The Charioteer (2 page)

The door opened wide. Laurie, looking over his father’s shoulder, saw his mother standing on the threshold.

“Michael!” she said quietly. “Oh, how could you?”

Laurie’s father said, “He woke up and came in.”

There was a pause. Still held in his father’s arms, Laurie looked around and saw his parents confronting one another. With a sense of profound shock, which altered the meaning of everything, he realized that his mother didn’t believe his father was telling the truth.

So dreadful a misunderstanding couldn’t last for more than a second. But, when he looked at his father’s face, he perceived that his father was accepting it. In some larger, unknown way beyond Laurie’s scope, the accusation had struck him home. He didn’t argue. He just lowered Laurie gently down, and set him on his feet on the floor.

As the firm, warm, supporting strength withdrew, Laurie was seized with a panic sense of insecurity and loss. He rushed blindly forward, sobbing, into his mother’s arms. Now all was familiar, immutable, sure. Cozily patted and smoothed, he pushed his wet cheek into her shoulder, and felt the final, absolute reassurance of her soft breast. Dimly he was aware of footsteps, and of a door shutting. When he looked up again his father had gone.

Tucked into bed with the rabbit hot-water bottle, a fresh night-light lit, he cuddled his mother’s hand, testing the favor and privilege he had sensed already. Tonight she wouldn’t say, “I must go and get dressed now, darling, I’m going out with Daddy.” Tonight and always she belonged to him. His mind felt beaten and aching, he would soon be sinking into exhausted sleep; but he knew also, with a triumph too profound to recognize itself, that after all it was he whom she loved the best.

“Go to sleep now,” she said, echoing his thought. “Mummie loves you. Mummie will always be here.”

He said drowsily, “Mummie. When I’m ten, will I be grown-up?”

“Not quite, darling.”

“When I’m grown-up, I’m going to marry you.”

“No, darling, but never mind. You’ll always be kind to Mummie, won’t you, and never do anything to make her cry?”

He pressed his flushed cheek against her hand, feeling its familiar shape, and the warm hardness of her rings. A vast and beautiful emotion filled him. He said, “I won’t ever be unkind, Mummie. I promise faithfully”; repeating it to make the beautiful feeling last. She stroked the curls back from his forehead. “That’s my darling boy. Now you must go to sleep. Shall I tell you St. George again?”

He said, “Yes, please,” to keep her beside him, but he only half listened to the familiar words. He had made, as he lay looking at the night-light’s quivering circle on the ceiling, a strange and solemn discovery. It had come to him that no one would ever look from these eyes but he: that among all the lives, numerous beyond imagination, in which he might have lived, he was this one, pinned to this single point of infinity; the rest always to be alien, he to be I.

“… So when St. George had untied her, he said, ‘Why have they left you all alone?’ And the princess said, ‘They were too much afraid of the dragon to stay with me, they ran away.’ Then St. George pulled out his sword, and he said …”

She paused, because this was the line on which Laurie liked to come in. But he had fallen asleep. After, when the passage of years had confused his memories of that night and overlaid them with later knowledge, what he remembered best was having known for the first time the burden, prison and mystery of his own uniqueness.

He never saw his father again.

I
N THE DENSE SUNLIGHT
, an inkstain on the table showed up in impasto, an iridescent peacock green. Between it and the window suspended dust shaped the path of the light; Laurie, who had written nothing for five minutes, wondered why of these seemingly weightless particles some should elect to rise and others to fall. It was like Jacob’s Ladder. He had moved around the table once already to get the sun out of his eyes. Even its refracted heat was making him drowsy; and the ink, flowing incontinently from his warmed pen, made blots on the page. He shook his nib over the linoleum, yawned, pulled his brows together, and wrote: “
Julius Cæsar
shows that Shakespeare understood politics, but saw them chiefly as a field for the study of human …”

Unable as always to remember where the
h
came in “psychology,” he reached for the dictionary. It offered its usual distractions to a mind already relaxed. “Pedant,” he read with approval “(It.
pedante,
a schoolmaster)
n.
, One who makes a show of learning, or lays undue stress on formulae; one with more book-learning than practical experience or common sense.”

