The Charioteer (45 page)

Lying there relaxed and dishevelled, with his cloudy unguarded smile, Ralph seemed to him suddenly for the first time as young as himself. Through the open shirt showed a spearhead of tan which, more than a year after he had last worn tropical whites, was still burned into his fair skin. Laurie thought again that he was built like the hero of a boy’s adventure story: strong-looking, but not with the set look of a man’s strength; the hollows over the collar-bones and in the pit of the throat had still the softened edges of youth. One could imagine him, Laurie thought, stripped to the waist in all the classic situations, fishing in lagoons or pinioned bravely defiant to a tree. He longed to give him something, to help him with something, to be depended on for a moment. Just then, without moving, Ralph said, “Are you thinking about me?”

“Yes,” said Laurie with affection. “I was thinking you look like Jack in
The Coral Island.
There was a picture of him sticking an oar in a shark’s mouth.”

Ralph appeared to wake up. “He’d be taking a chance if it was a fair-sized shark. It would probably bite it straight through. The teeth work like a double saw; I’ve seen a man’s leg taken off above the knee, snap, like that.”

As his mind had moved back to the memory his face had changed; he looked not like the boy in the frontispiece, but like a competent ship’s officer describing an unpleasant fatality, no more exotic than a street accident, which has put him in mind of a certain harbor, of this man or that. Laurie felt young and amateurish again. His own spell of action had been so brief, before the tide of retreat swept back his unit to the beach and the ships, that now, as if he had had some control over these events, he felt he had set out to prove himself, only to come to grief and be ignominiously rescued. Ralph was saying, “… but the deep-water channel at Mombasa’s the worst, they breed around there.”

He stretched again, lazy, easy, and confident. His left arm was flung out across the carpet and his mutilated hand, uncovered, lay as idly as he would have let it if it had been whole. Laurie had never seen him quite forget it before. When the glove was off he used often to maneuver it out of sight when he thought the movement wouldn’t be noticed; and when he didn’t, you could feel him preventing himself by an act of will. There was something trustful and touching in this undefended surrender of it; it gave Laurie, for the moment, what he felt to be the most solid happiness he had known among so much contradictory emotion.

Ralph meanwhile had sunk back into his reverie, resuming thoughts to which the sharks had been a pedestrian interruption. Now, as if suddenly he felt himself too highly charged with happiness to bear it in silence, he took a deep breath and said, “Spuddy!” making a statement of it, than which no more needs to be said.

“Hello, Ralph,” said Laurie, smiling back. But soon afterwards he moved away and found himself work among the litter that was left. He felt that overanxiety which hides an unconfessed resistance and sometimes brings about the thing it fears; watching Ralph working again, and using the hand with its taut one-finger grip, he felt for the first time that it could get on his nerves.

Ralph had found the fencing foil, now as always the awkward object left over till the end. He got to his feet with it in a pliant spring, balanced it for an instant to feel the length and weight, and flicked it in a quick pass. Laurie saw and remembered how his wrist and forearm looked like an extension of the steel. He glanced at the hacked guard, and suddenly said, “This must be the one you used in
Hamlet,
isn’t it?”

“Yes. I never thought you’d remember that.”

“You didn’t?”

“I was a rotten Laertes, anyway.”

Ralph smiled to himself. “Well, I wouldn’t exactly say you were a
good
Laertes. You were a very nice Laertes, though. ‘It was never like this at Sandhurst, what have I done to get mixed up with this awful crowd?’ ”

“Was I really like that?”

“I suspected not. That was the secret of its charm.”

“You’re making half this up.”

“But you know,” said Ralph, dropping the foil, “there was one moment, just at the end, when you were dying. Quite suddenly it had something. I remember it still. I was sitting in the second row, or was it the third, anyway quite near. ‘Exchange forgiveness with me, noble Hamlet.’ I don’t know, it just seemed to get me. I knew then why I was such a bastard to you that time I came down to coach the duel, when Hugh was in the sicker.”

Impulsively Laurie said, “You wouldn’t like it, would you?” He picked up the foil by the blade and offered Ralph the hilt.

