The Charioteer by Mary Renault
“If you say so, of course.” And now, he thought, perhaps it really is my fault. No one who knew so little had the right to do this.
Ralph turned and adjusted the windscreen wiper, which was out of true and took him some minutes. Still fidgeting with it, he said, “Well, now, about this appointment of yours. I don’t know how urgent it is. I thought possibly you might just be feeling you’d seen enough of my domestic ménage. If I’m wrong, or if you still feel the same way about it, let it go and we’ll be on our way.”
“Oh,” said Laurie. He had completely forgotten. Ralph’s eye caught his and all at once they were smiling. “Well, I’ve not got a late pass, but it’s no more urgent than that … I did rather feel he and I might get in each other’s hair if we met again.”
“He’s on duty this evening, so you won’t do that. How long have we?”
“If you can lift me back, about an hour and a half.”
“Come on, then, let’s go.”
The strict room was wearing a half-smile of hospitality; there was a cloth on the table, and a plate of sandwiches bought ready cut and sealed in wax paper. There was something very comforting to Laurie in the matter-of-fact way Ralph made no bones about having expected him. There was a feeling of being looked after, a feeling almost of home. Ralph mixed a couple of drinks, lifted his glass, and seemed to hesitate. In the end he just said, “Happy days.”
“Happy days,” said Laurie smiling. If only he had got a late pass he could have kept Ralph company for the rest of the evening. At a time like this one would remember little things that had been harmless and happy and which one had expected always to remember with pleasure, and they would seem to look at one with a sneer. Laurie would have worked hard to make himself good company, if that had been necessary, but in fact they had plenty to talk about and the meal was quite gay. When they were washing up and making coffee in the little hole of a kitchen, Ralph said, looking up from his plate and tea-towel, “This is better, isn’t it, Spud?”
“Yes,” said Laurie, “of course it is.” If only he hadn’t outstayed his pass so recently. He hated the thought of leaving Ralph alone.
The popping blue gas fire had warmed to a spreading glow. Beyond the hooded reading lamp’s small orbit it touched the room with dusky gold and rose. Laurie sat as he was bidden in the armchair; he had learned to accept such things simply, like the old. Ralph, curled easily on the old hooked-wool rug, would have looked incongruous there to no one, probably, except to Laurie, who found ancient habits of precedence still haunting his mind. The senior studies at school had had gas fires. He looked down at Ralph; except for being seen from the wrong angle, he, too, in this mellowing dimness seemed very little changed. He had nice hair, Laurie thought; it still had that freshly washed look, and the neat cut was the same. Fine, light, and straight, it had a kind of innocence; it would be pleasant to touch. Then he remembered how this thought had come to him seven years ago, at the moment when Ralph was saying goodbye to him.
He said, “Do you still like your toast done thin and crisp? I feel I ought to be making it.”
Ralph looked up, his face turning from the light. In the deep shadow it could only be seen that he was smiling; his face was a dark brightness edged with fire.
“What do you know about it? You never fagged for me. I say, Spud.”
“Yes?”
“I’ve got a bit of good news I’ve been saving up for you. When you hear it officially, don’t forget to look surprised.”
“Of course I won’t.” He couldn’t imagine what it could possibly be and fell back into a trusting blankness. Perhaps a new secret weapon was about to appear which would end the war in a week. “Well, come on, what is it?”
“I rather thought they’d have told you today. As a matter of fact, Alec’s been pulling a few strings for you. He’s rather a pet of the old girl who does your massage.” (So it was that, Laurie thought, which had started her on the boot. Suddenly he noticed that the leg hadn’t begun aching yet; he was about to communicate this good news, but Ralph hadn’t finished.) “She thought you ought to be coming oftener, and she takes a dim view of E.M.S. hospitals anyway; so she put the recommendation straight in. They’re going to transfer you to the hospital here in a day or two. That’ll be better, won’t it?”