A lullaby sound of distant cricket floated with the dust in the heavy air. The study furniture, deal dressed with a dark toffeelike varnish, its wounds explored by the light, looked weary, loveless and revealed. Laurie, to whom it was the emblem of luxury and prestige, balanced his rickety chair on one leg, listening to the creak of its strained joints with a vague affection. He was tunelessly, cozily bored. The muted sounds were like those that filter through to a sickroom during a placid convalescent doze, pleasanter than the exercises of recovery for which one pretends to be eager. Summer cradled him, the lap of a kind nurse whose knitting-needles click in the rhythm of sleep.

“Psychology,” he wrote, rousing himself. “Cassius, for example, is a familiar type, whose temperament modern science links with gastric ulcers.” He paused on this, wondering whether the English master would guess it had been inspired by the science master, or, if he guessed, would care. Rather than be at the trouble of erasing it neatly, he decided to take a chance. He inked a groove on the table, turning it into a miniature canal.

A yelped “Owzat?” came from the cricket-field; the quiet flowed back and closed. The thought of the work he would have to do next year gave flavor to the moment’s impressed ease. His mother had already begun telling him not to worry himself into nerves about the exhibition for Oxford; she had been alarmed by reading a newspaper report of a boy who had hanged himself, it was thought from this cause. Laurie had given suicide, its ends and means, the abstract meditation proper to sixteen; but, as he had assured her, he didn’t feel drawn to it. He took the exhibition seriously, knowing that if he failed she would make economies to send him up without it; but mainly he wished to prove that one could do these things without getting in a panic.

He had been too young when his father went to fear economic changes; and in fact there had been none. Mrs. Odell had been a beloved only child, and her parents, though they had thought her marriage in every respect beneath her, did not allow her to suffer for her mistake in any way they could control, either during their lifetimes or afterwards. Laurie knew his mother’s side of the story so well that on the thinking surface of his mind it was the only one. His father had been dead for ten years now; pneumonia, helped by acute alcoholism, had taken only three days to finish him off. His family responsibilities had seemed to sit on him lightly; but, detached from them, he had gone downhill with the steady acceleration of a stone loosened on a cliff.

Laurie was used to the idea that his father had been a bad lot. It did not consciously disturb him, since he had been brought up, for almost as long as he could remember, to think of himself as wholly his mother’s child.

A clock struck; it was later than he had thought. If he didn’t get the thing done, there wouldn’t have been much point in staying in to get the study to himself. As it was, Harris or Carter might be back any time now.

The subject of the essay was “Compare the character of Brutus’s dilemma with that of Hamlet.” In his private mind, Laurie thought poorly enough of both. In Hamlet’s place he wouldn’t have hesitated for a moment; and Brutus he thought a cold, joyless type, with his moral searchings in the orchard. Not thus, in Laurie’s view, should a cause be embraced. If it were worth anything, it would come down on you like a pentecostal wind, not the better but the only thing; it would sweep you up. “Over thy wounds now do I prophesy …” That, he felt, should be the stuff; though all that calculated demagogy afterwards was revolting. He gave up the effort to express this. “Portia,” he mentioned coldly, “is the ideal Roman wife.”

He disposed of Portia quickly, and counted the pages he had filled. One more, written large, should get him by. He got up to stretch, and strolled to the window. The pitch-pine sill on which he leaned was plowed and seamed with boot-marks; this was a ground-floor study. The window had the social as well as the practical functions of a front door. The actual door served as a kind of tradesman’s entrance, for junior boys, cleaners, and the Housemaster.

A straggle of boys carrying towels was crossing the grass from the baths. Laurie watched them idly, smelling the dry summer scents of earth, piled mowings, and wallflowers from the Head’s garden out of sight. The sense of a wasted afternoon suddenly oppressed him; he craved for the water, but it was too late now, the House’s time had run out. Depressed, he was about to turn away when he noticed young Barnes, noticeably isolated as usual. Peters would have been coaching him again, if, thought Laurie, you liked to call it that. It was a pity about Peters. The inter-school cups came in all right, but he shouldn’t be let loose on these wretched little twirps, bawling them into a panic and then telling the world they were scared of the water. Barnes, poor little runt, probably thought himself a marked man and it was giving him a bad start in the House. Peters always seemed to crack down extra hard on these pretty-pretty types, who after all soon grew out of it if you let them alone.

