“Good Lord, Mother would love it; you’d probably ruin the wedding for old Straike. But I think I’d better go on my own. You couldn’t get away, anyhow.”
“Oh, yes, I could work thirty-six hours.” His voice dropped half a tone. “Would you like it, Spud?”
At that moment, someone in the corridor shut a door, or switched off a light, plunging them into almost total darkness.
Taking him unaware, the extinction of light filled Laurie with a deep and warm relief. He could see dimly the silhouette of Ralph’s head, quite near, against a faint loom of light from the passage. Everything was going to be taken care of; there was no need to say anything. Then, as if he were waking from sleep, he knew why it was that he mustn’t take Ralph with him.
Collecting himself, he searched among his old good reasons for excuse. “I don’t think I ought to settle down to being sorry for myself, taking people with me for moral support and so on. You’d hate it, too, the relatives are bound to be hell, especially his. I expect I’d better just take it straight. Sometimes things are easier if there isn’t anyone to know how you’re feeling.” In a voice he tried to keep quite unchanged, he added, “Especially if it’s something you ought not to feel.”
There was a little silence. Laurie said to himself, It’s just a state I’m in. It’s just because of the wedding, and leaving Andrew, and being alone in this awful place. It needn’t mean anything if I don’t let it.
“Spuddy. You mustn’t worry the way you do.”
The voice was kind; but there was more than kindness in it. It struck the sounding-board of Laurie’s loneliness and his will died. Ralph’s arm was lying along the back of the pew, but he didn’t move it. Laurie could just feel his shoulder and that was all.
“You mustn’t get so upset about what you feel, Spud. No one’s a hundred per cent consistent all the time. We might like to be. We can plan our lives along certain lines. But you know, there’s no future in screwing down all the pressure valves and smashing in the gauge. You can do it for a bit and then something goes. Sometimes it gets so that the only thing is just to say, ‘That’s what I’d like to feel twenty-four hours a day; but, the hell with it, this is how I feel now.’ ”
Laurie didn’t try to speak. In the pause they heard, half muffled by walls and distance, the thin crying of a child.
Ralph said softly, “Things can happen. It’s not in the blueprint, perhaps. Perhaps it isn’t for ever. But a person who knows you will understand that. No one’s going to hold it against you afterwards.”
“I know, Ralph. It’s all right.” What does that mean, he thought; it doesn’t mean anything. He had known it was necessary to start talking. After a moment he said, “Ralph, I—I don’t really want to go alone. But I think I ought to.”
Ralph’s voice didn’t alter. He stayed just as he was. “Do, then, Spud, if that’s how you feel. It wouldn’t be good to make up your mind for you now.” For a moment Laurie sensed a deep undeclared reserve of confidence, glanced at, considered in the light of experience, and returned to store. “If you feel like company you can ring me up. Ring this number.” With sight better attuned than Laurie’s to the darkness, he got out a pad and scribbled across it: Laurie wondered what more he had been able to see. He tore out the leaf and offered it. Their hands touched. Ralph said, “You mustn’t worry any more, Spud. There’s nothing difficult or complicated or anything. I’m there when you want me. That’s all.”
After a moment Laurie said, “Ralph, you’re too good to people. I’m not worth your taking trouble over. Whatever happened, I never could be worth it.”
“What a silly boy you are.” He spoke as if someone were flirting with him at a party. Outlined in the doorway, Laurie saw him get to his feet. “I was forgetting, they have supper at some ungodly hour here, about a quarter to six. If you don’t go now you’ll miss it.”
As Laurie got up he found he was levering himself on a pile of hymn books; some almost submerged tactile memory remarked, Ancient and Modern, not Songs of Praise.
As they parted at the ward door Ralph said, “You’ve not lost that telephone number, have you, Spud?”
“No,” said Laurie. “It’s here.”
“Good. Don’t worry. God bless.”
He was just in time to catch the supper trolley. Going back to bed with his mug and plate, he found the boy Mervyn being fed by a nurse with a feeding-cup.
“Hello, Spud.”
“Hello, son, feeling better?”
“Look. There’s a navy officer in the door there, waving to you.” As Laurie turned, Ralph gave a valedictory wave and smile and vanished. Mervyn said, “Who’s he?”
“A friend I was at school with. He was at Dunkirk too.”
“You don’t mean,” said Mervyn, “the captain off that ship?”
“Yes.” He had quite forgotten the conversation. Now he realized that Mervyn had experienced a miracle of adult integrity. He was gazing after Ralph as if Michael the Archangel had looked in. Well, thought Laurie, that’s something anyway.
The rest of the evening he spent writing to Andrew. He had meant to talk about the wedding. But now the whole subject had become so entangled with things which couldn’t be told that it confused him, and in the end he didn’t dwell on it very much.
In the middle of the night he woke to hear whispers and movement behind the screens of the old man’s bed. He knew what had happened, as soon as he saw that the blankets had been thrown on the floor. In the morning there was a flat empty bed, like Charlot’s, neatly bisected by the center folds of sheet and counterpane.
He got up and went out some time before his train was due, so that he would have a chance to telephone Andrew before he went off duty. It was wonderful to hear his almost speechless pleasure at recognizing the voice; but considered strictly as a conversation, it was like waving handkerchiefs from a quarter-mile away. Ralph from long practice had always known how to extract humor from the fact that people were overhearing, while at the same time he conveyed with neatness and subtlety almost anything he wished. Laurie could hear Andrew’s sense of inadequacy behind every word, and longed to make him feel easier. “I’m in a call box, I can say what I like; I expect you’re standing in the middle of all the bathroom traffic, aren’t you?”
“Yes, it’s about peak hour. I wish—”
“I know. We’ll work something out when I come back.”
“I hope it won’t be too bad. If I’d only thought, perhaps I could have got my night off then, instead, and gone with you.”
There was a moment’s pause. “I wouldn’t have inflicted that on you. You must come up and meet Mother some other time.”
“I expect your stepfather might think me rather a bad influence.”
“Oh, yes, horrible. If he found Jesus Christ preaching on the village green, he’d have him arrested for blasphemy inside five minutes.”
“Laurie—”
“Sorry. Just a manner of speaking.”
“It’s not that—I wish I could see you before you go.”
It wasn’t till Laurie was sitting in the train that he remembered he had left no message for Reg.
He had not been home since his embarkation leave; and now, seeing from the gate the small, low house, its thick walls blunted at the edges and smoothed as if by the wear of giant hands, the fifty-year-old cedar floating its dark clouds over the lawn striped from the mower, it seemed impossible that change could touch it all, without or within. To gain this moment he had told his mother not to meet him, as she must be busy, but now it was spoilt for him because in his heart he was deeply hurt that she had taken him at his word. As a last charm to bring back the familiar, he gave the special whistle he used for his dog, and, standing behind the blue spruce at the gate, waited to see old Gyp come pottering stiffly out with his ears cocked. But it was his mother who heard and came out instead.