The Charioteer (50 page)

“Hello, Laurie.” He sounded, as always before, unexcited, attentive, and kind; but he had dropped his voice, and Laurie knew beforehand what he was going to say. “Come in the kitchen, will you, there are people asleep upstairs.”

The kitchen was a small dingy room, warm from its black iron range and, it seemed, from the stored vitality of the families whose hub of existence it must have been. A yellow varnished paper on the walls affected wood-graining. The scrubbed table in the middle was covered with clean newspaper, there were rolls of surgical lint and gauze on it, and piles of cut and folded dressings. An iron pot of porridge was simmering on the range, and a big kettle. Dave pulled up an old bentwood chair and said, “Sit down, Laurie, I’m just going to make some tea.”

He had always been lean, but lately he had grown much thinner. There were deep furrows in his cheeks, half hidden by the edges of the grizzled beard. He had on a worn leather golf jacket and stained, shabby flannel slacks. He spooned tea from a cocoa-tin into a brown teapot, and tipped the heavy kettle to fill it.

Laurie had had no food today but a cardboardy meat pie at the station. The tea smelt good. Some dim memory stirred in his mind of sitting with the maid in his grandmother’s kitchen when he was very small; he felt a sudden nostalgia, piercing and forlorn. He said, “Is Andrew here?”

“Yes,” said Dave. “He’s asleep with the others. Last night was fairly quiet, but he was still a bit tired, and we may be busy later.” He poured out tea in thick white china cups; you could have thought Laurie had dropped in from next door. “Sugar? We’ve got plenty, Andrew and Tom don’t take it.”

“Please. I wanted to see him about something rather important. I’m sorry he’s tired, but I think he’d rather see me.”

“I’ll call him presently,” said Dave, “if you want him called.” He sugared the tea from a Woolworth glass basin. “I’ve been half expecting you, difficult as it must have been for you to get away.”

“I’m absent without leave. I’ve had a letter from Andrew. I have to see him, there’s something I want to explain.”

Dave looked at him. “You look worn out,” he said simply. He went to the deal dresser, fetched a cloth out of the drawer, spread it on Laurie’s end of the table and set a plate and knife.

“Please don’t bother,” Laurie said. “I couldn’t eat anything.”

“We’ve some beef dripping this week. I’m going to make some toast.” He got a loaf from the bin, sliced it, and speared the bread on a wire fork. “You can do this one.”

Dully, Laurie turned his chair and held the fork to the bars of the range. The glow was comforting; it sheltered his eyes which flinched from being looked at any more. Dave pulled up the other chair and sat down beside him, with his slice of bread on a bent carving fork. They both kept their eyes on the fire, and shifted the toast about, because of the bars.

“Do you ever think,” said Dave, “that retribution seems to spread itself very unevenly? It’s often seemed so to me. But I think one must take the analogy of the body. A gangrened limb is quite insensitive. Only the living tissues feel pain.”

There was a pause, during which a hot coal dropped from the bars onto the hob and bounced down into the ash-pan. Laurie said, “Andrew told you.”

“Well, I was rather unfair to him. I didn’t warn him I could fill in a certain amount between the lines. I mean, from experience.” He added, not defensively, but kindly, as though Laurie had asked for reassurance, “That was a good many years ago.”

His toast was crumbling on the fork; he speared it gingerly in a fresh place. “I’ve felt now and then—if I’m wrong, stop me before I go any further, won’t you—that you’ve had a mistaken idea about my feelings for Andrew.” When Laurie said nothing, he went on, “Not that I’ve any right to resent it. But I’ve often wished I could set your mind at rest.”

Laurie looked at his toast, and turned it over. “I didn’t think that, exactly.”

“No,” said Dave. “I know. Not exactly. I know what you thought and I don’t really blame you. Every religious body has a few. With most of them it’s woolly thinking, rather than hypocrisy. I had the wool pulled off when I was about Andrew’s age, as a matter of fact.”

He got up, fetched Laurie’s tea from the table and stood it on the steel fender in reach of his hand. Laurie said, “Thanks,” and then, with difficulty, “It might not be a bad thing now for him to know that.”

“Well, I told him. He’d have thought of it himself in a short time, of course.”

