The Charioteer (28 page)

Laurie found this rough comfort, but did his best not to show it. “I expect it’ll work out,” he said.

“Have I been unnecessarily brutal, Spud? I’m sorry, I wouldn’t know. I’m not much of an authority on family relationships. None of my girl friends went in for that sort of thing, either.” He looked at Laurie and laughed. “Come, now, Spuddy, let it go at a raised eyebrow. That stunned expression isn’t very flattering.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“No, but joking apart, you don’t want to have written off half the human race at your time of life. I don’t mean this unkindly, but perhaps you’re having the navel-cord cut in the nick of time. Look at it that way and don’t be too upset about it.”

There was an odd unexpected relief in this hard handling. “All the same, I doubt if mothers will ever need to lock their daughters up when they see me coming.”

“Oh, perhaps not, I didn’t mean that so much. It’s more an attitude of mind than anything. What I always feel—”

This opened a conversation that went on for most of the meal. Once or twice Ralph would have changed it, but Laurie kept it going, not for the sake of the advice, which he couldn’t feel would ever be important to him, but to make Ralph talk about himself. So it turned out, for after dismissing the soup and remarking that they seemed to have used shark’s tripes, he said, “I did two years of women, when I first went to sea.” He said it very much as sailors say they have done two years in tankers, or two years in sail.

“Did you?” said Laurie. “Why?”

“Oh, for almost every reason except the real one. I’d had rather a sickener of the other side. Once people know about you at sea, they want you to be too obliging. It’s not so good in peacetime starting lower deck with the wrong accent and so on. I didn’t want to give them anything on me. Besides, when I found I could if I gave my mind to it, I thought I might become naturalized, so to speak. Some people seem to take an inordinate pride in never having made the attempt, but I don’t see it myself. I decided I’d give it the two years, anyway.”

He broke off to attend to his food. Laurie saw that though he could use the left hand well enough, the padded fingers of the glove were clumsy and got in his way. It was impossible to guess how much he felt all this.

“Did it make any difference?” Laurie asked him.

“Well, yes, it did in a sense, of course. It’s bound to do something for one’s self-confidence, if nothing else. I think one year would have been enough. Funny thing, you know, it didn’t feel at all like going straight. More like trying to cultivate some fashionable vice that never quite becomes a habit. I served out the contract, though. No, let’s be honest, I broke out a week short of the time. I happened to meet someone and I’d have been at sea a week later. All I can remember thinking is ‘Thank the Lord, back to normal at last.’ Well, there it is. Some people make a go of it. I don’t think it was a complete waste of time, though; it stops one getting too parochial. Now and again I’ve even had a woman since; I’ve met one who reminded me of one of the early ones, or something. I don’t know why, really. Vanity very likely. You look thoughtful, Spud. Do I sound very unfeeling?”

“No,” said Laurie. He felt a fool and looked away.

“Well, I only managed to get along with real bitches, and none of them complained. Good women are definitely not my cup of tea.”

This seemed reasonable in the circumstances, and Laurie hardly knew what it was that made him ask why.

“Probably because they’re the cruellest of the carnivora. Give me the bloody Nazis, any day.”

He had used the voice that closes a subject. Laurie, who had never gone in for forcing people’s confidence, thought afterwards that it must have been the gin which had made him behave so uncharacteristically. It did not occur to him that there is a degree of emotional insecurity, in which he had been living for some weeks now, where the need for reassurance can produce almost the same effects as the desire for power. The coffee came and Ralph ordered brandy with it. Laurie led the conversation round in a circle and tried again.

“Well, Spud, you see, I shouldn’t have said what I did just now. Don’t know why I said it. Cheap and nasty, I’ve been seeing too much of the wrong people lately. I can’t very well tell you after that … No, I mean look at it for yourself, once you start passing the buck to the previous generation, where do you step off? I suppose Eve put Cain’s nose out of joint by petting his little brother. You can flannel out of anything.”

“It doesn’t matter. Sometimes it helps to know about other people.”

“Well, Christ, it’s nothing. It happens every day. What do you think it is, the secret of Glamis or what? See, now. My mother was a good woman, only she saw something nasty in the woodshed. She couldn’t help what she felt about it.
Her
parents were Plymouth Brethren.”

“But what did she see?”

