8
“RIGHT, THEN, ABOUT FIVE-FIFTEEN tomorrow. Don’t wait about in the street bitching up the knee before we start. Sit in the Out-Patient Department and I’ll come for you there.”
Laurie began to say, “Do you know where it is?” but remembered in time that Ralph must know the hospital very well. “I’ll do that,” he said.
“Was this all right, my ringing up again?”
“Yes, Sister’s off duty.”
“The other men in the ward don’t think anything, I suppose?”
“Life’s too short to spend flapping about that sort of thing. I shan’t be here much longer, anyway.”
“What? Sorry, what was that?”
“I said they’ll be discharging me, anyway, as soon as this electrical treatment’s finished.”
“Oh, yes. Of course. How long’s that going to be?”
“Discipline would go to pieces if they told us things like that.”
It was much colder this evening; but when he got back to bed, he found someone had put a hot-water bottle in it.
“Did you get this, Reg?”
“Nurse Adrian done it.” Busily intent on tidying his locker, Reg added, “I reckon that girl’s going to miss you, when you go.”
He had never referred, even obliquely, to last Friday’s conversation; but life had become a tight-rope walk for both of them. Laurie would have given anything to be able to repay Reg’s overture with some grateful confidence; Reg himself would have given anything to recall it. Laurie guessed that this forced remark about Nurse Adrian was an invitation to pretend nothing had happened. It was, indeed, the only tolerable solution; he accepted it with relief. “I’m more likely to do the missing. Rodgers must be blind, saying she’s got no sex appeal.”
Reg accepted the modus vivendi with transparent thankfulness. He would never, Laurie knew, have ventured so far into the open if the thing hadn’t already been openly discussed.
That day the first breath of winter had reached the shrinking flesh of a continent at war. It had a message for Laurie as well as for the rest. He still hadn’t a greatcoat; Dunkirk had been a summer disaster. For the first time that day, walking with Andrew, he had found he couldn’t move fast enough to keep warm. Walking patients in the square had thrown blankets or dressing-gowns over their shoulders, or a civilian coat lent by one of the c.o.s; but to go outside the gates one must be properly dressed. He had got a cramp in his knee almost at once, and they had had to turn back, more than half an hour before the usual time.
Andrew said, “There’s a stove in our hut. This time of day there’s hardly anyone there.”
“Better not. It might make trouble.”
“Well, listen, I know what we can do another time. I’ve got an old carriage-rug from home on my bed, it’s enormous. I’ll bring that, and we can take it to that dip in the beechwood, and roll ourselves up in it.”
Like an actor who dries up on the crucial cue for which the scene is waiting, Laurie could think of absolutely nothing to say. He ordered and implored himself; he could hear, as exactly as the click of a time-fuse, the moment when the pause became remarkable. The impulse to look up was like the impulse people feel to throw themselves off towers, or under trains. He looked up. Andrew was scarlet to the roots of his hair. It was all up, thought Laurie, as suddenly and simply as this, only through a moment’s lack of resource. Then he realized that Andrew’s embarrassment was acutely social, and that he hadn’t had time yet to see beyond it.
“You must think,” Laurie managed, “that I’ve a horrible mind. The trouble is, I’ve got a pretty good idea what the Staff Sergeant’s is like.”
“Yes,” said Andrew. He swallowed. “Lucky you thought. Sorry.”
“That’s the army for you.”
“I shouldn’t really have been as dumb as that, because a boy at my school was actually expelled for it, though most of us didn’t know till afterwards.”
In spite of himself Laurie had to ask, “What was he like?”
“Not very nice. He used to bully the little boys, and terrify them into doing what he wanted.”
“No; he doesn’t sound very nice at all.”
Andrew said, “Well, if we give it a bit of thought there must be somewhere to go. Never mind, it will probably be much warmer tomorrow.”
“Yes. I’m afraid I shan’t be here, though.”
“Of course. I was forgetting. Will you be back on the six-thirty bus?”
