The Charioteer (29 page)

“Oh, it’s all right, I’d feel it if anything had gone.”

“You might not. Better let’s look. Every ship I’ve been in for years that hasn’t carried a doctor, I’ve always done this job. I won’t hurt you.”

“All right,” said Laurie relaxing. Suddenly he felt free of it all. It had been taken over. He had been quite long enough in hospital to know that even a surgeon wouldn’t swear to anything without X-rays, yet this knowledge seemed curiously irrelevant to his passive trust. He untied his boot and dropped it on the floor, and lay in an irresponsible peace while Ralph undid the bandage, and with an intent grave gentleness manipulated the joint. It was evident that he had some experience and knew what he was looking for. Laurie, who was used to the detached curiosity of doctors, felt something different here: Miss Haliburton had it, but in her it was overlaid with a complex technique, and in becoming mechanically perfect lost something of its nature. In Ralph it was direct and human, as it used to be in the old country bone-setters who came to their trade with nothing but an instinct in their hands of tactile sympathy with pain.

Laurie thought: At school, we were always discussing him. The thing about Lanyon is that he’s this, or that. That’s how he manages to do that, or this. And all the time no one knew anything.

“You ought to have been a doctor,” he said.

“I’ve only had to cope sometimes when there wasn’t anyone better. While I was living with Alec I did try to read up a bit of anatomy and so on; but he told me unqualified people messing about were a menace to society, and of course he was quite right.”

“Ralph. If you’d gone up to Cambridge and everything, what were you going to have done?”

“Some sort of geographical survey work, I rather thought. There are quite a few odd corners still left to do.”

“Yes,” said Laurie. “Yes, of course.”

By now, he would have fulfilled his destiny. He wouldn’t have struggled for it; it would have come to him inevitably from a course of knowing first what needed doing, and doing it rather sooner and more thoroughly than anyone else; from an accumulation of confidence which would have been forced on him by the trust of other people, such as F.R.G.S.s and porters and village priests. His profound happiness in it wouldn’t have come often into his conscious mind. He wasn’t made to accept his limitations without trying to compensate; being what he was he could only have done it on some such scale as this. He could have worked out his salvation, if they had let him alone; all he had ever asked had been to work his passage. You’d think, after seven years, they might have let him keep his ship, said Laurie to himself; he used the soldier’s “they,” having been long enough an infantryman to find the disposing powers—Divisional Headquarters, the Government, God—all very remote and hard to isolate one from another.

“I’m not as handy as I used to be,” Ralph said. “Excuse bad pun.”

“You’ve got a lot of grip in it, so soon after.”

“One has to practice it. Have a rest while I make this tea.”

He picked up his glove from the floor. Laurie said, “Don’t be silly.”

“Oh, I always wear it. Might meet the old woman outside. They told me at the hospital it would harden up quicker if I didn’t cover it; but I went into a pub and a tart who’d had a drink or two got it in focus rather suddenly, and shot a foot in the air before she could stop herself. No point in upsetting people.”

“All right. But I’m not drunk and I’m not a woman.”

“I know,” said Ralph at the door. He smiled unexpectedly and charmingly, and went out with the kettle.

Laurie sat up and rebandaged his knee. For the first time he had a feeling of its being no longer in the foreground of his self-portrait. He turned on his face, which as usual did a certain amount of good.

They talk about realism, thought Laurie, burying his face in the blanket, which smelt faintly of the cyanide with which ships are fumigated. As if only the outside were real. This is a very ugly room, and I’ve sat for my portrait for a handbook on war surgery; I expect Ralph has too. When he comes back, I think I’ll tell him about Andrew; I don’t know why I haven’t done it long ago. I’ve wished so often I could talk about it to someone who’d know.

The corner of the blanket, which was hanging out, had the label of a shop in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Slipping from under the displaced pillow a pair of pajamas showed, made of the thin silk sold in Indian stores; with instinctive curiosity Laurie fingered its foreign texture. He was lying like this, face forward, when the door opened.

He rolled over quickly, furious with himself for being taken by surprise: he was always careful not to be caught looking, he thought, as if one had been having a good cry. To remove all suspicion of this he began at once to say, “I was just looking at your pajamas.” At the moment of reaching the end of the sentence, he took in the fact that it wasn’t Ralph.

