treatment are we giving you?”

“I usually have A.P.C. if it gets bad, sir.”

“I said treatment, not palliatives. God knows why these things don’t get reported to me. Well, we’d better fix you up with some physiotherapy, I think. I’ll see about it.”

“Thank you, sir.”

He had the dimmest idea of what physiotherapy was, feeling sure only that it would take place when he could have been seeing Andrew. But when he met Nurse Adrian in the covered way she said, “I was hoping they’d do something like that. You’ll find it’s well worth it, even if it does hold up your discharge a little.” Then he realized his luck for the first time, and couldn’t remember any more of the interview, except for a vague feeling that his happiness had seemed to communicate itself to her. He wondered sometimes why he didn’t overhear the other men saying how pretty she was. She was a little coltish, perhaps, and certainly nothing like the star of the Technicolor musical; and he supposed he wasn’t much of a judge.

It was just after this that he and Andrew began to fall into the way of meeting in the ward kitchen at night. It began as an accident, and then there seemed no reason why it shouldn’t happen again. After Andrew had done a round of the ward and scrubbed the bedpans, he always went outside to clean the kitchen up. Laurie would lie awake watching quietly till the right moment, then slip out of bed, reach in a matter-of-fact way for his dressing-gown, slippers, and stick, and make his legitimate way to the lavatory. When he got back to the corridor Andrew would be visible near the kitchen door. They were still at the stage of saying, “Oh, hello,” in mild surprise, as a tribute to this coincidence.

The Sister used to make herself a pot of tea before she went off duty, and to the stewed remains of this Andrew would add some hot water. Laurie, arriving at first as if he couldn’t stay more than a minute, would prop himself against the wooden slab where the chromium water-heater stood, watching Andrew scrub the sink and the draining-boards. They drank the weak, hot, bitter-sweet tea out of thick china mugs, and talked softly. Nurse Sims soon got to know what was happening, but winked at it provided they didn’t raise their voices or go on too long. Andrew would spin out the work a little; Laurie could always remember him, afterwards, bending over the slab with an almost stationary dishcloth in his hand. Sometimes he would express himself with it, moving it slowly and absently when he was shy or uncertain, scrubbing it along briskly to mark a point. A lock of hair, steamed limp over the sink, would come down over one eye, and he would push it back with a wet hand, making it limper.

A cockroach scuttled into a crack behind the draining-board; he watched Andrew reach for a tin of Keatings and sprinkle the crack with it. “Does life stop being sacred,” he asked, “when it gets down to cockroaches?”

“Well, the Jains don’t think so,” said Andrew seriously. “But I never know how they meet the fact that our own bodies destroy millions of microorganisms every day, without giving us any alternative to it except suicide. One has to draw the line where one sees it oneself.”

“Is that what you call the inner light?”

“If you like, yes.”

Faint noises of contracting metal came from the water-heater, behind which in genial warmth and darkness the cockroaches lived. The dressing trolley rattled faintly in the ward. A cricket was chirring somewhere.

“I was trying to remember how old you are,” Andrew said. “But I’ve never asked you.”

“Twenty-three last June.”

Andrew looked at him and said, in the voice of someone paying a deserved tribute, “I always thought you were older than that.”

Laurie didn’t think much about it at the time. Afterwards, when he knew more, this was a thing he always remembered about Andrew, that he took for granted one would regard maturity as a thing to be desired.

It was visiting day. Just after lunch the sky clouded over, a cold, bitter wind got up, and within fifteen minutes it had begun to rain. He had lost his greatcoat in the retreat, and had never had another. Chilled and damp in body and mind, he waited outside the gate, half sheltered by a tree which soon began to drip down his neck. With a muddy splashing the bus arrived; dimly he was aware of a dowdy little woman with an umbrella getting off it, along with several others. Then he saw that it was his mother. His bones, rather than his mind, remembered the pretty clothes she had worn last time, the new hat, when the sun had been shining, and Mr. Straike had been there.

“My dear!” he said. “Whyever, on a day like this?”

“I thought I wouldn’t bother with a car.” He recognized, sinking, her defensive voice. “It was rather extravagant, you know, with the buses running so conveniently.”

“But we can’t just sit in the ward,” he said, “and there’s nowhere else here to go.” The tree, full of rain now, was leaking everywhere with dull heavy drops. Hadn’t she cared enough to foresee all this? “Look, I’ll just go in and ring for a car now. It’s on me; it won’t be much, just the one way.”

