He lay back on the pillow, the only one not running over with gossip and sensation, the odd man out.
The clink and rattle of mugs on a trolley sounded beside him. The nurse usually came around at this hour, putting water on the lockers for the night. He turned over.
“Please, Nurse …” His voice stopped. It was Andrew with the trolley.
The forms, the shadows, the colors in the ward magically regrouped and changed. The pool of light on the Sister’s table had for the first time mystery beyond its rim.
Andrew pushed the trolley up quietly. He was wearing old, white tennis shoes. The light shining sideways on his hair made it look fairer and brighter than in the day. Shadow made the structure of his face emphatic, the eyes deeper-set, the mouth firmer. He looked more resolute, and at the same time younger. When he smiled, as he did immediately he saw who it was that had spoken, it seemed to Laurie almost frighteningly dramatic and beautiful.
Whispering as everyone did after lights-out, he said, “Now I know where to find you. Did you think I was going to leave you out?” He came with a mug and stood it on the locker, pausing, his fingers around the handle.
“What are you doing here, so late?”
“I’ve just gone on night duty. General orderly.”
“But have you had any sleep?”
“Oh, one hardly would the first day.” He lingered, with a curious lack of awkwardness, like a well-mannered child who assumes that, if unwanted at present, he will be dismissed without ill-feeling. Laurie at once found his mind a helpless blank.
“What about the man next you?” Andrew said. “He’d like some water, wouldn’t he?”
“Yes, please.” In a moment he would be gone; Laurie saw “Good night” forming already on his face.
“That’s Reg Barker’s bed, we came off the beach together. Have you heard what happened tonight?”
“No.” Andrew came back easily. There was a kind of trust behind the surface attention in his face. Laurie saw suddenly that it wasn’t the too-easy trust of people to whom everything has always been kind. Thankful that whispering would hide anything odd in his voice, he told the story.
Andrew said, his eyes looking grave under their shadowy lids, “Well, if he loves her.”
“After that?” Like someone touching the edge of a sleeve by stealth, he said, “Could you?”
“I expect, you know,” said Andrew, “he only had room for just the one thing.”
It was the morning of visiting day. Walking patients sat on the edges of their beds, polishing their brass. Supplies of hospital blue had not even yet caught up with the sudden Dunkirk demand upon a stricken commissariat. Many of them had arrived in rags, some half naked, or draped in the wayside gifts of shocked civilians; and few of them had not retained from this experience some traces of a savage, primitive humiliation. Even now those who got up were often dressed partly in items of uniform taken from the dead, and Laurie had asked nobody where his trousers came from.
Matron had just arrived, and done a round. She came poking into the ward, her petticoat showing slightly, defensively frigid; she had been promoted beyond her dreams and it had been a Nessus’ shirt to her. Homesick for her little country nursing home, she peered down the line of beds, noting with dismay how many men were up and at large, rough men with rude, cruel laughter, who wrote things on walls, who talked about women, who got V.D. (but then one was able to transfer them elsewhere). She was wretched, but her career was booming.
“Sour-faced old bag,” said Reg as she disappeared.
“I suppose …” began Laurie vaguely; but the feeling of pathos he had just experienced, meeting her slightly bulging, frightened eye, defied communication. He applied himself to the job of darning Reg’s socks. “God, Reg, I can get my fist through this one. It’ll be the most awful cobble. Why the hell don’t you let me do them when they start to go?”
“Here, you leave it, I’ll wear odd ones.”
“No, I can get it together.” He had invented a kind of blanket-stitch for this purpose. “When’s she coming? First bus?”
“That’s right.” There was a tacit understanding between them that the recent breach should be admitted, but not discussed. “Your mum coming ’sarternoon?”
“That’s right,” said Laurie, trying to sound flat and unexcited.
He had been allowed to dress today, for the first time since the operation. He was getting about briskly now; the stage of transition between crutch and stick had been reached. They had measured him already for a surgical boot.
Presently he slipped out of the ward, and into the square between the huts. He stood on the dirty grass enclosed by the asphalt, sown with coarse weeds and empty cigarette-cartons; the sky shone with the warm, yet delicate and tender blue of early autumn, a huge cumulus towering in it. At this hour, toward midday, it was almost certain that Andrew would have gone to bed. There was just the faint possibility which had become the mainspring of Laurie’s morning. In the afternoon, when the whole of the night staff was sleeping, the tension relaxed; this, if Laurie would have admitted it to himself, was usually the happiest time of his day.
The usual people were coming and going in the square. Watching the traffic, Laurie got little pointers to the degree of acceptance the c.o.s had achieved. A sergeant from another ward, a lonely schoolmaster whom his wound had balked of promotion, was frankly and enjoyably chatting with the bearded Dave. A nurse stopped one of the others, to discuss briefly but amicably some current job. A private from Ward A, whom Laurie didn’t know, observing this conversation spat noisily in the grass. Another soldier offered him a rather awkward “Good morning.”
Reg was back in the ward, supervising Derek’s preparations for lunch. Derek, the little man with the licked-down mustache, had become Reg’s protégé. Willis had soon found Dave and Andrew unrewarding subjects; but this shy and earnest little creature was the ideal victim. Laurie had interfered now and again; but Reg, pricked by the memory of snobberies in his home neighborhood, had found Derek’s refinement as irritating as his name, and decided that a bit of toughening-up wouldn’t hurt him. This attitude had changed mysteriously on a day when Reg’s arm was replastered, and Derek had the tricky and painful job of cutting the old plaster off. This was done in the privacy of the bathroom, and Reg had never volunteered any information about it, except once to say to Laurie that, in his opinion, Derek’s growth had been stunted by always taking other people’s troubles too much to heart.
Thinking about these things in a general way, Laurie became aware of a thin, tinny warble, the hospital’s Imminent Danger siren. There had been no big daylight raids hereabouts, so, though officially everyone out of doors was supposed to take cover, in fact a few extra people came out to scan the sky.
Presently there was the deep contrapuntal hum of many engines together, and in the broad square of sky between the roofs the dogfight appeared: small black plane after small black plane, weaving and circling. At that distance the motion looked joyful, like a dance of gnats. Then in the fresh sky one of the Spitfires turned away out of the battle. It glided for a while, then seemed to slip sideways. Something broke off from it; it fell over and over, like a toy thrown by a child from a high window, and disappeared behind the roofs. Nobody spoke. One of the nurses, who had an Irish face, made the sign of the cross.
But the Messerschmitt which had shot down the Spitfire had been engaged at once by another. Suddenly the German plane leaked a dribble of smoke, there was a silent flash, then as the sound overtook it, the explosion. A scatter of black shards fell at leisure. The battle passed out of sight, the planes catching the sun in silvery flashes as they turned, pretty and brisk as minnows in the high clear air.