The Charioteer

by Mary Renault

  “Hit me?” said Ralph, staring. “Hit me?”

  Laurie felt physically sick. He knew that this would have seemed to him really the voice of an innocent person, if any other explanation were possible, if his informant had been anybody in the world but one. His memories grimaced at him. He said, “Oh, don’t be so cheap.”

  Ralph stood with his back to the iron banister, his right hand gripping the rails. His eyes seemed to have become darker because of the changed color of his face. He said, presently, speaking slowly and carefully, “Look, Spud, I’m sorry to say this, I know you’re fond of him; but if that’s what he says, he’s putting something over on you.”

  It had only wanted that. Laurie thought of Andrew on his knees scrubbing the filthy floor, of Willis making for the bucket, of Mr. Straike, of the whole terrible vulnerability of goodness in the world.

  “Excuse me.” Two theater porters, with a stretcher and a nurse, had come up below them. They drew back, mechanically, to opposite sides. The senior porter said over his shoulder, “These stairs is supposed to be kept clear.”

  The interruption had sharpened Laurie’s anger, and the pause had given him time.

  “Are you asking me now to take your word against his? You must have forgotten what people who speak the truth are like. I know what you are, I’ve only been pretending to myself; as far as I’m concerned, this serves me right. When you wanted me to live with you and go on seeing him as if nothing had happened, I really knew then. You could be trusted once, you knew what it was all about, you had it in you; but it’s gone now, you’ve no feeling for it any more, you’re all blunt at the edges. Won’t you ever realize why it is when you try to run other people’s lives you can’t do anything but harm? God, must you go on putting yourself in charge and smashing everything you don’t understand? Like a drunk trying to mend a watch.” He paused for breath. Ralph stood against the rail in silence. His face had a dead, fixed, stupid look. Laurie had a feeling of total devastation in which all objectives had been destroyed. He said grayly, “I suppose you can’t help it by now. Too many Bunnies in your life.”

  At first Ralph hardly seemed to know he had finished speaking; he stood there, his face curiously stretched and sharpened over the bones, looking half at Laurie and half through him, as people look through a passing stranger when deep in thought. When he spoke it was almost a soliloquy. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, very likely.”

  Laurie said, “You’d better go, they want the stairway kept clear.”

  A nurse from the ward above came hurrying down the stairs, glanced at Ralph with a flicker of interest, then, touched with discomfort, bustled past them without looking around.

  Ralph said, “Yes, I’ll be going.” He had already moved down a stair, when he paused and looked upward. “Just a moment. When did this happen? This boy, I mean, which day did we meet?”

  “How can you talk about it? It was only for you I promised not to see him. And the day I came to tell you, you knew what you’d just done, and you … you—”

  “Sunday, then, was it?” He paused. “Not that it matters, really, after all. All right, Spud, goodbye, then. I’m sorry; I hope it works out for you sometime. I won’t come back. I see now there’s a lot of truth in what you’ve been saying.”

  Laurie watched the flat white top of his cap as he went down the stairs, slowly at first and then more quickly, moving like a sailor without looking down, his hand—the one in the glove—just touching the rail. He turned the corner at the bottom, and was gone. Laurie waited a little, then went out himself into the street. If he returned to the ward, Mervyn would be sure to ask if Mr. Lanyon was coming.

  It was too cold to walk, and he was too tired. In the first cinema he came to, he sat through the meaningless noise of a gangster film. As time passed, and he began to think, he became occupied with the growing strangeness of finding himself so free. As little as three weeks ago, his life had been full of strings: a home, three people he had been tied to. Now he was as free as air, he could go anywhere, it made no difference to anybody.

  The film had changed and there was a shot of a girl running with a dog. In the distance she looked like Nurse Adrian, of whom he hadn’t thought for days. Now that his life was so uncomplicated, he supposed he might write to her sometime. The thought made a faint tinge of color on the aseptic blankness of freedom. They would reread, as others did, their letters before posting them, measuring carefully their signals of interest and liking, not replying too quickly for fear of seeming to force the pace. Passingly he wondered whether Miss Haliburton had sold the bull-terrier pup yet. At a second meeting, it had seemed to remember him, and its ears were warm.

