“No,” Laurie said.
“You had a row, didn’t you?”
“I’m sorry, Alec. If you don’t mind I’ll go back to bed. I thought a doctor wanted me. I’m sorry. Good night.”
“Now look,” said Alec in a hard casualty-officer’s voice, “there’s no time for all that now. This is serious. Did you have a row with Ralph over one of the orderly boys at the E.M.S. hospital?”
Laurie found that all the anger in him had gone flat and sour: he could feel nothing but a dull swallow of sickness, even at this. He thought again that Alec looked as if he hadn’t slept for days. London had been full of such faces. But now suddenly his dimmed perceptions partly cleared: a vague, premonitory apprehension stirred in him. He said, “That’s nothing to do with you.”
“Make up your mind about that later. Just listen now. If you’ve been told that Ralph went to see the boy and had some kind of scene with him, it isn’t true. That’s all.”
“It must be true.” It disturbed him that Alec’s voice hadn’t been that of a bland peacemaker, but brittle with the exasperation of a tired man. “It must be true, Andrew told me himself.”
“Oh, it’s not the boy’s fault. He’s only young, isn’t he? If someone called claiming to be Ralph, why should he doubt it? Only it wasn’t Ralph, you see. It was Bunny.”
“Bunny?” His entrails shrank, heavy and cold. Of course, he thought, of course. The food he had eaten half an hour before lay hard in his stomach, like a meal of wood. “But how could it be Bunny? Why?”
“Oh, use your intelligence, if you ever do use it. Does it sound the sort of thing Ralph would do?”
“But he was always saying—” Although he could sense above him an annihilating weight of remorse ready to fall, he couldn’t feel it yet, it was pushed out by the grotesque, obscene image of Andrew and Bunny together. “I found it hard to picture you and him as great friends. When he told me it was much more than that—”
His hand reached to his pocket as if to touch the letter might alter his almost verbal recollection of it. “It is like something from another world, but it has touched you, and the touch is real.”
“Well?” said Alec impatiently. “Now it starts to add up, I suppose.”
“But … but he didn’t know Andrew even existed. I didn’t tell Ralph about it till after that. If he knew, then Ralph must have been seeing him all the time. No one else could have told him. That’s nearly—” He stopped, recognizing for what they were the bitter lees of jealousy.
“I can guess how he found out. Sit down, can’t you; don’t stand there passing out on your feet, I’ve got no time to cope with it.”
“I’m not,” said Laurie angrily; but he let Alec push him into the patient’s chair. It was true that he was feeling sick. Alec sat back on the desk, watching his face irritably.
“I know just what he did, the little sod.” He pulled a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket, lit one in a jerky mechanical way without offering them, and drew on it hungrily. “I know, because I’ve carried the can for him before now. Either he’s been reading your letters, if you’ve written Ralph any, or he’s been at his diary again. I know he reads it because once Bim came out with something at a party, and from the way Ralph looked at me, I knew straight away I was the only person he’d ever told. It would have been just my word against Bunny’s, and I can’t bear these fracas, they make me ill.”
Laurie said slowly, “I know when that happened. I was there.”
“Oh, God, yes, so you were; of course that was why Ralph was so angry about it. He ought to have left his papers with me, like he did while he was at sea; he trusted me in those days, even after we’d split. The bits he used to show me were just travel stuff, but he always hovered rather, ready to grab it back again, so I assumed he’d committed his soul to it here and there. He’d have lost one lot with his ship, I suppose; but if he began another in hospital, God knows what he put in that.” His dark bruised-looking eyes, set in creases of fatigue, stared at Laurie with dislike. He was smoking feverishly, burning the cigarette down one side. “Of course, living in the same house with Bunny, he must have locked things up. I suppose he didn’t think to put a Yale on.”
It was like getting an anonymous letter, Andrew had said. As a comment on Ralph it might have sounded a little shrill, if the context had not seemed to explain everything. There are drawings which when inverted reveal the features of a new and different face. In a dead voice, its protest mechanical, Laurie said, “How do you know all this?”
“Oh, in the usual way. Toto Phelps and Bunny have been honeymooning for two full weeks now; anyone could have told him Toto’s one to get very nasty if he’s two-timed, but all these wide boys get swelled head. The crash came yesterday, and Toto couldn’t wait to plant the story where it could do most good. He’s scared stiff of Ralph, so he came to me.”
Laurie sat with his elbows on his knees, his hands pressed to his forehead. Alec twitched out the cigarettes again and lit another from the bent stub of the first which he trod into the rug. “I didn’t believe it myself at first. I said to Toto, ‘Don’t give me that, Bunny’s too crude for that Cinquecento stuff.’ But Toto says it was more or less handed him on a plate. I gather the final break with Ralph was fairly acrimonious, Ralph wouldn’t enlarge on that very much to you, I expect, and he didn’t change digs for a week afterwards. Bunny found out all he could in the meantime; well, of course, being Bunny, his first thought was that the thing between you and the orderly boy mightn’t be quite what you’d made it look to Ralph. So he went down just in the hope of finding some silly little piece whom he could charm into spilling the beans. Instead of which—well, I’ve met a few Quakers, I can imagine. And then the moment he introduced himself as a friend of yours, the boy said, ‘You must be Ralph Lanyon’: the uniform, of course. Well, improvisation is Bunny’s middle name. You must have noticed it.”
“Yes,” said Laurie emptily. “Yes, I know.”
“After all, there was nothing to give him away definitely except the hand, and Bunny’s always got his hands in his pockets; they were there at the start of the conversation and he remembered not to take out the left one. He must have remembered even when he was hit in the face. If he had any application, he could probably learn to be quite dangerous.”
“He was as good as he needed to be,” said Laurie bitterly.
“What happened?” asked Alec, as if he didn’t expect an answer. “Well, you could have known a couple of hours ago if you’d stayed put. I saw Toto last night; I was going to have told you this morning. But Sandy had one of his bad turns, climbing the walls and threatening what he’d do to himself, and I’ve been frightened to leave him, to tell you the truth. I had to ring up Dallow to do my jobs for me, and Christ, what I found when I got back.” He got up from the table with a nervous jerk; but the room was tiny and there was nowhere to walk to.
“Is Sandy all right?” said Laurie, though he didn’t care.
“Oh, yes,” said Alec in his flat edgy voice. “I suppose so … I’ve lived my own life to some extent. One can’t tell him everything, you know what he is. I’ve let Bunny get away with little things before now, because of the trouble he could make if he wanted to. Then this blew up, and I thought, No, there’s no two ways here, if I pass this it’s blackmail. So I did what I always say one should, I told Sandy everything Bunny could have told him. When I got back eventually, after about two hours’ sleep, I found one of Harrison’s gastrectomies leaking, and they’d buzzed for me three times.” He had displaced a pile of report forms on the desk; mechanically he began to straighten them. “I’m due to take my finals next summer. I don’t know how I can go on like this.”