The Charioteer (7 page)

“Who’d I get to look after him? ’S not just the kid.”

“No, of course. It’s hell.”

“You’re right,” said Reg, and fell silent. But Laurie felt a heavy certainty that he was waiting; for sympathy, for fellow feeling. He felt like a man who has strolled empty-handed into a famine area.

“She can’t be worth it. Treating you like that.” But, he thought immediately after, perhaps she was, perhaps he ought to be urging Reg to understand, to win her back.

“Too true she’s not. But it’s one thing to know you been a mucking fool, it’s another to learn sense.” His face reddened. A shiny rim began to form along his lower lids.

“You know, my father wasn’t faithful to my mother. She minded a lot at the time, but she’s all right now.”

“It’s not the same for a woman. That’s their lot, and nature made them to stand it. But a man’s nature’s different.”

“Is it? It’s bloody hell, Reg, I know. I’m terribly sorry.”

“Her sister’s a good girl. Looked after the mother and got passed over like. Our dad would have rather I’d picked Ireen, I know. But she hadn’t the life in her that Madge had.” He snatched a handkerchief from the pillow and blew his nose.

“If she got sick of all this would you take her back?”

“No. Never.” Reg swallowed convulsively. “I couldn’t never go with her again, thinking of how she’d been with him.” He swallowed again; there was a pause. “But I’d never get used to no one else. She was one of those that know what a man needs—I used to think she only learned it thinking of me.” Suddenly he turned over with his back to Laurie, and held up the book close to his face.

“Goodness, they
have
left you in a mess.” It was the Charge Nurse with the dressing trolley, making the bandages good. The doctors had been gone some minutes. The nurse bandaged the leg and straightened the bed, tutting mildly. He lay looking at the ceiling, wondering whether to tell his mother by letter or wait till she came.

“Qu’est-ce que tu as, Spoddi?”
He turned to meet Charlot’s kind, vague eyes. Here was someone who could be told without bothering Reg. If he could tell just one person it was all he wanted. He said in French, “It’s only something the doctor has just said about my leg—that it will always be stiff, and shorter than the other, and that all my life I shall be lame.”

“That is bad,” said Charlot slowly. “That is a wicked thing.” Suddenly a spasm of extraordinary violence convulsed his face. The filthy Boches. Animals. Pigs. …” Laurie could only guess at the next few words. “When the war is over we shall split the gullets of these assassins. All … all—”

“Oh, I don’t know. If you hanged the lot of them it wouldn’t put back an inch on my leg.”

“The world knows what they are. They are—”

“Yes,” said Laurie soothingly. “Yes, I know.” He had been forgetting the Germans, and was ashamed of his lack of tact.

“You’re having your stitches out soon,” said a shy, cool voice beside him. “I heard Major Ferguson telling Sister.”

It was Nurse Adrian. He looked around, smiling. The emotions of the anesthetic were still tangled in his consciousness; he felt at once that it was she all the time whom he had really wanted. Her hand, resting on the locker, looked cool and slim, with nice bones.

“You’ll be up again before long,” she said. “What’s the matter, is it aching?”

“Not much, thanks.” He looked at her again, longing to speak; but he could only think of things too simple to say. “I shall always be different,” he wanted to tell her; and some part of his mind expected that she would say “No,” and everything would be changed. “It only aches on and off now,” he said, to fill the pause which already she might be noticing. She had none of that awful knowingness; one could take one’s time with her, hesitate, and she would only be grateful. “Different?” she would say, surprised. “But of course you’re not.”

“I’ll ask Sister for some A.P.C. for you,” she said.

“No, really, it’s all right.” As she stood looking down at him in kind anxiety, he saw what his own trouble had hidden before, that she was dog-tired and harried to death. Strands of her fair hair were slipping down damply under her cap; her face was shiny like a schoolgirl’s after hockey; the inside of her hand was soggy and rough, she must have been scrubbing somewhere out of sight. She had the air of giving up appearances and expecting nothing. He remembered that both the maids and the nurses had always seemed to have a full-time job, and there were no maids today.

“Thanks all the same,” he said, “but it’s gone off now, it feels fine.” On a sudden impulse, because she looked plain and didn’t deserve to, he added, “Seeing you must have cured it.”

“Silly,” she said offhandedly; but she gave him a quick, shy smile as she went on to the next locker.

