The Charioteer

by Mary Renault

  These nights were dark and clouded. The bombers stayed away, but they would be back. It wasn’t a time for rushing to meet one’s problems: one puts off mending clothes that may have to be thrown away. Ralph had no problem, only a purpose; but Laurie was living each day as though the world would end tomorrow. Ralph must have known this. He never discussed the future; he never mentioned Andrew; he never tried to make Laurie admit any change of heart. If there was something in this of kindness, and something of common sense, no doubt there was something too of pride. Laurie had no trouble in guessing that scenes of jealousy were relegated in Ralph’s mind to a special category, along with bracelets and eyeshadow; he had his private vanities, and was sensitive about them. There was something almost formidably perfect in his manners on this point; but though he didn’t touch upon the future, in compensation he talked, and got Laurie to talk, a good deal about the past. All Laurie’s most difficult period of self-discovery had been got through alone, except for the unhelpful intrusion of Charles. Though there could be no very useful purpose in telling anyone about it now, there could be a good deal of emotional satisfaction; and Ralph saw to it that there was. After these long retrospective confidences, exchanged under the conditions best suited of all to unreserve, the feeling that they were deeply rooted in each other’s lives seemed to Laurie as old as the events they had been reviving.

  The boy Mervyn, at whom Ralph had once waved from the ward doorway, had decided to worship him. He never arrived till after visiting hours, so their acquaintance ripened on signals and smiles. It gave satisfaction to Mervyn, however; and there was an understanding that the next time the Sister was out of the way, Ralph should somehow be smuggled in. Meanwhile, Ralph sent him as a present a very old spare copy of the East Africa Pilot. Laurie thought it an odd choice; but Ralph had remembered the years of hunger for factual information. Mervyn spent, reverently, his waking hours upon it.

  Andrew hadn’t written for some days. He had said he would let Laurie know when he could get over. The orderlies’ days off were worked out among themselves, and it took a certain amount of shuffling to get a night orderly relieved; Laurie guessed that he must have put off writing from day to day, expecting to hear something definite. The two hospitals were so closely linked that, as Laurie now realized, neither could be bombed without the news travelling around the other in a flash. He had expected Andrew to write oftener; his first letter had been dashed off like a daily journal to be continued very soon. Laurie knew that in other circumstances, this silence would have been a grief to him. Now, because it put off the day when he must write back an account of himself which would be false in every significant thing, he was relieved.

  He had reached a point of no return when he could see neither help nor virtue in anticipation. It would cost him his integrity to protect Andrew now; but this didn’t present itself to him as a choice, only as a debt he had run up and would have to pay. There was no clean way out; confession would only lift the weight from his own shoulders to Andrew’s. It would be impossible for him to know about Laurie now without turning the knowledge on himself.

  Staring into the fire, Laurie remembered wishing that his love for Andrew could be divided, leaving only the part Andrew could happily share. The fire, settling, threw up a dim transparent flame; there was a faint resurgence of light on the fair hair beside him. It was a Delphic answer, he thought, to an impossible petition; you could see the smile behind the smoke.

  “What is it?” asked Ralph, always at these times instantly aware when Laurie withdrew from a common consciousness to thoughts of his own. He replied only with a violent demonstration of love; and guessed, from a certain quality of comfort and forgiveness in the response, that Ralph had divined the sense of guilt behind it. For Laurie couldn’t pretend to himself that even this last loyalty of the heart to Andrew was innocent. It was withheld at the expense of someone who on his side had withheld nothing, and whose need of love was in its kind no less. The idealist and romantic in Ralph, reviving late and left for dead, felt its own wants with the greater urgency; and it had lived too hard, too close to the ground, to be deceived.

  It was on the morning of the fifth day that Laurie awoke to a sense of anxiety about Andrew, so fully formed that he must have been reasoning it out in his sleep. He counted the days since Andrew had written. Suddenly Laurie’s mind cleared; he knew this silence was utterly uncharacteristic. Andrew was essentially gentle and considerate; if he was having trouble in getting a night off he would write to say so. When he had told Laurie not to telephone, it had been because he had meant to write in any case, instead. Something was wrong.

