The Charioteer by Mary Renault
Laurie poured out for Bunny and himself. In the lower ranks of the army, brewing tea has few feminine associations; to an ex-merchant seaman, he thought, the joke wasn’t likely to be excruciating either. Probably it was this which had irritated Ralph. He had come back with his drink and Laurie found himself thinking of him with vague perturbation. Imagining him ideally happy with Bunny had had a peaceful kind of remoteness. Now, as soon as one began wondering what could be wrong and why, one began to have new and disturbing thoughts and to resent Bunny more than was reasonable. Laurie got exasperated with himself and revolted against emotion altogether. With a decision which his habitual fear of boring people made rare in him, he embarked on a conversation about the war.
Ralph flung himself into it with transparent relief, and displayed a grasp of naval strategy which was practical and lively, if not profound. Used as Laurie was to considering the prospect of invasion in terms of what was to be done about the Germans when they arrived, he found it stimulating to be rapped smartly over the knuckles for assuming that they could arrive at all. At the back of Ralph’s mind, he suspected, was the thought that an emergency on this scale might get him back on the bridge of a fighting ship; but they didn’t discuss it. The conversation, begun as an expedient, soon became absorbing to both of them; some minutes of it passed before Laurie realized the fact that it was a dialogue. He looked up to see Bunny absorbed in his own reflections; not resentful it seemed but resigned, like someone who is used to not being considered much.
For the first time, Laurie admitted to himself that it was a mistake to have come. In anyone he had liked and trusted less, he would have suspected by this time that he was being used to bring Bunny to heel. But it was simple enough, he thought; Ralph had felt bored and depressed, perhaps because Bunny had arranged to go to a party without him, and had wanted someone to talk to and pass the time. And why not?
Just then he saw Bunny glance at Ralph’s glass which he had just emptied, pick it up, and refill it. Laurie watched the process out of the tail of his eye; the tot of gin was very small, the bitters helped to color it, the rest came from the water-jug. It shed quite a new and different light on Bunny, and made Laurie resolve to be very tactful indeed.
Just after this, the doorbell rang and Bunny went to answer it. Ralph applied himself to his drink in silence. Laurie had wondered whether he would take the opportunity of making it up to strength, but he was too preoccupied to notice anything.
The callers were Alec and Sandy. Laurie felt very awkward; but it was made clear to him at once by both that a new leaf had been turned and that his name was on it. It was the first time Laurie had observed them both together; he realized quite soon that Sandy regarded Alec as belonging to a superior order of beings, and was childishly proud of him. Perhaps it was admiration that caused him to commit such violent assaults on Alec’s emotions, as a small child will pummel an adult, not believing that it can really hurt him. As for Alec, one would have supposed that he and Bunny were the best of friends. Laurie thought this reasonable but decided that he himself would never have been equal to it. Tea things were swept away and Bunny dispensed drinks; he went on looking after Ralph’s glass as before, choosing moments when his attention was divided. Certainly it made one look at the pink mirror coffee tables with a gentler eye.
For the last few minutes, Ralph had been watching Alec, not talking much. Suddenly he said, “Has something happened?”
“Yes,” said Alec. “It’s Bim. I thought, as we were passing … I wasn’t sure if you’d heard.”
Ralph said “No.” He stared at the glass in his hand, and drank as if it were a routine duty he was absently carrying out. “No, I’d not heard. How was it?”
“Over Calais somewhere. He was seen to hit the ground; he hadn’t baled out. There seems no doubt about it.”
Ralph didn’t speak. It was Bunny who said gently, “Poor old Bim. I ran into him only the other day. It seems like a few hours.”
“He had a long life,” said Sandy, “as it’s going now.” Laurie could see that he was really distressed; his face was sharpened with it. Today he and Alec seemed closer and their friendship no longer unlikely. They reminisced together for a few minutes about Bim.
Bunny said, in the same gentle sickroom voice, “You met him, didn’t you, Laurie? At Alec’s the other night?”
