The Charioteer

by Mary Renault

  Andrew didn’t take it away. He returned a friendly pressure, smiling in the pale light; at a loss and anxious to hide it. Why not, thought Laurie, slipping away into a lonely understanding. He had been behaving very oddly, quite unlike himself; and to someone who had had nothing he must still smell of drink.

  “I’m glad you’re all right,” said Andrew softly. “We had a warning here, so I wondered.”

  “You shouldn’t have worried. A funny thing happened, I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

  “It was a big day for you, meeting your friend again.”

  Nurse Sims must have said something, then. Suddenly he remembered saying to Andrew in the woods that he and Ralph wouldn’t know each other if they met. “What a grapevine this place is. However did you get that?”

  “He gave me his name,” said Andrew, “when I answered the telephone. Sleep well; good night.”

  The moonlight shifted silently. Charlot’s uneasy sleep had turned to one of his nightmares; he started to fight the bedclothes and to mutter, “Au secours!” Kept wakeful by the sound, Laurie saw again the endless interlocking chain of the world’s sorrow, and Andrew’s face, no longer secure in the secret orchard, but locked and moving with the chain.

  7

  “SO IT’S OFFICERS NOW, eh?” said Reg. “That run you into something, I reckon. Saloon bar stuff.”

  “Bit of free. A party at someone’s flat.”

  “Ah. Nice girls?”

  “Fine.” If only one had notice of these questions, Laurie thought. The answer that seemed to save trouble on the spur of the moment hardly ever did. Sure enough, a few more minutes’ cross-examination had involved him in factual accounts of Alec’s wife, Ralph’s girl friend, and his own partner, for whom he had to supply a service career as well as complexion, clothes, and a name.

  He was so tired that he slept all afternoon, a thing he hadn’t done since ceasing to be a bed patient; and the strangeness of waking from a sleep so deep that it had drowned the noises of the ward, to altered light and the evening routine, made everything seem even more different than it had before. The twilight struck chilly as he went outside. He experienced for the first time that special dread brought by the first touch of winter to lovers who have nowhere to meet except out of doors.

  “You’ve been catching up with your sleep,” said Andrew, smiling in the lane (it was the same spot where Ralph had stopped the car last night). “Now you know how I feel every evening.”

  “There’s Christian charity for you. As a matter of fact I wasn’t as drunk last night as you probably thought.”

  “No?” said Andrew, looking at him amusedly. In sudden panic he paused to drill his disorganized inhibitions. If he hadn’t been drunk, then what was supposed to have happened? Dimly he was aware that it wasn’t the loose talk at the party which was making him careless now; it was the dark confessional of the car on the long empty road. It seemed to him that there was nothing he couldn’t have said, and very little that he hadn’t.

  “It wasn’t the drink,” he said lightly, “so much as the dope.”

  “It sounds quite a party.” Andrew didn’t appear uncontrollably amused. Unwillingly, Laurie explained.

  “It was rather trusting of you to swallow the stuff without even asking what it was. Do you like him as much as you did at school?”

  “I don’t know.” The electrifying pertinence of Andrew’s questions seemed always to be taking him off guard. “I never knew him well at school, you know. He still seems a pretty good type to me.”

  They went up the lane between October hedges draped with flossy swags of old-man’s-beard. Laurie was saying to himself that it would soon cease to seem so important, this discovery he had made that, instead of accepting concealment as a permanent condition of his life, he had merely been enduring it.

  Andrew said, continuing the almost unbroken conversation, “He seems to have made a great hit with Nurse Sims. I’ve never seen anyone bridle on the telephone before.”

  “I hope he didn’t overdo it.”

  “Is he married?”

  “No.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  For a moment Laurie was attacked by an almost ungovernable impatience; a feeling of the utter waste of time involved in going through the motions of exposition, where no possibility of enlightenment exists. “Well, he was Head of the House two years before me, only he was Head of the School as well—”

  “Head of the School? He must have been a very democratic one.”

