The Charioteer (31 page)

“We didn’t have a scout troop actually,” he said. “But I think it’s quite good. It keeps boys off the streets. Did you ever join one?”

Oh, God, he thought, that was a bit much. He saw Sandy try to catch Alec’s eye and Alec pretend not to notice; he saw Ralph frowning in forced concentration as if he knew something ought to be dealt with. He looked at Bunny again.

“I should think I did,” said Bunny genially. “I was prepared every minute, but it turned out a terrible flop.”

He spoke as if he had missed the point; but Laurie had seen his face at the moment of impact. While Alec and Sandy hurried to pad the conversation with gossip, Laurie thought: He took that because he couldn’t think of a comeback he felt would be smart enough. That’s what he wants more than anything; cleverness, making things go his way. And he’s just clever enough to suspect sometimes that he’s fundamentally stupid, and it limits even his malice. That must be most frustrating. I suppose Ralph sees the best of him when they’re alone.

It was at this point that the air-raid sirens went.

There were the usual sounds of weary and resigned irritation. Bunny went to the window to fix a dubious bit of blackout; a warden shouted at him from the street for showing a light; there was some moving about in search of a drawing-pin. Laurie bumped the cocktail cabinet and slopped over the cut-glass water-jug, and returned to mop it up with his handkerchief. As he was about to put this back in his pocket something arrested him; he brought it out again and sniffed it Bunny was at the window, and didn’t see.

Ralph heaved on his chair-arms, and got to his feet. “Well, Spud,” he said, “time we were getting you home.”

Bunny came over. In his gentlest voice he said, “Ralph, my dear, really and truly I
don’t
think you ought to drive.”

“Now look,” said Ralph, “I’ve only—” He frowned again, as if he were trying to remember something.

“Yes, we know all about that.” Bunny’s cozy voice seemed addressed to an engagingly naughty child. “Just you take a little nap till I get home. I’ll see after Laurie.”

Laurie said to Ralph, “It’s all right. Don’t worry.” Ralph took hold of the back of the chair to steady himself, and stared at him with his eyes narrowed, as if he were a bright light. Laurie went up to him. “I enjoyed this evening. Thanks for everything.” It didn’t matter any longer what Bunny thought.

“It’s a pleasure, Spud, any time,” said Ralph, speaking carefully and rather pompously. “Bunny’s right, you know. Bad show, I’m sorry. Comes of mixing them. I shouldn’t have had that rum upstairs.”

“You didn’t have any rum,” Laurie said. He didn’t care whether Bunny heard him or not.

“That’s what I thought too,” said Ralph, nodding solemnly. “Only goes to show.” He sat down again; this time he looked as if he wouldn’t get up so easily. Just then the guns began, crackling and pattering at the other end of the town. Laurie looked around at Bunny. Evidently it would be necessary to speak to him sooner or later.

“You’d better forget about driving me back. You’ll have to get back to the Station, won’t you?”

“Oh, no,” said Bunny soothingly. “That’s all right, I’m not on duty.”

“Won’t you want to run Ralph over?”

“Ralph?” Bunny smiled as if something whimsical had been said. “He’s only on a course. He isn’t responsible for anything.”

Laurie’s hand clenched itself in his pocket; his fingers met in the wet twist of handkerchief he had used to mop the cocktail shelf. Ralph’s eyelids were dropping, he was just in the pose for which the chair had been designed. Laurie said to Alec, “Will you be here?”

“We’re on casualty tonight. We ought to be on our way now. I’m sorry.” His eyes met Laurie’s in a look of open understanding. “I shouldn’t worry, it can’t be helped, you know. Well, thanks for the drink, Bunny. Good night.”

Laurie wondered, as the door shut on them, what their first words would be when they were alone. There was a thump; the bombs had started. He walked back to Ralph’s chair.

“I’m not going,” he said. “Not till this is over.”

“Push off, Spud,” said Ralph drowsily. “I’m going to sleep.” He shut his eyes again.

Laurie walked around him. He wasn’t going to speak to Bunny across him as if he didn’t count. “We can’t,” he said evenly, “just leave him here. What if the house gets a stick of incendiaries?”

Bunny spread his hands in a vaguely mystic gesture, committing them all to the will of Allah.

