The Charioteer

by Mary Renault

“We’ve some beef dripping this week. I’m going to make some toast.” He got a loaf from the bin, sliced it, and speared the bread on a wire fork. “You can do this one.”

  Dully, Laurie turned his chair and held the fork to the bars of the range. The glow was comforting; it sheltered his eyes which flinched from being looked at any more. Dave pulled up the other chair and sat down beside him, with his slice of bread on a bent carving fork. They both kept their eyes on the fire, and shifted the toast about, because of the bars.

  “Do you ever think,” said Dave, “that retribution seems to spread itself very unevenly? It’s often seemed so to me. But I think one must take the analogy of the body. A gangrened limb is quite insensitive. Only the living tissues feel pain.”

  There was a pause, during which a hot coal dropped from the bars onto the hob and bounced down into the ash-pan. Laurie said, “Andrew told you.”

  “Well, I was rather unfair to him. I didn’t warn him I could fill in a certain amount between the lines. I mean, from experience.” He added, not defensively, but kindly, as though Laurie had asked for reassurance, “That was a good many years ago.”

  His toast was crumbling on the fork; he speared it gingerly in a fresh place. “I’ve felt now and then—if I’m wrong, stop me before I go any further, won’t you—that you’ve had a mistaken idea about my feelings for Andrew.” When Laurie said nothing, he went on, “Not that I’ve any right to resent it. But I’ve often wished I could set your mind at rest.”

  Laurie looked at his toast, and turned it over. “I didn’t think that, exactly.”

  “No,” said Dave. “I know. Not exactly. I know what you thought and I don’t really blame you. Every religious body has a few. With most of them it’s woolly thinking, rather than hypocrisy. I had the wool pulled off when I was about Andrew’s age, as a matter of fact.”

  He got up, fetched Laurie’s tea from the table and stood it on the steel fender in reach of his hand. Laurie said, “Thanks,” and then, with difficulty, “It might not be a bad thing now for him to know that.”

  “Well, I told him. He’d have thought of it himself in a short time, of course.”

  Laurie shifted the toast and said, “Yes, of course. He’d better have someone he can trust to be straight with him.”

  Dave looked up. “He isn’t a fool. You know that better than anyone. He knows why he wasn’t told everything, if he wasn’t. That’s not the sort of thing he has on his mind.”

  “I know. That’s why I came.”

  “I thought it might be.” Dave relieved him of the toast which was beginning to smoke, nicked off a burnt corner, spread it with dripping, salted it, and put the plate on the fender. “Don’t let it get cold,” While Laurie was eating it he went back to the swabs on the table. Presently he said, “You don’t have to worry about me, whatever else you worry about. Do get that into your head, won’t you? For a lot of reasons; one of which, a minor one I like to think nowadays, is that Andrew looks just like his mother. Except in character sometimes, I never see Bertie in him at all.”

  It could be perceived that his youth belonged to a decade when Bertie had sounded charming, even perhaps romantic. He pronounced it Bartie. This trifle had on Laurie the effect of a kind of emotional trigger, and for several minutes he could not speak. Dave continued to fold swabs with the reflex precision of a factory hand who has been carrying out the same process for years. He went on, “As soon as Catherine joined us, it became obvious that Bertie was perfectly normal, except in fastidiousness, so I’d done nothing but make a virtue of necessity after all. With Andrew, I don’t know. I mean, I know at the moment of course, but life’s made some rather excessive demands on him lately. He may quite well grow out of it. If so, he’ll largely have you to thank.”

  Laurie said, “Not now.”

  Dave put some finished swabs away in a cardboard hatbox. “You’ll know what I’m talking about now better than I do. He came here with some doubt about you which he didn’t want to discuss with me or anyone else, and I imagine you’ve come here partly to resolve it. Of course, if you can give him the answer he wants, you have every right to. Indeed, you should, in spite of the fact that it won’t make things any easier for him at first.”

  Laurie was silent, looking at the fire. At last he said, “I couldn’t give him the answer he wants.”

