He said nothing more till he had changed up again, then, as if continuing a quite different conversation: “I think what gets me down most about Sandy is his stupidity. He’s lived a year with Alec and still hasn’t cottoned on to his—his fanatical claustrophobia. Anyone who tries to put a screw on Alec is playing about with something dangerous. I don’t know how far Alec realizes that himself.” He stopped talking while he crossed a main road and added, “Some things about him don’t alter, much as he’s changed.”
The bitterness he had kept out of his voice seemed to thread itself under Laurie’s skin. Tentatively he said, “He seemed to be worried about something you thought he’d done and he thought he hadn’t. I’m afraid I was rather drunk at the time; I don’t think he said what it was.”
“He knows what he’s done. It’s not worth talking about.” One should have remembered, Laurie thought, that knack of formidable silence. There must however have been a difference of some kind, or Laurie certainly wouldn’t have felt that it devolved upon him to break it. He said, “This will have taught Sandy a lesson, anyway.”
As if nothing had happened Ralph said, “That’s what I thought the first time. Oh, yes, and he gave Alec his solemn word of honor not to do it again.”
“What did he do then?”
“Phenacetin, or veganin, or something like that. About half the fatal dose. Alec didn’t know that, of course. He was all alone that time, laboring away with emetics and things and nearly going mental. He goes through torments of remorse afterwards. Alec, I mean; not Sandy, of course.”
“You know, anyone could have fainted in that bath and been drowned.”
“I think that started to occur to him when he heard me passing the door. It was lucky I did—I suppose. I really don’t think one should be expected to meet his friends; if Alec wants to put up with them himself, it’s his business. I never go there now without wondering whether they’ll start turning up in drag.”
“In what?” asked Laurie curiously.
He felt that in the near-darkness Ralph turned his head with an almost startled look; he repeated himself, however, without comment.
“Yes, I heard you before, but what does it mean?”
Ralph said, in a slight clear voice which seemed surrounded by a wide margin of stillness, “Don’t you know what it means?”
With one of those little jets of irritability which weariness releases, Laurie said, “If I did I wouldn’t ask you.”
“It means dressed as women.” They had come out of the trees upon a straight open stretch between wire fences. Laurie could see easily, with eyes accommodated now to the night, Ralph’s face looking ahead with an intent frown at the pale stream of road being swallowed by the car. “Spuddy.”
“Yes?”
“What do you know?”
“I know about myself.”
“Well?” Laurie didn’t answer at once, not from reluctance but because he was tired and it took time to think. Ralph said, deliberately, “If you know about yourself, presumably you know about at least one other person.”
“There was a man at Oxford. It was all rather silly. He looked a bit like one of the less forceful portraits of Byron. It wasn’t so much he himself who attracted me, though up to a point he did. There are always certain people at Oxford who seem to hold a key. I didn’t know what I expected he’d let me into, Newstead Abbey by moonlight or something. He kept telling me I was queer, and I’d never heard it called that before and didn’t like it. The word, I mean. Shutting you away, somehow; roping you off with a lot of people you don’t feel much in common with, half of whom hate the other half anyway, and just keep together so that they can lean up against each other for support. I don’t think I’ve ever tried to put all this into words before; am I talking nonsense?”
With smothered violence Ralph said, “Christ Almighty, no.”
“I started to meet his friends. I’d imagined a lot of rather exquisite people it would be hard work getting to know; but they were all horribly eager, and it wasn’t because they liked me really, I could tell that. It was more like—have you read a story by Wells called The Country of the Blind?”
“Spuddy, there always was something a bit terrifying about you. Well, don’t stop, go on.”
“That’s all. He asked me to a party and I ran away in the middle, and he took it rather personally, so that was that.”
“That was that for how long?”
“Well, it was at the end of the summer term, and the war started in the vac.”
“Some types seem to have found the war their great opportunity.”
“It depends what you’re looking for, I suppose. Anyway, learning to soldier was a bit distracting.”
Ralph didn’t speak for what seemed like some minutes. Then he said, “That’ll teach you to chuck the O.T.C.,” in an almost absent voice, as though he were making conversation. After another silent interval he asked, “What about women?”
Although women represented just then an absolute nullity in Laurie’s emotions, the question itself, the lack of empressement in asking it, gave him a free and stimulated feeling; it was a relief from the bonded circle at the party, from the bars at the window and the gate on the stairs. “One,” he said.
“No good?”
“Well … I didn’t like her much as a human being.”
“D’you need to?”
“Yes, I think I do.”
“That complicates it a bit.”
Laurie began to say, “Yes, because one can hardly …” but Ralph looked too preoccupied and remote, as if a dangerous bit of road was coming. By the time he knew that it wasn’t, he too was given up to his own thoughts, which, after he had rehearsed so much of his history, were inevitably of Andrew. Here if anywhere, he thought, was someone to whom he could release the pressure of so much uncommunicated experience, who would inevitably understand. He remembered how after Charles’s party, leaning out of his window long into the night, he had thought of Ralph; though it was already years since their brief meeting, the thought had supported him in his isolation. Now there seemed nothing that could not be told; yet something silenced him. It was Andrew’s secret too. Besides, it was holy ground: he was honest enough to examine this simplicity, weigh it, and decide not to abandon it. The result was one of those compromises to which people in such a case will sometimes resort.
“When I say there was nothing after I joined the army”—he could feel Ralph almost start; he must have been miles away—“there was a time when I felt very much drawn to someone; but it was impossible from the first.”
“In what way impossible?” Ralph had turned the car onto a bad secondary road. He seemed intent on the driving and sounded a little curt.
“He told me, or as good as told me, without knowing it, that he’d no time for that sort of thing. It was obvious without telling, in any case.”
“So you let it alone?”
“Yes.”
Ralph seemed to come out of himself. With a sudden kindness he said, “It can be hell while it lasts, though, can’t it?”
Laurie didn’t answer; the assumption of transience hurt him though it was he who had implied it.
Ralph drove on in silence for a few minutes. Then, with what Laurie could feel beforehand as a decision, he said abruptly, “I was caught up once in something like that.”
“Yes?” said Laurie, after waiting some time in vain.
“He was a sub of mine. If he’d been a matelot it would have been all right; I could have put it out of my mind because I’d have bloody well had to. But he was round my neck all day. He wanted to learn everything I knew except what I wanted to teach him. Finally it settled itself in the way which, for some reason, I’d been afraid of almost from the start.”