The Charioteer (38 page)

The rest of the day stretched before him, a long aimless blank. He loafed out by himself and ran into Nurse Adrian, who was off duty, in the lane. She seemed as much at a loose end as he, and they walked on together. It was a keen, gray day with an edgy wind; the dead leaves, crisp and hard, were being scoured along the road with a gritty rattle. She remarked on the ease with which he was walking and said the treatment must be doing good.

“Too much,” he said. “It’s made them ambitious. But Sister’s told you, of course.”

“No. Do you mean you’re being transferred?”

“Yes, on Monday. It’s a bit of an uprooting all around, one way and another. My mother’s being married next week, too.”

She asked one or two questions; she didn’t seem bored or perfunctory but as if she actually wanted to know. Because of the thoughts that occupied the foreground of his mind, this seemed unbelievably generous of her. Even the passing illusion that he had struck roots somewhere, and would be missed, was comforting, especially from a woman. Women still stood to him for background and stability, as they do to children, because they had never stood for anything more.

Presently she said, “Will you live at home when you’re discharged?”

“Well, I don’t suppose so.”

“Where are you going, then?”

So much had happened lately that the question had not presented itself, till now, as something close at hand. “Quite honestly,” he said, “I haven’t the least idea.”

In fact, he thought, he would have to start planning immediately. His exhibition covered his fees at Oxford, and he had still nearly four hundred and fifty pounds in the bank, the bulk of a legacy from his grandmother which had come to him at twenty-one, and which he had hardly drawn on because of the war. For the time, at least, he could live anywhere; term didn’t start for a couple of months. He would find some place where Andrew could go easily on his day off, try to catch up with his reading. At this point he became aware that Nurse Adrian was scrambling through her pockets in a quiet panic. He stopped walking at once and said, “Have you lost something?”

“Only my handkerchief.” She sniffed fiercely. “I’m so sorry … have you … could you … it’s the cold wind.”

“It’s only a hospital one with a hole in it. It’s not even clean, very.” He fished it out in some embarrassment and held it out to her. It was only then he realized she was in tears.

He stood transfixed with the discovery, wondering what could have happened to her. Had she had bad news from home? Suddenly, in a flash of horrified intuition, he knew.

What on earth was he going to do? Better not take any notice, unless she said something or made a noise. She wouldn’t want to attract attention. But how to get away? A sharp gust of wind tore through a gap in the hedge; it caught the handkerchief out of her hand and whirled it away down the lane behind them. Instinctively he started to run after it, felt the stiff drag of his leg, and stopped. She had gasped at finding her face exposed, run like the wind, and snatched up the handkerchief from the bank. Now she had her back to him, so that he shouldn’t see her mopping her eyes. Oddly enough, it was the leg, and not being able to run, that settled it for him: the total sum of helplessness and ineffectuality was too much to bear. He remembered how kind she had always been. Walking firmly up to her, he put his arm around her and said, “Here, what is all this?”

As she didn’t answer, he took the handkerchief from her and dabbed her eyes with it. At this she gave a hiccup of hysterical laughter, and buried her face on his shoulder. It was virtually impossible now not to embrace her with both arms, and he did so. There they were, and he felt as much shock and bewilderment as if he had waked up to find himself stretched in the road after a street accident. Now he must think what to do next. Without a notion of the answer he asked himself what the orthodox procedure would have been: to ignore the whole thing and make conversation; seduce her (there was nowhere to go and the wind was full of dead leaves and grit); tell her he was secretly married; talk her out of it? He supposed though that in more orthodox circles all this wouldn’t have arisen, because he would be engaged to her by now. She was the kind of girl you could quite easily imagine attracting men, if their tastes were a cut above the pin-up level: why, he himself, even, found it easy to forgive her for placing him in this ghastly predicament; and he stroked her hair. It was nice hair, fair, fine, and nearly straight, straighter than Andrew’s and lighter. Nearly as straight as Ralph’s, he thought, running it through his fingers; how odd, what an extraordinary coincidence. He put his cheek against it and shut his eyes.

She was gulping into his neck, like a schoolgirl, and muttering something about being ridiculous and that he wasn’t to take any notice. Even his inexperience could perceive her complete physical naïveté. She was sexually backward as is scarcely any female creature except the English girl of a certain upbringing: nothing she wanted was clear to her but love. It was a need which Laurie felt just now as intolerably poignant; where a more specific approach would have alarmed and repelled him, this found out the crack in his defenses. He could no more have kept from kissing her than he could have kicked a lost puppy back into the street.

