“Hello, Ralph. I’m sorry I kept you waiting.”
“Just a minute,” Ralph said. Laurie heard the telephone laid down, and a sound like a door shutting. “Sorry, all right now. Well, Spud, how are you?”
“Fine.” Yes, he thought, it was going to be that kind of conversation. “How about you?”
“Fine. Look, Spud, will it be all right if I pick you up this afternoon after the treatment, and run you back? I’d like to have a word with you, and that way it won’t hold you up. One can’t say much on this line.”
“Of course. Thanks very much.” Bunny must have kept his story for a day or two, cooking. Now, it seemed, Ralph had decided to have it out. It would have to be got through. … “Odell. Lanyon wants you in his study after prayers.”
He said, “I’ll wait on the same bench as I did before.”
“Good.” There was a short pause. “There’ll be no one else coming.”
“All right.” It must certainly be trouble. “Five-fifteen, then. Goodbye.”
“Spud, just a minute.”
“Yes?”
“Don’t worry about anything.” The line went dead.
Before he left for Bridstow, he wrote a letter. It was for Madge, and was ostensibly an apology for the trouble he had given her. He wrote it with the incident of the Wurlitzer request program held steadfastly before his eyes. Afterwards he read it over to himself, with a kind of fascinated nausea. The thought that Madge might not destroy it, that it might continue to exist, even, by way of ultimate horror, that she might show it to the Major, who would accept it as a fair sample of his style—all this crept in his stomach and in the hair on his neck. The secret of its peculiar gruesomeness was that it wasn’t pure invention. Under the shaming sentimentality, the awful all-jolly-good-sorts-together, it was quite sincere.
He stuck it down quickly before he had time to dilute it, and gave it to the Sister when he went to catch his bus. She glared at him; but she had made herself his accomplice. She hadn’t told Reg anything.
Miss Haliburton’s puppy was noticeably bigger. The department was rather less busy than last week and she spent more time with him, asking questions about the leg. Something he said, which hadn’t seemed to him of the slightest significance, seemed to excite her. She whipped him out of the apparatus, put the boot on his bare foot and leg, and made him walk around the cubicle. To his extreme embarrassment she got down and, as he moved, followed on hands and knees; it was like being investigated by an Old English sheepdog. The bare leg with the boot on it already seemed to him pure Salvador Dali; he felt that, even for hospital, the macabre was being overstressed. He could hear her tut-tutting under her breath. The puppy waddled beside her, breathing eagerly.
“Who made this?” she barked suddenly. He presumed that it wasn’t the leg to which she was referring, and replied that it had been made by a small man with cross eyes and thick glasses, whose name he didn’t know.
Miss Haliburton called a senior student to her, and made a speech. “… everything so slapdash. No conscience about their work. Look at it, Miss Cardew. Look at this rotation here. Put your hand on the peroneus. (Just walk a few steps again, Odell.) There, feel that. And when the boy gets pain, first they give him aspirin three times a day and then they order faradism. Really, sometimes one despairs. How does a government like that expect to win a war?” Almost before he knew what was happening, she had him out of the boot again, drew lines on it with chalk, and, to his alarm, handed it over to a deliberate old character with a walrus mustache, who poked it with a blunt pencil, explained why he wouldn’t be able to make a right job of it, and took it away.
“You’ll have to have a new one, of course,” she said as he was watching it vanish. “But this will help meanwhile.”
At first he could think of nothing but the delay. It was nearly five-fifteen already; he felt he could bear anything except that Ralph should think he had run out on him, with things as they were; and he knew hospital too well to suppose there was any possibility of sending a message. It was only gradually that he began to understand what she was still trying to tell him. Hope trickled slowly, through a half-choked channel, into his mind. Pain had become as inevitable to him in these last weeks as any of the body’s natural demands, differing from them in being insatiable. Even now he wouldn’t trust himself to anticipation, but he remembered to thank her.
“Don’t thank me, my dear boy; I’m saving myself trouble in the long run. Now this bit of intensive treatment we’re starting will really do something for you. Ah, here’s Arthur. Now we’ll see.”
It was after five-thirty. He was almost too worried to notice what Arthur had done to the boot, which was largely a matter of altering the tilt of the thickened sole. It felt odd for the first moment, then very quickly seemed natural. He thanked everyone again and escaped.
When he couldn’t see Ralph anywhere in the hall, a wave of such misery struck him that he stood stock-still where he was, saying to himself stubbornly that it wasn’t true. He looked around again, refusing the facts, and, as if created by his act of will, Ralph was there after all. He was sitting on one of the benches, his back turned, listening attentively to what looked like a long story from a very old man. When Laurie had approached within a couple of yards he saw him, smiled, and motioned him to wait. Laurie heard him say at the end, “Well, sir, I can see I’ve missed a lot not shipping with you. I’ve enjoyed this very much.”
He fell into step beside Laurie, telling him, as if they hadn’t been separated for more than an hour, the old man’s story: the start in sail, the wool-clipper, the Chinese pirates, the torpedoing in 1917. Out of the tail of his eye Laurie saw the ancient captain, a stocky figure in a shiny old blue suit, look after Ralph with an old man’s sour approval, before settling down again to his long wait.
“Thanks for waiting. I was afraid you’d write me off.”
“Good Lord, I know hospital. I shouldn’t have started worrying for another hour. Did they tell you anything?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, this time they did.” He explained about the boot; he was getting used to the feel of it now, and it did begin to seem more comfortable than before. Ralph listened carefully and at the end said, “Nothing else?”
“Well, not yet.” This reserve reminded Laurie of the caution he had urged upon himself. “They wouldn’t say much more till they’ve seen how it works.”
“Good luck to it, anyhow.” They had got to the car. When they were in, he hesitated a moment. “I suppose you’ve not got time for a quick turn round the Downs?”
“Oh, I think so.”
Ralph drove in silence through the pink stone streets, took a half-turn around the Downs, and pulled off the road at the spot where cars stop to admire the gorge. Twilight was falling and no other cars were there. The steep side of the gorge with its sheer faces was out of sight below them: opposite were wooded slopes, with a scoop of quarry. The ebb-tide river flowed sluggishly at the bottom, a muddy thread between two long slopes of slime.
“It’s all right, Spud. I told you, there’s nothing to worry about.”
“I wasn’t worrying.”