The Charioteer (41 page)

Staring at the portrait he thought how sometimes, when he looked at Andrew, he had felt glimmerings of a mysterious recognition. He had wondered sometimes, secretly, whether it was possible that they had met in a former life.

It was not till he was brushing his hair that he noticed the black hairpins on the dressing-table. Then he remembered that, since the little house had no spare room, Aunt Olive would be sleeping here tonight, and he on the living-room divan. He, in fact, had invaded her bedroom, not she his; you could say that she had won after all. He could think of nowhere to hide the photograph, so put it in his breast pocket.

There was a number of odd jobs still to be done about the place, and he was thankful for the occupation. Once or twice at odd moments he went into the garden to look for Gyp, but he hadn’t come back. He was an independent dog and often went for miles by himself, ratting and rabbiting, though not so much in the last few years since he had got rheumatic. Laurie thought to himself that when he went looking for digs, the first thing must be to make some arrangements for Gyp. His mother, though kindness itself, wasn’t good with dogs and never trained him at all; and it would be just like Straike, Laurie thought, to expect the poor old thing to learn new rules like a puppy and crack down on him when he was slow and confused. Anyway, just for once, sleeping downstairs tonight one could have him in, even if he did smell a bit. He didn’t fidget, or conduct violent flea-hunts in the small hours. He was so glad to be there, the thought of it seemed to last him all night.

It was just after tea, when Laurie had persuaded his mother to have one of her rare cigarettes, that, without knocking, Mr. Straike walked in.

Laurie hadn’t believed it could happen. He knew they mustn’t meet on the wedding morning, and his wishes, rather than his reason, had covered this evening with the same immunity. He sat fixed with his cigarette in his hand, without the wit to rise, for some instants; at once he sensed that this was just what Mr. Straike would have expected of his normal manners. He got up; but now his mother (having first put out her cigarette with a shy guilty look) had got up first, and Mr. Straike was kissing her warmly.

For a moment Laurie felt he was being subjected to an obscene outrage which would be recognized as such anywhere in the civilized world. He waited for his mother to protest and remind Mr. Straike that he was there. Then he saw Aunt Olive looking sentimental, and understood that it would go on happening, probably, for years, and that when it stopped he ought to be sorry.

His mother sat down with a pretty, flattered look; Mr. Straike, pressed, accepted tea. He then devoted himself for several minutes to Laurie, making himself emphatically pleasant. Laurie looked at the raw, red hand, close to his mother’s on the table; it was like a rough thumb rubbing a wound. He felt that none of this was really addressed to him. He imagined Mr. Straike saying, “Observe how I am being nice to your ill-mannered, sulky, and (I suspect) neurotic son. It is for your sake I am doing this so much against the grain. I trust it is appreciated.”

“No doubt you’re enjoying the, hrrm, relative lenities of civil hospital routine?”

“Well, they seem rather strong on discipline so far. After all they’re the regulars, in a way.”

“Ah, yes, I do seem to remember at the other place there were certain signs of improvisation.” (The teacups, Laurie thought.) “In fact, I well recall saying to your mother in the train that if conchies
must
be employed to wait upon war casualties, possibly in the hope of arousing some vestigial sense of shame, they might at least be kept where they need not affront the eye, in suitable activities such as scrubbing latrines, and so on.”

A bright spinning anger seemed to press outward against Laurie’s temples and eyes. He felt light, as in the first stage of drink. He said coolly, “How did you guess? When I met my best friend he was doing that very thing.”

Mr. Straike said, “Urhm,” and decided not to see the point. “Then no doubt
his
reaction to their arrival was ‘For this relief, much thanks.’ ” It was a tactical error; it gave the enemy time.

“Oh, well,” said Laurie pleasantly, “we all reacted to their arrival, of course. But actually, we found persecuting Christians awfully overrated. Perhaps we needed lions or something. Perhaps we ought to have tried burning them alive. Perhaps we just needed to be civilians and not soldiers. I wouldn’t know.”

Mr. Straike wore his dog-collars large; but the creased red skin of his neck had become tinged with purple, and Laurie saw a large Adam’s apple surface twice.

“Laurie, my
dear
.”

