The Charioteer: A Novel

6

“IT’S A MAUSOLEUM,” SAID Sandy at the front door. “All you can say is, the proportions are good.”

Laurie said something about Italian influence. He could recall few doors which he had felt such reluctance to enter.

They had been separated in the bus, which had saved conversation. All kinds of little things came suddenly back to him; but most of all he remembered the term after Lanyon had gone. Over and over, during those first months, Laurie had relived the scene in the study, guarding it with fierce secrecy as a savage guards a magic word. Now he felt strands and fibers of Lanyon twitching in his mind where he had not recognized them before, and realized the source of those standards which had supplemented his mother’s in those parts of his life where she could not go.

He knew that he didn’t want to submit any of this to daylight. Lanyon’s survival belonged only between the worn leather covers of the Phaedrus. The only firm fact about him now was that he was a friend of Sandy’s. It was madness to have come.

The bus had halted and an old woman was getting out. It would wait for her; for him too, if he wanted to escape. Sandy wasn’t looking; he reached for his stick. But it would be a lout’s trick, he thought; and this distaste gave pretext enough to his divided mind. He sat back again, and the next stop was theirs.

The house was tall and narrow, in a massive late Palladian terrace of Bath stone. As they crossed the threshold, Laurie agreed that the proportions were good.

Inside it looked, like many others in that old once-wealthy suburb, as if it had been lived in for thirty years by a Lord Mayor’s widow. It looked uneasy now, turned into a respectable tenement full of transients in a time of flux. They crossed the hall with its thick red and blue Turkey carpet. On the half-landing a huge stained-glass window was half blacked-out with paint, half curtained with an army blanket; there was a cigarette burn on the white-painted tread of one of the stairs.

The first landing had a mahogany tallboy, the second a half-acre engraving of Victoria and Albert at the Crystal Palace. Sandy said, “I’m frightfully sorry about all these stairs.”

“It’s good practice for me. Sorry to be so slow.” There were no stairs at the hospital and he hadn’t expected it to be so bad. He took his time. He wasn’t going to waste his strength impressing Sandy Reid.

At the top of the next flight he saw, still set in the newel-post, the hinges of the wicket gate which, fifty years since perhaps, had guarded the nursery floor. Voices and laughter came from a door beyond it. Sandy said, “Here we are.”

Laurie’s first glance around the room told him only that Lanyon was not there; he felt a dull flat relaxation, which he took for relief. Several introductions went through his ears unheard. He roused himself in time to identify Alec, his other host: a dark, narrow-headed, nearly good-looking young civilian, whose calling didn’t need guesswork; he looked already much more like a doctor than Sandy did, or like a better doctor perhaps. He talked like one, coolly, throwing all his good lines away. Sandy treated him, rather ostentatiously, like a lovable dreamer to be bossed and protected. The first few minutes were enough to give Laurie all this.

The other dozen or so faces had closed in a little; he became aware that the conversation had a poised, tentative feel. The unspoken query in the air became as unmistakable to him as a shout. Deciding that it was no business of his to resolve it, he threw the onus on Sandy by the simple means of asking to go and wash. As he crossed the landing, he heard Sandy’s voice on a rising note: “… my dear, right across the ward in the middle of the teaching round, as bold as brass, no possible error, it made me feel quite shy. Goodness knows why he won’t drop a hairpin now, the silly boy.”

Returning, Laurie began to take in the room. It contained a big white-painted cupboard (the toy cupboard, he thought at once) and an old-fashioned nannie’s rocking chair. There were also two divans covered with hessian and strewn with bright cotton cushions; a couple of modern Swedish chairs; one or two charming little pieces in old walnut; various poufs; a wooden black boy holding an ashtray; and a crayon drawing, literal and earnestly dull, of a young sailor’s head. Across the lower half of the big windows, rusty but still thick and strong, the nursery bars remained protectively fixed.

He had heard, as he came in from the doorway, the conversation swerve awkwardly. He was acutely conscious of his limp, of the lowness of the divans and poufs which would exhibit his stiff knee when he sat and when he rose. He recognized Sandy’s changed voice which he had heard from the landing: it was the voice of Charles’s friends. Suddenly he imagined Lanyon frisking in and speaking like that. With a trapped feeling he saw Alec coming up carrying a whisky and soda.

“I believe it’s your birthday? Many happy returns.”

“Thank you. Do sit down; try this one.” It was one of the Swedish chairs, with helpful arms. Alec poised himself on the edge of a table and said, “You’re a friend of Ralph’s, I hear.”

“Well, I can’t honestly claim that. He was Head of the School when I was in the fifths, and we’ve never even met since he left. If he remembers me at all it’ll only be because he’s got a good memory for faces; or used to have.”

“Oh, he still has. Is your drink all right?”

“Yes, thanks, fine. I rather feel, really, that I’ve come here under false pretenses.” He was quite sure Alec had subtlety enough to interpret that.

“So far,” said Alec, “you seem to me very lacking in pretenses.” It struck Laurie that he would be formidable in a consulting room someday. “Oh, by the way, I don’t know whether you get a kind of functional deafness during introductions, like me? I never got your name properly; was it—er—Hazell, or—?”

“Christ!” said Laurie, nearly spilling his drink. “No, it wasn’t.”

“I really do apologize. I thought not, but I just wanted to exclude the possibility before Ralph got here. Evidently, from your strong reaction, you were there the term he was expelled?”

Laurie put down his drink and said, in the formal voice of open hostility, “Lanyon left the term he was due to leave. There was nothing else to it, as far as I know.”

“I’m sorry. But Ralph makes so little secret of it; everyone in our own set knows. And I suppose you struck me as not being a mischievous person.”

Laurie felt his anger go cold on him. Under a score of surface differences, and accompanied no doubt by many basic ones, he recognized a speaker of his own language; another solitary still making his own maps, his few certainties gripped with a rather desperate strength. “I didn’t mean to be cagey,” he said. “Lanyon was a very good Head and generally liked, and I suppose that’s what one mostly remembers. Of course you must know much more about him than I do.”

“Don’t apologize,” said Alec, “I liked it.” He had a smile of unexpected decision and charm. “And what is your name, if you’ll forgive my unmannerly persistence?”

“Oh, sorry. It’s Odell. I don’t think he’ll remember me, you know.”

Alec looked up. His dark eyes had a peering, short-sighted look. “Odell?” he said.

“Without the apostrophe, if it matters. Needless to say I got called Spud just the same.”

“Yes,” said Alec. “Yes, I expect so.” His characteristic alertness seemed lost; he stared in silence. “You say you don’t think Ralph will remember you?”

“Well, I suppose he might dimly.” Laurie himself was remembering with sharpening clearness: the green paint in the corridor, the torn books in the basket, the silver pencil. “But I should hardly think so; he had a good deal else to think about, after all.”

“You never knew he brought you back from Dunkirk, then?”

“What?” said Laurie dully. His brain refused to yield him the least response. His memories had been healing; he could recall nothing of that journey with any clearness now.

“You didn’t recognize him?”

“No. I can’t have seen him, even. I think I passed out, you see, most of the way.”

“Yes, of course. Apparently he picked up some kind of impression that you knew him. At least, I remember him saying he wrote to you afterwards; but of course he hadn’t much to go on. Evidently there was some muddle, because the letter came back ‘Died of Wounds.’ And from the state you were in when he saw you, it didn’t seem unlikely, so he left it there.”

“I see. I wondered why you seemed surprised when I told you my name.” The shadows of memory were disconnected and meaningless, like the first markings on a negative in the tank. “Fancy his bothering to write to me. That’s just like him, you know; he made everyone feel he took a personal interest. He was wounded himself, Sandy says?”

“Yes, that was later. He went back two or three more times for another load. His ship got a direct hit in the end, but they picked him up out of the water. Well, he’s late, I hope he’s going to turn up. Excuse me, I’d better see how the drinks are doing.”

He got up. For the first time, Laurie perceived in his movements a kind of reticent, controlled delicacy, like that of a well-bred woman who is usually aware of making, without vulgar emphasis, the right impression. He collected someone’s glass and went over to the table with it, catching Sandy’s eye on the way. They met at the table and went through some business with a siphon, and talked discreetly. Laurie heard nothing except the end of a sentence from Sandy: “… started out long ago. Does it matter?” The rest was drowned by a conversation going on just behind his chair. “So I said to him, well really at that point I couldn’t help saying, ‘Well, if that’s your attitude, I don’t mind telling you I think I’ve treated you very nicely, and when I say that you know what I mean.’ And he did, too. ‘I’ve treated you nicely,’ I said, ‘and in return you’ve done nothing but two-time me, and not even with decent people, but with people whom I consider absolute riff-raff. You know who I mean.’ He knew all right; he looked very silly, I can tell you, when he saw I’d been checking up on him. ‘I think you’ll go a long way,’ I said, ‘before you’ll find anyone who …’ ”

Oh God, Laurie was thinking, where has it got to? He had left his chair and was now searching for his stick. There it was, fallen flat on the floor; and he knew from past failures that he would have to sit down in the chair again in order to retrieve it without looking ridiculous.

“Looking for this, chum?”

“Thanks,” said Laurie. “Yes, I was.”

It was a soldier, whom Laurie had till now scarcely had time to notice, though he had been vaguely aware of him as a somewhat incongruous presence. He now said, “You don’t mind, do you, chum, if I sit here with you and have a word or two?” and, carefully bringing up a pouf before Laurie could answer, settled himself beside him.

Laurie recognized at once the solemn intensity of drink taken; to go away instantly might start a scene. After a little heavy breathing, the soldier addressed him in the flat accent of the Midlands.

“I reckon you got that packet at Dunkirk. Eh?”

“Yes,” said Laurie. “Were you there too?”

“No, I was still doing training. I saw you come in. You got one leg shorter than the other, haven’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t they reckon that’ll get no better, then?”

“Probably not.”

The soldier leaned forward; he smelled of jasmine hair oil and of beer. “Here,” he breathed huskily. “I want to ask you something. You ever been here before?”

“No. Have you?”

“It don’t matter about me. Look, when you come in here, I took a liking to you. That’s what I’m like, always have been, first impressions is what I go by; and when I see you come in limping on that stick, I thought, ‘That lad stopped a packet at Dunkirk and they didn’t ought to have brought him. That’s not right,’ I thought, ‘they never ought to have done it.’ ”

“It’s all right. I’ve only looked in for a drink.”

“That’s what you think, chum. Here, do you know what they are, all this lot here?”

“Don’t you worry about me; I’m leaving to catch a bus in a minute.” He had missed it, but there was another at nine, and he would sit in a cinema till it was due. He looked around, trying to catch Sandy’s eye.

“I know what you think,” said the soldier earnestly. “I could see it in your face when you come in. You think being lame like what you are, a girl won’t have you. You think to hell with all that. It takes all sorts to make a world, give it a go and look after number one same as we all got to do, that’s what you think. Now I’ll tell you something.”

“Yes,” said Laurie. “Excuse me.” He gripped the arms of the chair and braced himself to rise. But the door had opened. Sandy was saying, “So here you are at last. Come along in, we’ve got a little surprise for you.”

Laurie straightened himself smartly. When he was on his feet and standing still, there wasn’t much to notice. In his haste he threw his weight too quickly on his lame leg, so that it was shot through with a violent stab of pain. When the effort of concealing this was over, he saw that Lanyon was already in the room.