“Well, me of course. Oh, waiter, two more brandies. What a flop this story’s going to be after the build-up you’ve given it. She saw me aged six, and the little girl next door aged seven, rather solemnly discussing anatomy. I imagine the same thing’s going on at this moment in about five million woodsheds from China to Peru. However, it was apparently the filthiest crime that had ever touched my mother’s life. She found it quite hard to talk about, so by the time she’d done, I took away some dim idea that carnal knowledge of women would cause one’s limbs to rot and fall off, like leprosy.” With an unconscious tic which Laurie had noticed in him once or twice before, he touched as if for reassurance his spotless white collar. “She got my father to do the beating; he told me it was about time I went to school to learn a clean life. Rather horrible precocious child I must have been, I suppose. Finish your brandy, Spud, you’re one behind.”

Laurie could see that if he wanted more of the story than this, it would be necessary to ask for it. He finished his brandy. “I see now,” he said, “that last day at school, why it was you said you were going straight to Southampton.”

There was a short pause. Then Ralph said, “Did I? Well, that was what I ought to have done.”

After this, Laurie learned without much surprise, soon after, that Ralph had had nothing to do with women since leaving hospital. He offered no comment on this; but it would fit well with his conception of them, Laurie thought, to expect that they would punish him with his deformity.

Suddenly he seemed to remember the text of his earlier sermon, and laughed. “No, all I mean is, Spud, don’t have a closed mind about it. I can’t remember who those cranks are who say you mustn’t think negatively; but they’ve got something, you know. About the most boring conversation this world affords—and I don’t say this lightly, Spud, I’ve been in ships that took passengers, and sat with them at meals, and still I’ve heard nothing to touch a bunch of queers trying to prove to each other that the grapes are sour.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Well, look at Shakespeare’s girl friend in the Sonnets, who was probably the bitch of all hell, yet she gives the thing what you might call body.”

“Yes, but the thing about Shakespeare is that he was normal plus, not minus.”

“Good Lord. Well, if you’re prepared to admit
that
without a struggle, I’ve just been wasting your time. Have a cigarette.”

As in this public place they took and lit their own, Laurie found they were exchanging the shadow of a smile, and he couldn’t be sure afterwards which of them had smiled first.

“There’s always this,” Ralph said. “If one hasn’t accepted too many limitations, one can pay one’s final choice the compliment of—”

“Your brandy, sir,” said the waiter.

Shortly after this Ralph looked at his watch and said, “Well, we’ve got an hour or so in hand; let’s go round to my place.”

“Surely there won’t be time?”

“What? Oh, not the Station, I’ve got a room in town. Very utilitarian. There’s a nice old square outside, but you won’t see that for the blackout. Never mind.”

The argument over the bill, about which Ralph was inclined at first to be imperious, ended amicably in a draw. Laurie scarcely noticed that his side of the discussion only made sense if they assumed that they were going to see a good deal more of one another.

The house was later than the one where Alec and Sandy lived; probably mid-Victorian. You couldn’t say of this one that the proportions were good. It still came within the great period of the town’s wealth; Ralph’s torch picked out door-frames and banisters hideously carved, but made of solid teak. The landlady had summarily settled the blackout problem by removing the light bulbs from the hall and staircase. It was a narrow house: as one came in one could almost feel the squeeze of the walls. There were two flights of stairs, but Laurie began the climb without misgiving; Miss Haliburton’s machine was still doing him good. The first landing was quite dark and silent, without even a crack of light under a door.

“Are you all right, Spud?”

“Yes, fine.”

The blackout in the room was still open. Irregular blots of darkness surrounded a tall glimmering rectangle of night sky. From the doorway, Laurie caught an indefinable, strangely familiar and nostalgic smell of shabbiness and simplicity. It was the combination of these two things, so often divorced, that stirred the memory, as much by what was absent as what was there: a positive kind of cleanness which lacked the institutional sour undertaste, a smell of scrubbed wood and beeswax and books.

Ralph’s shoulder jutted sharply against the window. “Take a look if you like, but you can’t see much.”

Laurie came over, feeling his way along a table. They were on the upper side of the square, which sloped with the slope of the town. Beyond the houses opposite, a gray expanse of distance merged into the sky.

“Where are you, Spud?”

“Here.” He put out his hand and touched the stiff cold braid on Ralph’s moving sleeve.

