Besieged Fortress: Act Two, Part 1
Ralph/Laurie, Seven Years On, Gibraltar and Elsewhere

PG-13




In the fortnight or so that had passed since Ralph had gone to sea Laurie had found himself at loose ends, drifting idly round the house, writing letters and then throwing them into the wastepaper basket unsent - not that this mattered, since Ralph wouldn't reach port for weeks yet - thinking of what was needed to secure the house against the gales of winter, and, usually, finding that Ralph had been beforehand in that, too.

He found it difficult to make plans. He had thought himself stagnating in the narrow confines of society here on the Rock, suspecting that Ralph's fishing and smuggling friends saw him merely as his appendage; urban, useless and effete, like someone insisting on wearing patent-leather evening pumps on a country hike.

But their circle did not, it seemed, see it that way after all. Tómas and Annunciata had, if anything, opened their hearts and home more widely since Ralph's departure, and Philippe, on learning that Laurie's spoken and written German was more than adequate, had beckoned him into a corner, one evening in Niko's, and, after much elaborate swearing to secrecy accompanied with gestures which would have been hair-raising had they not been so theatrical, had produced from an inside pocket a black leather-bound diary, battered with long concealment and stained with blood and worse than blood.

"This," Philippe had said, "I have shown to no-body. I took it that night we were compelled to - There was something about the way he died that has always had me wondering, and I thought perhaps now enough time has passed that I should try to find out - You will translate it for me, yes?"

And Laurie had done so. At the end of which Philippe had nodded gravely and said, "Thank you. I thought as much. Le pauvre bougre, he deserved a better country. It is a pity he had to die like that."

And Laurie, unable to think of anything to say in answer, had nodded, and ducked out of the bar leaving Philippe drinking rough brandy with a fierce wolfish smile of vindication on his lips, and gone home to a bed whose restless dreams, for once, were not of Ralph tossing alone on a life-raft far from shore but infused with the waste and pity of war.

His relations with Alec during these weeks were peculiar. Alec rose late, usually, and spent the remainder of the morning between the Post Office, the small reading-room where they took an erratic selection of the English language periodicals and the harbour mole, where he would sit looking out to sea sometimes for hours. He took no siesta (and indeed as the year turned through autumn it was becoming more a matter of habit than of need) and sometimes Laurie found him in early evening, wandering erratically about the streets of the upper town and stopping transfixed to look at odd, random things; a bunch of bright, tiny flowers clinging to a crack in a stone wall, or a lizard sitting on a stone to soak up the last rays of the sinking sun. If Laurie had had less experience in recognising the signs he would have said he had been drinking.

In the evenings Alec was prepared to be more companionable; they would go out for drinks or, very occasionally, a meal down by the harbour, but even there Laurie found him abstracted, noting he would break off from some cool, clinical speculation about the nature of "the fever then raging at Gibraltar" which had accounted for so many of those marble plaques on the walls of the chapel by the Governor's residence to look Laurie over with a detachment almost equally cool and clinical, as though assessing him for the emergence of dangerous symptoms.

But the flocks of migrating birds were coming in thicker and thicker across the Rock, and the rattle of gunfire in the early morning as the locals took their fill for the pot or for the mere joy of slaughter took Laurie back, waking uneasily in the grey dawn, to his early days with the Army in France, and still he could not make up his mind to leave.

It was Edward Longenhurst who decided that matter for him.