He had come alone. Laurie would have known him instantly, anywhere; which is not to say that he had not changed. He was in R.N.V.R. uniform with a lieutenant’s rings; and Laurie’s first clear thought was that if one had had the sense to notice it, he must have looked like a ship’s officer even at school. Now the incipient lines were graven in; against his weathered skin his light hair looked several shades fairer, almost ash-colored. He was still spare and alert-looking, but he held his shoulders more stiffly now. There was time for all this while he stood in the doorway. For Sandy he had a suitable smile which, without being exactly guarded, revealed nothing whatever except good manners: when he turned to Alec, though the transition wasn’t crude, Laurie could see that it was Alec on whose account he had come. He had brought him a birthday present, Laurie couldn’t see what, and the unwrapping and thanks took a little time. Laurie was glad of it. It had all been more disturbing than he had expected, and it occurred to him for the first time that Lanyon might find his sudden appearance embarrassing, once he remembered who he was.

Alec took some time to admire his present; he was evidently one of those who are generous in the receiving of gifts. It was Sandy who seemed suddenly to grow impatient. He gave Lanyon a shove which turned him half around from the door, and said, in a voice carelessly audible through the room, “And now come over here and see what we’ve got for you.”

Lanyon stared at this and Laurie saw for the first time his light-blue, wary, sailor’s eyes. Above the superficial smile on his mouth, they swept the room as inexpressively as if it had been a doubtful stretch of sea. Laurie got ready: but when they reached him, he forgot after all to say anything or even to smile, since Lanyon did neither: he simply stood there, with his face draining, visibly, of color, till one could see that his mouth and chin were less deeply tanned than the rest of his face, because they suddenly stood out pallid against the darker skin above. His mouth straightened; Laurie knew the expression well, but now it seemed part of a naval uniform, emergency kit. It jerked Laurie out of himself. He took a step forward and said, “Hello. They told me you might be coming.” But Lanyon still stared at him in silence, so he added, “Do you remember me? Spud Odell?”

Lanyon came up, and Laurie noticed for the first time the glove on his left hand. He said, so abruptly that he might have been charging Laurie with a disciplinary offense, “I thought you were dead.”

“Only temporarily.” Laurie thought: I can’t have very much imagination, not to have expected this. That day at school must have been the worst in his life, much worse than anything the sea’s done to him or even the war; seeing me must be like living it over again. He felt so strongly for Lanyon in this that his nervousness left him. He smiled and said, “Alec’s just told me that I owe you for a Channel crossing. Is it true?”

Lanyon said in the same court-martial voice, but rather more slowly, “You knew that.”

“No.” (It wouldn’t have taken much more, Laurie thought, to have made him say, “No, please, Lanyon.”) “I hadn’t the least idea. I was dead to the world most of the time.”

With startling abruptness, Lanyon’s face broke into a hard gay smile. “Well, for someone alleged to be unconscious, I must say you did pretty well. Sending me up sky-high in front of a petty officer and a couple of ratings. You’ll be telling me you can’t remember that now, I suppose?”

Laurie’s mouth opened. He stared at the jaw-line from which, now, the pale margin had disappeared. “Oh, my God,” he said. “That wasn’t you?”

“You’re telling me. I got down into the beard I was mercifully wearing at the time, and pulled it up over my head. Much to my relief, a Stuka came over a few seconds later and machine-gunned us. I was a great deal more frightened of you.”

“But … God, this is … I’d had a lot of morphia, and they gave me another shot just before they embarked us, to stop the bleeding. I remember realizing I was light-headed, even at the time.”

“I never quite worked out whether you were thinking, ‘Well, well, so that was R. R. Lanyon,’ or if it was just a case of ‘Oh, Lord, here comes another.’ ”

“I was off my head. Of course I didn’t know you. Christ, you don’t suppose if I had—”

“Same old Spud,” said Lanyon, in a kind of echo of the bright voice he had used before. “I wouldn’t have believed it.” He took a step back and looked at Laurie, then said, not brightly but with a dull kind of incredulity, “Good God, you haven’t changed a bit.”

“It was the beard,” said Laurie. “That was all. I’d have known you anywhere, but for that.”

“Ah, well,” Lanyon said smiling again, “we’ve both got a shock or two coming, I daresay.”

It was then that Laurie remembered, for the first time in some minutes, the presence of other people. Alec was hovering, with a couple of drinks, tactfully on the fringe of the conversation. Sandy, less tactful, was drinking in their reunion open-mouthed. There had been so much to say, Laurie had scarcely noticed till now the special phrases casually accepted, the basic assumption on which all their words had made sense. What after all could Lanyon have supposed, finding him here? Well, he thought, Sandy should be satisfied. The hairpin had been dropped.

“Aren’t you drinking, Laurie?” Alec said. “Here’s yours, Ralph.”

“Healths in water are unlucky,” said Lanyon, looking at the glass.

“Sorry, I gave you the wrong one. This is yours. Laurie, this do for you?”

Laurie, who had lost his first drink, took it. It was rather strong, but he didn’t like now to do anything about it. They drank to Alec’s birthday and then Lanyon, turning, said, “Well … hello, Laurie. I’ll get used to that, I suppose.”

They drank. Laurie said, “There’s no need to, Spud will do.”

“No. Boys will be boys, but heaven defend us from Old Boys. Now I think of it, I never did know your real name. When I was doing the lists sometimes I used to wonder what it was. Odell, L. P. What was the P. for?”

“Patrick.”

“Well, I got that one right, anyway. I wish you wouldn’t keep looking at me as if I might give you a hundred lines at any moment. For God’s sake relax.” He stared at his glass, then emptied it with a jerk.

“Sorry. It’s all very well for you, but Ralph does feel a bit of a hanging matter.”

“That’ll pass off, you’ll find. Drink up and I’ll get you another.”

“Not for a minute, thanks.”

“How are your drinks?” asked Sandy, who all this time hadn’t been far away. “The usual, Ralph? Oh, by the way, I’m afraid I’ve rather been committing you in your absence. Have you got your car?”

Lanyon’s face shut like a door. Laurie had seen him first take in the room with one angry, summarizing glance. “Well,” he said, “yes and no.”

“If you can’t, never mind,” said Alec easily. “It was just for Laurie. It seems he’s got to run for some godforsaken bus in about five minutes, unless someone can lift him back.”

“Oh. I see. Where to, Laurie? Surely, yes, I can do that all right. I thought Claude wanted a taxi for his bit of rent.” The soldier was still sitting where Laurie had left him, staring in front of him with a glazed, hazy eye. No one seemed to be taking the slightest notice of him.

Beside the fireplace, opposite the toy cupboard, was a gramophone on which Sandy now put a stack of dance records. Two or three couples stood up. They all danced very seriously and correctly, as if they were in a ballroom.

Lanyon said abruptly, “For God’s sake let’s sit down, and tell me what’s been happening to you.” They went over to one of the hessian divans; it was very low, and Laurie hesitated for a moment. Lanyon at once slid a hand under his elbow, and firmly lowered him down. It was smoothly authoritative and unfussy, like hospital. Then he remembered the glove. Lanyon kept the left hand in his pocket most of the time; but it was on his knee now, and Laurie could see that half of it had a padded, artificial look.

“Cigarette?” said Lanyon. Laurie was only just beginning to notice how naturally he did with one hand a great many things for which most people are apt to use both. This is Lanyon, he thought, actually sitting here and lighting my cigarette.

Suddenly Lanyon stared at him and said, “Good God! Don’t tell me they saved that leg for you after all?”

This approach to the matter gave Laurie an oddly comfortable and relaxed feeling. “More or less. They’ve been tinkering with it ever since.”

“Well, I think that’s a bloody miracle. When I saw you on deck, the only thing I couldn’t understand was why they hadn’t taken it off back at the dressing station. But they’d lost most of their equipment anyway, I suppose.”

“I expect so.” For a moment, through the press of their own concerns, there rose between them the shadowy constraint of the beaten army confronting the unbeaten navy, the suppressed withdrawal, the carefully careless tact.

“I’m the one to talk,” said Lanyon. “You know I lost my ship.”

Something in his voice reminded Laurie for the first time that this was rather more than an incident in which one was liable to be killed.

“I just heard,” he said. “I’m sorry. Had you commanded her long?”

“Five and a half months. My first; and my last, of course. In seventeen ninety-eight, missing parts were considered quite amusing, even for admirals, but all that’s terribly dated now. Well, it might have been worse; we were on the way out, not coming back. Really, there are some bloody good surgeons about nowadays. You had a great splinter of bone sticking clean through the dressing into the open air. We had some of those big gunshot jobs in hospital. They seemed to give people hell for months. Does yours?”

“Only off and on. They’ve sent me in for treatment here, to get it fixed up.”

“Why on earth don’t you get yourself transferred here altogether? Isn’t yours one of these temporary dumps? This place is quite good, or so Alec always says.”

“I couldn’t do that,” said Laurie, with an absurd prick of anxiety. “I only come in twice a week.”

“Oh, well,” said Lanyon. He picked up their glasses and made for the table, at the last moment noticing that Laurie’s was nearly full and putting it back.

While they had been talking, two or three more people had arrived. He realized that a young man, one of the newcomers, was threading among the dancers in a purposeful way, and was plainly making for the place beside him. Just then Lanyon came back. He stood over the young man, quite quietly, with the kind of expression a captain uses on a tipsy passenger he has found exploring the bridge. “Excuse me,” he said. The young man flinched like a startled fawn, and hurried away.

Lanyon sat down again with what, Laurie supposed, must be his fourth or fifth double. He seemed as self-possessed as if he had been drinking water. His voice had got louder, but so had Laurie’s; it was the only way of making oneself heard. Except for two people in a far corner who seemed to be holding hands in dead silence, they were probably the quietest couple in the room.

“I nearly didn’t come tonight.” Lanyon stared for a moment unseeingly at the dancers, then added circumstantially, “I was working on something and nearly forgot about it.”

“I refused twice,” said Laurie. “The third time Sandy happened to mention you, or I’d have refused again.”

Lanyon’s light eyes lifted, sharply, under his straight fair brows. Laurie remembered the look.

“You don’t know him well, then?”

“I don’t properly speaking know him at all. We knew each other by sight at the hospital. Till we ran into each other this evening, I didn’t know his name.”

“Oh?” said Lanyon without much expression. “Then which of these people have you met before?”

“Only you.”

He hadn’t meant to give this simple statement of fact any special significance. For some reason which he couldn’t understand it seemed to go on ringing, like glass picking up a note. Alec, he thought, tasting his drink again, was inclined to mix them strong.

“He will drown them,” Lanyon said. “Give it me, and I’ll tip it out and give you another.”

“This one’s all right.” However, since Lanyon looked impatient he finished it fairly soon. It still embarrassed him to have Lanyon wait on him. He watched him elbowing his way through the dancers, and saw someone snatch the empty glasses from him, and try to make him dance. He refused smiling; then at something the other man said he seemed to grow suddenly angry, and walked sharply off.

He sat down in silence with the two drinks and then, when they had scarcely started them, said, “For God’s sake let’s get out of here.”

“Are you due back on duty?”

“I said let’s get out, that’s all.”

“Isn’t it a bit early? I shouldn’t like to upset Alec, he seems rather nice.”

“If it’s Alec you want, I’ll fetch him for you.”

Laurie looked up; he couldn’t think of anything to say. Lanyon said, “Sorry, Spud.”

He gave the drink in his hand a look of cold irritation, as if someone had planted it on him, and put it up on a bookshelf near by.

“It doesn’t matter,” Laurie said. “We’ll go if you’d rather, I don’t mind.”

“No, it’s his birthday, I suppose there’ll be some nonsense with a cake. We’ll give it another minute or two.”

Someone dancing by leaned out (the dancing had grown a good deal less conventional) and called, “What’s he got that I haven’t?” Lanyon’s reply was swift and explicit; he added, “Go to hell.” Turning to Laurie he said, “This party’s deteriorating,” then, “Are you all right, Spud? You look a bit done in.”