“Yes. Only for a few moments.”
“No, of course I remember, he didn’t stay long. You swept him off, didn’t you, Ralph, to get some rest?”
Ralph said abruptly and rather loudly, “Well, someone had to. He was ill. He ought to have been in hospital.”
“Oh, I know,” said Bunny earnestly. Seeing Ralph about to get another drink, he took his glass and gave him one. “I remember you saying, Alec, if Ralph hadn’t taken over, Bim would have folded up in a couple of hours. It seems like fate, doesn’t it?”
“No,” said Alec in his clinical voice, “I didn’t say so. I’ve had training enough not to make that sort of cocksure prognosis.”
Staring at Bunny and forgetting to care if anyone noticed it, Laurie thought: How stupid he is; how does Ralph bear it? Of course he’s very good-looking, and I suppose … “I suppose,” he said, “the skies over Britain are full just now of fighter pilots who ought to be in nursing homes if they had their rights.”
“I’m surprised, really, they hadn’t grounded him,” Bunny said. “I expect they would have if he’d gone round the bend any further. What do you think, Alec?”
“I’ll save him the trouble of telling you,” said Ralph. His face had a heavy stiffness and his voice had gone flat and hard. “He thinks untrained people should mind their own—business, don’t you, Alec?”
Laurie looked at him puzzled. If it hadn’t been so clearly impossible—for the last three gins Bunny had given him would hardly have added up to one good double—one would have sworn he was getting drunk.
Alec didn’t rise to it. He had brownish eyelids with long dark lashes, under which his eyes slid around to look at Bunny for a moment. He spoke however to Ralph, with pleasant detachment. “Not in this instance, my dear. At least, I can assure you, you did precisely what I should have done if I’d had any influence with Bim, which I hadn’t.”
“Well,” said Ralph, “it seems that night he knew what he needed better than anyone else did. Too bad he got pushed around.” He gave Bunny his glass and said, “Not so much bloody bitters this time, Boo.”
Boo, thought Laurie. He looked at Ralph, who was beginning to have a fixed stare when he was not actually speaking. Boo. Well, good God, what business is it supposed to be of mine? He looked at his watch and got up.
“It’s on the half-landing,” said Ralph, rousing himself.
“Yes, I know, but I won’t come up again, I’ll have to catch my bus. Don’t get up, it’s all right.”
Ralph said, “What in blazes are you talking about? I’m driving you home.” He stared at Laurie as if he had been insulted and were waiting for an apology.
How can he be drunk? thought Laurie. I could take what he’s had myself and hardly feel it. He replied calmingly that of course Ralph wasn’t to turn out and that the bus went to the door.
“Sit down,” said Ralph, “and don’t talk crap. I’m driving you home and that’s the end of it.”
Laurie hesitated. As he did so, Bunny caught his eye and said, “Don’t worry, Laurie; it’ll be all right.” He sounded both kindly and confident. After all, thought Laurie, he should know.
On his way to the half-landing, where he retreated for a brief escape from all the tension upstairs, he knew that he was relieved not to be going yet. He hadn’t realized, till it came to the moment of saying goodbye, how much he had hated leaving Ralph after this news; in this awful flash room it was like abandoning him in a strange town or in a desert. One had to keep reminding oneself how very far from strange to him it really was, and that he wasn’t alone, either.
When Laurie got back, they were all discussing a recent blackm
“I agree,” said Alec. “You could add that it gives the relatively balanced type, who makes some effort to become an integrated personality, a quite false sense of solidarity with advanced psychopaths whom, if they weren’t all driven underground together, he wouldn’t even meet.” He caught Sandy’s eye fixed on him reverently, and, as if he were giving way to a suppressed irritation, added, “Not that I can feel much pity for anyone who’ll submit to blackmail, myself.”
Sandy said at once, “No, really, that’s a bit sweeping, Alec. What about his job, what about dependents, what if his mother’s got a weak heart and the news will kill her? It’s not like you to be so rigid.”
