The Charioteer

by Mary Renault

  At the door he said, “I’m sorry you’ve had this trouble with Sandy because of me.”

  “If it wasn’t you,” said Alec unemotionally, “it would be something else. And it wasn’t for you, really. Ralph would never let one do anything for him. It was what most of our rows were about.” His eyes met Laurie’s. Neither had moved, but they were like people at a station who see each other receding and getting small as each departs on his different journey. Alec said, “Walk out through the front door, not the lodge. And get a move on.”

  In the street outside the hospital, a taxi was unloading its freight of relatives summoned to someone critically ill. Laurie hailed it and got in. The night was black, and bitterly cold.

  The drive, from which he had expected a breathing space, seemed over in a moment. He stood on the doorstep, making up his mind to ring. The landlady’s radio was on. She was a talker, who had trapped him once or twice in the hall, and he dreaded its happening now. He tried the door; it was unlocked, and he came in quietly. She was rattling away to someone in her room, using the voice she kept for men. Helped by the banisters, he hoisted himself softly up the stairs.

  Ralph’s door was open and the light was on. Laurie paused at the stair-head. Suddenly he wondered why he was forcing himself on Ralph at all. It seemed formal and meaningless, an expiation important only to himself. What he had done was done. He ought to see to his own punishment; it was clear, from what Alec had said about the telephone, that Ralph wanted nothing of it or of him. Thinking about Ralph as he looked again at the door, he knew suddenly before he reached it that the room was empty.

  It looked vividly different, as familiar rooms do after a strong experience. Lying on the bed was a shirt, to Laurie’s eye quite clean, which Ralph must just have changed for a still cleaner one. He always used to hurry such things out of sight like guilty secrets; to have found it seemed one more offense against him. He must only have gone out for a few minutes, Laurie thought.

  He walked in, across the room and around it; he was at the point of fatigue when delays are intolerable and one tries to abolish them by continuing to make the motions of effort. It was mainly under this taut compulsion to be doing something that, when he found two or three letters on the table stuck down ready for posting, he picked them up to read the envelopes. The top one was for him. For a moment he felt only the relief of his restlessness, that here was something he could be dealing with. By the time he began to have scruples, his finger was already under the flap, and he noticed that the edge was lifting. It had been closed so recently that the gum hadn’t quite set. For no good reason this made up his mind for him, and he peeled it open.

  Ralph’s clear sloped writing was packed in neat sections on a big white sheet from some kind of naval memo-pad. Laurie stood staring at it for a second or two, vaguely aware as he stood by the table of a faint smell which had some incongruous association for him, belonging to some part of his life with which Ralph had had nothing to do. The thought vanished from his mind and he began to read.

  Dear Spud,

  I am sorry that there seems to be no way of writing to you more quickly than by the post, if one is to avoid people reading it I should have liked you to know sooner that you are not to blame for this in any way. It was Bunny who interviewed your friend, as I suspected, but that’s immaterial. It couldn’t have happened but for me, I saw that immediately, so that I have done what you thought in another way. I am telling you this to get it straight between us, because you are bound to find out sooner or later. The real reason I am getting out is that I can see no future for me at sea, and can’t fancy myself in a shore job. I have had something of the sort in mind ever since Dunkirk. I swear that is true.

  I am sincerely sorry for the harm I have done to you and to this boy. You had the right idea in the first place, knowing yourself best, and I came along and bitched up your life in every way. I can see now that I was wrong even at school; I should either have gone the whole way, which in those days would probably have shocked you and put you against it all, or shut up about it altogether. When I found you remembered, I felt it must have been what I wanted to happen. One may as well face these things.

  If it is any satisfaction to you, I paid a call on Bunny just now and he has been taken to sick bay, with concussion and broken ribs as well as I could judge. He came round in time to agree it was the blackout once again. I tripped him into admitting he had been at my private papers. I shouldn’t like you to think I had ever discussed you or your affairs with him. If you should see Alec, will you tell him I owe him an apology? He will know what I mean.