The knee had started, but not specially badly; it was rather better than it sometimes was by this time of night. He hadn’t been thinking much about it, except as a background like the gramophone. As a rule, he hated to think that other people could notice anything, but, he thought, when most people asked these questions you could see them hoping to God you would say everything was fine, and they needn’t do any worrying. Lanyon sounded different: he even made one feel that some real, effective potential was actually being offered. It was absurd, but very comforting.

“I’m all right,” he said.

“Yes, I know, you feel like a million dollars. Only I’m going to get you out of this and back to bed.” He stood up and held out his hand.

“No, thanks, it isn’t anything. I’m not tired. The leg gets up a bit in the evening, but you don’t get anywhere taking notice of it.”

“Just a minute,” said Lanyon. He went out of the room and, when he came back, took the handkerchief from his breast pocket with three tablets in the corner. He slipped them to Laurie and said, “Try that. Alec gave it me for the toothache once.”

Laurie took the tablets. On a sudden impulse he said, “Thank you, Ralph.”

Ralph smiled at him. It was an odd smile, with a practiced charm which it was impossible to mistake, and yet with something curiously vulnerable and defensive in it. Laurie felt an inexplicable urgency to be kind, for which he could find no expression.

“What treatment are they giving you?” Ralph reached up absently to the shelf and recovered his drink again. “God, I can see you now, with those filthy bandages black with blood, and the bone sticking out of them. D’you know how I came to find you? I was called to settle an argument on whether you were dead. I was rather busy just then; I remember asking what the hell I was supposed to do about it if you were, and did they think I was Jesus Christ? I didn’t come for about five minutes, and by that time you were sufficiently alive to hand me the biggest raspberry in living memory.”

“Don’t keep telling me that. I was just being funny with myself. I’d have said it to anyone.”

“You looked me straight in the eyes and brought it out snap.”

“I couldn’t tell you from Father Christmas. I don’t think I’d remember it at all if someone hadn’t told me about it afterwards. I’m only surprised that you recognized me. I can imagine how I looked from seeing the others.”

Ralph gave him a narrow, silent look. “As a matter of fact, I recognized you then more quickly than I probably should have at any other time.”

Some warning sense made Laurie look up; the dancing was getting spirited, and a couple was gambolling heavily toward him. With a flinching anticipation he saw them about to collide with his leg and tried to get it out of the way. Ralph was quicker: leaning out, he handed-off the dancers with such force that the near one almost fell over, regaining his balance, indignantly, some yards farther on.

“Why the—can’t you look where you’re—well going, you—?” If Laurie had imagined Ralph as a captain before, he now glimpsed him vividly as a first mate. The dancer said, “Well, really, I’m sorry I’m sure, but there’s no need to speak to me like that.” Ralph’s only reply was to stare him out; Laurie could hear him working off his protests on his partner halfway around the room.

“Hell,” said Ralph, “that settles it, we will go.” Just then, however, Sandy made an entrance, carrying the cake. Candles were lit and everyone stood around to see Alec blow them out. Sandy watched proudly at his elbow; someone said, “Have you wished?” and Alec paused for a moment, concentrating like a child with shut eyes, before he blew. Watching, Laurie was aware of some inward change in the group about him, a hopefulness, a wistfulness; they looked at the little ritual as though it were an affirmation of something doubtfully promised, or insecurely held, a symbol of stability, of permanence and trust. He thought of the white toy cupboard, the window bars, the place for the gate on the stairs.

Alec’s health was drunk. “Happy Birthday” was sung, and the moment of sentiment was over; a reactive rowdiness at once set in. Ralph and Laurie hung about in the middle of the room, waiting to say goodbye, but Alec was telling a story and couldn’t be detached at once. It was during this wait that someone came up whom Laurie recognized as the dancer Ralph had sworn at. He smiled at Ralph—he had a smile which looked as if he used it more often than not on people he disliked—and said, “My dear, what have you done with Bunny? Couldn’t he get away?”

“He’s working late,” said Ralph. “He’ll be along soon, I expect.” His voice was extremely cool and steady. There are moments when one is aware of an actor using his technique in social life, and this was a professional manner too, but the profession was different.

“Well, I must say, I am relieved. Claude said to me only just now, ‘Ralph’s arrived on his own, does it mean anything?’ You know what a bitchy little number that one is.”

“What am I supposed to do?” asked Ralph calmly. “Bring Claude a duty sheet to show him why we can’t all knock off at five?”

“Take my advice, my dear, and don’t tell him anything. You know I don’t tell tales out of school.” He looked at Laurie and back to Ralph again, gave a sudden startled giggle, and disappeared into the crowd.

Ralph said, “Alec’s a fool to let Sandy bring people like that here.” Then he looked straight at Laurie and added, “Bunny’s a friend of mine, as I suppose you gathered. We’re both working on the same job, more or less.”

“That’s a bit of luck for you both,” Laurie said quickly. At a deep level of irrationality, too stupid to let oneself think about, he felt sore because Ralph hadn’t told him before.

Ralph said, “Laurie, would you mind waiting here for a minute or two? I think I ought to make a phone call before I go.”

“Of course.” There had been something deliberate in Ralph’s calling him Laurie again, it put time in remembrance.

The music had started again and the dancing was beginning. Ralph said, “Will you be all right here?” and helped him down on one of the divans against the wall. “You can look after my drink for me; here’s yours.” He put them down on the floor and, as he stooped, said softly, “Don’t go away.” It was a quick throwaway, done with great charm and at the same time discarded, as if to say, “You see what nonsense amuses some people.” Laurie felt a sadness pressing on him from he did not know where. He smiled and settled his leg and said, “Not going is the thing I do best.”

After Ralph had gone he felt suddenly isolated. In the bookshelf behind him he saw a binding he knew. Its schoolroom shabbiness was friendly and he took it down.

Soon cool drafts of air began to reach me; and a few steps farther I came forth into the open borders of the grove, and saw the sea lying blue and sunny to the horizon, and the surf tumbling and tossing its foam along the beach.

I have never seen the sea quiet round Treasure Island. The sun might blaze overhead, the air be without a breath, the surface smooth and blue, but still those great rollers …

A young man sat down beside him on the divan and, without any kind of preliminary, said, “Is it a queer book?”

“No,” said Laurie.

“Oh,” said the young man, on a note of utter deflation. He got up and went away.

… but still those great rollers would be running along all the external coast, thundering and thundering by day and night; and I scarce believe there is one spot in the island where a man would be out of earshot of their noise.

A considerable tumult at the door interrupted him. Rising above it a precise, scholarly, drunken voice was singing, “Happy Birthday to You.” He looked up to see a man of about fifty-five, impeccably dressed, accompanied by a small crowd of naval ratings. There was a brief and clearly embarrassing exchange on the threshold, while Sandy and Alec eased them out again. The sailors, who were rather less drunk than their host, remained strictly neutral. Behind his shoulders two of them stood like heraldic supporters, one a curly-browed Cretan bull, the other a blank-faced boy of about eighteen. After the door had shut Alec walked over to Laurie, probably for no better reason than that he had happened to catch his eye. On a doctor’s note of mild deprecation, he said, “One can’t do anything about Harry. He’ll get himself murdered, one of these days. We don’t see more of him than we can help. I mean, one’s prepared to pay one’s own piper, but—”

“If one goes anywhere, after all,” said Sandy, “one’s bound to run into people.”

“And you know,” said Alec, “he’s kind when he’s sober. It’s his business really, I suppose.”

“I suppose,” said Laurie. His mind had reverted to the younger sailor’s face, with its look of a blank sheet waiting helplessly to be scribbled on.

“I’m glad we got rid of him, though, because Ralph if he’d got back and found him here would have walked straight out of the place.”

Laurie said nothing. With a new and better-informed gratitude, he summoned up remembrance of things past. He was still by all reasonable standards sober, but the gentle glow of his small dose reinforced the feeling which presently, as if by some magic power, seemed to open the door of the room and present him with its object.

Ralph came in looking not altogether happily preoccupied. Then he saw Laurie, and crossed over as if they had been the only two people in the room. “How’s the leg? Did that stuff of Alec’s work at all?”

Laurie realized with surprise that he hadn’t noticed the leg for some ten minutes. He said, “It’s marvellous stuff, what was it?”

“Something he gets from the hospital. A couple of drinks don’t hurt either, in my experience. Where’s mine you were looking after, by the way?”

Sandy came up just then and said, “Hello, Ralph, your very favorite person came and you missed him.”

“Oh?” said Ralph, in a very even, colorless voice. He looked at Sandy, who began suddenly to rattle away at his little story so fast that it was quite ruined. Ralph gave a laugh which, though irritable, was also relieved. “I wonder why Alec always maintains he’s so kind-hearted.”

“When he’s sober, that’s all Alec says.” Sandy had tried to sound offhand, but a simple, almost brash partisanship sounded behind it.

“That must narrow down his opportunities to about six hours a week.”

Alec had joined them in time to say, in his easy muted voice (it was always linked in Laurie’s mind with remarks like, “I’ll have a look at these sutures, Sister”), “He gets a bit lonely, I think. He always hates the thought of a party breaking up.”

“I don’t blame him,” said Ralph crisply. “It must be tiresome to find that one’s broken up along with it.”

Alec looked at them with quiet resistance. He was, Laurie thought, a person who hated soft thinking on one hand and intolerance on the other; much of his life must be spent fighting a war on two fronts. “One doesn’t know how far he can help himself. Perhaps he can’t be different from what he is.”

“God,” said Ralph, “what are any of us?” His blue eyes stared out with a kind of tired anger. “It’s not what one is, it’s what one does with it.”

“Get your feet on the ground, my dear. People get sick of what they are. They get sick of carrying it. What d’you think dictators and party bosses are for? Or they just pour it down the drain and forget it, like Harry does. Everyone isn’t like you, Ralph, trying to carry the world.” His eyes met Ralph’s for a moment. Laurie saw Sandy turn quickly and walk away.

When they had gone Ralph turned to Laurie. “You don’t miss very much, do you?”

“Plenty, I should think.” But he knew well enough what Ralph had meant.

“It was more than two years ago. I was running between Avonmouth and Quebec then. It got to a point where I threw up my job and spent a couple of months looking for something ashore. By the end of that time we both knew it would never work anyway. Sandy knows, of course. He’s jealous of his own shadow and wasn’t too pleased when I pitched up again, but he’s not quite such a fool as he looks. He knows we had all our second thoughts at the time and there aren’t any more. When people part as friends it’s usually past resurrection; this was, anyhow.”

Laurie found that none of this was a great surprise to him. Very early on, he had thought that Alec knew too much. He said, “You’d have missed the sea.”

“I’ll need to get used to that.” He flipped idly at the padded fingers of the glove. “Alec formed the opinion that I took too much on myself.” Without looking around he picked up his drink and finished it.

A rush of old memories went through Laurie like a pain. “I’ve never noticed,” he said, “that the competition to take things on was as killing as all that.”

Ralph stooped down and picked up the book from the floor; he must have seen it when he bent for his drink. Now he turned it over and read the title. “Oh, Spuddy,” he said, laughing and looking away. He got up quickly with the glasses and went over to fill them.

Laurie, who felt a fool, was relieved to see him caught up with a group of new arrivals at the door. As greetings settled down into conversation, however, the thought that he might not come back again was less welcome.

The party had warmed up by this time. A momentary detachment came upon Laurie as he looked on. After some years of muddled thinking on the subject, he suddenly saw quite clearly what it was he had been running away from; why he had refused Sandy’s first invitation, and what the trouble had been with Charles. It was also the trouble, he perceived, with nine-tenths of the people here tonight. They were specialists. They had not merely accepted their limitations, as Laurie was ready to accept his, loyal to his humanity if not to his sex, and bringing an extra humility to the hard study of human experience. They had identified themselves with their limitations; they were making a career of them. They had turned from all other reality, and curled up in them snugly, as in a womb.

