The Charioteer (17 page)

It wasn’t worth going to a cinema, and he didn’t feel like drinking alone; he thought he would walk a little to see the sights, while the knee felt so good. But he had only got as far as the cathedral green when the air raid sirens went.

It was broad daylight; on current form, it should be no more than a reconnaissance raid, delayed probably by cloud earlier in the day. He walked on among the pathetic little Home Guard trenches on the green. It was a beautiful afternoon.

“Everyone in the shelter. Come along, ladies, bring your knitting, nice and cozy inside. This way, sonny, mind how you go on the steps.”

Laurie became aware of a sandbagged cave and a fatherly person in a white tin hat. At that time they were still rounding up people in the streets and shepherding them into the shelters willy-nilly; but, living in the country, Laurie had forgotten. He said, “It’s all right, thanks, I’ll see how it goes.”

“Sorry, son, everyone in the shelter, that’s the drill. Come along, now, you’ve had enough to be going on with, won’t hurt
you
to take it easy.”

Laurie observed that the warden was over sixty; he had the ribbons of the Military Medal and the Mons Star. “Have a heart, Sergeant, I’ve only got a short pass.”

A thin sputter of gunfire sounded from somewhere near the river. “She’ll wait for you,” the warden said. “Don’t waste time, lad, I’ve got a job to do.”

A voice behind Laurie said, “You can’t have this one, warden. He’s a patient of mine, due for treatment. I’ll be responsible for him.”

The warden said, as one who washes his hands of a nuisance, “Okay, you’re the doctor,” and walked away. Laurie remained, confronted by the young man with the white eyelashes, who had been the target for his rather erratic humor some weeks ago during Major Ferguson’s round. He had told himself, at the time, that someday one of these little jokes of his would come home to roost.

“Well,” he said, “thanks very much.”

“Happy to oblige. I gathered you didn’t want to waste half an hour down there.” His tone was quite conventional. Hanging unspoken between them, and clearly understood, were the words, “Your move.”

A false but powerful sense of destiny attends those decisions which seem to be demanded of us without warning, but which we have in reality been maturing within ourselves. Laurie answered not from the loneliness of his emotions, but from the long solitude of his thoughts. Some instinct of his recognized, in this cautious and discreet person, one who had escaped from solitude, whose private shifts had given place to a traditional defense-system. Somewhere behind him was the comforting solidarity of a group.

Laurie said, lightly, “Well, I suppose if I look about this city I might find something a bit more entertaining than a hole in the ground.”

“Why not?” said the young man. “We’ll all get there in due course without all these rehearsals. It won’t be anything.”

“There it goes.” It was a single plane, flying very high. “What a flap about nothing.”

The young man said, “You’re a patient of Ferguson’s, aren’t you, at the E.M.S. hospital?”

“Yes. I think I’ve seen you there, haven’t I?”

“I thought I remembered you from somewhere. You won’t know my name: Sandy Reid. I’m not a doctor yet, by the way.” In the midst of an almost timid friendliness, there was something hard and wary about the way he said this. Laurie noticed it with slight distaste, but didn’t pause to consider it. He introduced himself. The young man said in a semifacetious American voice, “Glad to know you, Laurie,” and then, after a tiny pause, “How about a drink?”

The All Clear went just as they reached the pub. It was a large one, nastily modernized at vast expense. The chromium stools, the plastic leather, the sham parquet floor, and the fluorescent lighting which made everyone look jaundiced, caused him to expect that the beer too would turn out to be a chemical synthetic. A radio, slightly off the beam, was running like a leaky tap. He overbore Sandy’s protests and bought the drinks, intending to leave before another round.

This was not the first time he had touched the fringe he was touching now. He knew the techniques of mild evasion and casual escape. Though the Charles episode had been disillusioning, he hadn’t given up hope of finding himself clubbable after all. This time, he had briefly thought the right moment had come. But, after all, no: and after all, it was no one’s business but his own.

“It’s a bit tatty,” said Sandy Reid, as the drinks came over the ebonoid bar, “but one runs into people here.”

“Oh, yes?” said Laurie politely. “I suppose you can never get far from the hospital, in any case.”

“Actually I’ve got some quite civilized digs just up the hill, with a friend of mine.” He added, with a circumspect kind of pride, “We’ve been together more than a year now.”

