The Charioteer (8 page)

It was often quite hard to hear what Willis said, even when he was not chewing. It was the prevailing hush which carried his voice along the ward.

“You can take that—thing away, and put it where the—monkey put the—nuts. I don’t want none of you—’s touching me.”

The c.o. replied as if to an expected social commonplace. “I expect not, it’s awkward for both of us. Still, we’ll have to get on with it, I suppose.”

“You—off and get on with it somewhere else. See?”

“This is a lot of silly bull,” said Laurie. He sat up, and reached for his crutch. But the little c.o. had just pulled out his bed from the wall where it was, and he couldn’t reach it.

“I say, Reg.” But Reg had hitched his dressing-gown over his shoulder, and was shuffling down the ward.

“Here,” he said to the c.o. “Didn’t they give you no list of the men that gets up?”

“No,” said the c.o. with a friendly smile. “I ought to have asked for it.”

“You only want it mornings. Evenings they take them all round, barring the chaps out on passes. I reckon that’s soft, not giving you no list. Asking for it, that is. Here. You turn that paper over and I’ll give you one now. Save tempers all round, that will.”

When they had finished he turned around. “And when you done your funny number, Willis,” he said over his shoulder, “you remember there ain’t been no comfort in the ward since the maids went, and if this lot’s transferred there won’t be none again. What you want them to do, go through the whole flipping war without working?”

Just then Laurie’s bed moved. The little c.o., having swept behind it, was putting it back. His face confronted Laurie over the end of it, as he shoved earnestly with all the force of his thin arms. Laurie said encouragingly, “Next time give me that crutch first, then you can have the pram without the baby.”

“Oh, beg pardon. Yes, of course.” With helpless concern and irritation, Laurie saw that he had blushed to the ears. Perhaps he thought his physique was being sneered at. Suddenly Laurie felt that, early as it was, his nervous system had had enough. He would get away for a bit, he thought, before he lost his sense of humor over some trivial annoyance. He was not allowed to dress yet, but with luck the bathroom might be free.

The lavatory was too filthy to linger in—no one could have scrubbed it since the maids went—but he was lucky with the bath. Although he couldn’t get into it properly because of the dressings on his leg, at least the water was hot. The window was steaming up; he opened it; an apple tree in a cottage garden looked faintly gold against a cool blue autumn sky, and he caught the smoky tang of sun on frost-caught leaves.

Behind the noise of the taps, the jerry-built hut echoed with every thud and bang of the morning work. He could hear someone scrubbing the floor just outside, and whistling quietly. The whistling stopped almost as soon as he turned the taps off. The last notes had sounded like a phrase of Mozart, but he had probably imagined it.

As he dried himself, the sun went in behind a cloud; easing himself slowly and stiffly into his pajama trousers, he got a waft of watery haddock from the kitchen. Just another day, he thought. He put on his dressing-gown, reached for his crutch, and opened the door into the lobby.

The cement floor outside was wet; a voice said quickly, “Look out for the bucket.”

Before he had seen around the door, some instantaneous reflex caused Laurie to say “Oh, thanks very much” in a conversational, instead of an automatic way.

He came out. In the open doorway of the lavatory, the boy who had been scrubbing the floor sat back on his heels and smiled.

Laurie stopped in his tracks, balanced himself between the crutch and the bathroom doorpost, and smiled back. Well, he thought after a moment, one can’t just stand grinning like a fool. “Hello. What was that bit of Mozart you were whistling just now?”

The boy put down his floorcloth, wiped his hand on the seat of his trousers, and with the back of it pushed the hair away from his eyes. It was fairish, the color of old gilt. He had a fair skin which was smoothly tanned, so that his gray eyes showed up very bright and clear. He was working in old corduroy trousers and a gray flannel shirt with rolled sleeves.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “I was thinking about something else.” Fearing perhaps to have sounded unsocial, he smiled again.

Laurie had become touched with a feeling of panic, like someone confronted with a locked door and a strange bunch of keys, none of which may fit. He said with a jerk, “I thought it might be the Oboe Quartet in F Major.” This simply happened to be one of the few he could identify by name. The boy said in a willing way, “It might have been; it’s one I’m very fond of” and stirred the cloth in the bucket, sending up a clean bleak smell of carbolic.