Laurie didn’t answer the question, because he hadn’t heard it. The first shock was too great either for protest or disguise. He sat for many long seconds, fixed in the dull astonishment and slow comprehension of a mortal wound, his face naked and forgotten in the light of the fire.
He became aware presently of something outside the shell of his own pain. Ralph was kneeling beside the chair, gripping his arm and staring at him. He tried to get his face in order.
“Spud. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” said Laurie stupidly. He put the back of his hand across his eyes; the light felt too bright. “I expect it’s gone through by now.” Dimly he knew that this was unkind, perhaps more; but he had been injured beyond his strength and had to struggle with himself to keep from being much more cruel than this.
There was a long silence after he had spoken. Then Ralph said, with the crudity of deep feeling, “You’ve got someone there.”
“Yes,” Laurie said. Voices came through the shell now; kindness and loyalty tapped remindingly on the walls. He said dully, “But you couldn’t have known that.”
“I could have thought.”
Ralph’s face was still turned from the light, but it ran along his shoulder and arm and caught the edge of his glove, and Laurie, for whom everything was etched as hard and sharp as silverpoint, saw that the padded fingers had become oddly separate in their limpness, quite dissociated from the rest of the hand. “You’ve been there since June, and you—Christ Almighty, I should think anybody could have thought of it.”
“I meant to have told you last time.” Laurie spoke with apology; he felt exhibited now and ashamed. “I was going to tell you here, but there were too many people.”
Ralph said in a neat, quiet voice, “That’s been the trouble, hasn’t it? Too many people.”
He should have asked me first, thought Laurie. It was all beginning now to burn down into his imagination: he could fill with their lost content the stolen days. He’d only met me twice; why should he assume that I’d told him everything? He takes too much on himself; he acts like God.
With all this, he gave no sign of what he thought; for the near presence of great anguish touched some instinct in him, though he was too confused to recognize it except as a phantasm projected on his surroundings by his own pain.
“It was my fault. I ought to have told you. I talked so much, I told you everything but that. I didn’t talk like a person who’s keeping something back.”
“For God’s sake why should you?” Ralph looked down and seemed to notice the clenched hand in the limp glove; there was a kind of distaste in the movement with which he straightened it. “Some people never learn, and it seems I’m one of them.”
“Don’t,” said Laurie, “please.” In the shadows he could feel, more than see, Ralph’s eyes looking into his. “It’s not like you think. It wouldn’t have been any good, ever.”
Ralph said, “The first night we met, in the car. You said something about this.”
“Not really. I talked as if it were years ago. It is my fault, you see.”
“Of course you talked as if it were years ago. So would anyone who—God, you hardly knew me. Just because I’ve been spending my time with a lot of nattering queens—you even told me, and I had to do this to you.”
“Look, Ralph, this had to happen quite soon. It’s better to get it over with.”
Ralph said, looking down at his hands, “Like dying tomorrow instead of next week.”
“Not only like that. It’s been getting risky. You see, he—I think he quite likes me, and he mustn’t ever know. It would spoil his life, and there’s no need. I wonder if this wasn’t meant to happen. One gives oneself away without mean
He became aware of Ralph staring at him. He couldn’t see the eyes, except as curved reflecting surfaces in a mask of darkness. “Spud, for God’s sake. Stop it. It’s like a ghost.”
“What?” asked Laurie, confused.
“Nothing. Sorry. Well, tell me about him, who is he, what’s he like? Well, come on.”
“Oh, he”—Laurie stared into the fire—“he’s—”
“Well,” said Ralph, his voice suddenly gentle, “he’s a soldier, I suppose?”
“No. No, he works there. He’s a Quaker; a c.o.”
Ralph said, “Jesus Christ.”
“If you met him, you’d understand.”
“Yes, of course. I’m sorry, Spud. You don’t get anything like that at sea.”
“His name’s Andrew. Andrew Raynes.”
“That’s a nice name.”
