by Mary Renault
“What was the trouble just now, Odell? Not still getting pain with that knee, are you?”
“A bit, sir. Only when I walk on it.”
“Well, that’s what it’s for, after all, isn’t it? Eh?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What treatment are we giving you?”
“I usually have A.P.C. if it gets bad, sir.”
“I said treatment, not palliatives. God knows why these things don’t get reported to me. Well, we’d better fix you up with some physiotherapy, I think. I’ll see about it.”
“Thank you, sir.”
He had the dimmest idea of what physiotherapy was, feeling sure only that it would take place when he could have been seeing Andrew. But when he met Nurse Adrian in the covered way she said, “I was hoping they’d do something like that. You’ll find it’s well worth it, even if it does hold up your discharge a little.” Then he realized his luck for the first time, and couldn’t remember any more of the interview, except for a vague feeling that his happiness had seemed to communicate itself to her. He wondered sometimes why he didn’t overhear the other men saying how pretty she was. She was a little coltish, perhaps, and certainly nothing like the star of the Technicolor musical; and he supposed he wasn’t much of a judge.
It was just after this that he and Andrew began to fall into the way of meeting in the ward kitchen at night. It began as an accident, and then there seemed no reason why it shouldn’t happen again. After Andrew had done a round of the ward and scrubbed the bedpans, he always went outside to clean the kitchen up. Laurie would lie awake watching quietly till the right moment, then slip out of bed, reach in a matter-of-fact way for his dressing-gown, slippers, and stick, and make his legitimate way to the lavatory. When he got back to the corridor Andrew would be visible near the kitchen door. They were still at the stage of saying, “Oh, hello,” in mild surprise, as a tribute to this coincidence.
The Sister used to make herself a pot of tea before she went off duty, and to the stewed remains of this Andrew would add some hot water. Laurie, arriving at first as if he couldn’t stay more than a minute, would prop himself against the wooden slab where the chromium water-heater stood, watching Andrew scrub the sink and the draining-boards. They drank the weak, hot, bitter-sweet tea out of thick china mugs, and talked softly. Nurse Sims soon got to know what was happening, but winked at it provided they didn’t raise their voices or go on too long. Andrew would spin out the work a little; Laurie could always remember him, afterwards, bending over the slab with an almost stationary dishcloth in his hand. Sometimes he would express himself with it, moving it slowly and absently when he was shy or uncertain, scrubbing it along briskly to mark a point. A lock of hair, steamed limp over the sink, would come down over one eye, and he would push it back with a wet hand, making it limper.
A cockroach scuttled into a crack behind the draining-board; he watched Andrew reach for a tin of Keatings and sprinkle the crack with it. “Does life stop being sacred,” he asked, “when it gets down to cockroaches?”
“Well, the Jains don’t think so,” said Andrew seriously. “But I never know how they meet the fact that our own bodies destroy millions of microorganisms every day, without giving us any alternative to it except suicide. One has to draw the line where one sees it oneself.”
“Is that what you call the inner light?”
“If you like, yes.”
Faint noises of contracting metal came from the water-heater, behind which in genial warmth and darkness the cockroaches lived. The dressing trolley rattled faintly in the ward. A cricket was chirring somewhere.
“I was trying to remember how old you are,” Andrew said. “But I’ve never asked you.”
“Twenty-three last June.”
Andrew looked at him and said, in the voice of someone paying a deserved tribute, “I always thought you were older than that.”
Laurie didn’t think much about it at the time. Afterwards, when he knew more, this was a thing he always remembered about Andrew, that he took for granted one would regard maturity as a thing to be desired.
It was visiting day. Just after lunch the sky clouded over, a cold, bitter wind got up, and within fifteen minutes it had begun to rain. He had lost his greatcoat in the retreat, and had never had another. Chilled and damp in body and mind, he waited outside the gate, half sheltered by a tree which soon began to drip down his neck. With a muddy splashing the bus arrived; dimly he was aware of a dowdy little woman with an umbrella getting off it, along with several others. Then he saw that it was his mother. His bones, rather than his mind, remembered the pretty clothes she had worn last time, the new hat, when the sun had been shining, and Mr. Straike had been there.
