After a while, Laurie said, “This is a hell of a party for you to drive all this way for.”
“I’m sorry about that just now, Spud. I only hope nothing serious comes of it.”
“You’re sorry?” Laurie looked up. There were still people fairly near; he only looked for a moment.
“I should have said it was Langham. What if he runs into Jeepers again before he forgets? You’ll be the one to get the backwash.”
“So I ought to be.”
“No, I shouldn’t have done it. It was just a rather tarty bit of exhibitionism, really.”
Laurie looked at the nut in his hand and slid it unseeingly over the worn screw. “You know why you did it. Because I wanted you to.”
When Ralph spoke again it was so quietly that no one else could have heard at all; but he only said, “Did you?”
Laurie fixed the nut to an unworn scrap of thread at the bottom, and heard the soft wood crunch faintly. Staring down at it, he said, “Yes.”
“Laurence, my dear boy, if I may make a suggestion.”
Laurie knew that in the moments of Mr. Straike’s approach they had been silent; he clung to this certainty, and quite soon was able to look around.
Later, while he was perambulating with sausage rolls, it occurred to him to wonder why Mr. Straike called him Laurence with such determination, when he must long have known that no one else did so. He realized that in Mr. Straike’s considered opinion Laurie was a sissy name, such as would be wished by a woman on a fatherless boy. He was being rechristened as a bracer. With this thought, he looked around for his mother, and couldn’t find her. She had gone to change into her going-away things.
For a moment he thought of following her home, so that he could say goodbye to her alone. But if she had wanted it, he thought, she would have told him where she was going; and he oughtn’t to leave the guests for so long. He gave up the idea, with a relief for which these reasons seemed enough. The house he had inherited was waiting for him. It wasn’t fitting any longer that he should encounter her in it.
At the other side of the hall Ralph had stopped to talk to a girl. She was a Straike guest, a Wren in uniform. Looking at his face, Laurie could tell that he was talking service shop with a conventional garnish of sex which he had found to be expected. They both seemed to be enjoying it. For a moment Laurie felt sharply jealous; but almost at once the feeling became unreal, and he went on watching Ralph with a tolerance in which pleasure was barely concealed. The girl had become a shadowy figure to him, a demonstrator of something in which she had no rights.
He had a sudden memory, heightened and colored by his present emotions, of how at Alec’s party he had watched Ralph standing in the crowd, and had felt his essential isolation. He had been like a solitary outpost standing fast in a rout. He had courage, the catalyst without which pride and truth cannot combine. Almost all the others had sold out truth for vanity; or, in the more fashionable phrase, they had flaming inferiority complexes. But Ralph had been willing to lay on his pride the burden of self-knowledge, and carry it with his shoulders straight. How has he managed all these years, thought Laurie; where has he gone, who has he talked to? But now voices at the door were telling his mother how charming she looked, and almost at once someone was crying, “The car’s here!”
The grape-purple feather on the little hat tickled Laurie’s cheek, he smelt the fragile bloom of powder and violets; then she seemed carried away from him as if he had been trying to hold her against a river flowing strongly to sea. Voices laughed and called, the noise of the rapids; the car vanished, swirled away around the bend of the stream.
He had a feeling, not of grief, but of absolute full stop and aimlessness. He turned, and Ralph was beside him.
For a moment so short that it was over almost as their eyes met, Ralph looked at him with great tenderness, understanding, and reassurance; then said with cheerful conventionality, “Come over here and talk to Babs Whitely, she says you don’t know each other yet.”
He steered Laurie over to the girl and plunged him into the thick of a conversation. She was amusing, full of little party tricks which repetition might make tiresome, but which were diverting the first time. They all had some more champagne. They were the only people there under thirty, and all in uniform; unconsciously they reacted to their elders’ reflected image of them, young, brave, and gay. Ralph had taken Babs’s measure quickly; she was unexacting in spite of her façade, with that display of bawdiness on safe occasions often found in women who are not highly sexed, but long to be taken for rakes. As the champagne took effect one could see that she was very good-natured, and liked men, as some people say of dogs, in their place. Laurie reflected that if it hadn’t been for Ralph he would have run away from her.
When she left them, in a cloud of warm nebulous resolves to meet again, the party was breaking up at the edges, though a hard clinging core remained. As they returned to their duties, Laurie said, in one of those flashes of high illumination which champagne produces, “Ralph, you’re much more briefed up on all this than I am. You’ve been at a wedding before.”
“Well,” said Ralph calmly, “I’ve been a best man four times in various parts of the world. It’s previous experience they seem to go for, before good references.”
“How long do people usually go on staying?”
“It depends. All night in some places.” Laurie gazed at him blankly, then saw the smile under his lashes. There was a brief and rather breathless pause. “Don’t you know when the mainline trains go?” said Ralph lightly. “That should give you a clue.”
In fact, the London contingent was moving already; the party for the down train would have to go in half an hour. It would be a decisive exodus; the rest who had come by car would hardly outstay it. He told Ralph all this, explaining it carefully. At the end Ralph, who had listened with a kind but searching look, said, “Spuddy. What have you had to eat today?”
“Oh, breakfast and everything.”
“Yes, but what did you actually eat?”
When it was put in this way, Laurie wasn’t sure. Ralph said, “Well, come and eat now, you’re getting tight.”
He had been feeling a little strange, but light and clear, not like a recognizable phase of drink. As they stood by the deserted buffet Ralph said, “How’s the leg holding out?”
“Oh, it’s fine.”
“Tell me if you want to rest and I’ll fix it.”
“There’s nothing you can’t fix, is there?”
“It’s time someone started to look after you.”
“Is it?” He felt subtle and rarefied. He looked up.
“Spud,” said Ralph softly, “you’re drunk. Be careful.”
They held one another’s eyes for a moment, not having meant to.
Perhaps it was only instinct that made Laurie look around, perhaps it was a movement on the edge of his visual field. At the far end of the buffet, one of the decrepit waiters had appeared. Laurie’s gaze travelled out from Ralph’s face to meet a cold, flat, withdrawing eye, glaucous and sunken, the eye of yesterday’s fish rejected by this morning’s buyers, wrinkling on the slab. The face could still be read, as it were, between the lines; faint traces were left in it of a mincing, petulant kind of good looks. The glance, so quickly caught away, lingered on like a smell; it had been a glance of classification. Laurie sensed, without comprehending, the dull application of unspeakable terms of reference; the motiveless calculation proceeding, a broken mechanism jogged on its dump by a passing foot. His eyes, flinching away, met Ralph’s retreating too.