The Charioteer (16 page)

After all it was Andrew who was the first to speak.

“Ralph Ross Lanyon.”

“What?” said Laurie stupidly.

“It’s the name that’s written in the book, before yours.”

“Yes, I know, what about it?”

“Nothing. I only thought, perhaps, it was a present from someone.”

Laurie reached for a cigarette. “What a romantic mind you have,” he said from behind his hands. “It came down to me from a chap who was leaving, that’s all.”

“I only meant,” said Andrew stiffly, “that if it’s a book you’d rather not lend, or anything, it doesn’t matter. I should quite understand.”

He coaxed the cigarette alight, carefully. “Just for the record, I’ve neither seen nor heard anything of Lanyon since the day he left; if I saw him again I probably wouldn’t know him, and it’s even less likely that he’d know me.” He broke off with a vague feeling that he had said more than enough. “Does that cover everything?”

“It should, shouldn’t it? A lot of people would just have told me to mind my own business. Don’t take any more notice of me.” He put the book down, and burrowed his head into his arm as if to sleep. Laurie sat waiting: longing wearily, yet dreading, to be released into loneliness by the coming of this little death. But Andrew’s breathing was quick and silent. He turned and looked up. “I wonder—are you very short of cigarettes, could you spare me one?”

“Sorry, I thought you didn’t smoke.”

“I don’t really. I just felt like it. If you’re sure you’ve enough.” He didn’t move back when he had taken it. “I haven’t a match; give me a light from yours.” He leaned up on his elbow; his tilted head caught a splinter of light from between the branches. One of the gold birch leaves had fallen in his hair.

Laurie drew on the cigarette; a bright ring ran swiftly up the paper. He watched it burn for a moment; turned and began to lean down; then took the cigarette quickly and handed it at arms’ length across. “Thanks,” said Andrew. He got his cigarette lighted, gave Laurie’s back to him, and turned away. Neither spoke; the faint curls of smoke looked blue against the shadows of the wood behind them.

After a few minutes Andrew stubbed out his cigarette and said, “I think I shall sleep here. It’s quieter than the hut. Do you mind?”

“No,” said Laurie. “I can’t think of any objection.”

“I shan’t oversleep, so don’t bother about me. Just go when you have to go. You won’t need to go yet, will you?”

“No. I shan’t be going yet.”

“Just forget about me. You looked so peaceful before I came disturbing you. Now you can get on with your book as if I weren’t here.”

In the lane just outside the hospital gate, Laurie came to a standstill. He had thought that a rest would set the knee right, but on the way back it had started at once, and now he had to admit it was worse than it had ever been; it felt as if it had been transfixed with a hot screw. He stood, a little breathless, making up his mind to go on.

“Evening, Odell.” It was Major Ferguson, whose approach he hadn’t heard. He pulled himself together and saluted. “Good evening, sir.”

“What was the trouble just now, Odell? Not still getting pain with that knee, are you?”

“A bit, sir. Only when I walk on it.”

“Well, that’s what it’s for, after all, isn’t it? Eh?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What treatment are we giving you?”

“I usually have A.P.C. if it gets bad, sir.”

“I said treatment, not palliatives. God knows why these things don’t get reported to me. Well, we’d better fix you up with some physiotherapy, I think. I’ll see about it.”

“Thank you, sir.”

He had the dimmest idea of what physiotherapy was, feeling sure only that it would take place when he could have been seeing Andrew. But when he met Nurse Adrian in the covered way she said, “I was hoping they’d do something like that. You’ll find it’s well worth it, even if it does hold up your discharge a little.” Then he realized his luck for the first time, and couldn’t remember any more of the interview, except for a vague feeling that his happiness had seemed to communicate itself to her. He wondered sometimes why he didn’t overhear the other men saying how pretty she was. She was a little coltish, perhaps, and certainly nothing like the star of the Technicolor musical; and he supposed he wasn’t much of a judge.

It was just after this that he and Andrew began to fall into the way of meeting in the ward kitchen at night. It began as an accident, and then there seemed no reason why it shouldn’t happen again. After Andrew had done a round of the ward and scrubbed the bedpans, he always went outside to clean the kitchen up. Laurie would lie awake watching quietly till the right moment, then slip out of bed, reach in a matter-of-fact way for his dressing-gown, slippers, and stick, and make his legitimate way to the lavatory. When he got back to the corridor Andrew would be visible near the kitchen door. They were still at the stage of saying, “Oh, hello,” in mild surprise, as a tribute to this coincidence.

