A land of déjà entendu twitched at Laurie’s mind; then he remembered Major Ferguson. The thought made him angrier and more injured; but he still felt himself to be moved only on Charlot’s behalf. Andrew was standing very straight. As on rare occasions before, his blood was showing in him; in his gray hospital-orderly’s coat he looked more like a soldier than Laurie did in his battle-dress. He was distinct and separate and far away, and strikingly good-looking.
“For God’s sake,” said Laurie, even now remembering not to raise his voice, “don’t stand there like St. Sebastian full of arrows, thinking of nothing but your own bloody principles. When you care about people you can’t always be so choosy. Go outside, then, and keep yourself clean. I’ll manage here. Charlot and I understand each other.”
What he had said came home to him only gradually, like the collapse of a wall which starts with a few loose bricks.
Andrew stood where he was. His face had a pinched look, as if he were cold. You could see the bone-structure of character showing, the shape of the winter tree.
“I’m sorry, Andrew. I lost my temper. I didn’t mean all that.”
“Whatever you meant,” said Andrew in a voice of ashes, “I’ve been given this job to do and I must do it. I can’t leave it just for a personal reason.”
For a moment, this putting him in his place seemed to Laurie the last affront. He felt he would say anything to revenge himself and only delayed to make the telling choice; but this was not true, he was losing time by putting aside one weapon after another as too base to use, shocked by what he had used already. During this interval he recovered part of his reason and saw Andrew freshly, as he stood.
With an increase of effort which left him with a drained, almost empty look, Andrew said, “I know you only wanted to help him; I realize that.”
“Andrew, I must have gone off my head. I can’t think how I—I’m sorry.”
There was an oxygen cylinder standing in the corner; it was the stiff, seized-up one that couldn’t be used, kept here out of the way. Andrew went over to it and picked up the spanner, turned it about in his hands for a moment, then suddenly fitted it to the cylinder head and gave it a violent wrench. The gas hissed like an angry snake; he wrenched the spanner back again and shut it off.
“That’s all right,” he said. He looked at his hands; there were deep crimson weals across his palms. “This thing works after all.” He hung the spanner back.
“Yes, does it?” Andrew’s face at the moment of attacking the cylinder had been something of a revelation. “Look, I was wrong about that.” He was only just starting to realize how wrong. It occurred to him too for the first time that Charlot’s mind might have been wandering back to some confession five or fifteen years old. “I’m sorry, Andrew.”
They were interrupted by a guttural sound from the bed. As they turned, Charlot, who had been quite quiet, began to have a kind of epileptic fit. They held his head away from the wall while he jerked like a huge, grotesque marionette; even the legs moved, which had not moved for so long. When it was over he sank into a deep, heavily relaxed unconsciousness; his face was dark, one side of his mouth sagged, his breathing was loud and very slow. They spoke to him, touched him, dug their fingers into his arms. He made no response at all.
They looked at each other. Andrew said, “I’ll go and get Nurse.”
She arrived this time in a matter of seconds. When she turned away from the bed the first thing she said was, “Odell, what are you doing here? Go back to bed at once.” She watched him out of the room; there was no chance to make peace with Andrew even by a look.
In the ward he found half the men awake and asking what had been going on. Some were grumbling because they needed this or that and there was no orderly. Laurie went around and got them what they wanted as well as he could. After a while the talking died down; he heard the voices of doctors arriving outside, of Major Ferguson’s assistant using the telephone, and, about half an hour later, of an ambulance driving up. Then suddenly everything was quiet again; Nurse Sims came in and sat down at the desk, looking all around with suspicion as if trying to guess what they had been up to while she had been gone.
The night deepened and grew cold, the local air-raid siren went, and the darkness tightened like stretched gauze. Once the mobile gun was heard stuttering in the distance. Andrew came in at last, his work outside done, and made a round of the patients, most of whom were by now asleep. He reached Laurie’s bed, stood by the locker and looked down, trying after the bright light outside to see if Laurie was awake. Laurie slid out a hand and touched his wrist. “What happened?” he asked softly.
“They’ve taken him to the big hospital for a decompression.” He paused and added, “They don’t think he’ll make it.” Laurie, whose eyes were at home in the darkness, saw clearly the strain in his face.
He whispered, “See you in the kitchen after she gets back from her meal.”
It was eleven-fifty. Ten minutes later Nurse Sims went out, and Andrew, whom this left in charge of the ward, sat down as usual at the desk. Soon Laurie felt he had been lying forever watching the hand of the clock crawl and the dusky light on Andrew’s bent head. At last Nurse Sims came back again. Laurie gave it a couple of minutes and went out.
Andrew was getting ready a little tray for Nurse’s coffee. Laurie had never met him in the kitchen quite so late. The cracking of the hot pipes sounded enormous, and the throb of a single plane overhead widened in great spreading rings like a pebble dropped in a still pool. A silence as wide as the night sky closed them in, and all the world’s sleep lay heavy over them. Laurie was aching with weariness; his eyes felt dry, and his face drawn with it.
“I had to see you,” he said. “You know I—you can’t go on feeling—no, I mean it, Andrew, you must believe I do.”
“You shouldn’t have stayed awake,” said Andrew in a flat kind voice. “You look terribly tired.” He got some milk from the refrigerator and filled a cup with it. “Would you rather have it hot?”
“No, thanks, this is fine.” He drank it mechanically, watching Andrew. “Look, just because that happened after what I said to you—it was a filthy thing to say and when I said it I knew it wasn’t true. I just got emotional and lost my grip.”
Andrew smiled at him, and for an instant he had the illusion of looking at someone older than himself. “You’d take back what happened, too, wouldn’t you, if you could?”
“That makes no difference.” He hadn’t realized how Andrew’s certainties, including those he didn’t believe himself to share, had knit themselves into his cosmos. Now to see them shaken was not pathetic but terrible. “I was wrong, of course. It was a thing Charlot wouldn’t have wanted done, if he’d understood.”
“I know,” said Andrew. “I didn’t mean that.” He looked straight in front of him. “It was about me you were right.”
“God, no, Andrew, I wasn’t. I wasn’t even trying to be. I was just bitching you because—well, I was in a mood, and one thing and another. I can’t tell you. Just take my word.”
“Everything that was actually done for him,” said Andrew slowly, “was done by you. I couldn’t think beyond what not to do. If I … if my mind had been where it should have been, I’d have known what ought to be done, something would have come to me.”
“That was my fault too.”
“No. No, it wasn’t your fault.”
“Look, Andrew. I ought to know. I do this kind of thing. I get steamed up about things that happen to people till I’ve got to do something or burst, and if it turns out to do more harm than good, hell, what’s the odds, it did good to me. At school for instance. A man—one of the boys I mean, was going to be sacked, and because I liked him I took for granted he couldn’t have done it, and I was all set to have raised hell and involved a lot of other people. And all the time he’d done it after all.”