Work Text:
The East End street was half obliterated, brick and rubble. One imagined that in the end London would be indistinguishable from the other cities, Bridstowe and Lubeck and Mannheim and Liverpool, all of them one in destruction.
The young man stood in the doorway, still holding the knob of the door that he had opened only moments earlier. He was in stocking feet, one toe poking through a hole, smudging the grime on the green-painted sill.
"I'm sorry," said Ralph. "I thought you deserved to hear the news in person. It was last week, in the Good Friday raid. He'd come down from Oxford for the Easter vac. He was meant to be revising. When I got back from the base that night the house was flattened, simply gone. Five people dead, no survivors. I would have come to you sooner but I couldn't get leave."
"Thank you," said Andrew Raynes. He leaned against the doorframe as if he needed its support, though he was whole and unharmed. "Thank you," he repeated. "I just—you'll have to excuse me, but why me? You've come a very long way."
"Laurie would have wanted me to. That's all."
Andrew brushed at his dusty hair, looking away, but he kept his composure. When he raised his eyes again his gaze was direct. "I should invite you in, you must want a cup of tea, but they're having a meeting in the kitchen and there's nowhere else presentable. I—it's impossible, isn't it, what is one meant to say? Somehow one never expects to hear it about a person whom one knows—one knew—so well, even in the midst of all this."
"That's quite all right." Ralph could hear the brisk formality of his own voice, as if he were reassuring a subordinate on the bridge while under fire. But there was something about Andrew that inspired the treatment, a curious mix of ingenuousness and unconscious steel. "You can't take it in all at once. No one can. I haven't yet."
"You could come through to the garden, if you wanted, only it isn't much to look at…"
Ralph could well imagine the state of the garden behind such a tumbledown house. "No, thanks," he said decisively. "I can't stay, I have to see a man at the Admiralty directly."
"Of course; it was extraordinarily good of you to come at all…"
Ralph hesitated for a moment. He had in truth come to see Andrew only out of a sense of duty, a task unwelcome and soonest ended. And yet something compelled him.
"If you find yourself free tomorrow, I shall be at the Lyons on Coventry Street at noon."
Why he had picked the place he couldn't say, except that he had used to go there with Alec, once upon a time. He turned on his heel and went without taking his leave.
"Please wait," called Andrew down the street. "You haven't told me who you are."
It was still two hours before his appointment at the Admiralty. Ralph made it as far as the pub by the station, where he quickly downed two doubles. They did nothing to drown the voice in his head, the one which said I should have been there when the bombs fell.
***
Andrew's lack of uniform drew a curious look from the woman at the next table as he took a seat in the Lyons Corner House. He looked appalling, lack of sleep worn into his face as if the shadows of the night had never left it. Automatically he poured himself a cup of tea, sipped at it gingerly. The pot had been sitting on the table for ten minutes but Ralph had not touched it.
"I've just heard," said Ralph, no preamble. "The funeral is at the weekend. Saturday."
"Oh," said Andrew vacantly. "The funeral. Yes. Will you be staying in London until then? Will you be able to get away?"
"I've just been transferred here. In a manner of speaking I've moved already. After the raid I hadn't much left, you see. I spent Easter in an air raid shelter."
(He had thought that he might sleep on the divan at Alec's, but it had been decided that the effect on Sandy's nerves would not be good.)
"If you need a place to stay… well, you've seen the house, we're all at sixes and sevens, but we always seem to manage to fit another in."
"I don't expect your Quaker friends would much appreciate your bringing a Navy officer home."
Andrew looked hurt at that. "We don't discriminate."
"Perhaps you ought."
"You sound just like Laurie when you say that."
They looked at one another across the lace of the tablecloth. It was so incongruous, this place, all tea and camp and memories of gay pre-war gatherings. What on earth had possessed him to bring the boy here? There was a nasty twinge in his hand and he could have killed for a drink.
"Do you know," said Andrew, "you never told me your name yesterday. Would I know it? Would Laurie have mentioned you?"
