The Charioteer (51 page)

“If you told that child to eat your dinner as well as his own and say you were there, I don’t think much of it. When she taxed him with it he got nervous and brought the whole lot up again.”

“No, really I didn’t. Is he all right?”

“Not much thanks to you. Get to bed now for goodness’ sake, if you don’t want me to tell her you cut your treatment as well. Lucky for you it’s her half day. All I can say is, I hope it was worth it.”

Mervyn, flattered by Laurie’s concern, waved it away. “It’s all right, it was a bit of a waste, but I ate some sweets when I got hungry again, and there was a super pie for supper, I had some more. Did you fix everything okay?”

“Yes, thanks. We’d better stop talking or Nurse won’t like it.”

“Go on, we’ve got six minutes yet. I say, Spud, you know what? I had a visitor this evening. I bet you sixpence, come on, I bet you a hundred thousand pounds you don’t guess who I had.”

“I can’t think,” said Laurie, coming near to a literal truth just then. “Someone from school?”

“Go on, you’re soppy, they come Sundays. Come on, guess. I bet you never do guess. Shall I tell you? Do you give up? Okay, then you owe me a hundred thousand pounds, see? It was Mr. Lanyon. He came right into the ward and said is Sister off duty, so then he asked Nurse if he could see me, and she said, well, don’t stay long, only she was busy, see, so he stayed for ages, he told me all about Morse, and he showed me how you sail a dhow, he drew me one, and he gave me my soap and flannel to wash, he stayed right up till they came to make the bed. I bet you’d never have guessed, would you? Would you, Spud? You’d never have guessed if you weren’t there he’d come just to see me?”

“No,” said Laurie. “Was that all you talked about?”

“Coo, no. We talked for ages.” The first bright shine of elation had gone from his voice, and there was half a question in it.

“What about?”

Already the old sharp look was coming back into Mervyn’s face; no clear suspicion, only the knowledge that he was being given at best half a truth. “Only what I was going to do when I leave school, and he asked about you, he asked where you were. So I said I didn’t know, you had to see about something on business.” He gave the sharp look again, this time a request for approval. Laurie realized that this was some kind of stock answer he had been taught to make at home, perhaps when creditors called. No doubt at the time he had simply told all he knew; this canniness was retrospective. Laurie could feel in himself all the wheels running down in a slack hopeless sense of universal defeat. “I’m glad you had a nice talk.”

“Yes, I thought he was super.” Laurie sensed, in the pause, a forlorn hope of having everything made right again.

“He tells some good stories, doesn’t he? I ought to have left a message for him, but I forgot.”

“He said he’d come back tomorrow.” A cautious relief quickened in Mervyn’s voice. “I say, Spud, did you know, it’s Sister’s day off tomorrow? Mr. Lanyon didn’t know it was, so when I told him, he said he might come and see me again, just for a minute.”

“That would be fine. But sometimes he gets orders at short notice. So if you don’t see him, don’t be upset.”

The night nurses were coming in; now there was no need to talk any more. But though the raid that night was a light one and soon over, he was awake till three, with the tight spinning wakefulness of mental exhaustion. Soon after five the lights went on and the day’s work began.

The long featureless desert of the morning passed. After dinner he dozed fitfully for about an hour, till it was time to go for his treatment and make his apologies to Miss Haliburton. After that there was nothing to do but think.

At five Laurie slipped out of the ward quietly, and waited at the head of the stairs. In the ward at the bottom someone had just died and the widow was led away crying. For a little while the flagged stone well was empty; then two housemen paused there to exchange a bit of hospital scandal and laugh; a long wait, then a very young nurse hurried away on an errand, rolling down her sleeves and pushing the hair out of her eyes. The next footsteps were Ralph’s.

The landing was too near the ward; Laurie went down, and they met on the bend of the stairs. With a kind of horror, he saw that Ralph looked exactly the same. Even now that one knew, there seemed nothing behind his smile but a certain alertness and anxiety, there was nothing to see.

He said, “Hello, Spud. What happened yesterday? If you left a message for me I never got it.” Laurie didn’t answer; he thought his face would be answer enough. Ralph looked at him again and said, “What’s been going on, for God’s sake? You look terrible. What’s the trouble, Spud, tell me about it.”

