The Charioteer (22 page)

“That’s all right. I won’t go away. I’ll wait for him here if it takes all night.”

Alec looked down at him for a moment, shrugged his shoulders, got up and went over to the group by the fire. Someone said, “Sandy seems to have vanished lately. Is all well?”

“Oh, yes; he’s making coffee or something, I expect.”

“Well, you
were
having a rather cozy get-together.”

“That? I was just carrying out an experiment in sleep-suggestion. They do it in
Brave New World,
with tiny little radios under the pillows.”

“I think I should check your results a good long way from Sandy, if I were you. And just possibly from Ralph Lanyon—or am I letting my imagination run away with me?”

Laurie opened his eyes, vaguely. By some biochemical trick, now that he was free to sleep he found that he couldn’t. He hung in a suspended half-consciousness. Alec’s cocktail couldn’t be wearing off so soon; he discovered that he hadn’t even finished it. It occurred to him that the drug Ralph had given him, earlier, had been the potent force; that it was passing its peak, and that though he was both torpid and rather drunk, he was neither to the point of incapacity. He would get up as soon as Ralph came back, and give them all a surprise. Ralph would …

The door opened. Ralph looked in and, ignoring everyone else in the room, said, “Alec. Can you come for a minute?”

Laurie sat up. He felt dizzy and swayed a little as he got to his feet; but this did not affect at all the strange sharpness which had happened in his mind, like the sudden crystallization of a fluid, as soon as he heard Ralph’s voice. Out of all the known and unknown possibilities, he guessed at once what kind of emergency this was.

He was still drunk enough to have lost certain social inhibitions. The discreet murmur of the residual guests (by now there were only four), and their careful noninterference, infected him with no hesitation. Implanted in his mind, at some nonrational level, was the idea that Ralph was in a fix and needed him. He followed Alec out to the landing.

The party had been discreetly lit with a couple of shaded table lamps; by contrast, the naked light from the open door of the bathroom seared the eyes. Ralph ran down the stairs with the brisk neatness of a seaman; Alec holding the banisters swung down in strides and was just behind him. Laurie, arriving last, found them both kneeling over Sandy, who was lying on the bath mat with a dressing-gown thrown over his naked body. He was groaning, and showing the whites of his eyes. Round his left wrist was a tourniquet made of a folded handkerchief, a toothbrush, and a strip torn from a towel. The bath was half full of crimson water.

Alec said nothing. With a feverish but instinctively exact movement, he took Sandy’s other wrist and felt the pulse.

Ralph said, “He’s all right. I left the bath so that you could see how much he’s lost. You can tell in water better than I can.”

Alec looked up. “Not more than two pints at the most, I should think. Pulse about ninety-six. Sandy!”

Sandy groaned, and turned his face away.

Speaking across him as though he were an inanimate object Ralph said, “I heard him in here, doing that, as I came upstairs. The door wasn’t locked.”

Sandy rolled over toward Alec again. “Let me alone,” he said in a dying voice. “I want to finish it. Go away.” Ralph slapped him lightly across the face and said, “Shut up.”

“Please, Ralph,” said Alec, “not now. He’s feeling ill.”

“He’s not feeling half as ill as I’d like to make him.”

“Go away,” said Sandy. “Go away.”

Laurie felt sorry for Alec but his sympathies were with Ralph. There was no doubt that Sandy looked a disgusting spectacle, with his pale damp face, his head lolling on the bath mat, his watery eyes upturned. He had thrown off the dressing-gown as he moved, and Ralph with a gesture of distaste twitched it back again. The movement caught Laurie’s eye. Suddenly he realized Ralph had taken off his glove; it was the left hand Laurie was looking at.

He had seen so much in hospital that if it had been displayed to him deliberately, in a moment when he had been thinking about it, he would have felt scarcely a qualm except of sympathy; but now, he felt a catch in his stomach. Not only the two last fingers were missing and half the second, but the outermost bone of the hand had gone too, taking with it the margin of the palm and narrowing it by an inch. The effect was strange and clawlike; at the edge, and at the stumps of the fingers, the recently healed flesh was still red and mauve. Ralph was balanced on his heels, his good hand holding the edge of the bath; and it came back to Laurie that he had had beautiful hands, with which he had never made an affected or exhibiting movement; neither coarse nor overfine, full of intelligence and adaptable strength. The one that was left was still the same.

Just as if Laurie had spoken aloud, Ralph’s head came up and their eyes met. He said coolly, “Shut the door, Spud.”