Trying to form his ideas quickly before he was interrupted again, he found instead that he was staring at Ralph, who was standing in the thick of the crowd, hard and crisp and gay, laughing at someone’s dirty story, his battle-scars put neatly out of sight.

He moved impatiently in his seat; he felt angry and useless, and wondered how late he would have to stay. He had a sudden homesick vision of Andrew in the ward kitchen starting to wash up, the brown teapot with the Sister’s stewed tea saved on one side.

For the last few minutes two army officers had been sitting at the other end of the divan, punctuating a hot item of gossip with little squeals. Now one of them nudged the other, who raised his eyebrows, coughed, and went away. The first moved, purposefully, nearer.

“He knew I wanted him to go, but he gets daily cruder. Now quickly tell me all about yourself. Why haven’t I seen you here before?”

“I’ve not been here before.” Laurie didn’t mind the pink and yellow gold bracelet, which was Cartier and rather beautiful; but he noticed too the eyes, which were hard and shallow, and the soft self-pitying mouth.

“Not? And you don’t go to Max’s, at least so Claude tells me, I don’t go, my dear, not my thing at all.” With rapid but profuse detail he sketched the private life and eccentricities of the man who had just gone. Laurie listened, fascinated, not believing it but impressed by the inventive fertility. He listened indeed a little too well, for soon the officer was saying, “Well, come along, dear, this seems as good a moment as any to be slipping away. Though what moment wouldn’t be good; I do see now what they meant about Sandy’s evenings. Whether it’s the sight of Alec’s true-blue past frowning on the revels like the statue in Don Giovanni, though for all that they do tell me, strictly entre nous—”

“If you mean Ralph Lanyon,” said Laurie, who was beginning to be rather drunk, “he’s a friend of mine, I’ve known him for years.”

“Real-ly? No. Then, my dear, do tell me, is it true that he”—here something in Laurie’s face seemed to give him pause—“well, there, fancy. Now before Alec starts to organize intellectual paper games, which can scarcely be ruled out as a possibility, we’ll tiptoe off and—”

Feeling suddenly annoyed, Laurie said, “Well, if it’s really all right about the wooden leg?”

The officer looked down and noticed the stick for the first time. Laurie watched, smugly, his struggle for equilibrium.

“Sorry,” said Ralph. “Thought I should never get away.” He lowered himself onto the middle of the divan, coolly forcing the officer to make room. So relieved was Laurie by his arrival that he scarcely noticed it had been proprietary to the point of arrogance. The officer appeared to recognize with delighted surprise someone at the other end of the room. When he had gone Ralph said, “I’d only just realized that was happening, or I’d have got here before.”

“I wasn’t nervous,” said Laurie lightly, reacting to the proprietorship without noticing it.

“I’m sorry if I interrupted anything.”

Laurie could not believe that he was expected to take this seriously. He said, “Do you remember that old red Turkish slipper you used for beating the twirps?”

“Yes,” said Ralph, still half frowning. “It was an odd one.”

“They argued that a lot. They used to try and remember, before they went in, to look if it was left or right. No one ever did.”

“Spud, did I tell you just now you were too good to be true? Stop me if you’ve heard it, because they tell me I tend to repeat myself when drunk, and I’m about one short of bloody drunk, so kindly correct any such tendency on all occasions. Thank you. I think I might have, the other now.”

“Aren’t you going to drive me back? It’s the only way I’ve got of getting there.”

Sounding suddenly stone sober, Ralph said, “Don’t worry, Spud, that will be all right.” He went off rather stiffly to the drinks table.

Just as he had got back again, someone near the door said in a suppressed voice, “Look, here’s Bim.” At this announcement Laurie saw a weasellike person, to whom he had not spoken all the evening, looking at him expectantly.

A young night-lieutenant came in. He was a small man but very handsome, with a tough, steely kind of grace. The high girlish voice with which he greeted his friends was burlesqued and perfunctory, like a carnival vizard held with a flourish a foot away from the face. You felt, and were meant to feel, that he was playing at it. He was like a little fighting-cock, brave, shining and cruel. He took one swift look around the room, saw Ralph and Laurie, and crossed over to them beautifully, like a dancer walking.

“Ralph, my poor sweet,” he crowed shrilly, “what have you got there?”

Ralph said quite quietly, “Hello, Bim.” He put down his drink and stood up.

Bim cocked his head sideways and glinted up at him. “How many times has Auntie got to tell you? You must attend to these things earlier in the evening, while your eye’s still in.”

Now we’ll see something, thought Laurie not without satisfaction.

Ralph looked at Bim quietly for a moment; then he took his arm and said, pleasantly, “Relax, my dear, you’re full up with benzedrine and five drinks behind. Come along and get loaded down to your marks, there’s a good boy.”

Laurie perceived now in all this hard glitter something feverish and taut. Alec had come up, looking unhappy. He said, “Shut up, Ralph, what he wants is bromide and twelve hours’ sleep.”

“Shut up, both of you,” said Bim gaily, shaking off Ralph’s hand. “I’ll tell you what I want when I want it. Introduce, my dear; it’s so unlike you to be the least bit gauche.”

Standing behind his shoulder, Alec gave the others a look of warning and apology. “Bim Taylor, Laurie Odell. Laurie and Ralph were at school together; they’ve just run into each other tonight after not having met for years.”

Laurie was the only person not standing, a thing that does not seem awkward till one is tied. Nothing would have induced him to struggle to his feet under those bright satiric eyes, so he lounged defiantly where he was. But something rather odd was happening; Bim had taken a step backwards, wide-eyed, and was staring at him with awe.

“But, my dears, you don’t mean this? Not the Odell?”

Laurie thought he had seldom heard a more pointless joke and didn’t even take the trouble to smile; though, considering much else that had been going on, he couldn’t see why Alec should look so embarrassed about it.

“Perhaps,” said Bim, “I should have said, ‘Not the late Odell?’ Well, better late than never, obviously.”

The feeling of a dense atmospheric pressure caused Laurie to look around. He saw that Ralph was staring silently, not at Bim but at Alec. Alec opened his mouth to speak, but didn’t say anything. There was something pent and helpless about him, though he had not dropped his eyes. Laurie supposed that he must have been gossiping to Bim on the landing before he came in. Ralph’s look of shocked contempt was a little excessive, but he could be awkward after a few drinks, as Laurie had seen already.

Bim stood looking at all three of them with a deadly kind of inquisitiveness, the intent irresponsible look a monkey gives to something it is just going to pick up and break. “Have I,” he asked, “said anything in any way out of place?”

“Not in the least,” said Ralph. Once before Laurie had heard him speak with what might have been called professional finish. It was very much more apparent now. You would have said that he hadn’t a care in the world, and that his next words would probably be, “Take your boat stations in an orderly manner, please. There is plenty of room in the boats for everyone.”

In fact, however, he said, “I think you had better get drunk, Bim. Come along and I’ll fix you one of my specials.”

“We’ll all get drunk in a minute,” said Bim, looking around with a flashing smile. “But, darlings, if you think I’m going anywhere before I’ve got the true story of this romantic Odyssey, you must be mad.” He flicked out a heavy silk handkerchief with a monogram; a gold and platinum identity bracelet caught the light. “It is the Odyssey, isn’t it? I went to such a ropy school, my dear,” he confided to Laurie. “Free expression and no classics, you’d have hated it. Is it the Odyssey? The one where this silly boy goes away for about twenty years, and when he appears again he’s so dreadfully gone off that no one knows him except the nurse who … oh, excuse me, perhaps we’d better scrub that bit. And the dog took one look, didn’t he, and died of shock. And all this while, the poor queen has been knitting and knitting away madly in the bedroom, dropping stitches left and right, with suitors camping and screaming all over the house.” He smiled at them ingenuously, like a stage undergraduate. “Or is it Shakespeare I’m thinking of all the time?”

Laurie swung himself up on his feet. On the spur of the moment he found a new technique for doing it; it was rather painful, but it looked smooth. With intense pleasure he found himself three inches taller than Bim.

“No,” he said. “It’s the Odyssey all right. It’s the one where the man comes back from the war and finds the flash boys on his pitch, and runs them out.”

“Your sentiments do you credit,” said Bim raising his eyebrows.

Laurie listened to the internal echo of his own words with incredulous horror. Whatever would Ralph …

“Now, you two,” said Sandy suddenly. “Paddy-paws, paddy-paws, claws in.” A kind of pepper-cloud of facetiousness was flung on them from all sides. It brought Laurie very thoroughly down to earth. He could feel himself shaking with mingled anger, strain, and fatigue; and in jumping up he had wrenched his knee. Stirred by Sandy, the group was changing and breaking up around him. He felt a hard grip on his elbow and, turning, found Ralph saying something to him with anxious insistence; but he had missed it, and now Ralph had vanished in the crowd.

Laurie sat down again, feeling deadly tired. This was his first night out of hospital for months. Looking at his watch he saw that it was after ten; even with a pass he would still have been late. He had better ask Alec where the nearest telephone was; but Alec was talking to Sandy in a corner and it looked as though they were having words. The room was full of new faces; there were some furtive slippings-out, and self-conscious reappearances. Longing to be gone, he lit a cigarette and snatched a few minutes’ awkward rest, propped against the wall.

The divan sagged down. He turned to find Alec beside him.

“Laurie, I’m awfully sorry. Do forgive us all. I promised Ralph I’d look after you specially while he was gone.”

“Gone?” said Laurie. He looked around. No, of course, he hadn’t seen Ralph for some minutes now.

“He won’t be long. He’s just taking Bim home.”

Laurie drew in his breath sharply. He reached down to the floor, and felt for his stick.

“I don’t think I’ll wait, thanks very much.”

“When I say home, I only mean to a friend of his who’ll look after him and give him a bed. Ralph’ll probably be back in about fifteen minutes. It’s not far.”

“Thanks,” said Laurie, “but I won’t wait.”

“But what about—”

“It’s all right, I can get a car.”

He could sleep in a shelter somewhere, and get a bus in the morning. He’d have his passes stopped for a month; but, he thought bitterly, there wouldn’t be much hardship in that.

“I do wish you wouldn’t,” said Alec. He sat curled up on the divan looking rather charming and sensitive, and just a little exploiting it. “You see, there’s been a slight misunderstanding between Ralph and me just recently, which it won’t be easy for me to clear up; I don’t want him upset any more if I can help it.”

“It doesn’t matter in any case. It’s been a lovely party; thank you both for asking me.”

He started to get up. Alec reached out a surprisingly firm hand and quietly pulled him back.

“The thing about all that was, Bim had just about got to the end, and Ralph happened to be the only person who could do anything with him.”

Laurie thought of a good answer to this; but something gave him pause, and he didn’t say it.

“It’s a shame you couldn’t have met Bim a few months ago; well, even a few weeks. He was light relief, you know. Pure Restoration comedy. I don’t know how long it is since he averaged more than two or three hours’ sleep out of the twenty-four, he’s stopped talking about it; they’re not supposed to let on how far under strength they are. As a matter of fact, I think Bim’s one of two or three people who are still alive of the original squadron a few months back. I’ve no idea how long a break they’ve given him now, but I do know it takes a lot of sedative to cancel out a week’s benzedrine, especially if you’ve forgotten how to give it the chance. He can’t go on much longer. It’s too bad you had to meet him just tonight.”

“I shouldn’t have taken any notice.”

“Oh, my dear, it was just what he was after. If you hadn’t played I think he’d have collapsed like a house of cards, and I’d have hated that. He’s had a bit of a thing about Ralph for quite a while, but Ralph’s always managed to laugh it off successfully, up till tonight.”

“Oh,” said Laurie. “I see.”

