No one else was awake. Reg Barker lay in a patch of moonlight which seemed to eat like acid into the thin surface of his sleep, leaving him half exposed to reality; it was like seeing someone sleeping huddled in the cold. There was something unbearably childlike and vulnerable in the bareness of his unprotected face; so he must have lain while his wife looked down at him with boredom, with calculation, with sensual dreams of the new man. Charlot, the white light piercing his brain with some memory of a naked and dead sky, was whimpering in his sleep as he sometimes did, softly, like a dog by the fire. Laurie slid into bed. With a poignancy he had never felt during the half-stupefying agony on the beach, he was beset by a terrible consciousness of the world’s ever-renewed, ever-varied, never-dying pain: children and animals without hope in the present moment’s eternity; the prisoners of cruel men, the cruel terribly imprisoned in themselves; Alec watching beside Sandy; Ralph quietly struggling with the gear-lever of his last command; tomorrow’s air raid victims, the still unknown suffering of the unmeasured years of war. He heard footsteps coming, and turned on his face to hide it and to ease the ache in his leg. Then he knew they weren’t the nurse’s, and looked up into Andrew’s face.
“Andrew!” he whispered. He had forgotten there was anything to hide. To return to the innocence of their love was like returning home. He reached for Andrew’s hand as it might be for the hundredth time, as if everything had been accepted and spoken of between them.
Andrew didn’t take it away. He returned a friendly pressure, smiling in the pale light; at a loss and anxious to hide it. Why not, thought Laurie, slipping away into a lonely understanding. He had been behaving very oddly, quite unlike himself; and to someone who had had nothing he must still smell of drink.
“I’m glad you’re all right,” said Andrew softly. “We had a warning here, so I wondered.”
“You shouldn’t have worried. A funny thing happened, I’ll tell you tomorrow.”
“It was a big day for you, meeting your friend again.”
Nurse Sims must have said something, then. Suddenly he remembered saying to Andrew in the woods that he and Ralph wouldn’t know each other if they met. “What a grapevine this place is. However did you get that?”
“He gave me his name,” said Andrew, “when I answered the telephone. Sleep well; good night.”
The moonlight shifted silently. Charlot’s uneasy sleep had turned to one of his nightmares; he started to fight the bedclothes and to mutter, “Au secours!” Kept wakeful by the sound, Laurie saw again the endless interlocking chain of the world’s sorrow, and Andrew’s face, no longer secure in the secret orchard, but locked and moving with the chain.
7
“SO IT’S OFFICERS NOW, eh?” said Reg. “That run you into something, I reckon. Saloon bar stuff.”
“Bit of free. A party at someone’s flat.”
“Ah. Nice girls?”
“Fine.” If only one had notice of these questions, Laurie thought. The answer that seemed to save trouble on the spur of the moment hardly ever did. Sure enough, a few more minutes’ cross-examination had involved him in factual accounts of Alec’s wife, Ralph’s girl friend, and his own partner, for whom he had to supply a service career as well as complexion, clothes, and a name.
He was so tired that he slept all afternoon, a thing he hadn’t done since ceasing to be a bed patient; and the strangeness of waking from a sleep so deep that it had drowned the noises of the ward, to altered light and the evening routine, made everything seem even more different than it had before. The twilight struck chilly as he went outside. He experienced for the first time that special dread brought by the first touch of winter to lovers who have nowhere to meet except out of doors.
“You’ve been catching up with your sleep,” said Andrew, smiling in the lane (it was the same spot where Ralph had stopped the car last night). “Now you know how I feel every evening.”
“There’s Christian charity for you. As a matter of fact I wasn’t as drunk last night as you probably thought.”
“No?” said Andrew, looking at him amusedly. In sudden panic he paused to drill his disorganized inhibitions. If he hadn’t been drunk, then what was supposed to have happened? Dimly he was aware that it wasn’t the loose talk at the party which was making him careless now; it was the dark confessional of the car on the long empty road. It seemed to him that there was nothing he couldn’t have said, and very little that he hadn’t.
“It wasn’t the drink,” he said lightly, “so much as the dope.”
“It sounds quite a party.” Andrew didn’t appear uncontrollably amused. Unwillingly, Laurie explained.
“It was rather trusting of you to swallow the stuff without even asking what it was. Do you like him as much as you did at school?”
“I don’t know.” The electrifying pertinence of Andrew’s questions seemed always to be taking him off guard. “I never knew him well at school, you know. He still seems a pretty good type to me.”
They went up the lane between October hedges draped with flossy swags of old-man’s-beard. Laurie was saying to himself that it would soon cease to seem so important, this discovery he had made that, instead of accepting concealment as a permanent condition of his life, he had merely been enduring it.
Andrew said, continuing the almost unbroken conversation, “He seems to have made a great hit with Nurse Sims. I’ve never seen anyone bridle on the telephone before.”
“I hope he didn’t overdo it.”
“Is he married?”
“No.”
“Tell me about him.”
For a moment Laurie was attacked by an almost ungovernable impatience; a feeling of the utter waste of time involved in going through the motions of exposition, where no possibility of enlightenment exists. “Well, he was Head of the House two years before me, only he was Head of the School as well—”
“Head of the School? He must have been a very democratic one.”
“I keep telling you I didn’t really know him. I never spoke to him apart from routine till the day he left.”
“Yes, I see. When he gave you the Plato?”
“I expect he was having an orgy of giving away everything he couldn’t find room to pack.”
“It was a nice thing to choose, though. Not what one would give to the first person who came along.”
“Well, naturally it pleased me to think so, at the time.”
“So then he joined the navy.”
“No, the merchant service actually.”
“As an apprentice or something?”
“No, as a deck hand, I think. He was keen on adventure, and roughing it, and all that.”
“He sounds very strong-minded. Is he doing well?”
“He’s had half his hand blown off. They won’t give him another ship.”
“It must be a bad time for him. A little sad, I expect, to meet someone who’d only known him in the days of his glory.”
Laurie tried to look at the intrinsic kindness of this rather than its unconscious cruelty. He said quickly, “Well, he hardly needed to worry about that with me. Only a few minutes before I met him, I’d found out that he saved my life.”
“How?” said Andrew. Laurie saw it then, when it was too late to do anything but go on.
“Well, perhaps that’s rather a stagy way of putting it. He commanded the ship that brought me back from Dunkirk, that’s all.”
“How lucky you found out in time.” There was a helpless and painful silence.
One might almost as well, thought Laurie, have said it aloud. Because he did for me what you wouldn’t do, I’m alive to be with you now. Here at last, stripped of the secondary things, of motive and praise and blame, were the bare bones of logic, grinning in the sun.