At the sound of Laurie’s name Sandy squirmed around toward Alec, moaning.

“Alec—don’t bring
him
here. Oh, how could you? No no, it’s too much.”

“Shut up,” said Ralph. “I’ll bring the police if you don’t behave.”

Laurie said, “I’m sorry. I’d better clear out.”

“Don’t go, Spud,” said Ralph. “I might want you.” He jerked the chain of the bath-plug and the water started to gurgle out. Suddenly he said in an urgent undertone, “Bolt the door. Don’t make a row about it.”

Laurie slid the bolt home softly. Next moment the handle turned, persistently, but in a refined, rather furtive way. Laurie knew at once that a woman was doing it. It hadn’t struck him before that in an unconverted house the bathroom might be shared. Ralph slammed his right hand flat over Sandy’s mouth, cleared his throat raspingly, and gave a loud, aggressively masculine cough. The door-handle went dead, and a fading creak sounded on the stairs.

“That would have been pretty,” Ralph said. He removed his hand from Sandy’s face and added, “All right, you can start groaning again now.”

“We’ll have to get him out of this,” said Alec.

“You’ve got something there. Here, you.” He shook Sandy’s shoulder. “Get up, damn you. You’ve got to move.”

“Don’t, Ralph.” Alec knelt down beside Sandy and put an arm around his shoulders. “Look, old dear, you’ll get pneumonia lying here all wet on the floor. You’ve got to let us get you to bed. Try and sit up, come on.”

There was certainly a good deal of water about. Laurie noticed for the first time—the darkness of the navy cloth had disguised it—that Ralph’s uniform was soaking wet from shoulder to knee. It couldn’t have been a light job to heave Sandy unaided out of the bath; Laurie was struck forcibly with this while they were trying to persuade the patient onto his feet. Clammy, slippery, and repulsive to the touch, he kept sliding through their hands like a fish and subsiding on the mat again. Laurie saw Ralph open his mouth, shut it after a glance at Alec, and swear to himself soundlessly.

“Sandy,” said Alec. He was panting with exertion; his face looked white and strained. “Sandy,
try.
Why can’t you get up? What is it?”

“I’m going to die,” said Sandy. “Oh, God, I’m going to die.” He rolled over and was violently sick on the bath mat.

Ralph let go of him and stood up. Sitting back against the edge of the bath, with his hands in his pockets, he stared down at Sandy silently; then he looked at Alec. Laurie, who was well sobered up by now, had a powerful consciousness that he shouldn’t be there, and looked behind the bath for a floorcloth. The smell of steam, blood, vomit, and stale drink was overwhelming.

The silent conversation behind his back ended, or perhaps was cut off by the sounds Sandy was making. Laurie was in time to see Alec taking his pulse again. His face had a blotchy, blue-and-yellow look. Ralph said, unemotionally, “He can’t possibly have taken anything, as well, I suppose?”

Alec said, “Sandy, have you? Sandy! Sandy, you must tell us. Sandy—please.”

Sandy, stark naked after the recent struggle, heaved himself into a Dying Gladiator pose. “What do you care? I shan’t tell you.” He collapsed again.

“Sandy. Listen to me—”

“No,” said Ralph. He pushed Alec on one side, not unkindly but with finality. “Listen to
me.
How much more responsibility do you expect Alec to take for you, you fish-bellied, blackmailing little crap? You’re talking to me now. Are you going to tell us what you’ve taken, or shall I send Spud here to phone the hospital? Well? Take your choice.”

Closing his eyes, Sandy murmured, “Only—aspirin. What there was in the bottle.”

Ralph looked at Alec. “How much?”

“Not more than a dozen tablets. He must have brought most of it up.”

It seemed, indeed, that there was no more to come. They rolled Sandy’s limp form off the bath mat, and Laurie swilled it under the tap. Ralph said, “Better give him a tot, I suppose?”

“Not if he’s bleeding much. I’ll have a look.” Alec untwisted the toothbrush from the tourniquet. “Good Lord, Ralph, you put this on tight enough.”

“It’s supposed to be a tourniquet. Not a bangle.”

“My hand’s gone dead,” moaned Sandy, reviving a little and working his fingers about. A dark red, sluggish bleeding at once started again. Alec stared at the razor cut, drawing his brows together, before he pressed back the pad and put the bandage on.

Ralph said, “Don’t tell me, I know. It needs stitching.”

