The Charioteer (37 page)

They looked at each other. Andrew said, “I’ll go and get Nurse.”

She arrived this time in a matter of seconds. When she turned away from the bed the first thing she said was, “Odell, what are you doing here? Go back to bed at once.” She watched him out of the room; there was no chance to make peace with Andrew even by a look.

In the ward he found half the men awake and asking what had been going on. Some were grumbling because they needed this or that and there was no orderly. Laurie went around and got them what they wanted as well as he could. After a while the talking died down; he heard the voices of doctors arriving outside, of Major Ferguson’s assistant using the telephone, and, about half an hour later, of an ambulance driving up. Then suddenly everything was quiet again; Nurse Sims came in and sat down at the desk, looking all around with suspicion as if trying to guess what they had been up to while she had been gone.

The night deepened and grew cold, the local air-raid siren went, and the darkness tightened like stretched gauze. Once the mobile gun was heard stuttering in the distance. Andrew came in at last, his work outside done, and made a round of the patients, most of whom were by now asleep. He reached Laurie’s bed, stood by the locker and looked down, trying after the bright light outside to see if Laurie was awake. Laurie slid out a hand and touched his wrist. “What happened?” he asked softly.

“They’ve taken him to the big hospital for a decompression.” He paused and added, “They don’t think he’ll make it.” Laurie, whose eyes were at home in the darkness, saw clearly the strain in his face.

He whispered, “See you in the kitchen after she gets back from her meal.”

It was eleven-fifty. Ten minutes later Nurse Sims went out, and Andrew, whom this left in charge of the ward, sat down as usual at the desk. Soon Laurie felt he had been lying forever watching the hand of the clock crawl and the dusky light on Andrew’s bent head. At last Nurse Sims came back again. Laurie gave it a couple of minutes and went out.

Andrew was getting ready a little tray for Nurse’s coffee. Laurie had never met him in the kitchen quite so late. The cracking of the hot pipes sounded enormous, and the throb of a single plane overhead widened in great spreading rings like a pebble dropped in a still pool. A silence as wide as the night sky closed them in, and all the world’s sleep lay heavy over them. Laurie was aching with weariness; his eyes felt dry, and his face drawn with it.

“I had to see you,” he said. “You know I—you can’t go on feeling—no, I mean it, Andrew, you must believe I do.”

“You shouldn’t have stayed awake,” said Andrew in a flat kind voice. “You look terribly tired.” He got some milk from the refrigerator and filled a cup with it. “Would you rather have it hot?”

“No, thanks, this is fine.” He drank it mechanically, watching Andrew. “Look, just because that happened after what I said to you—it was a filthy thing to say and when I said it I knew it wasn’t true. I just got emotional and lost my grip.”

Andrew smiled at him, and for an instant he had the illusion of looking at someone older than himself. “You’d take back what happened, too, wouldn’t you, if you could?”

“That makes no difference.” He hadn’t realized how Andrew’s certainties, including those he didn’t believe himself to share, had knit themselves into his cosmos. Now to see them shaken was not pathetic but terrible. “I was wrong, of course. It was a thing Charlot wouldn’t have wanted done, if he’d understood.”

“I know,” said Andrew. “I didn’t mean that.” He looked straight in front of him. “It was about me you were right.”

“God, no, Andrew, I wasn’t. I wasn’t even trying to be. I was just bitching you because—well, I was in a mood, and one thing and another. I can’t tell you. Just take my word.”

“Everything that was actually done for him,” said Andrew slowly, “was done by you. I couldn’t think beyond what not to do. If I … if my mind had been where it should have been, I’d have known what ought to be done, something would have come to me.”

“That was my fault too.”

“No. No, it wasn’t your fault.”

“Look, Andrew. I ought to know. I do this kind of thing. I get steamed up about things that happen to people till I’ve got to do something or burst, and if it turns out to do more harm than good, hell, what’s the odds, it did good to me. At school for instance. A man—one of the boys I mean, was going to be sacked, and because I liked him I took for granted he couldn’t have done it, and I was all set to have raised hell and involved a lot of other people. And all the time he’d done it after all.”

Andrew, who had listened intently, said, “It must have been rather horrible finding out.”