  You mustn’t go on being upset about this, Spud. I have never had much time for people who do this kind of thing as a form of repartee, so if you want to do anything for me, try not to think of it in that way. The fact of the matter is that if I hadn’t met you again, and had gone on as I was, I might have drifted past the point where a step of this kind ought to be taken, and I would rather have it like this. You did what anyone would in the circumstances. So don’t worry. Just lately I have been happier than I ever had the right to expect, and as one goes round the world one sees that happiness is hard to come by and seldom lasts for long. Good luck to you, Spud. We always agreed that right, left, or center, it is still necessary to make out as a human being. I haven’t done it but you will. Goodbye.

  Ralph

  Laurie did not begin to think immediately. He was, though now he had forgotten this, very tired. He wondered stupidly for a few moments where Ralph meant to go, and remembered that if he went anywhere at an hour’s notice, it would be as a deserter. The picture of Ralph on the run had a disturbingly wrong shape. Laurie turned to the letter again; but, after all, he didn’t read it. He was not halfway through the first paragraph when he placed the little smell that hung about the table. It belonged to the training depot and the first months of war. As he bent down it got stronger; he saw the cleaning rag soaked in gun-oil at the bottom of the wastepaper basket.

  No, he said stupidly; and while his mind was still inert with refusal, he heard the sound of the radio flow out through the opened door downstairs, and Ralph’s voice in the hall.

  When one checks a fall one is sometimes aware of the whole complex process as if it were the result of thought. Laurie pushed the letter back into the envelope, licked the gum again, and with swift accuracy stuck it down. He put it on the table exactly where he had found it, resisting his impulse to hide it under the others; crossed the room, and stood leaning on the mantelshelf looking into the fire. Now he noticed that Ralph had been burning papers, and a book of some kind. A yellow flame was licking through a fissure in the black paper, like a tongue between thin lips.

  Some final exchange was going on between Ralph and the landlady in the hall. He heard Ralph’s voice, on a note of conventional thanks and apology for giving trouble, moving toward the stairs as he made his escape. It sounded pleasant and easy. Laurie thought that if he had heard it when he first arrived, he would at once have said to himself, “Thank God, everything’s all right.”

  He stood beside the hearth, his arm on the high, empty mantelshelf, waiting, and now Ralph was at the door. He had something in his hand, a little strip of postage stamps. Laurie remembered then that the letters on the table had had no stamps on them. Ralph stood quite still on the threshold for a couple of seconds, then came in and shut the door.

  Laurie still didn’t know what to say, but now it didn’t matter. Instinct told him it was better to wait, not to make speeches. So he only said, “I had to come.”

  As soon as Ralph was in the room Laurie saw his eyes flick over to the writing-table, where the letters stood beside the telephone. Reassurance seemed to bring him to a standstill. Then he said, abruptly, “Did you try to ring me up, about half-past six?”

  “Yes,” said Laurie, “but I couldn’t get through.” He spoke with naturalness and conviction. Indeed, he scarcely knew that he was lying. He felt he was expressing something truer than the facts.
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  As he said it, he, too, turned to the writing-table. But he was looking at the telephone. Now he realized why he had not noticed it before. There had been nothing to notice. The receiver wasn’t off the hooks now. Some time after six-thirty, Ralph must have put it back.

  Laurie was unaware, at the time, of doing much more than note this as a material fact. If he had rung later he could have got through; that was all. Ralph’s face was bruised on the left cheekbone; it looked rather drawn and sunken, as if he had been ill, but it was set now and gave very little away. What Laurie felt seemed to have its origin only in himself. He wanted it so. Knowledge was cruelty. The moment he had used it, he threw away the discovery he had made, that he had waited at the door of a house without defenses.

  He had not thought of this. He had come to take his punishment and, his penance begun, to leave as he had come, alone. That was to have been the beginning. But that was in another country. “Something was wrong with the line,” he said.

  Ralph didn’t move forward. His eyes were dragged down at the corners, as if with lack of sleep; he contracted them strainingly. Behind them, like an almost exhausted runner, his pride seemed to pause, to sway and balance. “What did you ring for?” he said. “I suppose you found out?”