“My dear!” he said. “Whyever, on a day like this?”
“I thought I wouldn’t bother with a car.” He recognized, sinking, her defensive voice. “It was rather extravagant, you know, with the buses running so conveniently.”
“But we can’t just sit in the ward,” he said, “and there’s nowhere else here to go.” The tree, full of rain now, was leaking everywhere with dull heavy drops. Hadn’t she cared enough to foresee all this? “Look, I’ll just go in and ring for a car now. It’s on me; it won’t be much, just the one way.”
It was in the car that he had meant to talk to his mother; he had lain awake at night thinking up easy, natural openings. She said, “It is a shame about the rain, you said in your letter how lovely everything was looking,” and he said, “Yes, it will strip a lot of the trees, I expect.” And suddenly he knew that this was not, as he had been saying to himself, simply an unlucky day. It was a day dedicated beforehand to a lost cause. Before she had abandoned him, he had begun already to abandon her. He was marked for life, as a growing tree is marked, by the chain that had bound him to her; but the chain was rusting away, leaving only the scar. It was an irony mathematical in its neatness, that in the moment when the pattern of her possession was complete, the gulf of incommunicable things opened between them. Already it was unbridgeable. She would never now, as once he had dreamed, say to him in the silent language of day-to-day, “Tell me nothing; it is enough that no other woman will ever take you from me.”
For the first time when they got out of the car she noticed his boot. She was as pleased as if, he thought, it were a supplementary part of himself which, like a lizard, he had cleverly grown.
Sitting in the dowdy, clean mahogany tea-shop, he said, “Mother, you’re sure you’re going to be happy? Is he”—he looked down at the cloth, he hadn’t anticipated this throttling inhibition, this almost physical shame—“is he kind to you, does he look after you properly and all that?”
“Oh, yes, dear, indeed he does. He would never of course dream of saying so, but I feel, one can’t help guessing, that in his first marriage he didn’t quite get the—well, quite the affection that a man of his kind needs. That, you know, is just between you and me.”
“Yes,” said Laurie, “of course.” There was a thick slab of sawdust-like cake on his plate, yellow, with dates in it. He could not imagine how it had got there.
“Laurie, dear, I do hope you’ve not caught a chill. Is it this damp weather making your knee ache?”
“No, it’s just a bit stiff. I was thinking they’ll be wanting the table. Shall we go to the cinema?”
The rain had stopped, but the clouds held the heavy damp over everything; above the still-wet pavements the long slow twilight hung like the moist air, unmoving. Limp dead leaves were pasted to the gutters. They sat in the fireless blacked-out station waiting room which smelt of smoke, dust, old varnish, coal, and feet. A heavy red-faced woman with a heavy red-faced little girl sat opposite staring at them with black button eyes, drinking in every word. The train came in; they had just lit the dim blue bulbs which would give light enough to prevent the commission of crimes. “Well, dear—”
“Get well quickly, darling. Look after yourself. Don’t go back and sit in damp things, will you. Dear, you must never think that t
hings will be any different. You know. It would upset me terribly, it would spoil everything, if I thought you felt that.”
“No, dear, of course. It’s just that—if anything goes wrong, if you start to have any doubts about it, send me a wire, or ring. I’ll get a pass somehow and come straight over. Promise me.”
“But of course there’s no … Oh, dear, they’re shutting the doors now. Goodbye, dear, take care not to catch cold, goodbye.”
Reg was on the bus that took him back to the hospital. It had been one of Madge’s days. Kindly they inquired after one another’s outing and replied that their own had been fine, thanks. Each sensed in the other a certain reservation; each was grateful not to be questioned too nearly. They sat side by side, nursing their so different griefs which were yet the same grief to the inmost heart, unaware of the instinctive comfort they got from their sense of solidarity.
That night in the kitchen Andrew, opening the subject rather shyly since Laurie had not seen fit to do so, said, “I hope it was all right today, when your mother came.”