“Was it this bit?” Laurie said. He tried to hum a few bars of the first movement. The boy sat with a listening expression; at the end he said with serious courtesy, “Yes, it probably was that bit,” and then, as there began to be a pause, “Have you ever heard Goossens play it?”

“No. Only on a record. Have you?”

“Only the record.”

There was another pause. The boy started to work again, though not in a dismissing way, and moved his bucket into the lavatory doorway. “This is a bit of a dreary job for you,” Laurie said.

“Here. Move that mucking bucket, you lazy—, d’you think we’ve got all day?” Laurie hadn’t heard Willis coming up behind them.

The boy had started a little, but repressed it quickly; he moved the bucket, civilly but without apology. Willis stepped forward to pass it. There was a kind of forced clumsiness in his gait, a crude preparation for knocking the bucket over. Laurie swung out on his crutch and, silently, caught Willis’s eye. It was a look he had not tried on anyone since his last year at school, but apparently it still worked. Willis’s face slumped soggily, seeming to mirror a defeated ancestry as long as Banquo’s line of kings. He went inside and slammed the door. It was over in seconds.

The boy stood up. Laurie could see that he was shyly, but doggedly, working up to something. “That was very kind of you. But it will have to come out sometime, if that’s how he feels. We have to cope with all that ourselves, I mean. It’s the least we can do, after all, isn’t it?”

The brush with Willis had fortified Laurie’s self-confidence. “Well, to you it probably seems to be your business; but to me it seems to be mine. I have to live here.”

“Have you been here long?”

“Oh, I more or less crept out of the woodwork, I—”

The face of the bearded man came in at the door. He looked at them with kindly detached interest and said briskly, “When you’ve finished in there, Andrew, will you take the swill bucket down to the main kitchen? They’ll show you there what to do with it.” The boy looked up, smiled with casual but affectionate ease, said, “All right, Dave,” and bent to his scrubbing again.

Andrew, thought Laurie; the name slipped into place like a clear color-note in the foreground of a picture. Mechanically he stepped aside as the lavatory door opened; Willis came out and went off without a backward glance. “Andrew what?”

“Raynes. But we don’t use surnames much.”

“Are you Quakers? Sorry, I’m never sure whether that’s rude or not.”

“Oh, it stopped being rude about 1700. We mostly say Friends.”

“Here,” said Laurie suddenly, “you washed all that before.” He looked past Andrew into the open door. “Stop that. Leave it just as it is. I’m going to fetch him back and rub his face in it.”

Andrew, busy with the cloth, said over his shoulder, “Well, I can’t stop you. If you think it’ll do any of us any good.”

“This is my show. Just leave this to me.”

“Look. This man’s had nothing since he was born but his two hands to work with; and he’s given one of those. You can’t expect him to welcome us with flowers. Give him a chance.”

“Willis,” said Laurie crisply, “is suffering from a self-inflicted wound, caused by gross incompetence. He fumbled a grenade in the practice pit. It killed his instructor, a very good man who was decorated in the last war, and he’s never shown the slightest sign of giving a damn. I shouldn’t waste any beautiful thoughts on Willis, if I were you.” They stared, with very mixed feelings, into each other’s faces. Suddenly Laurie laughed and said, “I saw the ’potamus take wing, Ascending from the damp savannas—’ ”

Andrew laughed too; his teeth showed clear, like his eyes, against the tan. He backed out of the doorway and Laurie saw that the floor was clean again.

“You’ll hear me called Spud about the place, but actually it’s Laurie. Laurie Odell. I’d give you a hand with that, but this strapping’s a bit tight on my knee.”

“I can see Dave’s face if I let you.”

“That chap with the beard?” Jealousy breathed on him, like the first shiver of sickness. “Who is he exactly?”

“Well, he’s just Dave. I mean, nothing officially. He did a lot of this work in the 1914 war. He’s voluntary now, of course.”

“Do you like him a lot?”

“Oh, I’ve known Dave a long time.”