“I was sure you would. Just a minute.” He got up and took a plate of sandwiches from Sandy, who looked rather sulky about it. “Do have something to eat; I’m going to. Sandy’ll cope with the rabble. How long have you been discharged from hospital, by the way? There was such a babel going on when Sandy told me.”

“It’ll be another week or two, I expect.”

“Oh, God. No wonder Ralph … I thought you were looking tired. What will they do to you when you get back?”

“Oh, nothing much. First offense. I feel fine. I think, you know, that probably I ought to be going. If you’d just tell Ralph that I’m sorry I couldn’t wait.”

“If it’s a matter of time, it’ll be quicker to wait for him. He can’t be long.” He bit into a sandwich, opened it to look inside, and stuck it together again. “I wonder what I put in that one, it’s rather good. In case I didn’t make this clear, there isn’t the slightest reason why Ralph should take any responsibility for Bim, except that he’s a person whom responsibility always seems to stick to.”

“I suppose he always was.”

“It was rather bad luck, his getting beached. Especially as it was a matter of inches, literally. He lost just half a finger too many. Two and a half instead of two. With two he’d probably have got back on the active list again.” He opened another sandwich. “A good deal seems to have happened to Ralph at Dunkirk, one way and another.”

Just then Sandy came up and said tartly, “Alec, if you could possibly tear yourself away for a moment, Peter and Theo want to say goodbye.”

Alec said, with pointed friendliness, “Just a moment, Laurie; I’ll be right back.” He went and saw off the people who were leaving; immediately after, Laurie saw him get Sandy in a corner and give him what looked like a quiet but concentrated dressing-down. When Sandy began to argue, he silenced him with a look and turned away.

“I’ve brought you a drink,” said Alec, returning. “Don’t take any notice of Sandy; he gets little turns, but they don’t mean a thing.”

Laurie took the unknown mixture and tasted it. It was smooth on the palate and, he guessed, concealed a ferocious kick; but it made him feel, for the moment, better. Alec said, “It’s what Ralph calls his special.”

“You were going to tell me something. I can’t remember what it was now. About Ralph at Dunkirk, or something.”

“Oh, yes. Well, on second thoughts, I can’t remember what it was either.”

“Just as you like.”

“Don’t be like that about it. It’s just—oh, well, nothing, except that Ralph’s got a funny idea about me this evening and it seems rather a moment not to add to it. You see, to give you a slightly more intelligible angle on all this, perhaps I ought to explain that Ralph and I at one time saw a good deal more of each other than we do now.”

“Yes, he told me.”

Alec looked at him without annoyance and said, “Yes, of course. So you’ll see how it is that I might know one or two things about Ralph which at the time he told them to me might seem in some degree to be my concern, and which afterwards one would regard as, well, privileged.”

“Yes,” said Laurie hazily. “Yes, quite.” He could feel the potion dissolving his fatigue into a loose-limbed relaxation. He thought that Alec had a pleasant, restful voice.

“So just now my name’s mud, which isn’t enjoyable, especially as I can do damn-all about it; but I mind more about Ralph, really. Not that I’m anything much now, of course; it’s just that so many of Ralph’s things have gone, if you understand me.”

“What did you put in this drink?”

“Oh. Oh, yes, of course. Don’t mind me, just drop off when you feel like it.”

“No, stay here and talk. I like it. Only Sandy doesn’t like it. You know about that?”

“Yes, I know about that. It’s not good for him to be let get away with it. He’ll be all right. What makes me cross about people like Ralph is the way everyone uses them. Their life gets like one of those ham spy films where they brief the agent and say, ‘But remember, one slip and you’re on your own.’ Take school. I went to a conventional public school and by firmly eluding all responsibility, I managed to get along nicely. Really, it makes me feel quite indignant when I think what must have been put on Ralph; and then, when the crack-up happened, no one was even sorry for him. Except you, of course.”

“Sorry for him?” Laurie opened his eyes wide; for a moment he struggled awake; he stared at Alec. “I wasn’t sorry for him.”

Alec looked at him. “I see,” he said slowly. “Oh, God, yes, now I see everything.”

“I don’t know what you mean.” He listened to the drag of his own voice and thought, No doubt about that. Drunk. Stinking.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Alec. “Let it go. No one but a lunatic would shove his oar in here, anyway.”

“I think we’re both a little bit tight. I am.”

“Oh, well, then we know where we are, don’t we? In vino veritas: alarmingly true, usually, don’t you find? It’s nice to know you make such a candid and sympathetic drunk; it’s reassuring, as far as it goes. Were you very surprised to find that Ralph remembered you after all?”

“He’s got a very good memory. Knew everyone’s name, all the little twirps, first day of term, everyone.”

“Listen, Laurie. Are you listening?”

“Sorry, Alec. You shouldn’t have put all that in this drink.”

“Oh, well. Can you see Sandy anywhere about?”

“No. Not here. Shall we look?”

“No, he’s just being naughty. We must leave him a bit longer or he’ll get spoilt. Everyone seems quite happy.” The few guests who were left seemed, indeed, to be sufficiently entertaining one another. “Do you think it funny that a person who’s been attracted by Ralph should also be attracted by Sandy? Or do you think I’m just not particular, as they say?”

“No, I think you’re nice. Funny, but really very nice.”

“Too kind, as Florence Nightingale said to Edward the Seventh. Much too kind, I’m afraid. T. E. Lawrence has a rather sad passage about ‘complex men who know how sacrifice uplifts the redeemer and casts down the bought.’ He doesn’t use the word ‘complex’ flatteringly, and neither do I. Ralph’s tragedy is that he’s retained through everything a curious innocence about it. I suppose when at last he loses that, the tragedy will be complete.”

“Where is he?”

“Oh, hello. I thought you passed out minutes ago. Ralph won’t be long.”

“Is he all right? You said he’s in a spot. You said then—tell me again. Can I do something? Where is he?”

“Not now. Take it easy. He’ll be on his way back by this time.”

“No, tell me, please, if I can do something. I want to know.”

“Not for the moment. It’s a pity, as things are, he takes such a functional view of his own existence. He isn’t even scrapping himself tragically; just by fits and starts of irritation, like throwing out junk you don’t see a use for. I don’t suppose, really, there was ever a time when I could have done much about it. Complex man with his mean little instinct of self-preservation. He could get plenty of full-time passengers, God knows, but he despises them. No, I see now the only kind of person who’d offer him some hope of happiness would be someone up to his own strength with the continual patience to go on concealing it. Or, of course, the modesty not to know it, which would mean an innocence comparable in its way with his own.”

Laurie, who disliked to feel himself slipping, had been determined to follow every word of this. He opened his heavy eyes.

“Like Bunny?” he said.

“What?”

“This friend of his. Bunny, isn’t it, he said?”

“Oh, dear God. Make yourself comfortable, my dear. Lie down properly and put your feet up; that’s the way. I’m not going to bother you any more.”

“I’m not so sleepy. When Ralph comes back, if he’s in a fix you’ve got to wake me. No good keep talking about he’s in trouble, and not do anything. Ralph was very good to me.”

“Was he? Laurie. Laurie. Just a minute. It doesn’t matter about the rest if you just listen to this. Do you hear?”

“Yes?” Laurie half sat up, rubbing an arm smarting from Alec’s wiry strength. “Yes, I can hear. What is it?”

“Stick around Ralph for a bit. Will you? You, not anyone else. That’s all. Just stick around.”

“That’s all right. I won’t go away. I’ll wait for him here if it takes all night.”

Alec looked down at him for a moment, shrugged his shoulders, got up and went over to the group by the fire. Someone said, “Sandy seems to have vanished lately. Is all well?”

“Oh, yes; he’s making coffee or something, I expect.”

“Well, you were having a rather cozy get-together.”

“That? I was just carrying out an experiment in sleep-suggestion. They do it in Brave New World, with tiny little radios under the pillows.”

“I think I should check your results a good long way from Sandy, if I were you. And just possibly from Ralph Lanyon—or am I letting my imagination run away with me?”

Laurie opened his eyes, vaguely. By some biochemical trick, now that he was free to sleep he found that he couldn’t. He hung in a suspended half-consciousness. Alec’s cocktail couldn’t be wearing off so soon; he discovered that he hadn’t even finished it. It occurred to him that the drug Ralph had given him, earlier, had been the potent force; that it was passing its peak, and that though he was both torpid and rather drunk, he was neither to the point of incapacity. He would get up as soon as Ralph came back, and give them all a surprise. Ralph would …

The door opened. Ralph looked in and, ignoring everyone else in the room, said, “Alec. Can you come for a minute?”

Laurie sat up. He felt dizzy and swayed a little as he got to his feet; but this did not affect at all the strange sharpness which had happened in his mind, like the sudden crystallization of a fluid, as soon as he heard Ralph’s voice. Out of all the known and unknown possibilities, he guessed at once what kind of emergency this was.

He was still drunk enough to have lost certain social inhibitions. The discreet murmur of the residual guests (by now there were only four), and their careful noninterference, infected him with no hesitation. Implanted in his mind, at some nonrational level, was the idea that Ralph was in a fix and needed him. He followed Alec out to the landing.

The party had been discreetly lit with a couple of shaded table lamps; by contrast, the naked light from the open door of the bathroom seared the eyes. Ralph ran down the stairs with the brisk neatness of a seaman; Alec holding the banisters swung down in strides and was just behind him. Laurie, arriving last, found them both kneeling over Sandy, who was lying on the bath mat with a dressing-gown thrown over his naked body. He was groaning, and showing the whites of his eyes. Round his left wrist was a tourniquet made of a folded handkerchief, a toothbrush, and a strip torn from a towel. The bath was half full of crimson water.

Alec said nothing. With a feverish but instinctively exact movement, he took Sandy’s other wrist and felt the pulse.

Ralph said, “He’s all right. I left the bath so that you could see how much he’s lost. You can tell in water better than I can.”

Alec looked up. “Not more than two pints at the most, I should think. Pulse about ninety-six. Sandy!”

Sandy groaned, and turned his face away.

Speaking across him as though he were an inanimate object Ralph said, “I heard him in here, doing that, as I came upstairs. The door wasn’t locked.”

Sandy rolled over toward Alec again. “Let me alone,” he said in a dying voice. “I want to finish it. Go away.” Ralph slapped him lightly across the face and said, “Shut up.”

“Please, Ralph,” said Alec, “not now. He’s feeling ill.”

“He’s not feeling half as ill as I’d like to make him.”

“Go away,” said Sandy. “Go away.”

Laurie felt sorry for Alec but his sympathies were with Ralph. There was no doubt that Sandy looked a disgusting spectacle, with his pale damp face, his head lolling on the bath mat, his watery eyes upturned. He had thrown off the dressing-gown as he moved, and Ralph with a gesture of distaste twitched it back again. The movement caught Laurie’s eye. Suddenly he realized Ralph had taken off his glove; it was the left hand Laurie was looking at.

He had seen so much in hospital that if it had been displayed to him deliberately, in a moment when he had been thinking about it, he would have felt scarcely a qualm except of sympathy; but now, he felt a catch in his stomach. Not only the two last fingers were missing and half the second, but the outermost bone of the hand had gone too, taking with it the margin of the palm and narrowing it by an inch. The effect was strange and clawlike; at the edge, and at the stumps of the fingers, the recently healed flesh was still red and mauve. Ralph was balanced on his heels, his good hand holding the edge of the bath; and it came back to Laurie that he had had beautiful hands, with which he had never made an affected or exhibiting movement; neither coarse nor overfine, full of intelligence and adaptable strength. The one that was left was still the same.

Just as if Laurie had spoken aloud, Ralph’s head came up and their eyes met. He said coolly, “Shut the door, Spud.”