“Now then, Spud,” said Reg, suddenly reappearing. “At it again. Ought to be ashamed. Here, I never asked you, what did the old man say about your leg? He was going on long enough.”

“God knows,” said Laurie. “It was just Greek to me.”

They put Reg into an airplane splint next day. It supported his arm outwards on a level with his shoulder, flexed at the elbow. Learning not to knock people down as he passed them gave him an occupation. He wrote Madge a long letter. Laurie had his stitches out, and was allowed up. This was his fourth convalescence; there was nothing to it, except that, as usual, he found when he used the crutch again that his arm muscles had gone soft. The stick would come later; he had only graduated to a stick once before.

In the evening, when he came back to the ward from the kitchen where he had been washing up, he was pleased to notice still more progress in Reg. Not only was he not sitting alone, but he had a grouse. It was plainly a stirring, public and noisy one. His face looked a healthier color already. He was sitting on the end of Neames’s bed. Between Reg and Neames there was always something of a class war; so Laurie realized the grouse must be serious, and he had better be in on it.

“Hello,” he said. “What’s cooking?”

“What’s cooking? Eh?” Reg wheeled round, so that Neames had to duck to dodge a scythelike sweep of the splint. “Cor, Spuddy, you wait till you hear. This’ll kill you, this will. Listen to this. Who d’you think they’re sending up here, to do for us ’stead of the maids?”

“German prisoners?” guessed Laurie. Unlikely as it seemed, he could think of nothing else proportionable to Reg’s fury.

“Oh, come on, wake up, Spud; what Jerry prisoners do we get? Only the Luftwaffe boys. And God’s truth, I’d rather have a bunch of them. They learn them this Nazi stuff in the schools, they don’t know no better, they’ve been had for suckers but they done their duty the way they see it, same as us. Not like these creeping-Jesus, knock-kneed conchies.”

Laurie took it in. He whistled.

“C.o.s? God, that’s going to be a bit embarrassing.”

“Embarrassing?” said Reg sharply. He usually covered up Laurie’s social gaffes, but this was serious. “Too true it is. Embarrassing for them, the muckers.”

“One way to look at it,” said Neames, making what was evidently not his first speech in the debate, “they’re mouths the country’s got to feed. If they’re kept in prison producing nothing, who foots the bill? We do. Now here we have the nurses wasting half their time on cleaning, and everyone’s comfort going by the board. No fraternization, that goes without saying. But no obstruction. That’s what I suggest.”

Reg snorted. “Got it totted up like the petty cash, haven’t you? After all we been through, if I was to see one of them muggers coming up with a soap and flannel to wash
me,
I’d smack it acrost his face. Don’t worry, we’ll soon have them out of here.”

There was a growl of assent from the meeting behind him. Laurie listened in mounting depression and dismay; his imagination flinched from the series of excruciating little dramas he saw approaching. He said, “You know, they did some pretty fine ambulance work in the last war, right in the line.”

“Ah,” said Reg, “that would be the Quakers. Not that I hold with them, but that’s a proper religion, what they’ve been brought up to, same as what the Catholics are.”

“But if—” began Laurie. His knee, which had been aching dully, like a sprain, had begun to ache fiercely, like a burn. Growing cross, he said, “Don’t look now, but it’s supposed to be our religion too, when there isn’t a war on.”

“If you’ll excuse me saying so, Odell, you’re apt to be a bit too easygoing. Suppose we had Hitler here, and all our kiddies brought up to worship Valhalla and inform on us to the Gestapo. What about religion then?” Laurie perceived in Neames’s sallow face the old stresses of a fierce struggle and hard victory; it gave him, for a moment, almost distinction.

“Yes, that’s a point. Still—”

“Good old Spud,” said Reg with sudden awkward kindness; he had recognized the signs of pain and fatigue around Laurie’s eyes and mouth. “Argue the case for Jack the Ripper,
he
would.”

“What are you men doing still up?” The Sister, expecting trouble, had scented it from afar. “I know you’ve been helping outside, Odell, and thank you, but get along now. Barker, you’ve been here long enough to know the rule about sitting on beds.”

Laurie’s leg felt worse before it felt better. He lay trying to forget it, thumbing the pages of a dog-eared magazine. The unshaded electric bulbs revealed mercilessly the cement floors, the wooden lockers with their day’s burden of ash, orange peel, paper and foil.

Reg Barker, returning from a trip to the lavatory, jerked the thumb of his good hand at the outer door. “Them sods has moved in.”

