The Charioteer

by Mary Renault

  Wakened harshly out of the illusion that the conversation which had just taken place had somehow explained everything, Laurie now realized that since the moment of entering the room he had scarcely uttered a word.

  Stumblingly, he began saying the things he had planned. But much of it seemed impossible now, much had to be qualified or softened; there was much that he could no longer imagine having ever meant to say. “Ralph, don’t ever think it was because I didn’t care enough. I—”

  “Don’t be silly, Spud. I know you love me, and so do you.”

  Laurie looked up. Ralph’s blue eyes were fixed on his face, but not in doubt or entreaty. They were watching him: closely, carefully, with absolute concentration. He understood now how sentimental and unreal had been his picture of Ralph as a passive victim whom his rejection would instantly crush. He was looking into the face of a resolute quick-thinking man used to authority, to measuring other men’s strength and asserting his own, to a swift reaction in moments of danger. He stood on the bridge now, going into action: and, as long as Laurie’s resolution held, it was he who was the enemy.

  “Don’t waste time, Spud. It’s childish to start an argument about whether we love each other, the moment I go and sit on the other side of the room. Get down to brass tacks. What does all this rigmarole add up to, really? You met me at Sandy’s party and you can’t forget it. You surely don’t still think I went there for the conversation, do you?”

  He waited, as if expecting a reply; a disciplinary trick so old and simple that no doubt he was scarcely aware of using it.

  “I went because I was on the town, like everyone else in the room. Yes, that includes Alec too, you don’t know as much about Alec as you think. Surely Sandy told you it was a queer party before you went there; you knew what it meant?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “I don’t just mean that queers would be there. A queer party: something between a lonely hearts club and an amateur brothel. You expected that, didn’t you?”

  Much of that evening had been a surprise to Laurie, but he didn’t want to sound pious, so he said, “Yes.”

  “And are you going to tell me you’d have gone yourself if you’d been happy and satisfied, even if you did know I’d be there?”

  “Yes. I’d have gone to see you.”

  “Would you, Spud?” Ralph’s face had softened; there was a kind of respect in it too. “After all those years. Yes; I expect you would.”

  He lit two cigarettes, gave Laurie one, and stood for a while looking down at him in silence.

  “I’m not romantic,” he began. From his lack of emphasis Laurie saw that he believed this to be true. “When I saw you lying on the deck in all the muck and dunnage, I don’t know what I felt, really. You had a two-day beard, you were dirty, you smelt worse than the others because your wound was going bad. I suppose you stood to me for something or other. When you sent me up, I was almost too busy to think about it at the time; but it seemed to sink in later, when I was lying in hospital with nothing to do. So I wrote, because one can’t swear to every impression one picks up on a day like that, and I wanted to settle it one way or another. When I heard you were dead, it seemed inevitable, somehow. And after that, so did everything else.”

  He had spoken in the intent, rather muddled way of a man who is defining his thoughts to himself as he goes along. He had done better for himself, it seemed, than he wanted; for when he saw Laurie’s face his own hardened at once.

  “Well, that’s past history.” He added, with the clear colorless decision that told nothing, except that the subject was closed, “You can leave that out of it. None of that could happen again.” Laurie remembered suddenly the contempt with which he had gazed down at Sandy on the bathroom floor.

  “I wasn’t thinking that.”

  “Well, seeing some of the things you do think …” As if it were unnatural for him to meet an emergency except on his feet, he took a quick turn across the room, came back to the hearth, and stood there, poised to move again, looking out across Laurie’s head. Laurie could feel how the walls of the room were cramping his eyes. He looked at him, measuring his own resolve against Ralph’s courage and his pride, and scarcely realizing that there had been a subtle reorientation. He was feeling now that if he weakened Ralph would respect him less.

  Suddenly Ralph smiled, and came back across the room again. As if for the exchange of confidences, he settled himself cozily on the chair-arm. His voice wasn’t insistent any longer, but intimate, reassuring, a voice Laurie remembered all too well. “Relax, Spuddy. Don’t be so tense. How you like to make things difficult, don’t you? We weren’t long enough together, that’s where the trouble is. Dashing off after a few hours and leaving you to mill over all the reaction and everything by yourself. This bloody war! It won’t always be like that. I like you the way you are, Spud; why would I want to make you less yourself? I’m not attracted to people I can push around.”

  Laurie gathered himself together with a hard, unwilling effort; it felt like dragging oneself up from a warm sea onto a harsh rocky shore. He said, “But you’re trying to do it now.”

  Looking at Ralph’s face he saw how quickly the man on the bridge resumed command. “No. You’re about to make a decision. I’m putting the facts on which you’ve to make it.”

  With painful determination Laurie said, “Half the facts. You don’t know the other half.”

  Ralph was silent for a moment; but his face hardly altered. He said quietly, “That’s true; I’m putting the half I know. But I’ve a right to do that.”

  “Yes,” said Laurie. “I know you have.”

  “Spud,” said Ralph softly, “you break me up when you look like that. What are we fighting over? What nonsense it all is.”