  Laurie looked at the clock. It was half-past five in the morning and still quite dark. The nurses were scurrying about in the busiest rush hour of a busy surgical ward. Less than at any other time of day was he likely to be missed. He counted his small change, got up, and made his bed. Mervyn, no longer a “heavy dressing” to be done early, was still asleep. Laurie bundled his uniform together, hid it under his dressing-gown, and changed in the bathroom. The quiet empty streets of the city, in which only the first workers were stirring, rang with frost under his feet; he could hear echoed back from the tall buildings on the other side the clump of his thicksoled boot.

  He got through from the telephone box very quickly. He could hear the bell ringing in the ward, and tried to picture Andrew hurrying to answer it; but the picture wouldn’t form, and when the answering voice came, it wasn’t Andrew’s.

  “Is that Ward B?”

  “Yes?”

  “Who is that speaking?”

  “This is the ward orderly, Roger Curds.” Then, after a pause, “Do you want to inquire for someone?”

  It was very cold in the telephone box, which had a missing pane that let in the wind. Laurie felt his palms filmed with an icy moisture. “Doesn’t Andrew Raynes work on Ward B any more?”

  “No. Andrew Raynes went to London yesterday.”

  “To London?” His mind was a blind scramble of conjecture under a cold sky of fear. “Do you know how long he’s likely to be away?”

  “I’m afraid not.” The rather high, pleasant voice paused tentatively; then, “Is that Laurie Odell speaking?”

  “Yes. It is. Did Andrew leave a message for me?”

  “Not with me; but that will mean he must have written. You’ve not changed your address lately?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I expect you’ll have a letter when the post comes in. I know you’re a friend of Andrew’s; I’m sure he wouldn’t move without letting you know.”

  “Move?” The cold seemed to have gone through to his bones, not numbly but with a sharp eating pain. “Aren’t you expecting him back?”

  “Well, not at present, I think. If you don’t hear by this morning’s post, you could always ring here in the daytime; I haven’t his address and I can’t leave the ward now, but you could easily get it then.”

  “Thank you.” He rang off.

  When he got back the ward seemed just the same, as if it had been fixed in an enchanted sleep through disastrous decades. Mechanically, Laurie undressed again, went into the sluice-room, and with a couple of other walking patients carried out his usual morning job, giving enamel bowls of water to such bed patients as could wash themselves.

  The giving out of the patients’ mail was one of the Sister’s sacred cows. A royal prerogative, it gave way to every more urgent duty but was never delegated. Laurie could remember the letters coming around as late as eleven-thirty. He felt too sick to eat breakfast, though after the early hospital supper he was usually ravenous.

  Mervyn, well on toward convalescence, was in the mood when boys are endurable only to one another, entranced with elementary jokes and building on them vast structures of silly elaboration. Laurie lost his temper at last and shut him up. He looked hurt, but not very badly; he knew already that no one keeps a sense of humor much after sixteen.

  The letters came around rather earlier than usual, at about a quar
ter to nine. There were two for him. One was from his mother, a picture postcard of the hotel, her window marked with a cross. The other was from Andrew.

  Laurie sat with the unopened letter in his hand, trying to think of somewhere to go. The nurses would be working in the bathroom; there was only one lavatory, never free for long; in a word, there was nowhere. He hid behind yesterday’s paper, and opened the letter against the middle page. Andrew’s round, young writing stood like an inset on the day’s score-card of dead pilots and fallen planes.

  Dear Laurie,

  Forgive me for not writing before. You will guess why, from what Ralph will have told you, but that’s no excuse. I have begun two or three letters, but they weren’t honest enough to send. Tomorrow I am going to London to work, which I think you will see is the only logical thing; so I must write today, and I find now that I can. I want you to know …

  “Odell! Do put that paper down, we want to tidy the bed.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Sister hates newspapers about. We’ll throw it out now if you’ve done with it.”