“Yes, thanks,” said Laurie. “Yes, it was quite all right.” But lest Andrew should feel snubbed or hurt he produced a few limp platitudes, which Andrew went through the form of accepting as real. It was a sad little session; but he could feel Andrew thinking as he thought, that tomorrow it would be all right.
But next morning the Sister said, “Odell, look after this carefully, won’t you, and give it to the Sister of the department as soon as you arrive.”
“Where?” asked Laurie. The pain was as sharp and sudden as a bullet, but there wasn’t any comeback. A war was on, he had been transferred somewhere else, so what? The war giveth and the war taketh away. Andrew would be in bed by now, sleeping; who would take him a message? Derek, of course. “When am I leaving, Sister, today?”
“Now you know quite—surely I told you about all this yesterday?”
“No, Sister. I went out.”
“Oh. Oh, yes, so you did. Well, you’re to go into Bridstow twice a week for electrical treatment at the City Hospital. Tuesdays, that’s this afternoon, and Fridays. Now don’t lose this card, whatever you do.”
The relief was almost too much: he wanted to laugh stupidly aloud. When he remembered that for the second evening running he couldn’t meet Andrew in Limbo, it seemed by contrast a trifle.
Bridstow had had some more raids since his last call there. The burgher solidity of the city was interrupted by large irrelevant open spaces, in some of which bulldozers were flattening the rubble out. At the City Hospital he had only to wait an hour, which was better than his expectations. Upstairs a brisk gentlewoman took him in hand as bracingly as if he had been a Girl Guide, and applied damp compresses, with electric wires involved in them, to his leg. Rhythmic waves of pins-and-needles followed, which, to his surprise, were pleasant and soothing after a time. At intervals Miss Haliburton returned to the couch where he lay, kneaded his muscles comfortingly, and talked dogs. She bred several varieties, and before long Laurie felt as unself-conscious under her ministrations as if he had been one of them. He left the hospital with an hour in hand before his bus went.
It wasn’t worth going to a cinema, and he didn’t feel like drinking alone; he thought he would walk a little to see the sights, while the knee felt so good. But he had only got as far as the cathedral green when the air raid sirens went.
It was broad daylight; on current form, it should be no more than a reconnaissance raid, delayed probably by cloud earlier in the day. He walked on among the pathetic little Home Guard trenches on the green. It was a beautiful afternoon.
“Everyone in the shelter. Come along, ladies, bring your knitting, nice and cozy inside. This way, sonny, mind how you go on the steps.”
Laurie became aware of a sandbagged cave and a fatherly person in a white tin hat. At that time they were still rounding up people in the streets and shepherding them into the shelters willy-nilly; but, living in the country, Laurie had forgotten. He said, “It’s all right, thanks, I’ll see how it goes.”
“Sorry, son, everyone in the shelter, that’s the drill. Come along, now, you’ve had enough to be going on with, won’t hurt you to take it easy.”
Laurie observed that the warden was over sixty; he had the ribbons of the Military Medal and the Mons Star. “Have a heart, Sergeant, I’ve only got a short pass.”
A thin sputter of gunfire sounded from somewhere near the river. “She’ll wait for you,” the warden said. “Don’t waste time, lad, I’ve got a job to do.”
A voice behind Laurie said, “You can’t have this one, warden. He’s a patient of mine, due for treatment. I’ll be responsible for him.”
The warden said, as one who washes his hands of a nuisance, “Okay, you’re the doctor,” and walked away. Laurie remained, confronted by the young man with the white eyelashes, who had been the target for his rather erratic humor some weeks ago during Major Ferguson’s round. He had told himself, at the time, that someday one of these little jokes of his would come home to roost.
“Well,” he said, “thanks very much.”
“Happy to oblige. I gathered you didn’t want to waste half an hour down there.” His tone was quite conventional. Hanging unspoken between them, and clearly understood, were the words, “Your move.”
A false but powerful sense of destiny attends those decisions which seem to be demanded of us without warning, but which we have in reality been maturing within ourselves. Laurie answered not from the loneliness of his emotions, but from the long solitude of his thoughts. Some instinct of his recognized, in this cautious and discreet person, one who had escaped from solitude, whose private shifts had given place to a traditional defense-system. Somewhere behind him was the comforting solidarity of a group.
