The Charioteer by Mary Renault
But it was done now; and as they were changing and collecting their things to leave, he felt that he wouldn’t recall his promise if he could. He couldn’t have borne to deliver Ralph so coolly to the pains of jealousy: at least he could be saved the tension and bitterness of feeling that everything was being won back from him in his absence by someone on the spot. Laurie thought: Yes, if we must part altogether that will be different, a clean cut, finis, the end. But with this thought in his mind he looked around the living room, at the swept hearth, the divan reassembled under its covers against the wall; and a memory, which had been imperceptibly transforming itself into an anticipation, gave a long sigh of protest and whispered, “Never again?”
14
IN THE BED WHERE the old man had died there was another one, who seemed to be having the same treatment for the same disease, and talked much more about it, his monologue from behind the screens making them, indeed, almost redundant. But the boy Mervyn was delighted at Laurie’s return, and he was glad that at the last moment he hadn’t forgotten.
“Here; I’ve brought you something for tea.”
“Coo. What a super birthday cake.”
“Wedding.”
“Go on. You been and got married?” Good manners struggled with disesteem in his face; it was a much better color, mauve-pink instead of blue.
“No—my mother has.” He could say it, he found, as if it were years ago, as indeed it seemed.
“No kidding, Spud?” He considered Laurie gravely, then said, with a mature kind of tact, “Have an acid drop.”
“Thanks very much. You look better.”
“I’ve been having the Wonder Drug. Honest. The doctor said. What sort of a night did you have last night?”
“What did you say?”
“I said what sort of a night did you have. You look kind of tired. I thought you might have had a noisy one, like what we had here.”
“Oh. Was there a raid?”
“Was there a raid? We had an incendiary right on the roof. One of the doctors put it out.”
“Did he? Good show.”
“I reckon, with the moon like it is now, we’ll have another tonight, don’t you?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Probably not.” He realized now that the child was a little too bright and cocky to be quite true. “If there is, we’ll just have to tell each other the story of our lives to pass the time, eh?”
“Bags you tell yours first, then.”
Laurie got into bed and, opening a book, tried to think quietly behind its screen. Soon it fell from his hand and, with the clatter of the ward work all around him, he slept like the dead. Later with the noise his dreams grew restless; he thought he was back at Dunkirk, but this time responsible for everything, so that he had to crawl about the beach dragging his broken leg. He heard his name being called, but he couldn’t go any faster; he muttered, “All right, I’m coming, all right.”
“Easy does it. It’s only me.”
He started awake; the lights were on and the blackout up; a doctor in a white coat was standing by his bed. He blinked and saw that it was Alec.
“I can’t really stop. I’ve got to assist with an emergency in ten minutes, but I couldn’t leave you in here any longer without saying hello.” He pulled out the stool from under the bed and sat down, looking just as all the housemen did when they came to take patients’ histories; one half expected him to bring out a patella hammer or a stethoscope. He chatted vaguely about his work, and how to keep on the right side of the Sister; it was all rather dim and dutiful, and Laurie, who was still muzzy with sleep, began to wish he’d go. But he got out the X-rays from the box on the bed-rail, and started holding them up to the light. Laurie was used to seeing doctors enthralled by this pastime; but after saying, “Good Lord, you were lucky with that callus,” Alec became a little absent. He glanced over his shoulder, dropped his voice, and said, “I ran into Ralph for a minute today, just after he left you here.”
“Oh, yes, did you?” He didn’t feel in a state to deal with it, and hoped his face had given nothing away. The reserves which Ralph had broken down felt, in reaction, shy and raw at the approach of anyone else.
Alec looked around for a moment under his brown eyelids, with his disarming throw-away smile. “I didn’t keep him. He was looking incandescent and elevated, like a candle burning at both ends.” After a faintly hesitant pause, he added, “Don’t keep him on a string too long, he hasn’t the temperament.”
Laurie didn’t answer. He was violently embarrassed and, in any case, could think of nothing to say. Alec looked at the X-ray again.
“He hasn’t been talking. But I know him pretty well.”