He turned at the sound of her voice, suddenly shaken as if after physical violence. Anger might have toughened and braced him; but he saw something worse, a cloudy misgiving. He knew that by her own standards she was fully committed, and would be quite unequal in any case to the ordeal of escape; that if he urged it on her she would deny with conviction that any such thought had touched her mind. They sat looking at each other across the used tea things, gagged and helpless. Laurie got to his feet.

“I’m sorry,” he said with difficulty. “We got to know these chaps and like them. I oughtn’t to have been rude about it. Will you excuse me, Mother? I’ll just go out and look for Gyp.” As he got to the door he thought his mother called after him; but he pretended not to hear.

It was twilight. He walked up behind the house to the warren, needing his stick but thinking that if you were with a dog, a stick didn’t show. He gave his special whistle and called, “Come on, boy, come on.”

It was lonely and quiet on the warren, in the lee of the firs. The colonnades opened into deep tunnels of dusk, till over a rise he saw a lake of gold sky and a lace of birches.

Childe Maurice hunted the silver wood,

He whistled and he sang,

“I think I see the woman coming

That I have lovèd lang.”

He had known
Childe Maurice
by heart for years. The tale of this young outlaw, the hidden love-child whom his stepfather murdered, taking him for the lover instead of the son, had always gripped Laurie’s imagination. He had never wondered why.

He could not find Gyp, and the unfamiliar jerk of walking downhill made his leg ache. When he got back the blackout was up, and his mother waiting for him in the porch. As soon as they had looked at each other, he knew what it was she had to say.

“Mother. Where’s Gyp?”

“Laurie darling. Oh, dear, I
am
sorry. It was dreadful of me not to have told you before.”

He stared at her, stonily. Part of him refused it entirely; the rest said bitterly that she should have no help with this.

“Where is he? It’s late. It’s his dinnertime. Do you know where he is?”

“Darling.” She had only looked at him for a moment. “Poor old dog. You know, he was …”

Laurie walked past her, through the hall to the corner under the turn of the stairs. The basket was gone. There was only a large crate labelled
GLASS WITH CARE.

He turned around. “What did he die of? You didn’t tell me he was sick.”

His mother tucked in her lower lip, and he saw that she was beginning to have a sense of injury. “Dear, one doesn’t write worrying letters to people in hospital.”

“But Gyp was mine. He was my dog.” Like a child he said helplessly, “He was a birthday present, he belonged to me.”

“Dear, of course I know, but you’ve not been home for a long time” (Gyp must have noticed that too, Laurie thought), “and we had to do what we thought best.”

“We?”

“Laurie,” said his mother with grieved gentle dignity, “you’re not trying to make me unhappy, are you?”

“He wasn’t sick at all, was he? You had him put down.” She didn’t answer. “He was all right when I was here. You had him put down because that—” Carefully he said, “because that man didn’t want to be bothered with him.”

Now he knew that in his absence she had been reviewing the scene at the tea-table and protecting herself against its meaning. “Laurie, dear, I know you’re upset, but that is a very unfair, unkind thing to say.”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t like to be unkind.” He must have known, Laurie thought. Dogs always do. He must have wondered what it was he’d done.

“Laurie!” He must have been staring through her.

He said, “You would never have done this before. Did you decide he’d be better off that way?”

He saw her eyes, frightened behind their anger as she recognized what she had hidden from herself. “Mother—”

“Aha! So
there
you both are!” Aunt Olive came tripping out of the kitchen, a fall of fine pearl-gray trailing from her arm.

“Oh, Olive, dear, how good of you. Did it need pressing again?” He saw that this intolerable interruption had come to her as a rescue.

“Mother, please could we—”

“Later, dear, not just now. Look at poor Olive doing everything by herself. Be a dear boy and just see if there’s room in there for the air-twist glasses.”

He got out the case from the recess under the stairs, remembering how he had trained Gyp to sleep there when he was three months old. The first night he had cried a good deal, but Laurie had known it wouldn’t do to give in to him and fetch him upstairs. He had gone down himself, wrapped in his eiderdown, and Mrs. Timmings had found them both asleep there in the morning; but of course, he had only been at his prep school then.

