Work Text:
“So you see,” Ralph was saying, with an air of having satisfactorily explained absolutely everything, “there really was nothing else that could be done.”
Andrew could just picture him frowning earnestly at the air above the telephone as if he could get it to surrender, or at least acquiesce, through concentrated force of will. The rest of the picture was hazier. He kept straining to hear other cries in the lacunae of their conversation, but no luck. Hopefully it was just a closed door in-between, and nothing worse.
“I think I can, just dimly,” he said, desperately trying not to laugh. It was becoming increasingly difficult, but Ralph would never forgive him. When next he saw Alec, he promised himself, the two of them would have a nice long chat about how easy it was to manipulate Ralph, if only one knew where all the soft places lay, and whether anything could possibly be done about it. “Will you be able to manage?”
“I’ve got some experience in the field,” Ralph allowed.
“Ralph,” Andrew said, and then paused a moment to recalibrate his voice to sift fondness from the exasperation he wanted to convey. “An infant is not the same as a schoolboy.”
“To be sure; schoolboys are prodigious little beasts. I was primarily thinking of sailors: the tendency to toddle, and imbibe stupendous amounts is quite similar, and the general air of incoherence only serves to strengthen the comparison.” It was absurd of course, to think he could hear a smile in Ralph’s voice, but all the same it was there, warming him through. “It’s alright, my dear. It’s only for a few days.”
“How old is he? It is a boy, I suppose?”
“Girl; coming up on her fourth birthday. I’ll understand,” Ralph said, and now there was the curious pause that in a different man would have been reluctance and a need for reassurance, “if you’d rather not come down this weekend.”
“I’d rather you didn’t come to the station,” Andrew said by way of answer, and replaced the receiver in its cradle before returning his attention to his work. It took longer than it ought have, for the scrawls to make sense, though there both Neeson’s calligraphy and his pitiful understanding of the War of the Roses militated against Andrew. Pity one couldn’t skive off more easily: as it was there had been initial rumblings in the staff-room about his frequent disappearances; it had helped that many of the new masters were, like Andrew himself, unmarried young men unsettled by the war, and he didn’t stand out very much in habits or opinions.
Friday evening, disembarking with his usual duffel bag over one shoulder and a small bag of sweets clutched in the free hand, he looked around cursorily for Ralph. He’d asked to not be received, but it felt rather strange, all the same: barring emergencies at work—which Ralph tended to file under goat-fucking lunatics and moronic incompetents, with significant overlap between the two categories—he had never had to find his way to Ralph’s flat alone. Usually they dined at Ralph’s local, and walked back if the weather held. It was disorienting to walk the streets without the accompaniment of Ralph’s usual acerbic commentary.
Ralph’s landlord, loitering by the stoop, offered a vague greeting and turned his attention to the absorbing task of not letting his tabby eat the straggling grass. In the beginning he had wondered desultorily whether it might not look suspicious or strange for him to come by so regularly, every other weekend like clockwork. It had taken a full minute for Ralph to stop smirking and several more before he would give up making the first half of lewd comments and then breaking off to grin at Andrew by way of completion. In any event, he had never been stopped or questioned and in time his wariness had worn off: now he could nod perfectly easily at Ralph’s neighbours and let himself in with the key Ralph had more or less chucked at his head by way of concluding one of their rare arguments. Alec had the other, the official spare, but then Alec by now had a formidable collection of keys Ralph had left with him at one time or another. Laurie had... but it was no good thinking about Laurie now, any more than it had been these three years and more.
With his hand on the door he promised himself he wouldn’t be too obviously disconcerted, or judge Ralph too harshly on whatever shortcomings were glaringly visible. Himself having graduated from minding his cousins at a difficult age, through calming passengers of the Kinder Express through dint of repeated applications of patience and cobbled-together French, to administering the lives of a hundred inky schoolboys, he had had a decade more of practice than Ralph, who even before he took to the sea had by all accounts been the sort of prefect likelier to dole out canings than compassionate advice.
The flat looked at first sight as neat as it ever was, though with Ralph that hardly signified: untidiness wouldn’t occur to him as a possibility. On one bookshelf there was an old-fashioned doll of the type Andrew’s cousins, more than a decade ago, had already scorned; in front of the cold fireplace a tea-party had been abandoned mid-way, a stuffed bear occupied pride of place in his favourite armchair and was clearly overseeing proceedings.
Andrew, charmed but suddenly feeling the length of the day like a tangible weight, ruthlessly ousted the animal and then, relenting, drew it down on his lap. Doubtless he looked absurd, but the only likely eyes would be Ralph’s, who had seen him in situations far more ridiculous in certain lights.
In fact Ralph, emerging momentarily from his study with a show of care that gave away his anxiety about the child, went directly for the doll and disappeared again without betraying any knowledge of Andrew’s presence. Resurfacing five minutes later, he smiled at Andrew and came up to kneel before the grate and put away the toys in a commodious carpet-bag plainly provided for the purpose. He did it quickly, but with occasional pauses, as though checking against some set order in his mind. Once he peered into the depths, drew out a train engine and set it aside.
“She likes that one to be on top,” he explained offhandedly. “Darling, you’ll have to relinquish the bear now, he has to go in under the plates and things.”
“Beg pardon, of course he does.”
Ralph grinned. In the years Andrew had known him, he had seemingly mastered the trick of growing backwards: frowningly serious at twenty-six and given to frequent smiles now at thirty-two. Peace and the beginnings of a sedentary life had played their part. He would never be well-fleshed, but the haggardness had eased from his features.
“She eats normally, I suppose? Not on a course of mush or anything. Only I...” He shuffled around and produced the brown-paper bag. “If you think she’ll oughtn’t try them of course I’ll put them away.”
