The Charioteer (35 page)

Ralph took another drink. “Well, Spuddy, it’s your life. Will he mind you going away?”

“Yes, he will.”

“As much as you?”

“Oh, well … He will mind, though.”

“If he’s honest with himself, when it comes to the point he’ll know. Why do you want to help him tell himself lies?”

“I don’t. It means something different to him, that’s all.”

“Different my foot. Don’t fool yourself, Spud. He’ll come back in a year or two and tell you all about his boy friend. That one’s a classic, didn’t you know?”

Laurie hadn’t believed he could ever have felt so lonely with Ralph in the same room. He said, “Once you wouldn’t have talked like that.”

Ralph looked at him across the table. For one extraordinary second he seemed about to throw back his head and laugh.

“Wouldn’t I? Well, in the meantime I’ve been around.”

So strong was Laurie’s sense of solitude that for a few moments he stared past the lighted table into the shadows without any self-consciousness, as if physically he were alone.

“Spud.”

It wasn’t the voice that roused him, but Ralph’s hand closing over his on the table. “Spud, cheer up. Come along now, snap out of it.”

He swallowed and said, “It’s all right.”

Ralph got up and went over to the window, standing as if the blackout weren’t up and he could see out.

“You stick to it, Spud, and don’t worry. You don’t want to let people hand you these smart lines of talk. They pick it up at parties and it gets to be a habit and most of the time it doesn’t mean a thing.”

“Didn’t it?”

“Oh, come, be your age. For God’s sake, what does it matter to you what I meant?”

“It does, that’s all. I can’t imagine there ever being a time when it wouldn’t.”

There was a little silence. Then Ralph said, quite quietly and simply, “Of course I didn’t mean it. It was just a line of talk. Forget all about it.”

After this, there was a retreat into commonplaces; then presently Ralph began to talk about the sea. They had returned to the fire, but this time Laurie wouldn’t take the armchair. The rug was comfortable to lie on, sprawling with his chin in his fists. He lay there, getting heavy with the heat and the residual fumes of the gas fire.

“… I said, ‘I’m sorry, senhor, but I shipped with you as a passenger to Beira, and I’m not prepared to navigate for you under conditions like that: either your mate’s mad or he isn’t; if he isn’t, you don’t need me, and if he is, you’ll have to put him under restraint even if he is your brother-in-law, because I can’t do with him under my feet in the chartroom weeping and praying and playing about with knives.’ So finally he …”

As he lay listening, Laurie’s whole being seemed to relax in a sigh of mysterious contentment. Even the day’s disaster withdrew into a distance where it was known rather than felt. All the tangles of his life seemed looser and easier to resolve. He didn’t want to take his mind from the story, or disturb with analysis this fragile happiness and security, which were what one might feel if some legend, dear to one’s childhood but long abandoned, were marvelously proved true.

“… these big ocean-going dhows that come over from Arabia with the monsoon. They have a high carved poop like a caravel, and a raked-up bowsprit. There were a lot of them coming into the Old Harbor the way they do, covered in tassels and pennants with the crews singing and dancing on the decks, and beating drums and gongs. Just after we’d passed them …”

The strange feeling of fulfillment touched Laurie again; suddenly he remembered and understood. In the weeks of that summer holiday seven years before, after he had read the
Phaedrus
by the stream in the wood, he had gone for long walks alone, and, returning, sat in the evening by a September fire, so silent and enclosed that more than once his mother had asked if he was well. It was of this that he had been dreaming.

Involuntarily he moved his hands so that they covered his face, as the dream came back in all the high colors of boyhood: his own room with the fire he had, as a rule, only on the first day of the holidays, furnished as he had thought, then, he would want it when he was older; the flickering light on leather and books; and Ralph’s face at nineteen. In the dream there had always been a pause in which he had looked up and said, “Next time you go away, I’m going with you”; and Ralph, who hadn’t had a first name in those days, had looked down all the same and answered, “Of course.”

