The Charioteer

by Mary Renault

  Andrew came back to say that Nurse Sims was doing a dressing behind screens, so they began work on Charlot together, changing his pajama jacket and the soiled bed-linen. From the far side of the bed Laurie could see, whenever he looked up, Andrew’s bent head ringed with soft light from the shaded lamp on the locker. It made a gold blur around the edges of his hair. It was as if, thought Laurie, one were idealizing in memory someone already lost.

  Suddenly for the first time he felt the parting to come as implicit in them from the moment of their first meeting. He wanted to reject this: if he could talk to Andrew, he thought, it would be exorcised. But it wouldn’t be easy, or even decent now. While Andrew was taking the dirty things to the sluice Laurie looked down at the bed again, and listened to the clockwork breathing. During his months in hospital he had seen death’s approach several times. Just then, waking from a moment of stupor, Charlot plucked at his sleeve and spoke his name.

  “Qu’est-ce que tu as, Charlot?” said Laurie helplessly. His emotions refracted from his own concerns focused in an intense point of compassion like the center of a burning-glass. Chariot’s almost animal state gave him the feeling one can have with a dying dog, that one is being trusted like God and is going to fail.

  “Can you hear what he wants?” asked Andrew anxiously at the door.

  “Not when you’re talking.” He had never snapped at Andrew in his life. “Sorry.” They bent to listen together; but this seemed to frighten Charlot, who tried to push them back with a waving arm. Laurie said, “There’s no point in our both hanging over him. It only puts him off.”

  Andrew withdrew obediently and stood back against the wall. Laurie sat down by Charlot on the edge of the bed and took his hand. His speech had become more jerky and agitated, and was now quite incoherent; he seemed to be begging for something. Andrew tried him with the bed-bottle, but he pushed it away, and, turning toward Laurie, seemed to look for a few minutes straight into his face. Laurie leaned over him and stroked his coarse, curly hair. “Qu’est-ce que tu voudrais, dis-le moi, je t’écoute; look, it’s me.”

  “Spoddi,” said Charlot thickly. Laurie felt his hand stir and tighten. His eyes had stopped wandering; Laurie could have sworn he knew whom he was talking to. Of his next few words it was possible to recognize several; Laurie heard the name of some French curé and the words péché mortel. His heart contracted. All other thoughts were swamped by the idea that Charlot had struggled to the surface for a moment, had looked into his face and made this appeal to him alone. He turned to Andrew and said, “He wants a priest.”

  For a moment there was no answer, and Laurie realized that just then Andrew had been entirely away from him.

  Sometimes when they were sitting quietly somewhere out of doors, Andrew would withdraw into himself, and Laurie, without any wish to interrupt him, used to sit silent, watching him with admiration and love. Now suddenly he felt alone and excluded. The sudden pain mixed itself with the pity he had been feeling for Charlot before. He felt urgent and desperate, without understanding the nature of what he felt.

  Andrew said, “I’ll tell Nurse. We must ring for Father James.” He looked once more at Charlot and went quietly out of the room.

  Charlot’s face had slackened and grown heavy; even his eyes did not move. When Laurie squeezed his hand he murmured something faintly. Andrew had said, while they were changing the sheet, that a brain specialist was coming out to look at him in the morning; he might have to go to Bridstow for an operation. With luck Father James would get there in time to see him first. But before long, even if he was still alive, he would have receded out of Father James’s reach. He had only asked, Laurie thought, for this one thing.

  Just then Andrew came back into the room and said, “We can’t get through to the presbytery. I suppose the wire’s been bombed somewhere; they said try again in two hours.”

  “That’s a long time.”

  Andrew looked at him quickly. “Nurse is coming as soon as she’s got a minute.”

  “It’s always later than one thinks.”

  Andrew looked at his face, and after a second or two said slowly, “You’ve heard something, haven’t you? You’ve got your discharge, you’re going away.”