Ralph thought he had prepared himself for this moment but the suddenness of it left him feeling slightly sick. There was nothing for it but honesty. "Lanyon. Ralph Lanyon. Actually."
"No," said Andrew firmly.
Silently Ralph took his Navy identification from his pocket and handed it across the table.
"You can't be," Andrew continued. "I've met Ralph Lanyon. I wish I never had."
As briefly as possible, Ralph unfolded the tale of Bunny and the confusion of identities. It took much less time in the telling than it had in the unravelling. When Ralph finished, Andrew was looking as if he had just heard the news of Laurie's death for the first time.
"Oh," he said convulsively. "So it was a lie, all of it. I'd hoped it was, and yet to hear it now…"
He hid his face behind his hands. For a moment his thin shoulders shook; it looked as though he might break down completely.
Ralph took the handkerchief from his pocket and passed it to Andrew as well. It took some time before the boy began to regain his composure.
"This makes it worse, don't you see? Before one could at least feel justified. And now, now one just thinks of all the things one could have told him."
"I thought you had rather know the truth than not," said Ralph.
"Always."
Another long silence. Andrew put Ralph's handkerchief down on the table next to the identification pass and then rather sheepishly took a handkerchief from his own pocket.
"You said that the funeral is on Saturday," he said finally, in a voice quiet and half choked. "Do you know his people at all? Would they object, do you think, if I…?"
"We can go down together, if you like," said Ralph.
"Thanks." Andrew said it with the utmost seriousness, as if he had just been offered something of great price. He continued to look at Ralph. "This is probably the most awful cheek, and I won't blame you if you refuse to answer, but I find myself hoping that not quite everything that man said was a lie."
"Not everything," said Ralph slowly.
"Good."
The waitress came then, and left them sitting self-consciously when she had gone again, two men sitting in a tea shop in the middle of the day. They cast about for a moment, adrift, then began to talk about the Blitz, which had become in wartime as commonplace a topic as the weather. It was with great suddenness that Andrew's eyes filled with tears once again.
"How is one meant to bear it?" he asked.
"I don't know," said Ralph awkwardly, feeling helpless and loathing himself for it.
He had not expected to sympathise with the boy at all, had half hated him in fact, though he would never have admitted it to Laurie. When Bunny had gone to see Andrew, it had been as if Bunny had been his own dark twin, doing the thing that he had longed to do himself. In his darkest hours afterwards he had thought of that, knowing that it was Bunny who was responsible for all his happiness, that he deserved none of it and should regret it all. The avenging angel had come in the end, as he had known it would, only not for him.
***
Andrew's blond head was visible a long way down the platform, distinct amidst a crowd of khaki, somehow self-contained. He came up to Ralph's side half at a jog, through a cloud of steam.
"You've put yourself under no obligation by traveling with me, you know."
Ralph, to whom a sense of obligation was as natural as breathing, hardly knew what the boy meant.
"You shouldn't expect persecution before it arrives," he said mildly. "It only ensures that it arrives in the end."
Andrew had a peaked, feverish look to him. "In my experience it arrives whether you anticipate it or not. But what do you know about it?"
"Quite a bit more than you're assuming," said Ralph. "Didn't Laurie tell you all about it? I rather got the impression he told you everything."
"I'm beginning to think that he didn't tell me anything at all," said Andrew.
Somehow they had got off on the wrong foot altogether. Instead of the cautious sympathy of two days earlier, there was this prickly awkwardness. They stood side by side until the train pulled into the station. Perhaps they would simply pretend that they did not know one another.
It was a stopping train and after Hayes and Harlington they were alone in the compartment.
"But what did you mean about persecution?" said Andrew, with a fine persistence that seemed to outweigh his instinct for self-preservation. "What you said earlier. If you expect me to know, I can assure you I don't."
Hell with it. After all, once the funeral was over he would not be expected to see the boy again. "I was expelled from my school. That's all."