Laurie said quickly, “I didn’t. He told me himself, to keep me out of trouble.”

“Oh.” There was a pause; then Andrew looked up. “What was it? What had he done?”

Laurie had not thought of this question. “I don’t think I ought to tell you that.”

“No, of course. Sorry.” Andrew looked away. Laurie saw too late that there was no good reason not to tell, unless the person concerned was one whom Andrew knew of. After a few moments’ silence Andrew picked up the tray. “I must take Nurse her coffee, she’ll be wondering.”

“I’ll wait for you.”

“No, don’t. You look done up. Go and get some sleep.”

“I’d rather wait. There won’t be very much longer.”

Andrew turned, the tray of coffee in his hand, and looked at it blindly as if he had to get rid of it but couldn’t think how.

“Take that first,” Laurie said. “Don’t worry, it’s all right.” Andrew went out quickly.

When he got back, Laurie explained about the transfer, leaving it to be inferred that he had heard of it at the other hospital. He wouldn’t be far away, he told Andrew; after he was discharged he could often come over, he could stay at some farm. … Andrew said at intervals suitable things: that it was a good thing they had noticed the boot, and so on. It didn’t take them long to get through all this.

“I’ve never known this place without you,” Andrew said. “We got here at night, you know it was quite dark, and in the morning, before I’d been working half an hour, we met.”

“We never did get that record of the oboe concerto, in the end.”

Andrew attempted to smile. “No. So now it will be one of those tunes that people have.”

“Don’t talk like that. As if we—”

After a pause Andrew said, “This doesn’t seem very—very sensible. Other people aren’t like this.”

“That doesn’t make any difference.”

“No.”

“You’ll have Dave back in a day or two.”

“Dave? … I heard from him today. He’s working in the East End, he wants to stay there.”

Like most people, Laurie had heard more about the blitz than the papers were printing. “Does he have to do that?”

“He can go where he likes, he’s years over military age. It’s because of Cynthia, I know.” Andrew gave him a strange bewildered look and added, “I know how he feels. No, that must sound stupid. I mean I—”

“Yes,” said Laurie. “Yes, it’s all right.”

“How is it that—I’ve often liked people enough to talk to them, but—things I’d feel a fool saying to anyone else in the world—I don’t always tell you, one doesn’t of course, but I always feel I could and you’d know what they meant better than I do.”

“I don’t suppose so,” said Laurie roughly. “It’s just that you know I like you. People who—oh, well, anyway.”

“Only you keep things to yourself sometimes. Well, of course. It’s just a way you look with it. ‘No, he couldn’t take that’ You oughtn’t to think of me as a person whose head has to be stuck in a bag. That ought to be the last thing, if you see what I mean.” When Laurie didn’t answer, he said with difficulty, “It makes me feel, in a way, jealous, without knowing what of.”

Laurie looked up and said deliberately, “You needn’t ever feel that.”

For a moment their eyes met, then Andrew went over to the sink where there were a few things left from making the coffee. He picked up a jug and looked at it. “You see, the fact that I could say a thing like that to you, and you … One shouldn’t waste time analyzing oneself with the world in the state it is. I try not to. But things happen that one can’t completely … It’s all right when I’m with you. I don’t have the feeling of being different, then.”

“Don’t have it on your mind,” said Laurie unevenly. At this moment, he could feel nothing in himself from which Andrew ought to be protected. With a simplicity which this knowledge made to seem quite natural, he leaned over and kissed him. Even when he had done it he felt no reaction or self-reproach. It was as if it had happened before and they both remembered.

Just at this moment, when Andrew was looking up with a kind of strangeness which was only the threshold of some feeling not yet formed, they heard a sound in the doorway. It was as impossible not to spring apart as to keep the eye open against flying grit. Nurse Sims said, “May I have a teaspoon, please?” Her voice was a tone louder than is usual on night duty, and had an unfamiliar formality.

Andrew said, “Oh. I’m sorry.” He brought out a handful of spoons from the box, dropped two, picked them up from the floor, nearly handed her one of them instead of a clean one, and said “Sorry” again. She walked rapidly to the door, half turned without looking around, and said, “I think you’d better be going back to bed now, Odell.” Afterwards he didn’t know whether he had answered her or not. When she went out, she shut the door behind her. They had left it ajar, as they always did.

