The Charioteer (52 page)

“Now look,” said Alec in a hard casualty-officer’s voice, “there’s no time for all that now. This is serious. Did you have a row with Ralph over one of the orderly boys at the E.M.S. hospital?”

Laurie found that all the anger in him had gone flat and sour: he could feel nothing but a dull swallow of sickness, even at this. He thought again that Alec looked as if he hadn’t slept for days. London had been full of such faces. But now suddenly his dimmed perceptions partly cleared: a vague, premonitory apprehension stirred in him. He said, “That’s nothing to do with you.”

“Make up your mind about that later. Just listen now. If you’ve been told that Ralph went to see the boy and had some kind of scene with him, it isn’t true. That’s all.”

“It
must
be true.” It disturbed him that Alec’s voice hadn’t been that of a bland peacemaker, but brittle with the exasperation of a tired man. “It must be true, Andrew told me himself.”

“Oh, it’s not the boy’s fault. He’s only young, isn’t he? If someone called claiming to be Ralph, why should he doubt it? Only it wasn’t Ralph, you see. It was Bunny.”

“Bunny?”
His entrails shrank, heavy and cold. Of course, he thought, of course. The food he had eaten half an hour before lay hard in his stomach, like a meal of wood. “But how could it be Bunny? Why?”

“Oh, use your intelligence, if you ever do use it. Does it sound the sort of thing Ralph would do?”

“But he was always saying—” Although he could sense above him an annihilating weight of remorse ready to fall, he couldn’t feel it yet, it was pushed out by the grotesque, obscene image of Andrew and Bunny together. “I found it hard to picture you and him as great friends. When he told me it was much more than that—”

His hand reached to his pocket as if to touch the letter might alter his almost verbal recollection of it. “It is like something from another world, but it has touched you, and the touch is real.”

“Well?” said Alec impatiently. “Now it starts to add up, I suppose.”

“But … but he didn’t know Andrew even existed. I didn’t tell Ralph about it till after that. If he knew, then Ralph must have been seeing him all the time. No one else could have told him. That’s nearly—” He stopped, recognizing for what they were the bitter lees of jealousy.

“I can guess how he found out. Sit down, can’t you; don’t stand there passing out on your feet, I’ve got no time to cope with it.”

“I’m not,” said Laurie angrily; but he let Alec push him into the patient’s chair. It was true that he was feeling sick. Alec sat back on the desk, watching his face irritably.

“I know just what he did, the little sod.” He pulled a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket, lit one in a jerky mechanical way without offering them, and drew on it hungrily. “I know, because I’ve carried the can for him before now. Either he’s been reading your letters, if you’ve written Ralph any, or he’s been at his diary again. I know he reads it because once Bim came out with something at a party, and from the way Ralph looked at me, I knew straight away I was the only person he’d ever told. It would have been just my word against Bunny’s, and I can’t bear these fracas, they make me ill.”

Laurie said slowly, “I know when that happened. I was there.”

“Oh, God, yes, so you were; of course that was why Ralph was so angry about it. He ought to have left his papers with me, like he did while he was at sea; he trusted me in those days, even after we’d split. The bits he used to show me were just travel stuff, but he always hovered rather, ready to grab it back again, so I assumed he’d committed his soul to it here and there. He’d have lost one lot with his ship, I suppose; but if he began another in hospital, God knows what he put in that.” His dark bruised-looking eyes, set in creases of fatigue, stared at Laurie with dislike. He was smoking feverishly, burning the cigarette down one side. “Of course, living in the same house with Bunny, he must have locked things up. I suppose he didn’t think to put a Yale on.”

It was like getting an anonymous letter, Andrew had said. As a comment on Ralph it might have sounded a little shrill, if the context had not seemed to explain everything. There are drawings which when inverted reveal the features of a new and different face. In a dead voice, its protest mechanical, Laurie said, “How do you know all this?”

“Oh, in the usual way. Toto Phelps and Bunny have been honeymooning for two full weeks now; anyone could have told him Toto’s one to get very nasty if he’s two-timed, but all these wide boys get swelled head. The crash came yesterday, and Toto couldn’t wait to plant the story where it could do most good. He’s scared stiff of Ralph, so he came to me.”