Afterwards he made up the living-room divan for himself. Sometimes on cold nights he used to take off the mattress and put it by the fire, but nowadays it was firelight or ventilation. On his embarkation leave, he had looked around his room thinking he would probably never sleep there again; but he had guessed the wrong reason.

Soon after, his mother came in. He must be good to her, he thought, as if she were going into hospital with something worse than she knew. He found some sherry and they sat down to village gossip by the fire. It wasn’t, he thought, an ill wind for everyone; for she would make a good vicar’s wife if she were allowed to get on with it, unintrusive and kind. She was happy to find that he had stopped being difficult; they chatted quite gaily till, remembering something he had meant to ask before, he said, “By the way, Mother, what are you doing about the house?”

“Well, dear, really! You don’t mean to say that you’ve not written to the Trevors
yet
? It’s not fair, you know, to be unbusinesslike with friends, and they depend on it so much. As you didn’t write back about it, I naturally assumed you’d no objection.”

“Me? Whyever should they mind what I think?”

“Laurie! Didn’t you
read
my letter? Surely you do know this house belongs to you now?”

As she spoke it began to come back to him. It had been fifteen years ago, and he had forgotten with the deep forgetfulness which is not an accident. He had been just old enough to understand that it would be in the nature of things for him to outlive her; his grandfather’s death had been a terrible reminder of her mortality. He had thrown his arms round her and said, “But you’re not going to die or get married, so you’ll have it for ever.”

Now he didn’t know what he felt. For the present it was an empty possession; even if war regulations had allowed him to keep it as a weekend place, he couldn’t easily have used it with the vicarage a quarter-mile off. But it was something of his own, a fragment of the past that couldn’t utterly be snatched away. No one could cut down the damson or the cedar. “I’ll write straight away,” he said when they had discussed the business. “I’m sorry I left it.”

He was writing the letter when Aunt Olive, who had answered the telephone, snatched pencil and paper and began to take down a wire, her manner becoming tinged with gloomy importance.

“I’ll read it you word for word.” She cleared her throat. “ ‘Sharp attack last night doctor vetoes travel very sincere regrets and heartfelt wishes for your happiness Edward Lethbridge.’ ”

“Oh!” said Mrs. Odell. “Oh,
dear.
I was so afraid … I asked him if he really felt equal to it, but after what he said about Raymond … Besides—”

Laurie said, “I’m sorry he’s ill.” His wits moved slowly. Aunt Olive gave him a bright, nonreproachful look.

“Well, how lucky it is, isn’t it, that you’re here and able to step into the breach!”

Without quite looking at either of them, his mother said, “Of course I know it’s
considered
correct, but perhaps …”

Yes, he had read that part of the letter. He remembered now why Great-Uncle Edward had been so important. As soon as he became capable of thought again, he realized that there was, in fact, nobody else now.

“Would you like me to give you away, Mother? Unless someone’s coming who’d be better?”

“Who could be, darling? I know it’s rather sudden for you; it’s because we’re such a small family. At least,” she said, in the comfortable voice with which she had smoothed the minor crises of his schooldays, “you won’t have to worry about clothes.”

“I wish I could have put up a pip for you.”

“Darling, everyone can see why it was you didn’t have time for that.”

Yes, he thought, of course. He tried to remember how long the aisle was. It was quite a big church. “It won’t look too good. I mean I’m awkward to walk with, rather.”

“I shan’t find you awkward.” She got up from her chair and kissed him. “We must let Mrs. Joyce know about Uncle Edward at once; she was putting him up.”

“I’ll go,” he said; but it ended with the two women going together. The house was quite near, Mrs. Joyce buoyant and reassuring.

There was still the big cupboard in his room to be cleared for the Trevors. If he didn’t do it tonight, he would have to come back to the empty house tomorrow. It could be dealt with quite simply by throwing everything away.

He got a dust-sheet and began tossing things into it. It was something of a massacre, for he had eliminated the rubbish when he joined the army, with the idea of sparing his mother a depressing job if he got killed; what was left had all had value for him as little as a year ago. When he came to the fencing foil again, he thought it wouldn’t hurt to leave this in the bottom of the cupboard; it took up almost no room, and the Trevors wouldn’t fuss. Then he remembered that out of all that was here, this was the thing he had least occasion to keep.