The Charioteer (27 page)

A sheet of cirrus cloud was beginning to be flecked on its underside with crimson; the horizon was darkening to blue. Looking away at it, Ralph said, “You must have given me the benefit of every conceivable doubt.”

“Well, of course. I had every reason to.”

“Nice of you,” said Ralph briskly, “but even so it doesn’t add up.” His head, against the flamboyant sky, looked remote and severe. “I suppose you could make out some sort of case for me as an individual. But for a pillar of the institution, the only possible justification was never to get found out. I deserved the sack for my judgment of character if for nothing else.” He examined some afterthought here, and laughed shortly.

“It was a good job for Hazell his people took him away.”

“I’m sure he’d agree with you. He’s in Hollywood now, didn’t you know?”

“Good God, is he? Who with?”

“Really, Spud! I didn’t think you had that much bitchery in you. Of course you’re perfectly right.” He related Hazell’s success story.

In seven years, thought Laurie, every cell in one’s body has been replaced, even our memories live in a new brain. That is not the face I saw, and these are not the eyes I saw with. Even our selves are not the same, but only a consequence of the selves we had then. Yet I was there and I am here; and this man, who is sometimes what I remember and sometimes a stranger I met at a party the other day, is also to himself the I who was there: his mind in its different skull has travelled back to a place his living feet never visited; and the pain he felt then he can feel again.

“What is it, Spud?” said Ralph softly.

Laurie remembered the voice from the other day, it was charming and intimate and too experienced and left you in doubt. “I was just thinking about Hazell, and all that.”

“Oh, Hazell,” said Ralph slowly. That he should have read the words as a question embarrassed Laurie greatly. No one could be expected to talk of such things except to strangers. Strangers are a distorting mirror, and hold things off. But Ralph spoke first, before he could change the subject.

“Hazell was generally underrated, you know. He was really rather a clever little boy. All that Dostoievsky was largely put on: it worked quite well.”

“He used to get away with murder.” One of Ralph’s burnt-straw-colored eyebrows shot up intimidatingly into the peak of his cap. But ancient resentment had suddenly revived, and Laurie faced it out.

Ignoring it, Ralph went on, “Of course, if you took him up at all and seemed sympathetic, he used to play down the idiocy and let his intelligence be glimpsed; not obviously, just so that one felt he’d been given a bit of confidence. Perhaps it really was that, partly. It can’t have been quite as calculated as it seems to look back on, I realize that.”

“He was easily scared,” said Laurie, trying to sound detached.

“The thing was, there was no doubt about him. Obviously, most people at school who get caught up in it are either going through a phase, or merely in the position of cattle who if you don’t give them salt will lick it off the ground. I gave a lot of thought to this in my last year; there hadn’t been so much time when I was working for Cambridge. It wasn’t everybody one felt justified in taking a chance with. Side-tracking them, or something, perhaps; one couldn’t know. I used to look round, and try to decide whether there was anyone I could feel as sure about as I did about myself.”

The sky was now a great sheet of rose fire, rippled like ebb-tide sands. It would be gone in a matter of minutes; already a long arm of shadow, cast by something on the horizon, was stealing across.

Ralph broke off his thoughts with a visible jerk of impatience, and threw the stub of his cigarette away. Silently Laurie gave him another. Ralph said, “Did it ever strike you about Hazell, at the time?”

“No. I just thought he was a bit bats, I suppose.”

“He hated you,” said Ralph in a light, cool voice. “Didn’t you know why?”

Odd, thought Laurie, that whatever one’s contempt for the hater this news is never quite without its sting. “I had awfully little to do with him. Didn’t he ever say?”

“I didn’t ask him,” said Ralph shortly.

“Nobody could imagine afterwards,” Laurie ventured presently, “how you managed to meet without getting caught.”

“In the prop room mostly. That’s why the stage has the most elaborate lighting panel for its size in the British Isles. It was the only thing I knew something about that would get me inside the place. He leaned toward the Old Vic in those days; he used to hint sometimes that I’d saved his genius from being pushed over the thin line into madness. Can you imagine me falling for that?”

Yes, thought Laurie; but he supposed this was the wrong answer.