Laurie sat with his elbows on his knees, his hands pressed to his forehead. Alec twitched out the cigarettes again and lit another from the bent stub of the first which he trod into the rug. “I didn’t believe it myself at first. I said to Toto, ‘Don’t give me that, Bunny’s too crude for that Cinquecento stuff.’ But Toto says it was more or less handed him on a plate. I gather the final break with Ralph was fairly acrimonious, Ralph wouldn’t enlarge on that very much to you, I expect, and he didn’t change digs for a week afterwards. Bunny found out all he could in the meantime; well, of course, being Bunny, his first thought was that the thing between you and the orderly boy mightn’t be quite what you’d made it look to Ralph. So he went down just in the hope of finding some silly little piece whom he could charm into spilling the beans. Instead of which—well, I’ve met a few Quakers, I can imagine. And then the moment he introduced himself as a friend of yours, the boy said, ‘You must be Ralph Lanyon’: the uniform, of course. Well, improvisation is Bunny’s middle name. You must have noticed it.”

“Yes,” said Laurie emptily. “Yes, I know.”

“After all, there was nothing to give him away definitely except the hand, and Bunny’s always got his hands in his pockets; they were there at the start of the conversation and he remembered not to take out the left one. He must have remembered even when he was hit in the face. If he had any application, he could probably learn to be quite dangerous.”

“He was as good as he needed to be,” said Laurie bitterly.

“What happened?” asked Alec, as if he didn’t expect an answer. “Well, you could have known a couple of hours ago if you’d stayed put. I saw Toto last night; I was going to have told you this morning. But Sandy had one of his bad turns, climbing the walls and threatening what he’d do to himself, and I’ve been frightened to leave him, to tell you the truth. I had to ring up Dallow to do my jobs for me, and Christ, what I found when I got back.” He got up from the table with a nervous jerk; but the room was tiny and there was nowhere to walk to.

“Is Sandy all right?” said Laurie, though he didn’t care.

“Oh, yes,” said Alec in his flat edgy voice. “I suppose so … I’ve lived my own life to some extent. One can’t tell him everything, you know what he is. I’ve let Bunny get away with little things before now, because of the trouble he could make if he wanted to. Then this blew up, and I thought, No, there’s no two ways here, if I pass this it’s blackmail. So I did what I always say one should, I told Sandy everything Bunny could have told him. When I got back eventually, after about two hours’ sleep, I found one of Harrison’s gastrectomies leaking, and they’d buzzed for me three times.” He had displaced a pile of report forms on the desk; mechanically he began to straighten them. “I’m due to take my finals next summer. I don’t know how I can go on like this.”

Laurie had been thinking that Alec always seemed to save his confidences for occasions when one was incapable of taking them in. He said, “You’ll be all right, because you’re more a doctor than you’re a queer.”

Alec pushed the forms together and stood up. “You know,” he said slowly, “that’s the first sensible remark anyone’s made to me all day. Let’s hope you’re right. How could you be such a bloody fool about Ralph? Didn’t it even strike you he hadn’t a mark on him after this alleged brawl? Bunny’s been going around with a split lip for nearly a week, from walking into a lamp-standard in the blackout,
he
said. You don’t seem to have given the orderly boy credit for much
élan.
And why should he hit Ralph, anyway? Even if Ralph did put it to him, he’d never put it like that.”

“No,” said Laurie. Another bit of the letter had come back to him.

“He denied it at first,” he said. “And then, in the end, he seemed not to be denying it.”

“I suppose he just thought what the hell. Or else—” Alec smoked in silence for some moments, more evenly now, his hands pushed down into the pockets of his white coat. “Ralph’s got a simple mind in some ways, but it follows through. Unlike so many of our fraternity, he’s no good at ducking out. It was his doing in this sense, that he was the link. He let in the jungle. About one queer in a thousand has the guts to accept that sort of responsibility, and he’s the odd one.” He fell silent again, then looked up suddenly. “Just how bad was this row between you?”

Laurie saw Alec summing up his face; there seemed no need to answer.

“Final?” Alec asked. His voice had sharpened.

Laurie got up. “Will it be all right for me to use this telephone? I don’t want to leave it till morning.”

“He won’t answer it. I told you, he took the receiver off the hooks as soon as the bell started. About six-thirty.” He looked at his watch. With abrupt decision he sat down at the desk, searched the paper-rack, and got out a form. “You’d better go around there. Yes, for God’s sake go around right away. I’ll give you a pass. Family affairs, married sister ill. I’ve no right to do this; never mind, you’re not supposed to know that, you’ll be covered anyway. Here you are.” He blotted the form swiftly and pushed it at Laurie. “I’ll see the Night Nurse. I can’t help what she thinks. Get on your way and don’t loiter. He’s not like Sandy, you know.”

Laurie took the form. He didn’t ask what Alec meant by this uncharacteristic statement of the obvious. He was tired now to the point when he had begun to live on his nerves. He felt he could go on forever, that he would never sleep again.

