The Charioteer (13 page)

The week after, Laurie’s own mother wrote to him, announcing her engagement to Mr. Straike. There is only one kind of shock worse than the totally unexpected: the expected for which one has refused to prepare.

He was still staring at the open letter when he heard Reg creaking and breathing near him, minding his own business with that heavy tact which invites a confidence. Suddenly Laurie craved for those kind flat feet trampling down the sharper edges of his misery. He looked up.

“Cheer up, cock,” said Reg in a leading voice. “All the same in a hundred years.”

“That’s right. Not so hot now, though.”

“How’s that, then?” Reg sat down beside him on the bed.

Laurie told him the news. He did not canvass Reg’s views on Mr. Straike. When Reg said politely “No kidding?” and then “Bit unexpected, like?” there was perfect understanding between them.

“Mind you,” said Reg, “it’s a nice position for her. Nice house and that, too, I daresay.”

Laurie thought of the red, damp Gothic pile of the vicarage, its high, heavy rooms and horrid little lancet windows. He and his mother had lived in their seventeenth-century cottage almost since he could remember. For the first time he realized that this too would have to go.

“Never told you, did I,” said Reg, “our dad nearly got caught, seven year it must be going on for now. Girl young enough to be his daughter. Never forget him bringing her home to tea. Only had to look at her. Well, I mean, you don’t know how to put it, like, to your own dad. Then my brother Len found out she was in the family way by a chap at his works. He had to tell the old man then. Proper broke him up, for a bit; and poor old Len, he didn’t like to show up at home for a couple of months; missed his birthday and all. Well, one thing, you got nothing like that to worry about with your mum. ’S all aboveboard and that.”

“Oh, yes. I think he was keen to get it fixed up before I got home.”

“Ah. On the artful side. Not after your mum’s money, you don’t reckon?”

“She hasn’t got much. It would help, I suppose.”

“Well, one way to look at it, you do know who he is. Not one of these fly-by-nights, mean to say. Mind you, Spud, it’s partly just the idea, like, and you get used to that. Still, got to face it, home’s not the same. Here, Spud. No offense and that, but this girl, now; I wouldn’t let her slip off the hook, not if I was you.”

“Girl?” said Laurie, taken off his guard.

“Come off it, now, you told me about her only the other day.”

“Oh, that. I don’t think that will ever come to much.”

“More fool you, excuse me saying so. Be better off with you than someone with two good legs what kicked her with them Saturday nights, wouldn’t she?”

“I suppose so.”

“Right, then. That’s how you want to keep looking at it.”

Laurie agreed to do so. Meanwhile, there was his mother’s letter to answer. After tearing up two versions which read too revealingly, he urged quite simply a pause for consideration. He sealed, stamped, and addressed it, with a heavy sense of its ultimate uselessness.

The only other person with whom he discussed the news was Nurse Adrian, whom he met at the village post office when he was posting the letter. On the spur of the moment he invited her to tea at one of the rickety tables in the postmistress’s garden, and told her all, or nearly all, about it. It was pleasant, he found, to see her listening, her bare brown arms with their soft down folded on the table, her brown little face, under the straight flaxen hair looped back at the side, looking honest and troubled. At the end she said, “I’ll tell you something if you like I’ve never told anyone. When Bill, he’s my brother, he’s a prisoner of war now, when Bill was engaged two years ago to Vera, who of course is now my sister-in-law, and she really is a terribly nice person, she got pneumonia. I was lying in bed one night and my thoughts were sort of running on, and suddenly I woke up and
looked
at them, and I realized I’d been planning for when Vera was dead just like one might for the holidays. And she’d always been
perfectly
nice to me, even when I was in the way. Yet I knew I’d been wishing her dead, can you believe that? So, you see, if a person who’s had such terrible thoughts can get over it, and I
have
got over it, you’re bound to get over it before long.”

He saw her looking at him with sudden anxiety; after this confession she was clearly prepared to see him turn from her with loathing. Without thinking much about it he leaned out and patted her folded arms.