He hadn’t a moment’s doubt of who it must be. The situation wasn’t one which would easily yield to words: it could only depend on the kind of person Bunny was, so he looked to see. But it was impossible to notice anything about him, initially, except his conspicuous good looks and the confidence that went with them; it was like trying to read something printed on a bright surface which dazzled the eye. He did not, however, appear angry, and this at once seemed to Laurie like a gesture of prodigality from someone who can well afford it; he had a moment of feeling rather dejected and down-at-heel, before remembering to be glad that Ralph had done as well for himself as this.

Bunny stood easily just inside the door with his hands in his pockets; he looked thoughtful, and this gave his boyish face a certain pathos as if he were carrying a burden beyond his years. This grave moment gave to the smile that followed an irresistible sincerity.

“Now don’t tell me who you are. I know I’m right. Laurie Odell.”

“Yes. You’re Bunny, aren’t you? Ralph was telling me.”

“Oh, was he? It’s all very well for him to keep telling people about each other and never to let them meet.” He came in and sat on the edge of the table, swinging one leg. “I hear you’ve been having a pretty tough time in hospital. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s not much nowadays. A rest soon fixes it.” He leaned down and reached for his boot. At the back of his mind hovered a feeling that Bunny was taking it almost too well. In his place, Laurie thought, he himself wouldn’t have guaranteed to be charming at a moment’s notice. But then, he reflected, in Bunny’s place, one would feel pretty solid; it would take more than that to shake one. Ralph had said something: that the best way of being independent was to have all you needed at home. This easy and careless trust; not like Sandy; it was heartening to know that it did actually happen.

“Is Ralph anywhere about?” Bunny was asking. “I wonder I didn’t meet him on the stairs.”

“He can’t be far. He went to put on the kettle for some tea.”

“For some
what
?” asked Bunny, staring. Laurie had no time to be analytical or to put a name to the hard flippancy in the smiling eyes. “Well, well, that’s definitely a new one for old Ralph. Now me, I’m a proper old auntie for the stuff. Up at the Station we’re always … Oh, hello, sweetie. Here I am back after all, with my gay evening in ruins.”

The door had been open, so Ralph must have heard their voices as he crossed the landing. He stood in the doorway with a cool, cheerful look, and nodded at Bunny as if he had half expected him.

“Why, hello, Bunny, what happened to the party?”

“My dear, I couldn’t be more furious. I’ll swear by anything you like that Binky told me it was today. Now he says it’s tomorrow. He was rushing out somewhere and didn’t even stop to offer me a drink. Never mind, I shall have some of your delicious tea, instead.”

Ralph said, “Here’s the aspirin,” and added, “I was downstairs getting some milk.” It had a certain note, not of apology, of giving an explanation which one owes. He was carrying the milk in a little gray aluminum jug; he must have been to the basement to beg it from the landlady. Laurie felt foolish because he hadn’t anticipated this difficulty. “You shouldn’t have bothered, I don’t mind it without.”

“I do, though,” said Bunny boyishly. He got up. “Well, dears, why on earth are we all sitting about up here?” He spoke as if it were something temporary done in preoccupation, like loitering in the hall or kitchen. “Come along downstairs and get comfortable, and we’ll have it out of proper cups and saucers, like ladies and gentlemen.” He gave Ralph a flashing smile and added, “I bet you were going to give it him in a toothglass, weren’t you?”

Ralph said, “We’ll come if you’ve got some fresh tea. I don’t trust this lot.” His manner was very light and easy; it had been like this during the first part of Sandy’s party. He put out the light and they groped their way across the landing to the stairs. About halfway down, Ralph said, “All right, Spud?” and put an arm quickly around his shoulders, as if to steady him. The gesture had a helpless, almost a childish tenderness, like that of a small boy who has got his little brother into a scrape. But there below was Bunny’s room, and he was hospitably waving them in.

It was hard to believe one was in the same building. The room had been, one could say, interior-decorated. There was a single picture, which was vorticist of a kind and had patently been chosen to match the color scheme. A large number of glossy magazines were strewn about; but such books as could be seen looked as if people had left them behind and never missed them. The furniture was very low, with that overstated lounginess which rarely turns out to be physically comfortable. It was all very bright and sleek, and had the look of being kept under dust-sheets except when open to the public.

