The Charioteer (20 page)

A young man sat down beside him on the divan and, without any kind of preliminary, said, “Is it a queer book?”

“No,” said Laurie.

“Oh,” said the young man, on a note of utter deflation. He got up and went away.

… but still those great rollers would be running along all the external coast, thundering and thundering by day and night; and I scarce believe there is one spot in the island where a man would be out of earshot of their noise.

A considerable tumult at the door interrupted him. Rising above it a precise, scholarly, drunken voice was singing, “Happy Birthday to You.” He looked up to see a man of about fifty-five, impeccably dressed, accompanied by a small crowd of naval ratings. There was a brief and clearly embarrassing exchange on the threshold, while Sandy and Alec eased them out again. The sailors, who were rather less drunk than their host, remained strictly neutral. Behind his shoulders two of them stood like heraldic supporters, one a curly-browed Cretan bull, the other a blank-faced boy of about eighteen. After the door had shut Alec walked over to Laurie, probably for no better reason than that he had happened to catch his eye. On a doctor’s note of mild deprecation, he said, “One can’t do anything about Harry. He’ll get himself murdered, one of these days. We don’t see more of him than we can help. I mean, one’s prepared to pay one’s own piper, but—”

“If one goes
any
where, after all,” said Sandy, “one’s bound to run into people.”

“And you know,” said Alec, “he’s kind when he’s sober. It’s his business really, I suppose.”

“I suppose,” said Laurie. His mind had reverted to the younger sailor’s face, with its look of a blank sheet waiting helplessly to be scribbled on.

“I’m glad we got rid of him, though, because Ralph if he’d got back and found him here would have walked straight out of the place.”

Laurie said nothing. With a new and better-informed gratitude, he summoned up remembrance of things past. He was still by all reasonable standards sober, but the gentle glow of his small dose reinforced the feeling which presently, as if by some magic power, seemed to open the door of the room and present him with its object.

Ralph came in looking not altogether happily preoccupied. Then he saw Laurie, and crossed over as if they had been the only two people in the room. “How’s the leg? Did that stuff of Alec’s work at all?”

Laurie realized with surprise that he hadn’t noticed the leg for some ten minutes. He said, “It’s marvellous stuff, what was it?”

“Something he gets from the hospital. A couple of drinks don’t hurt either, in my experience. Where’s mine you were looking after, by the way?”

Sandy came up just then and said, “Hello, Ralph, your
very
favorite person came and you missed him.”

“Oh?” said Ralph, in a very even, colorless voice. He looked at Sandy, who began suddenly to rattle away at his little story so fast that it was quite ruined. Ralph gave a laugh which, though irritable, was also relieved. “I wonder why Alec always maintains he’s so kind-hearted.”

“When he’s sober, that’s all Alec says.” Sandy had tried to sound offhand, but a simple, almost brash partisanship sounded behind it.

“That must narrow down his opportunities to about six hours a week.”

Alec had joined them in time to say, in his easy muted voice (it was always linked in Laurie’s mind with remarks like, “I’ll have a look at these sutures, Sister”), “He gets a bit lonely, I think. He always hates the thought of a party breaking up.”

“I don’t blame him,” said Ralph crisply. “It must be tiresome to find that one’s broken up along with it.”

Alec looked at them with quiet resistance. He was, Laurie thought, a person who hated soft thinking on one hand and intolerance on the other; much of his life must be spent fighting a war on two fronts. “One doesn’t know how far he can help himself. Perhaps he can’t be different from what he is.”

“God,” said Ralph, “what are any of us?” His blue eyes stared out with a kind of tired anger. “It’s not what one is, it’s what one does with it.”

“Get your feet on the ground, my dear. People get sick of what they are. They get sick of carrying it. What d’you think dictators and party bosses are for? Or they just pour it down the drain and forget it, like Harry does. Everyone isn’t like you, Ralph, trying to carry the world.” His eyes met Ralph’s for a moment. Laurie saw Sandy turn quickly and walk away.

When they had gone Ralph turned to Laurie. “You don’t miss very much, do you?”

“Plenty, I should think.” But he knew well enough what Ralph had meant.

