The Charioteer (12 page)

They bit into the glossy winesaps; on the sunny side of the fruit, the clear crimson had run below the skin and streaked the crisp, white flesh.

“You see,” said Laurie presently, “it’s all a muddle, nothing clear-cut.”

Andrew didn’t answer. As soon as Laurie turned he looked away, not furtively but rather shyly. During his last term at school, when it had seemed to be a fairly generally held view that he hadn’t made too bad a job of the House, Laurie had sometimes caught the tail-end of looks like that. But this time it seemed too much that it should be true, and he dared not believe in it. He put his head back in the grass, watching its fine stalks laced against the sky. The world was full of a golden undemanding stillness. Even the wretchedness of the afternoon now seemed only the gate that had brought him to this place. But this reminded him to look at his watch; it was time to go.

Andrew got up first and held out his arm smiling, managing to make it seem a light-hearted gesture like that of children who pull each other up from the ground for fun. Laurie had observed sometimes in the ward how his tact would conquer his diffidence. His grip was firm and his rough hand had a kindly warmth in it. He had remembered to have the crutch ready in the other hand before he pulled.

As they walked back through the orchard the grass was deep green in the twilight; but across the stream the tops of the beeches, catching the last sun, burned a deep copper against a cloudless aquamarine sky.

“My gramophone’s come,” said Laurie. “But—” He stopped, because the door of the cottage had opened, disclosing a square of dusky lamplight against which Mrs. Chivers stood sharply black and animated, like a figure in an early bioscope. She still had her hat on.

“Hello, Mrs. Chivers,” said Laurie. “We’re just going. Thank you
so
much. This is a friend of mine, Andrew Raynes.”

Mrs. Chivers came nearer. As she left the lamplit door she grew three-dimensional again. Her little face, yellow and creased with wrinkles as if the skin had been wrung out and hung over the bone, peered up at them, bright-eyed.

“Young man,” she said, “why aren’t you in khaki?”

Laurie gazed at her blankly; it was as if one of the ripe apples had proved, as one bit it, to contain a bee. Andrew said seriously, “I’m a pacifist, Mrs. Chivers, I belong to the Friends.”

Mrs. Chivers looked up under her hat, rattling the cherries; she stood no more than five feet, and had to tilt the brim to see them. “Take shame to yourself. I’ve heard of that. Friends, indeed. A big strong lad as you be, I wonder you can look your friends in the face. It’s all foretold in the blessed Scriptures, Battle of Armageddon, that’s what our lads are fighting. Conscientious, I never heard such stuff.”

“Mrs. Chivers,” said Laurie when he could get it in endways, “Andrew’s a friend of mine. He’s doing war work, you know. He’s all right.”

Ignoring him, she thrust her head out at Andrew, like a furious little wren. “And mark my words, young man, if you come here talking your wicked nonsense to this dear wounded boy of mine, and trying to make him run away from the war, I’ll write to Lord Kitchener myself about you.
He’ll
know what to do.”

“I won’t hurt him,” said Andrew gently. “I promise you that.”

“I should think not indeed. Get away with you out of my garden, it’s no place for the likes of you. Now, sonny, that’s enough, I’m ashamed of you speaking up for him, and you in the King’s uniform. Run away home, the pair of you. I’ve no patience.”

The orchard smelt of September and early dew; the grass in the deep light was now the color of emerald. A blackbird, the last awake, was meditating aloud in a round, sweet whistle. Everything had the colors of farewell.

Andrew was walking ahead, but when he noticed Laurie’s awkward haste behind him he waited, surrendering his breathing space: Laurie reflected that being a cripple involves special kinds of social finesse, which only come gradually. “I’m terribly sorry,” he said.

“No, I ought to have thought, it’s being with you that makes me forget. I shouldn’t have come in and spoilt all this for you.”

“She’ll have forgotten by tomorrow.” They had come to the tall yews by the gate; it was very old, and flakes of paint and rust came away as he touched it. He had said the sensible thing and it would be wise to leave it there. The huge bulk of the yew trees was like dark-veined malachite against the bronze-gold sky. He was filled with a vast sense of the momentous, of unknown mysteries. He did not know what he should demand of himself, nor did it seem to matter, for he had not chosen this music he moved to, it had chosen him. He smiled at Andrew in the shadow of the yews.