Bunny threw open a glittering cocktail cabinet lined with looking-glass; this seemed to be an automatic gesture like switching on the radio, which he did at the same time. Talking brightly against it, he went to a cupboard and got out a red-and-black tea set. Ralph walked over to the radio and, without permission or apology, switched it off.

“Oh,
you
,” said Bunny coquettishly. He arranged cups on a gold lacquer tray. “It’s
so
nice to meet a fellow addict. Sit here, Laurie, then you’ll have this little table.” The chair seats were a few inches off the ground and there was nothing to do with one’s legs but stick them straight out before one. Laurie settled himself, feeling conspicuous and vulnerable. Ralph hovered uncertainly for a few seconds, and then took the next chair.

Bunny held up a tea tin and shook it playfully. He looked at Ralph, who was lighting a cigarette and seemed not to notice.

“I should think that old kettle of yours must be boiling madly. Run along, do, sweetie, my tongue’s hanging out.”

It is possible, in a very low chair, to adopt a posture which makes getting up look like a physical impossibility. Ralph had settled himself like this, his legs crossed and extended, his hands in his pockets, the cigarette tilted at the corner of his mouth.

“No. You’re the tea expert. You make it.” One might have called his manner a colorless extract of decision.

Laurie saw their eyes meet. Although he had brought to this occasion a number of preconceived ideas, he was too keenly interested to let his powers of observation sleep. He knew at once that the air of cozy family bickering was a thin façade, that Bunny had had a surprise and was only beginning, yet, to be angry. Ralph lounged in the chair, giving him the straight look which hadn’t changed essentially in all the years that Laurie remembered. It would be odd if by this time Bunny weren’t equally used to it; yet, seeing these two men in uniform confronting one another, Laurie had a suspicion that he wasn’t used to it at all, that finding the challenge suddenly removed into the field of man to man, he felt something like outrage, as if Ralph had won on a foul.

He carried it off, however, quite well, making as he got up a whimsical face at Laurie and murmuring, “You see? Just an Eastern slave.” He had after all, thought Laurie, met a difficult situation, just now, in a civilized manner, and in the matter of the kettle Ralph was demonstrably in the wrong. In any case, thought Laurie, it wasn’t his business. Now that he was alone with Ralph he felt a dead weight of constraint; the glossy magazines made him think of a dentist’s waiting room. After nearly a minute’s silence Ralph said awkwardly, “Bunny’s fixed himself up nicely down here. I’m a dead loss at interiors and all that myself.”

“Me too.” He suspected that Ralph wished without disloyalty to disclaim the standard of taste around him. A leisured view of the room yielded so many awful little superfluities, so many whimsies and naughty-naughties, tassels and bits of chrome, that one recalled one’s gaze shamefaced as if one had exposed the straits of the poor. Laurie remembered the room upstairs: the absence of all loose ornament, the mantelpiece firmly packed with books, the little shelf fixed to the wall over the bed; the smell of scrubbing-soap, the wood and brass polished as a seaman, not a landlady, does it; the single eighteenth-century color print of a frigate under all sail. As tactfully as he could, he said, “I expect he likes to feel as unnautical as possible when he isn’t at sea.”

“Bunny isn’t a sailor.” Just for a moment, before he covered it, Laurie saw that he had wanted to laugh. “He’s attached to the navy for instructional purposes in this thing we’re doing. He was in the same sort of line commercially, before the war.”

“Oh. Does he instruct you?” Laurie found he resented it deeply. Then it struck him that Ralph might take it for a cheap joke. But Ralph said simply, “He did at first. I’ve moved up to another class now.” It was just then that Bunny came in with the tea.

For some time Laurie had been telling himself there was nothing remarkable about the smooth cool surface Ralph had presented ever since Bunny appeared: the more he felt, the less would be on display; you could be certain of that, Laurie thought. Now, however, he stopped snubbing his own instincts; he knew that all wasn’t well in this household, though, no doubt, the flaw was passing and trivial; he had blundered in at a delicate moment, and almost certainly complicated whatever trouble there was. In some anxiety he waited for Bunny to speak.