“You can’t see anything. It must have been pretty, when they had the lights.”

“I expect it’s nice in the daytime.”

Laurie narrowed his eyes at the invisible horizon. A curtain, made of some harsh stuff, brushed his hand. He was scarcely aware of it, or of what he was looking at. In a flash of recognition, he had identified the smell of the room. It was like school: not like the corridors and classrooms, which smelled of gritty boards and pencil shavings and ink and boys, but like the Head Prefect’s study. He might have thought of this sooner, since it had been his own for a year; but just at this moment he didn’t feel it as ever having been his. His perceptions, to everything else so dull, were full of this special feeling of the room, and, growing out of it, an intense awareness of Ralph standing close and silent beside him, not in serge and braid but in gray flannel; it seemed to him that he could even feel the cloth again. It all took him suddenly and with bewildering force; his next immediate reaction was a panic fear of having somehow betrayed himself. He had a dim impression that Ralph had made some movement and that this must mean he had noticed something. With Andrew so much on his mind, Laurie had become unreasoningly nervous; he obeyed a chain of reflexes with scarcely an intelligible thought. He turned quickly from the window, said, “Shout when you’ve done the blackout and I’ll do the light,” and made for the door. Haste made him clumsy; he collided with a chair and struck it hard with his knee, the wrong one.

It was very bad and seemed to go on for some time; he was only distantly conscious of Ralph speaking to him and couldn’t answer; but by the time Ralph had done the blackout and got over to the light, he was able to say, “Sorry. All right now.”

“Sit down,” said Ralph. He used what Laurie thought of as his court-martial voice. He guided Laurie to an armchair; even at this moment there was some dim reminiscence in the fact that it was the only one in the room. Having settled him there, he stood looking down at him for a moment, then walked sharply across to the cupboard. Laurie had been longing to be let alone, but had had just enough control not to say so. The, first white flash of pain had sunk to a red smolder; confusedly he recalled that he had had a silly mood of some kind, which had caused him to go blundering about the room in the dark; but this crude sensation had effaced it, the image of it was gone.

Ralph came up with a glass. “Here. Get this down.”

“What is it?”

“Navy rum. Tip it down. It’ll fix you up all right. They’d have taken off your leg with it in Nelson’s day.”

“I wish they bloody well had,” said Laurie bitterly. He looked at the glass. “And if I drank that, I should think they could. God, what do you think my head’s made of?”

“It’s only a double tot. Just enough to make you happy.”

The pain now was no worse than it had been several times before. Suddenly Ralph looked touching, standing there in anxious muddled kindness with the rum. “No, it’d make it worse. Tip it back, go on. All I need’s three aspirin and some army char.”

“Tea?” said Ralph blankly, and then, “Of course, my dear. If the mice haven’t had it.”

From the bottom of the cupboard he produced a tin kettle. This also must be where the rum had come from, for Laurie could hear him pushing aside some bottles. This must have been one of the servants’ rooms when the house was new; the teak joinery didn’t reach so high. The cupboard, the shoes, the kettle, would still have been like the study; but the faint clunk of the bottles had snapped the thread of illusion and now it wasn’t like school any more.

Ralph had extracted the kettle from the back of the cupboard; he stood up. Mixed with the weakness of physical shock Laurie felt a strange complex of emotions. He said, “You shouldn’t let me make such a nuisance of myself.”

Ralph came up to the chair, changing the kettle over from his right hand to his left. For a few moments he stood there silent, then he touched Laurie’s shoulder. “Spud.”

“Yes?” said Laurie, looking up.

Ralph’s face changed. He said in his officer’s voice, “You damned fool, why didn’t you have that drink? You look like death.”

“I’d rather have tea.”

“Lie down over there.” It was an order. He held out his hand; obediently Laurie took it and was lifted up. This, he found, was what he wanted. He felt tired and sick and it was wonderful not to be obliged to think, or to be in charge of himself. Ralph half carried him across the room, taking the weight easily: his face was older than his years, but he moved like an athletic boy in hard training and one remembered then that he was only twenty-six. He pulled the cotton counterpane off the bed and settled Laurie’s head on the pillow. Afterwards he folded the counterpane neatly, edges together, not fussily but as if it wouldn’t have occurred to him not to do this. He sat down beside Laurie and said, “I think we should look at this knee before you walk on it again.”