The Charioteer (15 page)

“That doesn’t arise.”

“I don’t—”

“Well—I was waiting for you. I saw you taking the nurses back. I—”

“
Odell!
If you don’t come straight in I’m going to report you.”

“Yes, Nurse, coming. Andrew, we must—”

“You must go, she meant that.”

“But—”

“Please. I’ll be seeing you in the ward.”

As he went in he heard the thin, steady shrilling of the All Clear.

Laurie looked up from his home letter to say, “Don’t you wish your name was Gareth, Reg?”

“Eh? Wish it was how much?”

“Gareth. That’s what my stepfather-elect’s called. I suppose he was conceived with Tennyson in limp suede sitting on the po-cup-board.”

Reg coughed repressively. Habit had made of the standard nouns and adjectives in his own vocabulary something merely conventional, like italics or points of exclamation. He sometimes found Laurie’s conversation highly obscene, and would have voiced his disapproval to anyone he had liked less. “Comes from Wales, I reckon. I had a girl called Gwynneth once. Have a Gold Flake. Ah, come on, got the best part of a packet left. Chap in our unit was called Jutland Jellicoe Clark. Course, being called Clark, that was a help to him. Always got called Nobby, barring when anyone wanted to nark him.”

“I might try Uncle Nobby. I’ve got to call him something.”

“You want to go careful at first with a parson. Nice day, today. Lovely the trees look, now they’ve turned. We always took our holiday August, to get the social life. Never knew it got so pretty. Evenings it gives you the pip, though. Makes you miss home, and that.”

“Yes,” said Laurie. He remembered how, in other autumns, he and his mother had roasted chestnuts, sitting on a sheepskin rug before the fire.

“Afternoons is the time, though. Lovely it is then.”

“How’s Madge keeping?” asked Laurie quickly. He was afraid Reg was about to suggest a walk, and today he felt that at any cost he must get away alone.

The declining sun was ripe and warm. Hips and haws shone like polished beads in the hedgerows; the damp mats of fallen leaves had a smoky, rusty smell. There was a bridle-path running between brambles, and a stile he had taught himself to manage. It was all right when no one was about.

The blackberries tasted of frost and faint sun and smoke and purple leaves: sweet, childish, and sad. Soon came the wood, with light edges of coppice, full of birds, and birches beyond; the golden leaves shook like sequins against the sky. Presently the path opened into a field of stooked barley. Along its border he found his old place, a smooth bank running up to a big elm. He lowered himself down, carefully. It had been a long pull up and the knee had hurt him, but it was worth it.

He hadn’t been here since two operations back, before he had met Andrew. The barley had been standing in the ear then, dipping and shivering silkily under the running breeze. It was caught now, its fancies were ended. He had brought, he remembered, Herrick to read.

The sun slanted deep into the wood, making hidden birds sing softly. The touch of autumn struck from his youth that cosmic sadness, which time will tame like the bite of spring. Under the pale sun, beauty and fate and love and death ached through him. After a while he sighed, and took out his book.

He found that the sea water hadn’t soaked in beyond the notes at the back. The front cover unfortunately recalled the butcher’s order book which his mother used to keep, fastidiously, apart from the others; but though the tops of the pages were stained, they parted easily, and inside they were clean. He turned them to and fro, remembering other places where he had read them: in a punt moored to a willow by Magdalen Bridge, on a packing-case behind a Nissen hut; and the first time of all, in a sunny clearing with a stream running through it, a short way from his home. It had struck him with religious awe to find Phaedrus leading Socrates almost, it might have been, to the very spot. The spreading tree, the green bank to lean on, the water cold to the foot: nothing had been wanting, except the votive offerings and the shrine. “Give me to be beautiful within,” Socrates had prayed, “and for me let outward and inward things be reconciled together.”

Laurie turned the pages gently; they separated at the top with a crisp little sound. He found the part he was looking for and smoothed it open.

… and so it is with the followers of the other gods. Each man in his life honors, and imitates as well as he can, that god to whose choir he belonged, while he is uncorrupted in his first incarnation here; and in the fashion he has thus learned, he bears himself to his beloved as well as to the rest. So, then, each chooses from among the beautiful a love conforming to his kind; and then, as if his chosen were his god, he sets him up and robes him for worship. …

Laurie looked up at the barley; if any of the beautiful and ruthless Olympians had owned him they had lost him, he thought.

