The Charioteer

by Mary Renault

  “She doesn’t understand. You see, you see it’s important. You don’t think I’m like that, do you?”

  “Of course not, it’s just the anesthetic.”

  “Going through a phase is different, I mean people do. It isn’t anything. You never met Charles, did you?”

  “Please try and settle down.”

  “It was the people he knew, awful people you’d never have believed, it was that, really. Can I have some water?”

  “You’ve just had some. Only a sip.”

  “Thank you. There was a man at school, that would have been quite different, you may not understand that, but it would. But he had too high ideals, I can’t tell you now, it was all wrong the way they treated him, of course I never saw him again. So please don’t think I’ve ever done anything that would make you not want to sit here with me. You don’t, do you?”

  “Of course you haven’t. It’s only the ether upsetting you. Is your leg hurting much?”

  “It always hurts a bit. Just don’t think about it. I should like to kiss you and I think that speaks for itself, don’t you?”

  “You’re talking rather nonsense and it’s only making you tired.”

  “I suppose you wouldn’t kiss me, just quickly?”

  “Sister wouldn’t let me sit here if I did, I should have to go.”

  “People don’t understand, do they? I’m sorry, Nurse.”

  “It isn’t your fault, it’s only the ether. I think I’ll ask if you can have a sedative now.”

  A light crossed his eyes. The blackout was up; it was the Night Nurse leaning over him with her torch.

  “Hello, Odell. Feeling better now?”

  “Oh, hello, Nurse. Yes, thanks. What time is it?”

  “Nearly one.”

  “Good Lord, is it? I say, I do hope I’ve not been making a row.”

  “Not since I’ve been on. We’ll put you back in the ward in the morning.”

  When she had gone he shifted his leg cautiously on the pillow, moving it from the hip. It felt tender and aching, and the joint seemed stiffer than ever, but then the bandage was tight. Major Ferguson would be doing a round tomorrow; one could ask him, perhaps.

  All being well, this was his final operation. In a few weeks’ time, someone would write in the ward report book, “Returned to unit for discharge: Odell. Admitted: So-and-So.” They would remember him, perhaps, as long as people remember one of the bit parts in an old film. Exit a quiet, tidy patient (except on operation days). Enter, somewhere else, a young man with a lame leg and an unanswered question. Statistics gave this new character something like fifty years’ expectation of life. Laurie reminded himself that it was two in the morning; he drank his malted milk, wriggled down in the pillow and shut his eyes.

  The river flowed gently under the hanging willows; the sun shone slanting through it, lighting up dark streaming weeds along the bottom, warm umber mud, and golden stones. The fish slipped by, sly fine shadows among the other shadows of water and weed. The afternoon sun felt warm along his side. He raised his arms and dived, straight and clear; came up, shook his eyes free, and with long, easy strokes swam into the sunny waters upstream.

  Eight days after his operation they had still not told him anything. The morning of Major Ferguson’s round had come again. It was the most detested event of the week: for the staff, because he expected the punctilio of a large teaching hospital to which the resources of the place were unequal; and for the patients because for an hour or more they would be virtually on parade, unable to move from their beds, smoke, or talk.

  Laurie’s knee had been cleaned and dressed, and a cheap gauze bandage put on which could be cut to save ninety seconds of Major Ferguson’s time. There had been opportunity for a good look. The upper half of the scar had been reopened; it was thick, purplish, deeply indented, and smelt of pus. Two red rubber drainage tubes stuck out of it. Below that it was almost healed; but that was where the kneecap had been shot away and the ragged skin cobbled over. From there a long, deep, jagged scar went plowing down nearly to the ankle. He had got over feeling sick when he looked at it. Sometimes it had been a struggle to hide this ungrateful reaction. He had been told often enough it was a miracle he should have the leg at all.

  There seemed, he thought, to be a worse flap than usual today. Every nurse was doing the work of one junior to herself; and now for the first time he noticed that the junior of them all was sweeping the floor, a job normally finished hours before by the wardmaid. It was the young Nurse Adrian: he had been a little shy of her since the operation, which he felt to be selfish since she was probably much shyer. It was high time to be making an effort.

