The Charioteer (10 page)

Even now, as he waited for her at the outer gate, he dreamed of a land of undefined, tacit understanding, misty at the edges, like an old-fashioned photograph.

She always picked him up in the car that brought her; they drove back to the nearest small town, had tea, and talked till it was time for her to catch her train. Waiting in the usual place, he saw the old blue-and-gray bus arrive, the visitors struggle up with their parcels. In the gangway Madge Barker moved slowly along, wedged in the crowd; impatient it seemed for reunion, she began making arch little signals to Reg through the window. But after all, Laurie never knew how Reg received his prodigal; for, just behind her, his mother was standing on the step of the bus.

Laurie limped forward to meet her. He was using a stick for the first time out of doors; the shortening of the leg, without the crutch to swing on, now made itself felt with brutal insistence. She would know, this time, that it wasn’t going to alter.

She hadn’t noticed him yet, however. A fellow passenger, a clergyman, was helping her down, and she was thanking him. She had on a travelling coat of soft gray wool, which made her look a little plump, and a new little pale blue hat. Her auburn hair, fading while Laurie’s had darkened, was turning sandy-and-silver; but it would be exquisite when it was white, silky and pure. The hat was younger than those she usually wore, but it suited her.

“Well, my
dear
.” She kissed him, smelling of fresh face powder and eau de cologne. She always gave him the illusion that he was tall, from the way she put her hands up to his shoulders. “How
nice
this is, dear, to see you really walking again, and so
much
better than last time.”

For a moment he was hurt, as sometimes before when she had retreated into optimism leaving him to face reality alone; but he had worked through all that long ago. “Yes,” he said. “What happened, couldn’t you get a car?”

She had made a little warning face. Then he saw that the clergyman who had handed her off the bus was standing almost at her elbow. He was carrying something. It was Laurie’s portable gramophone, which he had asked her to send by train.

Somewhat to his surprise, the clergyman returned his glance promptly with a smile. It was the kind which insists on the adjectives “frank” and “manly,” even from those by whom they are not much employed. He was big-boned and tall, over six feet; the gramophone dangled like a light parcel from his big red hand.

Mrs. Odell turned from one to the other of them; Laurie saw her go a little pink before she smiled.

“Laurie, dear, you
did
meet Mr. Straike, didn’t you, just before the war?” Laurie remembered that if he had been to church he would have been greeted in the porch after the service. Mr. Straike was smiling in what Laurie felt to be a professionally tactful way.

“I don’t think we’ve actually met to speak, have we, sir?” He was full of the bewildered courtesy one extends, as compensation, to people for whom one is wholly unable to account.

Mr. Straike held out his hand in a big, sincere gesture; Laurie, balancing awkwardly, had to change his stick to his other side in order to respond.

“I’ve heard so much about you that, like your mother, I felt the introduction to be almost superfluous.” He turned the frank smile on Mrs. Odell.

Planning instant escape, Laurie remembered with helpless embarrassment the gramophone. By no possible effort could he manage it himself. Unless he were to watch his mother carrying it, this inexplicable person would have to walk up to the hospital with them.

“Which of the men have you come to see?”

“Only this one.” The difference of height seemed to give Mr. Straike’s smile an avuncular quality. A five-shilling tip would hardly have taken Laurie by surprise. He felt faintly sick; but nothing would happen, he was getting stronger every day.

Mrs. Odell spoke quickly, as if to forestall awkwardness even before it had time to exist in her own mind. “Wasn’t it
good
of Mr. Straike? I was telling him the other day how worried I was in case the railway people broke your gramophone, you know with all these
temporary
porters, and he insisted on coming
all
this way with me to help carry it.”

She smiled at him. It was a special smile, which had been Laurie’s exclusive property ever since he could remember. To see it used, so easily and as if already by habit, upon a stranger, gave him the emotional counterpart of a violent kick in the stomach. At almost the same moment a trailing end of the smile rested on him, in a delicately admonishing way. A scrap of her last letter came back to him. One must be nice to this man, he had been recently bereaved. A new, dreadful thought ran through Laurie like cold steel. He felt that he must get away, if only for seconds, to collect himself. But common good manners, and his lame leg which made an elaborate business of everything he did, held him to the spot like a ball-and-chain. He looked at Mr. Straike, to whom it seemed his feelings must by now have been delivered in stark nakedness: but Mr. Straike was looking manly, modest, and deprecating, and murmuring something about its being a privilege.