  “I keep telling you I didn’t really know him. I never spoke to him apart from routine till the day he left.”

  “Yes, I see. When he gave you the Plato?”

  “I expect he was having an orgy of giving away everything he couldn’t find room to pack.”

  “It was a nice thing to choose, though. Not what one would give to the first person who came along.”

  “Well, naturally it pleased me to think so, at the time.”

  “So then he joined the navy.”

  “No, the merchant service actually.”

  “As an apprentice or something?”

  “No, as a deck hand, I think. He was keen on adventure, and roughing it, and all that.”

  “He sounds very strong-minded. Is he doing well?”

  “He’s had half his hand blown off. They won’t give him another ship.”

  “It must be a bad time for him. A little sad, I expect, to meet someone who’d only known him in the days of his glory.”

  Laurie tried to look at the intrinsic kindness of this rather than its unconscious cruelty. He said quickly, “Well, he hardly needed to worry about that with me. Only a few minutes before I met him, I’d found out that he saved my life.”

  “How?” said Andrew. Laurie saw it then, when it was too late to do anything but go on.

  “Well, perhaps that’s rather a stagy way of putting it. He commanded the ship that brought me back from Dunkirk, that’s all.”

  “How lucky you found out in time.” There was a helpless and painful silence.

  One might almost as well, thought Laurie, have said it aloud. Because he did for me what you wouldn’t do, I’m alive to be with you now. Here at last, stripped of the secondary things, of motive and praise and blame, were the bare bones of logic, grinning in the sun.

  Laurie said urgently, “Look, my dear, we’ve had all this in principle. Let’s be sensible when something concrete turns up. We knew this whole position before we’d even spoken to each other for the first time.”

  “This isn’t the school debating society. This happened to you. Do you think I’ve got no imagination at all?” He was looking away.

  “God, you have to take people for what they are, not for what you expect to get out of them. Why do you suppose I fell”—his tongue stiffened. What had possessed him?—“felt we’d get on together?”

  “Laurie, you don’t look yourself this evening. Are you feeling all right?”

  “Of course I am. Let’s go up to the beechwood.”

  It was warm in Limbo, in the dry mast-filled hollow out of the wind; but it was a close fit for two, and when they had talked for a while and fallen silent, Laurie found himself remembering Ralph’s story about the sub-lieutenant. But that had been different. A kind of starter’s pistol went off in his head. It said, “Why?”

  He knew that he had only asked the question because he had just found out the answer. Ralph’s had been a story in which no moral choice existed, only impossibility and a desire excluded by the facts of life. It was Andrew who was the difference.

  At once there seemed never to have been a day when he hadn’t known this; he looked back with wonder at the times when he had waited, in so much doubt and uncertainty, for Andrew to make himself known. How should he confess what he himself had not discovered? All yesterday evening Laurie had been, consciously and subconsciously, using his eyes, and noticing little things; and now, when he looked at Andrew, it seemed written all over him.

  After all, thoug
ht Laurie, it wasn’t so hard to understand. Too much had been put on the boy too young. The army traditions which, however repudiated, must still have roots in him; the uncompromising ethic he had accepted; the certainty, as war came nearer, of the coming choice which would violate half his nature either way: all this had been for him the anticipated responsibility of manhood. It had been enough: his whole organism had known the impossibility of accepting more. But escape, and unconscious escape most of all, is like a usurer; it heaps up the liability. Andrew’s present liability had become more than either half of his divided nature was made to bear. To make him aware of it, thought Laurie quite clearly, would scatter his whole capital of belief in himself. He must never know.

  With the tail of his eye he saw Andrew look at him and, respecting his concentration, turn away. Andrew recognized thought as a human activity. He stretched contentedly in the dry beech-mast; almost absently, Laurie moved to settle him more comfortably. Andrew looked up at him. “Hello. How’ve you been keeping all this time?”

  “Oh, well but busy, you know. Sorry.”

  “It’s all right. About the only time you ever get to be alone is when you’re with me. I take it as a compliment.”