“No, not this time. I’ve got a pass.” He said quickly, “God, it’s freezing, isn’t it? We’ll have to get in. See you tonight.” As he limped to the gate he could feel Andrew looking after him, but it was useless to turn back.
Later that evening, it occurred to him that it would be possible to represent Ralph as an object of pity, in a way which would reconcile Andrew at once to the whole situation. Laurie glanced at the idea and at once found it revolting. Since this had been the only thing left to say on the subject, he gave up the attempt to say anything. They tried, in this way and that, to make signals of confidence in each other across the No Man’s Land which both avoided.
It was shortly after this that Ralph had telephoned. When Laurie went back to bed, he could tell by Reg’s breathing that he wasn’t asleep; but neither he, nor anyone else of those who might be awake and watching, made a sound.
Miss Haliburton at the hospital remembered him at once. When she produced from some cache or other a two-months dachshund puppy and let him nurse it, he knew that she had favorites. He usually got on with strong-minded old maids, and it was one of his wry private jokes that they so unawarely waived their misanthropy on his behalf. He found himself confiding not only the life-history of his elderly airedale at home, but how the knee had been behaving and what brought on the pain. She put on a crepe bandage to keep it warm; on the way he had bought a pullover to wear under his uniform, and began to feel under a slightly less medieval servitude to winter. When she had done with him, he went down to wait for Ralph.
The out-patient departments of general hospitals do not conduce to a thoughtless optimism. Beside him a thin, overworked woman described to a very old one the three operations that hadn’t cured her trouble; a mentally defective girl appeared, six months pregnant; male syphilitics, with an air of indescribable seediness, were queuing for treatment; there was another queue of skin cases, with dirty bandages and patches of gentian-violet paint. The smell of antiseptics, sick bodies, and old clothes pervaded everything. Amid all this Laurie sat and wondered, with rapidly decreasing confidence in each successive answer, what he was going to do with his life. The surrounding climate of shabbiness, dejection, and failure seemed to subdue all possible futures to itself. It was in the midst of such thoughts that he saw Ralph walk briskly in at the street door.
The contrast was dazzling. His energy and precision stood out among the sick, worried people, slumped on the benches waiting their turn, as bright steel stands out in a heap of scrap iron. His well-fitting, well-pressed uniform would have shone against the dingy clothing, even without the gold on the sleeves. The cleanness of the hospital staff was functional, a reminder of the human ills against which it was directed; Ralph’s was personal and aristocratic. In spite of the glove he seemed a foreign visitor here; and as if to emphasize this he was carrying, for show, the other glove of the pair. Watching him come nearer, Laurie realized what a confused memory of the other night he had brought away, for he had thought of Ralph as looking quite five years older than this. Even from across the hall, you could see that his eyes were blue. He raked the benches swiftly and systematically, saw Laurie, smiled, and came forward. The devitalized figures in the gangway seemed to melt out of his path.
“Hello, Spud, am I late, have you been browned off waiting here?”
As they left, nearly all the faces at that end of the hall turned to gaze after them. The looks were not of the kind that Laurie had come to fear just lately. He could feel a wistful envy in them. He had been one of them all with his stick and
his white card, and now in a moment he had become a person while they were cases still. Watching these young men meet as if in a street or a hotel, they were downcast or cheered according to their natures by the invasion of life, by Ralph’s happiness and the sudden lightening of Laurie’s anxious face.
“Too early for a drink,” Ralph said. “How about a drive before it gets dark?”
The sun was still up, warm and clear. Ralph headed for the hills, not talking much. Presently they came out at a famous view-spot; parked in it was a closed saloon car with people sitting inside reading magazines. They both laughed. Ralph said, “Can you put up with four counties instead of five?”
Behind them, when he stopped, the crown of the hill rose from a tonsure of trees; below were the patched colors of stubble and roots and grape-purple plowland, streams picked out with thorn and willow, a puff of wool from a toy train, a silver band of Severn water on the horizon. It was a sight, in the autumn of 1940, to evoke special emotions. They were almost silent for some minutes, except perfunctorily to point out some landmark. Laurie had a feeling that the conversation had no need to be filled in with words at every stage.