“Get along with you,” he said. “You know perfectly well if anything had really happened you’d have jumped into the river to pull her out.” Her unguarded eyes looked at him across the crumby little table, in admiration and relief. In them he saw himself reflected, a man, protecting, lightly lifting the burden. It did not seem to him specially ironic. His loneliness had preserved in him a good deal of inadvertent innocence; there was much of life for which he had no formula; it had never even occurred to him that he involved himself in various kinds of effort which, by ruling a few lines around himself, he could have avoided.

She gazed at him with respect, and presently asked his opinion on the probable course of the war. Silly little dumbbell, he thought; but he could not analyze his affectionate amusement. The fact was that he found her a refreshing relief, and was already cutting and fitting himself a special personality to oblige her. He could be no more than three or four years her senior, but it felt like fifteen. Ever since he grew up he had been unobtrusively avoiding girls, whom secretly he imagined to be applying subtle and sophisticated tests to him, and observing the results with hidden scorn. Watching her off, he thought that she wore slacks well, as if she didn’t think about them; she had the right kind of shoes, and moved from the hips. He smiled and waved, and, as he turned away, wondered what the brother was like.

Back in the ward, with the radio blaring “Roll Out the Barrel,” the thought of his mother came back to him, burning with all its implications deeper and deeper in; whole vistas of the future, as he reviewed them, suddenly becoming consumed and blowing away. He longed for the evening which would bring the relief of telling Andrew.

“Been out?” said Reg as they waited for supper.

“Not far. It’s nice outside. Warm.”

“Sharp frost this morning. Nice now, is it?”

“Yes, nice out of the wind.”

“Here, Spud. No offense and that.”

“Uh?” Laurie went deep into his locker after a cigarette.

“Well, see, Spud, I know how it is. No one here can’t say you ever done any highbrow act. But what I mean, these lads come along, college boys like yourself, reading literary books and that. Well, stands to reason, ordinary, you have to keep a lot of your thoughts to yourself. I watched you when you didn’t know it, time and again.”

Laurie came crimson out of the locker, where he longed to remain. “Christ, Reg, the bull you talk.” They sat, not looking at each other. Laurie knew his protest had been too weak; it should have been something more like “What would I want with that bunch of sissies?” Why, he wondered, was it the people one held in the most innocent affection who so often demanded from one the most atrocious treachery?

“They interest me,” he said, doing his best. “You can’t help wondering what’s at the bottom of it, whether they just don’t like the idea of getting hurt, or what. Well, having seen a bit of them I don’t think it’s that. It may be with some of them; but not this lot.”

“Ah, go on, Spud, don’t tell me you’ve been this long working that one out. I could have told you that, first day they come here. I watched them, I never said nothing. Not even Neames don’t think they’re yellow, no matter what he gives out. It’s just the idea, like, that gets him. Same as what it does me, and that’s a fact”

“Fair enough, so it does me in a way. But as people, you know—”

“That kid that does the ward at night, the young one, properly took to you, hasn’t he?”

“Me?” said Laurie. He went back quickly into the locker again. “Can’t say I’ve noticed it specially.”

“What I’m getting at, Spud, you want to watch it. No offense.”

“Come again?” said Laurie into the locker.

“I mean the law,” said Reg with deliberation, “that’s what I mean.” He paused to push back the wet shreds into the end of his cigarette. “ ’Course, Spud, if you can talk some sense into him, good enough. But if he tries to start in on you, that’s where you want to watch it. Because that’s an offense. Seducing His Majesty’s troops from their allegiance. High treason, that is. Got to look out for yourself in this world, ’cause no one won’t do it for you.”

“That’s right,” said Laurie. He took a long steadying draw on his cigarette. “I appreciate it, Reg. Don’t worry, I guarantee that if any seducing goes on it’ll be done by me.” He held his breath. Look out you don’t cut yourself, Reg had once said.

Reg said, approvingly, “Ah. That’s more like it. That’s all a lad like that wants, someone to make a man of him.”

After a restless night, he was awake in time for the six o’clock news. It seemed to him to contain more than the usual number of euphemisms and it occurred to him that fresh ones were steadily being coined, which met with less and less resistance. One by one the short bloody words, which kept the mind’s eye alive, were vanishing: a man-killing bomb was an anti-personnel bomb now. He remarked upon this to Neames, who was standing beside him.

