The Charioteer (40 page)

Ralph said, “You’ll know the ropes by tomorrow; ring me up and we’ll try to have supper out.”

“I can’t tomorrow; I’m going home.”

“Home?” said Ralph sharply. “Oh—the wedding. I’d forgotten that was so soon. It won’t be a mad riot for you, Spud.”

“Well, it’s only one day in a lifetime, I suppose.”

“Spud, is—anybody going with you?”

“Good God, no.”

“Why, would you hate that?”

“I hadn’t thought.”

“I’ll go with you if you like.”

Laurie was a moment taking it in. Ralph said, more formally, “I mean, of course, if it wouldn’t annoy your mother, your bringing a stranger along.” Laurie remembered then that his social contacts must have been unconventional for a good many years.

“Good Lord, Mother would love it; you’d probably ruin the wedding for old Straike. But I think I’d better go on my own. You couldn’t get away, anyhow.”

“Oh, yes, I could work thirty-six hours.” His voice dropped half a tone. “Would you like it, Spud?”

At that moment, someone in the corridor shut a door, or switched off a light, plunging them into almost total darkness.

Taking him unaware, the extinction of light filled Laurie with a deep and warm relief. He could see dimly the silhouette of Ralph’s head, quite near, against a faint loom of light from the passage. Everything was going to be taken care of; there was no need to say anything. Then, as if he were waking from sleep, he knew why it was that he mustn’t take Ralph with him.

Collecting himself, he searched among his old good reasons for excuse. “I don’t think I ought to settle down to being sorry for myself, taking people with me for moral support and so on. You’d hate it, too, the relatives are bound to be hell, especially his. I expect I’d better just take it straight. Sometimes things are easier if there isn’t anyone to know how you’re feeling.” In a voice he tried to keep quite unchanged, he added, “Especially if it’s something you ought not to feel.”

There was a little silence. Laurie said to himself, It’s just a state I’m in. It’s just because of the wedding, and leaving Andrew, and being alone in this awful place. It needn’t mean anything if I don’t let it.

“Spuddy. You mustn’t worry the way you do.”

The voice was kind; but there was more than kindness in it. It struck the sounding-board of Laurie’s loneliness and his will died. Ralph’s arm was lying along the back of the pew, but he didn’t move it. Laurie could just feel his shoulder and that was all.

“You mustn’t get so upset about what you feel, Spud. No one’s a hundred per cent consistent all the time. We might like to be. We can plan our lives along certain lines. But you know, there’s no future in screwing down all the pressure valves and smashing in the gauge. You can do it for a bit and then something goes. Sometimes it gets so that the only thing is just to say, ‘That’s what I’d like to feel twenty-four hours a day; but, the hell with it, this is how I feel now.’ ”

Laurie didn’t try to speak. In the pause they heard, half muffled by walls and distance, the thin crying of a child.

Ralph said softly, “Things can happen. It’s not in the blueprint, perhaps. Perhaps it isn’t for ever. But a person who knows you will understand that. No one’s going to hold it against you afterwards.”

“I know, Ralph. It’s all right.” What does that mean, he thought; it doesn’t mean anything. He had known it was necessary to start talking. After a moment he said, “Ralph, I—I don’t really want to go alone. But I think I ought to.”

Ralph’s voice didn’t alter. He stayed just as he was. “Do, then, Spud, if that’s how you feel. It wouldn’t be good to make up your mind for you now.” For a moment Laurie sensed a deep undeclared reserve of confidence, glanced at, considered in the light of experience, and returned to store. “If you feel like company you can ring me up. Ring this number.” With sight better attuned than Laurie’s to the darkness, he got out a pad and scribbled across it: Laurie wondered what more he had been able to see. He tore out the leaf and offered it. Their hands touched. Ralph said, “You mustn’t worry any more, Spud. There’s nothing difficult or complicated or anything. I’m there when you want me. That’s all.”

After a moment Laurie said, “Ralph, you’re too good to people. I’m not worth your taking trouble over. Whatever happened, I never could be worth it.”

“What a silly boy you are.” He spoke as if someone were flirting with him at a party. Outlined in the doorway, Laurie saw him get to his feet. “I was forgetting, they have supper at some ungodly hour here, about a quarter to six. If you don’t go now you’ll miss it.”

