The Charioteer (26 page)

There was nothing to do about it. He couldn’t pretend to sleep, for Andrew must have heard him talking to Ralph just now; it would seem like a slap in the face. He couldn’t do anything, except behave as if nothing were the matter. The trolley rattled up.

“Hello, Andrew.”

“Hello, Laurie. Did we walk too far today?”

“Of course not.” He held out his mug. “Thanks.”

“I think we did. Have you had your A.P.C.?”

“Yes, thanks. I’m going to sleep now.” But Andrew, who had never had a dismissal from him before, didn’t recognize one when he heard it.

“There’s quite a party going on in our hut tonight. You know Richard on Ward A? He’s just got engaged.” He was speaking softly, not to disturb the other patients. Something like this happened nearly every night. No doubt it looked very intimate. Andrew had never had a moment’s concern about it. That everyone knew they were friends was a thing he took for granted.

“Good show.” But he said it too warmly, torn between the longing for Andrew to go and the dread of showing it.

“Yes, it is; you see when the war started he wouldn’t ask her, he didn’t think it was fair. But she kept on writing, and finally, the other day—”

“Good for her,” said Laurie, cutting him off short. Where did he think he was, exposing this naked happiness and trust? It was time he learned to be decent.

Andrew’s face changed. One day Laurie had been swishing a stick about, and caught his dog a cracking blow by accident; he had looked incredulous and bewildered, just like this.

Suddenly Laurie thought, Oh, damn the lot of them. He smiled up at Andrew and said, “Tell me all about it in the kitchen.”

“No, don’t get up tonight, you’re tired.”

“Oh, wrap it up. Of course I’m coming.”

Later, when he had seen Andrew go out from the sluice to the kitchen, he lay looking at the dim face of the clock on the wall. Five minutes, he thought. He had always waited for five minutes, not to make it obvious. He wondered how many people, for how long, had been having a quiet laugh about it

Five minutes passed. He got out of bed, and put on his slippers; they felt odd and lopsided nowadays, after the boot. He reached for his dressing-gown and his stick. A mattress creaked as someone turned over; the twenty yards between his bed and the door seemed suddenly very long. He would have liked to cover them with a little more speed or a little more grace. No, he thought, it was really too naïve to get so upset about it; one was supposed to carry off this kind of thing with a flick of the wrist and a light laugh which would tell the world one hadn’t been trying. Playing at hearties with all these dreary common people; my dear, I’m exhausted, I couldn’t have been more bored.

Suddenly, as if the memory had been kept in storage especially for this, he saw with extraordinary vividness Ralph’s face against the background of the dismantled study. Ralph had been nineteen. And here was a grown man in wartime making such heavy weather of so little.

Earlier today, during one of the current invasion rumors, Laurie had pictured an English Thermopylae behind the Home Guard roadblocks; amid the last-ditch grimness of this vision there had intruded a vague exhilaration, and he realized that he had imagined Ralph beside him. So, but much more so, it was now, and with this sudden comfort he found he had got to the door, and was outside in the shelter of the corridor.

He would have been glad of a few minutes’ pause before going on. But the sound of his step was too individual; already Andrew would have recognized it.

“R
IGHT, THEN, ABOUT FIVE-FIFTEEN
tomorrow. Don’t wait about in the street bitching up the knee before we start. Sit in the Out-Patient Department and I’ll come for you there.”

Laurie began to say, “Do you know where it is?” but remembered in time that Ralph must know the hospital very well. “I’ll do that,” he said.

“Was this all right, my ringing up again?”

“Yes, Sister’s off duty.”

“The other men in the ward don’t think anything, I suppose?”

“Life’s too short to spend flapping about that sort of thing. I shan’t be here much longer, anyway.”

“What? Sorry, what was that?”

“I said they’ll be discharging me, anyway, as soon as this electrical treatment’s finished.”

“Oh, yes. Of course. How long’s that going to be?”

“Discipline would go to pieces if they told us things like that.”

It was much colder this evening; but when he got back to bed, he found someone had put a hot-water bottle in it.

“Did you get this, Reg?”

“Nurse Adrian done it.” Busily intent on tidying his locker, Reg added, “I reckon that girl’s going to miss you, when you go.”