“They looking back, all th’ eastern side beheld

Of Paradise, so late their happy seat,

Wav’d over by that flaming Brand, the Gate

With dreadful Faces throng’d and fiery Arms …”

Andrew put his hands on the top of the gate and swung it open. His face had a solemn improvising look. He said,

“… They hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,

Through Eden took their solitary way.”

Laurie went through the gate, out into the lane. Two great horses, ringing with idle brass, were being led home, their coats steaming in the cool. He felt absolute, filled; he could have died then content, empty-handed and free. All gifts he had ever wished for seemed only traps, now, to dim him and make him less. This, he thought with perfect certainty, this after all is to be young, it is for this. Now we have the strength to make our memories, out of hard stuff, out of steel and crystal.

The steam of the horses, a good strong russet smell, hung on the air. Sailing in a deep inlet of sky off the black coast of an elm tree, the first star appeared, flickering like a riding-light in a fresh wind. Andrew walked beside him silently.

An eddy of air in the quiet lane brought back like an echo the stamp and jingle of the horses, a shake of the bridle and a snort.

… Let us say, then, that the soul resembles the joined powers of a pair of winged horses and a charioteer. Now the horses and drivers of the gods are of equal temper and breed, but with men it is otherwise. …

For the first time in months, he had remembered the dirty little parcel done up in newspaper at the back of his locker. It had contained the things saved from his pockets after Dunkirk, when the clothes had been cut away. A pocket-knife; a pipe he had been trying to get used to; a lighter; and the book Lanyon had given him seven years ago, with a brown patch of blood across the cover, and the edges of the pages stuck at the top. At different times he had tried the knife, the pipe, and the lighter, found them ruined, and thrown them away. The book had looked done for, too; but it was still there.

L
AURIE WAS ANXIOUS TO
get the gramophone out of the ward before it was noticed; he had not forgotten that a former patient had been accustomed to play his against the radio. Under cover of night he passed it to Andrew, who received it with joy; the c.o.s had had only one gramophone among them, and it had broken down. Laurie apologized for the records; but this proved to be quite unnecessary. A few days later the hospital rang with a new and sensational scandal: eight nurses had been found by the matron in the orderlies’ common-room, dancing with the orderlies.

The news soon got to the wards, where it divided opinion as decisively as the Dreyfus affair. The hard core of animosity centered on Neames; his cold resentment, which had seemed temperate at the outset compared with noisier indignations, had outlasted them all. Willis was surprisingly tepid. As for Reg, he was anti-matron before anything else. He spent a happy day imputing to little Derek unimaginable excesses; but these two understood each other perfectly.

It took Laurie some hours of unobtrusive intelligence work to learn that Andrew hadn’t been there. He enjoyed this relief till the evening, when they met, and it turned out that Andrew had merely left before the matron’s arrival, being due on duty.

“It’s very interesting,” he said, fixing Laurie with his candid gray eyes, “very primitive, you know. Subconsciously they feel we’re a biological loss and ought not to have women or propagate ourselves. John in the kitchen said that was sure to happen, but as a matter of principle we shouldn’t submit to it.”

Laurie needed a moment or two to recover from this. “But did you want to have any of them?”

“Oh, not
literally
.” Andrew looked amused. “I have hopes for John, I must admit; but it’s much too early to say anything.”

“Who did you dance with?” asked Laurie, who had just ordered himself to change the subject.

“Most of them, as far as I remember. I danced with Nurse Adrian twice.”

“Did you find plenty to talk about?”

“Yes, we talked about you.” Andrew smiled, and settled his head back on his arms. “We were in favor of you,” he added sleepily. He had only just got up.

They sat on a bank scattered with old beech-mast. Through a gap in the bronze trees, across the stream, the apples of Eden could be seen, blandly shining. It was like Limbo, Laurie remarked.

“Who is Limbo supposed to be for?” asked Andrew. “I can never remember.”