“It was more than two years ago. I was running between Avonmouth and Quebec then. It got to a point where I threw up my job and spent a couple of months looking for something ashore. By the end of that time we both knew it would never work anyway. Sandy knows, of course. He’s jealous of his own shadow and wasn’t too pleased when I pitched up again, but he’s not quite such a fool as he looks. He knows we had all our second thoughts at the time and there aren’t any more. When people part as friends it’s usually past resurrection; this was, anyhow.”

Laurie found that none of this was a great surprise to him. Very early on, he had thought that Alec knew too much. He said, “You’d have missed the sea.”

“I’ll need to get used to that.” He flipped idly at the padded fingers of the glove. “Alec formed the opinion that I took too much on myself.” Without looking around he picked up his drink and finished it.

A rush of old memories went through Laurie like a pain. “I’ve never noticed,” he said, “that the competition to take things on was as killing as all that.”

Ralph stooped down and picked up the book from the floor; he must have seen it when he bent for his drink. Now he turned it over and read the title. “Oh, Spuddy,” he said, laughing and looking away. He got up quickly with the glasses and went over to fill them.

Laurie, who felt a fool, was relieved to see him caught up with a group of new arrivals at the door. As greetings settled down into conversation, however, the thought that he might not come back again was less welcome.

The party had warmed up by this time. A momentary detachment came upon Laurie as he looked on. After some years of muddled thinking on the subject, he suddenly saw quite clearly what it was he had been running away from; why he had refused Sandy’s first invitation, and what the trouble had been with Charles. It was also the trouble, he perceived, with nine-tenths of the people here tonight. They were specialists. They had not merely accepted their limitations, as Laurie was ready to accept his, loyal to his humanity if not to his sex, and bringing an extra humility to the hard study of human experience. They had identified themselves with their limitations; they were making a career of them. They had turned from all other reality, and curled up in them snugly, as in a womb.

Trying to form his ideas quickly before he was interrupted again, he found instead that he was staring at Ralph, who was standing in the thick of the crowd, hard and crisp and gay, laughing at someone’s dirty story, his battle-scars put neatly out of sight.

He moved impatiently in his seat; he felt angry and useless, and wondered how late he would have to stay. He had a sudden homesick vision of Andrew in the ward kitchen starting to wash up, the brown teapot with the Sister’s stewed tea saved on one side.

For the last few minutes two army officers had been sitting at the other end of the divan, punctuating a hot item of gossip with little squeals. Now one of them nudged the other, who raised his eyebrows, coughed, and went away. The first moved, purposefully, nearer.

“He
knew
I wanted him to go, but he gets
daily
cruder. Now quickly tell me all about yourself. Why haven’t I seen you here before?”

“I’ve not been here before.” Laurie didn’t mind the pink and yellow gold bracelet, which was Cartier and rather beautiful; but he noticed too the eyes, which were hard and shallow, and the soft self-pitying mouth.

“Not? And you don’t go to Max’s, at least so Claude tells me,
I
don’t go, my dear, not my thing at all.” With rapid but profuse detail he sketched the private life and eccentricities of the man who had just gone. Laurie listened, fascinated, not believing it but impressed by the inventive fertility. He listened indeed a little too well, for soon the officer was saying, “Well, come along, dear, this seems as good a moment as any to be slipping away. Though what moment wouldn’t be good; I do see now what they meant about Sandy’s evenings. Whether it’s the sight of Alec’s true-blue past frowning on the revels like the statue in
Don Giovanni,
though for all that they do tell me, strictly
entre nous
—”

“If you mean Ralph Lanyon,” said Laurie, who was beginning to be rather drunk, “he’s a friend of mine, I’ve known him for years.”

“
Real-
ly
? No.
Then, my dear, do tell me, is it true that he”—here something in Laurie’s face seemed to give him pause—“well, there, fancy. Now before Alec starts to organize intellectual paper games, which can scarcely be ruled out as a possibility, we’ll tiptoe off and—”

Feeling suddenly annoyed, Laurie said, “Well, if it’s really all right about the wooden leg?”

The officer looked down and noticed the stick for the first time. Laurie watched, smugly, his struggle for equilibrium.

