The Charioteer

by Mary Renault

  He stretched again, lazy, easy, and confident. His left arm was flung out across the carpet and his mutilated hand, uncovered, lay as idly as he would have let it if it had been whole. Laurie had never seen him quite forget it before. When the glove was off he used often to maneuver it out of sight when he thought the movement wouldn’t be noticed; and when he didn’t, you could feel him preventing himself by an act of will. There was something trustful and touching in this undefended surrender of it; it gave Laurie, for the moment, what he felt to be the most solid happiness he had known among so much contradictory emotion.

  Ralph meanwhile had sunk back into his reverie, resuming thoughts to which the sharks had been a pedestrian interruption. Now, as if suddenly he felt himself too highly charged with happiness to bear it in silence, he took a deep breath and said, “Spuddy!” making a statement of it, than which no more needs to be said.

  “Hello, Ralph,” said Laurie, smiling back. But soon afterwards he moved away and found himself work among the litter that was left. He felt that overanxiety which hides an unconfessed resistance and sometimes brings about the thing it fears; watching Ralph working again, and using the hand with its taut one-finger grip, he felt for the first time that it could get on his nerves.

  Ralph had found the fencing foil, now as always the awkward object left over till the end. He got to his feet with it in a pliant spring, balanced it for an instant to feel the length and weight, and flicked it in a quick pass. Laurie saw and remembered how his wrist and forearm looked like an extension of the steel. He glanced at the hacked guard, and suddenly said, “This must be the one you used in Hamlet, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. I never thought you’d remember that.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “I was a rotten Laertes, anyway.”

  Ralph smiled to himself. “Well, I wouldn’t exactly say you were a good Laertes. You were a very nice Laertes, though. ‘It was never like this at Sandhurst, what have I done to get mixed up with this awful crowd?’ ”

  “Was I really like that?”

  “I suspected not. That was the secret of its charm.”

  “You’re making half this up.”

  “But you know,” said Ralph, dropping the foil, “there was one moment, just at the end, when you were dying. Quite suddenly it had something. I remember it still. I was sitting in the second row, or was it the third, anyway quite near. ‘Exchange forgiveness with me, noble Hamlet.’ I don’t know, it just seemed to get me. I knew then why I was such a bastard to you that time I came down to coach the duel, when Hugh was in the sicker.”

  Impulsively Laurie said, “You wouldn’t like it, would you?” He picked up the foil by the blade and offered Ralph the hilt.

  “Thank you, Spuddy. I should love it.” He received it with affection, but, instinctively, in a trained and expert grip. As the blade left Laurie’s hand, of a sudden it all smote him with a ruinous significance; he felt in his own gesture the ancient symbol of the surrendered sword. His nature had suffered a self-discovery, a swing off its old center of balance, stranger to him and less foreseen than he had allowed Ralph to know. For a moment an instinctive hostility must have shown in his eyes.

  Ralph tossed the foil away, and said quickly, “Spud!”

  “What’s up?” said Laurie smiling. “It’s all right.” He was glad that Ralph had read in his face only the passing envy of a cripple for a man who can fence.

  Ralph said, “We’ve about finished here. I wish I could have seen this room with your things in it.”

  Laurie started to tell him how it used to look; but in the middle he was overtaken by a longing to compensate Ralph for what he felt as a latent treachery, mixed with a simpler and more direct emotion. He said, “Sit in that chair for a moment, will you?”

  Ralph dropped into it and said, “Well? What for?” Sliding along the floor to the place beside him, Laurie said, “Only because that’s where you always used to sit.”

  After a pause Ralph said in a stilled listening voice, “Is that the truth?”

  “Yes. But not the whole truth.” He threw his arm across Ralph’s knees.