  “New job for you, Nurse?” he ventured when she got to his bed.

  She gave him her open, schoolroom smile. (A bumpy tennis court, he thought; red-hot-pokers in the border, and a few cobby old trees with a hammock they call the orchard; a pensioned-off gun-dog who sits in with Daddy, and a wire-haired terrier you couldn’t show, but a good listener.) “I do wish these beds had wheels, I can’t get behind them properly.”

  “Where’s the maid, off sick?”

  “No, they’ve left.”

  “What, not all of them?”

  “Yes—oh, I’m so sorry, I hope that didn’t jog your leg. They thought it was too isolated.”

  “Oh, they did?” said Reg Barker. A walking patient, he saw a number of small fatigues coming his way. “That’s too bad, that makes my heart bleed, that does. I been in some isolated places too, and so’s Spud here. See, Spud, that’s how mugs like you and me waste our lives. That’s what we ought to have done, packed it in and gone to the pictures. We wouldn’t be no trouble to anyone then.”

  Neames, who had been in a bank in civil life and was dignified, said, “From what I hear, Nurse, there’s been a good deal of mismanagement over staff conditions here.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” said Nurse Adrian correctly. She hurried on. Everyone in earshot, except Charlot, settled down to a solid army grouse.

  “Quiet, everyone, please,” said the Charge Nurse. A clump of white coats had appeared in the doorway.

  Laurie stubbed out his cigarette, moistened his lips, and waited. They would start on the other side and take more than half an hour to reach him. The thing was to be prepared for the worst; and at once he imagined Major Ferguson saying, “Well, Odell, I think we can get you back the full use of that leg. A few exercises and some massage …” The scene presented itself to him with vivid clearness, like a landscape before a storm.

  He had no entertainment to pass the time, except the slow procession across the ward. There was a different lot of students. They came out from the large City Hospital at Bridstow. The pink young man at the end was a new one. Crowded out from the case under discussion, he was running his eye idly along the opposite line of beds. His glance lingered on Laurie; slid away with a flick of his light eyelashes; slid back and lingered again, cautiously, as a fly settles. Laurie, whose nerves were strained, began to be irritated. In heaven’s name, he thought, why so shy? Every second man in this room, on a modest estimate, must have wiped out at least one of his fellow creatures; with the gunners it might run into scores for all they know. That poor little devil with the white eyelashes, with any luck at all, will probably save enough lives to balance the book. But because something holds him back from reproducing himself in time for the next holocaust, here he is peering out at us from under a flat stone. Cheer up, darling, after all you might have invented a bigger and better bomb and got a bloody knighthood. … At this point the young man looked his way again. Rapidly, Laurie caught his eye before he could disengage it, and gave him a deliberately dazzling smile. As he had confidently expected, the young man went crimson, and merged himself deeply in the throng. I do hope, thought Laurie he won’t decide later to write me a little note. But no, I don’t think he puts much in writing. To a nunnery go, why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?

  From long practice on mornings like this, he
and Reg had perfected an almost soundless speech like that of convicts at exercise. Beg said, “Know that guy?”

  “No. Made a mistake.”

  “I’ll say. Proper sissy.” But the Sister had turned. He pretended he had only leaned over for a drink from the locker-top.

  The clump of white coats moved sluggishly on, clotting around each bed like ants around lumps of sugar.

  “Morning, Odell.”

  Laurie sat at attention, a little lopsidedly because of the cushions under his leg. “Good morning, sir.”

  “Leg more comfortable now?”

  “Yes, thank you, sir.”

  “Much drainage still, Sister?”

  “Very little now, sir.”

  “I’ll see it, please.”

  The Sister folded back the clothes, snipped the bandage, and lifted the dressing off with forceps. Major Ferguson peered down with simple pleasure, like a gardener at a choice rose. Laurie got his question ready; his hands felt rather cold.

  “I think you saw this man after his first operation, sir.”

  The question died on Laurie’s lips. He had noticed for the first time, on the visiting surgeon’s shoulders, the tabs of a brigadier.

