The week after, Laurie’s own mother wrote to him, announcing her engagement to Mr. Straike. There is only one kind of shock worse than the totally unexpected: the expected for which one has refused to prepare.
He was still staring at the open letter when he heard Reg creaking and breathing near him, minding his own business with that heavy tact which invites a confidence. Suddenly Laurie craved for those kind flat feet trampling down the sharper edges of his misery. He looked up.
“Cheer up, cock,” said Reg in a leading voice. “All the same in a hundred years.”
“That’s right. Not so hot now, though.”
“How’s that, then?” Reg sat down beside him on the bed.
Laurie told him the news. He did not canvass Reg’s views on Mr. Straike. When Reg said politely “No kidding?” and then “Bit unexpected, like?” there was perfect understanding between them.
“Mind you,” said Reg, “it’s a nice position for her. Nice house and that, too, I daresay.”
Laurie thought of the red, damp Gothic pile of the vicarage, its high, heavy rooms and horrid little lancet windows. He and his mother had lived in their seventeenth-century cottage almost since he could remember. For the first time he realized that this too would have to go.
“Never told you, did I,” said Reg, “our dad nearly got caught, seven year it must be going on for now. Girl young enough to be his daughter. Never forget him bringing her home to tea. Only had to look at her. Well, I mean, you don’t know how to put it, like, to your own dad. Then my brother Len found out she was in the family way by a chap at his works. He had to tell the old man then. Proper broke him up, for a bit; and poor old Len, he didn’t like to show up at home for a couple of months; missed his birthday and all. Well, one thing, you got nothing like that to worry about with your mum. ’S all aboveboard and that.”
“Oh, yes. I think he was keen to get it fixed up before I got home.”
“Ah. On the artful side. Not after your mum’s money, you don’t reckon?”
“She hasn’t got much. It would help, I suppose.”
“Well, one way to look at it, you do know who he is. Not one of these fly-by-nights, mean to say. Mind you, Spud, it’s partly just the idea, like, and you get used to that. Still, got to face it, home’s not the same. Here, Spud. No offense and that, but this girl, now; I wouldn’t let her slip off the hook, not if I was you.”
“Girl?” said Laurie, taken off his guard.
“Come off it, now, you told me about her only the other day.”
“Oh, that. I don’t think that will ever come to much.”
“More fool you, excuse me saying so. Be better off with you than someone with two good legs what kicked her with them Saturday nights, wouldn’t she?”
“I suppose so.”
“Right, then. That’s how you want to keep looking at it.”
Laurie agreed to do so. Meanwhile, there was his mother’s letter to answer. After tearing up two versions which read too revealingly, he urged quite simply a pause for consideration. He sealed, stamped, and addressed it, with a heavy sense of its ultimate uselessness.
The only other person with whom he discussed the news was Nurse Adrian, whom he met at the village post office when he was posting the letter. On the spur of the moment he invited her to tea at one of the rickety tables in the postmistress’s garden, and told her all, or nearly all, about it. It was pleasant, he found, to see her listening, her bare brown arms with their soft down folded on the table, her brown little face, under the straight flaxen hair looped back at the side, looking honest and troubled. At the end she said, “I’ll tell you something if you like I’ve never told anyone. When Bill, he’s my brother, he’s a prisoner of war now, when Bill was engaged two years ago to Vera, who of course is now my sister-in-law, and she really is a terribly nice person, she got pneumonia. I was lying in bed one night and my thoughts were sort of running on, and suddenly I woke up and looked at them, and I realized I’d been planning for when Vera was dead just like one might for the holidays. And she’d always been perfectly nice to me, even when I was in the way. Yet I knew I’d been wishing her dead, can you believe that? So, you see, if a person who’s had such terrible thoughts can get over it, and I have got over it, you’re bound to get over it before long.”
He saw her looking at him with sudden anxiety; after this confession she was clearly prepared to see him turn from her with loathing. Without thinking much about it he leaned out and patted her folded arms.
“Get along with you,” he said. “You know perfectly well if anything had really happened you’d have jumped into the river to pull her out.” Her unguarded eyes looked at him across the crumby little table, in admiration and relief. In them he saw himself reflected, a man, protecting, lightly lifting the burden. It did not seem to him specially ironic. His loneliness had preserved in him a good deal of inadvertent innocence; there was much of life for which he had no formula; it had never even occurred to him that he involved himself in various kinds of effort which, by ruling a few lines around himself, he could have avoided.
She gazed at him with respect, and presently asked his opinion on the probable course of the war. Silly little dumbbell, he thought; but he could not analyze his affectionate amusement. The fact was that he found her a refreshing relief, and was already cutting and fitting himself a special personality to oblige her. He could be no more than three or four years her senior, but it felt like fifteen. Ever since he grew up he had been unobtrusively avoiding girls, whom secretly he imagined to be applying subtle and sophisticated tests to him, and observing the results with hidden scorn. Watching her off, he thought that she wore slacks well, as if she didn’t think about them; she had the right kind of shoes, and moved from the hips. He smiled and waved, and, as he turned away, wondered what the brother was like.
Back in the ward, with the radio blaring “Roll Out the Barrel,” the thought of his mother came back to him, burning with all its implications deeper and deeper in; whole vistas of the future, as he reviewed them, suddenly becoming consumed and blowing away. He longed for the evening which would bring the relief of telling Andrew.
“Been out?” said Reg as they waited for supper.
“Not far. It’s nice outside. Warm.”
“Sharp frost this morning. Nice now, is it?”
“Yes, nice out of the wind.”
“Here, Spud. No offense and that.”
“Uh?” Laurie went deep into his locker after a cigarette.
“Well, see, Spud, I know how it is. No one here can’t say you ever done any highbrow act. But what I mean, these lads come along, college boys like yourself, reading literary books and that. Well, stands to reason, ordinary, you have to keep a lot of your thoughts to yourself. I watched you when you didn’t know it, time and again.”
Laurie came crimson out of the locker, where he longed to remain. “Christ, Reg, the bull you talk.” They sat, not looking at each other. Laurie knew his protest had been too weak; it should have been something more like “What would I want with that bunch of sissies?” Why, he wondered, was it the people one held in the most innocent affection who so often demanded from one the most atrocious treachery?
“They interest me,” he said, doing his best. “You can’t help wondering what’s at the bottom of it, whether they just don’t like the idea of getting hurt, or what. Well, having seen a bit of them I don’t think it’s that. It may be with some of them; but not this lot.”
“Ah, go on, Spud, don’t tell me you’ve been this long working that one out. I could have told you that, first day they come here. I watched them, I never said nothing. Not even Neames don’t think they’re yellow, no matter what he gives out. It’s just the idea, like, that gets him. Same as what it does me, and that’s a fact”