“It’s very good of you,” said Laurie, speaking his lines like a well-trained actor in an air raid. “You really shouldn’t have; a battered old thing like that could have taken another kick or two. Shall we go up to the ward, then you can get rid of it?”

His mother, he now noticed, had a record album under her arm. It raised his spirits; his imagination in a brief idyllic flight listened to Mozart with Andrew in the woods. He took it from her and saw at once that it wasn’t the one he had asked for, or even one of his own at all.

His mother said, with a defensiveness which made her sound faintly reproachful, “We didn’t bring any of your
classical
records, dear, they’d be
sure
to get scratched in a place like this; and besides, Mr. Straike said he felt certain they wouldn’t be popular with the men. And he was a chaplain in the last war, so he does
know
.”

Mr. Straike acknowledged this with a short modest laugh. “Something they can sing.” He spoke like a kindly uncle explaining his small nephews. “You can’t go wrong with a good chorus. Your mother and I brought ourselves up to date and made a little expedition in search of the latest.”

Laurie could see that he ought to look into the album. Managing his stick with difficulty, he succeeded in doing so. The records were, indeed, the latest song-hits. There wasn’t one of them that the Forces’ Radio hadn’t been plugging three times a day for the last month. “That’s marvellous,” he said. “Thank you so much.”

“They’re your mother’s choice,” said Mr. Straike, gallantly surrendering the credit. “I think you’ll find they make the party go better than Mozart. After all, these lads leave school at fifteen, one must temper the wind to the shorn lamb, ha-ha.”

“They want to be taken out of themselves,” said his mother, gently making everything clear.

Laurie said yes, they did, of course. The pause that followed was broken by Reg greeting Mrs. Odell as he passed with Madge on his arm.

“That’s the man I told you about, whose eyesight Laurie saved.” Once she had taken to herself an impression of this kind, no subsequent explanations ever shifted it. Laurie had long given this one up. “Is that girl his ‘young lady,’ dear?
Do
try and warn him not to marry her. Oh,
is
she? Oh, I see. Well, girls of that class are often
so
unfair to themselves. I expect under all that make-up she’s really quite a nice little thing.”

Laurie found a glance being shot at him from the corner of Mr. Straike’s eye. He gathered from it that his mother was a pure, generous woman, while he and Mr. Straike were men of the world making their own little reservations. As soon as he had looked away from this glance without response, Laurie knew that a line had been crossed. Some events are crucial from their very slightness; because circumstances have used no force on them, they are unequivocally what they are, test-tube reactions of personality. Between Laurie and Mr. Straike there began to weave the first fine filaments of a dislike mutually known.

As they walked up the path to the wards, Mr. Straike kept them entertained with a humorous account of how they used to detect malingerers in the base hospitals of Flanders in 1916.

The patients’ tea was being served as they arrived. Lacking transport there was nowhere else to go but here. Laurie guessed by now that his mother had foreseen Mr. Straike’s chivalrous insistence on paying the car fare, which ordinarily she and Laurie would have shared together. (He wouldn’t consider it really necessary, either, and through all his protestations this would somehow appear.) Now, the trolley arriving, both the others insisted that Laurie should not miss his tea. He assured them he wasn’t hungry, knowing the inflexible rule against treating visitors; there was no getting around it, since there were only just enough cups for the patients themselves.

“Nonsense,” said Mr. Straike bluffly. “You take everything that’s going, my boy, it’s the only way in the army,
I
know, ha-ha. Just have a word with the nurse, and tell her to rustle up a cup for your mother too. Tell her she’s come a long way.
She’ll
understand.”

Laboriously, Laurie explained about the crockery. Mrs. Odell looked understanding, Mr. Straike surprised and reserved. Laurie felt forced to add that half these people had come from the other side of England, and it would cause hurt feelings if exceptions were made. Everyone agreed to this, leaving Laurie with a damp sense of ineffectuality. He offered his mother a drink from his own cup, the accepted practice, and collected it from her, firmly, before she could suggest passing it on. Embarrassment, damp and penetrating as a mountain mist, settled upon the party.