  “No, please. Not yet.”

  “Well, do have the bed tidy for Mr. Sutcliffe’s round.”

  I want you to know it is true if he says that when I hit him it wasn’t even self-defense. There is a belief, which I expect he shares, that a pacifist who has behaved like this must see at once his ideas were wrong. I should have thought there could hardly be a better way of proving they were right. But if that were all I had to tell you, of course I could have written days ago.

  Dave says this about temptation, that in itself it is nothing but an opportunity for choice; so it is rather defeatist to feel very guilty about it, as though one were half ready to commit the sin. If I say I have had feelings about you it would have been wrong to act on, you know enough to see what I mean. As a rule it seemed not to matter very much. Often before when I have been fond of people I have got somehow caught up in it all round; but I am such an average person, it must be quite common I thought. With you it was more, sometimes you must have noticed I was difficult; but I got over that and it came to seem more like a smile when one is happy. It is the happiness one thinks about and not the smile. Toward the end I thought you felt the same. I knew I oughtn’t to be so glad of this, since it might be my fault, yet often it seemed good, in fact the only thing. Only I found that I couldn’t see things so clearly when I was alone, and I should have taken notice of that because it is the real test of everything.

  Well, about Ralph. He isn’t like I imagined, so I found it hard to picture you and him as great friends. When he told me it was much more than that, I felt—I don’t know a better way of expressing this—as if I’d had an anonymous letter. I got one once, after my Board. It is like something from another world, but it has touched you, and the touch is real. So then he said why did I pretend to be shocked when I was only jealous; and that was when I hit him.

  He didn’t hit me back, he just laughed and walked off. He had a right to. I knew before he was even out of sight that there could be only one reason for what I did. What he had said about me was true. He wanted to see what I would do, I suppose, and I did what he expected. But it taught me something. The thing you want to kill is really in yourself. That is why people become cruel in war, because they are doing what I did.

  I don’t know what more there is to say, except this: that since one can’t refuse to know oneself, and it must have happened eventually, I would rather it was through you than anyone else.

  I shall apply to do ambulance work in the line, as soon as such a thing exists again. Meanwhile, London seems the next best. I know what you will think, that I am starting to patch up my self-respect at a rather primitive level. But I find I have to do this before going on. That is another thing about me which had to be faced sometime. I daresay my father would have understood. Anyway, you will.

  You will probably be amazed and embarrassed after this when I ask you to write to me. Not to answer the kind of thing I have been telling you, no one could expect that. It is only this, because I can’t see you again and shall often be thinking about you. Will you please tell me yourself that there is nothing in what he said about you and him? Of course I know there isn’t. But somehow it has got a hold on me; I can’t get it out of my mind. It will be all right as soon as I hear from you. I can get rid of it then and keep the rest. There is much more I should like to say, but now I shall never be able to say it. You know I shall remember you all my life.

  Love,

  Andrew

  He had written an address at the bottom, somewhere in the neighborhood of the docks.

  “Spud. I say, Spud. You done with the outside bit of the paper?”

  Some mechanical residue in him detached the outer sheet and handed it over.

  “Coo, Spud. See about that Hurricane pilot? Spud, you know what, I saw a real ace once. Honest. He came to our school about War Savings. He was wizzo. I say, Spud—”

  Confused in his own darkness, Laurie turned to the boy and said as if to a contemporary, “Don’t talk to me now.”

  Mervyn looked from his face to the letter which was showing and said, quite quietly, “Okay, Spud. Sorry.” He folded the paper neatly and turned on his other side to read it.

  The surgeon of the day came, did a round with his students, and left. Patients relaxed, milled their beds about for comfort, talked to each other across the ward. The stir of activity seemed to release Laurie from a paralysis of the will. He got out of bed, and once more took his clothes out of the locker.

  “Going out, Spud?”

  Laurie looked at the boy. His thin face was sharply intelligent; loyal and shy.