Neames hitched his dressing-gown, giving Laurie a hard sideways glance. The two of them were always getting involved in arguments; but, as the only men in the ward who acknowledged the rules of logic in debate, they put up with each other for the sake of conversation. “Morale’s a munition of war,” Neames said.

“Morale’s just another blanket-word. What does it mean? Courage, or bloody-mindedness, or not asking awkward questions, or does it mean whatever we’re told it means from day to day?”

Neames’s dressing-gown was a faded purple; it made his rather sallow face look yellow. He hitched the girdle again. “I’m afraid that’s too intellectual for me,” he said. “You’d better talk to your friends about it.” He turned his shoulder, and walked away.

Laurie felt a little sinking jolt. He remembered, now, seeing last night the little group gathered around Willis in a corner. Luckily, Andrew had been in the next ward, and hadn’t heard.

He was still thinking about it while he made Reg’s bed. Reg couldn’t do it for himself, and patients whose beds were made by the staff had to be waked an hour earlier. Feeling a twitch on the opposite side of the blanket, he looked up expecting to see Reg back from the bath; but is was Dave, who must have come early on duty as he often did. He made beds with mechanical efficiency, like a trained nurse. When he caught Laurie’s eye he smiled without speaking. Often as he worked he seemed occupied with his own thoughts.

“I can manage, thank you,” said Laurie politely. “I expect you’re busy.”

“Not for the moment,” said Dave. He flicked back a corner expertly, flattened it, and tucked it in.

At the end of the ward, Andrew came in pushing the breakfast trolley. He steered it carefully around the center table at the bottom of the ward. As soon as this tricky bit was done his eyes came over toward Laurie as they always did. This time he felt rather than saw it, for he did not look. He was rather slow with his side of the bed, and Dave had to wait, which he did very patiently.

As they moved up to the top end of the sheet, Laurie looked up. He said, “You’re one of the organizers, aren’t you?”

“Not exactly, but I won’t split hairs if there’s anything I can do.” Dave picked up the pillow and slapped it into shape.

“It’s nothing much really.” They shook out the top sheet. “But the other day I was talking with one of your people, getting his angle and so on. Afterwards someone said it could have landed him in trouble, treason or some nonsense. I suppose that’s just a lot of—I mean there isn’t anything in it?”

Dave mitered a corner. “I suppose,” he said easily, “that would be Andrew.”

“Yes. Yes, Andrew Raynes.”

“I doubt whether Andrew would say anything technically treasonable. He knows the rules. He didn’t urge you to desert, for instance, or refuse to obey orders?”

“Oh, God, no. He just explained things.”

“Well, knowing Andrew, I should say the position probably is that you could make trouble for him if you wanted to, but it would depend on you.”

“Seeing I started it, that’s hardly likely.”

“That’s what I thought.”

Laurie picked up the counterpane on which ugly stencilled flowers, in a hard red and prussian blue, wound around a black trellis. Studying this pattern carefully, he said, “I suppose he told you more or less what we talked about.”

“You won’t find he’s like that.” Dave moved the center fold more to the middle. “I remember his saying some time ago that he found you easy to talk to. I didn’t warn him to be careful; it didn’t strike me as being necessary.”

“Well,” said Laurie, “thanks.” There was a curious moment in which the small space around the bed contained two different kinds of silence. It was broken by the rattle of the breakfast trolley behind them. As they turned Andrew looked from one to the other, his pleasure in their amity as plain as print.

Over his bacon and tea, Laurie felt that the only comfort would be found in full-time, party-line, nondeviationist hatred. One could warm oneself with a good thick hate by shutting all the windows and doors; but he knew, unfortunately, beforehand, that the snugness would not last, and the fug would drive him out into the cold again, gasping for air.

About a week later, on the day when Reg was liberated from his airplane splint, Laurie got his surgical boot.

He was sent into the Sister’s office to try it on. There it was, with an ordinary boot for the left foot all complete; black, shiny, hitting the floor with a clump. He had not foreseen that the design of the upper would be quite so ugly, nor the sole so thick, but after all, a cripple’s boot was a cripple’s boot. Perhaps after the war …

“Comfy, son? Because now’s the time to say. You’ve got to live with it, remember.”