At the sound of Laurie’s name Sandy squirmed around toward Alec, moaning.

“Alec—don’t bring him here. Oh, how could you? No no, it’s too much.”

“Shut up,” said Ralph. “I’ll bring the police if you don’t behave.”

Laurie said, “I’m sorry. I’d better clear out.”

“Don’t go, Spud,” said Ralph. “I might want you.” He jerked the chain of the bath-plug and the water started to gurgle out. Suddenly he said in an urgent undertone, “Bolt the door. Don’t make a row about it.”

Laurie slid the bolt home softly. Next moment the handle turned, persistently, but in a refined, rather furtive way. Laurie knew at once that a woman was doing it. It hadn’t struck him before that in an unconverted house the bathroom might be shared. Ralph slammed his right hand flat over Sandy’s mouth, cleared his throat raspingly, and gave a loud, aggressively masculine cough. The door-handle went dead, and a fading creak sounded on the stairs.

“That would have been pretty,” Ralph said. He removed his hand from Sandy’s face and added, “All right, you can start groaning again now.”

“We’ll have to get him out of this,” said Alec.

“You’ve got something there. Here, you.” He shook Sandy’s shoulder. “Get up, damn you. You’ve got to move.”

“Don’t, Ralph.” Alec knelt down beside Sandy and put an arm around his shoulders. “Look, old dear, you’ll get pneumonia lying here all wet on the floor. You’ve got to let us get you to bed. Try and sit up, come on.”

There was certainly a good deal of water about. Laurie noticed for the first time—the darkness of the navy cloth had disguised it—that Ralph’s uniform was soaking wet from shoulder to knee. It couldn’t have been a light job to heave Sandy unaided out of the bath; Laurie was struck forcibly with this while they were trying to persuade the patient onto his feet. Clammy, slippery, and repulsive to the touch, he kept sliding through their hands like a fish and subsiding on the mat again. Laurie saw Ralph open his mouth, shut it after a glance at Alec, and swear to himself soundlessly.

“Sandy,” said Alec. He was panting with exertion; his face looked white and strained. “Sandy, try. Why can’t you get up? What is it?”

“I’m going to die,” said Sandy. “Oh, God, I’m going to die.” He rolled over and was violently sick on the bath mat.

Ralph let go of him and stood up. Sitting back against the edge of the bath, with his hands in his pockets, he stared down at Sandy silently; then he looked at Alec. Laurie, who was well sobered up by now, had a powerful consciousness that he shouldn’t be there, and looked behind the bath for a floorcloth. The smell of steam, blood, vomit, and stale drink was overwhelming.

The silent conversation behind his back ended, or perhaps was cut off by the sounds Sandy was making. Laurie was in time to see Alec taking his pulse again. His face had a blotchy, blue-and-yellow look. Ralph said, unemotionally, “He can’t possibly have taken anything, as well, I suppose?”

Alec said, “Sandy, have you? Sandy! Sandy, you must tell us. Sandy—please.”

Sandy, stark naked after the recent struggle, heaved himself into a Dying Gladiator pose. “What do you care? I shan’t tell you.” He collapsed again.

“Sandy. Listen to me—”

“No,” said Ralph. He pushed Alec on one side, not unkindly but with finality. “Listen to me. How much more responsibility do you expect Alec to take for you, you fish-bellied, blackmailing little crap? You’re talking to me now. Are you going to tell us what you’ve taken, or shall I send Spud here to phone the hospital? Well? Take your choice.”

Closing his eyes, Sandy murmured, “Only—aspirin. What there was in the bottle.”

Ralph looked at Alec. “How much?”

“Not more than a dozen tablets. He must have brought most of it up.”

It seemed, indeed, that there was no more to come. They rolled Sandy’s limp form off the bath mat, and Laurie swilled it under the tap. Ralph said, “Better give him a tot, I suppose?”

“Not if he’s bleeding much. I’ll have a look.” Alec untwisted the toothbrush from the tourniquet. “Good Lord, Ralph, you put this on tight enough.”

“It’s supposed to be a tourniquet. Not a bangle.”

“My hand’s gone dead,” moaned Sandy, reviving a little and working his fingers about. A dark red, sluggish bleeding at once started again. Alec stared at the razor cut, drawing his brows together, before he pressed back the pad and put the bandage on.

Ralph said, “Don’t tell me, I know. It needs stitching.”

“Yes,” said Alec. His examination of the wound had been confident and decisive; now suddenly he looked up at Ralph, worried to rags, his resources scattered, a civilized mind put out of gear by an uncivilized situation. “What on earth shall we do, Ralph? I’ve got nothing here.”

“I’ll drive you down to the hospital. You can pick the things up there, surely. Spud’ll cope with everything here all right; won’t you, Spud?”

He smiled at Laurie, briefly. More than anything till now, the smile evoked a host of memories. For that casual accolade, cutthroat little competitions, all the shrewder for being tacit and undiscussed, had gone on all over the School. It looked strange in this hole-and-corner, squalid setting, touched still as it was with confident assumptions and open skies.

“Of course I will.”

Ralph smiled again, which hadn’t happened at school, and said, “Right. Let’s heave him into bed and get going.”

Alec, however, looked more worried than ever. “The trouble about the hospital is, I might get stuck there.”

“How d’you mean, stuck?”

“If the warning goes. I”—he looked down at Sandy, wretchedly—“I’m supposed to be on a casualty team. If there was a raid. Often there’s nothing to do, but if I were in the place I couldn’t walk out of it.” He reached for the dressing-gown and tucked it around Sandy, who was now shivering violently.

Ralph said expressionlessly, “He’s on call too, I suppose?”

Alec looked up at him. “Ralph. Have a heart.”

“Sorry,” said Ralph. Again Laurie felt that he shouldn’t be there.

“Look,” he said, “before we start getting him out, would you like anything done about the people upstairs? We must have been in here quite a while.”

“About eight minutes. Yes, Spud, go and get rid of them, will you?”

As he pulled himself upstairs on the banisters, Laurie found himself foolishly pleased by the fact that Ralph had said simply, “Get rid of them” without offering any directions.

To the guests he offered Alec’s apologies: Sandy had passed out and at first they had thought he was just tight, but now Alec had taken his temperature, which was a hundred and two. Alec hoped it was only, influenza, but there was a lot of diphtheria about. It was all rather worrying. Luckily the lavatory was well separated from the bathroom and they all knew the way to it.

Ralph and Alec had got Sandy sitting on the bathroom stool, where he looked like a groggy boxer at the ninth round.

“All clear,” Laurie said.

“What did you tell them?” Alec’s voice was getting increasingly overkeyed. It was Ralph who said, “Good show.”

When Sandy had been maneuvered into the bedroom, Laurie went back to clean the bathroom up. On the floor, under the stool, he found Ralph’s glove, the padding round and firm, the empty part defining the shape of the truncated hand. He laid it where it had fallen, touching it kindly.

Upstairs they had got Sandy into bed, where he was quietly weeping and holding Alec’s hand. Ralph was sitting on the dressing-table smoking, and Alec was saying to him, “But what will you say?”

Ralph drew deeply and irritably on his cigarette. “I shall tell him the truth, naturally. Omitting names, and a few other things.”

“But, Ralph, supposing he—”

“He’s got a right to know he’s not being mixed up in an assault case. Take it or leave it, Alec. If you’d rather I drove you to the hospital you’ve only to say so.”

“All right,” said Alec, “if you really think so.”

“Good enough,” said Ralph. He looked up suddenly. “Oh, there you are, Spud. What happened to you, are you all right?”

“Yes, of course. I’ve been removing clues in the bathroom.”

“This boy thinks of everything. Did I leave a glove there?”

“I didn’t see one.”

While Ralph was fetching it, Laurie turned to Alec to ask if there was anything he could do. At the sound of his voice Sandy’s sobs redoubled.

Pretending not to notice this, Alec said, “No, thanks, Laurie. You’ve been awfully good about all this. I feel—” He looked down at Sandy, who seemed about to have a fit of hysterics, and made a helpless ashamed little gesture. In a changed brisk voice he said, “Ralph thinks the naval surgeon at his Station will let him have some needles and gut without being too difficult. He’s just going off to see.”

“Oh, good,” said Laurie vaguely. He had stopped wondering when he would get back to his own hospital, or what would happen to him. It became evident to him now that this question was distressing Alec to a point where he couldn’t talk about it. Laurie wanted to say it was all right and that he mustn’t worry; but the presence of Sandy, the original host, was inhibiting. In a minute or so, Laurie would be left alone in the flat with the two of them. Just then, like an answer to prayer, Ralph appeared in the doorway fastening his glove. Laurie stepped forward.

“Can I come with you?”

“Yes,” said Ralph. His face was in shadow and Laurie thought how this gave his eyes a grave withdrawn look. “Yes, Spud, do.”

On the landing he picked up his cap and his blue stormcoat and said, “It’s cold tonight. Haven’t you anything warm?”

“I lost it in the wash, like King John. It’s not that cold, anyway.”

“Why the army doesn’t mutiny I never know. Here, Alec, I’m borrowing your burberry and a scarf for Spud. I’ll bring them back.” He shut the bedroom door with a relieved kind of finality. “And now, before we do anything else, what’s the telephone number of your hospital and who do I ask for?”

Laurie told him. Ralph said, “I’ll be five minutes. Wait for me in here.” Laurie wandered obediently into the sitting room. It had the usual debauched look of rooms after parties, and he remembered that Alec would have all this to cope with alone. He collected the glasses, found the kitchen, and washed them in the sink.

Ralph’s voice behind him said, “For Christ’s sake, Spud, haven’t you had enough tonight? Leave that and come on. I’ve fixed the nurse.”

“How on earth did you do that?”

“She hadn’t reported you yet. It seems the Day Sister had the evening off and no one else was sure if you had a pass. The situation now is that I should have had you back in time, but my car was involved in an accident and I’ve been held up making statements to the police. You weren’t in the accident, it was before I arrived, so you needn’t know much about it. Come on, let’s go.”

Outside he had a big battered sports car, belonging to a year when a resemblance to racing cars—a thick leather strap around the bonnet, the extrusion of copper pipes—was still considered smart. In uncertain starlight they fiddled with its rickety and obstructive hood, nipped their fingers, swore, said it wasn’t as cold as all that, and gave it up. Ralph warmed up the engine with a noise that outraged the quiet street; the car started, they were away. Now for the first time abruptly conscious of being alone, charged with the events of the evening and no longer able to diffuse themselves in activity or among other people, they were isolated together at the fixed center of the huge, swiftly running night.

For what seemed a long time they drove in silence. Ralph’s two gloved hands, resting easily on the wheel, looked like the hands of any other driver; it was only when he had to change the gear, which was worn and cranky, that Laurie felt in the arm and shoulder beside him the tension of concealed strain.

“Warm enough, Spud?”

“Fine.”

They drove on. Somewhere a clock struck the last quarter before midnight.

Ralph said, “I suppose I got there about seven-thirty. Four hours.”

They had come to a bridge over the river. The ground was high here, the river ran between cliffs. Laurie thought how in peacetime, from here, the town would have lain below them like a starry sky. Now, as the bridge gave gently on its chains in the wind that swept along the gorge, there was only a darkling sense of loneliness and height. Ralph showed a pass to a cloaked shadow. It was like a transit of the Styx.

The road climbed again, through old dark beechwoods. Ralph said out of a long silence, with a quiet and somehow touching simplicity, “What a way to have met.”

Threading the long vault of black trees under a slaty glimmer of sky, Laurie felt an almost astral detachment. “Yes,” he said, “it was strange. It was like having been lost in a surrealist picture, eyes with iron spikes growing out of them, and dead horses in Paris hats. All done very bright and sharp and looking almost solid. Then something real appears, and it all peels off like wet paper.”