Laurie shifted the toast and said, “Yes, of course. He’d better have someone he can trust to be straight with him.”

Dave looked up. “He isn’t a fool. You know that better than anyone. He knows why he wasn’t told everything, if he wasn’t. That’s not the sort of thing he has on his mind.”

“I know. That’s why I came.”

“I thought it might be.” Dave relieved him of the toast which was beginning to smoke, nicked off a burnt corner, spread it with dripping, salted it, and put the plate on the fender. “Don’t let it get cold,” While Laurie was eating it he went back to the swabs on the table. Presently he said, “You don’t have to worry about me, whatever else you worry about. Do get that into your head, won’t you? For a lot of reasons; one of which, a minor one I like to think nowadays, is that Andrew looks just like his mother. Except in character sometimes, I never see Bertie in him at all.”

It could be perceived that his youth belonged to a decade when Bertie had sounded charming, even perhaps romantic. He pronounced it Bartie. This trifle had on Laurie the effect of a kind of emotional trigger, and for several minutes he could not speak. Dave continued to fold swabs with the reflex precision of a factory hand who has been carrying out the same process for years. He went on, “As soon as Catherine joined us, it became obvious that Bertie was perfectly normal, except in fastidiousness, so I’d done nothing but make a virtue of necessity after all. With Andrew, I don’t know. I mean, I know at the moment of course, but life’s made some rather excessive demands on him lately. He may quite well grow out of it. If so, he’ll largely have you to thank.”

Laurie said, “Not now.”

Dave put some finished swabs away in a cardboard hatbox. “You’ll know what I’m talking about now better than I do. He came here with some doubt about you which he didn’t want to discuss with me or anyone else, and I imagine you’ve come here partly to resolve it. Of course, if you can give him the answer he wants, you have every right to. Indeed, you should, in spite of the fact that it won’t make things any easier for him at first.”

Laurie was silent, looking at the fire. At last he said, “I couldn’t give him the answer he wants.”

He didn’t look up. The rhythmic sound of Dave’s hands folding the swabs—a pause for adjustment, a light smoothing pat, a moment’s pause, and then a flat heavy pat—went on almost unbroken.

Laurie said, “I thought it might make him feel a little better to know that I’m sorry, and that it happened partly because—” He felt his voice about to get out of control, and stopped quickly.

“Of course,” Dave said. His lean knotted hands, seamed with work and scrubbing, paused on a half-folded square of gauze. “This is the worst of all my failures.”

“Yours?” said Laurie. He contracted his brows vaguely.

“Once or twice I thought of talking to you. I said to myself that you might be as innocent as Andrew was, and my interference might be a disaster to both of you; I couldn’t be absolutely sure. So I saved myself a tricky job which would have involved stating my qualifications for taking it on, and I had the pleasure of being right, where Andrew was concerned. But anyone involved in the recoil was just as much my responsibility.”

Laurie’s stillness had changed and become stony. He said, “I shouldn’t waste any worry there, if I were you.”

As if he hadn’t heard, Dave went on, “I took up the work I do largely to teach myself that sort of thing. As you see, I’ve not made much headway. Love is indivisible, Bertie said to me once. He’d only been out of the army a few months, but his instincts were better.”

Laurie looked up from the empty cup into which he had been staring. “If I don’t see Andrew, would you be willing to tell him I came?”

“Yes, of course. You’ve told me what you came here to say. I’ll tell him that, and anything else you want me to.”

The knowledge that he was not going to see Andrew again suddenly came home to Laurie as real. He hadn’t believed it while he was speaking.

Dave said, “It’s not that I think it would be wicked for you to meet. But you’d both suffer more than now, and no good would come out of it.” With a chance inflection which made Laurie able to imagine him as a young man, he added, “He really is awfully tired.”

“Yes,” said Laurie dully. “He must be. We’d better not wake him.”

“When you’re on the way back it won’t seem so bad. You’ll remember it would be all over by then anyway.”

“You people are so practical,” Laurie said.

Dave got up and came to sit on the kitchen table. His personality could be felt at this distance like something tangible. “There’s no need to feel finally cut off. He’ll want to hear from you, of course. Write when you feel he’ll be needing it, not when you feel you must, and it will be all right. Or if you want to know how he is without writing, you can always write to me.”