“… She was the filthiest ship I ever set foot in, garbage trodden into the decks, Indian kids piddling in the scuppers, the officer on watch was drunk, and the stink was something you could hardly …”

Laurie took his hands from his face and looked up: at the room, the blackout curtains fastened with safety-pins; at the padded fingers of the glove lying on Ralph’s knee; he could feel in his lame leg the pull of the cobbled muscles, and in his heart the bruise that couldn’t be forgotten for long. Life is cruel, he thought; leaving out war and all that wholesale stuff, human life is essentially cruel. Sometimes you can feel a smile. The Greeks felt it. Apollo Loxias at Delphi smiling in the smoke behind the oracle, and saying, “But I don’t mean what you mean.”

“… came tearing up to say it was typhoid they had on board, as if that were something astonishing.”

“Yes?” said Laurie. A part of his mind, which had never lost touch with the story, had become aware of a pause. “Yes, go on, what happened then?”

“Oh, of course that put us all into quarantine, so I missed the job with Union Castle after all. Spud, you shouldn’t lie down flat like that in front of a gas fire, you’ll fill yourself up with carbon monoxide or whatever it is. Are you all right?”

“Yes. Of course I am.”

“Because we’ll have to go now, or you’ll be late back.”

Laurie began to get up, turning himself into a sitting position and catching hold of the chair-arm to pull on. He sat there for a moment, his head beside Ralph’s knees, and this sharp sense of life’s cruelty trembling in him like an arrow that has just struck. “It was such a good story; you might finish it.”

“There isn’t much more, and there’s not time anyway. I thought you’d dropped off.”

“I could have listened all night. Most people get muddled and have to keep going back.”

“I used to keep a notebook and write all that sort of nonsense down. Look at the time, we’ll have to get a move on.”

“I wish I’d got a late pass tonight. I wish I could stay.”

Ralph put the good hand on his shoulder and sat looking down at him with his brows drawn together. “Poor old Spud, what a hell of a day you’ve had.” He rose smartly to his feet and helped Laurie up.

Just as they were starting, he said, “By the way, how about some aspirin?”

“What for?” Laurie asked.

“Why, for the leg, of course.”

“My God,” said Laurie incredulously. “It hasn’t started. I’d forgotten it.”

“Well,” said Ralph briskly, “that’s one of your troubles on the way out.”

He turned off the light and the fire and they began to grope their way down the dark staircase. They had crossed the landing and begun on the lower flight and Ralph was guiding him a little around the turn of the stairs, when suddenly a round white eye of light leaped out, almost in their faces. It held them blinking for a moment and disappeared. There was a pause of complete silence, then a soft laugh.

Later on, it struck Laurie as odd that it should have affected him so strongly. Earlier in the year, he had spent a number of hours lying, helpless and in pain, exposed to the efforts of people openly trying to encompass his death. It was ludicrous to have one’s hair lifted by a mere giggle in the dark.

Ralph said in a cold empty voice, “Good night, Bunny.”

There was a brushing sound against the wall and a whiff of scent. The laugh came again, from the landing above them now.

“Good night, boys. You sillies not to have waited. It’s
madly
unlucky to pass on the stairs.”

T
HE OFFICE WAS DIFFERENT
by artificial light. Major Ferguson had taken off his white coat and was sitting in uniform, to look more disciplinary. It only made him look like a doctor dressed as an officer. He stood Laurie at ease and fixed him with a calculated stare, at the same time tapping unconsciously with a pencil on a pair of prominent front teeth.

“Well, Odell. This is a pretty disgraceful business. Uhm?”

“Sir.”

“Got to deal with this now, I’m operating all tomorrow. It’s a serious matter.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We’ve taken a good deal of trouble with you one way and another. We don’t expect you to start setting the place by the ears as soon as you’re able to get about.”

“No, sir. I’m sorry.”

“Do you know what you’ve done? In effect you’ve forged an army order. Don’t you realize that’s a court-martial offense?”

“I see, sir.”

“As this is an E.M.S. hospital, the position’s slightly less cut-and-dried than it would be in a military one, fortunately for you. But use your common sense, man. If every relative a hospital sent for knew it might be a hoax, imagine the position. You can’t monkey about with these life-and-death services, it isn’t in the public interest. D’you understand?”

“I’m sorry, sir; yes.”

“Now I’ve had this man dragging his wife in here to beg you off, tears and intimate family histories and the Lord knows what. Did you know that?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, he insists you’ve kept him from desertion and manslaughter. What you’ve kept her from isn’t gone into, and it’s a matter of opinion I should say. However, in view of all this I’m not dealing with you as severely as I should have done otherwise. All passes stopped for a month.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Of course, if you’re transferred to a civil hospital before that, then it’ll lapse and you’ll be luckier than you deserve, uhm?”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Uhm. What are you going to do with yourself when we discharge you, eh?”