“Thank you, Spuddy. I should love it.” He received it with affection, but, instinctively, in a trained and expert grip. As the blade left Laurie’s hand, of a sudden it all smote him with a ruinous significance; he felt in his own gesture the ancient symbol of the surrendered sword. His nature had suffered a self-discovery, a swing off its old center of balance, stranger to him and less foreseen than he had allowed Ralph to know. For a moment an instinctive hostility must have shown in his eyes.

Ralph tossed the foil away, and said quickly, “Spud!”

“What’s up?” said Laurie smiling. “It’s all right.” He was glad that Ralph had read in his face only the passing envy of a cripple for a man who can fence.

Ralph said, “We’ve about finished here. I wish I could have seen this room with your things in it.”

Laurie started to tell him how it used to look; but in the middle he was overtaken by a longing to compensate Ralph for what he felt as a latent treachery, mixed with a simpler and more direct emotion. He said, “Sit in that chair for a moment, will you?”

Ralph dropped into it and said, “Well? What for?” Sliding along the floor to the place beside him, Laurie said, “Only because that’s where you always used to sit.”

After a pause Ralph said in a stilled listening voice, “Is that the truth?”

“Yes. But not the whole truth.” He threw his arm across Ralph’s knees.

For what seemed a long time, perhaps several minutes, they sat in silence. He could feel Ralph touching his hair with that intuitive pleasantness which, it seemed, couldn’t go wrong. The desire to be needed was basic in his make-up; it had developed in him a high degree of accomplishment and tact. He had, thought Laurie, the power good advertising is supposed to have of creating demands which had not been aware of themselves before. But when he spoke Laurie realized that all this had been absent and instinctive while his mind was elsewhere. “This room, the one I’ve moved to, I’ve only taken it for a month.”

“You didn’t tell me you’d moved.”

“I travel light, you know, it doesn’t take me long. It’s full of velvet curtains and Turkey carpets and stuffy junk, but it’s got a telephone, that’s why I took it. It’s just somewhere to be while we look around. What do you give it till you’re out—about a month?”

“They haven’t told me anything. I haven’t a clue.”

It was true, but he knew he would have said it, anyway. The first note of organization had given him a feeling of constriction, almost of panic.

“Never mind,” Ralph said. “I’ll go ahead, anyhow. If I find something soon, it will give us all the longer to fix up and get comfortable. You know, this trunk we’re packing will go on the car easily, and I expect we can get in some more, I’ll look in a minute. I can store it all at the Station, there’s a …” His voice ran on, effortlessly efficient, disposing of everything. Laurie realized that in another few minutes he would want to start loading the car.

“But, Ralph, I’ll be going up to Oxford in a few weeks. You’d be stuck with a flat for more than six months of the year.”

“Oh, no, we can let a room to someone at the local university in term-time, if we need to. I’ve got everything taped.”

Laurie realized that in every way he had bought this.

Ralph scratched up softly the short hair at the nape of his neck, causing an involuntary shiver like a stroked cat’s. “Spud,” he said gently, “are you worrying again?”

Laurie looked up, helplessly aware that he was leaving this for Ralph to cope with as he had, it seemed, left everything else.

“Surely, Spud, you didn’t think I was going to be difficult, did you? I mean, that was the understanding I came in on. I wouldn’t double-cross you like that.”

Laurie waited, feeling sure that this must be quite simple and that he had been stupid not to have followed it.

“If you want to see this boy when he’s got a free day, that’s fair enough; you don’t have to tell me about it. Unless you need someone to talk to. I can take it either way; for me it’s worth it. Nothing to worry about there, is there?”

All Laurie could find to say was, “Ralph, do you mind if I think a minute?”

“What for?” Ralph’s fingers moved, producing the shiver again.

What for, indeed, Laurie wondered. They had stepped across a narrow frontier and had become strangers speaking different tongues.

“I suppose,” he said, feeling like a man making signs across some valley too wide for the voice to cross, “I suppose I love both of you too much. It would pull me in half. I couldn’t live that way. And if I could myself, I couldn’t do it to him.”

Ralph had drawn his brows together. He looked, not resentful, but as if he felt some physical pain which mustn’t be allowed to confuse his mind. “But you’re living that way now, and it’s been all right. And with things as they are, I can’t see how he’s losing anything.”

