“It’s very good of you,” said Laurie, speaking his lines like a well-trained actor in an air raid. “You really shouldn’t have; a battered old thing like that could have taken another kick or two. Shall we go up to the ward, then you can get rid of it?”
His mother, he now noticed, had a record album under her arm. It raised his spirits; his imagination in a brief idyllic flight listened to Mozart with Andrew in the woods. He took it from her and saw at once that it wasn’t the one he had asked for, or even one of his own at all.
His mother said, with a defensiveness which made her sound faintly reproachful, “We didn’t bring any of your classical records, dear, they’d be sure to get scratched in a place like this; and besides, Mr. Straike said he felt certain they wouldn’t be popular with the men. And he was a chaplain in the last war, so he does know.”
Mr. Straike acknowledged this with a short modest laugh. “Something they can sing.” He spoke like a kindly uncle explaining his small nephews. “You can’t go wrong with a good chorus. Your mother and I brought ourselves up to date and made a little expedition in search of the latest.”
Laurie could see that he ought to look into the album. Managing his stick with difficulty, he succeeded in doing so. The records were, indeed, the latest song-hits. There wasn’t one of them that the Forces’ Radio hadn’t been plugging three times a day for the last month. “That’s marvellous,” he said. “Thank you so much.”
“They’re your mother’s choice,” said Mr. Straike, gallantly surrendering the credit. “I think you’ll find they make the party go better than Mozart. After all, these lads leave school at fifteen, one must temper the wind to the shorn lamb, ha-ha.”
“They want to be taken out of themselves,” said his mother, gently making everything clear.
Laurie said yes, they did, of course. The pause that followed was broken by Reg greeting Mrs. Odell as he passed with Madge on his arm.
“That’s the man I told you about, whose eyesight Laurie saved.” Once she had taken to herself an impression of this kind, no subsequent explanations ever shifted it. Laurie had long given this one up. “Is that girl his ‘young lady,’ dear? Do try and warn him not to marry her. Oh, is she? Oh, I see. Well, girls of that class are often so unfair to themselves. I expect under all that make-up she’s really quite a nice little thing.”
Laurie found a glance being shot at him from the corner of Mr. Straike’s eye. He gathered from it that his mother was a pure, generous woman, while he and Mr. Straike were men of the world making their own little reservations. As soon as he had looked away from this glance without response, Laurie knew that a line had been crossed. Some events are crucial from their very slightness; because circumstances have used no force on them, they are unequivocally what they are, test-tube reactions of personality. Between Laurie and Mr. Straike there began to weave the first fine filaments of a dislike mutually known.
As they walked up the path to the wards, Mr. Straike kept them entertained with a humorous account of how they used to detect malingerers in the base hospitals of Flanders in 1916.
The patients’ tea was being served as they arrived. Lacking transport there was nowhere else to go but here. Laurie guessed by now that his mother had foreseen Mr. Straike’s chivalrous insistence on paying the car fare, which ordinarily she and Laurie would have shared together. (He wouldn’t consider it really necessary, either, and through all his protestations this would somehow appear.) Now, the trolley arriving, both the others insisted that Laurie should not miss his tea. He assured them he wasn’t hungry, knowing the inflexible rule against treating visitors; there was no getting around it, since there were only just enough cups for the patients themselves.
“Nonsense,” said Mr. Straike bluffly. “You take everything that’s going, my boy, it’s the only way in the army, I know, ha-ha. Just have a word with the nurse, and tell her to rustle up a cup for your mother too. Tell her she’s come a long way. She’ll understand.”
Laboriously, Laurie explained about the crockery. Mrs. Odell looked understanding, Mr. Straike surprised and reserved. Laurie felt forced to add that half these people had come from the other side of England, and it would cause hurt feelings if exceptions were made. Everyone agreed to this, leaving Laurie with a damp sense of ineffectuality. He offered his mother a drink from his own cup, the accepted practice, and collected it from her, firmly, before she could suggest passing it on. Embarrassment, damp and penetrating as a mountain mist, settled upon the party.
Laurie had always known in his inmost heart that there were times when, if his mother couldn’t have her cake and eat it, she would convince herself that someone else must be to blame. A bitter conviction told him that this time it wouldn’t be Mr. Straike.
Conversation, however, had to go on. Mrs. Odell had brought as usual the local gossip for Laurie’s amusement. She enjoyed being very slightly shocked by his comments and making womanly, reproving little exclamations. Laurie found Mr. Straike’s reaction to this as exactly predictable as if they had known one another for years; so he listened with Sunday-school brightness, saying, “No, really?” from time to time. The footnotes were provided by Mr. Straike. It seemed to Laurie, who was admittedly prejudiced, that their manly humor was not of the kind that is inspired by good nature.
For the first time, the clock’s approach to his mother’s hour of departure was a signal of relief. At the last moment Mr. Straike withdrew, as he put it, to “explore the place.” Laurie had almost risen to show him the way, but suddenly saw in his face a conscious tact. Laurie and his mother were being left alone to exchange their little confidences. Their awareness of this, combined with feelings, for which there would be no time to find words, of mutual reproach and remorse, made this the most clammily tongue-tied interval of all.
Laurie watched his mother gathering her umbrella, her bag and gloves. In the perky blue hat, with its soft feather curling into the soft hair, and the fluffy coat, she looked like a plump ruffled bird, dainty, timid, a little foolish, full of confused tenderness and of instinctive wisdom from which, too easily, she could be fluttered and scared away. His throat tightened; he wanted to take her away and cherish her as if she were about to die. But the bus was due in a few minutes, and now they were all walking out toward it.
Just as they were leaving, the tea trolley came back for the used crockery. This time, little Derek was pushing it instead of the nurse. Mr. Straike’s nose went up, like a pointer’s.
“Who,” he asked in a loud aside, “are all these healthy-looking young men in mufti I keep seeing about the place?”
A wave of rage, the piled flood of the afternoon, broke in Laurie’s head. He did not trust himself to reply.