  For what seemed a long time, perhaps several minutes, they sat in silence. He could feel Ralph touching his hair with that intuitive pleasantness which, it seemed, couldn’t go wrong. The desire to be needed was basic in his make-up; it had developed in him a high degree of accomplishment and tact. He had, thought Laurie, the power good advertising is supposed to have of creating demands which had not been aware of themselves before. But when he spoke Laurie realized that all this had been absent and instinctive while his mind was elsewhere. “This room, the one I’ve moved to, I’ve only taken it for a month.”

  “You didn’t tell me you’d moved.”

  “I travel light, you know, it doesn’t take me long. It’s full of velvet curtains and Turkey carpets and stuffy junk, but it’s got a telephone, that’s why I took it. It’s just somewhere to be while we look around. What do you give it till you’re out—about a month?”

  “They haven’t told me anything. I haven’t a clue.”

  It was true, but he knew he would have said it, anyway. The first note of organization had given him a feeling of constriction, almost of panic.

  “Never mind,” Ralph said. “I’ll go ahead, anyhow. If I find something soon, it will give us all the longer to fix up and get comfortable. You know, this trunk we’re packing will go on the car easily, and I expect we can get in some more, I’ll look in a minute. I can store it all at the Station, there’s a …” His voice ran on, effortlessly efficient, disposing of everything. Laurie realized that in another few minutes he would want to start loading the car.

  “But, Ralph, I’ll be going up to Oxford in a few weeks. You’d be stuck with a flat for more than six months of the year.”

  “Oh, no, we can let a room to someone at the local university in term-time, if we need to. I’ve got everything taped.”

  Laurie realized that in every way he had bought this.

  Ralph scratched up softly the short hair at the nape of his neck, causing an involuntary shiver like a stroked cat’s. “Spud,” he said gently, “are you worrying again?”

  Laurie looked up, helplessly aware that he was leaving this for Ralph to cope with as he had, it seemed, left everything else.

  “Surely, Spud, you didn’t think I was going to be difficult, did you? I mean, that was the understanding I came in on. I wouldn’t double-cross you like that.”

  Laurie waited, feeling sure that this must be quite simple and that he had been stupid not to have followed it.

  “If you want to see this boy when he’s got a free day, that’s fair enough; you don’t have to tell me about it. Unless you need someone to talk to. I can take it either way; for me it’s worth it. Nothing to worry about there, is there?”

  All Laurie could find to say was, “Ralph, do you mind if I think a minute?”

  “What for?” Ralph’s fingers moved, producing the shiver again.

  What for, indeed, Laurie wondered. They had stepped across a narrow frontier and had become strangers speaking different tongues.

  “I suppose,” he said, feeling like a man making signs across some valley too wide for the voice to cross, “I suppose I love both of you too much. It would pull me in half. I couldn’t live that way. And if I could myself, I couldn’t do it to him.”

  Ralph had drawn his brows together. He looked, not resentful, but as if he felt some physical pain which mustn’t be allowed to confuse his mind. “But you’re living that way now, and it’s been all right. And with things as they are, I can’t see how he’s losing anything.”

  Laurie began to look up; but his eyes came first to the torn left hand on the chair-arm, and it was as if Ralph had been speaking of something like that when he had said “I can’t see.” Seven years was a long time, after all, and something had gone.

  Everything he had promised, he would not fail faithfully to perform. It would cost him something; he knew that he
would suffer; but he wasn’t accustomed to give up his aims out of a fear of being hurt, and, in any case, he would remind himself that it wouldn’t be for long. Laurie realized now that, from the moment when Ralph had learned that this was a love without physical bond, he had thought of it as something not quite real. As far as he believed in it at all, he thought of Laurie with compassion, as the victim of an infatuation whose object couldn’t or wouldn’t return it, who must endure the sickness till it could be cured by time and by a more generous lover. He was touched by it, as a grown man is by the pains of calf-love. Laurie remembered how he always said “this boy,” on a certain inflection, faintly indulgent; it would have been patronage in someone a little less kind. As far as he was concerned, Andrew was someone by whom Laurie had been refused. If one had tried to make him see such a relationship as a bond of mutual love with valid claims, that would be too much, he would feel, for anyone to swallow; it would seem to him the reduction to absurdity of romantic daydreams, something not far removed from autoerotic fantasy, which he would probably have called morbid outright in someone he didn’t love.