He had never referred, even obliquely, to last Friday’s conversation; but life had become a tight-rope walk for both of them. Laurie would have given anything to be able to repay Reg’s overture with some grateful confidence; Reg himself would have given anything to recall it. Laurie guessed that this forced remark about Nurse Adrian was an invitation to pretend nothing had happened. It was, indeed, the only tolerable solution; he accepted it with relief. “I’m more likely to do the missing. Rodgers must be blind, saying she’s got no sex appeal.”

Reg accepted the
modus vivendi
with transparent thankfulness. He would never, Laurie knew, have ventured so far into the open if the thing hadn’t already been openly discussed.

That day the first breath of winter had reached the shrinking flesh of a continent at war. It had a message for Laurie as well as for the rest. He still hadn’t a greatcoat; Dunkirk had been a summer disaster. For the first time that day, walking with Andrew, he had found he couldn’t move fast enough to keep warm. Walking patients in the square had thrown blankets or dressing-gowns over their shoulders, or a civilian coat lent by one of the c.o.s; but to go outside the gates one must be properly dressed. He had got a cramp in his knee almost at once, and they had had to turn back, more than half an hour before the usual time.

Andrew said, “There’s a stove in our hut. This time of day there’s hardly anyone there.”

“Better not. It might make trouble.”

“Well, listen, I know what we can do another time. I’ve got an old carriage-rug from home on my bed, it’s enormous. I’ll bring that, and we can take it to that dip in the beechwood, and roll ourselves up in it.”

Like an actor who dries up on the crucial cue for which the scene is waiting, Laurie could think of absolutely nothing to say. He ordered and implored himself; he could hear, as exactly as the click of a time-fuse, the moment when the pause became remarkable. The impulse to look up was like the impulse people feel to throw themselves off towers, or under trains. He looked up. Andrew was scarlet to the roots of his hair. It was all up, thought Laurie, as suddenly and simply as this, only through a moment’s lack of resource. Then he realized that Andrew’s embarrassment was acutely social, and that he hadn’t had time yet to see beyond it.

“You must think,” Laurie managed, “that I’ve a horrible mind. The trouble is, I’ve got a pretty good idea what the Staff Sergeant’s is like.”

“Yes,” said Andrew. He swallowed. “Lucky you thought. Sorry.”

“That’s the army for you.”

“I shouldn’t really have been as dumb as that, because a boy at my school was actually expelled for it, though most of us didn’t know till afterwards.”

In spite of himself Laurie had to ask, “What was he like?”

“Not very nice. He used to bully the little boys, and terrify them into doing what he wanted.”

“No; he doesn’t sound very nice at all.”

Andrew said, “Well, if we give it a bit of thought there must be somewhere to go. Never mind, it will probably be much warmer tomorrow.”

“Yes. I’m afraid I shan’t be here, though.”

“Of course. I was forgetting. Will you be back on the six-thirty bus?”

“No, not this time. I’ve got a pass.” He said quickly, “God, it’s freezing, isn’t it? We’ll have to get in. See you tonight.” As he limped to the gate he could feel Andrew looking after him, but it was useless to turn back.

Later that evening, it occurred to him that it would be possible to represent Ralph as an object of pity, in a way which would reconcile Andrew at once to the whole situation. Laurie glanced at the idea and at once found it revolting. Since this had been the only thing left to say on the subject, he gave up the attempt to say anything. They tried, in this way and that, to make signals of confidence in each other across the No Man’s Land which both avoided.

It was shortly after this that Ralph had telephoned. When Laurie went back to bed, he could tell by Reg’s breathing that he wasn’t asleep; but neither he, nor anyone else of those who might be awake and watching, made a sound.

Miss Haliburton at the hospital remembered him at once. When she produced from some cache or other a two-months dachshund puppy and let him nurse it, he knew that she had favorites. He usually got on with strong-minded old maids, and it was one of his wry private jokes that they so unawarely waived their misanthropy on his behalf. He found himself confiding not only the life-history of his elderly airedale at home, but how the knee had been behaving and what brought on the pain. She put on a crepe bandage to keep it warm; on the way he had bought a pullover to wear under his uniform, and began to feel under a slightly less medieval servitude to winter. When she had done with him, he went down to wait for Ralph.