“The good pagans, to whom the faith was never revealed. Such as Plato, I suppose; Buddha, Socrates, Confucius, and so on. A sort of eternal consolation prize.”

Laurie settled his back into the slope, and lit a cigarette. The stream sounded different from this side, mixed with the dry whisper of the beeches. After a few minutes he said, “How would you feel about your mother marrying again?”

After a pause Andrew said, “I don’t know. I daresay I shouldn’t have cared for it, really. Now, of course, I feel I should be only too glad, if it meant she was alive.”

This caused the inevitable awkwardness and apologies; but a little later he made no difficulty about talking. He had been born into one of those army families where every second or third generation throws off a sport, a musician perhaps, or a brilliant agricultural crank. Andrew’s father had served with distinction through the First World War, and had gone to Germany with the Army of Occupation. Peace had not been signed and the blockade was still on: an undisciplined habit grew up among the Allied troops of giving away their rations to the match-limbed, potbellied German children. An Order of the Day had to be issued about it. In the following week Andrews father, about whom no one had noticed anything odd except a certain taciturnity, resigned from his regiment, arranged his affairs at home in a family atmosphere of shocked silence, joined the Friends’ Ambulance Service, and went back to Germany again. There, some months later, he met and married Andrew’s mother, a lifelong Quaker; they continued working together until she became pregnant. While she was in England awaiting Andrew’s birth, the unit, which was by now in Austria, went to deal with a typhus epidemic. Overworked and under par, Andrew’s father got the disease, and in a couple of days was dead.

Dave had known both his parents, Andrew said. In fact, Dave was almost his only living link with his mother. He had been in charge of the unit, and it had been to Dave that Andrew’s father, in a more or less lucid interval of fever, had dictated his will.

At this point, Laurie was shocked to find his mind centered entirely on the unfair advantage this start had given to Dave, who, Laurie thought, on the strength of all this seemed to have assumed almost proprietary airs; there must be something behind it. But Andrew had noticed his lapse of attention, and evidently feared the story was becoming a bore. He dried up, and it took a couple of minutes to get him going again.

He had been brought up as a Quaker by his mother, to whom, obviously, he had been passionately devoted. If half he said about her was true, she had been an exceptionally gifted saint. When he spoke of her Laurie saw, as he had never seen in him at other times, a strain of fanaticism. She had died very suddenly when he was twelve, leaving no relatives who could do with him. His paternal grandmother, however, had been more than willing. It had been anguish to her all this time to see their good stock running to waste. She had treated him with kindness, and in her way with tact, never slighting his mother’s memory except in the daily implications of the code she taught him. The uncle and aunt, to whom he was passed on at her death a couple of years later, were less tactful. They had tried to send him at fifteen to the family school, which prepared for the army; he had refused to go there; they had insisted; Andrew had written the headmaster a letter which had caused him to turn Andrew down as an unsuitable entrant. There had been a shattering row about it, during some stage of which Andrew had appealed to Dave whom at that time he hardly knew. Dave had turned up, only to be insulted by the uncle and shown the door; but from that time onward, Andrew had kept in touch with him.

Throughout this crisis, Andrew seemed to have behaved, according to the view one was inclined to take of it, with rocklike integrity or mulish obstinacy; in any case, with determination much beyond his years. His face became a different shape when he spoke of it; incongruously, one could now trace the soldier forebears in the set of his jaw. Laurie gathered that during the row something had been said about the mother which Andrew, if he had forgiven it, couldn’t forget; but he never told Laurie what it was.

They had sent him in the end to a moderately progressive school, where he had enjoyed the term and dreaded the holidays. Then his call-up papers had arrived, heralding an explosion fiercer than any that had gone before. He talked of this less easily and Laurie could see that he was still raw from it.

But for the war, he said, changing the subject, he would have been going up to Oxford this autumn. The college he had been entered for was just across the road from Laurie’s, and they reflected solemnly on the fact that they would have missed one another by a matter of a month or two. Quite likely, said Laurie, they would have run into each other somehow or other. Andrew smiled, and said yes, it seemed that they were meant to meet. Laurie lived on these words for the next two days.