  “… and comminuted patella,” Major Ferguson was saying. “The fractured ends of the femur were extensively exposed and penetrated with gravel and so on. The osteomyelitis responded remarkably well to sulphonamides, but, as you see, we had to open four times in all to remove various sequestra, and about a month ago we began to feel he’d probably be better off without it. However, the callus started to look more promising, and the question then was whether amputation would be justified by the increased mobility he’d get from an artificial limb.”

  “The knee’s completely ankylosed, is it?” The brigadier sounded like an intelligent player discussing a chess problem.

  “No, sir, we managed to give him a flexion of about twenty degrees, and that decided us to leave it, combined with the fact that we’ve reduced the shortening to just about an inch. The repair of the quadriceps …”

  Laurie sat at attention, eyes front. After the blow had reached him through the swathes of technical jargon, he had suddenly remembered the pink young man lurking somewhere at the back. It stiffened his pride, which the two specialists had made to seem nugatory, a trivial reflex like a knee-jerk. Laurie schooled his face, for the necessary minutes, to a wooden noncomprehension; and soon he was alone again, half hearing the exchange of Charlot’s patois and the surgeon’s public-school French. Then he slipped down in bed with the caution of a criminal, lest the counterpane should be disturbed and some nurse come to straighten it. Luckily this fear was a kind of distraction; soon he was able to blot his eyes on the sheet and come to the surface again.

  Reg was maneuvering a book in front of his face, signal of a wish to talk. Suddenly Laurie felt a great craving for simple, platitudinous sympathy. He turned around, and held a paper up too.

  Reg said, “Had a letter from me dad today.”

  “M-m?” The doctors had worked over the next few beds quickly; they were nearing the door. Laurie realized a delayed impression which his tension had excluded before, that all day Reg had been rather like an actor gagging to cover up. “Your dad all right?”

  “Dad’s okay. Me better half’s gone off the rails, that’s all.”

  Laurie remembered the letter coming and the long silence after. An awful sense of inadequacy appeared ahead of him, like a gulf into which he would have to step. He murmured, “Things get garbled. Gossip and so on.”

  “Gossip?” Reg’s coarse-grained forehead puckered down the middle, so that the reddish hairs of his eyebrows met. “She’s gone to live with the mucker, and she’s took our boy.”

  “Bloody shame,” said Laurie, desperately trying to make emphasis do the work of sense. Madge Barker was a dumpy, bosomy girl with a dusty, mouse-colored parting in her platinum hair, which she wore shoulder-length, emphasizing the shortness of her neck. Her real-good-sort façade was not so much false as slovenly, like a cover flung over an unmade bed. She looked at every man she met as if there were only one thing she wanted to know about him, but her speech was terrifyingly genteel. Laurie detested her.

  “Boy’s turned six now,” Reg was saying. “Kids that age understand.”

  “They’ll give you custody.” Thankfully Laurie accepted the side issue.

  “Who’d I get to look after him? ’S not just the kid.”

  “No, of course. It’s hell.”

  “You’re right,” said Reg, and fell silent. But Laurie felt a heavy certainty that he was waiting; for sympathy, for fellow feeling. He felt like a man who has strolled empty-handed into a famine area.

  “She can’t be worth it. Treating you like that.” But, he thought immediately after, perhaps she was, perhaps he ought to be urging Reg to understand, to win her back.

  “Too true she’s not. But it’s one thing to know you been a mucking fool, it’s another to learn sense.” His face reddened. A shiny rim began to form along his lower lids.

  “You know, my father wasn’t faithful to my mother. She minded a lot at the time, but she’s all right now.”

  “It’s not the same for a woman. That’s their lot, and nature made them to stand it. But a man’s nature’s different.”

  “Is it? It’s bloody hell, Reg, I know. I’m terribly sorry.”

  “Her sister’s a good girl. Looked after the mother and got passed over like. Our dad would have rather I’d picked Ireen, I know. But she hadn’t the life in her that Madge had.” He snatched a handkerchief from the pillow and blew his nose.

  “If she got sick of all this would you take her back?”

