Confused in his own darkness, Laurie turned to the boy and said as if to a contemporary, “Don’t talk to me now.”
Mervyn looked from his face to the letter which was showing and said, quite quietly, “Okay, Spud. Sorry.” He folded the paper neatly and turned on his other side to read it.
The surgeon of the day came, did a round with his students, and left. Patients relaxed, milled their beds about for comfort, talked to each other across the ward. The stir of activity seemed to release Laurie from a paralysis of the will. He got out of bed, and once more took his clothes out of the locker.
“Going out, Spud?”
Laurie looked at the boy. His thin face was sharply intelligent; loyal and shy.
“Yes. I’ve got to, something’s happened I have to see about. I shan’t be back all day. Don’t say anything, will you, or ask them where I am?”
“Okeydoke, I won’t talk. Won’t she miss you at dinner, though?”
“I can’t help that. See you tonight.”
He was just in time to get the mid-morning express, and was at Paddington two and a half hours later. So completely had his thoughts absorbed him that he walked almost through the military police, and scarcely realized they had been there till he was in the underground. Perhaps his indifference had bluffed him through, perhaps they had other fish to fry, perhaps they saw his boot and didn’t trouble. He got out of the underground in a wide, crowded East End thoroughfare, asked the way and was told to take a tram. It put him off at the end of a long street of smoke-black villas, paired like Siamese twins. Old gray lace curtains framed lean aspidistras in Benares pots; the gardens had starved privet behind twisty cast-iron railings, or little straggly beds of London Pride edged with tile. If you touched the railings your hand came away thick with grime. It was the kind of place where there should have been children playing in the street, but they were mostly gone. The seventh pair of villas had been laid open all down the front, like a child’s dollhouse. You could see the dark squares on the wallpaper where the pictures had hung. But these were Nos. 84 and 86, and Laurie was looking for No. 50.
No. 50 had The Beeches over the door, engraved elegantly in cement which had once been painted cream. The curtains were casement cloth dyed pink, streakily, at home. There was even an aspidistra, though it looked a little seedy. The door was open. Laurie stepped into the hall. It had an embossed dado with chocolate varnish, and linoleum patterned like parquet and worn into holes, showing the boards. There was a smell of cabbage-water and carbolic soap. He listened; just out of sight, at the back of the house, someone was moving. He had just opened his mouth to call “Andrew!” when a door at the end opened and Dave came out.
“Hello, Laurie.” He sounded, as always before, unexcited, attentive, and kind; but he had dropped his voice, and Laurie knew beforehand what he was going to say. “Come in the kitchen, will you, there are people asleep upstairs.”
The kitchen was a small dingy room, warm from its black iron range and, it seemed, from the stored vitality of the families whose hub of existence it must have been. A yellow varnished paper on the walls affected wood-graining. The scrubbed table in the middle was covered with clean newspaper, there were rolls of surgical lint and gauze on it, and piles of cut and folded dressings. An iron pot of porridge was simmering on the range, and a big kettle. Dave pulled up an old bentwood chair and said, “Sit down, Laurie, I’m just going to make some tea.”
He had always been lean, but lately he had grown much thinner. There were deep furrows in his cheeks, half hidden by the edges of the grizzled beard. He had on a worn leather golf jacket and stained, shabby flannel slacks. He spooned tea from a cocoa-tin into a brown teapot, and tipped the heavy kettle to fill it.
Laurie had had no food today but a cardboardy meat pie at the station. The tea smelt good. Some dim memory stirred in his mind of sitting with the maid in his grandmother’s kitchen when he was very small; he felt a sudden nostalgia, piercing and forlorn. He said, “Is Andrew here?”
“Yes,” said Dave. “He’s asleep with the others. Last night was fairly quiet, but he was still a bit tired, and we may be busy later.” He poured out tea in thick white china cups; you could have thought Laurie had dropped in from next door. “Sugar? We’ve got plenty, Andrew and Tom don’t take it.”
“Please. I wanted to see him about something rather important. I’m sorry he’s tired, but I think he’d rather see me.”
“I’ll call him presently,” said Dave, “if you want him called.” He sugared the tea from a Woolworth glass basin. “I’ve been half expecting you, difficult as it must have been for you to get away.”
“I’m absent without leave. I’ve had a letter from Andrew. I have to see him, there’s something I want to explain.”
Dave looked at him. “You look worn out,” he said simply. He went to the deal dresser, fetched a cloth out of the drawer, spread it on Laurie’s end of the table and set a plate and knife.
“Please don’t bother,” Laurie said. “I couldn’t eat anything.”
“We’ve some beef dripping this week. I’m going to make some toast.” He got a loaf from the bin, sliced it, and speared the bread on a wire fork. “You can do this one.”
Dully, Laurie turned his chair and held the fork to the bars of the range. The glow was comforting; it sheltered his eyes which flinched from being looked at any more. Dave pulled up the other chair and sat down beside him, with his slice of bread on a bent carving fork. They both kept their eyes on the fire, and shifted the toast about, because of the bars.
“Do you ever think,” said Dave, “that retribution seems to spread itself very unevenly? It’s often seemed so to me. But I think one must take the analogy of the body. A gangrened limb is quite insensitive. Only the living tissues feel pain.”
There was a pause, during which a hot coal dropped from the bars onto the hob and bounced down into the ash-pan. Laurie said, “Andrew told you.”
“Well, I was rather unfair to him. I didn’t warn him I could fill in a certain amount between the lines. I mean, from experience.” He added, not defensively, but kindly, as though Laurie had asked for reassurance, “That was a good many years ago.”
His toast was crumbling on the fork; he speared it gingerly in a fresh place. “I’ve felt now and then—if I’m wrong, stop me before I go any further, won’t you—that you’ve had a mistaken idea about my feelings for Andrew.” When Laurie said nothing, he went on, “Not that I’ve any right to resent it. But I’ve often wished I could set your mind at rest.”
Laurie looked at his toast, and turned it over. “I didn’t think that, exactly.”
“No,” said Dave. “I know. Not exactly. I know what you thought and I don’t really blame you. Every religious body has a few. With most of them it’s woolly thinking, rather than hypocrisy. I had the wool pulled off when I was about Andrew’s age, as a matter of fact.”
He got up, fetched Laurie’s tea from the table and stood it on the steel fender in reach of his hand. Laurie said, “Thanks,” and then, with difficulty, “It might not be a bad thing now for him to know that.”
“Well, I told him. He’d have thought of it himself in a short time, of course.”
Laurie shifted the toast and said, “Yes, of course. He’d better have someone he can trust to be straight with him.”
Dave looked up. “He isn’t a fool. You know that better than anyone. He knows why he wasn’t told everything, if he wasn’t. That’s not the sort of thing he has on his mind.”
“I know. That’s why I came.”
“I thought it might be.” Dave relieved him of the toast which was beginning to smoke, nicked off a burnt corner, spread it with dripping, salted it, and put the plate on the fender. “Don’t let it get cold,” While Laurie was eating it he went back to the swabs on the table. Presently he said, “You don’t have to worry about me, whatever else you worry about. Do get that into your head, won’t you? For a lot of reasons; one of which, a minor one I like to think nowadays, is that Andrew looks just like his mother. Except in character sometimes, I never see Bertie in him at all.”