As Laurie got up he found he was levering himself on a pile of hymn books; some almost submerged tactile memory remarked,
Ancient and Modern,
not
Songs of Praise.

As they parted at the ward door Ralph said, “You’ve not lost that telephone number, have you, Spud?”

“No,” said Laurie. “It’s here.”

“Good. Don’t worry. God bless.”

He was just in time to catch the supper trolley. Going back to bed with his mug and plate, he found the boy Mervyn being fed by a nurse with a feeding-cup.

“Hello, Spud.”

“Hello, son, feeling better?”

“Look. There’s a navy officer in the door there, waving to you.” As Laurie turned, Ralph gave a valedictory wave and smile and vanished. Mervyn said, “Who’s he?”

“A friend I was at school with. He was at Dunkirk too.”

“You don’t mean,” said Mervyn, “the captain off that ship?”

“Yes.” He had quite forgotten the conversation. Now he realized that Mervyn had experienced a miracle of adult integrity. He was gazing after Ralph as if Michael the Archangel had looked in. Well, thought Laurie, that’s something anyway.

The rest of the evening he spent writing to Andrew. He had meant to talk about the wedding. But now the whole subject had become so entangled with things which couldn’t be told that it confused him, and in the end he didn’t dwell on it very much.

In the middle of the night he woke to hear whispers and movement behind the screens of the old man’s bed. He knew what had happened, as soon as he saw that the blankets had been thrown on the floor. In the morning there was a flat empty bed, like Charlot’s, neatly bisected by the center folds of sheet and counterpane.

He got up and went out some time before his train was due, so that he would have a chance to telephone Andrew before he went off duty. It was wonderful to hear his almost speechless pleasure at recognizing the voice; but considered strictly as a conversation, it was like waving handkerchiefs from a quarter-mile away. Ralph from long practice had always known how to extract humor from the fact that people were overhearing, while at the same time he conveyed with neatness and subtlety almost anything he wished. Laurie could hear Andrew’s sense of inadequacy behind every word, and longed to make him feel easier. “I’m in a call box, I can say what I like; I expect you’re standing in the middle of all the bathroom traffic, aren’t you?”

“Yes, it’s about peak hour. I wish—”

“I know. We’ll work something out when I come back.”

“I hope it won’t be too bad. If I’d only thought, perhaps I could have got my night off then, instead, and gone with you.”

There was a moment’s pause. “I wouldn’t have inflicted that on you. You must come up and meet Mother some other time.”

“I expect your stepfather might think me rather a bad influence.”

“Oh, yes, horrible. If he found Jesus Christ preaching on the village green, he’d have him arrested for blasphemy inside five minutes.”

“Laurie—”

“Sorry. Just a manner of speaking.”

“It’s not that—I wish I could see you before you go.”

It wasn’t till Laurie was sitting in the train that he remembered he had left no message for Reg.

He had not been home since his embarkation leave; and now, seeing from the gate the small, low house, its thick walls blunted at the edges and smoothed as if by the wear of giant hands, the fifty-year-old cedar floating its dark clouds over the lawn striped from the mower, it seemed impossible that change could touch it all, without or within. To gain this moment he had told his mother not to meet him, as she must be busy, but now it was spoilt for him because in his heart he was deeply hurt that she had taken him at his word. As a last charm to bring back the familiar, he gave the special whistle he used for his dog, and, standing behind the blue spruce at the gate, waited to see old Gyp come pottering stiffly out with his ears cocked. But it was his mother who heard and came out instead.

He had known it would sharpen his sense of loss to see her; but he had been unprepared for the bright defensive flutter, the silliness which came from self-consciousness and her unacknowledged sense of guilt toward him. She was determined to believe that he was losing nothing: it made her overinsistent, demanding of him in everything the role she had allotted him in advance to set her mind at rest.

The house was a last-minute chaos of clothes, luggage, and half-packed crates. He had expected this but hadn’t guessed at the desolation. He had forgotten too to expect Aunt Olive, which was foolish; for she lived for others, and her status as the family drudge was guiltily recognized by all its members. She was always overthanked and underloved, having something unco’ guid about her which led her always to do a little more than people wanted done. She was really only a cousin of Mrs. Odell’s. When Laurie went upstairs for a bath and a moment’s quiet, he found her packing his room.