  “Yes. I’ve got to, something’s happened I have to see about. I shan’t be back all day. Don’t say anything, will you, or ask them where I am?”

  “Okeydoke, I won’t talk. Won’t she miss you at dinner, though?”

  “I can’t help that. See you tonight.”

  He was just in time to get the mid-morning express, and was at Paddington two and a half hours later. So completely had his thoughts absorbed him that he walked almost through the military police, and scarcely realized they had been there till he was in the underground. Perhaps his indifference had bluffed him through, perhaps they had other fish to fry, perhaps they saw his boot and didn’t trouble. He got out of the underground in a wide, crowded East End thoroughfare, asked the way and was told to take a tram. It put him off at the end of a long street of smoke-black villas, paired like Siamese twins. Old gray lace curtains framed lean aspidistras in Benares pots; the gardens had starved privet behind twisty cast-iron railings, or little straggly beds of London Pride edged with tile. If you touched the railings your hand came away thick with grime. It was the kind of place where there should have been children playing in the street, but they were mostly gone. The seventh pair of villas had been laid open all down the front, like a child’s dollhouse. You could see the dark squares on the wallpaper where the pictures had hung. But these were Nos. 84 and 86, and Laurie was looking for No. 50.

  No. 50 had The Beeches over the door, engraved elegantly in cement which had once been painted cream. The curtains were casement cloth dyed pink, streakily, at home. There was even an aspidistra, though it looked a little seedy. The door was open. Laurie stepped into the hall. It had an embossed dado with chocolate varnish, and linoleum patterned like parquet and worn into holes, showing the boards. There was a smell of cabbage-water and carbolic soap. He listened; just out of sight, at the back of the house, someone was moving. He had just opened his mouth to call “Andrew!” when a door at the end opened and Dave came out.

  “Hello, Laurie.” He sounded, as always before, unexcited, attentive, and kind; but he had dropped his voice, and Laurie knew beforehand what he was going to say. “Come in the kitchen, will you, there are people asleep upstairs.”

  The kitchen was a small dingy room, warm from its black iron range and, it seemed, from the stored vitality of the families whose hub of
existence it must have been. A yellow varnished paper on the walls affected wood-graining. The scrubbed table in the middle was covered with clean newspaper, there were rolls of surgical lint and gauze on it, and piles of cut and folded dressings. An iron pot of porridge was simmering on the range, and a big kettle. Dave pulled up an old bentwood chair and said, “Sit down, Laurie, I’m just going to make some tea.”

  He had always been lean, but lately he had grown much thinner. There were deep furrows in his cheeks, half hidden by the edges of the grizzled beard. He had on a worn leather golf jacket and stained, shabby flannel slacks. He spooned tea from a cocoa-tin into a brown teapot, and tipped the heavy kettle to fill it.

  Laurie had had no food today but a cardboardy meat pie at the station. The tea smelt good. Some dim memory stirred in his mind of sitting with the maid in his grandmother’s kitchen when he was very small; he felt a sudden nostalgia, piercing and forlorn. He said, “Is Andrew here?”

  “Yes,” said Dave. “He’s asleep with the others. Last night was fairly quiet, but he was still a bit tired, and we may be busy later.” He poured out tea in thick white china cups; you could have thought Laurie had dropped in from next door. “Sugar? We’ve got plenty, Andrew and Tom don’t take it.”

  “Please. I wanted to see him about something rather important. I’m sorry he’s tired, but I think he’d rather see me.”

  “I’ll call him presently,” said Dave, “if you want him called.” He sugared the tea from a Woolworth glass basin. “I’ve been half expecting you, difficult as it must have been for you to get away.”

  “I’m absent without leave. I’ve had a letter from Andrew. I have to see him, there’s something I want to explain.”

  Dave looked at him. “You look worn out,” he said simply. He went to the deal dresser, fetched a cloth out of the drawer, spread it on Laurie’s end of the table and set a plate and knife.

  “Please don’t bother,” Laurie said. “I couldn’t eat anything.”