Laurie said, lightly, “Well, I suppose if I look about this city I might find something a bit more entertaining than a hole in the ground.”
“Why not?” said the young man. “We’ll all get there in due course without all these rehearsals. It won’t be anything.”
“There it goes.” It was a single plane, flying very high. “What a flap about nothing.”
The young man said, “You’re a patient of Ferguson’s, aren’t you, at the E.M.S. hospital?”
“Yes. I think I’ve seen you there, haven’t I?”
“I thought I remembered you from somewhere. You won’t know my name: Sandy Reid. I’m not a doctor yet, by the way.” In the midst of an almost timid friendliness, there was something hard and wary about the way he said this. Laurie noticed it with slight distaste, but didn’t pause to consider it. He introduced himself. The young man said in a semifacetious American voice, “Glad to know you, Laurie,” and then, after a tiny pause, “How about a drink?”
The All Clear went just as they reached the pub. It was a large one, nastily modernized at vast expense. The chromium stools, the plastic leather, the sham parquet floor, and the fluorescent lighting which made everyone look jaundiced, caused him to expect that the beer too would turn out to be a chemical synthetic. A radio, slightly off the beam, was running like a leaky tap. He overbore Sandy’s protests and bought the drinks, intending to leave before another round.
This was not the first time he had touched the fringe he was touching now. He knew the techniques of mild evasion and casual escape. Though the Charles episode had been disillusioning, he hadn’t given up hope of finding himself clubbable after all. This time, he had briefly thought the right moment had come. But, after all, no: and after all, it was no one’s business but his own.
“It’s a bit tatty,” said Sandy Reid, as the drinks came over the ebonoid bar, “but one runs into people here.”
“Oh, yes?” said Laurie politely. “I suppose you can never get far from the hospital, in any case.”
“Actually I’ve got some quite civilized digs just up the hill, with a friend of mine.” He added, with a circumspect kind of pride, “We’ve been together more than a year now.”
“Oh? Good.” He
saw Sandy eying him, anxiously expectant, under his eyelids; they were rather pink, reminding Laurie of white mice. Having been unhappy most of the day, he now found an unkind pleasure in being equivocal and elusive. “Do you have much trouble getting digs here? They tell me Oxford’s teeming like a Calcutta slum.”
Sandy’s face had fallen, but not despairingly. He had probably had some practice in distinguishing between ignorance and reserve. “Oh, you’re from Oxford. I’m at the local joint. Then you know Charles Fosticue, I expect.”
“Only by name,” said Laurie with prompt firmness. He gave thanks to his own instincts of self-preservation. “I used to see a good deal of Pat Dean; do you know him? He married a girl from Somerville last year.”
Stalemate had now been reached. Applying himself more briskly to his beer, Laurie decided to say that there wasn’t another bus if he missed this one.
“Not,” Sandy was saying (he had evidently decided to resurvey the terrain), “that I ever knew Charlie Fosticue at all well. I just mentioned him because he’s the sort of type everyone meets once. I’ve run into Vic Tamley now and again. Rather a pleasant person, I thought.”
“Yes, I heard someone say so, I forget who.”
“I thought you might know him, he seemed rather your type. Drink up, while there’s a lull in the rush.”
“Thanks, but I shall really have to get cracking to catch the bus.”
“Oh, hell, no, you’ve only been here five minutes. Don’t forget I saved you from rubbing knees with sixty-five typists in the shelter. Try old and bitter this time, the local old’s quite good.” The barman had collected the glasses while he was speaking. Laurie resigned himself to five minutes more.
There was a permanent air of improvisation, he thought, about Sandy Reid. He had clearly now abandoned what hopes of Laurie he might have had, but was loath to let him go. Perhaps the tenacity came only from boredom. He had a manner it would be too strong to call restless, a chronic but trivial kind of expectation. He looked often at the door, but when he was greeted by a couple of men as they entered, he gave them an offhand nod and turned away.