“I was a fool whichever way you look at it. I must have known really, of course; he was all a mess from cellar to attic. His sexual tendencies were just a minor symptom. He didn’t like reality, and he didn’t like doing anything for himself that he could get done for him. He had a great talent for being appreciative, of course. Really I think I fell for the corniest gag of the lot, the great
esprit-de-corps
racket. Esprit de corpse, Spud. Every time they try to slip it over on you, just say to yourself, ‘The lower they go, the tighter they hang together.’ ”

“The trouble is, how else are you to meet people you’re sure about, if it’s only to talk to? After all, it’s the way you and I met again.”

“I don’t forget that, Spud, believe me. No, of course we all have to use the network sometime. Don’t let it use you, that’s all. Ours isn’t a horizontal society, it’s a vertical one. Plato, Michelangelo, Sappho, Marlowe; Shakespeare, Leonardo, and Socrates if you count the bisexuals—we can all quote the upper crust. But at the bottom—Spud, believe me, there isn’t any bottom. Never forget it. You’ve no conception, you haven’t a clue, how far down it goes.”

Laurie almost said that he had picked up one or two clues at the party; but something in Ralph’s face told him he would be making a fool of himself, so he kept his mouth shut. Presently he said, “Don’t you think it’s mostly a matter of how sorry for themselves people are? I mean, whether one wants to be let off everything like a sick child, or—well, one could feel that one owes the race something, rather than the other way. It seems more logical.”

“Ah. I might have guessed I’ve been saving this for the last person who’d need it.”

“God, no,” said Laurie. “You’re wrong there.” Ralph made a gentle interrogative noise. “Oh, I don’t know. You get a bit tied up, making your own rules and trying to piece it all together.”

“Yes, I know.” The sky was fading, and the sun going down into a belt of mist. In the valley it was dark already, but up here a thin copper sunlight fell flat on their faces still. “There it is, Spud. When all’s said and done, the best way to be independent is to have all you need at home.”

Laurie looked away. He had wondered when Ralph was going to mention Bunny. Not to have done so would have seemed unfriendly; yet now it had happened Laurie found that he had no real wish to pursue the subject. He said, “Yes, I suppose it is,” but he couldn’t put as much feeling into it as he would have liked, and realized his inadequacy when Ralph failed to follow it up. He said, “You never finished telling me about Hazell.”

As if he had introduced some irrelevant new subject, Ralph looked vague and drew his brows together. “There isn’t much more to tell. What did you want to know?”

Thus confronted with the unspoken question in his mind, Laurie said at once, “Well, nothing specially.”

“Unfair to Spud,” said Ralph, suddenly laughing. “Sorry.” Snapping open his case he said, “Have one of mine,” and lit two. With an obscure pleasure, Laurie perceived that this wasn’t one of the things in which practice had made him perfect. “I never told you how it ended, did I?”

“Well, no one in their right mind would have thought of asking.”

“Why not? Ancient history. Hazell and I fell out on a matter of discipline in the end. By the way, when you said just now that he used to get away with murder, were you in point of fact referring to me?”

“No,” said Laurie, losing his nerve. “Of course not.”

“Well, he was a responsibility in any House, even Jeepers had the wit to see that. I believe he tried to get rid of him several times, but the Head took the view that he was a plow the School had put its hand to. Anyway, there he was, and one had to use a bit of discretion. Then this began, and at first one seemed to be helping him find his feet and really making something of him. I suppose some of that might even have been genuine. Quite soon he began to be tiresome in various ways, trying to take advantage. I remember I had a long talk with him, explaining in words of one syllable why that would be bad for both of us. When that got nowhere, I told him that the next time he came up to me for a beating, that would be what he’d get. He could see I meant it. I was surprised when he turned up a couple of days later. I thought he was calling my bluff. Perhaps that’s what he thought himself. I don’t know. Anyway he’d left me no choice. I hated the whole business, I don’t know when I’ve hated anything more, so I got down to it without wasting time. And afterwards I was just about to say, ‘Well, that’s that, don’t let it happen again and now let’s forget about it.’ And then I realized.”

Laurie waited and then said, “He couldn’t take it, you mean?”

“Well, no. Just the opposite. If you don’t know it doesn’t matter.”

