You would have thought that an introduction to Aunt Olive was the one thing Ralph had been hoping for. Laurie remembered suddenly a remark of Bunny’s about Christmas in the orphanage; but he didn’t want to think about Bunny any more.
It would be untrue to say that Aunt Olive had grown suddenly pretty, because women who employ no make-up miss it at such moments, and it inhibits them; but her self-esteem had climbed steeply. Suddenly she gave an arch little squeak of discovery and delight. “I know!” she cried. “I couldn’t think where I’d seen you! Now I remember!”
Ralph’s charming smile became just a little less casual. He said, as if he wanted to get in first, “I expect you saw me somewhere about the place at school.” As he spoke, he looked around to see who was in earshot, but so unobtrusively that even Laurie only just noticed it.
“School!” cried Aunt Olive in triumph. “I was right!” This time no one interrupted her. She turned to Laurie. “Your mother always tells me what a memory for faces I have. He’s the boy in the photograph!”
She must have taken the short silence that followed as a tribute to her gifts, for she smiled radiantly.
In the next few minutes, before she left, Laurie had time to think. It had been obvious to him from the first that Andrew couldn’t have come here without the risk of being exposed to insult. It must, he thought, be a symptom of the way his generation had been torn from its roots, that he hadn’t till now perceived the risk to Ralph.
The Head and the staff had tried, naturally, to hush his expulsion up. It was possible, though unlikely, that they even thought they had succeeded. The fact was, of course, that Hazell’s hysterical confidences had made it the most resounding scandal in the history of the School. The sensation had been proportionate to Ralph’s immense, and rather romantic, prestige; and it was a certainty that there hadn’t been a single boy, down to the lowest and most friendless fag, who hadn’t known at least something about it.
Although Laurie still felt very close to these events, it was in a purely inward and personal way. Externally, seven years was half a lifetime. He had grown in them from a boy to a man; he had met pain and fear, love and death; his comrades had been men for whom his old world had not at any time existed. Now, looking at the guests around him who had been adults longer than he had been alive, he saw that for most of them seven years must be only the other day. It was unlikely that Ralph hadn’t thought of it. The people who are vulnerable to these things are less absent-minded about them.
When Aunt Olive had gone Ralph lifted one eyebrow, smiled at Laurie, and murmured, “Whew!”
“You’ve not had a drink yet.” Laurie gave him one, and as they drank tried to thank him in a glance; but the glance didn’t turn out exactly as he had meant. He said quickly, “Come along and meet my mother.” As they went he saw, for the second time, Mr. Straike turning from his conversation with Canon Rosslow to eye Ralph with curiosity.
If you knew as much as Laurie had learned by now, you might perhaps get as far as a speculation about Ralph; but even then you wouldn’t be sure. He had reviewed his own weaknesses early in life, and with untender determination trained them as one bends a tree; the resolution this had demanded had stamped his face with most of the lineaments of strength. The fastidious severity of his dress and carriage hid, no doubt, a personal vanity by no means extinct; but it had the air of a fine, unconscious arrogance. Laurie, as he walked beside him up the hall, was looking at Mr. Straike and thinking, He’d have liked to be the one who brought him here, to put me in my place. Too bad he belongs to me.
At the last moment, Laurie’s mother was caught up by friends, and Mr. Straike came to meet them instead.
The next few minutes did Laurie a world of good. He discovered at once that Ralph hadn’t lost the famous manner; perhaps if one had known him well one might have detected a crease or two and a whiff of moth-balls; but it was more than good enough for Mr. Straike. “By the greatest good luck we happened to run into each other at Dunkirk” (he made it sound rather cosmopolitan, like Shepheard’s or the Long Bar at Shanghai), “so we were able to pick up the threads again.”
“Now I think of it,” said Mr. Straike suddenly, “I can’t recall that I ever asked your mother the name of your House, Laurence. Very remiss of me.”
“Stuart’s,” Laurie said. It had been Stuart’s when he first went there.
“Stuart’s, Stuart’s. That has some association for me. Wait, I have it. That’s the House that was taken over by a school contemporary of my own, dear old Mumps Jepson. Surely that would be within your time?”
“Yes. Mr. Jepson took it over when I was fairly senior, but you know how the old name sticks.” Almost unconsciously, he had closed his shoulder up to Ralph’s as if they were in battle.
“Ah, interesting. I wonder what impression he made on you. Poor old Mumps, he was something of a hypochondriac; I remember thinking he had scarcely the requisite—hrm—guts for the job. We’ve lost touch, I’m afraid. But I did meet him, at an Old Boys’ Dinner, if I remember, a year or two after he took up his appointment; he was very full then of his trials and his responsibilities, very full indeed. Would it be in ’33? It might even have been in ’35.” He looked at Ralph again. “I’m afraid I heard your name very imperfectly; Langham, did you say?”
There was a short and, for Laurie, terrifying pause. He didn’t look at Mr. Straike because he had, in a sense, forgotten about him; and he did not look around because he dared not, for he had felt the finger of some past evasion touch Ralph and dim him, like a quick smudge.
“No,” said Ralph. “It’s Lanyon.”
“M-m, no. I fancy it would be a little after your—”
“Laurie, darling.” It was the measure of Laurie’s feelings that he had been unaware of his mother’s arrival. For the last ten minutes people had been assuring her of her happiness; she had had a glass of champagne; she was expanding like a rose in a warm room. “This is delightful. How could you not tell me that you’d asked the R. R. Lanyon to come? Were you keeping him as a surprise?”
“Yes,” said Laurie, “as a matter of fact I was.” He presented him.
“Well, my dear boy—because I shall never think of you as more than eighteen even when you’re an admiral—you mustn’t laugh at me, but, really, I can hardly believe you’re true, it’s like meeting a unicorn. Of course, I know it’s all worlds away now to both of you, but to me it seems yesterday when Laurie used to bring home legends about you, just like my generation with the Prince of Wales.”
“You must let him live it down,” said Ralph, “after all this time.”
“Hrm,” said Mr. Straike. “Lucy, my dear …” Laurie realized that the healths were about to begin.
His response for the bride was one of the things that had kept him awake till the small hours. But now he had forgotten all about it, and came to it fresh, with a suddenly revived self-confidence. While the guests were still clapping, and his mother looking at him with pride, he was wondering already whether Ralph had thought it was all right.
Few men were there and no other young ones; he and Ralph were kept busy. For ten or fifteen minutes they scarcely met. There was probably no moment of this time when, if he had been asked where Ralph was, he couldn’t have given the answer without looking. At last somebody broke a folding chair. With an air of conscientious helpfulness, Laurie went over to the corner where it was and tinkered about with it. Ralph came up and steadied the chair for him, and they bent over the brown varnished wood with their backs to the room.
“This is what you’re looking for.” Ralph handed him a wing nut from the floor. Laurie couldn’t answer. He had heard in Ralph’s voice that secret overtone only half of which is created by the one who speaks, the other half by the one who listens, and which says in any language, “By and by all these people will have gone.”