“Oh, Sandy, we’ve been over this so often. It’s a matter of what your self-respect’s worth to you, that’s all. Isn’t that so, Ralph? In the first place, I didn’t choose to be what I am, it was determined when I wasn’t in a position to exercise any choice and without my knowing what was happening. I’ve submitted to psychoanalysis; it cured my stutter for me, which was very useful as far as it went. All right. I might still be a social menace, like a child-killer, and have to be dealt with whether I was responsible or not. But I don’t admit that I’m a social menace. I think that probably we’re all part of nature’s remedy for a state of gross overpopulation, and I don’t see how we’re a worse remedy than modern war, which from all I hear in certain quarters has hardly begun. Anyway, here we are, heaven knows how many thousand of us, since there’s never been a census. I’m not prepared to accept a standard which puts the whole of my emotional life on the plane of immorality. I’ve never involved a normal person or a minor or anyone who wasn’t in a position to exercise a free choice. I’m not prepared to let myself be classified with dope-peddlers and prostitutes. Criminals are blackmailed. I’m not a criminal. I’m ready to go to some degree of trouble, if necessary, to make that point.”
Sandy looked quickly around the room for applause. “I only mean,” he said, “that you can’t always know what other people are up against. Of course, if normal sex were ever made illegal, you’d get decent married couples meeting each other in brothels and dives and getting tarred with the same brush.”
Ralph stirred, in what seemed a sudden uncontrollable annoyance. “Well, for Christ’s sake, don’t let’s make blasted ostriches of ourselves. Anyone would think, to hear you and Alec talk, that being normal was immaterial, like whether you like your eggs scrambled or fried.”
“I didn’t say that,” said Alec temperately.
“That’s how you expect to be treated. Even civilized people had better hang on to a few biological instincts.” He had had to slow himself down to manage the last sentence without stumbling.
“It’s time they learned to be a bit more tolerant,” Sandy said.
“They’ve got children and they want grandchildren. Make you sick, the dirty bastards. So what? They’ve learned to leave us in peace unless we make public exhibitions of ourselves, but that’s not enough, you start to expect a medal. Hell, can’t we even face the simple fact that if our fathers had been like us, we wouldn’t have been born?”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Laurie. “In Athens we could have been.”
“Good old Spud,” said Ralph slowly and distinctly. “You’ll get yourself lynched if you don’t look out.” He leaned forward and tapped Laurie solemnly on the knee. “A lot of bull is talked about Greece by people who’d just have been a dirty laugh there. Not you, Spuddy. I’m not talking about you. You’d have got by.”
Alec shot a glance at Bunny and said swiftly, “Yes, well, we know under the social system the women were illiterates in semi-purdah, and most of the men were bisexual from choice. Hence Socrates, though probably not Plato. I think that supports my argument rather than yours.” His concern for the debate had something perfunctory about it.
“All right,” said Ralph rather thickly. “They were tolerant in Greece and it worked. But, Christ, there was something a bit different to tolerate. There was a standard; they showed the normal citizen something. There was Aris—” He stuck on the name; either he couldn’t pronounce it or he didn’t remember it. He looked at Laurie, as if he were issuing an order.
“Aristogeiton,” Laurie said.
“And the Sacred Band. In fact they took on the obligations of men in their friendships instead of looking for bluebirds in a fun-fair; and if they didn’t, they bloody well weren’t tolerated, and a good job too.”
Laurie didn’t realize how completely Bunny had been forgotten until he moved. He had been sitting on a tartan divan with his patient left-out look, as if a group of mathematicians had overlooked his presence and started to discuss relativity. Laurie had had enough of this and hadn’t glanced at him again. Now he got up gracefully and took away the glass with which Ralph had been tapping for emphasis on the arm of his chair.
“You’ll break it.” He smiled brightly across at Laurie. “I bet he handed you out some canings at school, didn’t he?”
“About the usual number,” said Laurie, rather coldly.