“Yes,” said Laurie. “Of course. I hear you got it quite heavy here last night.”
Alec gave him another swift neutral glance. “We’ve had worse. Sandy got a third-degree burn on the arm from an incendiary, picking it up with a coal shovel. It’s making us very short on Casualty. Well, I must go. See you sometime.”
Laurie shut his eyes again, to protect himself from conversation. He felt oppressed and dejected. He didn’t blame Ralph, at least not consciously. As if a few threads of contact still linked them like the streamers that cling to departing ships, he felt what must have happened: Alec had offered felicitations, Ralph, out of sensitiveness or superstition, had been driven to qualify them a little. As Alec had remarked, they had known each other very well. Laurie wondered whether he had had time to give the news to Sandy yet.
Through the blanket he had pulled around his ears he could hear the evening mouth-washes being poured out. Muffled like this, the clink and splash and talk sounded like party noises. He could imagine the party conversation as well. “Goodness, where have you been, you’re weeks behind. Why, that’s deader than the Alec affair. Bunny’s with Peter now and Ralph’s with this Laurie boy. No, you wouldn’t have, he’s new, Sandy picked him up in the street originally; he’s the boy Sandy and Alec had that row about. Funny boy, a cripple, awkward about mixing. However, Ralph’s madly in love with him at the moment. I thought everyone knew.”
You don’t get away from it, thought Laurie; once you’re really in, you never get away. You get swept along the road with the refugees, till you find you’ve been carried through the gates without noticing, and you’re behind the wire for the duration. The closed shop. Nous autres.
It would never be like that with Andrew, he thought. Talking in the hospital kitchen at night, they had felt special only in their happiness, and separate only in their human identities. How good it would be to see him now! At least one could write; and getting down into the bedclothes, he spent comfortingly in this way the next half-hour. It was not till he reread it that he realized how far it was falsified by what had been left out, and by that time it was too late to write it again, without missing the early morning post.
He was asleep when the sirens went. Used at the other hospital not to associate their sound with very much urgency, his subconscious mind dismissed it and let him sleep on. But the guns were linked with other memories, and waked him at once; the bombs began a few minutes later.
The other patients said at first that it wasn’t as bad as last night; then they seemed to decide that comparisons were odious, and made no more. Laurie remembered how in France, before he was wounded, he had begun to get his second wind, helped by the stimulus of action and the comradeship around him. It hadn’t been so good lying passively on the beach with the Stukas coming over, after one had had a sample already; but the morphia had helped most of the time. It had been light, too. Hearing two old gaffers joking together on the other side of the ward, he realized he was much more frightened than they were; and he remembered with shame Ralph, who hadn’t been too drunk that night to know what he was doing, falling asleep in Bunny’s deep chair. When he had set the wheels moving for Laurie’s transfer from the country, he would scarcely have considered small inconveniences like this. Accustomed to communicate his own courage to those around him, no doubt he
“Spud. You awake?”
“Hello,” said Laurie, sitting up. “Yes, I am, but I didn’t think you were. Do they still wake you up at two for the Wonder Drug?”
“No, only ten now. But it’s a bit noisy to sleep, isn’t it?”
Indeed, no one was attempting to do so, and the nurses had sensibly decided that it was better to keep the patients cheerful than quiet. But children will sleep through almost anything, and Mervyn’s stillness had been deceptive. He looked feverish, Laurie thought, and it would be partly that which was making him shiver. Laurie lit himself a cigarette, and got up.
“Let’s talk instead. I’ll come and sit on your bed to save shouting. Just let me put my boot on, in case the nurses want me to do anything.”
They had an acid drop, and later Mervyn had a draw at Laurie’s cigarette. It would probably, Laurie thought, with these associations, make a nonsmoker of him for life.
When one of the windows blew in, Mervyn said, without removing his cold fingers from Laurie’s hand, “I suppose this isn’t nearly as bad as Dunkirk, is it?”
“Well, not for me, because I can get about now. You’re fixed more like I was then.”
“If I had to walk would my stomach burst open?”
