“Hello, there,” Laurie said. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Hello,” said Andrew. He walked toward Laurie, but didn’t come under the roof. Laurie limped angrily over the rough grass toward him.
“For the Lord’s sake, come in out of there.”
“I will in a minute. I couldn’t see properly.” Laurie could see his face now. He was smiling. His fair hair, in the glimmer of moonlight, had a faint pale shine. He glowed dimly like a memory or a ghost.
Of all that Laurie felt there was nothing he could release but anger. He gripped the handle of his stick and pushed it viciously into the earth. “You bloody fool. Do you want a chunk of shrapnel in your brain? If you have one? Christ, are you deaf, you can hear it now.”
Andrew said, good-humoredly, “You go on to bed, or Nurse Sims’ll be after you. I’ll come in a minute and tuck you up.” There was something different about him, elated and defiant, like a schoolboy breaking bounds.
In a controlled voice Laurie said, “Don’t they issue you with tin hats?”
“There’s a couple hanging up somewhere. Don’t they you?”
“Why should they? We’ve got sense enough to take cover.”
“What are you doing messing about here, then?” said Andrew gaily.
The guns bickered again, but the shrapnel went somewhere else. Then they heard the bomber coming back. It sounded lower, and one of the engines was cutting, Laurie thought.
“That plane’s been hit,” he said. “Listen to it. It’s just about due to unload everything it’s got left. Are you half-witted or what?”
“I don’t suppose that roof would keep out much of a bomb, do you?”
The faint light from the sky caught the outlines of his face, his loose, thin boyish shoulders. He looked intolerably vulnerable and unsecured. Laurie’s tension suddenly snapped. “Oh, don’t be so bloody pleased with yourself. If you’d ever been under fire you wouldn’t think it so funny.”
There was a moment’s silence.
“I’m sorry,” Andrew said. He walked past Laurie onto the covered way. Laurie swung around on his stick and limped after him. “Good night,” said Andrew. He began to walk off.
“Come back,” said Laurie breathlessly. He reached out, almost losing his balance, and gripped Andrew’s shoulder. They faced each other in the almost black shadow beside the deserted office hut.
“For God’s sake, Andrew. What do you take me for? You know damn well I didn’t mean it like that.”
“The more fool you,” said Andrew in a flat strained voice. “You ought to have.”
“I was in a hurry to get in, that’s all. We’re a bit of a jittery lot, you know.”
Andrew looked around at him. “You can afford that. I shouldn’t bother.”
“Oh, hell. Look here—”
A bright moving illumination had fallen on the huts, around each tuft of grass wheeled a black swinging shadow. Andrew ran out, and paused; Laurie checked a stumble with a hand on his shoulder. They looked up. A streaming torch was crossing the sky above them, in a steep path like a comet’s. It passed out of sight beyond the roofs. There was an instant when the light went out in perfect stillness; the ground under their feet shook with a heavy jar; last came the detonation. The plane must have had most of its bomb-load still on board.
Laurie let go of Andrew and said, “Well, that’s that.” Doors began to open in the wards; nurses and patients peered out. Now, finding nothing (the guns had stopped, the searchlights dispersed), they all went in again. “Not bad,” said Laurie, “for a little popgun like that.”
Andrew didn’t reply for a moment or two. Then he said, “How many men do those bombers carry?”
“I don’t know. I suppose six or eight.” There was silence again. This division was a reminder to him of all separation. Blindly he resisted it. “Hell, that was self-defense if anything could be. If they hadn’t been stopped, they might have wiped out a block of working-men’s flats by now, or the children’s ward at the City Hospital. Wouldn’t you have been sorrier about that?”
Andrew turned around and looked at him, mutely and painfully, searching for words. At last he said, “They were dying up there. If they had innocent blood on their hands it was worse for them to die. I ought to have—I was just thinking about myself.”
“It’s a filthy business,” said Laurie awkwardly. “I don’t say it isn’t.”
“You showed me up to myself,” said Andrew slowly. “You’ve got the decency of your own convictions. And you’ve the courage of your convictions, too.”
“Oh, come off it, relax. So’ve you, we all know that.”
“No,” said Andrew looking away. “I haven’t the courage of mine, not always. I thought so. But I didn’t know then what it meant.”
“Andrew. Andrew, look here. If you only knew what I really—”
There was the sound of a door opening. “Odell! Are you out there? Odell!”
“Coming, Nurse. Shan’t be a minute. If there’s anyone who ought to be—”
“Do come along at once, Odell, please. I’m trying to get the ward settled.”
“Sorry, Nurse, I’m on my way. Look, Andrew my dear—”
“I must go in too. I shouldn’t be here. I’ll walk with you.”
“She’s only fussing; no one’ll settle till the All Clear. Silly bitch. All this is my fault, you’d have been all right on your own.”
“That doesn’t arise.”
“I don’t—”
“Well—I was waiting for you. I saw you taking the nurses back. I—”
“Odell! If you don’t come straight in I’m going to report you.”
“Yes, Nurse, coming. Andrew, we must—”
“You must go, she meant that.”
“But—”
“Please. I’ll be seeing you in the ward.”
As he went in he heard the thin, steady shrilling of the All Clear.
Laurie looked up from his home letter to say, “Don’t you wish your name was Gareth, Reg?”
“Eh? Wish it was how much?”
“Gareth. That’s what my stepfather-elect’s called. I suppose he was conceived with Tennyson in limp suede sitting on the po-cup-board.”
Reg coughed repressively. Habit had made of the standard nouns and adjectives in his own vocabulary something merely conventional, like italics or points of exclamation. He sometimes found Laurie’s conversation highly obscene, and would have voiced his disapproval to anyone he had liked less. “Comes from Wales, I reckon. I had a girl called Gwynneth once. Have a Gold Flake. Ah, come on, got the best part of a packet left. Chap in our unit was called Jutland Jellicoe Clark. Course, being called Clark, that was a help to him. Always got called Nobby, barring when anyone wanted to nark him.”
“I might try Uncle Nobby. I’ve got to call him something.”
“You want to go careful at first with a parson. Nice day, today. Lovely the trees look, now they’ve turned. We always took our holiday August, to get the social life. Never knew it got so pretty. Evenings it gives you the pip, though. Makes you miss home, and that.”
“Yes,” said Laurie. He remembered how, in other autumns, he and his mother had roasted chestnuts, sitting on a sheepskin rug before the fire.
“Afternoons is the time, though. Lovely it is then.”
“How’s Madge keeping?” asked Laurie quickly. He was afraid Reg was about to suggest a walk, and today he felt that at any cost he must get away alone.
The declining sun was ripe and warm. Hips and haws shone like polished beads in the hedgerows; the damp mats of fallen leaves had a smoky, rusty smell. There was a bridle-path running between brambles, and a stile he had taught himself to manage. It was all right when no one was about.
The blackberries tasted of frost and faint sun and smoke and purple leaves: sweet, childish, and sad. Soon came the wood, with light edges of coppice, full of birds, and birches beyond; the golden leaves shook like sequins against the sky. Presently the path opened into a field of stooked barley. Along its border he found his old place, a smooth bank running up to a big elm. He lowered himself down, carefully. It had been a long pull up and the knee had hurt him, but it was worth it.