… and this striving to discover the essence of their proper god, by tracing him in themselves, is rewarded; for they are forced to look on the god without flinching, and when their memory holds him, his breath inspires them, and they share his attributes and his life, as far as man can enter godhead. And for these blessings they thank the loved one, loving him even more dearly. …

Laurie put down the book and folded his arms behind his head. He was not analytical enough yet to have discovered that there are certain loves, and certain phases of love, which bring perfect happiness only in their pauses and intervals, as water grows clear when one’s progress has ceased to stir it.

… and it fills the soul of the beloved also …

As he read on, a cock pheasant made easy by his stillness came picking within a few yards of his feet.

He is in love, therefore, but with whom he cannot say; he does not know what has become of him, he cannot tell. He sees himself in …

The pheasant, startled, burst up almost into Laurie’s face and whirred away; but he scarcely noticed it.

… he sees himself in his lover as if in a mirror, not knowing whom he sees. And when they are together, he too is released from pain, and when apart, he longs as he himself is longed for; for reflected in his heart is love’s image, which is love’s answer. But he calls it, and believes it, not love but friendship; though he too—

That book must be good,” said Andrew. “What is it?”

Laurie felt his heart jerk like a shot deer. An uncontrollable reflex, as he sat up, made him slap the book shut and lean his hand on it.

“Good Lord, Andrew,” he said breathlessly, “you made me jump half out of my skin.”

Andrew came out of the wood behind him, from the footpath he had forgotten.

“Well, I needed that to make me believe you weren’t cutting me on purpose. You looked too absorbed to be true.”

Something in his voice made Laurie look up at him. His air of ease had not come easily; he was acting; it surprised Laurie to see that he could do it so well. More, he looked tired; for the first time since he had gone on night duty there were dark smears under his eyes.

“Sit down, you’re giving me a crick in the neck.” Straining not to betray himself or to sound unwelcoming, Laurie could feel himself striking a note of appalling heartiness, like a housemaster on sports day. “What a desperate character you are, turning day into night like this. It’s only ten to three. What happened?”

“Nothing.” Andrew sat down on the grass beside him. “I felt like a walk.”

“If I’d known I’d have waited for you. How did you know where to look?”

“I asked Reg Barker, of course. I always do.”

“Do you?” He did not add that Reg had never mentioned it. “Have some blackberries.” He had picked a leafful on the way.

Andrew ate one and, turning the next one over, said, “I thought you might—I mean, if you’d rather be on your own do tell me. Honestly, I shall quite—”

The lovers of the innocent must protect them above all from the knowledge of their own cruelty. “You know I never want you to go.”

“Well, you did say that as if you meant it.”

“Thanks for the few flowers,” said Laurie, unable to prevent himself.

“You never do take me seriously, do you?”

Laurie never, perhaps, came nearer to a disastrous self-betrayal than in that moment of almost pure exasperation. It passed, and he perceived that Andrew was almost rigid with embarrassment, as people are who realize that they have let something slip out. “That was only a joke,” he added, with the fatal error of timing that destroys all credibility.

“Try sending it to the
New Yorker.
It’s too sophisticated for
Punch.
” There was a pause.

“Sorry. You were better off with a good book.”

“Andrew.” There was silence. “Look—what
is
the matter?”

“Nothing.” He had been staring before him, his arms around his knees; suddenly he scrambled to his feet. “I think I’ll go back to bed. I don’t seem fit to be with anyone. Thanks for putting up with me, but I don’t see why you should have to. I don’t know what’s come over me, to make me behave like this.”

“Sit down,” said Laurie. He had suppressed just in time the hopeless attempt to jump up too. Andrew sat down again: he picked a long, tough stem of grass and pulled it apart. Laurie said, “You want some sleep, that’s all.” He looked down unseeingly at the book he was still holding. “You’re not in half as filthy a mood as I always am if I miss a night.”

“Do you often?”