“I always find,” said Ralph presently, “that the further I go away, the more patriotic I get. Believe it or not, in Adelaide once I had quite a heated argument with some local who spoke lightly of the English public-school system.” He blew a puff of smoke into the soft West-country air and added, “I’m not used to doing such a long stretch of home and beauty.”
Laurie said, “I don’t blame you.”
Ralph looked around at him for a moment, then returned to his cigarette. Suddenly he said, “For God’s sake, you’re not trying to fix me up with a grievance against society, are you? There wouldn’t be the least justification for it. All that gives me a pain in the neck.” The expression he used was a good deal coarser.
“I should think there’d be plenty of justification.”
“Now, Spud, come. You ought to know better than that by this time, with a couple of stripes up too. If you’re talking about school, as I suppose you are, I can see of course that you had it all rather sprung on you at the time.” He turned to flick his ash out of the car. “But don’t tell me it never occurred to you later, when you were a prefect yourself for instance, that people who abuse a position of trust have to be got rid of. At least, I should hope it did.”
He’s lecturing me, Laurie thought; first with surprise, then in some amusement, till without warning he found himself almost unbearably touched and sad. Collecting himself, he said, “I hardly knew enough to make snap judgments like that, did I?”
A sheet of cirrus cloud was beginning to be flecked on its underside with crimson; the horizon was darkening to blue. Looking away at it, Ralph said, “You must have given me the benefit of every conceivable doubt.”
“Well, of course. I had every reason to.”
“Nice of you,” said Ralph briskly, “but even so it doesn’t add up.” His head, against the flamboyant sky, looked remote and severe. “I suppose you could make out some sort of case for me as an individual. But for a pillar of the institution, the only possible justification was never to get found out. I deserved the sack for my judgment of character if for nothing else.” He examined some afterthought here, and laughed shortly.
“It was a good job for Hazell his people took him away.”
“I’m sure he’d agree with you. He’s in Hollywood now, didn’t you know?”
“Good God, is he? Who with?”
“Really, Spud! I didn’t think you had that much bitchery in you. Of course you’re perfectly right.” He related Hazell’s success story.
In seven years, thought Laurie, every cell in one’s body has been replaced, even our memories live in a new brain. That is not the face I saw, and these are not the eyes I saw with. Even our selves are not the same, but only a consequence of the selves we had then. Yet I was there and I am here; and this man, who is sometimes what I remember and sometimes a stranger I met at a party the other day, is also to himself the I who was there: his mind in its different skull has travelled back to a place his living feet never visited; and the pain he felt then he can feel again.
“What is it, Spud?” said Ralph softly.
Laurie remembered the voice from the other day, it was charming and intimate and too experienced and left you in doubt. “I was just thinking about Hazell, and all that.”
“Oh, Hazell,” said Ralph slowly. That he should have read the words as a question embarrassed Laurie greatly. No one could be expected to talk of such things except to strangers. Strangers are a distorting mirror, and hold things off. But Ralph spoke first, before he could change the subject.
“Hazell was generally underrated, you know. He was really rather a clever little boy. All that Dostoievsky was largely put on: it worked quite well.”
“He used to get away with murder.” One of Ralph’s burnt-straw-colored eyebrows shot up intimidatingly into the peak of his cap. But ancient resentment had suddenly revived, and Laurie faced it out.
Ignoring it, Ralph went on, “Of course, if you took him up at all and seemed sympathetic, he used to play down the idiocy and let his intelligence be glimpsed; not obviously, just so that one felt he’d been given a bit of confidence. Perhaps it really was that, partly. It can’t have been quite as calculated as it seems to look back on, I realize that.”
“He was easily scared,” said Laurie, trying to sound detached.