  He didn’t look up. The rhythmic sound of Dave’s hands folding the swabs—a pause for adjustment, a light smoothing pat, a moment’s pause, and then a flat heavy pat—went on almost unbroken.

  Laurie said, “I thought it might make him feel a little better to know that I’m sorry, and that it happened partly because—” He felt his voice about to get out of control, and stopped quickly.

  “Of course,” Dave said. His lean knotted hands, seamed with work and scrubbing, paused on a half-folded square of gauze. “This is the worst of all my failures.”

  “Yours?” said Laurie. He contracted his brows vaguely.

  “Once or twice I thought of talking to you. I said to myself that you might be as innocent as Andrew was, and my interference might be a disaster to both of you; I couldn’t be absolutely sure. So I saved myself a tricky job which would have involved stating my qualifications for taking it on, and I had the pleasure of being right, where Andrew was concerned. But anyone involved in the recoil was just as much my responsibility.”

  Laurie’s stillness had changed and become stony. He said, “I shouldn’t waste any worry there, if I were you.”

  As if he hadn’t heard, Dave went on, “I took up the work I do largely to teach myself that sort of thing. As you see, I’ve not made much headway. Love is indivisible, Bertie said to me once. He’d only been out of the army a few months, but his instincts were better.”

  Laurie looked up from the empty cup into which he had been staring. “If I don’t see Andrew, would you be willing to tell him I came?”

  “Yes, of course. You’ve told me what you came here to say. I’ll tell him that, and anything else you want me to.”

  The knowledge that he was not going to see Andrew again suddenly came home to Laurie as real. He hadn’t believed it while he was speaking.

  Dave said, “It’s not that I think it would be wicked for you to meet. But you’d both suffer more than now, and no good would come out of it.” With a chance inflection which made Laurie able to imagine him as a young man, he added, “He really is awfully tired.”

  “Yes,” said Laurie dully. “He must be. We’d better not wake him.”

  “When you’re on the way back it won’t seem so bad. You’ll remember it would be all over by then anyway.”

  “You people are so practical,” Laurie said.

  Dave got up and came to sit on the kitchen table. His personality could be felt at this distance like something tangible. “There’s no need to feel finally cut off. He’ll want to hear from you, of course. Write when you feel he’ll be needing it, not when you feel you must, and it will be all right. Or if you want to know how he is without writing, you can always write to me.”

  The room was getting dark. The first twilight was coming already to the long black street, though in the open, probably, it would still seem to be afternoon. Laurie noticed for the first time, hung on pegs at the side of the dresser as herbs are hung in the country, a bunch of gas masks and a cluster of tin hats.

  “May I give you my address?” he said. “If he were—ever ill, or anything. If you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Certainly,” said Dave, in the matter-of-fact voice he used in the wards. “Write it on this. I’ll put it in the file, I won’t keep it on me.”

  While he was doing this Laurie remembered something. He would have liked to say, “I heard about your wife and I’m very sorry.” But because of the road by which this thought had come to him, he could not bring himself to say it.

  Dave said, “This isn’t the day I’d have chosen to give you this advice, Laurie. But don’t think of yourself because of all this as necessarily typed and labelled
. Some men could make shift, for a time at least, with any woman out of about ninety per cent they meet. Don’t fly to extremes the moment you discover your own needs are more specialized.”

  Laurie waited, ready to say it after all; but Dave didn’t go on, and Laurie realized that his impersonality was in the nature of a human flinching, and that he was willing Laurie not to speak.

  “Well, I must go. There’s no sense in getting myself crimed my last week in the army, if I can help it.”

  Dave gave a smile which Laurie recognized as partly one of relief. “Don’t try and slip onto the platform by the footbridge, they’ve been on to that for at least twenty-five years.” They both got up. Dave said, “You’d better go out at the back, I think.”

  The scullery was tiny, there was hardly room for anything but the copper and the sink. The cement floor had been mixed with unsifted earth so that pebbles stood up in it. There were towels hanging by the sink; this must be where everyone washed.

