The Charioteer (23 page)

“Can I come with you?”

“Yes,” said Ralph. His face was in shadow and Laurie thought how this gave his eyes a grave withdrawn look. “Yes, Spud, do.”

On the landing he picked up his cap and his blue stormcoat and said, “It’s cold tonight. Haven’t you anything warm?”

“I lost it in the wash, like King John. It’s not that cold, anyway.”

“Why the army doesn’t mutiny I never know. Here, Alec, I’m borrowing your burberry and a scarf for Spud. I’ll bring them back.” He shut the bedroom door with a relieved kind of finality. “And now, before we do anything else, what’s the telephone number of your hospital and who do I ask for?”

Laurie told him. Ralph said, “I’ll be five minutes. Wait for me in here.” Laurie wandered obediently into the sitting room. It had the usual debauched look of rooms after parties, and he remembered that Alec would have all this to cope with alone. He collected the glasses, found the kitchen, and washed them in the sink.

Ralph’s voice behind him said, “For Christ’s sake, Spud, haven’t you had enough tonight? Leave that and come on. I’ve fixed the nurse.”

“How on earth did you do that?”

“She hadn’t reported you yet. It seems the Day Sister had the evening off and no one else was sure if you had a pass. The situation now is that I should have had you back in time, but my car was involved in an accident and I’ve been held up making statements to the police. You weren’t in the accident, it was before I arrived, so you needn’t know much about it. Come on, let’s go.”

Outside he had a big battered sports car, belonging to a year when a resemblance to racing cars—a thick leather strap around the bonnet, the extrusion of copper pipes—was still considered smart. In uncertain starlight they fiddled with its rickety and obstructive hood, nipped their fingers, swore, said it wasn’t as cold as all that, and gave it up. Ralph warmed up the engine with a noise that outraged the quiet street; the car started, they were away. Now for the first time abruptly conscious of being alone, charged with the events of the evening and no longer able to diffuse themselves in activity or among other people, they were isolated together at the fixed center of the huge, swiftly running night.

For what seemed a long time they drove in silence. Ralph’s two gloved hands, resting easily on the wheel, looked like the hands of any other driver; it was only when he had to change the gear, which was worn and cranky, that Laurie felt in the arm and shoulder beside him the tension of concealed strain.

“Warm enough, Spud?”

“Fine.”

They drove on. Somewhere a clock struck the last quarter before midnight.

Ralph said, “I suppose I got there about seven-thirty. Four hours.”

They had come to a bridge over the river. The ground was high here, the river ran between cliffs. Laurie thought how in peacetime, from here, the town would have lain below them like a starry sky. Now, as the bridge gave gently on its chains in the wind that swept along the gorge, there was only a darkling sense of loneliness and height. Ralph showed a pass to a cloaked shadow. It was like a transit of the Styx.

The road climbed again, through old dark beechwoods. Ralph said out of a long silence, with a quiet and somehow touching simplicity, “What a way to have met.”

Threading the long vault of black trees under a slaty glimmer of sky, Laurie felt an almost astral detachment. “Yes,” he said, “it was strange. It was like having been lost in a surrealist picture, eyes with iron spikes growing out of them, and dead horses in Paris hats. All done very bright and sharp and looking almost solid. Then something real appears, and it all peels off like wet paper.”

Ralph seemed to pause over this for some minutes. “Did it really seem as unlikely to you as that?”

“It does now.” He was in a vivid, dreamlike stage of fatigue.

Ralph flipped a cigarette-case onto the seat between them. “Light one for me too, will you?”

Laurie lit two together as he had seen other people do sometimes. When Ralph took it without thanking him it didn’t seem brusque, but as if they had been doing this for years.

“In some ways,” Ralph said, “it was like meeting during an action. You come out knowing each other a lot too well to begin at the beginning.” He paused to settle his cigarette. “And yet, not well enough.”

Laurie said sleepily, “So one has to go back or go on.”

“I’m not good on reversing.”

As if to give an unmeant point to his words, they had come to a steep downgrade for which he had to put the car in second. Laurie felt the effort being made to conceal effort, and guessed, now, that he had not been driving again for long and that the gear-lever still hurt his hand. It occurred to Laurie that a large number of drivers in this situation would have let themselves be tempted to go down on the footbrake; but Ralph had always hated anything sloppy.