“The thing was, there was no doubt about him. Obviously, most people at school who get caught up in it are either going through a phase, or merely in the position of cattle who if you don’t give them salt will lick it off the ground. I gave a lot of thought to this in my last year; there hadn’t been so much time when I was working for Cambridge. It wasn’t everybody one felt justified in taking a chance with. Side-tracking them, or something, perhaps; one couldn’t know. I used to look round, and try to decide whether there was anyone I could feel as sure about as I did about myself.”
The sky was now a great sheet of rose fire, rippled like ebb-tide sands. It would be gone in a matter of minutes; already a long arm of shadow, cast by something on the horizon, was stealing across.
Ralph broke off his thoughts with a visible jerk of impatience, and threw the stub of his cigarette away. Silently Laurie gave him another. Ralph said, “Did it ever strike you about Hazell, at the time?”
“No. I just thought he was a bit bats, I suppose.”
“He hated you,” said Ralph in a light, cool voice. “Didn’t you know why?”
Odd, thought Laurie, that whatever one’s contempt for the hater this news is never quite without its sting. “I had awfully little to do with him. Didn’t he ever say?”
“I didn’t ask him,” said Ralph shortly.
“Nobody could imagine afterwards,” Laurie ventured presently, “how you managed to meet without getting caught.”
“In the prop room mostly. That’s why the stage has the most elaborate lighting panel for its size in the British Isles. It was the only thing I knew something about that would get me inside the place. He leaned toward the Old Vic in those days; he used to hint sometimes that I’d saved his genius from being pushed over the thin line into madness. Can you imagine me falling for that?”
Yes, thought Laurie; but he supposed this was the wrong answer.
“I was a fool whichever way you look at it. I must have known really, of course; he was all a mess from cellar to attic. His sexual tendencies were just a minor symptom. He didn’t like reality, and he didn’t like doing anything for himself that he could get done for him. He had a great talent for being appreciative, of course. Really I think I fell for the corniest gag of the lot, the great esprit-de-corps racket. Esprit de corpse, Spud. Every time they try to slip it over on you, just say to yourself, ‘The lower they go, the tighter they hang together.’ ”
“The trouble is, how else are you to meet people you’re sure about, if it’s only to talk to? After all,
it’s the way you and I met again.”
“I don’t forget that, Spud, believe me. No, of course we all have to use the network sometime. Don’t let it use you, that’s all. Ours isn’t a horizontal society, it’s a vertical one. Plato, Michelangelo, Sappho, Marlowe; Shakespeare, Leonardo, and Socrates if you count the bisexuals—we can all quote the upper crust. But at the bottom—Spud, believe me, there isn’t any bottom. Never forget it. You’ve no conception, you haven’t a clue, how far down it goes.”
Laurie almost said that he had picked up one or two clues at the party; but something in Ralph’s face told him he would be making a fool of himself, so he kept his mouth shut. Presently he said, “Don’t you think it’s mostly a matter of how sorry for themselves people are? I mean, whether one wants to be let off everything like a sick child, or—well, one could feel that one owes the race something, rather than the other way. It seems more logical.”
“Ah. I might have guessed I’ve been saving this for the last person who’d need it.”
“God, no,” said Laurie. “You’re wrong there.” Ralph made a gentle interrogative noise. “Oh, I don’t know. You get a bit tied up, making your own rules and trying to piece it all together.”
“Yes, I know.” The sky was fading, and the sun going down into a belt of mist. In the valley it was dark already, but up here a thin copper sunlight fell flat on their faces still. “There it is, Spud. When all’s said and done, the best way to be independent is to have all you need at home.”
Laurie looked away. He had wondered when Ralph was going to mention Bunny. Not to have done so would have seemed unfriendly; yet now it had happened Laurie found that he had no real wish to pursue the subject. He said, “Yes, I suppose it is,” but he couldn’t put as much feeling into it as he would have liked, and realized his inadequacy when Ralph failed to follow it up. He said, “You never finished telling me about Hazell.”
As if he had introduced some irrelevant new subject, Ralph looked vague and drew his brows together. “There isn’t much more to tell. What did you want to know?”