“I doubt it; but I could carry you.”
“I weigh six stone eleven.”
“Yes, I could manage that.”
After a long awkward pause, as if he were making up his mind to confess to something, Mervyn said, “My Aunt Edie’s house was hit by a bomb, week before last.”
“Oh, bad luck. Was she all right?”
“No, she was killed. And Uncle Ted, and Mr. Robbins that lived with them, and their dog, he was called Smoky, he was half a spaniel. And the baby.”
“That’s too bad. I’m having another cigarette; want to light it? Watch out Nurse isn’t looking.”
This time it made him cough; they transferred the cigarette in guilty haste.
“Mum said Aunt Edie and Uncle Ted had gone to Canada, she said not to go round there because there was bad people come to live in the house. Only one of the boys at school said, that lives in their street. So I went and the lady next door told me.”
“Oh,” said Laurie helplessly. “I see.” A descending bomb whistled loudly. He leaned across the child, but the windows only rattled this time. Mervyn said, “Is it right you can’t hear the one that hits you?”
“That’s what they say. You’re all slipping down the bed, it’s bad for the stitches.” He settled his back against the rail, and the boy’s head against his shoulder. It felt heavy; if things eased off for even a few minutes he would probably sleep. “Mothers will do it, I can’t think why. I suppose they’d sooner think we can’t take it than feel we don’t need them any more. The more they’re fond of you, the worse it seems to be. Only way you can look at it is, women are like that.”
“Are they? Is your mum?”
“She used to be. You can’t go hurting their feelings about it. The only thing is just to put up with it and think your own thoughts.”
The raid was tailing off a little. Two casualties had just been carried in. He wondered if Andrew was safe, and whether Ralph’s Station was a target for tonight. He thought that if Mervyn had been five years older one could have tried him with:
The sorrows of our proud and angry dust
Are from eternity, and shall not fail.
Bear them we can, and if we can, we must—
But he looked a little fragile, yet, to shoulder tonight’s sky; and besides, he had fallen asleep.
Pressed by the double weight, the bed-rail was boring into Laurie’s shoulder; but he didn’t want to risk waking the child before the All Clear. For the same reason, he couldn’t reach the cigarettes. He had just given up trying when a lit one appeared, smoking, under his nose. He looked up. In the subterranean glimmer (almost all the lights had had to be put out, because of the broken window) a small leathery man, who looked like a retired jockey, gave him one of those caustic grins by which some people believe sentiment to be impenetrably concealed. He made a comic shushing gesture, and padded on in his gent’s natty dressing-robe to the lavatory.
The Night Sister did a round soon afterwards. Laurie saw her with alarm. He was breaking a rule; the nurses had winked at it; now there would be trouble. Sure enough she paused beside him. But she only removed the top pillow from his empty bed, and with a smile slipped it behind his shoulder.
Laurie sat smoking, with the boy’s mouse-brown hair under his chin. He felt a warm, kindly solidarity with the Night Sister and the nurses and the horsy little man. It wasn’t till some ten minutes later, when he had been half asleep himself, that he even remembered it would have been possible to misunderstand his situation. His neighbors’ basic assumptions had been his own. Suddenly he pictured one of Sandy’s friends passing by just now; the discreet lifted eyebrow, or snigger, or cough; the not-so-cryptic phrase, meant to pass over the boy’s head, which would ensure that there would never again be perfect innocence between them. It wouldn’t take so very long for that kind of consciousness to settle under one’s skin. We sign the warrant for our own exile, he thought. Self-pity and alibis come after.
It was as if Andrew had walked up and looked at him, and in a moment made everything clear.
For a few minutes, this decision brought him great relief and calm. Then he began to think how he was going to tell Ralph.
He hoped that to sleep on it would help; but perhaps the sleep wasn’t long enough, even though he dropped off before the All Clear and had to be steered back in a daze to his own bed. He could write, of course; it would be kinder not only to himself, but probably to Ralph as well; only it wasn’t the sort of kindness Ralph would ever understand. Deciding this, he tried to put out of his mind the confusing relief it brought him, and the feeling that an unbearable finality had been made not only less immediate, but in some undefined way less real.