Andrew's mouth had fallen open. "So you were the one… but no, you can't have been."
"I'm just as bad as Bunny told you after all," said Ralph. "I'm the sort of boy your parents warned you against. Just so you're not under any illusions about my role in Laurie's downfall."
"My parents are dead," said Andrew automatically. And then, "Unless you also fly for the Luftwaffe, I don't think you should be under any illusions either."
There was something fundamentally unsettling about Andrew's regard.
"That's depending," said Ralph. "I've never bombed a man, but I've depth charged a dozen in one go while they were swimming towards my ship shouting to be rescued."
"Doesn't one take prisoners at sea?" said Andrew.
"Yes, of course," said Ralph impatiently, "but these were our lot, as it happened."
That went down with the stunned silence that one might have expected. Andrew asked nothing more about it, but Ralph's mind continued to run along the same course.
"I've buried men at sea as well. My sublieutenant, for one. My first command, his first commander." He remembered that fjord in Norway, Namsos, the pine air, the body sewn into its canvas sack and pushed overboard into the dark water while the Stukas screamed overhead as if in salute. "Then of course I managed to sink my ship, my career and my boy friend in close succession, so that should give you an idea of the sort of man you're dealing with."
"The way Laurie described you," said Andrew, "you didn't seem the sort who would indulge in self-pity."
"Haven't you heard a word I've been saying to you? Sometimes even I wonder what the hell was the point of bringing him back from Dunkirk. Here I was telling myself I'd been fated to save him when it turns out that it was the very opposite. If only I'd had my men refusing wounded soldiers out of hand like we'd been ordered, I might never have seen him. Hell, he might have lived even if I'd tossed him over the side."
"I think you did save him."
"You mean that he saved me. 'And the other name of that is salvation,'" he quoted in mocking tones, having learned the passage off by heart in the days when Odell, L.P. was still a new boy. "Don't come over all David Blaize on me, it isn't like that at all. I never was Frank Maddox."
"No, I meant exactly what I said," pursued Andrew. "You saved him. After all, he died living the life that he chose. He never would have had that if he'd stayed at the E.M.S. hospital."
The unspoken words with me hung in the air between them.
"Compare that to being alive."
"Is it always the most important thing?"
Ralph shrugged noncommittally, not at all sure that it was. He had been unsure since Dunkirk. Having once come so close to the brink he had been reluctant to approach it once again, lest he become, like some, a habitué of that sort of thing. To endure until after Laurie's funeral was the most that he could promise himself. But he could hardly say that to Andrew.
"Look," said Andrew, "I think we've arrived."
The tiny deserted railway platform welcomed the two travelers without judgment. Ralph followed Andrew up the path into the village.
***
Unchanged the village, unchanged the church. They would have been the same in 1741 as they were in 1941. The last wars to touch this quiet corner of a quiet shire had been those of Cavalier and Roundhead, whose bones lay at peace under their epitaphs.
No bells could ring out during wartime; the stillness seemed abruptly poignant. Unwillingly Ralph found himself thinking of Housman. He had never been much for poetry but at school he had been forced to memorise it regardless and somehow this, of all things, had stuck.
"My love rose up so early/And stole out unbeknown," he said softly to himself.
"And went to church alone," came the answer, a quiet echo.
Ralph paused at the lych gate. He looked over at Andrew, who wore a dark suit that had probably been intended for his Oxford matriculation. The sleeves were slightly too short at the wrists, as if he'd had one last spurt of growth.
"Do you ever wonder why they had us learn that sort of thing?" said Ralph.
"In my school it was mostly Brooke. I rather thought they were preparing us for the Great War, actually, only they were a bit behindhand."
Ralph held the gate open for Andrew, gloved hand on the wood. "Shall we go?"
They slipped into a back pew in the church. Andrew moved along; Ralph stayed by the aisle. There was a fair six feet between them.
