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Rickie’s undistinguished profile was outlined for a moment against the pale sky and dark leaves of high summer as he reached over to close the casement window. ‘...Yes,’ he was saying. ‘I thought we might go along the road at first, though. There’s a lovely hedge along one side of it.’
‘All right,’ said Tilliard, his hand on the door. The day was not one to be wasted, and he and a few others had gathered in Rickie’s room in preparation for a walk to Grantchester.
‘—Only on one side, though. It’s curious; the other isn’t nearly so beautiful,’ continued Rickie. He looked round the room to make sure everything was in order, or at least in as much order as it ought to be left in. ‘And then back by the river path, if you like.’ He took up his hat from the corner of the sofa where it had been suspended, replaced the lid on a tin of Huntley & Palmers biscuits on the side table, then took out his handkerchief and turned away for a moment to blow his nose.
Tilliard and Widdrington had gone towards the door, and Stewart went to follow them.
‘—Oh, that’s just the limit!’
Widdrington looked round and interrupted Stewart’s ‘What’s the matter?’ with an exclamation of alarm. Rickie’s handkerchief was bright with blood.
‘Don’t worry.’ He waved a hand vaguely; his voice was slightly muffled by the handkerchief. ‘It happens sometimes. It’s the hot weather, I suppose. It’ll stop in about five minutes. Only what a vexing time for it to start.’
‘Are you sure you’re all right?’
‘Quite all right. Just I shan’t be any good to go out for a little while at least. Go if you like; I don’t want to keep you.’
Tilliard, embarrassed, went. Widdrington and Stewart stopped, and the former offered Rickie a fresh handkerchief, for his own was getting fairly soaked.
‘Thank you.’ He took off his hat and sighed, pacing restlessly and unevenly about the room.
‘Rotten thing for you to have to suffer,’ said Widdrington cheerfully. ‘Isn’t there anything we can do to help?’
‘Oh, not really...’ He lowered the handkerchief from his face and looked at it, frowning, then hastily replaced it and made towards the bedroom. ‘I think I ought to get a basin or something. This won’t do.’
‘I’ll fetch it! You sit down.’ Widdrington disappeared into the bedroom; Stewart motioned Rickie over towards the sofa and sat beside him, placing a hand on his shoulder. In a moment Widdrington returned bearing Rickie’s wash bowl. He took it, set it on his knees and leant down over it, dripping blood forlornly and helplessly.
‘How long did you say this would go on for?’ said Stewart abruptly. Widdrington was depositing the soiled handkerchiefs in the laundry basket.
Rickie shook his head carefully. ‘Less time than this, I think. This is worse than usual.’
‘Does it hurt much?’
‘Not at all. It’s only rather revolting, and tiresome.’ Though not actually painful, it was uncomfortable, and he now unconsciously demonstrated this by wrinkling his nose and setting off a moment’s greater gush of blood. ‘You needn’t stop, you know, either of you. I’ll be quite all right.’
Stewart squeezed the thin, bony shoulder in what he hoped was a comforting gesture, and was pleased when he felt Rickie, in spite of his last words, relax and lean into the touch a little. He did not mean to go. His friend’s bodily weakness did not revolt him, nor was it a thing to be shied away from or respectably ignored. Stewart always tried to think through things and understand their meaning; at this period, with his father’s encouragement for him to take up this philosophy seriously fresh in his mind, he pushed himself to do so more. Therefore, thinking of Rickie, he had said to himself that of course it made no difference to their set of philosophers, who lived by the mind and need not regard faults of the body. It was simply a fact to be acknowledged and treated with the natural sympathy of friendship.
This reasoning was flawed, or at least incomplete. There was a gap between it and the quality of the warmth he felt now—at feeling Rickie’s fragile body, which drained away its own blood so easily, close within the circle of his arm, and at the thought that he could give his friend comfort. Stewart was honest enough to see this, though he could not see further, and the gap jarred upon his mind and irritated him.
Here his thoughts were interrupted, however—for Rickie, adjusting the awkward angle of his head over the bowl, made a little noise of dissatisfaction, and Stewart at once, without deliberate thought, shifted closer to him and moved his arm down to Rickie’s waist. The circle narrowed inwards. Rickie could not easily turn to look at him, but the unhappy expression of his face was replaced by a smile.
Widdrington, who had been politely occupying himself in examining the contents of Rickie’s bookcases, heard the disturbance. ‘Look here, Elliot, old man,’ he said, looking at the bowl, ‘are you sure you don’t want us to fetch a doctor?’
‘No, you needn’t—thank you, though. It’s slowing now, in any case.’
