“If you mean Ralph Lanyon,” said Laurie, who was beginning to be rather drunk, “he’s a friend of mine, I’ve known him for years.”
“Real-ly? No. Then, my dear, do tell me, is it true that he”—here something in Laurie’s face seemed to give him pause—“well, there, fancy. Now before Alec starts to organize intellectual paper games, which can scarcely be ruled out as a possibility, we’ll tiptoe off and—”
Feeling suddenly annoyed, Laurie said, “Well, if it’s really all right about the wooden leg?”
The officer looked down and noticed the stick for the first time. Laurie watched, smugly, his struggle for equilibrium.
“Sorry,” said Ralph. “Thought I should never get away.” He lowered himself onto the middle of the divan, coolly forcing the officer to make room. So relieved was Laurie by his arrival that he scarcely noticed it had been proprietary to the point of arrogance. The officer appeared to recognize with delighted surprise someone at the other end of the room. When he had gone Ralph said, “I’d only just realized that was happening, or I’d have got here before.”
“I wasn’t nervous,” said Laurie lightly, reacting to the proprietorship without noticing it.
“I’m sorry if I interrupted anything.”
Laurie could not believe that he was expected to take this seriously. He said, “Do you remember that old red Turkish slipper you used for beating the twirps?”
“Yes,” said Ralph, still half frowning. “It was an odd one.”
“They argued that a lot. They used to try and remember, before they went in, to look if it was left or right. No one ever did.”
“Spud, did I tell you just now you were too good to be true? Stop me if you’ve heard it, because they tell me I tend to repeat myself when drunk, and I’m about one short of bloody drunk, so kindly correct any such tendency on all occasions. Thank you. I think I might have, the other now.”
“Aren’t you going to drive me back? It’s the only way I’ve got of getting there.”
Sounding suddenly stone sober, Ralph said, “Don’t worry, Spud, that will be all right.” He went off rather stiffly to the drinks table.
Just as he had got back again, someone near the door said in a suppressed voice, “Look, here’s Bim.” At this announcement Laurie saw a weasellike person, to whom he had not spoken all the evening, looking at him expectantly.
A young night-lieutenant came in. He was a small man but very handsome, with a tough, steely kind of grace. The high girlish voice with which he greeted his friends was burlesqued and perfunctory, like a carnival vizard held with a flourish a foot away from the face. You felt, and were meant to feel, that he was playing at it. He was like a little fighting-cock, brave, shining and cruel. He took one swift look around the room, saw Ralph and Laurie, and crossed over to them beautifully, like a dancer walking.
“Ralph, my poor sweet,” he crowed shrilly, “what have you got there?”
Ralph said quite quietly, “Hello, Bim.” He put down his drink and stood up.
Bim cocked his head sideways and glinted up at him. “How many times has Auntie got to tell you? You must attend to these things earlier in the evening, while your eye’s still in.”
Now we’ll see something, thought Laurie not without satisfaction.
Ralph looked at Bim quietly for a moment; then he took his arm and said, pleasantly, “Relax, my dear, you’re full up with benzedrine and five drinks behind. Come along and get loaded down to your marks, there’s a good boy.”
Laurie perceived now in all this hard glitter something feverish and taut. Alec had come up, looking unhappy. He said, “Shut up, Ralph, what he wants is bromide and twelve hours’ sleep.”
“Shut up, both of you,” said Bim gaily, shaking off Ralph’s hand. “I’ll tell you what I want when I want it. Introduce, my dear; it’s so unlike you to be the least bit gauche.”
Standing behind his shoulder, Alec gave the others a look of warning and apology. “Bim Taylor, Laurie Odell. Laurie and Ralph were at school together; they’ve just run into each other tonight after not having met for years.”
Laurie was the only person not standing, a thing that does not seem awkward till one is tied. Nothing would have induced him to struggle to his feet under those bright satiric eyes, so he lounged defiantly where he was. But something rather odd was happening; Bim had taken a step backwards, wide-eyed, and was staring at him with awe.
“But, my dears, you don’t mean this? Not the Odell?”
Laurie thought he had seldom heard a more pointless joke and didn’t even take the trouble to smile; though, considering much else that had been going on, he couldn’t see why Alec should look so embarrassed about it.
“Perhaps,” said Bim, “I should have said, ‘Not the late Odell?’ Well, better late than never, obviously.”
The feeling of a dense atmospheric pressure caused Laurie to look around. He saw that Ralph was staring silently, not at Bim but at Alec. Alec opened his mouth to speak, but didn’t say anything. There was something pent and helpless about him, though he had not dropped his eyes. Laurie supposed that he must have been gossiping to Bim on the landing before he came in. Ralph’s look of shocked contempt was a little excessive, but he could be awkward after a few drinks, as Laurie had seen already.
Bim stood looking at all three of them with a deadly kind of inquisitiveness, the intent irresponsible look a monkey gives to something it is just going to pick up and break. “Have I,” he asked, “said anything in any way out of place?”
“Not in the least,” said Ralph. Once before Laurie had heard him speak with what might have been called professional finish. It was very much more apparent now. You would have said that he hadn’t a care in the world, and that his next words would probably be, “Take your boat stations in an orderly manner, please. There is plenty of room in the boats for everyone.”
In fact, however, he said, “I think you had better get drunk, Bim. Come along and I’ll fix you one of my specials.”
“We’ll all get drunk in a minute,” said Bim, looking around with a flashing smile. “But, darlings, if you think I’m going anywhere before I’ve got the true story of this romantic Odyssey, you must be mad.” He flicked out a heavy silk handkerchief with a monogram; a gold and platinum identity bracelet caught the light. “It is the Odyssey, isn’t it? I went to such a ropy school, my dear,” he confided to Laurie. “Free expression and no classics, you’d have hated it. Is it the Odyssey? The one where this silly boy goes away for about twenty years, and when he appears again he’s so dreadfully gone off that no one knows him except the nurse who … oh, excuse me, perhaps we’d better scrub that bit. And the dog took one look, didn’t he, and died of shock. And all this while, the poor queen has been knitting and knitting away madly in the bedroom, dropping stitches left and right, with suitors camping and screaming all over the house.” He smiled at them ingenuously, like a stage undergraduate. “Or is it Shakespeare I’m thinking of all the time?”
Laurie swung himself up on his feet. On the spur of the moment he found a new technique for doing it; it was rather painful, but it looked smooth. With intense pleasure he found himself three inches taller than Bim.
“No,” he said. “It’s the Odyssey all right. It’s the one where the man comes back from the war and finds the flash boys on his pitch, and runs them out.”
“Your sentiments do you credit,” said Bim raising his eyebrows.
Laurie listened to the internal echo of his own words with incredulous horror. Whatever would Ralph …