The Charioteer (47 page)

“Let’s talk instead. I’ll come and sit on your bed to save shouting. Just let me put my boot on, in case the nurses want me to do anything.”

They had an acid drop, and later Mervyn had a draw at Laurie’s cigarette. It would probably, Laurie thought, with these associations, make a nonsmoker of him for life.

When one of the windows blew in, Mervyn said, without removing his cold fingers from Laurie’s hand, “I suppose this isn’t nearly as bad as Dunkirk, is it?”

“Well, not for me, because I can get about now. You’re fixed more like I was then.”

“If I had to walk would my stomach burst open?”

“I doubt it; but I could carry you.”

“I weigh six stone eleven.”

“Yes, I could manage that.”

After a long awkward pause, as if he were making up his mind to confess to something, Mervyn said, “My Aunt Edie’s house was hit by a bomb, week before last.”

“Oh, bad luck. Was she all right?”

“No, she was killed. And Uncle Ted, and Mr. Robbins that lived with them, and their dog, he was called Smoky, he was half a spaniel. And the baby.”

“That’s too bad. I’m having another cigarette; want to light it? Watch out Nurse isn’t looking.”

This time it made him cough; they transferred the cigarette in guilty haste.

“Mum said Aunt Edie and Uncle Ted had gone to Canada, she said not to go round there because there was bad people come to live in the house. Only one of the boys at school said, that lives in their street. So I went and the lady next door told me.”

“Oh,” said Laurie helplessly. “I see.” A descending bomb whistled loudly. He leaned across the child, but the windows only rattled this time. Mervyn said, “Is it right you can’t hear the one that hits you?”

“That’s what they say. You’re all slipping down the bed, it’s bad for the stitches.” He settled his back against the rail, and the boy’s head against his shoulder. It felt heavy; if things eased off for even a few minutes he would probably sleep. “Mothers will do it, I can’t think why. I suppose they’d sooner think we can’t take it than feel we don’t need them any more. The more they’re fond of you, the worse it seems to be. Only way you can look at it is, women are like that.”

“Are they? Is your mum?”

“She used to be. You can’t go hurting their feelings about it. The only thing is just to put up with it and think your own thoughts.”

The raid was tailing off a little. Two casualties had just been carried in. He wondered if Andrew was safe, and whether Ralph’s Station was a target for tonight. He thought that if Mervyn had been five years older one could have tried him with:

The sorrows of our proud and angry dust

Are from eternity, and shall not fail.

Bear them we can, and if we can, we must—

But he looked a little fragile, yet, to shoulder tonight’s sky; and besides, he had fallen asleep.

Pressed by the double weight, the bed-rail was boring into Laurie’s shoulder; but he didn’t want to risk waking the child before the All Clear. For the same reason, he couldn’t reach the cigarettes. He had just given up trying when a lit one appeared, smoking, under his nose. He looked up. In the subterranean glimmer (almost all the lights had had to be put out, because of the broken window) a small leathery man, who looked like a retired jockey, gave him one of those caustic grins by which some people believe sentiment to be impenetrably concealed. He made a comic shushing gesture, and padded on in his gent’s natty dressing-robe to the lavatory.

The Night Sister did a round soon afterwards. Laurie saw her with alarm. He was breaking a rule; the nurses had winked at it; now there would be trouble. Sure enough she paused beside him. But she only removed the top pillow from his empty bed, and with a smile slipped it behind his shoulder.

Laurie sat smoking, with the boy’s mouse-brown hair under his chin. He felt a warm, kindly solidarity with the Night Sister and the nurses and the horsy little man. It wasn’t till some ten minutes later, when he had been half asleep himself, that he even remembered it would have been possible to misunderstand his situation. His neighbors’ basic assumptions had been his own. Suddenly he pictured one of Sandy’s friends passing by just now; the discreet lifted eyebrow, or snigger, or cough; the not-so-cryptic phrase, meant to pass over the boy’s head, which would ensure that there would never again be perfect innocence between them. It wouldn’t take so very long for that kind of consciousness to settle under one’s skin. We sign the warrant for our own exile, he thought. Self-pity and alibis come after.