He had known he must do this before he went, but had reckoned on finding it still intact. It looked as if it had been ransacked by gangsters. The divan was stripped, the chair uncovered showing its ancient scars, the cupboard open and all its contents strewed on the floor. Aunt Olive sat beside a wooden tea-chest, surrounded by books which she appeared to be dusting. The
Oxford Book of French Verse
was in her hand, and she was carefully shaking out the pages.

Taking a grip on himself, he thanked her profusely and said that he would finish now, as she must be cold.

“Goodness,
I’m
never still long enough for that! Now you’re here I can ask you the little things I wasn’t sure about. Now for instance
here,
all these bits of paper and things I’ve found stuck in books, I thought you’d better see them before I threw them away.”

He looked with horror at the heap beside her knees. Some were merely markers, but some were not. He said, “Oh, just burn them.”

“No, I’d rather you
looked
first, one never really knows. Now what about this, for instance?”

She held up a bit of cardboard. Next moment he recognized it. It had been cut, not very expertly, from the center of a First Eleven cricket group. The cut had sliced through four out of the five heads in the square. Ralph’s was the one in the middle. The picture had been taken a week before he left.

“Aha!” said Aunt Olive. “You see! Raves,
we
used to call them, but I’m sure
you
didn’t use such sissy expressions! Now you must look at everything, or goodness knows what precious trophies might go up in smoke.”

“I will in a minute. Please don’t bother about it.”

“Now don’t forget. I know what you boys are, you
mean
well, till some other absorbing activity comes along! Now,
this
.” She plunged into the mouth of the cupboard, and emerged waving a fencing foil.

Laurie relieved her of it. It was strange to feel it lie so easily in the hand, to feel the body remembering its response as though, at the word, it would still obey as lightly as ever.

Hamlet
had been the set play for School Certificate, so following custom the form had enacted it in the autumn term. Laurie had played Laertes. He had had, in those days, the kind of looks you would think of casting for Laertes rather than Horatio, for instance. The School Certificate Shakespeare play was an annual joke, but that year people said that at least the fencing bout had something. Treviss had coached it, and Lanyon had strolled in sometimes during practices to watch. Once Treviss had been sick and he had taken the practice himself. Laurie remembered now, how clearly, the sensation of seeing him walk in at the door instead of Treviss, and pull his jacket off. Once he had taken the foil from Hamlet to demonstrate something in the last passage, and there they were, as Laurie had phrased it to himself at the time, facing one another across the cold steel. After a pass or two Lanyon had broken off and said, “Come along, come along, Odell. You’re supposed to know this foil’s poisoned: for the Lord’s sake fence as if you cared whether you get hit or not.” Everyone said that when Lanyon went up to Cambridge he would be sure to fence for the University.

“You see,” said Aunt Olive, “it’s too long for a packing-case and so
awkward
for a trunk. I was wondering what you’d like to do with it?”

“I can’t imagine. What would you do with it if you were me?”

He saw her neck go pink between the wisps of hair. He knew he would despise himself later, so added unwillingly in a kinder voice, “Perhaps the scouts could use it in some of their shows.”

“Yes, dear.” She fidgeted a little, collecting herself. “That
is
a good idea. We must ask your father about it when he comes.” She added archly, “Though perhaps we shouldn’t say
that
until tomorrow.”

After a short interval Laurie said, “I’m so sorry, but I was thinking of taking a bath.” After she had gone clucking out, his first action was to throw off all his clothes, with some furious thought of confronting her if she tried to get in again.

Afterwards he flung the things from the cupboard back to see to later, and went through the papers. There was a note from Charles; notes had been one of his accomplishments. Laurie tore it across, and picked up the photograph again.

Even in the first embarrassed glance, he had been aware of making some discovery about it; and now he saw what it was. It had been taken at a moment when Ralph must have got bored by the preliminaries and started thinking of something else; the shutter had caught a moment of preoccupation, of some serious private thought. Now Laurie realized that in the first instant he had recognized in it not Ralph but Andrew. It wasn’t really like him, but as a poor likeness it would almost have passed, except for the eyes. Once one began to think of it, one realized that the whole structure of the head was very similar, and the hair, though Ralph’s was straighter, grew in much the same way from the brow. Without the picture Laurie would never have thought of it; Ralph had altered, he saw now, more than one supposed.