  He left before the end of the film and had something at a snack bar, then went back to the hospital. He had annoyed them sufficiently, he mustn’t be late tonight. As he went up the main corridor he thought that he had been living in an enclosed and tiny personal world. These were the real people: this porter propped on an idle trolley having a quick cigarette, this stout, anxious woman hurrying to someone sick enough to be visited out of hours, these two doctors amicably disagreeing as they strode along to the theater; the little knot of nurses coming back from the first supper shift, crying, “Oh, no, she didn’t? My dear, what did you do?”

  These were the people for whom, after all, he had been fighting. They were the people for whom Andrew was fighting too. He would be one of them from now on.

  As he made for his bed, he saw with relief that Mervyn was already asleep.

  “Oh, thank goodness, Odell, there you are at last.”

  He looked around from his open locker, his dressing-gown in his hand. What had he done now? He had got back in good time. It was Sister’s day off. He had been so anxious to avoid trouble tonight, and get some sleep.

  “Mr. Deacon’s been practically living here all evening, trying to get hold of you. I told him you were never back till after eight. I should think if he’s rung once he’s rung four times. I’d better tell him you’re here.”

  “I’m sorry, Nurse. I didn’t know I had to see anyone.” He had never heard of Mr. Deacon. This must be some final check before his discharge. It was sure to happen somewhere outside the ward; there seemed no point in undressing. In a few minutes the nurse came back. “Mr. Deacon wants to see you in the doctors’ room. Do you know where it is?”

  “Yes, thank you.” It opened off the landing just outside; sometimes he had seen through the open door an examination couch, a desk, and steel files. The housemaster’s study, he thought. He was going on the carpet for having absconded yesterday. It only remained to hope that Mr. Deacon was a civilian. He knocked at the door, which was ajar, and went in.

  Mr. Deacon wasn’t sitting at the mahogany desk, but on it, his hands behind him gripping the edge. He straightened up as Laurie came in and said, “God, you would choose tonight to go and lose yourself. I’ve been looking for you since before six.” Laurie realized that he had never till now been told Alec’s second name.

  “What did you want me for?” He would have felt more resentment, except that he noticed Alec looked quite ill. He had the kind of skin which with sickness or strain goes a bruised color around the eyes; his eyelids looked like brown crepe, and his ordinarily pale face had a waxy undertinge.

  “Where’s Ralph?” he asked. “Did you see him again?”

  “Again?” said Laurie. His slowness was self-protective. He had thought that this empty place was all deadened and dull, as one can think with a raw burn till someone takes the dressing off.

  With an edgy, fine-drawn impatience Alec said, “After he went at five, did you go after him? When I rang him up, when he took the receiver off, were you with him then?”

  “No,” Laurie said.

  “You had a row, didn’t you?”

  “I’m sorry, Alec. If you don’t mind I’ll go back to bed. I thought a doctor wanted me. I’m sorry. Good night.”

  “Now look,” said Alec in a hard casualty-officer’s voice, “there’s no time
for all that now. This is serious. Did you have a row with Ralph over one of the orderly boys at the E.M.S. hospital?”

  Laurie found that all the anger in him had gone flat and sour: he could feel nothing but a dull swallow of sickness, even at this. He thought again that Alec looked as if he hadn’t slept for days. London had been full of such faces. But now suddenly his dimmed perceptions partly cleared: a vague, premonitory apprehension stirred in him. He said, “That’s nothing to do with you.”

  “Make up your mind about that later. Just listen now. If you’ve been told that Ralph went to see the boy and had some kind of scene with him, it isn’t true. That’s all.”

  “It must be true.” It disturbed him that Alec’s voice hadn’t been that of a bland peacemaker, but brittle with the exasperation of a tired man. “It must be true, Andrew told me himself.”

  “Oh, it’s not the boy’s fault. He’s only young, isn’t he? If someone called claiming to be Ralph, why should he doubt it? Only it wasn’t Ralph, you see. It was Bunny.”