  A faint blue mist, which the small morning hours would crystallize into frost, was furring already the dead leaves on the ground. When he got back to the ward Reg said, “That knee packed up, Spud?”

  “Not too bad.”

  “You want to watch it, sitting out these cold evenings. Get the rheumatics in it, that’s all you need. When do you go for this electric treatment?”

  “Tuesday.”

  “You better be getting the old alibi ready.”

  “Oh, I shan’t want that again.”

  Beds were tidied, lights put out; in a little spotlit circle at the desk, the Sister gave the Night Nurse the report. When the telephone rang she waited irritably till the day orderly came to the desk. “Oh, well, yes, I suppose so. But tell him he must ask his friend not to do it again, it’s very inconvenient.”

  Laurie was out of bed already, reaching for his dressing-gown. Although he hadn’t expected it before tomorrow, still the anticipation had subtly colored, and faintly disturbed, the day.

  “Hello, Spuddy. I thought I’d just make sure you hadn’t been put back on the danger list, or up for court-martial, or anything.”

  “No, you fixed that. Everything’s fine.”

  “Is it? Good.”

  The empty wire crackled faintly. It hadn’t occurred to Laurie to have any conversation ready; one always imagined Ralph taking charge. Now, sensing at the other end a tentativeness at least equal to his own, he felt suddenly afraid of drying up. The thought of Ralph ringing off after a few perfunctory commonplaces came to him with a terrible sense of flatness, disappointment, and failure. He hadn’t anticipated any of this. However, in the end they talked for nearly ten minutes.

  When he got back Reg said, “You look better, Spud. Coming in just now you looked properly cheesed.”

  “Oh, it just wanted a bit of rest.”

  Charlot turned his rough curly head on his fixed shoulders. “I think a nice girl ring for you, Spoddi, bit of all right, yes?” He grinned benevolently.

  “Not this time, no such luck.” He was dismayed to feel that he had blushed violently. But the lights were dim and probably Reg had noticed nothing.

  Nurse Sims turned off the radio, and everyone settled down for the night.

  “Leg okay now?” whispered Reg.

  “Yes, thanks, fine.”

  “Your officer friend dating you up again?”

  “We might have a drink or a meal or something next time I go up.”

  “Odell, Barker. Lights are out, in case you didn’t know it.”

  She was at the desk for some time, ruling lines in a book. By the time she went outside again he thought Reg was asleep.

  “Spud.”

  “Hello?”

  “This officer now. No offense, Spud. But know him well at school? To know what he’s like, mean to say?”

  “Oh, yes, I think so.”

  “What I mean, you’d know if he’s on the level and that?”

  “Good God, yes.”

  “No offense, I hope, Spud?”

  “Of course not. Takes a pal to do your worrying for you.” Over the time of Madge’s flight, Laurie had learned to talk this language almost without embarrassment, and was relieved to find it still came back to him.

  “That’s right. How some might look at it, though, worrying’s one thing, noseying’s another. Got to think of that.” He sunk his voice till Laurie had to lean half out of bed to hear it. “Don’t mind me, Spud. Interfering with what I don’t know nothing about, sticking out my big neck and asking for it, you don’t have to tell me. See, Spud, how it is, you done plenty of worrying for me, and I reckon that didn’t always come easy, putting yourself in my place. If that don’t make sense, forget it. All I want to say—any trouble, any time, don’t make no difference if it’s not my kind of trouble, not to me it don’t, no more’n what it done to you. A pal’s a pal the same all the world over. Well, that’s the lot, least said soonest mended. Night, Spud.”

  “Night, Reg. Thanks. God bless.”

  He lay looking at the ceiling: a number of little things came back to him, starting with the girls in the blackout. He wondered whether Reg had done his own simple addition, or whether someone else, Neames for instance, had totted it up for him. In any case, this was it. It had caught him up. If he hadn’t expected it he had been a fool, and the sooner he got used to it now the better.