  Remorse, even the greatest, has the nature of a debt; if we could only clear the books, we feel that we should be free. But a deep compassion has the nature of love, which keeps no balance sheet; we are no longer our own. So in the presence of this helpless forgiveness, Laurie seemed to himself to be doing only what was nearest in the absence of time to think. There was something here to be done which no one else could do. All the rest would have to be thought about later. He looked Ralph straight in the eyes, believing what he said.

  “Afterwards. Alec told me. But I should have come, anyway. I should have had to come back.”

  Quietly, as night shuts down the uncertain prospect of the road ahead, the wheels sink to stillness in the dust of the halting place, and the reins drop from the driver’s loosened hands. Staying each his hunger on what pasture the place affords them, neither the white horse nor the black reproaches his fellow for drawing their master out of the way. They are far, both of them, from home, and lonely, and lengthened by their strife the way has been hard. Now their heads droop side by side till their long manes mingle; and when the voice of the charioteer falls silent they are reconciled for a night in sleep.

  A Biography of Mary Renault

  Mary Renault (1905–1983) was an English writer best known for her historical novels on the life of Alexander the Great: Fire from Heaven (1969), The Persian Boy (1972), and Funeral Games (1981).

  Born Eileen Mary Challans into a middle-class family in a London suburb, Renault enjoyed reading from a young age. Initially obsessed with cowboy stories, she became interested in Greek philosophy when she found Plato’s works in her school library. Her fascination with Greek philosophy led her to St Hugh’s College, Oxford, where one of her tutors was J. R. R. Tolkien. Renault went on to earn her BA in English in 1928.

  Renault began training as a nurse in 1933. It was at this time that she met the woman that would become her life partner, fellow nurse Julie Mullard. Renault also began writing, and published her first novel, Purposes of Love (titled Promise of Love in its American edition), in 1939. Inspired by her occupation, her first works were hospital romances. Renault continued writing as she treated Dunkirk evacuees at the Winford Emergency Hospital in Bristol and later as she worked in a brain surgery ward at the Radcliffe Infirmary.

  In 1947, Renault received her first major award: Her novel Return to Night (1946) won an MGM prize. With the $150,000 of award money, she and Mullard moved to South Africa, never to return to England again. Renault revived her love of ancient Greek history and began to write her novels of Greece, including The Last of the Wine (1956) and The Charioteer (1953), which is still considered the first British novel that includes unconcealed homosexual love.

  Renault’s in-depth depictions of Greece led many readers to believe she had spent a great deal of time there, but during her lifetime, she actually only visited the Aegean twice. Following The Last of the Wine and inspired by a replica of a Cretan fresco at a British museum, Renault wrote The King Must Die (1958) and its sequel, The Bull from the Sea (1962).

  The democratic ideals of ancient Greece encouraged Renault to join the Black Sash, a women’s movement that fought against apartheid in South Africa. Renault was also heavily involved in the literary community, where she believed all people should be afforded equal standard and opportunity, and was the honorary chair of the Cape Town branch of PEN, the international writers’ organization.

  Renault passed away in Cape Town on December 13, 1983.

  Renault in 1940.

  Renault and Julie Mullard on board the Cairo in 1948, on their way to South Africa, where they settled in Durban.

  Renault in a Black Sash protest in 1955. She was among the first to join this women’s movement against apartheid.

  Renault and Michael Atkinson installing her cast of the Roman statue of the Apollo Belvedere in the garden of Delos, Camps Bay, in the late 1970s.

  Renault working in her “Swiss Bank” study with Mandy and Coco, the dogs.

  Renault and Mullard walking the dogs on the beach at Camps Bay in 1982.

  Delos, Greece, with a view over the beach at Camps Bay.

  Portrait of Renault in 1982.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1959 by Mary Renault

  Copyright renewed 1987 by Constance Bella Mullard and Hyman L. Margolis

  Cover design by Biel Parklee

  978-1-4804-3285-7

  This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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  EBOOKS BY MARY RENAULT

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