“I’ve been to see Andrew,” Laurie said, and waited.

Ralph waited too. His face betrayed nothing. If one hadn’t known, it would have seemed to show mere bewilderment passing into concern.

Laurie said, “Do you still want to know what the trouble is?”

With an anxious-sounding irritability Ralph said, “Yes, of course I do.”

Laurie remained silent; but this time it was because he had been left without words. Ralph’s fair brows came down in a straight line. He hadn’t even dropped his eyes. He said, slowly, “I suppose you mean he’s found out.”

Still Laurie stared, unbelieving. It had really seemed to him, till this moment, that he was ready for anything, that not a single illusion about Ralph was left. But he had taken for granted courage in a corner; he had imagined Ralph standing up to this as he had when Mr. Straike had asked him his name.

At first it had seemed not to matter what one said, the thing had been to get it over; but now he felt anger rising in him, pent, aching anger from hidden places, the blind undischarged poison of guilt and conflict and suppressed resistance. He said, “You should know.”

“I don’t understand. Why?”

After a short pause Laurie said, “Christ!”

“Now look, Spud,” said Ralph, suddenly crisp, “this isn’t getting us anywhere.”

“I’ve got some good news for you,” said Laurie bitterly. “He’s gone up to London. You did better than you expected there. He’s gone to work in the worst-bombed place he can find, he thinks he ought to because he hit you. I’m glad you had a good laugh about it. Are you satisfied now?”

“Hit me?” said Ralph, staring. “Hit
me
?”

Laurie felt physically sick. He knew that this would have seemed to him really the voice of an innocent person, if any other explanation were possible, if his informant had been anybody in the world but one. His memories grimaced at him. He said, “Oh, don’t be so cheap.”

Ralph stood with his back to the iron banister, his right hand gripping the rails. His eyes seemed to have become darker because of the changed color of his face. He said, presently, speaking slowly and carefully, “Look, Spud, I’m sorry to say this, I know you’re fond of him; but if that’s what he says, he’s putting something over on you.”

It had only wanted that. Laurie thought of Andrew on his knees scrubbing the filthy floor, of Willis making for the bucket, of Mr. Straike, of the whole terrible vulnerability of goodness in the world.

“Excuse me.” Two theater porters, with a stretcher and a nurse, had come up below them. They drew back, mechanically, to opposite sides. The senior porter said over his shoulder, “These stairs is supposed to be kept clear.”

The interruption had sharpened Laurie’s anger, and the pause had given him time.

“Are you asking me now to take your word against his? You must have forgotten what people who speak the truth are like. I know what you are, I’ve only been pretending to myself; as far as I’m concerned, this serves me right. When you wanted me to live with you and go on seeing him as if nothing had happened, I really knew then. You could be trusted once, you knew what it was all about, you had it in you; but it’s gone now, you’ve no feeling for it any more, you’re all blunt at the edges. Won’t you ever realize why it is when you try to run other people’s lives you can’t do anything but harm? God, must you go on putting yourself in charge and smashing everything you don’t understand? Like a drunk trying to mend a watch.” He paused for breath. Ralph stood against the rail in silence. His face had a dead, fixed, stupid look. Laurie had a feeling of total devastation in which all objectives had been destroyed. He said grayly, “I suppose you can’t help it by now. Too many Bunnies in your life.”

At first Ralph hardly seemed to know he had finished speaking; he stood there, his face curiously stretched and sharpened over the bones, looking half at Laurie and half through him, as people look through a passing stranger when deep in thought. When he spoke it was almost a soliloquy. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, very likely.”

Laurie said, “You’d better go, they want the stairway kept clear.”

A nurse from the ward above came hurrying down the stairs, glanced at Ralph with a flicker of interest, then, touched with discomfort, bustled past them without looking around.

Ralph said, “Yes, I’ll be going.” He had already moved down a stair, when he paused and looked upward. “Just a moment. When did this happen? This boy, I mean, which day did we meet?”

“How can you talk about it? It was only for you I promised not to see him. And the day I came to tell you, you knew what you’d just done, and you … you—”

“Sunday, then, was it?” He paused. “Not that it matters, really, after all. All right, Spud, goodbye, then. I’m sorry; I hope it works out for you sometime. I won’t come back. I see now there’s a lot of truth in what you’ve been saying.”