It was as if Andrew had walked up and looked at him, and in a moment made everything clear.

For a few minutes, this decision brought him great relief and calm. Then he began to think how he was going to tell Ralph.

He hoped that to sleep on it would help; but perhaps the sleep wasn’t long enough, even though he dropped off before the All Clear and had to be steered back in a daze to his own bed. He could write, of course; it would be kinder not only to himself, but probably to Ralph as well; only it wasn’t the sort of kindness Ralph would ever understand. Deciding this, he tried to put out of his mind the confusing relief it brought him, and the feeling that an unbearable finality had been made not only less immediate, but in some undefined way less real.

If you wanted an evening out, you waited till Sister was off duty and then had a quiet word with the Staff Nurse. That would be tomorrow. He rang the Station, but they didn’t know where Mr. Lanyon was and asked if it was urgent. Thankfully he said no, and left a message. After that he rang Andrew, for he was clear of his promise now and they could arrange to meet. But Derek, who would have fetched him without fuss, wasn’t there, only a new silly nurse who didn’t know anything. There was a queue for the call box, and he had to leave it till next day.

Alec did not reappear; he worked for a surgeon whose cases went mainly elsewhere, and had seldom any real business in the ward. There wasn’t a raid that night; Laurie slept for nearly eight hours, in spite of everything.

In the morning he had his first letter from Andrew. The round young-looking script was deceptive: in writing, Andrew revealed maturities which, in talk, his diffidence often hid. It was a swiftly written, unstudied letter, easy with confidence, the crossings-out light and unconcealing. Near the end Andrew said, “I ought to get over next week with any luck, and we’ll find somewhere to talk. The telephone is rather diminishing, isn’t it? In a way Morse would be better, because it doesn’t pretend to be conversation. I know you felt the same, so don’t feel obliged to ring for fear that I’ll take umbrage or anything. I ring the lodge every day to ask after you, though, of course, they won’t put me through to the ward.” Not for the first time, Laurie reflected that Andrew was the realist of them both, or had the courage of his realism perhaps. There was a postscript: “Your bed is still empty. I have got a sense of guilt in advance toward the man they put in it; I don’t know when I’ve resented a perfectly innocent person so much.”

When Laurie opened his locker drawer to put the letter away, the first thing he saw was Ralph’s note, the one that had come with the books.

He took it out, and opened it. The speculations of his first reading seemed strange to him now. The awkwardness, the reserve, were no longer enigmatic; they were like certain tones in a voice whose every inflection one knows. He put the letter back, thinking, I ought never to forgive myself for this as long as I live.

Ralph’s new room was a little nearer the hospital than the old one. He rang the bell at the strange door, thinking that with its tall squeezed bay windows it was a tight-mouthed sun-shy house, predestined to misery and unhappy leave-takings. But then the dark window opened above his head and Ralph’s voice, brisk and warm, said, “Just walk up, Spud. First floor.”

The stairs were narrow and rather steep; Ralph must have thought he’d prefer to do them without spectators.

The door of the first-floor front opened as Laurie reached it, and shut behind him. He had meant, in some confused unhistrionic way, to give his entrance a kind of significance which would warn Ralph from the first. Now it seemed unbelievable not to have known it would be like this. To administer a rebuff in this first moment would have been possible, Laurie vaguely supposed, to some other and better person: it wasn’t possible to him. In a moment or so, however, Ralph looked at his face and said quietly, “Well, come and sit down.”

Laurie had time now to notice the room, which was what the rest of the house would have led him to expect, full of frowsty comfort and solid vulgarity. Ralph had removed all the pictures and ornaments, which had given it the air of a commercial hotel. Where his old room had extended his personality, this flung it back so that all his reality was concentrated in himself.

“You see,” he said, “two chairs. Which shall we sit on?”

They were huge overstuffed ones covered in tapestry. Ralph sat on the arm beside him. “All right, Spud, all right. I know this is going to be difficult. Just be quiet for a minute. It’s been so long.”