The room was getting dark. The first twilight was coming already to the long black street, though in the open, probably, it would still seem to be afternoon. Laurie noticed for the first time, hung on pegs at the side of the dresser as herbs are hung in the country, a bunch of gas masks and a cluster of tin hats.

“May I give you my address?” he said. “If he were—ever ill, or anything. If you wouldn’t mind.”

“Certainly,” said Dave, in the matter-of-fact voice he used in the wards. “Write it on this. I’ll put it in the file, I won’t keep it on me.”

While he was doing this Laurie remembered something. He would have liked to say, “I heard about your wife and I’m very sorry.” But because of the road by which this thought had come to him, he could not bring himself to say it.

Dave said, “This isn’t the day I’d have chosen to give you this advice, Laurie. But don’t think of yourself because of all this as necessarily typed and labelled. Some men could make shift, for a time at least, with any woman out of about ninety per cent they meet. Don’t fly to extremes the moment you discover your own needs are more specialized.”

Laurie waited, ready to say it after all; but Dave didn’t go on, and Laurie realized that his impersonality was in the nature of a human flinching, and that he was willing Laurie not to speak.

“Well, I must go. There’s no sense in getting myself crimed my last week in the army, if I can help it.”

Dave gave a smile which Laurie recognized as partly one of relief. “Don’t try and slip onto the platform by the footbridge, they’ve been on to that for at least twenty-five years.” They both got up. Dave said, “You’d better go out at the back, I think.”

The scullery was tiny, there was hardly room for anything but the copper and the sink. The cement floor had been mixed with unsifted earth so that pebbles stood up in it. There were towels hanging by the sink; this must be where everyone washed.

“Thank you for everything,” Laurie said. “If you’ll tell him … you know what to say. Tell him I …” As if the sensation had come as a message, he felt something usually too familiar for consciousness, a flat heaviness in a pocket. He got out the book and turned it over in his hand, with the feeling that there was something that needed seeing to. Remembering, he tore out the flyleaf, then got out his pen and wrote Andrew’s name on the first page. “Please, will you give him this?”

Dave looked at the lettering on the spine. “You know,” he said, “even the most exalted paganism is paganism none the less.” He took the book, looking at the scored and salt-stained cover, at the blood. Something came into his face which had been there on the day when Laurie had seen him watching the battle in the air and the falling planes. “Yes,” he said. “I’ll give it him with your love.”

He opened the door. A broom which had been leaning behind it fell with a clatter. They both stood still, listening. There was a sound, muffled by the floor above, of a man yawning; then, more clearly, raised to carry through a party wall, Andrew’s voice. “Tom. What time is it?”

Laurie slipped through the door into the scrawny yard. He glanced upward, to ask Dave if the window looked that way. Dave shook his head. Upstairs a sleepy voice talking itself awake said, “Dave’s up, good, that means tea.” Andrew said, “Someone’s with him, I think.”

Laurie stood with one foot on the doorstep, perfectly still. He had heard the false casualness of a reviving hope, which dares not be open even with itself. There was a long, long moment of silence before the voices began again. Then, very softly, Laurie said, “While I’m going could you make a noise? He knows my step.”

Dave nodded and went over to the sink. In the street a lorry was approaching; that would help too. “Goodbye, Dave.”

“Goodbye,” Dave said. “God bless you.” He spoke as he might have said in the ward, “Here’s your blanket”; like a man offering in his hand something solid and real. As Laurie went, he heard him start to clatter the sink with both taps running.

It was not till Laurie had got level with the bombed houses down the street that he became aware of the sheet of paper which, because he couldn’t discard it in the house, he was still holding screwed up in his hand. He tossed it away into the road, where it landed in a little heap of rubble and broken glass. On the crumpled edge which was showing he could see “… anyon” and just below it “… dell.”

When he got out into the wide main street it seemed still quite light, but by the time he reached Paddington it was the latter end of dusk, and you could feel everywhere, in voices and footsteps and the sound of the traffic, the faint resonant overtone of a steady anticipation.

H
E ARRIVED BACK IN
the ward just before the night staff came on. The Staff Nurse said, “Oh, there you are, Odell; I suppose you know Sister’s absolutely livid with you?”

“Yes, I was afraid of that.”