It was at this point that he heard Ralph coming upstairs; the door opened a second or two later.
It must be a cold night, thought Laurie; not because Ralph looked cold, but because he had clearly been going fast to keep warm, and now, coming in again, he had the bright unfocused eyes and the slight strangeness that people have who suddenly emerge from darkness wide awake. He had turned up the collar of his jacket and forgotten to turn it down again; his eyes were extraordinarily blue. He looked sharp-edged rather than blurred, with a frosty sparkle, a flash of the night about him; he stood in the doorway a little out of breath, narrowing his blue eyes against the soft light as if it were dazzling, and looking at the room as a man might who after a long absence expects to find changes here and there. He was at all times compact and neat, but now there was more than this, a kind of diamond concentration, so that his unconscious pause on the threshold was brilliantly arresting, like a skillfully, produced entrance in a play.
It was a striking reversal, for Laurie, of the mood it had interrupted. If he had remembered his pity, it would have embarrassed him; but he had at once forgotten. First he was simply glad to see Ralph back; and then, as he looked again, there was a sharp stirring of some very old, romantic memory; perhaps of some book illustration he had known as a young boy, of which his very first glimpse of Ralph at school had reminded him before he had even known his name. So strong was this sense of the past that his own feeling, caught up in it, seemed like a memory. He stood looking at Ralph in startled admiration, moved by a dream of mystery and of command, and at the back of his mind was a thought that he wanted this moment not to end and that it was ending. Even as he formed it, Ralph came forward from the doorway into the room.
The first telephone box he came to hadn’t been working, he said. He was sorry he had been so long.
Laurie said, “You’ve been running.”
“It’s cold.”
“You don’t need this now, anyway.” He turned down the collar of Ralph’s jacket.
“Oh, thanks. Yes.”
They looked at each other. But their thoughts were set, deeply gripped in the situation that already obsessed them, and which seemed to them as hard and unyielding as stone; they were not aware of having altered it in any way. Laurie’s instinct hid what it had felt, for just then his heart would have rejected it as an outrage. As for Ralph, he had had a trying half-hour, and his perceptions were strained; it cannot be supposed he had subtlety enough to guess that a moment of black courage had given him power unasked, when he had only been seeking strength.
He got a pair of ivory brushes out of the cupboard (Laurie saw how characteristically clean they were) and polished his light hair to its usual smoothness; then he came back to the table, poured a couple of drinks, and said, “Well have to be going soon.”
“Shall we?” He had fancied it was earlier; the thought of breaking the news to Andrew dragged at his heart.
“Not for a bit,” said Ralph. “It’s all right.”
They drank in silence for a minute or two. Laurie said, “I think what I really want is to get drunk.”
“How drunk?” asked Ralph practically. “Blind?”
“I suppose so.”
“You can sleep here if you want.”
“I only meant I’d like to. I’ve got to be back tonight.”
Ralph poured some more tonic in Laurie’s glass. “I suppose you spend hours talking about life and death and God, don’t you?”
“What makes you think that?”
“Well,” said Ralph, not unkindly, “the alternatives are limited, I gather.”
“By the time you’ve done a few months in an E.M.S. hospital, you can do with someone to talk to.”
“You sometimes can even on a freighter. It’s funny we’ve been within a few miles of each other for months without knowing, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is. I wish we had.”
“You’re being almost inhumanly forbearing about all this, Spud; but let’s face it, you’ll never really forgive me, will you?”
“I told you about that. In the end you’ve probably done me an even better turn than you thought you had.”
“Poor old Spud. Does he tell you why his girls are different from all other girls?”
“No. You see, that’s really the hard part.”
Ralph looked up. “No girls?”
“No, none.” He met Ralph’s eye and said, “Yes, I think so. He’s almost told me; but he doesn’t understand what he says.”
Ralph finished his drink and folded his arms on the table.
“Well, for God’s sake, then, if that’s all, why don’t you tell him?”
“Have you ever met any Quakers?”
“Not that I remember. Would he think you were Satan incarnate?”
“It isn’t that,” said Laurie, appealingly. Ralph seemed suddenly shut away and he felt it like an absence. “It would spoil everything for him. He would never do anything about it, and—well, you see, he—he’s an affectionate sort of boy. He’s gone through life so far being fond of one person after another and it seems always to have made him happy. Knowing would poison all that for him, it would never be the same.”
Ralph took another drink. “Well, Spuddy, it’s your life. Will he mind you going away?”
“Yes, he will.”
“As much as you?”
“Oh, well … He will mind, though.”
“If he’s honest with himself, when it comes to the point he’ll know. Why do you want to help him tell himself lies?”
“I don’t. It means something different to him, that’s all.”
“Different my foot. Don’t fool yourself, Spud. He’ll come back in a year or two and tell you all about his boy friend. That one’s a classic, didn’t you know?”
Laurie hadn’t believed he could ever have felt so lonely with Ralph in the same room. He said, “Once you wouldn’t have talked like that.”
Ralph looked at him across the table. For one extraordinary second he seemed about to throw back his head and laugh.
“Wouldn’t I? Well, in the meantime I’ve been around.”
So strong was Laurie’s sense of solitude that for a few moments he stared past the lighted table into the shadows without any self-consciousness, as if physically he were alone.
“Spud.”
It wasn’t the voice that roused him, but Ralph’s hand closing over his on the table. “Spud, cheer up. Come along now, snap out of it.”
He swallowed and said, “It’s all right.”
Ralph got up and went over to the window, standing as if the blackout weren’t up and he could see out.
“You stick to it, Spud, and don’t worry. You don’t want to let people hand you these smart lines of talk. They pick it up at parties and it gets to be a habit and most of the time it doesn’t mean a thing.”
“Didn’t it?”
“Oh, come, be your age. For God’s sake, what does it matter to you what I meant?”
“It does, that’s all. I can’t imagine there ever being a time when it wouldn’t.”
There was a little silence. Then Ralph said, quite quietly and simply, “Of course I didn’t mean it. It was just a line of talk. Forget all about it.”