Laurie breathed sharply through his nose.
“Christ
—”

He turned at a sound behind him. Ralph had picked himself up from the chair. He stood with his feet apart and his hands dug in his pockets, swaying slightly as if he were giving with a moving deck.

“What in hell’s all this nonsense about? Stop flapping, Spud, and don’t be such a bloody nuisance.”

“All right.” He could feel Bunny watching at his elbow. “Try and stay awake till you see how it goes.”

“See how what goes? What’s eating you, for God’s sake?”

“There’s a raid on.” As he spoke he heard a bracket of bombs go down; it was like heavy feet running a step or two.

“All right, Spud, all right.” He stood there frowning, as if the raid were an obstruction which Laurie had called into being. Suddenly he narrowed his eyes tightly; something came into them, it seemed from an indestructible strong-point far behind. “Look after yourself. I’ll be ringing you. God bless.”

“God bless,” said Laurie, meaning it. The last thing he saw of the room was Ralph settling back in the chair again. As he went out, he saw Bunny go back and take the lighted cigarette out of Ralph’s hand. He’s thinking of his nice carpet, Laurie thought.

They went down without speaking. Laurie heard the dot-and-carry sound of his own feet on the stair-treads, and imagined Bunny in the hall below, hidden by the darkness, standing and listening to it.

Outside in the street Bunny said, “We’ll have to use old Ralph’s car, I’ve lent someone mine this evening.”

They got into the car, which Bunny started with a patronizing kind of carelessness. The guns were still going and a lot of searchlights were out; the streets were almost empty, till they came to one where a house lay half across the road with a rescue squad working, and they had to go another way.

Laurie thought: Andrew wouldn’t judge too quickly. Andrew would say you should get free of yourself and try to understand. For example: Bunny had gone to a good deal of trouble, which only made sense if one assumed that he was much fonder of Ralph than he seemed. It was true that his methods had not been aristocratic; but he had probably had a very unhappy childhood, or something. Very likely he tormented himself as much as Sandy did, but hid it better.

A bomb came down, not very near, somewhere behind them. Laurie thought of Ralph asleep in the deep tilted chair and wondered if it had been close enough to rouse him: but this did not further the effort to understand Bunny.

“I’m afraid this is rather a way for you.” To say he was sorry Bunny had had to turn out would have been too much.

“Oh, no, I adore driving at night, don’t you? Before the war I had one of those huge spotlights on my Riley. It made everything look madly dramatic, just like a color film. People used to look so funny blinking and staring in it, like fish in a tank. You’d love the Riley. I had her done specially, a sort of bronze, with cream upholstery. If I’d only known, I wouldn’t have lent her tonight. I hate doing it really, but this boy helped me out of a rather awkward predicament and saved a lot of unpleasantness, so one could hardly refuse. Of course, it
would
be tonight. Never mind, you must try her another time.”

“Thanks,” said Laurie reluctantly. One could hardly pick a quarrel in the face of this unexpected civility, unless one had decided never to see Ralph again. After all, he thought, people were patchy; Ralph, who was no fool, had found something in Bunny to love; and there was always the risk of investing one’s snobbery with moral sanctions.

“Most of the excitement seems to be the other side of town. We’ll be out in the country in a minute, then you’ll have to begin showing me the way. I didn’t mean to seem callous about Ralph, just now. I just happen to know that the old dear practically never passes out flat, no matter what he has; and that hag downstairs would wake him at a pinch. She adores him, you know, she thinks he’s a wicked romantic sailor; it would kill you, honestly, to see the way he plays up to her, and she’s such a dim draggle-tailed old thing, Christmas in the orphanage I always call it. My dear, I said, one dark night you’ll find you’ve given her so much self-respect, if that’s what you call it, that she’ll nip up the stairs and into bed with you and then you’ll be sorry. He got so annoyed, I think that must have really happened to him somewhere or other. There’s a lot of funny little kinks about old Ralph.”

“Yes?” said Laurie, whose attention had wandered; he had been watching Bunny drive. Unable to stand it any longer in silence, he said, “You’ll only make the gears worse than they are, slamming them like that.”

“Oh, my
dear,
the whole bus is just a Palladium turn. I think it originally went by steam, and they modernized it at great expense about 1920. Have you
seen
it in daylight?”

“Yes.”

“The thing that always astonishes me is to find the lever inside at all, and not sticking out of the mudguard in a brass casing.”