Ralph seemed to pause over this for some minutes. “Did it really seem as unlikely to you as that?”

“It does now.” He was in a vivid, dreamlike stage of fatigue.

Ralph flipped a cigarette-case onto the seat between them. “Light one for me too, will you?”

Laurie lit two together as he had seen other people do sometimes. When Ralph took it without thanking him it didn’t seem brusque, but as if they had been doing this for years.

“In some ways,” Ralph said, “it was like meeting during an action. You come out knowing each other a lot too well to begin at the beginning.” He paused to settle his cigarette. “And yet, not well enough.”

Laurie said sleepily, “So one has to go back or go on.”

“I’m not good on reversing.”

As if to give an unmeant point to his words, they had come to a steep downgrade for which he had to put the car in second. Laurie felt the effort being made to conceal effort, and guessed, now, that he had not been driving again for long and that the gear-lever still hurt his hand. It occurred to Laurie that a large number of drivers in this situation would have let themselves be tempted to go down on the footbrake; but Ralph had always hated anything sloppy.

He said nothing more till he had changed up again, then, as if continuing a quite different conversation: “I think what gets me down most about Sandy is his stupidity. He’s lived a year with Alec and still hasn’t cottoned on to his—his fanatical claustrophobia. Anyone who tries to put a screw on Alec is playing about with something dangerous. I don’t know how far Alec realizes that himself.” He stopped talking while he crossed a main road and added, “Some things about him don’t alter, much as he’s changed.”

The bitterness he had kept out of his voice seemed to thread itself under Laurie’s skin. Tentatively he said, “He seemed to be worried about something you thought he’d done and he thought he hadn’t. I’m afraid I was rather drunk at the time; I don’t think he said what it was.”

“He knows what he’s done. It’s not worth talking about.” One should have remembered, Laurie thought, that knack of formidable silence. There must however have been a difference of some kind, or Laurie certainly wouldn’t have felt that it devolved upon him to break it. He said, “This will have taught Sandy a lesson, anyway.”

As if nothing had happened Ralph said, “That’s what I thought the first time. Oh, yes, and he gave Alec his solemn word of honor not to do it again.”

“What did he do then?”

“Phenacetin, or veganin, or something like that. About half the fatal dose. Alec didn’t know that, of course. He was all alone that time, laboring away with emetics and things and nearly going mental. He goes through torments of remorse afterwards. Alec, I mean; not Sandy, of course.”

“You know, anyone could have fainted in that bath and been drowned.”

“I think that started to occur to him when he heard me passing the door. It was lucky I did—I suppose. I really don’t think one should be expected to meet his friends; if Alec wants to put up with them himself, it’s his business. I never go there now without wondering whether they’ll start turning up in drag.”

“In what?” asked Laurie curiously.

He felt that in the near-darkness Ralph turned his head with an almost startled look; he repeated himself, however, without comment.

“Yes, I heard you before, but what does it mean?”

Ralph said, in a slight clear voice which seemed surrounded by a wide margin of stillness, “Don’t you know what it means?”

With one of those little jets of irritability which weariness releases, Laurie said, “If I did I wouldn’t ask you.”

“It means dressed as women.” They had come out of the trees upon a straight open stretch between wire fences. Laurie could see easily, with eyes accommodated now to the night, Ralph’s face looking ahead with an intent frown at the pale stream of road being swallowed by the car. “Spuddy.”

“Yes?”

“What do you know?”

“I know about myself.”

“Well?” Laurie didn’t answer at once, not from reluctance but because he was tired and it took time to think. Ralph said, deliberately, “If you know about yourself, presumably you know about at least one other person.”

“There was a man at Oxford. It was all rather silly. He looked a bit like one of the less forceful portraits of Byron. It wasn’t so much he himself who attracted me, though up to a point he did. There are always certain people at Oxford who seem to hold a key. I didn’t know what I expected he’d let me into, Newstead Abbey by moonlight or something. He kept telling me I was queer, and I’d never heard it called that before and didn’t like it. The word, I mean. Shutting you away, somehow; roping you off with a lot of people you don’t feel much in common with, half of whom hate the other half anyway, and just keep together so that they can lean up against each other for support. I don’t think I’ve ever tried to put all this into words before; am I talking nonsense?”

With smothered violence Ralph said, “Christ Almighty, no.”

“I started to meet his friends. I’d imagined a lot of rather exquisite people it would be hard work getting to know; but they were all horribly eager, and it wasn’t because they liked me really, I could tell that. It was more like—have you read a story by Wells called The Country of the Blind?”

“Spuddy, there always was something a bit terrifying about you. Well, don’t stop, go on.”

“That’s all. He asked me to a party and I ran away in the middle, and he took it rather personally, so that was that.”

“That was that for how long?”

“Well, it was at the end of the summer term, and the war started in the vac.”

“Some types seem to have found the war their great opportunity.”

“It depends what you’re looking for, I suppose. Anyway, learning to soldier was a bit distracting.”

Ralph didn’t speak for what seemed like some minutes. Then he said, “That’ll teach you to chuck the O.T.C.,” in an almost absent voice, as though he were making conversation. After another silent interval he asked, “What about women?”

Although women represented just then an absolute nullity in Laurie’s emotions, the question itself, the lack of empressement in asking it, gave him a free and stimulated feeling; it was a relief from the bonded circle at the party, from the bars at the window and the gate on the stairs. “One,” he said.

“No good?”

“Well … I didn’t like her much as a human being.”

“D’you need to?”

“Yes, I think I do.”

“That complicates it a bit.”

Laurie began to say, “Yes, because one can hardly …” but Ralph looked too preoccupied and remote, as if a dangerous bit of road was coming. By the time he knew that it wasn’t, he too was given up to his own thoughts, which, after he had rehearsed so much of his history, were inevitably of Andrew. Here if anywhere, he thought, was someone to whom he could release the pressure of so much uncommunicated experience, who would inevitably understand. He remembered how after Charles’s party, leaning out of his window long into the night, he had thought of Ralph; though it was already years since their brief meeting, the thought had supported him in his isolation. Now there seemed nothing that could not be told; yet something silenced him. It was Andrew’s secret too. Besides, it was holy ground: he was honest enough to examine this simplicity, weigh it, and decide not to abandon it. The result was one of those compromises to which people in such a case will sometimes resort.

“When I say there was nothing after I joined the army”—he could feel Ralph almost start; he must have been miles away—“there was a time when I felt very much drawn to someone; but it was impossible from the first.”

“In what way impossible?” Ralph had turned the car onto a bad secondary road. He seemed intent on the driving and sounded a little curt.

“He told me, or as good as told me, without knowing it, that he’d no time for that sort of thing. It was obvious without telling, in any case.”

“So you let it alone?”

“Yes.”

Ralph seemed to come out of himself. With a sudden kindness he said, “It can be hell while it lasts, though, can’t it?”

Laurie didn’t answer; the assumption of transience hurt him though it was he who had implied it.

Ralph drove on in silence for a few minutes. Then, with what Laurie could feel beforehand as a decision, he said abruptly, “I was caught up once in something like that.”

“Yes?” said Laurie, after waiting some time in vain.

“He was a sub of mine. If he’d been a matelot it would have been all right; I could have put it out of my mind because I’d have bloody well had to. But he was round my neck all day. He wanted to learn everything I knew except what I wanted to teach him. Finally it settled itself in the way which, for some reason, I’d been afraid of almost from the start.”

Laurie, his mind still on his own troubles, said, “He guessed?”

“No. He was killed.”

“Oh!” said Laurie involuntarily. Ralph looked at him for a moment, then back to the road again.

“It happened just when the situation was becoming absolutely impossible. The ship was too small, we lived in each other’s pockets; I got to know his girl friend nearly as well as I knew him. Charming manners; he never gave you any excuse to brush him off. He was a highly efficient officer, he seemed to like me, he was dead keen on the ship. I tried to get him promoted away, but he was too young. I didn’t see how I was ever going to get rid of him, unless I told him why. Something had to happen. When it did, it seemed obvious that I must have made it happen—I feel it still, sometimes.”

“Yes, of course. One would know it was impossible and feel it just the same.”

“That’s a thing you never know when you’re commanding. You’ve had a hand in everything.” He laughed quickly and added, “I grew the beard round about then.”

“Some things can’t be thought about. The more you try to be honest with them, the more they lie to you. I’m only beginning to know that.”

“You know a hell of a lot, don’t you, Spud; more than you let on.”

Laurie attempted no reply. He felt haunted by untold parts of the tale, which came to him like certainties.

“Don’t make too much of it,” said Ralph, watching the road. “Believe me, it wasn’t a romantic story.”

“I know. If it had been it would have been easier, in a way.”

“Yes. That’s an odd thing for someone like you to see.”

The next thing Laurie was aware of was the squeak of the brakes.

“Sorry I can’t take you in, Spud. It’s all red tape, there’s nothing here really that wouldn’t bore German Intelligence into a coma. I’ll be as quick as I can.”

Alone in the car beside a high wall topped with wire, Laurie could hear Ralph speaking to a guard, then his feet ringing crisply into the distance, then silence. He dozed lightly, kept from sleeping by the cold. At last he heard Ralph’s voice again, with some other man’s, coming nearer, milling over the small stuff of people who work together.

“Was it all right?” he asked when Ralph came out alone.

“Yes, he let me have the whole tackle. I found him at a party so he was fairly mellow. The difficulty was getting away. Sorry I’ve been so long.”

He had had another couple of drinks at the party, Laurie thought. It was not extremely obvious, and betrayed itself chiefly in his own consciousness of it. He had become much more taciturn, and drove with elaborate precision, as if he were taking a test.

Laurie was feeling drowsy again. When the car stopped he thought at first that he had slept through to the end of the run. Then he looked around him and saw that Ralph had pulled onto a farm track just off the road.

“I’ll have to stop for a minute or two, Spud. I’m sorry.”

“What’s the matter?” He felt the tilt of the car on the rutted ground and asked, “Had a puncture?”

“No. Just one party too many. I can always tell”—he was speaking with carefully articulated distinctness—“when my reflexes get bitched up. Luckily my inhibitions stay good till a much, oh, very much later stage. Don’t give it a thought, Spud. I know when to go on again.” He pushed off his cap and slid back in the seat, his head tilted against the folded hood. “You’ve got the cigarettes.”

“Shall I light one for you?”

“Yes.”

He smoked in silence for some minutes. Laurie could think of nothing to say.

“I think from now on I shall change over to the system of Saturday night blind, sober all the week.”

“It comes cheaper, they say.”

“You make me laugh, Spud. This shocks you more than finding me mixed up with Sandy’s crowd, doesn’t it?”

“Hell, where do you think I’ve been living?”

“Falling down on an errand of mercy, m-m?”

“Oh, go on, he’s not bleeding to death.”

“All the same if he was, you might have said; why didn’t you?”

“Because I didn’t think it.”

“You see, Spud, if you will interrupt yourself without previous notice in this arbitrary and irrational manner, you must put up with a bit of disorganization.”

“What was that?”

“Don’t be unreasonable. I can’t keep saying arbitrary and irrational just to please you.”

A wash of cold sweet air stirred across them, like an eddy in water. Drawn along the meadows, a belt of mist began to appear in a milky glimmer.

The smoke of their cigarettes was growing visible, lifting almost straight into the sky. Across one of Ralph’s temples, where the tilt of his cap had let it bleach in the weather, the hair in this faint light looked silver, and his head like bronze.

“Spud, there’s no need for you to keep falling over yourself to be tactful, because it’s of no consequence, so you can just as well say. Did you really mean to do it, or not?”

“Mean to do what?”

“Oh, come. You never used to creep out of things.”

“I won’t out of this if you tell me what it is.”

