“Did he? Good show.”
“I reckon, with the moon like it is now, we’ll have another tonight, don’t you?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Probably not.” He realized now that the child was a little too bright and cocky to be quite true. “If there is, we’ll just have to tell each other the story of our lives to pass the time, eh?”
“Bags you tell yours first, then.”
Laurie got into bed and, opening a book, tried to think quietly behind its screen. Soon it fell from his hand and, with the clatter of the ward work all around him, he slept like the dead. Later with the noise his dreams grew restless; he thought he was back at Dunkirk, but this time responsible for everything, so that he had to crawl about the beach dragging his broken leg. He heard his name being called, but he couldn’t go any faster; he muttered, “All right, I’m coming, all right.”
“Easy does it. It’s only me.”
He started awake; the lights were on and the blackout up; a doctor in a white coat was standing by his bed. He blinked and saw that it was Alec.
“I can’t really stop. I’ve got to assist with an emergency in ten minutes, but I couldn’t leave you in here any longer without saying hello.” He pulled out the stool from under the bed and sat down, looking just as all the housemen did when they came to take patients’ histories; one half expected him to bring out a patella hammer or a stethoscope. He chatted vaguely about his work, and how to keep on the right side of the Sister; it was all rather dim and dutiful, and Laurie, who was still muzzy with sleep, began to wish he’d go. But he got out the X-rays from the box on the bed-rail, and started holding them up to the light. Laurie was used to seeing doctors enthralled by this pastime; but after saying, “Good Lord, you were lucky with that callus,” Alec became a little absent. He glanced over his shoulder, dropped his voice, and said, “I ran into Ralph for a minute today, just after he left you here.”
“Oh, yes, did you?” He didn’t feel in a state to deal with it, and hoped his face had given nothing away. The reserves which Ralph had broken down felt, in reaction, shy and raw at the approach of anyone else.
Alec looked around for a moment under his brown eyelids, with his disarming throw-away smile. “I didn’t keep him. He was looking incandescent and elevated, like a candle burning at both ends.” After a faintly hesitant pause, he added, “Don’t keep him on a string too long, he hasn’t the temperament.”
Laurie didn’t answer. He was violently embarrassed and, in any case, could think of nothing to say. Alec looked at the X-ray again.
“He hasn’t been talking. But I know him pretty well.”
“Yes,” said Laurie. “Of course. I hear you got it quite heavy here last night.”
Alec gave him another swift neutral glance. “We’ve had worse. Sandy got a third-degree burn on the arm from an incendiary, picking it up with a coal shovel. It’s making us very short on Casualty. Well, I must go. See you sometime.”
Laurie shut his eyes again, to protect himself from conversation. He felt oppressed and dejected. He didn’t blame Ralph, at least not consciously. As if a few threads of contact still linked them like the streamers that cling to departing ships, he felt what must have happened: Alec had offered felicitations, Ralph, out of sensitiveness or superstition, had been driven to qualify them a little. As Alec had remarked, they had known each other very well. Laurie wondered whether he had had time to give the news to Sandy yet.
Through the blanket he had pulled around his ears he could hear the evening mouth-washes being poured out. Muffled like this, the clink and splash and talk sounded like party noises. He could imagine the party conversation as well. “Goodness, where have you been, you’re weeks behind. Why, that’s deader than the Alec affair. Bunny’s with Peter now and Ralph’s with this Laurie boy. No, you wouldn’t have, he’s new, Sandy picked him up in the street originally; he’s the boy Sandy and Alec had that row about. Funny boy, a cripple, awkward about mixing. However, Ralph’s madly in love with him at the moment. I thought everyone knew.”
You don’t get away from it, thought Laurie; once you’re really in, you never get away. You get swept along the road with the refugees, till you find you’ve been carried through the gates without noticing, and you’re behind the wire for the duration. The closed shop. Nous autres.
It would never be like that with Andrew, he thought. Talking in the hospital kitchen at night, they had felt special only in their happiness, and separate only in their human identities. How good it would be to see him now! At least one could write; and getting down into the bedclothes, he spent comfortingly in this way the next half-hour. It was not till he reread it that he realized how far it was falsified by what had been left out, and by that time it was too late to write it again, without missing the early morning post.
He was asleep when the sirens went. Used at the other hospital not to associate their sound with very much urgency, his subconscious mind dismissed it and let him sleep on. But the guns were linked with other memories, and waked him at once; the bombs began a few minutes later.
The other patients said at first that it wasn’t as bad as last night; then they seemed to decide that comparisons were odious, and made no more. Laurie remembered how in France, before he was wounded, he had begun to get his second wind, helped by the stimulus of action and the comradeship around him. It hadn’t been so good lying passively on the beach with the Stukas coming over, after one had had a sample already; but the morphia had helped most of the time. It had been light, too. Hearing two old gaffers joking together on the other side of the ward, he realized he was much more frightened than they were; and he remembered with shame Ralph, who hadn’t been too drunk that night to know what he was doing, falling asleep in Bunny’s deep chair. When he had set the wheels moving for Laurie’s transfer from the country, he would scarcely have considered small inconveniences like this. Accustomed to communicate his own courage to those around him, no doubt he believed most people to be braver than they really were.
“Spud. You awake?”
“Hello,” said Laurie, sitting up. “Yes, I am, but I didn’t think you were. Do they still wake you up at two for the Wonder Drug?”
“No, only ten now. But it’s a bit noisy to sleep, isn’t it?”
Indeed, no one was attempting to do so, and the nurses had sensibly decided that it was better to keep the patients cheerful than quiet. But children will sleep through almost anything, and Mervyn’s stillness had been deceptive. He looked feverish, Laurie thought, and it would be partly that which was making him shiver. Laurie lit himself a cigarette, and got up.
“Let’s talk instead. I’ll come and sit on your bed to save shouting. Just let me put my boot on, in case the nurses want me to do anything.”
They had an acid drop, and later Mervyn had a draw at Laurie’s cigarette. It would probably, Laurie thought, with these associations, make a nonsmoker of him for life.
When one of the windows blew in, Mervyn said, without removing his cold fingers from Laurie’s hand, “I suppose this isn’t nearly as bad as Dunkirk, is it?”
“Well, not for me, because I can get about now. You’re fixed more like I was then.”
“If I had to walk would my stomach burst open?”
“I doubt it; but I could carry you.”
“I weigh six stone eleven.”
“Yes, I could manage that.”
After a long awkward pause, as if he were making up his mind to confess to something, Mervyn said, “My Aunt Edie’s house was hit by a bomb, week before last.”
“Oh, bad luck. Was she all right?”
“No, she was killed. And Uncle Ted, and Mr. Robbins that lived with them, and their dog, he was called Smoky, he was half a spaniel. And the baby.”