  “No. Never.” Reg swallowed convulsively. “I couldn’t never go with her again, thinking of how she’d been with him.” He swallowed again; there was a pause. “But I’d never get used to no one else. She was one of those that know what a man needs—I used to think she only learned it thinking of me.” Suddenly he turned over with his back to Laurie, and held up the book close to his face.

  “Goodness, they have left you in a mess.” It was the Charge Nurse with the dressing trolley, making the bandages good. The doctors had been gone some minutes. The nurse bandaged the leg and straightened the bed, tutting mildly. He lay looking at the ceiling, wondering whether to tell his mother by letter or wait till she came.

  “Qu’est-ce que tu as, Spoddi?” He turned to meet Charlot’s kind, vague eyes. Here was someone who could be told without bothering Reg. If he could tell just one person it was all he wanted. He said in French, “It’s only something the doctor has just said about my leg—that it will always be stiff, and shorter than the other, and that all my life I shall be lame.”

  “That is bad,” said Charlot slowly. “That is a wicked thing.” Suddenly a spasm of extraordinary violence convulsed his face. The filthy Boches. Animals. Pigs. …” Laurie could only guess at the next few words. “When the war is over we shall split the gullets of these assassins. All … all—”

  “Oh, I don’t know. If you hanged the lot of them it wouldn’t put back an inch on my leg.”

  “The world knows what they are. They are—”

  “Yes,” said Laurie soothingly. “Yes, I know.” He had been forgetting the Germans, and was ashamed of his lack of tact.

  “You’re having your stitches out soon,” said a shy, cool voice beside him. “I heard Major Ferguson telling Sister.”

  It was Nurse Adrian. He looked around, smiling. The emotions of the anesthetic were still tangled in his consciousness; he felt at once that it was she all the time whom he had really wanted. Her hand, resting on the locker, looked cool and slim, with nice bones.

  “You’ll be up again before long,” she said. “What’s the matter, is it aching?”

  “Not much, thanks.” He looked at her again, longing to speak; but he could only think of things too simple to say. “I shall always be different,” he wanted to tell her; and some part of his mind expected that she would
say “No,” and everything would be changed. “It only aches on and off now,” he said, to fill the pause which already she might be noticing. She had none of that awful knowingness; one could take one’s time with her, hesitate, and she would only be grateful. “Different?” she would say, surprised. “But of course you’re not.”

  “I’ll ask Sister for some A.P.C. for you,” she said.

  “No, really, it’s all right.” As she stood looking down at him in kind anxiety, he saw what his own trouble had hidden before, that she was dog-tired and harried to death. Strands of her fair hair were slipping down damply under her cap; her face was shiny like a schoolgirl’s after hockey; the inside of her hand was soggy and rough, she must have been scrubbing somewhere out of sight. She had the air of giving up appearances and expecting nothing. He remembered that both the maids and the nurses had always seemed to have a full-time job, and there were no maids today.

  “Thanks all the same,” he said, “but it’s gone off now, it feels fine.” On a sudden impulse, because she looked plain and didn’t deserve to, he added, “Seeing you must have cured it.”

  “Silly,” she said offhandedly; but she gave him a quick, shy smile as she went on to the next locker.

  “Now then, Spud,” said Reg, suddenly reappearing. “At it again. Ought to be ashamed. Here, I never asked you, what did the old man say about your leg? He was going on long enough.”

  “God knows,” said Laurie. “It was just Greek to me.”

  They put Reg into an airplane splint next day. It supported his arm outwards on a level with his shoulder, flexed at the elbow. Learning not to knock people down as he passed them gave him an occupation. He wrote Madge a long letter. Laurie had his stitches out, and was allowed up. This was his fourth convalescence; there was nothing to it, except that, as usual, he found when he used the crutch again that his arm muscles had gone soft. The stick would come later; he had only graduated to a stick once before.

  In the evening, when he came back to the ward from the kitchen where he had been washing up, he was pleased to notice still more progress in Reg. Not only was he not sitting alone, but he had a grouse. It was plainly a stirring, public and noisy one. His face looked a healthier color already. He was sitting on the end of Neames’s bed. Between Reg and Neames there was always something of a class war; so Laurie realized the grouse must be serious, and he had better be in on it.