“Oh? Good.” He saw Sandy eying him, anxiously expectant, under his eyelids; they were rather pink, reminding Laurie of white mice. Having been unhappy most of the day, he now found an unkind pleasure in being equivocal and elusive. “Do you have much trouble getting digs here? They tell me Oxford’s teeming like a Calcutta slum.”

Sandy’s face had fallen, but not despairingly. He had probably had some practice in distinguishing between ignorance and reserve. “Oh, you’re from Oxford. I’m at the local joint. Then you know Charles Fosticue, I expect.”

“Only by name,” said Laurie with prompt firmness. He gave thanks to his own instincts of self-preservation. “I used to see a good deal of Pat Dean; do you know him? He married a girl from Somerville last year.”

Stalemate had now been reached. Applying himself more briskly to his beer, Laurie decided to say that there wasn’t another bus if he missed this one.

“Not,” Sandy was saying (he had evidently decided to resurvey the terrain), “that I ever knew Charlie Fosticue at all well. I just mentioned him because he’s the sort of type everyone meets once. I’ve run into Vic Tamley now and again. Rather a pleasant person, I thought.”

“Yes, I heard someone say so, I forget who.”

“I thought you might know him, he seemed rather your type. Drink up, while there’s a lull in the rush.”

“Thanks, but I shall really have to get cracking to catch the bus.”

“Oh, hell, no, you’ve only been here five minutes. Don’t forget I saved you from rubbing knees with sixty-five typists in the shelter. Try old and bitter this time, the local old’s quite good.” The barman had collected the glasses while he was speaking. Laurie resigned himself to five minutes more.

There was a permanent air of improvisation, he thought, about Sandy Reid. He had clearly now abandoned what hopes of Laurie he might have had, but was loath to let him go. Perhaps the tenacity came only from boredom. He had a manner it would be too strong to call restless, a chronic but trivial kind of expectation. He looked often at the door, but when he was greeted by a couple of men as they entered, he gave them an offhand nod and turned away.

Someone turned up the radio. A brassy-lunged female sang of rainbows. Her vibrato was excruciating; Laurie made a vinegar face. Sandy replied with another, which expressed a subtly different kind of distaste; he must have thought that this was what Laurie had meant, and now Laurie himself was uncertain. Their eyes met in an indefinite kind of acknowledgment.

“Look here,” said Sandy, “we’re having a few people in for drinks tonight. It’s Alec’s birthday, he’s my friend I was telling you about. Why don’t you come along?” After the faintest pause he added, with more directness than he had so far used, “Can’t offer you any girls, I’m afraid. If you mind that?”

“Not in the least.” So much seemed only fair. “But unless I catch this bus I’ll be for it. Thanks all the same, I’d have liked to.”

“Oh, well, but if that’s all I’m sure we can fix it. Someone will run you back. Let’s think …”

Laurie for his part was thinking that this was what came of brushing people off with too soft a brush. It was a fault of his. Evidently he would have to use a hard one. “No, thanks very much, but—”

“You can count on someone with a car, definitely. If Bim can’t make it there’s still Theo Sumner, or Ralph Lanyon, or—”

“
Who
did you say?”

“Oh, d’you know Ralph Lanyon?” Sandy brightened. Now, he seemed to say, we’re getting somewhere.

“Not for years.” He had a dazed feeling of having fallen through a crack in time. “I expect it’s someone different.”

“Unusual name, after all. R.N.V.R. type; in armed trawlers, I think he was. He got wounded in the hand during the Dunkirk show and lost a couple of fingers. Now he’s doing a hush-hush technical course, radio or something. Well, there you are. That settles it, you’ll have to come along now.”

As if he had been drifting in uncertainly eddying water, and felt the sudden, authoritative pull of an ocean current, Laurie said easily and clearly, “Well, if you can do with me. Thanks very much.”

“I
T’S A MAUSOLEUM,” SAID
Sandy at the front door. “All you can say is, the proportions are good.”

Laurie said something about Italian influence. He could recall few doors which he had felt such reluctance to enter.

They had been separated in the bus, which had saved conversation. All kinds of little things came suddenly back to him; but most of all he remembered the term after Lanyon had gone. Over and over, during those first months, Laurie had relived the scene in the study, guarding it with fierce secrecy as a savage guards a magic word. Now he felt strands and fibers of Lanyon twitching in his mind where he had not recognized them before, and realized the source of those standards which had supplemented his mother’s in those parts of his life where she could not go.