For the whole of the service Ralph's mind continued, absurdly, to run to Housman. Instead of the Gospel reading he had 'by brooks too broad for leaping, the lightfoot boys are laid' and 'smart lad, to slip betimes away' and 'I cheer a dead man's sweetheart, never ask me whose.' Meaningless fragments, one following the next in close succession.
He was just as grateful, for it kept his mind from dwelling on other things. Ahead of him Ralph could hear the weeping of Laurie's mother and his aunt. The eulogy was given by an Oxford friend of Laurie's, who lost his self-control partway through and spent agonising moments blinking back tears. Andrew stood in the pew biting his lower lip with fierce concentration. The only person in church who seemed unmoved was Laurie's stepfather, who read the service with the same bluff assurance with which he had spoken to 'Laurence' while alive.
Andrew did not go up to take communion. He stood by himself, hands folded before him, as he had stood when most of the parishioners were crossing themselves. Ralph felt a brief pang of anger that transmuted itself unexpectedly into envy. Being Head of School, and later leading ship's prayers, had left him with too much of a sense of obligation to be shaken off so easily. So he went dutifully forward and knelt with the others.
(Laurie's knee, he thought. Instinctively he glanced to the side, wanting to take Laurie's elbow and ease him down onto the kneeler. He returned to the pew wiping surreptitiously at his own eyes.)
***
The reception was at the Vicarage, a gloomy Victorian pile which stood by the churchyard. It seemed a thinner affair than the wedding, far fewer Straike relations and only the smallest leavening of Laurie's contemporaries. Alec had been unable to get away; Sandy had not been asked. No other Bridstow friends had seemed remotely suitable. Was this all that Laurie had left behind him?
Laurie's mother embraced Ralph and wept against his uniform jacket. Ralph said all the things that one was meant to say at a time like this. He knew the duty only too well. A few months earlier he had boasted to Laurie about the number of weddings he had attended, but in truth he was more in demand at funerals, these days at least. At his elbow hovered Andrew, an unwelcome shadow.
"Mrs. Straike, may I introduce Andrew Raynes," he said finally. "Andrew, Mrs. Straike. Andrew knew Laurie at the E.M.S. hospital."
Ralph felt the inadequacy of the introduction immediately, but what could one possibly say of the truth? In any case Andrew did not seem to have minded it. He extended a hand to Laurie's mother.
"Laurie was a good person," he said solemnly. "I loved him very much."
That was one way of putting it, thought Ralph. Perhaps he had become too cynical.
"Have you come very far?" Mrs. Straike was speaking rapidly, as if trying to outpace her tears. "All the way from London, both of you? You must stay overnight. The cottage... Laurie's cottage..."
Tears caught her up once again. She dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief.
"Is still standing empty, in fact," put in Mr. Straike. He had been casting unfriendly looks at Andrew in his mufti, but had apparently been equally overcome, in this case by the desire to finish his wife's sentence for her.
"You can't travel back to London tonight," said Laurie's mother helplessly. "The air raids..."
"I wouldn't—" began Andrew.
Ralph had been about to make his own refusal when he thought with a sudden fierce longing of Laurie's cottage, the little fireplace and the armchair beside it, Laurie's touch and Laurie's kiss, a fencing foil given and accepted.
"Thank you," he said quickly. "We wouldn't dream of saying no."
***
Even the firelight looked different when it flickered on the yellow of Andrew's hair. The house was all bare and strange. It had spent the winter closed up and had that stuffiness that made a place seem no longer quite real.
"I can still go," Andrew was saying. "I know you would rather be alone here."
"You've missed the last train by ten minutes," said Ralph.
He did indeed want to be alone, very much; the inclusion of Andrew in the invitation had been purely an accident so far as he was concerned. He'd bought a bottle of rum in the village shop and intended to spend the rest of the evening getting blind drunk in Laurie's honour.
"Well then," said Andrew stiffly.
Ralph downed a tot. He was drinking it neat. It helped, a little, but only a very little. For a long time Andrew stayed silent, staring into the fire. Ralph had almost forgot he was there when he next spoke.
