There was nothing to do about it. He couldn’t pretend to sleep, for Andrew must have heard him talking to Ralph just now; it would seem like a slap in the face. He couldn’t do anything, except behave as if nothing were the matter. The trolley rattled up.
“Hello, Andrew.”
“Hello, Laurie. Did we walk too far today?”
“Of course not.” He held out his mug. “Thanks.”
“I think we did. Have you had your A.P.C.?”
“Yes, thanks. I’m going to sleep now.” But Andrew, who had never had a dismissal from him before, didn’t recognize one when he heard it.
“There’s quite a party going on in our hut tonight. You know Richard on Ward A? He’s just got engaged.” He was speaking softly, not to disturb the other patients. Something like this happened nearly every night. No doubt it looked very intimate. Andrew had never had a moment’s concern about it. That everyone knew they were friends was a thing he took for granted.
“Good show.” But he said it too warmly, torn between the longing for Andrew to go and the dread of showing it.
“Yes, it is; you see when the war started he wouldn’t ask her, he didn’t think it was fair. But she kept on writing, and finally, the other day—”
“Good for her,” said Laurie, cutting him off short. Where did he think he was, exposing this naked happiness and trust? It was time he learned to be decent.
Andrew’s face changed. One day Laurie had been swishing a stick about, and caught his dog a cracking blow by accident; he had looked incredulous and bewildered, just like this.
Suddenly Laurie thought, Oh, damn the lot of them. He smiled up at Andrew and said, “Tell me all about it in the kitchen.”
“No, don’t get up tonight, you’re tired.”
“Oh, wrap it up. Of course I’m coming.”
Later, when he had seen Andrew go out from the sluice to the kitchen, he lay looking at the dim face of the clock on the wall. Five minutes, he thought. He had always waited for five minutes, not to make it obvious. He wondered how many people, for how long, had been having a quiet laugh about it
Five minutes passed. He got out of bed, and put on his slippers; they felt odd and lopsided nowadays, after the boot. He reached for his dressing-gown and his stick. A mattress creaked as someone turned over; the twenty yards between his bed and the door seemed suddenly very long. He would have liked to cover them with a little more speed or a little more grace. No, he thought, it was really too naïve to get so upset about it; one was supposed to carry off this kind of thing with a flick of the wrist and a light laugh which would tell the world one hadn’t been trying. Playing at hearties with all these dreary common people; my dear, I’m exhausted, I couldn’t have been more bored.
Suddenly, as if the memory had been kept in storage especially for this, he saw with extraordinary vividness Ralph’s face against the background of the dismantled study. Ralph had been nineteen. And here was a grown man in wartime making such heavy weather of so little.
Earlier today, during one of the current invasion rumors, Laurie had pictured an English Thermopylae behind the Home Guard roadblocks; amid the last-ditch grimness of this vision there had intruded a vague exhilaration, and he realized that he had imagined Ralph beside him. So, but much more so, it was now, and with this sudden comfort he found he had got to the door, and was outside in the shelter of the corridor.
He would have been glad of a few minutes’ pause before going on. But the sound of his step was too individual; already Andrew would have recognized it.
8
“RIGHT, THEN, ABOUT FIVE-FIFTEEN tomorrow. Don’t wait about in the street bitching up the knee before we start. Sit in the Out-Patient Department and I’ll come for you there.”
Laurie began to say, “Do you know where it is?” but remembered in time that Ralph must know the hospital very well. “I’ll do that,” he said.
“Was this all right, my ringing up again?”
“Yes, Sister’s off duty.”
“The other men in the ward don’t think anything, I suppose?”
“Life’s too short to spend flapping about that sort of thing. I shan’t be here much longer, anyway.”
“What? Sorry, what was that?”
“I said they’ll be discharging me, anyway, as soon as this electrical treatment’s finished.”
“Oh, yes. Of course. How long’s that going to be?”
“Discipline would go to pieces if they told us things like that.”
It was much colder this evening; but when he got back to bed, he found someone had put a hot-water bottle in it.
“Did you get this, Reg?”
“Nurse Adrian done it.” Busily intent on tidying his locker, Reg added, “I reckon that girl’s going to miss you, when you go.”
He had never referred, even obliquely, to last Friday’s conversation; but life had become a tight-rope walk for both of them. Laurie would have given anything to be able to repay Reg’s overture with some grateful confidence; Reg himself would have given anything to recall it. Laurie guessed that this forced remark about Nurse Adrian was an invitation to pretend nothing had happened. It was, indeed, the only tolerable solution; he accepted it with relief. “I’m more likely to do the missing. Rodgers must be blind, saying she’s got no sex appeal.”
Reg accepted the modus vivendi with transparent thankfulness. He would never, Laurie knew, have ventured so far into the open if the thing hadn’t already been openly discussed.
That day the first breath of winter had reached the shrinking flesh of a continent at war. It had a message for Laurie as well as for the rest. He still hadn’t a greatcoat; Dunkirk had been a summer disaster. For the first time that day, walking with Andrew, he had found he couldn’t move fast enough to keep warm. Walking patients in the square had thrown blankets or dressing-gowns over their shoulders, or a civilian coat lent by one of the c.o.s; but to go outside the gates one must be properly dressed. He had got a cramp in his knee almost at once, and they had had to turn back, more than half an hour before the usual time.
Andrew said, “There’s a stove in our hut. This time of day there’s hardly anyone there.”
“Better not. It might make trouble.”
“Well, listen, I know what we can do another time. I’ve got an old carriage-rug from home on my bed, it’s enormous. I’ll bring that, and we can take it to that dip in the beechwood, and roll ourselves up in it.”
Like an actor who dries up on the crucial cue for which the scene is waiting, Laurie could think of absolutely nothing to say. He ordered and implored himself; he could hear, as exactly as the click of a time-fuse, the moment when the pause became remarkable. The impulse to look up was like the impulse people feel to throw themselves off towers, or under trains. He looked up. Andrew was scarlet to the roots of his hair. It was all up, thought Laurie, as suddenly and simply as this, only through a moment’s lack of resource. Then he realized that Andrew’s embarrassment was acutely social, and that he hadn’t had time yet to see beyond it.
“You must think,” Laurie managed, “that I’ve a horrible mind. The trouble is, I’ve got a pretty good idea what the Staff Sergeant’s is like.”
“Yes,” said Andrew. He swallowed. “Lucky you thought. Sorry.”
“That’s the army for you.”
“I shouldn’t really have been as dumb as that, because a boy at my school was actually expelled for it, though most of us didn’t know till afterwards.”