He knew that he didn’t want to submit any of this to daylight. Lanyon’s survival belonged only between the worn leather covers of the
Phaedrus.
The only firm fact about him now was that he was a friend of Sandy’s. It was madness to have come.

The bus had halted and an old woman was getting out. It would wait for her; for him too, if he wanted to escape. Sandy wasn’t looking; he reached for his stick. But it would be a lout’s trick, he thought; and this distaste gave pretext enough to his divided mind. He sat back again, and the next stop was theirs.

The house was tall and narrow, in a massive late Palladian terrace of Bath stone. As they crossed the threshold, Laurie agreed that the proportions were good.

Inside it looked, like many others in that old once-wealthy suburb, as if it had been lived in for thirty years by a Lord Mayor’s widow. It looked uneasy now, turned into a respectable tenement full of transients in a time of flux. They crossed the hall with its thick red and blue Turkey carpet. On the half-landing a huge stained-glass window was half blacked-out with paint, half curtained with an army blanket; there was a cigarette burn on the white-painted tread of one of the stairs.

The first landing had a mahogany tallboy, the second a half-acre engraving of Victoria and Albert at the Crystal Palace. Sandy said, “I’m frightfully sorry about all these stairs.”

“It’s good practice for me. Sorry to be so slow.” There were no stairs at the hospital and he hadn’t expected it to be so bad. He took his time. He wasn’t going to waste his strength impressing Sandy Reid.

At the top of the next flight he saw, still set in the newel-post, the hinges of the wicket gate which, fifty years since perhaps, had guarded the nursery floor. Voices and laughter came from a door beyond it. Sandy said, “Here we are.”

Laurie’s first glance around the room told him only that Lanyon was not there; he felt a dull flat relaxation, which he took for relief. Several introductions went through his ears unheard. He roused himself in time to identify Alec, his other host: a dark, narrow-headed, nearly good-looking young civilian, whose calling didn’t need guesswork; he looked already much more like a doctor than Sandy did, or like a better doctor perhaps. He talked like one, coolly, throwing all his good lines away. Sandy treated him, rather ostentatiously, like a lovable dreamer to be bossed and protected. The first few minutes were enough to give Laurie all this.

The other dozen or so faces had closed in a little; he became aware that the conversation had a poised, tentative feel. The unspoken query in the air became as unmistakable to him as a shout. Deciding that it was no business of his to resolve it, he threw the onus on Sandy by the simple means of asking to go and wash. As he crossed the landing, he heard Sandy’s voice on a rising note: “… my dear,
right
across the ward in the middle of the teaching round, as bold as brass, no possible error, it made me feel quite shy. Goodness
knows
why he won’t drop a hairpin now, the silly boy.”

Returning, Laurie began to take in the room. It contained a big white-painted cupboard (the toy cupboard, he thought at once) and an old-fashioned nannie’s rocking chair. There were also two divans covered with hessian and strewn with bright cotton cushions; a couple of modern Swedish chairs; one or two charming little pieces in old walnut; various poufs; a wooden black boy holding an ashtray; and a crayon drawing, literal and earnestly dull, of a young sailor’s head. Across the lower half of the big windows, rusty but still thick and strong, the nursery bars remained protectively fixed.

He had heard, as he came in from the doorway, the conversation swerve awkwardly. He was acutely conscious of his limp, of the lowness of the divans and poufs which would exhibit his stiff knee when he sat and when he rose. He recognized Sandy’s changed voice which he had heard from the landing: it was the voice of Charles’s friends. Suddenly he imagined Lanyon frisking in and speaking like that. With a trapped feeling he saw Alec coming up carrying a whisky and soda.

“I believe it’s your birthday? Many happy returns.”

“Thank you. Do sit down; try this one.” It was one of the Swedish chairs, with helpful arms. Alec poised himself on the edge of a table and said, “You’re a friend of Ralph’s, I hear.”

“Well, I can’t honestly claim that. He was Head of the School when I was in the fifths, and we’ve never even met since he left. If he remembers me at all it’ll only be because he’s got a good memory for faces; or used to have.”