  “Bunny?” His entrails shrank, heavy and cold. Of course, he thought, of course. The food he had eaten half an hour before lay hard in his stomach, like a meal of wood. “But how could it be Bunny? Why?”

  “Oh, use your intelligence, if you ever do use it. Does it sound the sort of thing Ralph would do?”

  “But he was always saying—” Although he could sense above him an annihilating weight of remorse ready to fall, he couldn’t feel it yet, it was pushed out by the grotesque, obscene image of Andrew and Bunny together. “I found it hard to picture you and him as great friends. When he told me it was much more than that—”

  His hand reached to his pocket as if to touch the letter might alter his almost verbal recollection of it. “It is like something from another world, but it has touched you, and the touch is real.”

  “Well?” said Alec impatiently. “Now it starts to add up, I suppose.”

  “But … but he didn’t know Andrew even existed. I didn’t tell Ralph about it till after that. If he knew, then Ralph must have been seeing him all the time. No one else could have told him. That’s nearly—” He stopped, recognizing for what they were the bitter lees of jealousy.

  “I can guess how he found out. Sit down, can’t you; don’t stand there passing out on your feet, I’ve got no time to cope with it.”

  “I’m not,” said Laurie angrily; but he let Alec push him into the patient’s chair. It was true that he was feeling sick. Alec sat back on the desk, watching his face irritably.

  “I know just what he did, the little sod.” He pulled a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket, lit one in a jerky mechanical way without offering them, and drew on it hungrily. “I know, because I’ve carried the can for him before now. Either he’s been reading your letters, if you’ve written Ralph any, or he’s been at his diary again. I know he reads it because once Bim came out with something at a party, and from the way Ralph looked at me, I knew straight away I was the only person he’d ever told. It would have been just my word against Bunny’s, and I can’t bear these fracas, they make me ill.”

  Laurie said slowly, “I know when that happened. I was there.”

  “Oh, God, yes, so you were; of course that was why Ralph was so angry about it. He ought to have left his papers with me, like he did while he was at sea; he trusted me in those days, even after we’d split. The bits he used to show me were just travel stuff, but he always hovered rather, ready to grab it back again, so I assumed he’d committed his soul to it here and there. He’d have lost one lot with his ship, I suppose; but if he began another in hospital, God knows what he put in that.” His dark bruised-looking eyes, set in creases of fatigue, stared at Laurie with dislike. He was smoking feverishly, burning the cigarette down one side. “Of course, living in the same house with Bunny, he must have locked things up. I suppose he didn’t think to put a Yale on.”

  It was like getting an anonymous letter, Andrew had said. As a comment on Ralph it might have sounded a little shrill, if the context had not seemed to explain everything. There are drawings which when inverted reveal the features of a new and different face. In a dead voice, its protest mechanical, Laurie said, “How do you know all this?”

  “Oh, in the usual way. Toto Phelps and Bunny have been honeymooning for two full weeks now; anyone could have told him Toto’s one to get very nasty if he’s two-timed, but all these wide boys get swelled head. The crash came yesterday, and Toto couldn’t wait to plant the story where it could do most good. He’s scared stiff of Ralph, so he came to me.”

  Laurie sat with his elbows on his knees, his hands pressed to his forehead. Alec twitched out the cigarettes again and lit another from the bent stub of the first which he trod into the rug. “I didn’t believe it myself at first. I said to Toto, ‘Don’t give me that, Bunny’s too crude for that Cinquecento stuff.’ But Toto says it was more or less handed him on a plate. I gather the final break with Ralph was fairly acrimonious, Ralph wouldn’t enlarge on that very much to you, I expect, and he didn’t change digs for a week afterwards. Bunny found out all he could in the meantime; well, of course, being Bunny, his first thought was that the thing between you and the orderly boy mightn’t be quite what you’d made it look to Ralph. So he went down just in the hope of finding some silly little piece whom he could charm into spilling the beans. Instead of which—well, I’ve met a few Quakers, I can imagine. And then the moment he introduced himself as a friend of yours, the boy said, ‘You must be Ralph Lanyon’: the uniform, of course. Well, improvisation is Bunny’s middle name. You must have noticed it.”