Bunny put his head on one side and looked down at Ralph with an indulgent smile. “It did something to him, you know. Scratch old Ralph after a couple of drinks, and you’ll always find an unfrocked scoutmaster.”
Laurie was certain afterwards that if he had had one more drink himself at the time when Bunny said this, he would have got to his feet and struck him. As it was, he was just sober enough to notice Alec looking at him, which brought him to himself. He sat upright in his chair, which wasn’t easy, since it seemed designed for patients under general anesthesia, and looked Bunny in the face.
“We didn’t have a scout troop actually,” he said. “But I think it’s quite good. It keeps boys off the streets. Did you ever join one?”
Oh, God, he thought, that was a bit much. He saw Sandy try to catch Alec’s eye and Alec pretend not to notice; he saw Ralph frowning in forced concentration as if he knew something ought to be dealt with. He looked at Bunny again.
“I should think I did,” said Bunny genially. “I was prepared every minute, but it turned out a terrible flop.”
He spoke as if he had missed the point; but Laurie had seen his face at the moment of impact. While Alec and Sandy hurried to pad the conversation with gossip, Laurie thought: He took that because he couldn’t think of a comeback he felt would be smart enough. That’s what he wants more than anything; cleverness, making things go his way. And he’s just clever enough to suspect sometimes that he’s fundamentally stupid, and it limits even his malice. That must be most frustrating. I suppose Ralph sees the best of him when they’re alone.
It was at this point that the air-raid sirens went.
There were the usual sounds of weary and resigned irritation. Bunny went to the window to fix a dubious bit of blackout; a warden shouted at him from the street for showing a light; there was some moving about in search of a drawing-pin. Laurie bumped the cocktail cabinet and slopped over the cut-glass water-jug, and returned to mop it up with his handkerchief. As he was about to put this back in his pocket something arrested him; he brought it out again and sniffed it Bunny was at the window, and didn’t see.
Ralph heaved on his chair-arms, and got to his feet. “Well, Spud,” he said, “time we were getting you home.”
Bunny came over. In his gentlest voice he said, “Ralph, my dear, really and truly I don’t think you ought to drive.”
“Now look,” said Ralph, “I’ve only—” He frowned again, as if he were trying to remember something.
“Yes, we know all about that.” Bunny’s cozy voice seemed addressed to an engagingly naughty child. “Just you take a little nap till I get home. I’ll see after Laurie.”
Laurie said to Ralph, “It’s al
“It’s a pleasure, Spud, any time,” said Ralph, speaking carefully and rather pompously. “Bunny’s right, you know. Bad show, I’m sorry. Comes of mixing them. I shouldn’t have had that rum upstairs.”
“You didn’t have any rum,” Laurie said. He didn’t care whether Bunny heard him or not.
“That’s what I thought too,” said Ralph, nodding solemnly. “Only goes to show.” He sat down again; this time he looked as if he wouldn’t get up so easily. Just then the guns began, crackling and pattering at the other end of the town. Laurie looked around at Bunny. Evidently it would be necessary to speak to him sooner or later.
“You’d better forget about driving me back. You’ll have to get back to the Station, won’t you?”
“Oh, no,” said Bunny soothingly. “That’s all right, I’m not on duty.”
“Won’t you want to run Ralph over?”
“Ralph?” Bunny smiled as if something whimsical had been said. “He’s only on a course. He isn’t responsible for anything.”
Laurie’s hand clenched itself in his pocket; his fingers met in the wet twist of handkerchief he had used to mop the cocktail shelf. Ralph’s eyelids were dropping, he was just in the pose for which the chair had been designed. Laurie said to Alec, “Will you be here?”
“We’re on casualty tonight. We ought to be on our way now. I’m sorry.” His eyes met Laurie’s in a look of open understanding. “I shouldn’t worry, it can’t be helped, you know. Well, thanks for the drink, Bunny. Good night.”
Laurie wondered, as the door shut on them, what their first words would be when they were alone. There was a thump; the bombs had started. He walked back to Ralph’s chair.