“Oh,” said Laurie. He thought how lightly he would have read all this, stripped of its human reality, in a psychological handbook.

“I think I just stood there and looked at him. Of course one sees if he was like that he couldn’t help himself, poor swine. It wasn’t the kind of thing I’d ever expected to find myself mixed up in, that’s all. I’d have liked to see him dead, so long as I hadn’t got to touch him. I suppose he saw it. It may be he went to Jeepers out of revenge, but I don’t think so. I think he was scared, and it made him a bit hysterical. He told it reversing the point of the final episode, if you see what I mean. I didn’t see very much future in arguing about it.”

“God, how little we all knew. How awful for you.”

“For him too,” said Ralph, “I suppose.” For a minute or two he didn’t speak, but tapped with his fingers on the top of the car door, a broken rhythm like Morse. “The thing is, sooner or later one has to think it out, one can’t just leave it there. I realized afterwards, some time afterwards, a perfectly normal person wouldn’t have been so angry. He was sick, after all. But that, really, was it. That was what I had against him. I’d been trying to work up what I was into a kind of religion. I thought I could make out that way. He made me see it as just a part of what
he
was.” His hand moved absently over the dashboard; suddenly the narrowed pencil of the masked headlamps shone out into the empty air of the valley, tracing paths of pale vapor in which midges danced like sparks. He swore under his breath and switched them off.

“Well, we have to face that sooner or later, of course.” Now that the sudden light had gone it could be felt that the neutrality of twilight was over; it was almost dark. There was a moment of extreme quiet in which the distant shunting of a train, a car on the road behind them, the chirr of a night bird, were like differently colored silences. Ralph said, with a basic simplicity, “You see, Spud, don’t you? That was why.”

“Yes,” said Laurie, “of course I see.” He was too much moved to narrow his thoughts down to any one point of the story. He strained for better, more expressive words, which would not come. It was at this moment that the approaching car turned in and parked beside them. Inside it girls’ voices were already giving provocative twitters of protest; whispers of giggling reproof pointed out that strangers were present. Ralph switched on the engine and, with carefully managed ease, put in the gear.

They drove for some time in silence. Soon they got down into traffic again; and it was then that he became aware of Ralph’s increasing irritability. The small misdoings of other drivers seemed to infuriate him; after keeping up for some miles a profane running commentary, he started to address the offenders direct. Laurie put it down to the gears at first, till it occurred to him that Ralph hadn’t had a drink yet this evening. He sat quiet, to avoid attracting the lightning, till a youth on a bicycle wobbled across in front of the car. Ralph pulled up and stayed to deliver a reprimand. For a moment it was funny to see the youth clinging paralyzed to the hedge like a monkey fascinated by a python; but when it was over he could see that Ralph was depressed and angry with himself, so at the next pub they passed he said, “What about stopping for a quick one?”

“No,” said Ralph shortly. “Won’t be time.” He accelerated. About a quarter of a mile on, he said quite pleasantly, “If we’re too late, everything fit to eat will be off.”

In one of their silent pauses Laurie found himself wishing it were possible, without telling Andrew too much, to get a sensible idea of Ralph into his head. It was the first time he had ever thought of Andrew in terms of criticism, even such gentle criticism as this.

“Usually the food’s a bit less filthy here than anywhere.” The hotel Ralph stopped at was Edwardian, shabby, clean, and restful. To Laurie’s relief, after the third double Ralph made a move to the dining room. By that time he had started to talk again.

“I must say, Spud, you’re remarkably well balanced for the offspring of divorce. Quite often being queer is the least of it.”

“Well, my mother’s pretty well balanced,” Laurie began. Then it all came back to him. Ralph looked at his face and said gently, “Come on, Spud.” With an awkwardness gradually superseded by relief, Laurie brought it out.

Ralph didn’t urge him to see the best in Mr. Straike. He sounded, Ralph said, a bloody-minded old so-and-so. Rather like the first captain he had served under, he added almost as an afterthought. He was an old so-and-so if you like; if he had ever come down off the bridge in a gale someone would undoubtedly have tipped him overboard. But one trip he had taken his old woman along, and she seemed to think he was God’s gift, it oozed out all over her. You couldn’t account for women.