It was in the car that he had meant to talk to his mother; he had lain awake at night thinking up easy, natural openings. She said, “It is a shame about the rain, you said in your letter how lovely everything was looking,” and he said, “Yes, it will strip a lot of the trees, I expect.” And suddenly he knew that this was not, as he had been saying to himself, simply an unlucky day. It was a day dedicated beforehand to a lost cause. Before she had abandoned him, he had begun already to abandon her. He was marked for life, as a growing tree is marked, by the chain that had bound him to her; but the chain was rusting away, leaving only the scar. It was an irony mathematical in its neatness, that in the moment when the pattern of her possession was complete, the gulf of incommunicable things opened between them. Already it was unbridgeable. She would never now, as once he had dreamed, say to him in the silent language of day-to-day, “Tell me nothing; it is enough that no other woman will ever take you from me.”

For the first time when they got out of the car she noticed his boot. She was as pleased as if, he thought, it were a supplementary part of himself which, like a lizard, he had cleverly grown.

Sitting in the dowdy, clean mahogany tea-shop, he said, “Mother, you’re sure you’re going to be happy? Is he”—he looked down at the cloth, he hadn’t anticipated this throttling inhibition, this almost physical shame—“is he kind to you, does he look after you properly and all that?”

“Oh, yes, dear, indeed he does. He would never of course dream of saying so, but I feel, one can’t help guessing, that in his first marriage he didn’t quite get the—well, quite the affection that a man of his kind needs. That, you know, is just between you and me.”

“Yes,” said Laurie, “of course.” There was a thick slab of sawdust-like cake on his plate, yellow, with dates in it. He could not imagine how it had got there.

“Laurie, dear, I do hope you’ve not caught a chill. Is it this damp weather making your knee ache?”

“No, it’s just a bit stiff. I was thinking they’ll be wanting the table. Shall we go to the cinema?”

The rain had stopped, but the clouds held the heavy damp over everything; above the still-wet pavements the long slow twilight hung like the moist air, unmoving. Limp dead leaves were pasted to the gutters. They sat in the fireless blacked-out station waiting room which smelt of smoke, dust, old varnish, coal, and feet. A heavy red-faced woman with a heavy red-faced little girl sat opposite staring at them with black button eyes, drinking in every word. The train came in; they had just lit the dim blue bulbs which would give light enough to prevent the commission of crimes. “Well, dear—”

“Get well quickly, darling. Look after yourself. Don’t go back and sit in damp things, will you. Dear, you must never think that things will be any different. You know. It would upset me terribly, it would spoil everything, if I thought you felt that.”

“No, dear, of course. It’s just that—if anything goes wrong, if you start to have any doubts about it, send me a wire, or ring. I’ll get a pass somehow and come straight over. Promise me.”

“But of course there’s no … Oh, dear, they’re shutting the doors now. Goodbye, dear, take care not to catch cold, goodbye.”

Reg was on the bus that took him back to the hospital. It had been one of Madge’s days. Kindly they inquired after one another’s outing and replied that their own had been fine, thanks. Each sensed in the other a certain reservation; each was grateful not to be questioned too nearly. They sat side by side, nursing their so different griefs which were yet the same grief to the inmost heart, unaware of the instinctive comfort they got from their sense of solidarity.

That night in the kitchen Andrew, opening the subject rather shyly since Laurie had not seen fit to do so, said, “I hope it was all right today, when your mother came.”

“Yes, thanks,” said Laurie. “Yes, it was quite all right.” But lest Andrew should feel snubbed or hurt he produced a few limp platitudes, which Andrew went through the form of accepting as real. It was a sad little session; but he could feel Andrew thinking as he thought, that tomorrow it would be all right.

But next morning the Sister said, “Odell, look after this carefully, won’t you, and give it to the Sister of the department as soon as you arrive.”

“Where?” asked Laurie. The pain was as sharp and sudden as a bullet, but there wasn’t any comeback. A war was on, he had been transferred somewhere else, so what? The war giveth and the war taketh away. Andrew would be in bed by now, sleeping; who would take him a message? Derek, of course. “When am I leaving, Sister, today?”

“Now you know quite—surely I told you about all this yesterday?”

“No, Sister. I went out.”

“Oh. Oh, yes, so you did. Well, you’re to go into Bridstow twice a week for electrical treatment at the City Hospital. Tuesdays, that’s this afternoon, and Fridays. Now don’t lose this card, whatever you do.”