  “Thank you for everything,” Laurie said. “If you’ll tell him … you know what to say. Tell him I …” As if the sensation had come as a message, he felt something usually too familiar for consciousness, a flat heaviness in a pocket. He got out the book and turned it over in his hand, with the feeling that there was something that needed seeing to. Remembering, he tore out the flyleaf, then got out his pen and wrote Andrew’s name on the first page. “Please, will you give him this?”

  Dave looked at the lettering on the spine. “You know,” he said, “even the most exalted paganism is paganism none the less.” He took the book, looking at the scored and salt-stained cover, at the blood. Something came into his face which had been there on the day when Laurie had seen him watching the battle in the air and the falling planes. “Yes,” he said. “I’ll give it him with your love.”

  He opened the door. A broom which had been leaning behind it fell with a clatter. They both stood still, listening. There was a sound, muffled by the floor above, of a man yawning; then, more clearly, raised to carry through a party wall, Andrew’s voice. “Tom. What time is it?”

  Laurie slipped through the door into the scrawny yard. He glanced upward, to ask Dave if the window looked that way. Dave shook his head. Upstairs a sleepy voice talking itself awake said, “Dave’s up, good, that means tea.” Andrew said, “Someone’s with him, I think.”

  Laurie stood with one foot on the doorstep, perfectly still. He had heard the false casualness of a reviving hope, which dares not be open even with itself. There was a long, long moment of silence before the voices began again. Then, very softly, Laurie said, “While I’m going could you make a noise? He knows my step.”

  Dave nodded and went over to the sink. In the street a lorry was approaching; that would help too. “Goodbye, Dave.”

  “Goodbye,” Dave said. “God bless you.” He spoke as he might have said in the ward, “Here’s your blanket”; like a man offering in his hand something solid and real. As Laurie went, he heard him start to clatter the sink with both taps running.

  It was not till Laurie had got level with the bombed houses down the street that he became aware of the sheet of paper which, because he couldn’t discard it in the house, he was still holding screwed up in his hand. He tossed it away into the road, where it landed in a little heap of rubble and broken glass. On the crumpled edge which was showing he could see “… anyon” and just below it “… dell.”

  When he got out into the wide main street it seemed still quite light, but by the time he reached Paddington it was the latter end of dusk, and you could feel everywhere, in voices and footsteps and the sound of the traffic, the faint resonant overtone of a steady anticipation.

  16

  HE ARRIVED BACK IN the ward just before the night staff came on. The Staff Nurse said, “Oh, there you are, Odell; I suppose you know Sister’s absolutely livid with you?”

  “Yes, I was afraid of that.”

  “If you told that child to eat your dinner as well as his own and say you were there, I don’t think much of it. When she taxed him with it he got nervous and brought the whole lot up again.”

  “No, really I didn’t. Is he all right?”

  “Not much thanks to you. Get to bed now for goodness’ sake, if you don’t want me to tell her you cut your treatment as well. Lucky for you it’s her half day. All I can say is, I hope it was worth it.”

  Mervyn, flattered by Laurie’s concern, waved it away. “It’s all right, it was a bit of a waste, but I ate some sweets when I got hungry again, and there was a super pie for supper, I had some more. Did you fix everything okay?”

  “Yes, thanks. We’d better stop talking or Nurse won’t like it.”

  “Go on, we’ve got six minutes yet. I say, Spud, you know what? I had a visitor this evening. I bet you sixpence, come on, I bet you a hundred thousand pounds you don’t guess who I had.”

  “I can’t think,” said Laurie, coming near to a literal truth just then. “Someone from school?”

  “Go on, you’re soppy, they come Sundays. Come on, guess. I bet you never do guess. Shall I tell you? Do you give up? Okay, then you owe me a hundred thousand pounds, see? It was Mr. Lanyon. He came right into the ward and said is Sister off duty, so then he asked Nurse if he could see me, and she said, well, don’t stay long, only she was busy, see, so he stayed for ages, he told me all about Morse, and he showed me how you sail a dhow, he drew me one, and he gave me my soap and flannel to wash, he stayed right up till they came to make the bed. I bet you’d never have guessed, would you? Would you, Spud? You’d never have guessed if you weren’t there he’d come just to see me?”