  “Sometimes I—I wish there were nothing else but this. But—”

  “Spud.”

  “But there is, and if I don’t do what seems right to me, it won’t be any good in the end.”

  “And if you do, and it turns out to be wrong, that won’t be any good either. I can do with a drink, and I should think you could.”

  The bottles had become respectable in a fumed-oak sideboard. Laurie realized that a drink was what he needed badly. While Ralph was seeing to it he looked around at the thick Turkey carpet, the crushed-velvet curtains, the coal fire and brass fender, the patent convertible divan. But he had guessed already that Ralph had been sharing the rent of Bunny’s room and had added the attic when Bunny’s personality got too pervasive; this, no doubt, was costing him less. It was strange how dim, how dead-and-done-with, Bunny seemed.

  “Isn’t it a fantasy?” said Ralph. “The love-nest of a city councillor, is my guess.”

  Laurie looked at the room again, and couldn’t help laughing. “They called each other Mr. Potter and Miss Smith in bed, like people in an Arno drawing. What were the pictures like?”

  Ralph opened the cupboard to show him; the ornaments were there too. In the midst of all the laughing and nonsense Laurie remembered that all this would be ending almost at once; but just then it didn’t seem true. They were still laughing when they drifted back to the chair again. The drink had been one of Ralph’s more generous doubles; it gave Laurie a feeling not exactly of optimism, for he hadn’t had enough to make him silly, but of sentimental living-in-the-moment, a feeling that the future would come fast enough without rushing to meet it. Ralph took his empty glass away and settled beside him. He didn’t speak at first. Laurie sat looking into the fire, remembering what it brought back to him, and wondering how it would feel presently to be walking back alone.

  “I want to talk to you, Spud. Now just relax, quietly now; you’re all fiddle-strings today; haven’t you been sleeping? You’re only a couple of days away from me, and look at you, all on edge. That’s better. The thing with you is, you’re too new to it all and you don’t know what to be frightened of. I’ve listened to so many life-histories: I don’t know why, I always seem to pitch up when they’ve had a drink too many,
or a knock too many, or something. It’s loneliness that rots them, every time. A starving man won’t notice a dirty plate. You don’t know, Spuddy, I do. When you’re settled with someone real you can forget all that. You can afford friends then, I mean friends, people to talk to, like anyone else.” He added softly, “You know, we do get along together.”

  Laurie saw that the time had come: it found him with nothing to say, except, “Why have you made it so hard?” And there was no use in saying that, for Ralph would only reply that he had wanted to make it impossible.

  Or one could say, thought Laurie, “I’m sorry, but he comes first and that’s all about it,” which would have, like a shot fired point-blank, the merit of being unanswerable.

  “Spud. I don’t ask whether you feel about me what I do about you, it’s such a meaningless question, how would you know? But could you bear, really, for us never to see each other again?”

  “Don’t,” said Laurie abruptly. He got up from the chair. Ralph got up too. They faced each other across the heavy fireplace with its brass fender and mahogany overmantel. “I’ve got to bear it. Don’t make it worse. Do you think I’m doing this because I don’t feel anything?”

  Ralph leaned his elbow on the empty shelf; the blank wood stirred in Laurie a dim memory which, untraced, slid away. “We don’t need to tell each other what we feel. You know this is murder for both of us, and you’re doing it for nothing.”

  He looked proud and brave, without the shame and shabbiness of a person who feels himself rejected; he was like someone suffering for a cause in which he believes.

  “You’ll have plenty of time for the other, Spud, without all this butchery. We’ll be separated enough before this war’s over, with me still in the navy and you in a job. Let’s take what we can, God knows we can’t afford to waste it. You don’t know how little there is in the world of what we can give each other.”

  Laurie peered into the cloudy future; he tried to re-create what he had felt last night with the child. He clung to a stubborn loyalty where a vision had been. Ralph, who had not ceased all this time to watch him, spoke in the changed voice of a man who has been following up a thought.

  “Tell me something, Spud. Supposing after the war this boy, still not knowing the facts of life, asked you to share digs with him. Would you do it?”

  “I haven’t thought.” The peacetime world had seemed irrecoverably remote, the horizon bounded by months at most. Ralph said, “Well, think now.”

  Laurie thought of the apple orchard and of Limbo; of the kitchen at night. Amid all this intruded the memory of Charlot’s side ward, and the red-shaded light on Andrew’s face. Defiantly he said, “Yes, of course I would.”

  Ralph said, quite gently, “You know, even St. Anthony practiced his austerities in the desert. His temptations came to him in dreams, and he just told them to go to hell. You can do that with a dream; it hasn’t any feelings.”

  Laurie looked at him, meditating who knows what appeal; but he saw at once that there would be no armistice.

  Ralph said, “Not that I don’t believe in sublimation. I mean, I believe some people have done it. They put it all into climbing mountains, or founding hospitals, or just into prayer. Some say it’s all done with will power, and some think it takes a special temperament. What do you think yourself?”

  “All right. You needn’t say it again. But he means something to me I can’t explain: he needs me, I don’t know why. And he trusts me. And there it is.”