By falling behind the others and edging sideways, Barnes had come within a few yards of the window. He looked horrible, Laurie thought; furtive and squinting, as if he had been caught pawning the spoons. It was worse, somehow, than if he had been grizzling.

Laurie had no theories about the dignity of man. He assented cheerfully to a social code which decreed that he should barely acknowledge Barnes’s existence, except as a featureless unit in a noxious swarm. Something, however, seemed to him to need doing. He leaned half out of the window. Laurie never considered his own compromises. His methods of defying convention were as a rule so conventional that they passed unnoticed by most people, including himself.

“Hi!” he bawled.

Barnes turned, with a hunted start. When he saw who it was, he registered a modified relief, mingled with awe and a paralyzed hesitation lest someone else might after all have been addressed.

“You!” shouted Laurie. “Whoever you are.” Only the prefects, whose job it was, were supposed to know their names. Barnes came up to the window.

“Barnes, J. B., please, Odell.”

“I want a chit paid at the shop. Do it straight away, will you?”

“Yes, Odell.” Barnes gazed up at the window, like a dog on trust. He had a face like a Spanish madonna with steel spectacles. When frightened he had a heavy sullen look; the contrast between features and expression was more unpleasant than ugliness. At the moment, a strained vacancy made him classic. Laurie felt in his pocket for the coppers and the chit.

“Stand on one leg or the other,” he said encouragingly. “You look as if your pants were wet. Of course, don’t let me keep you if they are.”

At first overwhelmed by this condescension, Barnes presently essayed a kind of grin. Mixed with its servility, traces of gratitude, humor, and even intelligence appeared. He looked almost human, Laurie thought.

“Here you are. And don’t lose it.”

“No, Odell.”

“Hi, stop, you’ve not got the chit yet, you fool.”

“Sorry, Odell.”

“Have the baths shut?”

“Yes, please, I think so, Odell.”

“Curse. I meant to get over. What was that extraordinary roaring going on?”

“I don’t know, Odell. Mr. Peters was coaching.”

“Oh, ah. I didn’t know he used a megaphone now.”

A flickering smile, in dread of presuming, appeared on Barnes’s face like an anxious rabbit ready to bolt back down the hole.

“The thing with Peters, once you’re on the board, is just to carry on as if he wasn’t there. He likes that really, you’ll find. It soothes his nerves.”

Laurie, a steady but unsensational performer at other games, was the House’s white hope at swimming and was expected to get his School colors next year. Barnes said, “Yes, Odell,” with an expression of almost inert stupidity. The awe of this heavenly message had stunned him. Laurie observed it with approval; it was no good if encouragement made them fresh.

“Here’s the chit. And you can take this bottle back.” The bottle was a gratuity. There was a penny refund on it.

“Oh, thanks very much, Odell.”

Barnes sprinted off, with a new animation. Laurie, looking after him, felt a warmth at the heart which he hastened to shed. A little drip like that. Perhaps he reminded one of dogs, or something. Dismissing Barnes from his mind, he was about to get back to the essay again, when Carter appeared outside. Luckily Laurie had the last paragraph in his head.

Carter climbed in, leaving two more scratches and some fresh dirt on the sill. He suffered from the disability of being already almost six feet tall, and not having caught up with it. Even his voice hadn’t finished breaking. Laurie’s had settled quite firmly, but he ran to compactness and was still at the five-foot-seven mark. You could see by his build that five-foot-nine would probably be about his limit. He had to look up to Carter to talk to him; to the onlooker, this had a somewhat incongruous effect.

Carter uncoiled himself from the window. He had to use the arts of a contortionist to get through it; but he would have shunned the eccentricity of using the door. “Now, now,” he said, jerking his head toward the receding Barnes. “You want to sublimate, you know. Collect antique doorknobs, or something.”

“It’s too strong for me,” said Laurie movingly. “I can’t get him out of my head. Those long eyelashes. Would he look at me, do you think?”

Carter followed this up, but rather half-heartedly. He was not the only one to find Laurie’s conversation disconcertingly uninhibited. The innuendo, more generally approved, was apt when it reached him to be smacked into the open with the directness of a fives ball. Lacking in some social instinct, he seemed never to know the difference.