It could be perceived that his youth belonged to a decade when Bertie had sounded charming, even perhaps romantic. He pronounced it Bartie. This trifle had on Laurie the effect of a kind of emotional trigger, and for several minutes he could not speak. Dave continued to fold swabs with the reflex precision of a factory hand who has been carrying out the same process for years. He went on, “As soon as Catherine joined us, it became obvious that Bertie was perfectly normal, except in fastidiousness, so I’d done nothing but make a virtue of necessity after all. With Andrew, I don’t know. I mean, I know at the moment of course, but life’s made some rather excessive demands on him lately. He may quite well grow out of it. If so, he’ll largely have you to thank.”
Laurie said, “Not now.”
Dave put some finished swabs away in a cardboard hatbox. “You’ll know what I’m talking about now better than I do. He came here with some doubt about you which he didn’t want to discuss with me or anyone else, and I imagine you’ve come here partly to resolve it. Of course, if you can give him the answer he wants, you have every right to. Indeed, you should, in spite of the fact that it won’t make things any easier for him at first.”
Laurie was silent, looking at the fire. At last he said, “I couldn’t give him the answer he wants.”
He didn’t look up. The rhythmic sound of Dave’s hands folding the swabs—a pause for adjustment, a light smoothing pat, a moment’s pause, and then a flat heavy pat—went on almost unbroken.
Laurie said, “I thought it might make him feel a little better to know that I’m sorry, and that it happened partly because—” He felt his voice about to get out of control, and stopped quickly.
“Of course,” Dave said. His lean knotted hands, seamed with work and scrubbing, paused on a half-folded square of gauze. “This is the worst of all my failures.”
“Yours?” said Laurie. He contracted his brows vaguely.
“Once or twice I thought of talking to you. I said to myself that you might be as innocent as Andrew was, and my interference might be a disaster to both of you; I couldn’t be absolutely sure. So I saved myself a tricky job which would have involved stating my qualifications for taking it on, and I had the pleasure of being right, where Andrew was concerned. But anyone involved in the recoil was just as much my responsibility.”
Laurie’s stillness had changed and become stony. He said, “I shouldn’t waste any worry there, if I were you.”
As if he hadn’t heard, Dave went on, “I took up the work I do largely to teach myself that sort of thing. As you see, I’ve not made much headway. Love is indivisible, Bertie said to me once. He’d only been out of the army a few months, but his instincts were better.”
Laurie looked up from the empty cup into which he had been staring. “If I don’t see Andrew, would you be willing to tell him I came?”
“Yes, of course. You’ve told me what you came here to say. I’ll tell him that, and anything else you want me to.”
The knowledge that he was not going to see Andrew again suddenly came home to Laurie as real. He hadn’t believed it while he was speaking.
Dave said, “It’s not that I think it would be wicked for you to meet. But you’d both suffer more than now, and no good would come out of it.” With a chance inflection which made Laurie able to imagine him as a young man, he added, “He really is awfully tired.”
“Yes,” said Laurie dully. “He must be. We’d better not wake him.”
“When you’re on the way back it won’t seem so bad. You’ll remember it would be all over by then anyway.”
“You people are so practical,” Laurie said.
Dave got up and came to sit on the kitchen table. His personality could be felt at this distance like something tangible. “There’s no need to feel finally cut off. He’ll want to hear from you, of course. Write when you feel he’ll be needing it, not when you feel you must, and it will be all right. Or if you want to know how he is without writing, you can always write to me.”
The room was getting dark. The first twilight was coming already to the long black street, though in the open, probably, it would still seem to be afternoon. Laurie noticed for the first time, hung on pegs at the side of the dresser as herbs are hung in the country, a bunch of gas masks and a cluster of tin hats.
“May I give you my address?” he said. “If he were—ever ill, or anything. If you wouldn’t mind.”
“Certainly,” said Dave, in the matter-of-fact voice he used in the wards. “Write it on this. I’ll put it in the file, I won’t keep it on me.”
While he was doing this Laurie remembered something. He would have liked to say, “I heard about your wife and I’m very sorry.” But because of the road by which this thought had come to him, he could not bring himself to say it.
Dave said, “This isn’t the day I’d have chosen to give you this advice, Laurie. But don’t think of yourself because of all this as necessarily typed and labelled. Some men could make shift, for a time at least, with any woman out of about ninety per cent they meet. Don’t fly to extremes the moment you discover your own needs are more specialized.”
Laurie waited, ready to say it after all; but Dave didn’t go on, and Laurie realized that his impersonality was in the nature of a human flinching, and that he was willing Laurie not to speak.
“Well, I must go. There’s no sense in getting myself crimed my last week in the army, if I can help it.”
Dave gave a smile which Laurie recognized as partly one of relief. “Don’t try and slip onto the platform by the footbridge, they’ve been on to that for at least twenty-five years.” They both got up. Dave said, “You’d better go out at the back, I think.”
The scullery was tiny, there was hardly room for anything but the copper and the sink. The cement floor had been mixed with unsifted earth so that pebbles stood up in it. There were towels hanging by the sink; this must be where everyone washed.
“Thank you for everything,” Laurie said. “If you’ll tell him … you know what to say. Tell him I …” As if the sensation had come as a message, he felt something usually too familiar for consciousness, a flat heaviness in a pocket. He got out the book and turned it over in his hand, with the feeling that there was something that needed seeing to. Remembering, he tore out the flyleaf, then got out his pen and wrote Andrew’s name on the first page. “Please, will you give him this?”
Dave looked at the lettering on the spine. “You know,” he said, “even the most exalted paganism is paganism none the less.” He took the book, looking at the scored and salt-stained cover, at the blood. Something came into his face which had been there on the day when Laurie had seen him watching the battle in the air and the falling planes. “Yes,” he said. “I’ll give it him with your love.”
He opened the door. A broom which had been leaning behind it fell with a clatter. They both stood still, listening. There was a sound, muffled by the floor above, of a man yawning; then, more clearly, raised to carry through a party wall, Andrew’s voice. “Tom. What time is it?”
Laurie slipped through the door into the scrawny yard. He glanced upward, to ask Dave if the window looked that way. Dave shook his head. Upstairs a sleepy voice talking itself awake said, “Dave’s up, good, that means tea.” Andrew said, “Someone’s with him, I think.”
Laurie stood with one foot on the doorstep, perfectly still. He had heard the false casualness of a reviving hope, which dares not be open even with itself. There was a long, long moment of silence before the voices began again. Then, very softly, Laurie said, “While I’m going could you make a noise? He knows my step.”