The relief was almost too much: he wanted to laugh stupidly aloud. When he remembered that for the second evening running he couldn’t meet Andrew in Limbo, it seemed by contrast a trifle.

Bridstow had had some more raids since his last call there. The burgher solidity of the city was interrupted by large irrelevant open spaces, in some of which bulldozers were flattening the rubble out. At the City Hospital he had only to wait an hour, which was better than his expectations. Upstairs a brisk gentlewoman took him in hand as bracingly as if he had been a Girl Guide, and applied damp compresses, with electric wires involved in them, to his leg. Rhythmic waves of pins-and-needles followed, which, to his surprise, were pleasant and soothing after a time. At intervals Miss Haliburton returned to the couch where he lay, kneaded his muscles comfortingly, and talked dogs. She bred several varieties, and before long Laurie felt as unself-conscious under her ministrations as if he had been one of them. He left the hospital with an hour in hand before his bus went.

It wasn’t worth going to a cinema, and he didn’t feel like drinking alone; he thought he would walk a little to see the sights, while the knee felt so good. But he had only got as far as the cathedral green when the air raid sirens went.

It was broad daylight; on current form, it should be no more than a reconnaissance raid, delayed probably by cloud earlier in the day. He walked on among the pathetic little Home Guard trenches on the green. It was a beautiful afternoon.

“Everyone in the shelter. Come along, ladies, bring your knitting, nice and cozy inside. This way, sonny, mind how you go on the steps.”

Laurie became aware of a sandbagged cave and a fatherly person in a white tin hat. At that time they were still rounding up people in the streets and shepherding them into the shelters willy-nilly; but, living in the country, Laurie had forgotten. He said, “It’s all right, thanks, I’ll see how it goes.”

“Sorry, son, everyone in the shelter, that’s the drill. Come along, now, you’ve had enough to be going on with, won’t hurt you to take it easy.”

Laurie observed that the warden was over sixty; he had the ribbons of the Military Medal and the Mons Star. “Have a heart, Sergeant, I’ve only got a short pass.”

A thin sputter of gunfire sounded from somewhere near the river. “She’ll wait for you,” the warden said. “Don’t waste time, lad, I’ve got a job to do.”

A voice behind Laurie said, “You can’t have this one, warden. He’s a patient of mine, due for treatment. I’ll be responsible for him.”

The warden said, as one who washes his hands of a nuisance, “Okay, you’re the doctor,” and walked away. Laurie remained, confronted by the young man with the white eyelashes, who had been the target for his rather erratic humor some weeks ago during Major Ferguson’s round. He had told himself, at the time, that someday one of these little jokes of his would come home to roost.

“Well,” he said, “thanks very much.”

“Happy to oblige. I gathered you didn’t want to waste half an hour down there.” His tone was quite conventional. Hanging unspoken between them, and clearly understood, were the words, “Your move.”

A false but powerful sense of destiny attends those decisions which seem to be demanded of us without warning, but which we have in reality been maturing within ourselves. Laurie answered not from the loneliness of his emotions, but from the long solitude of his thoughts. Some instinct of his recognized, in this cautious and discreet person, one who had escaped from solitude, whose private shifts had given place to a traditional defense-system. Somewhere behind him was the comforting solidarity of a group.

Laurie said, lightly, “Well, I suppose if I look about this city I might find something a bit more entertaining than a hole in the ground.”

“Why not?” said the young man. “We’ll all get there in due course without all these rehearsals. It won’t be anything.”

“There it goes.” It was a single plane, flying very high. “What a flap about nothing.”

The young man said, “You’re a patient of Ferguson’s, aren’t you, at the E.M.S. hospital?”

“Yes. I think I’ve seen you there, haven’t I?”

“I thought I remembered you from somewhere. You won’t know my name: Sandy Reid. I’m not a doctor yet, by the way.” In the midst of an almost timid friendliness, there was something hard and wary about the way he said this. Laurie noticed it with slight distaste, but didn’t pause to consider it. He introduced himself. The young man said in a semifacetious American voice, “Glad to know you, Laurie,” and then, after a tiny pause, “How about a drink?”

The All Clear went just as they reached the pub. It was a large one, nastily modernized at vast expense. The chromium stools, the plastic leather, the sham parquet floor, and the fluorescent lighting which made everyone look jaundiced, caused him to expect that the beer too would turn out to be a chemical synthetic. A radio, slightly off the beam, was running like a leaky tap. He overbore Sandy’s protests and bought the drinks, intending to leave before another round.