They were alone together; for Laurie it was like a parachute jump in which he felt for the cord in vain. After what, perhaps, was really only a matter of seconds, he said, “Oh, hell. I never get away with anything.” Andrew didn’t look around. “I only once ever cried at the theater, and in a flash the curtain was down and they’d turned on every light in the house.”

Andrew turned with a resolute smile. “She must have some peculiar ideas now about the way we spend our time in here.”

“Oh, I don’t think she more than felt an atmosphere, as they say.” He had the feeling of carrying out some brutal operation without anesthetics.

“You’ll have to go now, or she’ll have kittens any minute.”

Laurie could see Andrew copying his manner, trustfully, as if quite without resource of his own. “You’ve got something there, I shouldn’t wonder.” Suddenly the All Clear went, strident in the silence. “My God, was there a warning on? I didn’t know.”

“Sleep well,” said Andrew. Laurie saw him searching for words, or perhaps for the meaning of whatever words he had found. Better not to wait.

“Don’t worry. Good night.”

At the end of the ward Nurse Sims was sitting at the table. She had got her sewing out, and she didn’t look up.

It was bad luck on her, Laurie thought. She hadn’t wanted to know. She much preferred everything to be nice. You would never have heard her commenting unkindly on one of those quiet boys, a bit shy with girls, or one of those clever women, the tailor-made type, a bit independent with men. It took all sorts to make a world. As for people like
that,
them one would only hear of, never meet. They belonged, like sawn-up corpses, to the exotic land of the Sunday papers. Even now, almost certainly, she wouldn’t report what she had seen, partly because it would embarrass her too much, but chiefly because she still wouldn’t fully commit herself to having talked and worked with, and even liked, people like that. She would rather consign them to some indeterminate limbo of people who were no longer nice but not fully classified; people who were a bit morbid, or had something unhealthy about them.

Limbo, he thought, remembering the apples shining across the stream, and the day of separation coming nearer and nearer, till it would be now.

The A.P.C. had worn off and the familiar gimlet was boring into his knee. He turned and lay with his face in the darkness of his folded arms, feeling as if he had gone away already and were among strangers, alone.

In the end, however, the pain must have eased or fatigue overcome it, for he slept deeply, and when he began to dream, it was about none of the things which had filled his mind when he fell asleep. It was a vivid dream, and too direct to fascinate an analyst. After he woke he thought it surprising; but he knew that at the time it had been full of familiar recognition, and that he had seemed to come home to it all with longing and deep release, after an unbearably long absence which must never be allowed to happen again. It was the kind of thing one can make a joke of next morning, if one can find some uninhibited friend to listen: but that would be impossible for some days, and in any case one could hardly relate such a dream to the person concerned in it.

He slept again after, and in the morning he only remembered it dimly. Soon it was put out of his mind altogether, for he heard from his mother by the morning post. Canon Rosslow, the lifelong friend of Mr. Straike, had been appointed to a colonial see suddenly vacated by death; and as it was unthinkable that anyone else should officiate at the wedding, it had been arranged that this should take place by special license the following week. She had applied in writing to the hospital, asking that Laurie should be given a couple of nights’ leave of absence, in view of the very special occasion.

N
EXT DAY MAJOR FERGUSON
sent for Laurie, and told him that he was to be transferred the day after tomorrow. He added that he had written to the matron, enclosing Mrs. Odell’s letter, and he didn’t fancy she would make any difficulties.

This ended Laurie’s hopes that the transfer would supply him with some kind of alibi. There was no way out of it now; he would have to go. Remembering in time, he thanked Major Ferguson for his kindness in arranging it.

He had, as a matter of fact, fully expected to be transferred that day. He had keyed himself up to it, at a pitch which could not be maintained for long. He was still unsophisticated enough to feel shocked when he found that the reprieve gave him feelings of anticlimax, exhaustion and dismay. Andrew was in bed, he had arranged with Derek to call him if Laurie had to go. Laurie sent him a message with the news, so that he could sleep.