“Which?” asked Laurie vaguely. “Oh, yes. Have they?”

“Just been out and seen them come up in a truck and move into the maids’ block. Proper lot of pansies, too.”

“Go on, Reg, it’s been dark for hours, you couldn’t tell if they were Zulus.”

“Wait till tomorrow and you’ll see, then. Same as what they will.”

“You know, Reg, let’s face it, we’re all a bit on edge here. We can do to take things quietly, for our own sakes.”

“Then why do they have to send the muckers here, as if we hadn’t got no feelings?”

“God knows, and some zombie at Whitehall. Still, why make it worse?”

“You know, Spud, it’s right for once what Neames said, you’re too easygoing by half. Why should they get away with it? Sitting safe on their backsides at home and taking our jobs.” A dark flush rose in his forehead. “There’s women that fall for that smarmy sort,” he said, “if they can talk posh.”

“Did you say taking our jobs? They’re welcome to mine in the kitchen. I say, Reg—before you get into bed, would you mind asking Sister if I can have some A.P.C.?”

“Knee playing up?” Reg leaned forward; the shape of his splint made him look as if he were preparing a savage blow. Anxious creases divided his brows.

“Nothing much. You were right, though. I did mess about on it a bit too long.”

“They got no business to have put you on that kitchen fatigue. I said all along.”

“Someone’s got to, with all you lucky people in arm splints.”

“Well,” said Reg with vicious emphasis, “from tomorrow on, those muckers can do it.
And
like it.”

Laurie looked ingenuously up at him. “So they can. I shan’t be sorry, I must say.”

It was not one of his good nights. He was awake till the Night Sister gave him medinal at two. This sent him soundly off; so that a touch on his shoulder, waking him to light and clatter, filled him with impotent outrage. Dimly aware that the offending hand was not a nurse’s, he burrowed into the pillow and growled, “What the bleeding hell is it?”

“I’m sorry. If I can just take your temperature.”

Sudden recollection jerked Laurie awake. He looked up into a lean, austere face with a short grizzled beard. There was no doubt that the beard had a chin under it.

“Excuse my language,” he said uncomfortably. “I was half asleep.” He suppressed what he had meant to say; tomorrow would do. This was silly, for he might have known Reg would never let it pass.

“He don’t have it taken mornings,” said Reg promptly. “He gets up.”

The man withdrew his thermometer from Laurie’s arm. “Then I’ve waked you for nothing. I’m extremely sorry. I won’t do it again.”

“It’s all right. I never sleep much after the work starts.”

“Go on,” said Reg, more in sorrow than in anger. “Day before yesterday you slept till the breakfast come round, you know that.”

The bearded man as he passed on gave Laurie a slow smile which seemed, oddly, both sophisticated and good. He went on to Charlot, to whom he spoke in fluent idiomatic French. Reg said, in a hoarse whisper, “Here. What’s he doing here? You’re not telling me
he’s
still military age. Nor anywhere near.”

Laurie looked again. “No, of course. He must be a good fifty. Perhaps it was all a mistake.”

He looked along the ward. Another man, wearing a coarse, gray cotton coat like the first, was pulling out the beds one by one to sweep. No, thought Laurie with sinking spirits, this one wasn’t over age. He was a small man, with a small licked-down mustache, and looked about twenty-six. Eager conscientiousness informed his every movement. Chapel type, Laurie decided; and thinks damn is pretty serious swearing. This really is going to be rather hell.

“Proper little pipsqueak,” hissed Reg.

“Doesn’t look as if he’d pass a medical,” said Laurie hopefully.

“Go on. Course they’re c.o.s. It’s written all over them. Search me what the old boy’s here for, though.”

Laurie glanced after the bearded man, now several beds away. Neames, looking straight ahead, allowed his temperature to be taken as if by an automaton. The next bed was Willis’s.

Willis was a towheaded youth, whom Neames had early christened the Missing Link. He had never seemed to resent this, though he was quarrelsome by nature; Laurie deduced that he didn’t know what it meant. Willis always made him feel uncomfortable. One felt he should have been given a choice at the outset, whether or not to be born. It must have taken generations of conditioning to breed him, in some dockside warren neglected by angels and the borough inspector.

Reg said, “Watch this, this’ll be good.”

“Willis gets up,” said Laurie. “He’s only got to say so. What the hell did they send them here for, this bloody Government’ll lose us the war.”