  “Never mind all that now.” He did not know why he spoke so curtly. On the way, he had planned all kinds of gentle ways of breaking the news. He saw the startled grief on Andrew’s face, and, without letting it come clearly into his mind, felt a secret primitive satisfaction; insecurity wants always to make its mark. But his concern for Charlot, which was perfectly real, allowed him to lose sight of all this quickly.

  “We’ll talk later on,” he said. “Look, Andrew, we must do something about this while it’s still some use. He’s forgotten who you are. If I tell him you’re a priest it will be all right.”

  The unhappiness in Andrew’s face gave way to a blank, flat bewilderment. He looked at Laurie as if expecting him to say he hadn’t meant it. Laurie only waited impatiently. At last Andrew said, “But of course we can’t do that.”

  Laurie knew that he had expected Andrew to say this. His desperation, compounded of more pressures than one, at once began turning to anger.

  “Oh, God. What difference does it make? He can’t talk sense anyway. Just so he can go feeling it’s all right.”

  “You know we can’t do it,” Andrew said. He stared at Laurie with a lost, exploring look.

  Laurie had a reasonless but terrible feeling of having been discovered and condemned. He tried to push it away, but his mind still felt shocked, bleeding and raw. “But you don’t believe those church things matter. So long as what he feels is right. You’ve always said so. It isn’t much to do for him.”

  Andrew said, as if he hardly knew now what words would be simple enough, “But it’s not what we believe. He’s a Catholic. You know what that means as well as I do.”

  “It’s my responsibility,” Laurie said, “suppose anyone’s chalking it up.” He met defiantly Andrew’s straight gray eyes. “Not his. Or yours, if that’s how you feel.”

  “It’s a responsibility neither of us has any right whatever to take.” Andrew’s face had set with decision; Laurie felt that it had hardened against him. “He’s a human being. When he was himself he chose this creed. Now he’s ill and doesn’t know the difference, we can’t possibly deceive him. Laurie, you must see that.” There was appeal in his face. Laurie felt he was being asked to deny not only this, but everything. With a sudden stab of nostalgia he thought, Ralph would have understood.

  “You’re pretty hard, aren’t you?” he said.

  Andrew had read in Laurie’s eyes the will to hurt, his altered face showed it. It showed too that he knew he was being punished partly for what he was and believed. He said, “That doesn’t mean anything. A thing’s right or it isn’t.”

  “How simple,” Laurie said.

  Their eyes met and Laurie felt for an instant that a knowledge had passed between them so fundamental that the special fact, which had seemed so significant all this time, was only a trivial detail of it, unnoticed as yet. Andrew said earnestly, but without the smallest wavering of decision, “Don’t you see, some things are too important to be tampered with for any reason at all.”

  A land of déjà entendu twitched at Laurie’s mind; then he remembered Major Ferguson. The thought made him angrier and more injured; but he still felt himself to be moved only on Charlot’s behalf. Andrew was standing very straight. As on rare occasions before, his blood was showing in him; in his gray hospital-orderly’s coat he looked more like a soldier than Laurie did in his battle-dress. He was distinct and separate and far away, and strikingly good-looking.

  “For God’s sake,” said Laurie, even now remembering not to raise his voice, “don’t stand there like St. Sebastian full of arrows, thinking of nothing but your own bloody principles. When you care about people you can’t always be so choosy. Go outside, then, and keep yourself clean. I’ll manage here. Charlot and I understand each other.”
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br />   What he had said came home to him only gradually, like the collapse of a wall which starts with a few loose bricks.

  Andrew stood where he was. His face had a pinched look, as if he were cold. You could see the bone-structure of character showing, the shape of the winter tree.

  “I’m sorry, Andrew. I lost my temper. I didn’t mean all that.”

  “Whatever you meant,” said Andrew in a voice of ashes, “I’ve been given this job to do and I must do it. I can’t leave it just for a personal reason.”

  For a moment, this putting him in his place seemed to Laurie the last affront. He felt he would say anything to revenge himself and only delayed to make the telling choice; but this was not true, he was losing time by putting aside one weapon after another as too base to use, shocked by what he had used already. During this interval he recovered part of his reason and saw Andrew freshly, as he stood.