“Yes,” said Alec. His examination of the wound had been confident and decisive; now suddenly he looked up at Ralph, worried to rags, his resources scattered, a civilized mind put out of gear by an uncivilized situation. “What on earth shall we do, Ralph? I’ve got nothing here.”

“I’ll drive you down to the hospital. You can pick the things up there, surely. Spud’ll cope with everything here all right; won’t you, Spud?”

He smiled at Laurie, briefly. More than anything till now, the smile evoked a host of memories. For that casual accolade, cutthroat little competitions, all the shrewder for being tacit and undiscussed, had gone on all over the School. It looked strange in this hole-and-corner, squalid setting, touched still as it was with confident assumptions and open skies.

“Of course I will.”

Ralph smiled again, which hadn’t happened at school, and said, “Right. Let’s heave him into bed and get going.”

Alec, however, looked more worried than ever. “The trouble about the hospital is, I might get stuck there.”

“How d’you mean, stuck?”

“If the warning goes. I”—he looked down at Sandy, wretchedly—“I’m supposed to be on a casualty team. If there was a raid. Often there’s nothing to do, but if I were in the place I couldn’t walk out of it.” He reached for the dressing-gown and tucked it around Sandy, who was now shivering violently.

Ralph said expressionlessly, “He’s on call too, I suppose?”

Alec looked up at him. “Ralph. Have a heart.”

“Sorry,” said Ralph. Again Laurie felt that he shouldn’t be there.

“Look,” he said, “before we start getting him out, would you like anything done about the people upstairs? We must have been in here quite a while.”

“About eight minutes. Yes, Spud, go and get rid of them, will you?”

As he pulled himself upstairs on the banisters, Laurie found himself foolishly pleased by the fact that Ralph had said simply, “Get rid of them” without offering any directions.

To the guests he offered Alec’s apologies: Sandy had passed out and at first they had thought he was just tight, but now Alec had taken his temperature, which was a hundred and two. Alec hoped it was only, influenza, but there was a lot of diphtheria about. It was all rather worrying. Luckily the lavatory was well separated from the bathroom and they all knew the way to it.

Ralph and Alec had got Sandy sitting on the bathroom stool, where he looked like a groggy boxer at the ninth round.

“All clear,” Laurie said.

“What did you tell them?” Alec’s voice was getting increasingly overkeyed. It was Ralph who said, “Good show.”

When Sandy had been maneuvered into the bedroom, Laurie went back to clean the bathroom up. On the floor, under the stool, he found Ralph’s glove, the padding round and firm, the empty part defining the shape of the truncated hand. He laid it where it had fallen, touching it kindly.

Upstairs they had got Sandy into bed, where he was quietly weeping and holding Alec’s hand. Ralph was sitting on the dressing-table smoking, and Alec was saying to him, “But what will you
say
?”

Ralph drew deeply and irritably on his cigarette. “I shall tell him the truth, naturally. Omitting names, and a few other things.”

“But, Ralph, supposing he—”

“He’s got a right to know he’s not being mixed up in an assault case. Take it or leave it, Alec. If you’d rather I drove you to the hospital you’ve only to say so.”

“All right,” said Alec, “if you really think so.”

“Good enough,” said Ralph. He looked up suddenly. “Oh, there you are, Spud. What happened to you, are you all right?”

“Yes, of course. I’ve been removing clues in the bathroom.”

“This boy thinks of everything. Did I leave a glove there?”

“I didn’t see one.”

While Ralph was fetching it, Laurie turned to Alec to ask if there was anything he could do. At the sound of his voice Sandy’s sobs redoubled.

Pretending not to notice this, Alec said, “No, thanks, Laurie. You’ve been awfully good about all this. I feel—” He looked down at Sandy, who seemed about to have a fit of hysterics, and made a helpless ashamed little gesture. In a changed brisk voice he said, “Ralph thinks the naval surgeon at his Station will let him have some needles and gut without being too difficult. He’s just going off to see.”

“Oh, good,” said Laurie vaguely. He had stopped wondering when he would get back to his own hospital, or what would happen to him. It became evident to him now that this question was distressing Alec to a point where he couldn’t talk about it. Laurie wanted to say it was all right and that he mustn’t worry; but the presence of Sandy, the original host, was inhibiting. In a minute or so, Laurie would be left alone in the flat with the two of them. Just then, like an answer to prayer, Ralph appeared in the doorway fastening his glove. Laurie stepped forward.