"I have something for you. I nearly forgot. He gave it to me, you know, but I could never forget to whom it really belonged."
The little book which Andrew held out was stained, water-warped, and unmistakably the volume which had sat on his shelf at school.
"My God," said Ralph.
He took the book and leafed clumsily through its pages. Someone had torn out the flyleaf. On the first page, in Laurie's hand, was written 'Andrew Raynes.'
"He gave you this?" said Ralph with a feeling of dull amazement. It seemed to make real so much which had been theoretical: the orderly boy at the hospital whom nothing must disturb or alarm. Laurie had talked of love, to be sure, but it had seemed a pale and colourless thing in the telling. This was tangible, and present.
"Left it for me. He came to see me in London but Dave dissuaded him from it somehow. And that made all the difference. I rowed with Dave afterwards, about that and a lot of things; we still haven't quite made it up. But I read the book, and I read it again after... after you came to see me on Wednesday. I've been doing a great deal of thinking. It makes things very clear to me somehow."
"You must enlighten me then, because I don't find it clear at all."
"Oh, I didn't mean that," said Andrew in exasperation. "But it seems to me that I may have been wrong, and that Laurie suffered for it."
There was a long silence.
"He kissed me, once, in the kitchen at the hospital," Andrew continued. "I didn't ask him to stop. I keep wondering what might have happened if we hadn't been interrupted by the nurse. I never saw him again."
In the rawness of the voice, the openness of the wound, Ralph could hear the echo of his own existence. Never mind that he had last seen Laurie lying in bed, sleepy and contented, on that Good Friday morning. It felt as though he'd lost him all over again.
"He was about to go back to you," said Ralph. "Without Dave I believe he would have."
"Maybe."
"I begged him to stay with me," Ralph continued. "I told him that he needn't choose between us."
"I was the one who made the choice," said Andrew. "It was the wrong one, as it happens, but I made it. I didn't like being kept in the dark but I hadn't the guts to do anything about it."
"If you had, he would be yours now."
For Ralph, that bitter truth was only beginning to sink in.
"Must we make this a question of property, of possession, as if we were fighting over the Danzig Corridor or the Rhineland? It seems to me that Laurie deserves better than that."
"I didn't mean it that way in the least."
"I think you did," said Andrew.
Ralph got abruptly to his feet. "I'm going for a walk."
By the time he returned Andrew would, if he were sensible, have taken himself off to bed. Ralph would creep out early in the morning, get on the first train, and they would never have to speak to one another again. And then… and then. He would see.
The moon was in its last quarter and the village sunk in the depths of the blackout. It was uncannily quiet, only an occasional bomber droning high overhead to break the impenetrable calm. Ralph made it as far as the green, where he sat alone in the bus shelter and shivered. He thrust his bare, ungloved hand into the pocket of his jacket. Once again he could not help thinking of Housman.
And if your hand or foot offend you,
Cut it off, lad, and be whole;
But play the man, stand up and end you,
When your sickness is your soul.
Ralph was not one for philosophizing. He was not as introspective as Laurie nor as clear-headed, he suspected, as Andrew. His philosophy and resolutions had been painstakingly arrived at and, in some cases, just as painfully discarded once again in the light of experience. He felt as though he'd been washed up alone at the ends of the earth: no school, no family, no ship, no lover to come home to. No reason why he should not lie down on the tracks tomorrow morning just as soon as take the train to London.
***
When he got back to the cottage Andrew was still there, gazing passively into the dying fire. He didn't look up as Ralph came into the sitting room. He only roused himself when Ralph poured out another drink, wanting to drive the chill from his bones.
"You drink too much," said Andrew.
It was not the first time that Ralph had heard that. "I suppose you're a teetotaler as well as a conchie."
"Not at all. It's just that I see the way you feel about it, alcohol I mean." He paused. "We had a man in the ambulance corps. He used to drink before he went on duty; he said that he hardly felt it, it just settled his nerves. He drove into a storefront one night, killed a shop assistant as well as the patient in the ambulance."