Laurie watched the flat white top of his cap as he went down the stairs, slowly at first and then more quickly, moving like a sailor without looking down, his hand—the one in the glove—just touching the rail. He turned the corner at the bottom, and was gone. Laurie waited a little, then went out himself into the street. If he returned to the ward, Mervyn would be sure to ask if Mr. Lanyon was coming.

It was too cold to walk, and he was too tired. In the first cinema he came to, he sat through the meaningless noise of a gangster film. As time passed, and he began to think, he became occupied with the growing strangeness of finding himself so free. As little as three weeks ago, his life had been full of strings: a home, three people he had been tied to. Now he was as free as air, he could go anywhere, it made no difference to anybody.

The film had changed and there was a shot of a girl running with a dog. In the distance she looked like Nurse Adrian, of whom he hadn’t thought for days. Now that his life was so uncomplicated, he supposed he might write to her sometime. The thought made a faint tinge of color on the aseptic blankness of freedom. They would reread, as others did, their letters before posting them, measuring carefully their signals of interest and liking, not replying too quickly for fear of seeming to force the pace. Passingly he wondered whether Miss Haliburton had sold the bull-terrier pup yet. At a second meeting, it had seemed to remember him, and its ears were warm.

He left before the end of the film and had something at a snack bar, then went back to the hospital. He had annoyed them sufficiently, he mustn’t be late tonight. As he went up the main corridor he thought that he had been living in an enclosed and tiny personal world. These were the real people: this porter propped on an idle trolley having a quick cigarette, this stout, anxious woman hurrying to someone sick enough to be visited out of hours, these two doctors amicably disagreeing as they strode along to the theater; the little knot of nurses coming back from the first supper shift, crying, “Oh, no, she
didn’t
? My dear, what
did
you do?”

These were the people for whom, after all, he had been fighting. They were the people for whom Andrew was fighting too. He would be one of them from now on.

As he made for his bed, he saw with relief that Mervyn was already asleep.

“Oh, thank goodness, Odell, there you are at last.”

He looked around from his open locker, his dressing-gown in his hand. What had he done now? He had got back in good time. It was Sister’s day off. He had been so anxious to avoid trouble tonight, and get some sleep.

“Mr. Deacon’s been practically living here all evening, trying to get hold of you. I told him you were never back till after eight. I should think if he’s rung once he’s rung four times. I’d better tell him you’re here.”

“I’m sorry, Nurse. I didn’t know I had to see anyone.” He had never heard of Mr. Deacon. This must be some final check before his discharge. It was sure to happen somewhere outside the ward; there seemed no point in undressing. In a few minutes the nurse came back. “Mr. Deacon wants to see you in the doctors’ room. Do you know where it is?”

“Yes, thank you.” It opened off the landing just outside; sometimes he had seen through the open door an examination couch, a desk, and steel files. The housemaster’s study, he thought. He was going on the carpet for having absconded yesterday. It only remained to hope that Mr. Deacon was a civilian. He knocked at the door, which was ajar, and went in.

Mr. Deacon wasn’t sitting at the mahogany desk, but on it, his hands behind him gripping the edge. He straightened up as Laurie came in and said, “God, you would choose tonight to go and lose yourself. I’ve been looking for you since before six.” Laurie realized that he had never till now been told Alec’s second name.

“What did you want me for?” He would have felt more resentment, except that he noticed Alec looked quite ill. He had the kind of skin which with sickness or strain goes a bruised color around the eyes; his eyelids looked like brown crepe, and his ordinarily pale face had a waxy undertinge.

“Where’s Ralph?” he asked. “Did you see him again?”

“Again?” said Laurie. His slowness was self-protective. He had thought that this empty place was all deadened and dull, as one can think with a raw burn till someone takes the dressing off.

With an edgy, fine-drawn impatience Alec said, “After he went at five, did you go after him? When I rang him up, when he took the receiver off, were you with him then?”

“No,” Laurie said.

“You had a row, didn’t you?”

“I’m sorry, Alec. If you don’t mind I’ll go back to bed. I thought a doctor wanted me. I’m sorry. Good night.”