  With an increase of effort which left him with a drained, almost empty look, Andrew said, “I know you only wanted to help him; I realize that.”

  “Andrew, I must have gone off my head. I can’t think how I—I’m sorry.”

  There was an oxygen cylinder standing in the corner; it was the stiff, seized-up one that couldn’t be used, kept here out of the way. Andrew went over to it and picked up the spanner, turned it about in his hands for a moment, then suddenly fitted it to the cylinder head and gave it a violent wrench. The gas hissed like an angry snake; he wrenched the spanner back again and shut it off.

  “That’s all right,” he said. He looked at his hands; there were deep crimson weals across his palms. “This thing works after all.” He hung the spanner back.

  “Yes, does it?” Andrew’s face at the moment of attacking the cylinder had been something of a revelation. “Look, I was wrong about that.” He was only just starting to realize how wrong. It occurred to him too for the first time that Charlot’s mind might have been wandering back to some confession five or fifteen years old. “I’m sorry, Andrew.”

  They were interrupted by a guttural sound from the bed. As they turned, Charlot, who had been quite quiet, began to have a kind of epileptic fit. They held his head away from the wall while he jerked like a huge, grotesque marionette; even the legs moved, which had not moved for so long. When it was over he sank into a deep, heavily relaxed unconsciousness; his face was dark, one side of his mouth sagged, his breathing was loud and very slow. They spoke to him, touched him, dug their fingers into his arms. He made no response at all.

  They looked at each other. Andrew said, “I’ll go and get Nurse.”

  She arrived this time in a matter of seconds. When she turned away from the bed the first thing she said was, “Odell, what are you doing here? Go back to bed at once.” She watched him out of the room; there was no chance to make peace with Andrew even by a look.

  In the ward he found half the men awake and asking what had been going on. Some were grumbling because they needed this or that and there was no orderly. Laurie went around and got them what they wanted as well as he could. After a while the talking died down; he heard the voices of doctors arriving outside, of Major Ferguson’s assistant using the telephone, and, about half an hour later, of an ambulance driving up. Then suddenly everything was quiet again; Nurse Sims came in and sat down at the desk, looking all around with suspicion as if trying to guess what they had been up to while she had been gone.

  The night deepened and grew cold, the local air-raid siren went, and the darkness tightened like stretched gauze. Once the mobile gun was heard stuttering in the distance. Andrew came in at last, his work outside done, and made a round of the patients, most of whom were by now asleep. He reached Laurie’s bed, stood by the locker and looked down, trying after the bright light outside to see if Laurie was awake. Laurie slid out a hand and touched his wrist. “What happened?” he asked softly.

  “They’ve taken him to the big hospital for a decompression.” He paused and added, “They don’t think he’ll make it.” Laurie, whose eyes were at home in the darkness, saw clearly the strain in his face.

  He whispered, “See you in the kitchen after she gets back from her meal.”

  It was eleven-fifty. Ten minutes later Nurse Sims went out, and Andrew, whom this left in charge of the ward, sat down as usual at the desk. Soon Laurie felt he had been lying forever watching the hand of the clock crawl and the dusky light on Andrew’s bent head. At last Nurse Sims came back again. Laurie gave it a couple of minutes and went out.

  Andrew was getting ready a little tray for Nurse’s coffee. Laurie had never met him in the kitchen quite so late. The cracking of the hot pipes sounded enormous, and the throb of a single plane overhead widened in great spreading rings like a pebble dropped in a still pool. A silence as wide as the night sky closed them in, and all the world’s sleep lay heavy over them. Laurie was aching with weariness; his eyes felt dry, and his face drawn with it.

  “I had to see you,” he said. “You know I—you can’t go on feeling—no, I mean it, Andrew, you must believe I do.”

  “You shouldn’t have stayed awake,” said Andrew in a flat kind voice. “You look terribly tired.” He got some milk from the refrigerator and filled a cup with it. “Would you rather have it hot?”