  “No,” said Laurie. “Was that all you talked about?”

  “Coo, no. We talked for ages.” The first bright shine of elation had gone from his voice, and there was half a question in it.

  “What about?”

  Already the old sharp look was coming back into Mervyn’s face; no clear suspicion, only the knowledge that he was being given at best half a truth. “Only what I was going to do when I leave school, and he asked about you, he asked where you were. So I said I didn’t know, you had to see about something on business.” He gave the sharp look again, this time a request for approval. Laurie realized that this was some kind of stock answer he had been taught to make at home, perhaps when creditors called. No doubt at the time he had simply told all he knew; this canniness was retrospective. Laurie could feel in himself all the wheels running down in a slack hopeless sense of universal defeat. “I’m glad you had a nice talk.”

  “Yes, I thought he was super.” Laurie sensed, in the pause, a forlorn hope of having everything made right again.

  “He tells some good stories, doesn’t he? I ought to have left a message for him, but I forgot.”

  “He said he’d come back tomorrow.” A cautious relief quickened in Mervyn’s voice. “I say, Spud, did you know, it’s Sister’s day off tomorrow? Mr. Lanyon didn’t know it was, so when I told him, he said he might come and see me again, just for a minute.”

  “That would be fine. But sometimes he gets orders at short notice. So if you don’t see him, don’t be upset.”

  The night nurses were coming in; now there was no need to talk any more. But though the raid that night was a light one and soon over, he was awake till three, with the tight spinning wakefulness of mental exhaustion. Soon after five the lights went on and the day’s work began.

  The long featureless desert of the morning passed. After dinner he dozed fitfully for about an hour, till it was time to go for his treatment and make his apologies to Miss Haliburton. After that there was nothing to do but think.

  At five Laurie slipped out of the ward quietly, and waited at the head of the stairs. In the ward at the bottom someone had just died and the widow was led away crying. For a little while the flagged stone well was empty; then two housemen paused there to exchange a bit of hospital scandal and laugh; a long wait, then a very young nurse hurried away on an errand, rolling down her sleeves and pushing
the hair out of her eyes. The next footsteps were Ralph’s.

  The landing was too near the ward; Laurie went down, and they met on the bend of the stairs. With a kind of horror, he saw that Ralph looked exactly the same. Even now that one knew, there seemed nothing behind his smile but a certain alertness and anxiety, there was nothing to see.

  He said, “Hello, Spud. What happened yesterday? If you left a message for me I never got it.” Laurie didn’t answer; he thought his face would be answer enough. Ralph looked at him again and said, “What’s been going on, for God’s sake? You look terrible. What’s the trouble, Spud, tell me about it.”

  “I’ve been to see Andrew,” Laurie said, and waited.

  Ralph waited too. His face betrayed nothing. If one hadn’t known, it would have seemed to show mere bewilderment passing into concern.

  Laurie said, “Do you still want to know what the trouble is?”

  With an anxious-sounding irritability Ralph said, “Yes, of course I do.”

  Laurie remained silent; but this time it was because he had been left without words. Ralph’s fair brows came down in a straight line. He hadn’t even dropped his eyes. He said, slowly, “I suppose you mean he’s found out.”

  Still Laurie stared, unbelieving. It had really seemed to him, till this moment, that he was ready for anything, that not a single illusion about Ralph was left. But he had taken for granted courage in a corner; he had imagined Ralph standing up to this as he had when Mr. Straike had asked him his name.

  At first it had seemed not to matter what one said, the thing had been to get it over; but now he felt anger rising in him, pent, aching anger from hidden places, the blind undischarged poison of guilt and conflict and suppressed resistance. He said, “You should know.”

  “I don’t understand. Why?”

  After a short pause Laurie said, “Christ!”

  “Now look, Spud,” said Ralph, suddenly crisp, “this isn’t getting us anywhere.”

  “I’ve got some good news for you,” said Laurie bitterly. “He’s gone up to London. You did better than you expected there. He’s gone to work in the worst-bombed place he can find, he thinks he ought to because he hit you. I’m glad you had a good laugh about it. Are you satisfied now?”