For the first time in months, he had remembered the dirty little parcel done up in newspaper at the back of his locker. It had contained the things saved from his pockets after Dunkirk, when the clothes had been cut away. A pocket-knife; a pipe he had been trying to get used to; a lighter; and the book Lanyon had given him seven years ago, with a brown patch of blood across the cover, and the edges of the pages stuck at the top. At different times he had tried the knife, the pipe, and the lighter, found them ruined, and thrown them away. The book had looked done for, too; but it was still there.
5
LAURIE WAS ANXIOUS TO get the gramophone out of the ward before it was noticed; he had not forgotten that a former patient had been accustomed to play his against the radio. Under cover of night he passed it to Andrew, who received it with joy; the c.o.s had had only one gramophone among them, and it had broken down. Laurie apologized for the records; but this proved to be quite unnecessary. A few days later the hospital rang with a new and sensational scandaclass="underline" eight nurses had been found by the matron in the orderlies’ common-room, dancing with the orderlies.
The news soon got to the wards, where it divided opinion as decisively as the Dreyfus affair. The hard core of animosity centered on Neames; his cold resentment, which had seemed temperate at the outset compared with noisier indignations, had outlasted them all. Willis was surprisingly tepid. As for Reg, he was anti-matron before anything else. He spent a happy day imputing to little Derek unimaginable excesses; but these two understood each other perfectly.
It took Laurie some hours of unobtrusive intelligence work to learn that Andrew hadn’t been there. He enjoyed this relief till the evening, when they met, and it turned out that Andrew had merely left before the matron’s arrival, being due on duty.
“It’s very interesting,” he said, fixing Laurie with his candid gray eyes, “very primitive, you know. Subconsciously they feel we’re a biological loss and ought not to have women or propagate ourselves. John in the kitchen said that was sure to happen, but as a matter of principle we shouldn’t submit to it.”
Laurie needed a moment or two to recover from this. “But did you want to have any of them?”
“Oh, not literally.” Andrew looked amused. “I have hopes for John, I must admit; but it’s much too early to say anything.”
“Who did you dance with?” asked Laurie, who had just ordered himself to change the subject.
“Most of them, as far as I remember. I danced with Nurse Adrian twice.”
“Did you find plenty to talk about?”
“Yes, we talked about you.” Andrew smiled, and settled his head back on his arms. “We were in favor of you,” he added sleepily. He had only just got up.
They sat on a bank scattered with old beech-mast. Through a gap in the bronze trees, across the stream, the apples of Eden could be seen, blandly shining. It was like Limbo, Laurie remarked.
“Who is Limbo supposed to be for?” asked Andrew. “I can never remember.”
“The good pagans, to whom the faith was never revealed. Such as Plato, I suppose; Buddha, Socrates, Confucius, and so on. A sort of eternal consolation prize.”
Laurie settled his back into the slope, and lit a cigarette. The stream sounded different from this side, mixed with the dry whisper of the beeches. After a few minutes he said, “How would you feel about your mother marrying again?”
After a pause Andrew said, “I don’t know. I daresay I shouldn’t have cared for it, really. Now, of course, I feel I should be only too glad, if it meant she was alive.”
This caused the inevitable awkwardness and apologies; but a little later he made no difficulty about talking. He had been born into one of those army families where every second or third generation throws off a sport, a musician perhaps, or a brilliant agricultural crank. Andrew’s father had served with distinction through the First World War, and had gone to Germany with the Army of Occupation. Peace had not been signed and the blockade was still on: an undisciplined habit grew up among the Allied troops of giving away their rations to the match-limbed, potbellied German children. An Order of the Day had to be issued about it. In the following week Andrews father, about whom no one had noticed anything odd except a certain taciturnity, resigned from his regiment, arranged his affairs at home in a family atmosphere of shocked silence, joined the Friends’ Ambulance Service, and went back to Germany again. There, some months later, he met and married Andrew’s mother, a lifelong Quaker; they continued working together until she became pregnant. While she was in England awaiting Andrew’s birth, the unit, which was by now in Austria, went to deal with a typhus epidemic. Overworked and under par, Andrew’s father got the disease, and in a couple of days was dead.
Dave had known both his parents, Andrew said. In fact, Dave was almost his only living link with his mother. He had been in charge of the unit, and it had been to Dave that Andrew’s father, in a more or less lucid interval of fever, had dictated his will.
At this point, Laurie was shocked to find his mind centered entirely on the unfair advantage this start had given to Dave, who, Laurie thought, on the strength of all this seemed to have assumed almost proprietary airs; there must be something behind it. But Andrew had noticed his lapse of attention, and evidently feared the story was becoming a bore. He dried up, and it took a couple of minutes to get him going again.
He had been brought up as a Quaker by his mother, to whom, obviously, he had been passionately devoted. If half he said about her was true, she had been an exceptionally gifted saint. When he spoke of her Laurie saw, as he had never seen in him at other times, a strain of fanaticism. She had died very suddenly when he was twelve, leaving no relatives who could do with him. His paternal grandmother, however, had been more than willing. It had been anguish to her all this time to see their good stock running to waste. She had treated him with kindness, and in her way with tact, never slighting his mother’s memory except in the daily implications of the code she taught him. The uncle and aunt, to whom he was passed on at her death a couple of years later, were less tactful. They had tried to send him at fifteen to the family school, which prepared for the army; he had refused to go there; they had insisted; Andrew had written the headmaster a letter which had caused him to turn Andrew down as an unsuitable entrant. There had been a shattering row about it, during some stage of which Andrew had appealed to Dave whom at that time he hardly knew. Dave had turned up, only to be insulted by the uncle and shown the door; but from that time onward, Andrew had kept in touch with him.
Throughout this crisis, Andrew seemed to have behaved, according to the view one was inclined to take of it, with rocklike integrity or mulish obstinacy; in any case, with determination much beyond his years. His face became a different shape when he spoke of it; incongruously, one could now trace the soldier forebears in the set of his jaw. Laurie gathered that during the row something had been said about the mother which Andrew, if he had forgiven it, couldn’t forget; but he never told Laurie what it was.
They had sent him in the end to a moderately progressive school, where he had enjoyed the term and dreaded the holidays. Then his call-up papers had arrived, heralding an explosion fiercer than any that had gone before. He talked of this less easily and Laurie could see that he was still raw from it.
But for the war, he said, changing the subject, he would have been going up to Oxford this autumn. The college he had been entered for was just across the road from Laurie’s, and they reflected solemnly on the fact that they would have missed one another by a matter of a month or two. Quite likely, said Laurie, they would have run into each other somehow or other. Andrew smiled, and said yes, it seemed that they were meant to meet. Laurie lived on these words for the next two days.