“Did you spend all your sugar ration on this? Andrew, my dear.”
“I eat at the school. Be reasonable.”
“Well, perhaps something soft she can’t choke on. What’ll you have? I can run out to the pub for something. She’s fast enough asleep that it won’t wake her. I’ve mostly been living off sandwiches myself.”
“I’ll fetch and carry. You stay here, wouldn’t know what to do if she woke up,” Andrew replied, lying rapidly.
Ralph stuffed the bear in, covered it with the toy plates and pewter kettle and zipped the carpet-bag, standing with it slung over one shoulder and the engine in his right hand. “Thanks very much. I don’t like to leave her. Dottie sees to her in the day, but it’s unfair to expect too much from that quarter. Would you like to see her?”
Andrew, for a moment confused by what seemed to be an offer of introduction to the landlord’s daughter, caught on and refused in the same breath. “I’d better go, or everything fit to have will be gone.”
Most things had, but he was able to secure fish and chips two shops down, and Ralph fell upon it with a barely-hidden enthusiasm. Sandwiches three days straight would do that to a man, and Andrew knew from previous anecdotes that the food served up in the BI canteen was the sort of industrial grey sludge best left unidentified and only barely classifiable as edible.
For a while they spoke about Andrew’s attempts to keep on with his own work despite frequent interruptions by woebegone schoolboys and colleagues looking to unload a share of their duties.
“Peters especially is like a homing-pigeon,” he complained over the dredges of their dinner. “Has a fit of the miseries every time I’m contemplating a particularly choice passage.” The boy in question was eleven, small for his age, and exquisitely beautiful: inevitably he was bullied mercilessly and it was all passed off under the header of being character-building with the unstated but clear side-bar that all the pansyness was better beaten out of the child than otherwise. If he had been normal, Andrew thought, he would still have felt for the child, but perhaps his exasperation would have eclipsed his concern. It didn’t help that Peters was the most unprepossessing scrap of humanity ever to grace a public school, unsocial and unathletic and uninteresting and, Andrew feared very much, plain unintelligent.
“There isn’t much else you can do for him,” Ralph pointed out sensibly, which wasn’t anything new and wasn’t much help to him, since what was needed was an excuse to stop doing even so much.
“His house-master’s started in on how he’s always hoped the boys feel able to tell him anything. I can hardly reply that Peters says barely a word the whole time without getting him talking about how coddling is bad for boys.”
“Poor bastard. Doesn’t read either, I take it. If he’s going to get bullied anyway he might get some good out of it. And don’t, for pity’s sake, start him on Boys Own Adventures, doesn’t sound the sort who’d like it.”
Andrew, perilously amused again, said, “I’ll play tiddly-winks or marbles with him at this point if it’ll help. Here, give me the dishes.”
It was a long-standing argument, and Ralph demolished it perfunctorily with a contemptuous glance, gathering crockery into a pile and standing fluidly with it balanced precariously on one hand. Andrew, dawdling into the kitchen behind him, collected the first kiss of the evening and retreated out of the range of suds and soapy hands.
“There’s some rum in the cabinet,” Ralph said, nodding towards it. “Elaine will kill me if I have any, but don’t stint yourself.”
Andrew ignored this with all the ease it deserved, and lit two postprandial cigarettes, moving back to the sitting-room for the ash-tray after allowing Ralph to clamp one between his teeth.
“H’llo,” said a flannel-gowned scrap of femininity. “You’re not Uncle Rollie.”
Rollie. Lord. Andrew crouched a little unsteadily, careful of the loose ash, and said, “I’m Andrew, I’m a friend of his. Do you want me to fetch your uncle?”
The little girl nodded imperiously, and said, “My name’s Eleanor.” She frowned for a second, and added, “My feet are cold.”
“That is because you ought to be in bed,” Ralph said, and came up with the dish-towel still on his shoulder. “Do you know what time it is?”
Eleanor shook her head, waving her arms about for emphasis. “Is it nine?” For a three-year-old, nine might as well be the mountains of the moon, white on the map. Here be Dragons.
Ralph made great show of consulting his watch. “Ten minutes past. Come along, Linnet, or the monsters will eat you.”
“My feet are cold,” she explained. “And I’m thirsty.”
“Terrible,” Ralph said gravely, and picked her up, chafing her feet. “Andrew, could you?”
Having drunk a glass of water, visited the lavatory, and had her warmed feet tucked into socks, Eleanor finally consented to be returned to bed, where she promptly demanded a story and fell asleep before the princess had done much more than grasp the nettle. The initial fear of being up past bed-time had faded before she had finished the water, and she had rather seemed to regard it all as a great adventure.
When she finally shut her eyes, Ralph waited five minutes and poked her gently in the belly to reassure himself she wasn’t shamming, then proceeded to pile covers on her till she quite disappeared underneath the bulk of them. The narrow bed that Andrew fictively occupied on his weekends, and was never certain whether Alec occupied on his, was peopled with the old doll, the teddy bear, the train engine, and a collection of books she had appraised and rejected.
Asleep, she looked very nearly ethereal. Her hair, escaping two neat braids in wispy waves, was gold against the white pillow-case, and her pink little hand was an open curl beside her plump cheek. Even the woolly socks couldn’t spoil the fairy effect. Andrew wanted rather to sit and watch her sleep, but felt it would be unacceptable and dead certain that Ralph would tease him mercilessly about it, more vicious because of all he would feel sure it meant.
In the event they tip-toed out of the room and when Ralph leaned against the door-post and whispered, “It makes everything worthwhile, just knowing I’ll never have one of my own,” he was able to grin back in sincere assent.