“At Dunkirk. When you sent me up.”

“Of course not. I told you.”

“You looked at me when you said it.”

“In the army you somehow don’t think of seeing people you know with beards. I just thought ‘beard’ … I daresay it was partly not having died.”

“Who’s supposed to be drunk, you or me?”

“Well, the thing was that I’d felt rather bad just a while before. I expect it was just seasickness really; but I seem to remember thinking, This is it, I must let go now. Then I woke up and there was this officer with a beard. It was reaction, I think. Street-urchin sort of thing, really.”

“God, that’s funny.” He lay back laughing to himself.

“The chap lying next me thought it was funny, too.”

“That’s really all you remember?”

“Yes. What did happen, actually?”

“To see you sitting there saying, ‘What did happen?’ It’s so bloody ridiculous, I can’t tell you. Well, now, what happened, yes. I’d just had my pom-pom gunner shot. It was awkward taking the gun just then, my sub had got put out of action the trip before, but there wasn’t anyone else so I was stuck with it. I couldn’t hit the bastard, he got away. Then up comes Norris with some garbled story, would I tell them if someone was dead. I told him where to go, and then suddenly there was a lull and time on my hands, so I went over. You shouldn’t have been there really, the order was no wounded on deck, but we were full up below and we always finished up with a few odd ones. I was picking my way between them when a gingery man with a couple of black eyes seemed to grab me by the ankle. ‘ ’Ere, sir, Spud ’ere ain’t gone, is ’e? There’s a sailor ’ere keeps sayin’ ’e’s ’ad it. Don’t you let ’em put ’im overboard, sir, I swear I seen ’im breathe.’ There’s no question of doing that,’ I said, ‘in any case, on a short crossing like this.’ Then I looked to see what it was all about, and it was you. Have you got the cigarettes?”

“I shouldn’t think you’d have recognized me very easily.”

“Now that was the uncanniest thing I’ve ever seen. You were dead white, of course, and, well, here’s a thing you wouldn’t know about, but that day, when you knocked at my study door and came in, I suppose what with the awkwardness and one thing and another … Well, anyway, there you were. No, light it for me, you’ve got the lighter.

“So I felt your pulse, only I couldn’t feel anything except that you were as cold as a corpse, so I opened your tunic or whatever you call those workhouse slops the army wears now—can’t you remember any of this?”

“I expect I might have just afterwards. It’s all gone now.”

“It’s funny, that, really damned funny. I felt for your heart and it seemed I could feel something just faintly ticking over; and then you moved a bit. ‘Hello, Spud,’ I said, ‘how are you feeling?’ The next man had told me your name so he didn’t think anything of my knowing it. I think I said, ‘Hold on, Spud, we’ll get you home all right,’ or something like that. And then you opened your eyes, very deliberately, and seemed to give me a good look up and down. ‘Sorry, dearie,’ you said, smiling to yourself in a private sort of way. ‘Sorry, dearie, some other time.’ Then you turned away as if that were about enough. Famous last words.” He drew once or twice on the cigarette and added, “I heard you were dead about three weeks later.”

“Thank you for writing to me. I wish I’d had the letter.”

“There must be some reason why things happen. Something in us must touch them off. Like a magnetic mine.”

“I don’t know. I always think when you go to war you make yourself over to chance by an act of will.”

“You have a peaceful mind, Spuddy.”

“You’d be surprised.”

“Should I?” There was a long silence. Laurie could hear, deep in the field, the clumsy shifting of a sleepy horse, waking to graze. “Well, life’s full of surprises, isn’t it?” Suddenly his voice was light and hard, as it had been at the party. He sat up, stretched, put on his cap, switched the ignition on. “Let’s see how it goes now.”

They talked very little after that. Ralph’s contest with the car had developed a certain grimness. There was nothing wrong with his driving, except a persistent impression of something difficult being done for a bet, which kept Laurie on edge all the time. Because of the cold, or his fixed position in the car, or the bad springs, the ache in his knee was turning into a tight cramp. He was anxious not to bother Ralph with any of this; when he could bear it no longer, he dropped the cigarette-case on the floor as an excuse to move about. The knee had stiffened; he chose a moment when Ralph was turning a corner to try and flex it in his hands.

Ralph said, “How long has that been going on?”

“I don’t get it.”

“Don’t insult my intelligence,” said Ralph shortly. “Is it very bad?”

“No, it’s only seized up on the bearings a bit.”

“Whyever didn’t you tell me?”

“It just comes and goes again in no time. Sort of muscle spasm.”

“You bloody liar. We’ll be back in five minutes.”

He opened the throttle. Oddly enough, Laurie didn’t feel nervous. It was rather as if Ralph were driving himself as well as the car, with an eye on the defects of both.

They were back in four minutes. In the hall Laurie looked up the high well of the stairs and said, “Run up and give the things to Alec, he’ll be waiting for them. I’ll take my time.”

Ralph paused at the stair-foot. In the dim light outside there had been something young and rakish about his profile under the tilted cap. Light destroyed the illusion; he looked worn at the edges, hard and drawn. “God, he can wait another minute. It’s such a hell of a climb, Spud. Let me give you a hand.”

For the first time he looked uncertain and ineffective. Why, thought Laurie, pain twitching at the nerves of anger, why not accept the obvious fact that he couldn’t do anything, and get out of the way? Any fool must see that one couldn’t get up there with somebody staring. The mere sight of all that drive and force, poised indecisively, was oppressive; he had a feeling that at any moment Ralph would do something high-handed and insufferable, like trying to carry him. He drew back and said uncontrollably, “Oh, do get on, I can’t bear being stood over.”

“Sorry,” said Ralph. He turned and ran upstairs, brisk and straight-backed, as if he were on a companionway.

Alec had got a table set out with sterilized dishes and boiled water and Dettol, on a white cloth. It looked very professional; Laurie saw it through the open door and didn’t go in.

Just then Ralph crossed the landing from the kitchen. Each at the same moment began a strained tentative smile, which suddenly gathered kindness and relief. Ralph was going to help Alec with the suturing; he indicated this with an ironic gesture, and disappeared. Laurie lay flat on his face on one of the sitting-room divans; this posture, which always relieved the pain, was a luxury he had been looking forward to.

“Where are you, Spud?” said Ralph’s voice outside.

“Here,” said Laurie, rolling over. He guessed that Ralph was trying not to take him by surprise.

“Brought you some more dope. One more lot can’t hurt.”

Laurie took it thankfully. Soon he was sleeping, his head buried in his arms. The smell of strong coffee wove itself into his dreams.

Afterwards he had only the dimmest recollection of Ralph sitting beside him and persuading him to wake up, of getting downstairs again and into the car. He could not remember whether he saw Alec again or whether Ralph asked him the way to the hospital. Wrapped in something rough and warm he sank, as the car ran out into the country, deeper and deeper into sleep. At first his dreams were full of haste and confused emergency; but later they grew easy and idle, till at last the ivory gate opened, and the phantasms of happiness came out, like Arabian genii answering a wish. He was in bed at home; he had had a new operation on his leg, which had put everything right, and his mother was nursing him. There was some special joy in the fact of her presence, some danger past; but even the memory of what this danger had been was healed and smoothed away. When she had said good night she kissed him, very lightly but with more tenderness than she had shown him since he was a child. He was half aware that he dreamed, and was conscious of an extra happiness because, even after this fatal knowledge had touched him, he still felt the kiss as if it were real. To bring her back he began to put out his hand to her; but she had gone, and his own movement woke him. The car had stopped; beyond the shadow of the tree was the gate of the hospital. Ralph was sitting back in the driver’s seat, lighting a cigarette.

“Hello, Ralph,” said Laurie, smiling at him out of the peace he had just left.

“Hello, Spud. Here we are. Will you be all right going in, or shall I come with you?”

“No, I’ll be all right. I feel wonderful now. I’ve been sound asleep.”

“Have you? Good. Oh, I’d better take Alec’s burberry. Next time we meet perhaps it won’t be in such a madhouse. I’ll ring you up. Good night.”

The hospital lay flat in staring moonlight. As Laurie walked up the wide asphalt path between the huts, he thought that if he had been demobbed for years, and had looked in as he happened to pass, it couldn’t seem more altered and remote. He reached the ward without meeting anyone. In the corridor Nurse Sims swept down on him, and drove him with fierce whispers into the kitchen.

“No one saw you? Here, drink this while it’s hot, you look dead on your feet. To think of you breaking out like this! Don’t you dare go in the ward till you’ve changed; I’ll bring you your pajamas in the bathroom. Night Sister would kill me. When she did her first round I just threw your bed open and she thought you’d gone through. What have you been up to? No, don’t tell me, it’s written all over you. Don’t you ever think I’ll cover up for you if it happens again. And another thing. Next time you see your friend, you tell him from me that he’s a very naughty boy. He’s in the navy, he ought to know the man on the switchboard always listens in. Who drove you back here? Oh, did he? Well, I’m only surprised he didn’t come wandering in here, he seems to have cheek enough for anything. I suppose he thought he’d gone a bit too far. Well, goodness, I’d have found him a cup of cocoa or something, driving all that way this time of night. You tell him, I’m not such a sourpuss as all that.”

As he was creeping up the ward, someone whispered hoarsely, to the effect that his girl would be wanting breakfast in bed. It was Willis, making the first joke Laurie had ever heard from him which seemed inspired, on the whole, by good nature.

No one else was awake. Reg Barker lay in a patch of moonlight which seemed to eat like acid into the thin surface of his sleep, leaving him half exposed to reality; it was like seeing someone sleeping huddled in the cold. There was something unbearably childlike and vulnerable in the bareness of his unprotected face; so he must have lain while his wife looked down at him with boredom, with calculation, with sensual dreams of the new man. Charlot, the white light piercing his brain with some memory of a naked and dead sky, was whimpering in his sleep as he sometimes did, softly, like a dog by the fire. Laurie slid into bed. With a poignancy he had never felt during the half-stupefying agony on the beach, he was beset by a terrible consciousness of the world’s ever-renewed, ever-varied, never-dying pain: children and animals without hope in the present moment’s eternity; the prisoners of cruel men, the cruel terribly imprisoned in themselves; Alec watching beside Sandy; Ralph quietly struggling with the gear-lever of his last command; tomorrow’s air raid victims, the still unknown suffering of the unmeasured years of war. He heard footsteps coming, and turned on his face to hide it and to ease the ache in his leg. Then he knew they weren’t the nurse’s, and looked up into Andrew’s face.

“Andrew!” he whispered. He had forgotten there was anything to hide. To return to the innocence of their love was like returning home. He reached for Andrew’s hand as it might be for the hundredth time, as if everything had been accepted and spoken of between them.

Andrew didn’t take it away. He returned a friendly pressure, smiling in the pale light; at a loss and anxious to hide it. Why not, thought Laurie, slipping away into a lonely understanding. He had been behaving very oddly, quite unlike himself; and to someone who had had nothing he must still smell of drink.

“I’m glad you’re all right,” said Andrew softly. “We had a warning here, so I wondered.”

“You shouldn’t have worried. A funny thing happened, I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

“It was a big day for you, meeting your friend again.”

Nurse Sims must have said something, then. Suddenly he remembered saying to Andrew in the woods that he and Ralph wouldn’t know each other if they met. “What a grapevine this place is. However did you get that?”

“He gave me his name,” said Andrew, “when I answered the telephone. Sleep well; good night.”

The moonlight shifted silently. Charlot’s uneasy sleep had turned to one of his nightmares; he started to fight the bedclothes and to mutter, “Au secours!” Kept wakeful by the sound, Laurie saw again the endless interlocking chain of the world’s sorrow, and Andrew’s face, no longer secure in the secret orchard, but locked and moving with the chain.