“Sorry,” said Ralph. “Thought I should never get away.” He lowered himself onto the middle of the divan, coolly forcing the officer to make room. So relieved was Laurie by his arrival that he scarcely noticed it had been proprietary to the point of arrogance. The officer appeared to recognize with delighted surprise someone at the other end of the room. When he had gone Ralph said, “I’d only just realized that was happening, or I’d have got here before.”

“I wasn’t nervous,” said Laurie lightly, reacting to the proprietorship without noticing it.

“I’m sorry if I interrupted anything.”

Laurie could not believe that he was expected to take this seriously. He said, “Do you remember that old red Turkish slipper you used for beating the twirps?”

“Yes,” said Ralph, still half frowning. “It was an odd one.”

“They argued that a lot. They used to try and remember, before they went in, to look if it was left or right. No one ever did.”

“Spud, did I tell you just now you were too good to be true? Stop me if you’ve heard it, because they tell me I tend to repeat myself when drunk, and I’m about one short of bloody drunk, so kindly correct any such tendency on all occasions. Thank you. I think I might have, the other now.”

“Aren’t you going to drive me back? It’s the only way I’ve got of getting there.”

Sounding suddenly stone sober, Ralph said, “Don’t worry, Spud, that will be all right.” He went off rather stiffly to the drinks table.

Just as he had got back again, someone near the door said in a suppressed voice, “Look, here’s Bim.” At this announcement Laurie saw a weasellike person, to whom he had not spoken all the evening, looking at him expectantly.

A young night-lieutenant came in. He was a small man but very handsome, with a tough, steely kind of grace. The high girlish voice with which he greeted his friends was burlesqued and perfunctory, like a carnival vizard held with a flourish a foot away from the face. You felt, and were meant to feel, that he was playing at it. He was like a little fighting-cock, brave, shining and cruel. He took one swift look around the room, saw Ralph and Laurie, and crossed over to them beautifully, like a dancer walking.

“Ralph, my poor sweet,” he crowed shrilly, “what
have
you got there?”

Ralph said quite quietly, “Hello, Bim.” He put down his drink and stood up.

Bim cocked his head sideways and glinted up at him. “How many times has Auntie got to tell you? You
must
attend to these things earlier in the evening, while your eye’s still in.”

Now we’ll see something, thought Laurie not without satisfaction.

Ralph looked at Bim quietly for a moment; then he took his arm and said, pleasantly, “Relax, my dear, you’re full up with benzedrine and five drinks behind. Come along and get loaded down to your marks, there’s a good boy.”

Laurie perceived now in all this hard glitter something feverish and taut. Alec had come up, looking unhappy. He said, “Shut up, Ralph, what he wants is bromide and twelve hours’ sleep.”

“Shut up, both of you,” said Bim gaily, shaking off Ralph’s hand. “I’ll tell you what I want when I want it. Introduce, my dear; it’s so unlike you to be the least bit gauche.”

Standing behind his shoulder, Alec gave the others a look of warning and apology. “Bim Taylor, Laurie Odell. Laurie and Ralph were at school together; they’ve just run into each other tonight after not having met for years.”

Laurie was the only person not standing, a thing that does not seem awkward till one is tied. Nothing would have induced him to struggle to his feet under those bright satiric eyes, so he lounged defiantly where he was. But something rather odd was happening; Bim had taken a step backwards, wide-eyed, and was staring at him with awe.

“But, my dears, you don’t mean this? Not
the
Odell?”

Laurie thought he had seldom heard a more pointless joke and didn’t even take the trouble to smile; though, considering much else that had been going on, he couldn’t see why Alec should look so embarrassed about it.

“Perhaps,” said Bim, “I should have said, ‘Not the late Odell?’ Well, better late than never, obviously.”

The feeling of a dense atmospheric pressure caused Laurie to look around. He saw that Ralph was staring silently, not at Bim but at Alec. Alec opened his mouth to speak, but didn’t say anything. There was something pent and helpless about him, though he had not dropped his eyes. Laurie supposed that he must have been gossiping to Bim on the landing before he came in. Ralph’s look of shocked contempt was a little excessive, but he could be awkward after a few drinks, as Laurie had seen already.

Bim stood looking at all three of them with a deadly kind of inquisitiveness, the intent irresponsible look a monkey gives to something it is just going to pick up and break. “Have I,” he asked, “said anything in any way out of place?”