“He’s younger than I am, quite a bit.”
“Yes. I mean, is he?”
“He’s fair, with gray eyes. … I’m sorry I’ve not got a photograph to show you.”
“You must bring one another day.”
“The thing about him is, he wouldn’t know how to run away from it.”
“That’s always a thing,” said Ralph, in a gentle dead voice. “It makes one feel responsible, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, that’s just it. That’s just how I do feel. There’s no one I could talk about this to, except you.”
“Thank you,” said Ralph. “What about another drink?” He got up and reached for the gin bottle. He still kept his back turned to the fire.
“Yes, I’d like one, please.” Now that the half-seen eyes were no longer there he could bring it out more easily. “You see, when I say there’s no one else I could have told about it, I meant … Those people the other night, for instance. Anything goes. They’d never see it. There was something you did for me once. I expect you’ll have forgotten long ago; but it made all the difference. I just wanted to tell you.” He groped in the leg-pocket of his battle-dress, found what he wanted, and held it out. “Do you remember? You gave me this.”
It must be true, he thought, that Ralph had forgotten; for he stared at it dumbly, almost stupidly, and only reached out to take it just as Laurie was about to put it away again. He carried it over to the table and held it under the shaded reading lamp, standing up so that the light only fell on his hands and on the book. Suddenly Laurie remembered what it had looked like that day in the study, crisp and clean and nearly new. The pool of light was small, but bright and hard: it picked out the bloodstain and the rubbed edges, and the rough whitened patch from the sea. He said, “I’m sorry I’ve not looked after it better.”
“Well,” said Ralph with his back turned, “after all, seven years.” He put the book down on the table, and looked abruptly at his watch. “Look, Spud, I’m sorry, I have to phone the Station now. There’s a man I have to give a message to. It’s all right. I shan’t be long.”
Laurie began to say something, but he had caught up his cap and gone; a few moments later came the slam of the front door, and quick feet on a frosty pavement. Almost as soon as he had gone Laurie noticed the blue topcoat still lying on the bed; but now that he was alone, his own disaster seemed to fill the world, and no one was Ralph’s keeper.
To escape from thought, which told him nothing except that he must bear it, he took down the book nearest to his hand and opened it where it fell apart. He read: … and there shall we see adventures, for so is Our Lord’s will. And when they came thither, they found the ship rich enough, but they found neither man nor woman therein. But they found in the end of the ship two fair letters written, which said a dreadful word and a marvellous: Thou man, which shall enter into this ship, beware thou be in steadfast belief, for I am Faith, and therefore beware how thou enterest, for an thou fail I shall not help thee.
He could take in no more of it; he sat with the open book on his knees and the last sentence ringing in his head like an unanswered bell.
It must have been fifteen minutes or so later when Ralph came back. To Laurie it seemed much more. At first it had been a relief no longer to consider anyone’s feelings but his own; to rest his head in his hands, to be silent. He hardly knew at what point solitude passed into loneliness, and he began to listen for the sound of the door. Footsteps approached and seemed for a moment to be familiar, and came near and were a stranger’s and died away. It was strange, he thought, but true, that even after this catastrophic blunder the instinct still persisted to confide in Ralph and look to him for comfort. Anger was futile and no longer even a relief; it seemed now just a wretched mischance for both of them. His own secretiveness, and Ralph’s weakness for running other people’s lives, had conjoined like adverse stars. Laurie remembered the story of Bim and thought, Poor old Ralph, he does have bad luck.
It was at this point that he heard Ralph coming upstairs; the door opened a second or two later.
