It was just after this that he and Andrew began to fall into the way of meeting in the ward kitchen at night. It began as an accident, and then there seemed no reason why it shouldn’t happen again. After Andrew had done a round of the ward and scrubbed the bedpans, he always went outside to clean the kitchen up. Laurie would lie awake watching quietly till the right moment, then slip out of bed, reach in a matter-of-fact way for his dressing-gown, slippers, and stick, and make his legitimate way to the lavatory. When he got back to the corridor Andrew would be visible near the kitchen door. They were still at the stage of saying, “Oh, hello,” in mild surprise, as a tribute to this coincidence.
The Sister used to make herself a pot of tea before she went off duty, and to the stewed remains of this Andrew would add some hot water. Laurie, arriving at first as if he couldn’t stay more than a minute, would prop himself against the wooden slab where the chromium water-heater stood, watching Andrew scrub the sink and the draining-boards. They drank the weak, hot, bitter-sweet tea out of thick china mugs, and talked softly. Nurse Sims soon got to know what was happening, but winked at it provided they didn’t raise their voices or go on too long. Andrew would spin out the work a little; Laurie could always remember him, afterwards, bending over the slab with an almost stationary dishcloth in his hand. Sometimes he would express himself with it, moving it slowly and absently when he was shy or uncertain, scrubbing it along briskly to mark a point. A lock of hair, steamed limp over the sink, would come down over one eye, and he would push it back with a wet hand, making it limper.
A cockroach scuttled into a crack behind the draining-board; he watched Andrew reach for a tin of Keatings and sprinkle the crack with it. “Does life stop being sacred,” he asked, “when it gets down to cockroaches?”
“Well, the Jains don’t think so,” said Andrew seriously. “But I never know how they meet the fact that our own bodies destroy millions of microorganisms every day, without giving us any alternative to it except suicide. One has to draw the line where one sees it oneself.”
“Is that what you call the inner light?”
“If you like, yes.”
Faint noises of contracting metal came from the water-heater, behind which in genial warmth and darkness the cockroaches lived. The dressing trolley rattled faintly in the ward. A cricket was chirring somewhere.
“I was trying to remember how old you are,” Andrew said. “But I’ve never asked you.”
“Twenty-three last June.”
Andrew looked at him and said, in the voice of someone paying a deserved tribute, “I always thought you were older than that.”
Laurie didn’t think much about it at the time. Afterwards, when he knew more, this was a thing he always remembered about Andrew, that he took for granted one would regard maturity as a thing to be desired.
It was visiting day. Just after lunch the sky clouded over, a cold, bitter wind got up, and within fifteen minutes it had begun to rain. He had lost his greatcoat in the retreat, and had never had another. Chilled and damp in body and mind, he waited outside the gate, half sheltered by a tree which soon began to drip down his neck. With a muddy splashing the bus arrived; dimly he was aware of a dowdy little woman with an umbrella getting off it, along with several others. Then he saw that it was his mother. His bones, rather than his mind, remembered the pretty clothes she had worn last time, the new hat, when the sun had been shining, and Mr. Straike had been there.
“My dear!” he said. “Whyever, on a day like this?”
“I thought I wouldn’t bother with a car.” He recognized, sinking, her defensive voice. “It was rather extravagant, you know, with the buses running so conveniently.”
“But we can’t just sit in the ward,” he said, “and there’s nowhere else here to go.” The tree, full of rain now, was leaking everywhere with dull heavy drops. Hadn’t she cared enough to foresee all this? “Look, I’ll just go in and ring for a car now. It’s on me; it won’t be much, just the one way.”
It was in the car that he had meant to talk to his mother; he had lain awake at night thinking up easy, natural openings. She said, “It is a shame about the rain, you said in your letter how lovely everything was looking,” and he said, “Yes, it will strip a lot of the trees, I expect.” And suddenly he knew that this was not, as he had been saying to himself, simply an unlucky day. It was a day dedicated beforehand to a lost cause. Before she had abandoned him, he had begun already to abandon her. He was marked for life, as a growing tree is marked, by the chain that had bound him to her; but the chain was rusting away, leaving only the scar. It was an irony mathematical in its neatness, that in the moment when the pattern of her possession was complete, the gulf of incommunicable things opened between them. Already it was unbridgeable. She would never now, as once he had dreamed, say to him in the silent language of day-to-day, “Tell me nothing; it is enough that no other woman will ever take you from me.”
For the first time when they got out of the car she noticed his boot. She was as pleased as if, he thought, it were a supplementary part of himself which, like a lizard, he had cleverly grown.
Sitting in the dowdy, clean mahogany tea-shop, he said, “Mother, you’re sure you’re going to be happy? Is he”—he looked down at the cloth, he hadn’t anticipated this throttling inhibition, this almost physical shame—“is he kind to you, does he look after you properly and all that?”
“Oh, yes, dear, indeed he does. He would never of course dream of saying so, but I feel, one can’t help guessing, that in his first marriage he didn’t quite get the—well, quite the affection that a man of his kind needs. That, you know, is just between you and me.”
“Yes,” said Laurie, “of course.” There was a thick slab of sawdust-like cake on his plate, yellow, with dates in it. He could not imagine how it had got there.
“Laurie, dear, I do hope you’ve not caught a chill. Is it this damp weather making your knee ache?”
“No, it’s just a bit stiff. I was thinking they’ll be wanting the table. Shall we go to the cinema?”
The rain had stopped, but the clouds held the heavy damp over everything; above the still-wet pavements the long slow twilight hung like the moist air, unmoving. Limp dead leaves were pasted to the gutters. They sat in the fireless blacked-out station waiting room which smelt of smoke, dust, old varnish, coal, and feet. A heavy red-faced woman with a heavy red-faced little girl sat opposite staring at them with black button eyes, drinking in every word. The train came in; they had just lit the dim blue bulbs which would give light enough to prevent the commission of crimes. “Well, dear—”
“Get well quickly, darling. Look after yourself. Don’t go back and sit in damp things, will you. Dear, you must never think that things will be any different. You know. It would upset me terribly, it would spoil everything, if I thought you felt that.”
“No, dear, of course. It’s just that—if anything goes wrong, if you start to have any doubts about it, send me a wire, or ring. I’ll get a pass somehow and come straight over. Promise me.”
“But of course there’s no … Oh, dear, they’re shutting the doors now. Goodbye, dear, take care not to catch cold, goodbye.”