The Sister used to make herself a pot of tea before she went off duty, and to the stewed remains of this Andrew would add some hot water. Laurie, arriving at first as if he couldn’t stay more than a minute, would prop himself against the wooden slab where the chromium water-heater stood, watching Andrew scrub the sink and the draining-boards. They drank the weak, hot, bitter-sweet tea out of thick china mugs, and talked softly. Nurse Sims soon got to know what was happening, but winked at it provided they didn’t raise their voices or go on too long. Andrew would spin out the work a little; Laurie could always remember him, afterwards, bending over the slab with an almost stationary dishcloth in his hand. Sometimes he would express himself with it, moving it slowly and absently when he was shy or uncertain, scrubbing it along briskly to mark a point. A lock of hair, steamed limp over the sink, would come down over one eye, and he would push it back with a wet hand, making it limper.

A cockroach scuttled into a crack behind the draining-board; he watched Andrew reach for a tin of Keatings and sprinkle the crack with it. “Does life stop being sacred,” he asked, “when it gets down to cockroaches?”

“Well, the Jains don’t think so,” said Andrew seriously. “But I never know how they meet the fact that our own bodies destroy millions of microorganisms every day, without giving us any alternative to it except suicide. One has to draw the line where one sees it oneself.”

“Is that what you call the inner light?”

“If you like, yes.”

Faint noises of contracting metal came from the water-heater, behind which in genial warmth and darkness the cockroaches lived. The dressing trolley rattled faintly in the ward. A cricket was chirring somewhere.

“I was trying to remember how old you are,” Andrew said. “But I’ve never asked you.”

“Twenty-three last June.”

Andrew looked at him and said, in the voice of someone paying a deserved tribute, “I always thought you were older than that.”

Laurie didn’t think much about it at the time. Afterwards, when he knew more, this was a thing he always remembered about Andrew, that he took for granted one would regard maturity as a thing to be desired.

It was visiting day. Just after lunch the sky clouded over, a cold, bitter wind got up, and within fifteen minutes it had begun to rain. He had lost his greatcoat in the retreat, and had never had another. Chilled and damp in body and mind, he waited outside the gate, half sheltered by a tree which soon began to drip down his neck. With a muddy splashing the bus arrived; dimly he was aware of a dowdy little woman with an umbrella getting off it, along with several others. Then he saw that it was his mother. His bones, rather than his mind, remembered the pretty clothes she had worn last time, the new hat, when the sun had been shining, and Mr. Straike had been there.

“My dear!” he said. “Whyever, on a day like this?”

“I thought I wouldn’t bother with a car.” He recognized, sinking, her defensive voice. “It
was
rather extravagant, you know, with the buses running so conveniently.”

“But we can’t just sit in the ward,” he said, “and there’s nowhere else here to go.” The tree, full of rain now, was leaking everywhere with dull heavy drops. Hadn’t she cared enough to foresee all this? “Look, I’ll just go in and ring for a car now. It’s on me; it won’t be much, just the one way.”

It was in the car that he had meant to talk to his mother; he had lain awake at night thinking up easy, natural openings. She said, “It
is
a shame about the rain, you said in your letter how lovely everything was looking,” and he said, “Yes, it will strip a lot of the trees, I expect.” And suddenly he knew that this was not, as he had been saying to himself, simply an unlucky day. It was a day dedicated beforehand to a lost cause. Before she had abandoned him, he had begun already to abandon her. He was marked for life, as a growing tree is marked, by the chain that had bound him to her; but the chain was rusting away, leaving only the scar. It was an irony mathematical in its neatness, that in the moment when the pattern of her possession was complete, the gulf of incommunicable things opened between them. Already it was unbridgeable. She would never now, as once he had dreamed, say to him in the silent language of day-to-day, “Tell me nothing; it is enough that no other woman will ever take you from me.”

For the first time when they got out of the car she noticed his boot. She was as pleased as if, he thought, it were a supplementary part of himself which, like a lizard, he had cleverly grown.