Laurie had always known in his inmost heart that there were times when, if his mother couldn’t have her cake and eat it, she would convince herself that someone else must be to blame. A bitter conviction told him that this time it wouldn’t be Mr. Straike.

Conversation, however, had to go on. Mrs. Odell had brought as usual the local gossip for Laurie’s amusement. She enjoyed being very slightly shocked by his comments and making womanly, reproving little exclamations. Laurie found Mr. Straike’s reaction to this as exactly predictable as if they had known one another for years; so he listened with Sunday-school brightness, saying, “No, really?” from time to time. The footnotes were provided by Mr. Straike. It seemed to Laurie, who was admittedly prejudiced, that their manly humor was not of the kind that is inspired by good nature.

For the first time, the clock’s approach to his mother’s hour of departure was a signal of relief. At the last moment Mr. Straike withdrew, as he put it, to “explore the place.” Laurie had almost risen to show him the way, but suddenly saw in his face a conscious tact. Laurie and his mother were being left alone to exchange their little confidences. Their awareness of this, combined with feelings, for which there would be no time to find words, of mutual reproach and remorse, made this the most clammily tongue-tied interval of all.

Laurie watched his mother gathering her umbrella, her bag and gloves. In the perky blue hat, with its soft feather curling into the soft hair, and the fluffy coat, she looked like a plump ruffled bird, dainty, timid, a little foolish, full of confused tenderness and of instinctive wisdom from which, too easily, she could be fluttered and scared away. His throat tightened; he wanted to take her away and cherish her as if she were about to die. But the bus was due in a few minutes, and now they were all walking out toward it.

Just as they were leaving, the tea trolley came back for the used crockery. This time, little Derek was pushing it instead of the nurse. Mr. Straike’s nose went up, like a pointer’s.

“Who,” he asked in a loud aside, “are all these healthy-looking young men in mufti I keep seeing about the place?”

A wave of rage, the piled flood of the afternoon, broke in Laurie’s head. He did not trust himself to reply.

“Medically exempt?” asked Mr. Straike. Derek had been passing at the time, and must have heard.

With the cold ingenuity of repressed violence, Laurie gave a prudishly reproving shake of the head. “Male nurses,” he hissed. Mr. Straike said “Urhm.” Laurie indicated his mother with a glance, and pointedly dropped his voice. “Can’t very well discuss it here. Some things”—he paused, with heavy-handed delicacy—“women can’t be asked to do.”

“Quite,” said Mr. Straike. “Urhm, quite.” He ran a finger round the inside of his collar. Laurie found himself indulging an absurd self-righteousness, just as if it had been true.

They walked with the crowd down the iron-roofed cement path. Laurie felt his hatred and anger like a sickness. He no longer wanted to justify or fulfill them, only to clean them out of him and be quiet. He looked at Mr. Straike, who was gazing straight before him, grave, judicial; he had a digestive look, as if he were assimilating something, adapting it to his metabolism, settling it in.

“Well, dear, aren’t you going to say goodbye to me?”

Laurie saw that the bus had arrived, and people were streaming into it. His mother had come up to him, and had had to touch his arm before he had seen her. He met, defenseless, the reproach in her eyes.

Back in the ward, Neames and another man were playing chess on a locker. Laurie stood and watched the game till he realized he could not retrace it by a single move. His knee had got worse; little Derek, who always knew without being told when someone was in pain, got him a dose of A.P.C. He turned down his bedcover, sat on the bed, and tried to read. If one ceased the pretense of doing something, one became at once conspicuous, a man thinking, naked to public speculation.

“Well, Spud, how’s life?”

“Oh,” said Laurie, “hello, Reg.” For a moment, too full of himself, he expected to be asked what was up; then he remembered. “How was it? All right?”

“You said it.” Reg was, he could see now, very much moved. His face was pink, his eyes bright; he fidgeted with the things on Laurie’s locker, moving them unseeingly here and there. “Sometime, Spud, I’ll tell you a bit; mean to say, you’d be the first. How it is, I dunno, talk about a thing and the feeling of it goes off, gets more ordinary like. Haven’t felt like that for, oh, going on seven years. Well, just take a turn round the block. See you later.”