"What a touching moral tale," said Ralph.
Andrew bridled at that. "You know, I don't mind if you don't like me. You have a perfect right, under the circumstances. What I do mind is constantly feeling that I'm being patronized by you."
"I don't dislike you, Andrew. Quite the opposite."
"Well, I must say that you don't make it evident."
"You bloody fool," said Ralph. "You silly boy. Don't you see?"
"Spell it out in simple words," said Andrew. "Since I appear to need the help."
"Only that it's perfectly obvious to me why Laurie fell in love with you."
Andrew stared at him, blinking rapidly. "I—"
"No, don't say a thing. I talk such damned nonsense when I'm drunk." He paused. "How sloppy of me. What a horrible thing to become, just like the ancient mariner."
Staunchly Andrew said nothing at all. Ralph poured himself yet another drink. They sat for a long time watching the coals flare and fail. Bar Laurie they had nothing at all in common. In the morning they would go their separate ways.
"You don't seem horrible to me at all," said Andrew slowly. "Just very unhappy."
Was he? He wasn't sure that he was anything at all. For so long he had built up that image of himself, the one in which Laurie had believed, that he was no longer certain whether anything stood behind it.
"I should have gone down with my ship," said Ralph. "Or in the raid. And as I didn't, one begins to feel that one should finish the job."
It was something that he had never said to anyone else. Not even Laurie had known; after that night he had burnt the letters unread. The worst of it was that Andrew did not even look shocked.
"I'm not a moral absolutist about it," said Andrew after due consideration. "There are circumstances in which it could be justified. If one had a terminal illness, perhaps, or in pursuit of a cause, like Gandhi or the suffragettes. But I should think that you have a great deal to live for."
"What would that be, pray tell?"
"The war, for one. Wounded or not, you can do a great deal; I can't think that you would be unconscious of that. Your own ideals, for another."
Ralph laughed bitterly. "I had ideals once."
Andrew studied him, chin on his fist. "I believe you still do."
"They're cold company in the night, I can tell you."
"I suppose they are," said Andrew slowly.
"Death before dishonour, isn't that your line?"
"I try not to reason in the abstract. One can so easily mislead oneself."
"Shall we be concrete? How about this: you know you're queer. What are you going to do about it?"
Ralph sat back in a sort of triumph. At the back of his mind he was aware that it was an ignoble one, like scoring a point in the school debating club. More rum. He'd got so that he hardly noticed the burn of it.
Andrew took a deep, trembling breath. "I had rather hoped you wouldn't ask me that."
"Isn't it what we've been talking around this whole wretched time?"
"I thought we were talking about love."
"Oh, don't delude yourself, my dear. Very little of it is about love in the end."
"You loved Laurie," said Andrew stubbornly. "Laurie loved you. You obviously made him happy, which is more than I should have managed under the circumstances. And I think you're neither as much of a cynic nor as much of a sinner as you like to believe."
"Is that so? I thought you called yourself a Christian."
"In my better moments I like to consider myself a Friend. And my ideas of sin are not so fixed as you might think."
Ralph let out a breath that he had not realised he was holding. "If that's true, I'm sure you'll find no end of men willing to prove it with you."
He watched for a flinch of disgust. One came, as he had known it would, but it was no more than a flicker in the firelight.
"I've wondered whether it would come to that," said Andrew. "But I find that I can only think of one."
"I've resolved to stop rescuing people. It's a bad job; they never thank you for it in the end."
"That's all right. I don't want to be rescued."
"What do you want, then?"
"I want to be kissed," said Andrew Raynes.
***
'Is my friend hearty,
Now I am thin and pine,
And has he found to sleep in
A better bed than mine?'
Yes, lad, I lie easy,
I lie as lads would choose;
I cheer a dead man's sweetheart,
Never ask me whose.
—AE Housman