“Ralph seems to manage it pretty well, considering what he’s got left of that hand. It must be a bit of an effort for him.”

“Oh, but you know he adores effort, it’s his thing. He thinks comfort’s absolutely decadent. Now, I’m not a bit like that myself.”

“No,” Laurie said.

“The great thing,
I
think, is for everyone to be happy. What I always say is, life’s so simple really, if you don’t complicate it. It’s just a matter of live and let live, don’t you think so?”

“For God’s sake, do put the clutch in properly when you’re changing down. If you grind them like that they’ll soon be jamming all the time.”

“It’s all such a nonsense,” said Bunny petulantly. “Well, this is the
very
last time I lend the Riley.”

Laurie’s hatred faded in spite of him. His mind groped over the personality beside him seeking something to grip on, and everything that had seemed salient resolved itself into a deficiency. He was too tired to be choice with words: Common, he thought inadequately. I thought after Dunkirk that would never mean anything again. How does he keep all this from Ralph?

They were out in the country; the sounds of the raid behind were muted by distance. Less warmly than he would have spoken to a chauffeur, Laurie showed Bunny the way.

“Oh, yes, I know. You’re an awfully reserved person, aren’t you?”

“I’m afraid I’ve never thought about it.”

“I get terribly bored with people who are just on the surface. They never give you any surprises, do they? That was the thing that first attracted me to Ralph, you know. He didn’t put everything in the shop window. Now, of course, I know him inside out, and it’s not that I’m not terribly fond of him, but—well, I wouldn’t tell just any one this, but it’s different telling you—”

Laurie had to speak twice before he succeeded in interrupting. “I’m sorry; but if you don’t mind, I’d rather not hear about all this.”

“I wouldn’t have told you,” said Bunny in a hurt, sincere voice, “without a very good reason.”

Laurie said abruptly, “Well, you can tell me this, then. Why did you do it?”

“Well, really, my dear, I was more or less swept off my feet. Between ourselves …”

“Tonight, I mean. You gave him about five neat gins straight off. It was in the water-jug.”

“Goodness, you
are
observant, aren’t you? Or is it an old trick in the army too?”

“I wouldn’t know, I’m not an officer.”

“Of course, it doesn’t work with everybody. If I’d tried it on you, you’d have spotted it straight away. But with hard-drinking types like old Ralph, who’ve got one or two on board already—”

“I asked why you did it, that’s all.”

Bunny stopped the car.

“You awful boy,” he said. “You
do
believe in playing hard to get.”

It was probably for not more than a second that Laurie was paralyzed by sheer incredulity. It seemed far too long. Though Bunny hadn’t got beyond the arm flung along the back of the seat and the deep intimate gaze, Laurie felt already a nauseous anticipation of contact.

“Look,” he said, “shall we get something straight? I don’t like you. I don’t like you in any possible way that one person could like an other.” He paused for breath. When he remembered everything it didn’t seem enough. “If you were the last human being left alive, I’d sooner—” The phrase with which he finished took him by surprise. It was what Reg had said to the girls in the blackout. Laurie had never supposed that a time would come when he would use it with satisfaction.

“My, my,” said Bunny. “Aren’t we butch?”

Laurie thought, That got through.

“In that case,” said Bunny. He leaned over and snapped at the catch of the door. “I should hate to force my company on anyone who felt like that about it. Good night.”

Something primitive stirred in Laurie, as in a solitary man beset by the creatures of a swamp or forest “Oh, no,” he said.

“I shouldn’t take that tone, if I were you.”

This, thought Laurie, is what he doesn’t tell everyone. The practiced inflection had held many chapters of inadvertent autobiography.

“You know,” he said, “Ralph’s going to wake up before long and ring the hospital to see I got back all right. If I haven’t, what do you expect me to do tomorrow? Back up your story?”

“Why, you little—”

“Yes, all right. You’ve bought this. It’s not even your car. You’re a volunteer for this job. You went to a lot of bother to drive me back. Now you damned well drive me.”

The pain jumped in his knee; he was shaking a little, but not to notice in the dark. He waited.

“Well,” said Bunny, “
please
don’t let’s have a scene about it in the middle of the road.”

He let in the clutch.

As the car ran on through the cold sweet autumn night, Laurie thought, All that was an impromptu. It wasn’t a deep-laid scheme or anything. He’s just a chancer.