He said nothing more till he had changed up again, then, as if continuing a quite different conversation: “I think what gets me down most about Sandy is his stupidity. He’s lived a year with Alec and still hasn’t cottoned on to his—his fanatical claustrophobia. Anyone who tries to put a screw on Alec is playing about with something dangerous. I don’t know how far Alec realizes that himself.” He stopped talking while he crossed a main road and added, “Some things about him don’t alter, much as he’s changed.”

The bitterness he had kept out of his voice seemed to thread itself under Laurie’s skin. Tentatively he said, “He seemed to be worried about something you thought he’d done and he thought he hadn’t. I’m afraid I was rather drunk at the time; I don’t think he said what it was.”

“He knows what he’s done. It’s not worth talking about.” One should have remembered, Laurie thought, that knack of formidable silence. There must however have been a difference of some kind, or Laurie certainly wouldn’t have felt that it devolved upon him to break it. He said, “This will have taught Sandy a lesson, anyway.”

As if nothing had happened Ralph said, “That’s what I thought the first time. Oh, yes, and he gave Alec his solemn word of honor not to do it again.”

“What did he do then?”

“Phenacetin, or veganin, or something like that. About half the fatal dose. Alec didn’t know that, of course. He was all alone that time, laboring away with emetics and things and nearly going mental. He goes through torments of remorse afterwards. Alec, I mean; not Sandy, of course.”

“You know, anyone could have fainted in that bath and been drowned.”

“I think that started to occur to him when he heard me passing the door. It was lucky I did—I suppose. I really don’t think one should be expected to meet his friends; if Alec wants to put up with them himself, it’s his business. I never go there now without wondering whether they’ll start turning up in drag.”

“In what?” asked Laurie curiously.

He felt that in the near-darkness Ralph turned his head with an almost startled look; he repeated himself, however, without comment.

“Yes, I heard you before, but what does it mean?”

Ralph said, in a slight clear voice which seemed surrounded by a wide margin of stillness, “Don’t you know what it means?”

With one of those little jets of irritability which weariness releases, Laurie said, “If I did I wouldn’t ask you.”

“It means dressed as women.” They had come out of the trees upon a straight open stretch between wire fences. Laurie could see easily, with eyes accommodated now to the night, Ralph’s face looking ahead with an intent frown at the pale stream of road being swallowed by the car. “Spuddy.”

“Yes?”

“What
do
you know?”

“I know about myself.”

“Well?” Laurie didn’t answer at once, not from reluctance but because he was tired and it took time to think. Ralph said, deliberately, “If you know about yourself, presumably you know about at least one other person.”

“There was a man at Oxford. It was all rather silly. He looked a bit like one of the less forceful portraits of Byron. It wasn’t so much he himself who attracted me, though up to a point he did. There are always certain people at Oxford who seem to hold a key. I didn’t know what I expected he’d let me into, Newstead Abbey by moonlight or something. He kept telling me I was queer, and I’d never heard it called that before and didn’t like it. The word, I mean. Shutting you away, somehow; roping you off with a lot of people you don’t feel much in common with, half of whom hate the other half anyway, and just keep together so that they can lean up against each other for support. I don’t think I’ve ever tried to put all this into words before; am I talking nonsense?”

With smothered violence Ralph said, “Christ Almighty, no.”

“I started to meet his friends. I’d imagined a lot of rather exquisite people it would be hard work getting to know; but they were all horribly eager, and it wasn’t because they liked me really, I could tell that. It was more like—have you read a story by Wells called
The Country of the Blind
?”

“Spuddy, there always was something a bit terrifying about you. Well, don’t stop, go on.”

“That’s all. He asked me to a party and I ran away in the middle, and he took it rather personally, so that was that.”

“That was that for how long?”

“Well, it was at the end of the summer term, and the war started in the vac.”

“Some types seem to have found the war their great opportunity.”

“It depends what you’re looking for, I suppose. Anyway, learning to soldier was a bit distracting.”

