Andrew, who had listened intently, said, “It must have been rather horrible finding out.”
Laurie said quickly, “I didn’t. He told me himself, to keep me out of trouble.”
“Oh.” There was a pause; then Andrew looked up. “What was it? What had he done?”
Laurie had not thought of this question. “I don’t think I ought to tell you that.”
“No, of course. Sorry.” Andrew looked away. Laurie saw too late that there was no good reason not to tell, unless the person concerned was one whom Andrew knew of. After a few moments’ silence Andrew picked up the tray. “I must take Nurse her coffee, she’ll be wondering.”
“I’ll wait for you.”
“No, don’t. You look done up. Go and get some sleep.”
“I’d rather wait. There won’t be very much longer.”
Andrew turned, the tray of coffee in his hand, and looked at it blindly as if he had to get rid of it but couldn’t think how.
“Take that first,” Laurie said. “Don’t worry, it’s all right.” Andrew went out quickly.
When he got back, Laurie explained about the transfer, leaving it to be inferred that he had heard of it at the other hospital. He wouldn’t be far away, he told Andrew; after he was discharged he could often come over, he could stay at some farm. … Andrew said at intervals suitable things: that it was a good thing they had noticed the boot, and so on. It didn’t take them long to get through all this.
“I’ve never known this place without you,” Andrew said. “We got here at night, you know it was quite dark, and in the morning, before I’d been working half an hour, we met.”
“We never did get that record of the oboe concerto, in the end.”
Andrew attempted to smile. “No. So now it will be one of those tunes that people have.”
“Don’t talk like that. As if we—”
After a pause Andrew said, “This doesn’t seem very—very sensible. Other people aren’t like this.”
“That doesn’t make any difference.”
“No.”
“You’ll have Dave back in a day or two.”
“Dave? … I heard from him today. He’s working in the East End, he wants to stay there.”
Like most people, Laurie had heard more about the blitz than the papers were printing. “Does he have to do that?”
“He can go where he likes, he’s years over military age. It’s because of Cynthia, I know.” Andrew gave him a strange bewildered look and added, “I know how he feels. No, that must sound stupid. I mean I—”
“Yes,” said Laurie. “Yes, it’s all right.”
“How is it that—I’ve often liked people enough to talk to them, but—things I’d feel a fool saying to anyone else in the world—I don’t always tell you, one doesn’t of course, but I always feel I could and you’d know what they meant better than I do.”
“I don’t suppose so,” said Laurie roughly. “It’s just that you know I like you. People who—oh, well, anyway.”
“Only you keep things to yourself sometimes. Well, of course. It’s just a way you look with it. ‘No, he couldn’t take that’ You oughtn’t to think of me as a person whose head has to be stuck in a bag. That ought to be the last thing, if you see what I mean.” When Laurie didn’t answer, he said with difficulty, “It makes me feel, in a way, jealous, without knowing what of.”
Laurie looked up and said deliberately, “You needn’t ever feel that.”
For a moment their eyes met, then Andrew went over to the sink where there were a few things left from making the coffee. He picked up a jug and looked at it. “You see, the fact that I could say a thing like that to you, and you … One shouldn’t waste time analyzing oneself with the world in the state it is. I try not to. But things happen that one can’t completely … It’s all right when I’m with you. I don’t have the feeling of being different, then.”
“Don’t have it on your mind,” said Laurie unevenly. At this moment, he could feel nothing in himself from which Andrew ought to be protected. With a simplicity which this knowledge made to seem quite natural, he leaned over and kissed him. Even when he had done it he felt no reaction or self-reproach. It was as if it had happened before and they both remembered.
Just at this moment, when Andrew was looking up with a kind of strangeness which was only the threshold of some feeling not yet formed, they heard a sound in the doorway. It was as impossible not to spring apart as to keep the eye open against flying grit. Nurse Sims said, “May I have a teaspoon, please?” Her voice was a tone louder than is usual on night duty, and had an unfamiliar formality.
Andrew said, “Oh. I’m sorry.” He brought out a handful of spoons from the box, dropped two, picked them up from the floor, nearly handed her one of them instead of a clean one, and said “Sorry” again. She walked rapidly to the door, half turned without looking around, and said, “I think you’d better be going back to bed now, Odell.” Afterwards he didn’t know whether he had answered her or not. When she went out, she shut the door behind her. They had left it ajar, as they always did.
They were alone together; for Laurie it was like a parachute jump in which he felt for the cord in vain. After what, perhaps, was really only a matter of seconds, he said, “Oh, hell. I never get away with anything.” Andrew didn’t look around. “I only once ever cried at the theater, and in a flash the curtain was down and they’d turned on every light in the house.”
Andrew turned with a resolute smile. “She must have some peculiar ideas now about the way we spend our time in here.”
“Oh, I don’t think she more than felt an atmosphere, as they say.” He had the feeling of carrying out some brutal operation without anesthetics.
“You’ll have to go now, or she’ll have kittens any minute.”
Laurie could see Andrew copying his manner, trustfully, as if quite without resource of his own. “You’ve got something there, I shouldn’t wonder.” Suddenly the All Clear went, strident in the silence. “My God, was there a warning on? I didn’t know.”
“Sleep well,” said Andrew. Laurie saw him searching for words, or perhaps for the meaning of whatever words he had found. Better not to wait.
“Don’t worry. Good night.”
At the end of the ward Nurse Sims was sitting at the table. She had got her sewing out, and she didn’t look up.
It was bad luck on her, Laurie thought. She hadn’t wanted to know. She much preferred everything to be nice. You would never have heard her commenting unkindly on one of those quiet boys, a bit shy with girls, or one of those clever women, the tailor-made type, a bit independent with men. It took all sorts to make a world. As for people like that, them one would only hear of, never meet. They belonged, like sawn-up corpses, to the exotic land of the Sunday papers. Even now, almost certainly, she wouldn’t report what she had seen, partly because it would embarrass her too much, but chiefly because she still wouldn’t fully commit herself to having talked and worked with, and even liked, people like that. She would rather consign them to some indeterminate limbo of people who were no longer nice but not fully classified; people who were a bit morbid, or had something unhealthy about them.
Limbo, he thought, remembering the apples shining across the stream, and the day of separation coming nearer and nearer, till it would be now.
The A.P.C. had worn off and the familiar gimlet was boring into his knee. He turned and lay with his face in the darkness of his folded arms, feeling as if he had gone away already and were among strangers, alone.