At the door he said, “I’m sorry you’ve had this trouble with Sandy because of me.”

“If it wasn’t you,” said Alec unemotionally, “it would be something else. And it wasn’t for you, really. Ralph would never let one do anything for him. It was what most of our rows were about.” His eyes met Laurie’s. Neither had moved, but they were like people at a station who see each other receding and getting small as each departs on his different journey. Alec said, “Walk out through the front door, not the lodge. And get a move on.”

In the street outside the hospital, a taxi was unloading its freight of relatives summoned to someone critically ill. Laurie hailed it and got in. The night was black, and bitterly cold.

The drive, from which he had expected a breathing space, seemed over in a moment. He stood on the doorstep, making up his mind to ring. The landlady’s radio was on. She was a talker, who had trapped him once or twice in the hall, and he dreaded its happening now. He tried the door; it was unlocked, and he came in quietly. She was rattling away to someone in her room, using the voice she kept for men. Helped by the banisters, he hoisted himself softly up the stairs.

Ralph’s door was open and the light was on. Laurie paused at the stair-head. Suddenly he wondered why he was forcing himself on Ralph at all. It seemed formal and meaningless, an expiation important only to himself. What he had done was done. He ought to see to his own punishment; it was clear, from what Alec had said about the telephone, that Ralph wanted nothing of it or of him. Thinking about Ralph as he looked again at the door, he knew suddenly before he reached it that the room was empty.

It looked vividly different, as familiar rooms do after a strong experience. Lying on the bed was a shirt, to Laurie’s eye quite clean, which Ralph must just have changed for a still cleaner one. He always used to hurry such things out of sight like guilty secrets; to have found it seemed one more offense against him. He must only have gone out for a few minutes, Laurie thought.

He walked in, across the room and around it; he was at the point of fatigue when delays are intolerable and one tries to abolish them by continuing to make the motions of effort. It was mainly under this taut compulsion to be doing something that, when he found two or three letters on the table stuck down ready for posting, he picked them up to read the envelopes. The top one was for him. For a moment he felt only the relief of his restlessness, that here was something he could be dealing with. By the time he began to have scruples, his finger was already under the flap, and he noticed that the edge was lifting. It had been closed so recently that the gum hadn’t quite set. For no good reason this made up his mind for him, and he peeled it open.

Ralph’s clear sloped writing was packed in neat sections on a big white sheet from some kind of naval memo-pad. Laurie stood staring at it for a second or two, vaguely aware as he stood by the table of a faint smell which had some incongruous association for him, belonging to some part of his life with which Ralph had had nothing to do. The thought vanished from his mind and he began to read.

Dear Spud,

I am sorry that there seems to be no way of writing to you more quickly than by the post, if one is to avoid people reading it I should have liked you to know sooner that you are not to blame for this in any way. It was Bunny who interviewed your friend, as I suspected, but that’s immaterial. It couldn’t have happened but for me, I saw that immediately, so that I have done what you thought in another way. I am telling you this to get it straight between us, because you are bound to find out sooner or later. The real reason I am getting out is that I can see no future for me at sea, and can’t fancy myself in a shore job. I have had something of the sort in mind ever since Dunkirk. I swear that is true.

I am sincerely sorry for the harm I have done to you and to this boy. You had the right idea in the first place, knowing yourself best, and I came along and bitched up your life in every way. I can see now that I was wrong even at school; I should either have gone the whole way, which in those days would probably have shocked you and put you against it all, or shut up about it altogether. When I found you remembered, I felt it must have been what I wanted to happen. One may as well face these things.

If it is any satisfaction to you, I paid a call on Bunny just now and he has been taken to sick bay, with concussion and broken ribs as well as I could judge. He came round in time to agree it was the blackout once again. I tripped him into admitting he had been at my private papers. I shouldn’t like you to think I had ever discussed you or your affairs with him. If you should see Alec, will you tell him I owe him an apology? He will know what I mean.

You mustn’t go on being upset about this, Spud. I have never had much time for people who do this kind of thing as a form of repartee, so if you want to do anything for me, try not to think of it in that way. The fact of the matter is that if I hadn’t met you again, and had gone on as I was, I might have drifted past the point where a step of this kind ought to be taken, and I would rather have it like this. You did what anyone would in the circumstances. So don’t worry. Just lately I have been happier than I ever had the right to expect, and as one goes round the world one sees that happiness is hard to come by and seldom lasts for long. Good luck to you, Spud. We always agreed that right, left, or center, it is still necessary to make out as a human being. I haven’t done it but you will. Goodbye.

Ralph