  “Yes,” said Laurie emptily. “Yes, I know.”

  “After all, there was nothing to give him away definitely except the hand, and Bunny’s always got his hands in his pockets; they were there at the start of the conversation and he remembered not to take out the left one. He must have remembered even when he was hit in the face. If he had any application, he could probably learn to be quite dangerous.”

  “He was as good as he needed to be,” said Laurie bitterly.

  “What happened?” asked Alec, as if he didn’t expect an answer. “Well, you could have known a couple of hours ago if you’d stayed put. I saw Toto last night; I was going to have told you this morning. But Sandy had one of his bad turns, climbing the walls and threatening what he’d do to himself, and I’ve been frightened to leave him, to tell you the truth. I had to ring up Dallow to do my jobs for me, and Christ, what I found when I got back.” He got up from the table with a nervous jerk; but the room was tiny and there was nowhere to walk to.

  “Is Sandy all right?” said Laurie, though he didn’t care.

  “Oh, yes,” said Alec in his flat edgy voice. “I suppose so … I’ve lived my own life to some extent. One can’t tell him everything, you know what he is. I’ve let Bunny get away with little things before now, because of the trouble he could make if he wanted to. Then this blew up, and I thought, No, there’s no two ways here, if I pass this it’s blackmail. So I did what I always say one should, I told Sandy everything Bunny could have told him. When I got back eventually, after about two hours’ sleep, I found one of Harrison’s gastrectomies leaking, and they’d buzzed for me three times.” He had displaced a pile of report forms on the desk; mechanically he began to straighten them. “I’m due to take my finals next summer. I don’t know how I can go on like this.”

  Laurie had been thinking that Alec always seemed to save his confidences for occasions when one was incapable of taking them in. He said, “You’ll be all right, because you’re more a doctor than you’re a queer.”

  Alec pushed the forms together and stood up. “You know,” he said slowly, “that’s the first sensible remark anyone’s made to me all day. Let’s hope you’re right. How could you be such a bloody fool about Ralph? Didn’t it even strike you he hadn’t a mark on him after this alleged brawl? Bunny’s been going around with a split lip for nearly a week, from walking into a lamp-standard in the blackout, he said. You
don’t seem to have given the orderly boy credit for much élan. And why should he hit Ralph, anyway? Even if Ralph did put it to him, he’d never put it like that.”

  “No,” said Laurie. Another bit of the letter had come back to him.

  “He denied it at first,” he said. “And then, in the end, he seemed not to be denying it.”

  “I suppose he just thought what the hell. Or else—” Alec smoked in silence for some moments, more evenly now, his hands pushed down into the pockets of his white coat. “Ralph’s got a simple mind in some ways, but it follows through. Unlike so many of our fraternity, he’s no good at ducking out. It was his doing in this sense, that he was the link. He let in the jungle. About one queer in a thousand has the guts to accept that sort of responsibility, and he’s the odd one.” He fell silent again, then looked up suddenly. “Just how bad was this row between you?”

  Laurie saw Alec summing up his face; there seemed no need to answer.

  “Final?” Alec asked. His voice had sharpened.

  Laurie got up. “Will it be all right for me to use this telephone? I don’t want to leave it till morning.”

  “He won’t answer it. I told you, he took the receiver off the hooks as soon as the bell started. About six-thirty.” He looked at his watch. With abrupt decision he sat down at the desk, searched the paper-rack, and got out a form. “You’d better go around there. Yes, for God’s sake go around right away. I’ll give you a pass. Family affairs, married sister ill. I’ve no right to do this; never mind, you’re not supposed to know that, you’ll be covered anyway. Here you are.” He blotted the form swiftly and pushed it at Laurie. “I’ll see the Night Nurse. I can’t help what she thinks. Get on your way and don’t loiter. He’s not like Sandy, you know.”

  Laurie took the form. He didn’t ask what Alec meant by this uncharacteristic statement of the obvious. He was tired now to the point when he had begun to live on his nerves. He felt he could go on forever, that he would never sleep again.