  None the less, having been once convinced that Laurie felt like this, he would be quixotically generous; yes, even on the rare occasions when he believed in a rival made of flesh and blood. It would appeal to his honor to keep the compact, to his pride to behave at such times especially well, to his instinct for sacrifice to console Laurie undemandingly, without letting his feelings appear. But most of the time, Laurie thought, he would be like a man who without interference allows his wife to practice some obscure religion he doesn’t believe in, because they were married on that understanding. Laurie had a sudden impossible vision of Ralph packing him off efficiently to see Andrew, looking up his trains, lending him a raincoat, reminding him not to walk about and strain his knee, and, when he got home, laying on some special supper to cheer him up.

  With the steady confidence of someone nursing a fever which under the right treatment is running its normal course, Ralph would wait for the symptoms to subside. For he had not only courage, but the faith that moves mountains; and, besides, possession is nine points of the law.

  “You know,” he was saying now, “it’s funny, when I saw you at Dunkirk your hair still seemed quite red, but it was only because your face was so white. It’s gone like a horse chestnut when you find it in your pocket next year. Conker color.”

  “Do you mind?”

  “Spud: it half kills me to see you making yourself unhappy like this. It doesn’t make sense even, not now. Why do you do it?”

  “But, you see, it’s … well, apart from anything else, what would I tell him? People don’t meet without talking about what they’re doing and where they’re living, and how they like it, and things like that. I couldn’t talk to him for hours knowing that he was telling me the truth and I was just stringing him along with lies.”

  “But how much of the truth have you ever been able to tell him?”

  “That’s not the same.”

  “Why tell him lies, at that? You can say you’re sharing a flat with me. Or do you suspect him of knowing more about these things than he makes out?”

  “It isn’t that. It’s … well, I should be different. He’d feel at once that something was wrong.”

  “Wrong?” From his control Laurie knew that this had suddenly and deeply hurt him. “You didn’t behave last night as if you thought it was wrong.”

  “Not wrong like that. Wrong between him and me.”

  “You half meant the other, though.”

  “No, I swear not. There’s another thing too. He’d know we were great friends, at least, and he might get the idea that I’d passed him up because he’s a c.o.; he thinks already that at heart I’d rather have someone who’d fought.”

  “Surely not. Who’d be that unreasonable?”

  Laurie looked at his face. He understood the effort Ralph must have been making all this time, not to betray the truth which had at last slipped out.

  “You despise him, don’t you?”

  After a pause Ralph said, “Oh, I believe he’s sincere. I’d back you to spot a phony quicker than most.”

  “He has the guts all right. Only he thinks that’s a side-issue, because what really matters is whether he’s right or wrong. I couldn’t bear him to think I was ratting on him.”

  “But,” said Ralph, “he is wrong, so then what?” There was a silence. He said in a different voice, “You don’t feel any doubt on that point, do you?”

  “Yes. When I’m with him, sometimes I do.”

  “Really, Spud,” said Ralph quietly. “At a time like this.”

  He spoke as one rebukes a child who is old enough to see with what dangerous irresponsibility he has been behaving. He had talked often about the war, never about the feelings he had brought to it. Laurie had supposed that his bitterness at his forced inaction had been chiefly for the waste of his own powers. Now, looking at his face, one could see that this wasn’t so; and there was nothing more to say.

  “You see, Spuddy, my dear,” said Ralph, speaking with great kindness and with care that Laurie shouldn’t be hurt, “you have a very sweet nature, really, and you let it ride you a bit sometimes. You say this boy has guts, but what you’re trying to do for him is to keep him like a mid-Victorian virgin in a world of illusion where he doesn’t know he’s alive. He mustn’t be told he’s a passenger when human decency’s fighting for survival, in case it upsets his religion. He mustn’t be told he’s a queer, in case he has to do a bit of hard thinking and make up his mind. He mustn’t know you’re in love with him, in case he feels he can’t go on having his cake and eating it. If he amounts to anything, he won’t really want to be let off being human. And if he does want it, then he isn’t worth all this, Spud. I’m sorry, but there it is.”

