“No. You’re the tea expert. You make it.” One might have called his manner a colorless extract of decision.
Laurie saw their eyes meet. Although he had brought to this occasion a number of preconceived ideas, he was too keenly interested to let his powers of observation sleep. He knew at once that the air of cozy family bickering was a thin façade, that Bunny had had a surprise and was only beginning, yet, to be angry. Ralph lounged in the chair, giving him the straight look which hadn’t changed essentially in all the years that Laurie remembered. It would be odd if by this time Bunny weren’t equally used to it; yet, seeing these two men in uniform confronting one another, Laurie had a suspicion that he wasn’t used to it at all, that finding the challenge suddenly removed into the field of man to man, he felt something like outrage, as if Ralph had won on a foul.
He carried it off, however, quite well, making as he got up a whimsical face at Laurie and murmuring, “You see? Just an Eastern slave.” He had after all, thought Laurie, met a difficult situation, just now, in a civilized manner, and in the matter of the kettle Ralph was demonstrably in the wrong. In any case, thought Laurie, it wasn’t his business. Now that he was alone with Ralph he felt a dead weight of constraint; the glossy magazines made him think of a dentist’s waiting room. After nearly a minute’s silence Ralph said awkwardly, “Bunny’s fixed himself up nicely down here. I’m a dead loss at interiors and all that myself.”
“Me too.” He suspected that Ralph wished without disloyalty to disclaim the standard of taste around him. A leisured view of the room yielded so many awful little superfluities, so many whimsies and naughty-naughties, tassels and bits of chrome, that one recalled one’s gaze shamefaced as if one had exposed the straits of the poor. Laurie remembered the room upstairs: the absence of all loose ornament, the mantelpiece firmly packed with books, the little shelf fixed to the wall over the bed; the smell of scrubbing-soap, the wood and brass polished as a seaman, not a landlady, does it; the single eighteenth-century color print of a frigate under all sail. As tactfully as he could, he said, “I expect he likes to feel as unnautical as possible when he isn’t at sea.”
“Bunny isn’t a sailor.” Just for a moment, before he covered it, Laurie saw that he had wanted to laugh. “He’s attached to the navy for instructional purposes in this thing we’re doing. He was in the same sort of line commercially, before the war.”
“Oh. Does he instruct you?” Laurie found he resented it deeply. Then it struck him that Ralph might take it for a cheap joke. But Ralph said simply, “He did at first. I’ve moved up to another class now.” It was just then that Bunny came in with the tea.
For some time Laurie had been telling himself there was nothing remarkable about the smooth cool surface Ralph had presented ever since Bunny appeared: the more he felt, the less would be on display; you could be certain of that, Laurie thought. Now, however, he stopped snubbing his own instincts; he knew that all wasn’t well in this household, though, no doubt, the flaw was passing and trivial; he had blundered in at a delicate moment, and almost certainly complicated whatever trouble there was. In some anxiety he waited for Bunny to speak.
Bunny only surveyed the tray with his head on one side, and the naïve boyish look of one who will surely turn out to have forgotten something, but hopes for the best. “Well, now! Who’s going to be mother and pour out?” He put the tray at Laurie’s elbow and smiled confidingly. “Miss Odell?”
Laurie said equably, “All right, if you like.” A course of Charles’s friends had inured him to this kind of humor. He began putting milk in the cups. When he reached the third Ralph said, “Not for me, thanks,” and went over to the cocktail cabinet, where he got himself a pink gin.
Laurie poured out for Bunny and himself. In the lower ranks of the army, brewing tea has few feminine associations; to an ex-merchant seaman, he thought, the joke wasn’t likely to be excruciating either. Probably it was this which had irritated Ralph. He had come back with his drink and Laurie found himself thinking of him with vague perturbation. Imagining him ideally happy with Bunny had had a peaceful kind of remoteness. Now, as soon as one began wondering what could be wrong and why, one began to have new and disturbing thoughts and to resent Bunny more than was reasonable. Laurie got exasperated with himself and revolted against emotion altogether. With a decision which his habitual fear of boring people made rare in him, he embarked on a conversation about the war.
Ralph flung himself into it with transparent relief, and displayed a grasp of naval strategy which was practical and lively, if not profound. Used as Laurie was to considering the prospect of invasion in terms of what was to be done about the Germans when they arrived, he found it stimulating to be rapped smartly over the knuckles for assuming that they could arrive at all. At the back of Ralph’s mind, he suspected, was the thought that an emergency on this scale might get him back on the bridge of a fighting ship; but they didn’t discuss it. The conversation, begun as an expedient, soon became absorbing to both of them; some minutes of it passed before Laurie realized the fact that it was a dialogue. He looked up to see Bunny absorbed in his own reflections; not resentful it seemed but resigned, like someone who is used to not being considered much.
For the first time, Laurie admitted to himself that it was a mistake to have come. In anyone he had liked and trusted less, he would have suspected by this time that he was being used to bring Bunny to heel. But it was simple enough, he thought; Ralph had felt bored and depressed, perhaps because Bunny had arranged to go to a party without him, and had wanted someone to talk to and pass the time. And why not?
Just then he saw Bunny glance at Ralph’s glass which he had just emptied, pick it up, and refill it. Laurie watched the process out of the tail of his eye; the tot of gin was very small, the bitters helped to color it, the rest came from the water-jug. It shed quite a new and different light on Bunny, and made Laurie resolve to be very tactful indeed.
Just after this, the doorbell rang and Bunny went to answer it. Ralph applied himself to his drink in silence. Laurie had wondered whether he would take the opportunity of making it up to strength, but he was too preoccupied to notice anything.
The callers were Alec and Sandy. Laurie felt very awkward; but it was made clear to him at once by both that a new leaf had been turned and that his name was on it. It was the first time Laurie had observed them both together; he realized quite soon that Sandy regarded Alec as belonging to a superior order of beings, and was childishly proud of him. Perhaps it was admiration that caused him to commit such violent assaults on Alec’s emotions, as a small child will pummel an adult, not believing that it can really hurt him. As for Alec, one would have supposed that he and Bunny were the best of friends. Laurie thought this reasonable but decided that he himself would never have been equal to it. Tea things were swept away and Bunny dispensed drinks; he went on looking after Ralph’s glass as before, choosing moments when his attention was divided. Certainly it made one look at the pink mirror coffee tables with a gentler eye.
For the last few minutes, Ralph had been watching Alec, not talking much. Suddenly he said, “Has something happened?”
“Yes,” said Alec. “It’s Bim. I thought, as we were passing … I wasn’t sure if you’d heard.”
Ralph said “No.” He stared at the glass in his hand, and drank as if it were a routine duty he was absently carrying out. “No, I’d not heard. How was it?”
“Over Calais somewhere. He was seen to hit the ground; he hadn’t baled out. There seems no doubt about it.”