“I’ve a year to go at Oxford, sir. After that I don’t know.”

Major Ferguson passed a hand back over his bald crown to the occipito-parietal line where the hair began. He supposed that before the war was over, and still more afterwards, he was often going to hear that tone of voice. “Uhm, well, a year to look round in, uhm? All right, you can get back to your ward, Odell.”

Reg, in pajamas and dressing-gown, was waiting for him in the dark quadrangle between the huts.

“Just slipped out. Had to find out the damage. How’d it go?”

“Fine, thanks to you. You mad with me, Reg?”

“Ah, shove it. Never had a pal what’d go that far for me. Fact.”

“So long as it worked.”

“I’ll tell you something, Spud. She cried. Cried like a child. Never forget it, long as I live.”

“Did she think you were dying?”

“She was over that. It was your letter done it.”

“Oh,” said Laurie inadequately. With a cold crawling of the bowels he reviewed it, held now by the lapse of time shudderingly at arms’ length.

“ ‘Let’s have it, girl,’ I said, ‘and I’ll take it to the Major. There won’t be no trouble if he reads this.’ But no, she wouldn’t. ‘I never had such a beautiful letter written to me,’ she says, ‘never. If you’d have written me a few like that things would have been a lot different,’ she said to me, ‘and I’m not giving it you for strangers to poke their nose in. I’d rather see the Major and tell him what’s what myself.’ And that’s what she done.”

“Well, do thank her for me when you write.”

“She’s stopping the night. Stopping at the Feathers. We’ll have a day out tomorrow, like old times.”

“That’s fine.”

They had got to the ward. Nurse Sims, scuttling through the outer corridor, acknowledged Laurie absently. His experienced instincts picked up at once the sense of emergency, even before he saw her go into the side ward and shut the door quickly after her. A blurred, crazy-sounding mutter was going on inside. He turned to Reg. It’s not operating day; who’s that?”

“ ’S okay, Spud.” Reg looked away and spoke with spurious cheerfulness. “Old Charlot had a bit of an upset. Shell-shock or some job. I dunno.”

“Charlot?”
The muttering had got louder now and he could hear it quite easily through the door. He said with the idiocy of helpless protest, “But he was all right this morning. I
talked
to him.”

“That’s right. I missed the start of it with Madge coming. Some of them reckon it was the bomb, but—”

“Bomb?” Fear for Andrew slid between his ribs. “Anyone hurt?”

“Nah, nothing to it. Some flipping Jerry on the run. Far end of that field there; broke the odd window in Ward D. No, if you ask me, I reckon it was this mobile gun. New issue, quick-firing job, shells come clipped on a belt, noisy bastard it is. Seems they brought it right up the lane here, silly muckers; might have been in the ward by the sound, Purvis says. See, when the bomb dropped, old Charlot took it same as anyone. But soon as they heard the first burst from this gun, he shouted out something in French, and heaved himself clean off the bed. Machine-gunned them in the boats, didn’t they, when he stopped his packet? Well, done up in all that plaster, you can see how heavy he’d fall.”

“God, yes.”

“Must have hit his head; been like this ever since.”

“It might only be concussion.”

“That’s it,” said Reg helpfully. Nurse Sims came out, looked at them as nurses do when they find patients discussing other patients, and told them sharply to hurry up and get into bed. When she had gone Reg said, “Your pal Andrew’s got a nice job tonight. Got to sit in there and see he don’t do it again.”

Perhaps he wouldn’t see Andrew all night, then. He thought that this is what always happens when one’s anticipations are overkeyed. As he passed the door he could hear Andrew’s voice, delivering some reassurance in careful schoolroom French, and then the mutter again.

For more than an hour Laurie lay wide awake beside the flat empty bed from the side ward which had been put in Charlot’s place. At last, from a change of light in the corridor outside, he knew that the side ward door had opened. He got on his dressing-gown hastily and slipped out. It was remarkable how quickly he had ceased to care very much whether people were noticing, and tonight he didn’t think about it at all.