Ralph didn’t speak for what seemed like some minutes. Then he said, “That’ll teach you to chuck the O.T.C.,” in an almost absent voice, as though he were making conversation. After another silent interval he asked, “What about women?”

Although women represented just then an absolute nullity in Laurie’s emotions, the question itself, the lack of
empressement
in asking it, gave him a free and stimulated feeling; it was a relief from the bonded circle at the party, from the bars at the window and the gate on the stairs. “One,” he said.

“No good?”

“Well … I didn’t like her much as a human being.”

“D’you need to?”

“Yes, I think I do.”

“That complicates it a bit.”

Laurie began to say, “Yes, because one can hardly …” but Ralph looked too preoccupied and remote, as if a dangerous bit of road was coming. By the time he knew that it wasn’t, he too was given up to his own thoughts, which, after he had rehearsed so much of his history, were inevitably of Andrew. Here if anywhere, he thought, was someone to whom he could release the pressure of so much uncommunicated experience, who would inevitably understand. He remembered how after Charles’s party, leaning out of his window long into the night, he had thought of Ralph; though it was already years since their brief meeting, the thought had supported him in his isolation. Now there seemed nothing that could not be told; yet something silenced him. It was Andrew’s secret too. Besides, it was holy ground: he was honest enough to examine this simplicity, weigh it, and decide not to abandon it. The result was one of those compromises to which people in such a case will sometimes resort.

“When I say there was nothing after I joined the army”—he could feel Ralph almost start; he must have been miles away—“there was a time when I felt very much drawn to someone; but it was impossible from the first.”

“In what way impossible?” Ralph had turned the car onto a bad secondary road. He seemed intent on the driving and sounded a little curt.

“He told me, or as good as told me, without knowing it, that he’d no time for that sort of thing. It was obvious without telling, in any case.”

“So you let it alone?”

“Yes.”

Ralph seemed to come out of himself. With a sudden kindness he said, “It can be hell while it lasts, though, can’t it?”

Laurie didn’t answer; the assumption of transience hurt him though it was he who had implied it.

Ralph drove on in silence for a few minutes. Then, with what Laurie could feel beforehand as a decision, he said abruptly, “I was caught up once in something like that.”

“Yes?” said Laurie, after waiting some time in vain.

“He was a sub of mine. If he’d been a matelot it would have been all right; I could have put it out of my mind because I’d have bloody well had to. But he was round my neck all day. He wanted to learn everything I knew except what I wanted to teach him. Finally it settled itself in the way which, for some reason, I’d been afraid of almost from the start.”

Laurie, his mind still on his own troubles, said, “He guessed?”

“No. He was killed.”

“Oh!” said Laurie involuntarily. Ralph looked at him for a moment, then back to the road again.

“It happened just when the situation was becoming absolutely impossible. The ship was too small, we lived in each other’s pockets; I got to know his girl friend nearly as well as I knew him. Charming manners; he never gave you any excuse to brush him off. He was a highly efficient officer, he seemed to like me, he was dead keen on the ship. I tried to get him promoted away, but he was too young. I didn’t see how I was ever going to get rid of him, unless I told him why. Something had to happen. When it did, it seemed obvious that I must have made it happen—I feel it still, sometimes.”

“Yes, of course. One would know it was impossible and feel it just the same.”

“That’s a thing you never know when you’re commanding. You’ve had a hand in everything.” He laughed quickly and added, “I grew the beard round about then.”

“Some things can’t be thought about. The more you try to be honest with them, the more they lie to you. I’m only beginning to know that.”

“You know a hell of a lot, don’t you, Spud; more than you let on.”

Laurie attempted no reply. He felt haunted by untold parts of the tale, which came to him like certainties.

“Don’t make too much of it,” said Ralph, watching the road. “Believe me, it wasn’t a romantic story.”

“I know. If it had been it would have been easier, in a way.”

“Yes. That’s an odd thing for someone like you to see.”

The next thing Laurie was aware of was the squeak of the brakes.

“Sorry I can’t take you in, Spud. It’s all red tape, there’s nothing here really that wouldn’t bore German Intelligence into a coma. I’ll be as quick as I can.”