“Not me, I always shout for dope.”

Andrew made an irresolute movement, as if to go after all. Perhaps it’s better, Laurie thought.

“What were you reading before I interrupted you? Can I see?”

Laurie kept his hand on the book covering the title. In his imagination the pages were printed not with their own paragraphs only, but with all that he himself had brought to them: it seemed as though he must be identified and revealed in them, beyond all pretense of detachment, as if they were a diary to which he had committed every secret of his heart.

Andrew moved back looking awkward and constrained, and Laurie suddenly wondered whether he supposed it was something pornographic; after all in a free country there are very few reasons for hiding books. He tossed it over.

Andrew picked it up and said, “I haven’t read this one. I thought it was the
Phaedo
for a minute, we did that at school. What’s it about?”

Laurie remembered in the nick of time to say, “Well, primarily, it’s about the laws of rhetoric.”

“Are you interested in rhetoric? If I were asked to choose the least likely person I could think of, it would be you.”

“Actually I suppose people read it most for the sample speeches.” Andrew waited expectantly. Laurie felt the held-in feeling in his chest easing off. “There are three, but the first is rather a dull one, just put up to be knocked down. Socrates recomposes it as he thinks it ought to be done. Then he decides it ought not to be done at all because it isn’t true. So he does another of his own on the same subject.”

“What subject?”

“Love.” Laurie skimmed as lightly as he could over the most treacherous word in the language. “The first speech sets out to prove that a lover who isn’t in love is preferable to one who is. Being less jealous, easier to live with, and generally more civilized.”

“It sounds,” said Andrew with the maddening intolerance of youth, “hardly worth stating the first time, let alone redoing it.”

“Well, maybe, but Socrates’ version is quite amusing. And, as a matter of fact, perfectly true. Only as the whole thing hangs on the definition of love, he’s able to turn it inside out in the refutation, which is the highlight of the piece. It—”

“Read it to me.”

“What? Oh, no. No, I—” It was a moment before he recovered the presence of mind to add, “It’s far too long.”

“Read as much as you can, then.” Andrew lay down on the grass. It could be seen that he was very tired. His voice had the edgy insistence one hears in a child’s who has sat up too long.

“No, I should spoil it.” It and much more, he thought. To keep Andrew quiet he went on, “It’s got the famous myth of the charioteer.”

“I don’t know it. Go on.”

“Well …” He paused. It had been part of his mind’s furniture for years, but he had never spoken of it to anyone before. “He likens the soul to a charioteer, driving two winged horses harnessed abreast.”

“Yes, don’t stop.”

“Each of the gods has a pair of divine white horses, but the soul only has one. The other” (he smiled to himself; he always remembered this part best) “is black and scruffy, with a thick neck, a flat face, hairy fetlocks, gray bloodshot eyes, and shaggy ears. He’s hard of hearing, thick-skinned, and given to bolting whenever he sees something he wants. So the two beasts rarely see eye to eye, but the charioteer has to keep them on the road together. The god driving his well-matched grays is ahead setting the pace; he drives up to a track which encircles the heavens, and is carried around with eternity as it spins, like—”

Andrew, interrupting, said, “ ‘Like a great ring of pure and endless light.’ ”

“Yes. Yes, that will be where Vaughan got it, I suppose.” Both found themselves with nothing to say. And now, thought Laurie, he will ask at any moment, “But what has all this to do with love?”

In fact, however, he said nothing, but picked up the book itself from the grass, where Laurie had forgotten it. Presently he said without turning around, “You’ve had this for quite a time, haven’t you?”

“Yes, I had it at school.”

“And you took it to France with you.”

“All too obviously, I’m afraid. I must get it rebound.”

“I should like to read it. Will you lend it me?”

“Yes. Of course. I’ll let you have it sometime. I’ll try and clean it first, or put on a paper cover or something. It’s really in too filthy a condition to pass around.”

Andrew said, his usually clear voice muffled by the position he was lying in, “You needn’t for me.”

Laurie knew that at this point he should not have allowed another silence to begin. The rustle of a rabbit in the wood echoed like the tread of cattle; the faint sound of a page turning seemed to go through his skin like a cutting edge.