  “But—” As soon as he started he knew it was no good. He could have said that Andrew was essentially more realistic and less sentimental than Ralph himself. He wanted to say, “But he does know that I love him, and I know he loves me.” But as soon as his mind formed words around these things, he saw that they could only hurt Ralph for nothing without enlightening him at all. “It isn’t quite like that. I mean, Christianity on weekdays isn’t really such a soft option. I believe enough in him to feel I’d like to help him be what he wants to be. Not hinder, anyway.”

  “Anyone can see that you weren’t brought up in a Christian home.”

  Ralph’s face had altered. It looked impenetrable, and no longer even kind. He had taken his hand away and had begun to tap Morse on the arm of the chair.

  Laurie paid scant attention to the actual words. He had heard behind them the voice of an unknown boy who wasn’t Jack in The Coral Island. As if it were possible to reach into the past, he took hold of the restless hand that was tapping the chair-arm and said, “I don’t think that’s how it was meant to be.”

  “Well, anyway, that’s how it comes. The pagans did recognize our existence, at least. They even allowed us a few standards and a bit of human dignity, just like real people.”

  He was silent for a moment, frowning; but it was in concentration more than anger, for the hardness had gone from his eyes. Looking out across Laurie’s head he said slowly, as if the words were being salvaged from deep water, “ ‘If a city or an army could be made up only of lovers and their beloved, it would excel all others. For they would refrain from everything shameful, rivalling one another in honor; and men like these, fighting at each other’s side, might well conquer the world. For the lover would rather be seen by anyone than by his beloved, flying or throwing away his arms; rather he would be ready a thousand times to die.’ ”

  Laurie couldn’t say anything. He had neither the power nor the wish to hide what he felt.

  “It’s only since it’s been made impossible that it’s been made so damned easy. It’s got like prohibition, with the bums and crooks making fortunes out of hooch, everyone who might have had a palate losing it, nobody caring how you hold your liquo
r, you’ve been smart enough if you get it at all. You can’t make good wine in a bathtub in the cellar, you need sun and rain and fresh air, you need a pride in the job you can tell the world about. Only you can live without drink if you have to, but you can’t live without love.”

  Laurie said, “I know,” and then a little later, “Ralph, I’ve got to be alone for a bit, after I get back, and make up my mind about things.”

  “Why? You’ll only get all tensed up again like you were before. I know what you’re like without me there; you’ll get into this morbid state when you think if you want something, then you shouldn’t have it.”

  “No; I’ve got to find out what it is I really want. You said something once, it was at Sandy’s party; you said it isn’t what you are, it’s what you do with it.”

  “At a party? Christ, I must have been stinking.”

  “And just now in a different way you said it again. And it’s true, of course, and that’s how it is. I know what I am and I’ve got to think what to do with it. You’re not angry, are you?”

  “No,” said Ralph quite quietly. “I’m not angry. But don’t be gone too long.”

  Laurie knew, from a closeness that already seemed inevitable, what it was that he was resolving not to say.

  “I won’t see Andrew again either, until I’ve decided something; that’s only fair.”

  “Do what you feel, Spud. I wouldn’t have asked you, you know that.”

  “No, I promise I won’t.” As soon as it was out of his mouth he knew he had been wrong. The feeling of justice had been an illusion, he had felt only the emotion of tenderness for Ralph’s pain, and a sentiment, strong but confused, born of all they had shared together, which had made him yield easily to a boyish sense of fair play and had blunted his adult perceptions. There was no real parallel between seeing Ralph and seeing Andrew; for Andrew’s cause was more than his own cause, and if he argued it, it would only be by the fact of being himself.