It was, at last. The flow of blood was already less rapid and relentless, and within another couple of minutes it had stopped. Rickie waited until he was quite sure it had, then raised his head cautiously.
‘Here—’ Stewart, with his free hand, pulled out his own handkerchief, and Rickie dabbed gingerly at his nose. He was breathing carefully through his mouth; Stewart could feel the movement of his side with each breath in and out.
Rickie put the bowl down and stood up—then sat immediately back down again, not very steadily. Stewart replaced his arm.
‘Careful!’ cried Widdrington. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘A little dizzy,’ muttered Rickie, with a hand on his forehead.
‘I’m not surprised, when you’ve lost about a gallon of blood.’
Stewart was not much more of a judge in medical matters than Widdrington was, but it did certainly look like more blood than a man might reasonably expect to lose without feeling it, and the dark crust around Rickie’s nostril and down to his upper lip accentuated a pallor alarming enough in itself.
‘You ought to have something sweet to drink—orange juice or milk or something like that.’
Rickie agreed that this might help, and Widdrington was despatched to the college kitchen in search of such a commodity.
‘I am awfully sorry, Ansell,’ said Rickie, when he had been gone about a minute. ‘I’ve gone and spoilt your walk, too, and everything.’
The hedgerow along one side of the Grantchester road might be very lovely—Rickie had watched it through the succeeding blossoms of blackthorn, hawthorn and elder, and had wanted to see the wild roses adorning it to-day—but Stewart had been looking forward to Rickie’s company more than to the excursion for its own sake, and he said, ‘That’s nothing. Besides, it’s not as if you could help it. This might have happened to any of us.’
‘It is good of you to try to help.’
Stewart tightened his arm round Rickie, who leant towards him and rested his head for a moment affectionately on his shoulder, laughing a little.
‘—Shall I fetch some water?’ said Stewart presently. ‘You ought to clean up; you do look a bit ghoulish.’
He shook his head. ‘I can’t yet. If I prod at it too much I’ll set it off again.’
His face, which was thus obliged to go on looking slightly ghoulish, was very close to Stewart’s. His hair had fallen forward a little, and Stewart could almost feel the ends of it brush against his own forehead. He tried to think whether anything else might be done before Widdrington returned, and his eyes going round the room lighted upon the biscuit tin. He rose from the sofa and took it up. ‘You might have a couple of these.’
‘Thank you.’ He took a biscuit and offered the tin back to Stewart.
So they sat there, not so close together any more as they had been, talking and eating biscuits. Rickie asked some question about the argument Stewart had been making in the last evening’s philosophical discussion, which he believed he had not quite followed, and the explanation of this was absorbing enough to take up the time until Widdrington arrived with a jug of orange juice. Rickie, fortified by this and the biscuits, felt stronger and began to look more like his usual self. So the episode ended.
Stewart spent the rest of that day reading in his own room; but in the evening, feeling in want of a change, he wandered out into the court, went round to Rickie’s staircase and ascended. The outer door of his rooms stood ajar, and as Stewart approached he heard voices: Rickie talking to the bed-maker.
‘...And I hate to be so much trouble to the laundry, you know.’
‘Don’t you worry about that, Mr Elliot. The laundry can handle a few blood-stains, I’m sure. But what a thing for you to have to bear! You must be careful, you know.’
‘Oh, it’s really not—’
‘It’s only a mercy your friends were there. You are fortunate in them, I always think—and they in you, too. You’re more like brothers than friends, aren’t you?’
This remark displeased Stewart greatly, which surprised him. Again he tried to explain it to himself: his love for Rickie was the true love of friendship; to call it by the name of brotherhood instead was therefore either a falsehood or a metaphor, and Stewart hated the former device and mistrusted the latter. Again he felt the gap between understanding and reality, without being able to bridge it. But he heard the definite note of doubt in Rickie’s voice as he replied to Mrs Aberdeen, ‘I suppose so,’ and it cheered him to hear it.
As for Rickie, in his mind there were two reasons for this doubt. One was that, barely a year away from the cold memory of his public school, the word ‘friend’ was still a new and a precious thing to him, not to be taken for granted, and he disliked the suggestion that it was inadequate; the other was his sensitivity about the fact of his having no real brother. Two reasons seemed to suffice, and therefore he did not notice any other.
Mrs Aberdeen’s footsteps now moved towards the door. Stewart, who did not just now want to hear a cheerful ‘Good evening, Mr Ansell, sir,’ or any remarks about his goodness in coming to see Rickie, withdrew hastily. But the dissatisfaction lingered in his mind, and was to do so until he saw the thing in its true light.