The out-patient departments of general hospitals do not conduce to a thoughtless optimism. Beside him a thin, overworked woman described to a very old one the three operations that hadn’t cured her trouble; a mentally defective girl appeared, six months pregnant; male syphilitics, with an air of indescribable seediness, were queuing for treatment; there was another queue of skin cases, with dirty bandages and patches of gentian-violet paint. The smell of antiseptics, sick bodies, and old clothes pervaded everything. Amid all this Laurie sat and wondered, with rapidly decreasing confidence in each successive answer, what he was going to do with his life. The surrounding climate of shabbiness, dejection, and failure seemed to subdue all possible futures to itself. It was in the midst of such thoughts that he saw Ralph walk briskly in at the street door.

The contrast was dazzling. His energy and precision stood out among the sick, worried people, slumped on the benches waiting their turn, as bright steel stands out in a heap of scrap iron. His well-fitting, well-pressed uniform would have shone against the dingy clothing, even without the gold on the sleeves. The cleanness of the hospital staff was functional, a reminder of the human ills against which it was directed; Ralph’s was personal and aristocratic. In spite of the glove he seemed a foreign visitor here; and as if to emphasize this he was carrying, for show, the other glove of the pair. Watching him come nearer, Laurie realized what a confused memory of the other night he had brought away, for he had thought of Ralph as looking quite five years older than this. Even from across the hall, you could see that his eyes were blue. He raked the benches swiftly and systematically, saw Laurie, smiled, and came forward. The devitalized figures in the gangway seemed to melt out of his path.

“Hello, Spud, am I late, have you been browned off waiting here?”

As they left, nearly all the faces at that end of the hall turned to gaze after them. The looks were not of the kind that Laurie had come to fear just lately. He could feel a wistful envy in them. He had been one of them all with his stick and his white card, and now in a moment he had become a person while they were cases still. Watching these young men meet as if in a street or a hotel, they were downcast or cheered according to their natures by the invasion of life, by Ralph’s happiness and the sudden lightening of Laurie’s anxious face.

“Too early for a drink,” Ralph said. “How about a drive before it gets dark?”

The sun was still up, warm and clear. Ralph headed for the hills, not talking much. Presently they came out at a famous view-spot; parked in it was a closed saloon car with people sitting inside reading magazines. They both laughed. Ralph said, “Can you put up with four counties instead of five?”

Behind them, when he stopped, the crown of the hill rose from a tonsure of trees; below were the patched colors of stubble and roots and grape-purple plowland, streams picked out with thorn and willow, a puff of wool from a toy train, a silver band of Severn water on the horizon. It was a sight, in the autumn of 1940, to evoke special emotions. They were almost silent for some minutes, except perfunctorily to point out some landmark. Laurie had a feeling that the conversation had no need to be filled in with words at every stage.

“I always find,” said Ralph presently, “that the further I go away, the more patriotic I get. Believe it or not, in Adelaide once I had quite a heated argument with some local who spoke lightly of the English public-school system.” He blew a puff of smoke into the soft West-country air and added, “I’m not used to doing such a long stretch of home and beauty.”

Laurie said, “I don’t blame you.”

Ralph looked around at him for a moment, then returned to his cigarette. Suddenly he said, “For God’s sake, you’re not trying to fix me up with a grievance against society, are you? There wouldn’t be the least justification for it. All that gives me a pain in the neck.” The expression he used was a good deal coarser.

“I should think there’d be plenty of justification.”

“Now, Spud, come. You ought to know better than that by this time, with a couple of stripes up too. If you’re talking about school, as I suppose you are, I can see of course that you had it all rather sprung on you at the time.” He turned to flick his ash out of the car. “But don’t tell me it never occurred to you later, when you were a prefect yourself for instance, that people who abuse a position of trust have to be got rid of. At least, I should hope it did.”

He’s lecturing me, Laurie thought; first with surprise, then in some amusement, till without warning he found himself almost unbearably touched and sad. Collecting himself, he said, “I hardly knew enough to make snap judgments like that, did I?”