  “No, thanks, this is fine.” He drank it mechanically, watching Andrew. “Look, just because that happened after what I said to you—it was a filthy thing to say and when I said it I knew it wasn’t true. I just got emotional and lost my grip.”

  Andrew smiled at him, and for an instant he had the illusion of looking at someone older than himself. “You’d take back what happened, too, wouldn’t you, if you could?”

  “That makes no difference.” He hadn’t realized how Andrew’s certainties, including those he didn’t believe himself to share, had knit themselves into his cosmos. Now to see them shaken was not pathetic but terrible. “I was wrong, of course. It was a thing Charlot wouldn’t have wanted done, if he’d understood.”

  “I know,” said Andrew. “I didn’t mean that.” He looked straight in front of him. “It was about me you were right.”

  “God, no, Andrew, I wasn’t. I wasn’t even trying to be. I was just bitching you because—well, I was in a mood, and one thing and another. I can’t tell you. Just take my word.”

  “Everything that was actually done for him,” said Andrew slowly, “was done by you. I couldn’t think beyond what not to do. If I … if my mind had been where it should have been, I’d have known what ought to be done, something would have come to me.”

  “That was my fault too.”

  “No. No, it wasn’t your fault.”

  “Look, Andrew. I ought to know. I do this kind of thing. I get steamed up about things that happen to people till I’ve got to do something or burst, and if it turns out to do more harm than good, hell, what’s the odds, it did good to me. At school for instance. A man—one of the boys I mean, was going to be sacked, and because I liked him I took for granted he couldn’t have done it, and I was all set to have raised hell and involved a lot of other people. And all the time he’d done it after all.”

  Andrew, who had listened intently, said, “It must have been rather horrible finding out.”

  Laurie said quickly, “I didn’t. He told me himself, to keep me out of trouble.”

  “Oh.” There was a pause; then Andrew looked up. “What was it? What had he done?”

  Laurie had not thought of this question. “I don’t think I ought to tell you that.”

  “No, of course. Sorry.” Andrew looked away. Laurie saw too late that there was no good reason not to tell, unless the person concerned was one whom Andrew knew of. After a few moments’ silence Andrew picked up the tray. “I must take Nurse her coffee, she’ll be wondering.”

  “I’ll wait for you.”

  “No, don’t. You look done up. Go and get some sleep.”

  “I’d rather wait. There won’t be very much longer.”

  Andrew turned, the tray of coffee in his hand, and looked
at it blindly as if he had to get rid of it but couldn’t think how.

  “Take that first,” Laurie said. “Don’t worry, it’s all right.” Andrew went out quickly.

  When he got back, Laurie explained about the transfer, leaving it to be inferred that he had heard of it at the other hospital. He wouldn’t be far away, he told Andrew; after he was discharged he could often come over, he could stay at some farm. … Andrew said at intervals suitable things: that it was a good thing they had noticed the boot, and so on. It didn’t take them long to get through all this.

  “I’ve never known this place without you,” Andrew said. “We got here at night, you know it was quite dark, and in the morning, before I’d been working half an hour, we met.”

  “We never did get that record of the oboe concerto, in the end.”

  Andrew attempted to smile. “No. So now it will be one of those tunes that people have.”

  “Don’t talk like that. As if we—”

  After a pause Andrew said, “This doesn’t seem very—very sensible. Other people aren’t like this.”

  “That doesn’t make any difference.”

  “No.”

  “You’ll have Dave back in a day or two.”

  “Dave? … I heard from him today. He’s working in the East End, he wants to stay there.”

  Like most people, Laurie had heard more about the blitz than the papers were printing. “Does he have to do that?”

  “He can go where he likes, he’s years over military age. It’s because of Cynthia, I know.” Andrew gave him a strange bewildered look and added, “I know how he feels. No, that must sound stupid. I mean I—”

  “Yes,” said Laurie. “Yes, it’s all right.”

  “How is it that—I’ve often liked people enough to talk to them, but—things I’d feel a fool saying to anyone else in the world—I don’t always tell you, one doesn’t of course, but I always feel I could and you’d know what they meant better than I do.”