It must be a cold night, thought Laurie; not because Ralph looked cold, but because he had clearly been going fast to keep warm, and now, coming in again, he had the bright unfocused eyes and the slight strangeness that people have who suddenly emerge from darkness wide awake. He had turned up the collar of his jacket and forgotten to turn it down again; his eyes were extraordinarily blue. He looked sharp-edged rather than blurred, with a frosty sparkle, a flash of the night about him; he stood in the doorway a little out of breath, narrowing his blue eyes against the soft light as if it were dazzling, and looking at the room as a man might who after a long absence expects to find changes here and there. He was at all times compact and neat, but now there was more than this, a kind of diamond concentration, so that his unconscious pause on the threshold was brilliantly arresting, like a skillfully, produced entrance in a play.
It was a striking reversal, for Laurie, of the mood it had interrupted. If he had remembered his pity, it would have embarrassed him; but he had at once forgotten. First he was simply glad to see Ralph back; and then, as he looked again, there was a sharp stirring of some very old, romantic memory; perhaps of some book illustration he had known as a young boy, of which his very first glimpse of Ralph at school had reminded him before he had even known his name. So strong was this sense of the past that his own feeling, caught up in it, seemed like a memory. He stood looking at Ralph in startled admiration, moved by a dream of mystery and of command, and at the back of his mind was a thought that he wanted this moment not to end and that it was ending. Even as he formed it, Ralph came forward from the doorway into the room.
The first telephone box he came to hadn’t been working, he said. He was sorry he had been so long.
Laurie said, “You’ve been running.”
“It’s cold.”
“You don’t need this now, anyway.” He turned down the collar of Ralph’s jacket.
“Oh, thanks. Yes.”
They looked at each other. But their thoughts were set, deeply gripped in the situation that already obsessed them, and which seemed to them as hard and unyielding as stone; they were not aware of having altered it in any way. Laurie’s instinct hid what it had felt, for just then his heart would have rejected it as an outrage. As for Ralph, he had had a trying half-hour, and his perceptions were strained; it cannot be supposed he had subtlety enough to guess that a moment of black courage had given him power unasked, when he had only been seeking strength.
He got a pair of ivory brushes out of the cupboard (Laurie saw how characteristically clean they were) and polished his light hair to its usual smoothness; then he came back to the table, poured a couple of drinks, and said, “Well have to be going soon.”
“Shall we?” He had fancied it was earlier; the thought of breaking the news to Andrew dragged at his heart.
“Not for a bit,” said Ralph. “It’s all right.”
They drank in silence for a minute or two. Laurie said, “I think what I really want is to get drunk.”
“How drunk?”
“I suppose so.”
“You can sleep here if you want.”
“I only meant I’d like to. I’ve got to be back tonight.”
Ralph poured some more tonic in Laurie’s glass. “I suppose you spend hours talking about life and death and God, don’t you?”
“What makes you think that?”
“Well,” said Ralph, not unkindly, “the alternatives are limited, I gather.”
“By the time you’ve done a few months in an E.M.S. hospital, you can do with someone to talk to.”
“You sometimes can even on a freighter. It’s funny we’ve been within a few miles of each other for months without knowing, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is. I wish we had.”
“You’re being almost inhumanly forbearing about all this, Spud; but let’s face it, you’ll never really forgive me, will you?”
“I told you about that. In the end you’ve probably done me an even better turn than you thought you had.”
“Poor old Spud. Does he tell you why his girls are different from all other girls?”
“No. You see, that’s really the hard part.”
Ralph looked up. “No girls?”
“No, none.” He met Ralph’s eye and said, “Yes, I think so. He’s almost told me; but he doesn’t understand what he says.”
Ralph finished his drink and folded his arms on the table.
“Well, for God’s sake, then, if that’s all, why don’t you tell him?”
“Have you ever met any Quakers?”
“Not that I remember. Would he think you were Satan incarnate?”
“It isn’t that,” said Laurie, appealingly. Ralph seemed suddenly shut away and he felt it like an absence. “It would spoil everything for him. He would never do anything about it, and—well, you see, he—he’s an affectionate sort of boy. He’s gone through life so far being fond of one person after another and it seems always to have made him happy. Knowing would poison all that for him, it would never be the same.”