  The soft rattle of the trolley, and the chink of crockery, sounded at the doors. He didn’t need to look. He heard the slight noises of things being shifted on the lockers to make room for the mugs. As the homely domestic sounds drew nearer, he thought that the ward was quieter than usual, that no one was saying much.

  There had never been a time when he hadn’t thought of himself as one of this company the mischance of battle had brought together: one with a secret, as many others had of one sort or another; one with an oddity, but there were plenty of those. Lovell, who had owned a freak-booth that toured the fairs; Jansen, who was three parts colored; Willis; Charlot; Odell, who had started with the handicap of “talking posh.” Now in a cold solitude he imagined, everywhere in the shadows, men quietly watching, curious, or mocking, or repelled, according to their kind, but all thanking their Maker for the solidarity that didn’t include him. Then he remembered that it wouldn’t be he, lying down protected by the shadows and made cautious by self-knowledge, who would entertain them most, but Andrew in his unguarded innocence.

  There was nothing to do about it. He couldn’t pretend to sleep, for Andrew must have heard him talking to Ralph just now; it would seem like a slap in the face. He couldn’t do anything, except behave as if nothing were the matter. The trolley rattled up.

  “Hello, Andrew.”

  “Hello, Laurie. Did we walk too far today?”

  “Of course not.” He held out his mug. “Thanks.”

  “I think we did. Have you had your A.P.C.?”

  “Yes, thanks. I’m going to sleep now.” But Andrew, who had never had a dismissal from him before, didn’t recognize one when he heard it.

  “There’s quite a party going on in our hut tonight. You know Richard on Ward A? He’s just got engaged.” He was speaking softly, not to disturb the other patients. Something like this happened nearly every night. No doubt it looked very intimate. Andrew had never had a moment’s concern about it. That everyone knew they were friends was a thing he took for granted.

  “Good show.” But he said it too warmly, torn between the longing for Andrew to go and the dread of showing it.

  “Yes, it is; you see when the war started he wouldn’t ask her, he didn’t think it was fair. But she kept on writing, and finally, the other day—”

  “Good for her,” said Laurie, cutting him off short. Where did he think he was, exposing this naked happiness and trust?
It was time he learned to be decent.

  Andrew’s face changed. One day Laurie had been swishing a stick about, and caught his dog a cracking blow by accident; he had looked incredulous and bewildered, just like this.

  Suddenly Laurie thought, Oh, damn the lot of them. He smiled up at Andrew and said, “Tell me all about it in the kitchen.”

  “No, don’t get up tonight, you’re tired.”

  “Oh, wrap it up. Of course I’m coming.”

  Later, when he had seen Andrew go out from the sluice to the kitchen, he lay looking at the dim face of the clock on the wall. Five minutes, he thought. He had always waited for five minutes, not to make it obvious. He wondered how many people, for how long, had been having a quiet laugh about it

  Five minutes passed. He got out of bed, and put on his slippers; they felt odd and lopsided nowadays, after the boot. He reached for his dressing-gown and his stick. A mattress creaked as someone turned over; the twenty yards between his bed and the door seemed suddenly very long. He would have liked to cover them with a little more speed or a little more grace. No, he thought, it was really too naïve to get so upset about it; one was supposed to carry off this kind of thing with a flick of the wrist and a light laugh which would tell the world one hadn’t been trying. Playing at hearties with all these dreary common people; my dear, I’m exhausted, I couldn’t have been more bored.

  Suddenly, as if the memory had been kept in storage especially for this, he saw with extraordinary vividness Ralph’s face against the background of the dismantled study. Ralph had been nineteen. And here was a grown man in wartime making such heavy weather of so little.

  Earlier today, during one of the current invasion rumors, Laurie had pictured an English Thermopylae behind the Home Guard roadblocks; amid the last-ditch grimness of this vision there had intruded a vague exhilaration, and he realized that he had imagined Ralph beside him. So, but much more so, it was now, and with this sudden comfort he found he had got to the door, and was outside in the shelter of the corridor.

  He would have been glad of a few minutes’ pause before going on. But the sound of his step was too individual; already Andrew would have recognized it.