This was not the first time he had touched the fringe he was touching now. He knew the techniques of mild evasion and casual escape. Though the Charles episode had been disillusioning, he hadn’t given up hope of finding himself clubbable after all. This time, he had briefly thought the right moment had come. But, after all, no: and after all, it was no one’s business but his own.

“It’s a bit tatty,” said Sandy Reid, as the drinks came over the ebonoid bar, “but one runs into people here.”

“Oh, yes?” said Laurie politely. “I suppose you can never get far from the hospital, in any case.”

“Actually I’ve got some quite civilized digs just up the hill, with a friend of mine.” He added, with a circumspect kind of pride, “We’ve been together more than a year now.”

“Oh? Good.” He saw Sandy eying him, anxiously expectant, under his eyelids; they were rather pink, reminding Laurie of white mice. Having been unhappy most of the day, he now found an unkind pleasure in being equivocal and elusive. “Do you have much trouble getting digs here? They tell me Oxford’s teeming like a Calcutta slum.”

Sandy’s face had fallen, but not despairingly. He had probably had some practice in distinguishing between ignorance and reserve. “Oh, you’re from Oxford. I’m at the local joint. Then you know Charles Fosticue, I expect.”

“Only by name,” said Laurie with prompt firmness. He gave thanks to his own instincts of self-preservation. “I used to see a good deal of Pat Dean; do you know him? He married a girl from Somerville last year.”

Stalemate had now been reached. Applying himself more briskly to his beer, Laurie decided to say that there wasn’t another bus if he missed this one.

“Not,” Sandy was saying (he had evidently decided to resurvey the terrain), “that I ever knew Charlie Fosticue at all well. I just mentioned him because he’s the sort of type everyone meets once. I’ve run into Vic Tamley now and again. Rather a pleasant person, I thought.”

“Yes, I heard someone say so, I forget who.”

“I thought you might know him, he seemed rather your type. Drink up, while there’s a lull in the rush.”

“Thanks, but I shall really have to get cracking to catch the bus.”

“Oh, hell, no, you’ve only been here five minutes. Don’t forget I saved you from rubbing knees with sixty-five typists in the shelter. Try old and bitter this time, the local old’s quite good.” The barman had collected the glasses while he was speaking. Laurie resigned himself to five minutes more.

There was a permanent air of improvisation, he thought, about Sandy Reid. He had clearly now abandoned what hopes of Laurie he might have had, but was loath to let him go. Perhaps the tenacity came only from boredom. He had a manner it would be too strong to call restless, a chronic but trivial kind of expectation. He looked often at the door, but when he was greeted by a couple of men as they entered, he gave them an offhand nod and turned away.

Someone turned up the radio. A brassy-lunged female sang of rainbows. Her vibrato was excruciating; Laurie made a vinegar face. Sandy replied with another, which expressed a subtly different kind of distaste; he must have thought that this was what Laurie had meant, and now Laurie himself was uncertain. Their eyes met in an indefinite kind of acknowledgment.

“Look here,” said Sandy, “we’re having a few people in for drinks tonight. It’s Alec’s birthday, he’s my friend I was telling you about. Why don’t you come along?” After the faintest pause he added, with more directness than he had so far used, “Can’t offer you any girls, I’m afraid. If you mind that?”

“Not in the least.” So much seemed only fair. “But unless I catch this bus I’ll be for it. Thanks all the same, I’d have liked to.”

“Oh, well, but if that’s all I’m sure we can fix it. Someone will run you back. Let’s think …”

Laurie for his part was thinking that this was what came of brushing people off with too soft a brush. It was a fault of his. Evidently he would have to use a hard one. “No, thanks very much, but—”

“You can count on someone with a car, definitely. If Bim can’t make it there’s still Theo Sumner, or Ralph Lanyon, or—”

“Who did you say?”

“Oh, d’you know Ralph Lanyon?” Sandy brightened. Now, he seemed to say, we’re getting somewhere.

“Not for years.” He had a dazed feeling of having fallen through a crack in time. “I expect it’s someone different.”

“Unusual name, after all. R.N.V.R. type; in armed trawlers, I think he was. He got wounded in the hand during the Dunkirk show and lost a couple of fingers. Now he’s doing a hush-hush technical course, radio or something. Well, there you are. That settles it, you’ll have to come along now.”

As if he had been drifting in uncertainly eddying water, and felt the sudden, authoritative pull of an ocean current, Laurie said easily and clearly, “Well, if you can do with me. Thanks very much.”