Laurie began to look up; but his eyes came first to the torn left hand on the chair-arm, and it was as if Ralph had been speaking of something like that when he had said “I can’t see.” Seven years was a long time, after all, and something had gone.

Everything he had promised, he would not fail faithfully to perform. It would cost him something; he knew that he would suffer; but he wasn’t accustomed to give up his aims out of a fear of being hurt, and, in any case, he would remind himself that it wouldn’t be for long. Laurie realized now that, from the moment when Ralph had learned that this was a love without physical bond, he had thought of it as something not quite real. As far as he believed in it at all, he thought of Laurie with compassion, as the victim of an infatuation whose object couldn’t or wouldn’t return it, who must endure the sickness till it could be cured by time and by a more generous lover. He was touched by it, as a grown man is by the pains of calf-love. Laurie remembered how he always said “this boy,” on a certain inflection, faintly indulgent; it would have been patronage in someone a little less kind. As far as he was concerned, Andrew was someone by whom Laurie had been refused. If one had tried to make him see such a relationship as a bond of mutual love with valid claims, that would be too much, he would feel, for anyone to swallow; it would seem to him the reduction to absurdity of romantic daydreams, something not far removed from autoerotic fantasy, which he would probably have called morbid outright in someone he didn’t love.

None the less, having been once convinced that Laurie felt like this, he would be quixotically generous; yes, even on the rare occasions when he believed in a rival made of flesh and blood. It would appeal to his honor to keep the compact, to his pride to behave at such times especially well, to his instinct for sacrifice to console Laurie undemandingly, without letting his feelings appear. But most of the time, Laurie thought, he would be like a man who without interference allows his wife to practice some obscure religion he doesn’t believe in, because they were married on that understanding. Laurie had a sudden impossible vision of Ralph packing him off efficiently to see Andrew, looking up his trains, lending him a raincoat, reminding him not to walk about and strain his knee, and, when he got home, laying on some special supper to cheer him up.

With the steady confidence of someone nursing a fever which under the right treatment is running its normal course, Ralph would wait for the symptoms to subside. For he had not only courage, but the faith that moves mountains; and, besides, possession is nine points of the law.

“You know,” he was saying now, “it’s funny, when I saw you at Dunkirk your hair still seemed quite red, but it was only because your face was so white. It’s gone like a horse chestnut when you find it in your pocket next year. Conker color.”

“Do you mind?”

“Spud: it half kills me to see you making yourself unhappy like this. It doesn’t make sense even, not now. Why do you do it?”

“But, you see, it’s … well, apart from anything else, what would I tell him? People don’t meet without talking about what they’re doing and where they’re living, and how they like it, and things like that. I couldn’t talk to him for hours knowing that he was telling me the truth and I was just stringing him along with lies.”

“But how much of the truth have you ever been able to tell him?”

“That’s not the same.”

“Why tell him lies, at that? You can say you’re sharing a flat with me. Or do you suspect him of knowing more about these things than he makes out?”

“It isn’t that. It’s … well, I should be different. He’d feel at once that something was wrong.”

“Wrong?” From his control Laurie knew that this had suddenly and deeply hurt him. “You didn’t behave last night as if you thought it was wrong.”

“Not wrong like that. Wrong between him and me.”

“You half meant the other, though.”

“No, I swear not. There’s another thing too. He’d know we were great friends, at least, and he might get the idea that I’d passed him up because he’s a c.o.; he thinks already that at heart I’d rather have someone who’d fought.”

“Surely not. Who’d be that unreasonable?”

Laurie looked at his face. He understood the effort Ralph must have been making all this time, not to betray the truth which had at last slipped out.

“You despise him, don’t you?”

After a pause Ralph said, “Oh, I believe he’s sincere. I’d back you to spot a phony quicker than most.”

“He has the guts all right. Only he thinks that’s a side-issue, because what really matters is whether he’s right or wrong. I couldn’t bear him to think I was ratting on him.”

“But,” said Ralph, “he
is
wrong, so then what?” There was a silence. He said in a different voice, “You don’t feel any doubt on that point, do you?”