Sitting in the dowdy, clean mahogany tea-shop, he said, “Mother, you’re sure you’re going to be happy? Is he”—he looked down at the cloth, he hadn’t anticipated this throttling inhibition, this almost physical shame—“is he kind to you, does he look after you properly and all that?”

“Oh, yes, dear, indeed he does. He would never of course dream of saying so, but I feel, one can’t help guessing, that in his first marriage he didn’t quite get the—well, quite the affection that a man of his kind needs. That, you know, is just between you and me.”

“Yes,” said Laurie, “of course.” There was a thick slab of sawdust-like cake on his plate, yellow, with dates in it. He could not imagine how it had got there.

“Laurie, dear, I do
hope
you’ve not caught a chill. Is it this damp weather making your knee ache?”

“No, it’s just a bit stiff. I was thinking they’ll be wanting the table. Shall we go to the cinema?”

The rain had stopped, but the clouds held the heavy damp over everything; above the still-wet pavements the long slow twilight hung like the moist air, unmoving. Limp dead leaves were pasted to the gutters. They sat in the fireless blacked-out station waiting room which smelt of smoke, dust, old varnish, coal, and feet. A heavy red-faced woman with a heavy red-faced little girl sat opposite staring at them with black button eyes, drinking in every word. The train came in; they had just lit the dim blue bulbs which would give light enough to prevent the commission of crimes. “Well, dear—”

“Get well quickly, darling. Look after yourself. Don’t go back and sit in damp things, will you. Dear, you must never think that things will be any different. You know. It would upset me terribly, it would spoil everything, if I thought you felt that.”

“No, dear, of course. It’s just that—if anything goes wrong, if you start to have any doubts about it, send me a wire, or ring. I’ll get a pass somehow and come straight over. Promise me.”

“But of course there’s no … Oh, dear, they’re shutting the doors now. Goodbye, dear, take care not to catch cold, goodbye.”

Reg was on the bus that took him back to the hospital. It had been one of Madge’s days. Kindly they inquired after one another’s outing and replied that their own had been fine, thanks. Each sensed in the other a certain reservation; each was grateful not to be questioned too nearly. They sat side by side, nursing their so different griefs which were yet the same grief to the inmost heart, unaware of the instinctive comfort they got from their sense of solidarity.

That night in the kitchen Andrew, opening the subject rather shyly since Laurie had not seen fit to do so, said, “I hope it was all right today, when your mother came.”

“Yes, thanks,” said Laurie. “Yes, it was quite all right.” But lest Andrew should feel snubbed or hurt he produced a few limp platitudes, which Andrew went through the form of accepting as real. It was a sad little session; but he could feel Andrew thinking as he thought, that tomorrow it would be all right.

But next morning the Sister said, “Odell, look after this carefully, won’t you, and give it to the Sister of the department as soon as you arrive.”

“Where?” asked Laurie. The pain was as sharp and sudden as a bullet, but there wasn’t any comeback. A war was on, he had been transferred somewhere else, so what? The war giveth and the war taketh away. Andrew would be in bed by now, sleeping; who would take him a message? Derek, of course. “When am I leaving, Sister, today?”

“Now you know quite—surely I told you about all this yesterday?”

“No, Sister. I went out.”

“Oh. Oh,
yes,
so you did. Well, you’re to go into Bridstow twice a week for electrical treatment at the City Hospital. Tuesdays, that’s this afternoon, and Fridays. Now don’t lose this card, whatever you do.”

The relief was almost too much: he wanted to laugh stupidly aloud. When he remembered that for the second evening running he couldn’t meet Andrew in Limbo, it seemed by contrast a trifle.

Bridstow had had some more raids since his last call there. The burgher solidity of the city was interrupted by large irrelevant open spaces, in some of which bulldozers were flattening the rubble out. At the City Hospital he had only to wait an hour, which was better than his expectations. Upstairs a brisk gentlewoman took him in hand as bracingly as if he had been a Girl Guide, and applied damp compresses, with electric wires involved in them, to his leg. Rhythmic waves of pins-and-needles followed, which, to his surprise, were pleasant and soothing after a time. At intervals Miss Haliburton returned to the couch where he lay, kneaded his muscles comfortingly, and talked dogs. She bred several varieties, and before long Laurie felt as unself-conscious under her ministrations as if he had been one of them. He left the hospital with an hour in hand before his bus went.