It wasn’t what Laurie had planned. There had not been time to discover, till now, the sensation of coming home again which is one of the more stable by-products of physical love. One can see sometimes in a crowded railway carriage at night two lovers, lethargic, travel-grimed, and bored, weary beyond the dimmest stirrings of desire, but by instinct comfortably adapting their bodies to cushion and support each other, making a little refuge from the crush while the strangers or even friends around them rub elbows and knees, stiff with apologetic constraint and inward resentment. It was with almost a shock that, after a minute or two, Laurie felt Ralph get up abruptly and move away. He crossed over to the other chair and said, “All right, then, Spud, let’s have it. Well, come along, shoot.”

Wakened harshly out of the illusion that the conversation which had just taken place had somehow explained everything, Laurie now realized that since the moment of entering the room he had scarcely uttered a word.

Stumblingly, he began saying the things he had planned. But much of it seemed impossible now, much had to be qualified or softened; there was much that he could no longer imagine having ever meant to say. “Ralph, don’t ever think it was because I didn’t care enough. I—”

“Don’t be silly, Spud. I know you love me, and so do you.”

Laurie looked up. Ralph’s blue eyes were fixed on his face, but not in doubt or entreaty. They were watching him: closely, carefully, with absolute concentration. He understood now how sentimental and unreal had been his picture of Ralph as a passive victim whom his rejection would instantly crush. He was looking into the face of a resolute quick-thinking man used to authority, to measuring other men’s strength and asserting his own, to a swift reaction in moments of danger. He stood on the bridge now, going into action: and, as long as Laurie’s resolution held, it was he who was the enemy.

“Don’t waste time, Spud. It’s childish to start an argument about whether we love each other, the moment I go and sit on the other side of the room. Get down to brass tacks. What does all this rigmarole add up to, really? You met me at Sandy’s party and you can’t forget it. You surely don’t still think I went there for the conversation, do you?”

He waited, as if expecting a reply; a disciplinary trick so old and simple that no doubt he was scarcely aware of using it.

“I went because I was on the town, like everyone else in the room. Yes, that includes Alec too, you don’t know as much about Alec as you think. Surely Sandy told you it was a queer party before you went there; you knew what it meant?”

“Yes, of course.”

“I don’t just mean that queers would be there. A queer party: something between a lonely hearts club and an amateur brothel. You expected that, didn’t you?”

Much of that evening had been a surprise to Laurie, but he didn’t want to sound pious, so he said, “Yes.”

“And are you going to tell me you’d have gone yourself if you’d been happy and satisfied, even if you did know I’d be there?”

“Yes. I’d have gone to see you.”

“Would you, Spud?” Ralph’s face had softened; there was a kind of respect in it too. “After all those years. Yes; I expect you would.”

He lit two cigarettes, gave Laurie one, and stood for a while looking down at him in silence.

“I’m not romantic,” he began. From his lack of emphasis Laurie saw that he believed this to be true. “When I saw you lying on the deck in all the muck and dunnage, I don’t know what I felt, really. You had a two-day beard, you were dirty, you smelt worse than the others because your wound was going bad. I suppose you stood to me for something or other. When you sent me up, I was almost too busy to think about it at the time; but it seemed to sink in later, when I was lying in hospital with nothing to do. So I wrote, because one can’t swear to every impression one picks up on a day like that, and I wanted to settle it one way or another. When I heard you were dead, it seemed inevitable, somehow. And after that, so did everything else.”

He had spoken in the intent, rather muddled way of a man who is defining his thoughts to himself as he goes along. He had done better for himself, it seemed, than he wanted; for when he saw Laurie’s face his own hardened at once.

“Well, that’s past history.” He added, with the clear colorless decision that told nothing, except that the subject was closed, “You can leave that out of it. None of that could happen again.” Laurie remembered suddenly the contempt with which he had gazed down at Sandy on the bathroom floor.

“I wasn’t thinking that.”

“Well, seeing some of the things you do think …” As if it were unnatural for him to meet an emergency except on his feet, he took a quick turn across the room, came back to the hearth, and stood there, poised to move again, looking out across Laurie’s head. Laurie could feel how the walls of the room were cramping his eyes. He looked at him, measuring his own resolve against Ralph’s courage and his pride, and scarcely realizing that there had been a subtle reorientation. He was feeling now that if he weakened Ralph would respect him less.