If you wanted an evening out, you waited till Sister was off duty and then had a quiet word with the Staff Nurse. That would be tomorrow. He rang the Station, but they didn’t know where Mr. Lanyon was and asked if it was urgent. Thankfully he said no, and left a message. After that he rang Andrew, for he was clear of his promise now and they could arrange to meet. But Derek, who would have fetched him without fuss, wasn’t there, only a new silly nurse who didn’t know anything. There was a queue for the call box, and he had to leave it till next day.
Alec did not reappear; he worked for a surgeon whose cases went mainly elsewhere, and had seldom any real business in the ward. There wasn’t a raid that night; Laurie slept for nearly eight hours, in spite of everything.
In the morning he had his first letter from Andrew. The round young-looking script was deceptive: in writing, Andrew revealed maturities which, in talk, his diffidence often hid. It was a swiftly written, unstudied letter, easy with confidence, the crossings-out light and unconcealing. Near the end Andrew said, “I ought to get over next week with any luck, and we’ll find somewhere to talk. The telephone is rather diminishing, isn’t it? In a way Morse would be better, because it doesn’t pretend to be conversation. I know you felt the same, so don’t feel obliged to ring for fear that I’ll take umbrage or anything. I ring the lodge every day to ask after you, though, of course, they won’t put me through to the ward.” Not for the first time, Laurie reflected that Andrew was the realist of them both, or had the courage of his realism perhaps. There was a postscript: “Your bed is still empty. I have got a sense of guilt in advance toward the man they put in it; I don’t know when I’ve resented a perfectly innocent person so much.”
When Laurie opened his locker drawer to put the letter away, the first thing he saw was Ralph’s note, the one that had come with the books.
He took it out, and opened it. The speculations of his first reading seemed strange to him now. The awkwardness, the reserve, were no longer enigmatic; they were like certain tones in a
Ralph’s new room was a little nearer the hospital than the old one. He rang the bell at the strange door, thinking that with its tall squeezed bay windows it was a tight-mouthed sun-shy house, predestined to misery and unhappy leave-takings. But then the dark window opened above his head and Ralph’s voice, brisk and warm, said, “Just walk up, Spud. First floor.”
The stairs were narrow and rather steep; Ralph must have thought he’d prefer to do them without spectators.
The door of the first-floor front opened as Laurie reached it, and shut behind him. He had meant, in some confused unhistrionic way, to give his entrance a kind of significance which would warn Ralph from the first. Now it seemed unbelievable not to have known it would be like this. To administer a rebuff in this first moment would have been possible, Laurie vaguely supposed, to some other and better person: it wasn’t possible to him. In a moment or so, however, Ralph looked at his face and said quietly, “Well, come and sit down.”
Laurie had time now to notice the room, which was what the rest of the house would have led him to expect, full of frowsty comfort and solid vulgarity. Ralph had removed all the pictures and ornaments, which had given it the air of a commercial hotel. Where his old room had extended his personality, this flung it back so that all his reality was concentrated in himself.
“You see,” he said, “two chairs. Which shall we sit on?”
They were huge overstuffed ones covered in tapestry. Ralph sat on the arm beside him. “All right, Spud, all right. I know this is going to be difficult. Just be quiet for a minute. It’s been so long.”
It wasn’t what Laurie had planned. There had not been time to discover, till now, the sensation of coming home again which is one of the more stable by-products of physical love. One can see sometimes in a crowded railway carriage at night two lovers, lethargic, travel-grimed, and bored, weary beyond the dimmest stirrings of desire, but by instinct comfortably adapting their bodies to cushion and support each other, making a little refuge from the crush while the strangers or even friends around them rub elbows and knees, stiff with apologetic constraint and inward resentment. It was with almost a shock that, after a minute or two, Laurie felt Ralph get up abruptly and move away. He crossed over to the other chair and said, “All right, then, Spud, let’s have it. Well, come along, shoot.”