Laurie saw that the last patch of floor was nearly finished. “If I only had my gramophone here, we could have had some Mozart, sometime.” He tilted his shoulder against the wall; the crutch felt a little shaky. “I’ve got quite a bit of Tchaikovsky, ballet music mostly. It’s all right when you feel like it, or don’t you think so? I read somewhere once, Tchaikovsky was queer.”

He seemed to wait hours for the upturned face to change; but the pause was in his own imagination, as he realized when Andrew said with mild interest, “Was he? I hadn’t heard. He was never actually shut up, surely?”

“No, it never came out. Though I believe—” He saw his mistake, and with a painful jolt caught himself up just in time. “Not mad, you know. Just queer.” He waited again.

“You mean a bit … Oh, yes, I see.” Andrew wrung out the cloth in the bucket. “I find all Russians slightly mysterious, don’t you? Perhaps if one met more of them.”

Laurie said yes, that was the trouble, probably. He leaned heavily on the door-jamb; he had been standing too long. He hoped that Andrew wouldn’t look up for a minute; he knew that with these cold turns he went sensationally white. It would pass off, it was all a matter of will-power. His brain felt drained and light; he thought: If he’s seen it in the Bible and guessed what it meant, that’s about as much as he knows.

Andrew stood up and tipped the dirty water into the lavatory. “I must do the swill,” he said, and paused. “I say, you do look tired. Let me see you back to bed before I go.”

“God, no. I’m officially up. I’m all right. Are you detailed to this ward from now on?”

“I don’t know yet, we’re just filling in till the lists are done. Thanks for coming to talk to me.” He colored suddenly. Laurie saw why: he had let down the side, he shouldn’t have thanked a soldier for talking to him, as if he belonged to something that had to apologize for itself.

“Thanks for putting up with me, under your feet. Goodbye.”

“Goodbye.” He moved to the door, with young pliant awkwardness, swinging the bucket. Laurie said quickly, “Oh, by the way—” but it was too late, he had passed into the clatter of the corridor and didn’t hear. The clank of the bucket sounded for a moment, receding. Laurie’s armpit felt wrenched by the pressure of the crutch; his arm was numb, and his leg had started to ache again. The breakfast trolley, with the haddock, was being wheeled into the ward. He followed it. There was nowhere else to go.

L
AURIE SIGNED HIS LETTER
to his mother, and reread it. He used to write her rather good letters once, he remembered. “Major Ferguson went over the leg the other day. He says it will always be a bit stiff, and I shall have to wear a thick sole on my shoe or something.” She knew already about his discharge, so there had been little more to say. He went over her last letter again, looking for something that would give him another paragraph; but the best he could find was that the vicar still felt the loss of his wife very much, though it was a year now since her death. Desperate for material, Laurie added a short postscript in which he said he was sorry to hear this.

He sat staring at the letter on the writing-pad, and imagining it rewritten.

Darling Mother,

I have fallen in love. I now know something about myself which I have been suspecting for years, if I had had the honesty to admit it. I ought to be frightened and ashamed, but I am not. Since I can see no earthly hope for this attachment, I ought to be wretched, but I am not. I know now why I was born, why everything has happened to me ever; I know why I am lame, because it has brought me to the right place at the right time. I would go through it all again, if I had to, now that I know it was for this.

Oddly enough, what I feel most is relief, because I know now that what kept me fighting it so long was the fear that what I was looking for didn’t exist. Lanyon said it didn’t, and after meeting Charles’s set I thought he was probably right. If it hadn’t been for him I might have fallen for all that, and missed this. I wish I could thank him.

You may think I have been rather quick to decide I am in love …

He looked up from the page, and then back to it, in an absurd fear that something of all this might have become stamped on the paper. For the first time, now, the secret between them had shape and outline; it would be real when she sat by him at her next visit.

She had been very good to him since he had been wounded. He had wished for her sake he could have got his commission first. There had been hints, and he had already been recommended for sergeant when the great confusion descended; but she had never reminded him of his folly in throwing up the O.T.C., though she had been against it at the time. He had always felt that his best wasn’t good enough for her. Now there was this. But after all, however orthodox his sex life might have been, he knew they would never have discussed it; the mere thought would have shocked her to death.

His imagination wrote on:

… to decide I am in love. But he is a clear kind of person, about whom one has to think clearly.