  Ralph said steadily, “Trusts you for what? It wouldn’t work, Spud. It isn’t you he needs, he doesn’t know you. He needs someone like himself, who wouldn’t have to pretend with him.”

  Laurie said violently, “How can you tell? You don’t know anything about him.”

  Some instinct was saying that anger would do all he needed, release this intolerable pressure and drug him and give him the impetus to escape. He waited to be angry at what Ralph would say.

  But Ralph said, with the greatest quiet and gentleness, “Very well, Spud, if that’s your last word. Let’s part before we make ourselves any more unhappy. We’ve got better things to remember. If this is the finish, let’s have it now.”

  He took his arm from the mantelshelf, a slight movement which seemed a gesture of dismissal. Laurie gazed at him, stupidly unprepared. It was like having endured a painful but indecisive illness, and being suddenly told that the end is death.

  He took a step forward, for it had always been natural to look to Ralph for help, one would never despair without first having recourse to him. He saw Ralph’s straight blue eyes, tenderly and inflexibly watching: the eyes looking at him with love were the eyes of the man on the bridge, who awaits with delicate precision the moment of convergence when he will say, “Open fire.”

  “Goodbye, then, Ralph. I … it doesn’t seem …” Ralph hadn’t moved. It would have to be now. “Goodbye.”

  “Are you going away just like that?”

  Laurie paused in the moment of turning. Ralph looked at him: a kind relenting look, not quite smiling. It said, “Did you really think I would stand aside and see you suffer?”

  Laurie stood silent. He didn’t want to think, there was too much pain in it; only for a moment, resisting foreknowledge, to stand here waiting, his mind’s eyes closed.

  “Come here, then,” said Ralph with gentle arrogance. “Come and say goodbye to me.”

  Afterwards he said, “Are you going to be angry with me, Spuddy, as soon as you’re alone?”

  Laurie shook his head. He didn’t want to talk. Ralph mistook his movement in the dark and said, “Yes, you are.”

  “What do you think I am? I can take my own responsibility.”

  Ralph said slowly, “You said that to me once before.”

  “Did I? It’s a natural thing to say.”

  “I’m the one to take it. I know that Perhaps I was wrong, Spuddy; tell me so if you like. When it came to the last I couldn’t help myself, and that’s a fact.”

  “I know. It’s all right. Don’t talk now.”

  It was a quiet street. The passing cars were so few that each stirred a transient speculation.

  “Spuddy.”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s as I said; before you make up your mind about things you have to see how they are.”

  “I know how they are. I knew before.”

  “Don’t be unhappy, Spud, and blame yourself. I’d rather you blamed me.”

  “It’s not your fault. You thought it would settle something. I knew it wouldn’t, but still I—”

  “It should settle something, Spud. I think it should.”

  “It makes it more difficult, that’s all.”

  “You put too much on yourself. You’re only human.”

  “So are we all. So is he.”

  “Is he? I wouldn’t know.”

  “Don’t, Ralph. What’s the use?”

  A clock struck somewhere. Ralph said, “It’s my firewatch tonight, I must go soon.”

  “Did you have any trouble in the raid?”

  “Nothing that wouldn’t brush off.”

  “You never told me.”

  “Don’t worry. We ought to be charmed lives at the moment, God knows. There’s only one way of getting death to solve your problems, as a rule.”

  “Look after yourself.”

  “Would you care?”

  “You know.”

  “Spud, I’d give anything to ease this up for you. Not just for my own sake, though you think that.”

  “No, I don’t. I don’t think that, of course.”

  “You only hurt yourself, you don’t know what it does to me. I’ve been around more than you. If you’d only trust me.”

  “You can’t eat and breathe for me, or live for me. No one can.”

  “It kills me just to stand watching,” Ralph said. “It’s not the way I’m made.”

  15

  IT WAS THE TALL Sister who brought Laurie the news that he was for discharge in ten days’ time
. She added that he might go out walking if he wished; making, as he learned later, a virtue of necessity, for his new boot was ready and she had been told that he was to test it.

  The next few evenings all merged for him later into a common memory and he thought of them almost as one. They walked for the first hour, usually in the old town by the river, among the ships’ chandlers and tattooing shops which looked as if they hadn’t changed hands in a couple of centuries, or the steep streets of flaking Adam houses that leaned above the Wells. Then they would drop into some small local for a drink, and join in the talk if it was a talkative pub. If Ralph had had any idea of showing Laurie that he could “pass,” he must have forgotten about it almost immediately. Places like this had been the stuff of his daily life too long for him to be conscious of his assimilation. He was more than ever himself when he fell in with some merchant mate or master, picking up the loose-ended gossip of the sea: “… They had to fly out a second engineer to Rangoon, and from what I heard when she berthed next to us at Colombo …” Sometimes Laurie would feel himself almost forgotten; but in the middle of it Ralph would look at his watch; the blackout would reseal itself behind them; in the dim street he would smile and say, “Let’s go home.”

  When they got in, Ralph would fix the blackout while Laurie got the fire going. Usually they never put on the light at all. As Ralph said, the room looked much better without it.