Her mouth was soft and cool, and didn’t taste of tears as her cheek had done. He felt it almost unmoving against his, in a kind of contemplative wonder. How different from the girl in London, four years ago. All at once he was horrified by his own feckless sentimentality. In a muddled tenderness born of remorse, inextricably mixed with the fear of being found out and with a more generous impulse to protect her from the insult of his pity, he pulled her closer and kissed her again.

“Don’t,” she sobbed, “oh, please. This is awful, how could I? What shall I do?”

“What’s awful? Don’t be silly. It’s all right.”

Her hair felt young and beautifully clean, like washed silk; he had laid her head back on his shoulder so as to reach it again. He remembered something Charles had said and thought what hysterical nonsense it was; there was nothing so terrifying about her. In fact …

What’s the matter with me? he thought. At first he wouldn’t admit to himself that it was happening: it was disruptive, undermining all the established decencies and securities of his life. Then suddenly he felt delighted with himself. After this nothing would ever be exactly the same, one’s limitations would never seem quite so irrevocably fixed. At this moment she linked her arms around his neck and for the first time kissed him of her own accord. He saw her face; it brought him down to earth with a jolt. He remembered now who it was that was paying for all this.

“Stop being so nice to me,” she whispered. “Please stop, it only makes it worse.”

“I can’t help it either.” Indeed, he was having to remind himself that she was very young, and mustn’t be frightened. The gratitude he felt to her confused him; unable to resist expressing it along the line of least resistance, he knew at the same time that he was already beginning to exploit her, and that this was only the first of many excuses with which he would be able to furnish himself, if and when he wished. She knew nothing, she had scarcely even preconceptions; he had only to find himself the right kind of emotional pose, which as she trusted him wouldn’t be difficult, and he could make use of her to almost any extent. She would be very useful, invaluable indeed, and after all, it was what she wanted.

“It’s all right,” she said. “I’ll soon get over it. Please don’t think I’m trying to let you in for anything.”

“For God’s sake. Don’t talk like that.” He looked up; in the distance a couple of men were approaching. He steered her through the nearest gate into a field with Alderney cows in it. A high hedge shut off the wind; there was a pile of sawed logs to sit on. He had already put his arm around her to keep out the cold, and it would have been unkind to take it away again. He sat there trying to find something to say and suddenly thought, If I asked her to marry me, she would.

She doesn’t think me different, except as the person one loves is always different. No one need ever think that again. I could tell her the truth sometime, perhaps. If I put it nicely she wouldn’t know what it really meant. She’d probably think it very romantic. Or perhaps she need never know at all.

One would have to be tactful, not let her think she’d rushed one into it. Perhaps one could say …

Just then she moved away from him and leaned out and pulled at a loose flake of bark on one of the logs. With her shoulder turned to him, she said, “I know what it is. I know why you’re being so sweet about it. It’s because you know how I’m feeling. You couldn’t be like this if you weren’t in love with someone else.”

He took her hand. “Yes. Life’s rather hell, isn’t it? If things could possibly be different, it would be you.”

She squeezed his fingers and said, “I think I’ve guessed there was someone, all the time. How terrible to have so little self-control: this must have been the most dreadfully embarrassing thing that ever happened to you in your whole life. I could just about jump in the sea.”

“Not embarrassing. Or, well, it depends what you mean.” He put his arm hard around her waist. “I nearly behaved very badly, you know.” He was afraid this must sound impossibly naïve, and was greatly relieved to see that it had impressed her. Although he was ashamed to find himself capable of detachment at a moment when she was very unhappy, still he couldn’t help being aware that the memory of having tempted a man, and shaken his fidelity, would not come amiss to her in her future dealings with life. She was sweet, he thought.

“I suppose people are always telling you what nice hair you have.”

“It’s terrible now. There isn’t a decent hairdresser for miles. I’ve given it up, I just wash it under the tap.”

“Don’t have it permed or messed about. It’s nice. May I kiss you again?”

But the shift in their combined weight caused the pile of logs to roll apart, and they went sprawling. It was the kind of accident in which people can be quite badly hurt; when they had picked themselves up unscathed except for some nettle stings, they were both so generally shaken that they collapsed into weak laughter. This, and hunting for dock leaves, offered a rescuing anticlimax; both of them were thankful.

In the lane she said, “I oughtn’t to ask—but why doesn’t she ever come to see you?”

For some reason he was quite unprepared for this. It was poverty of invention, rather than subtlety, which made him say, “Well, the thing is, as far as she knows, we’re nothing more than friends. I’ve never told her. She—she isn’t free, you see, and she wouldn’t think it was right.”

“I
am
sorry.” Transparently, this grown-up situation caused her to look at him with new eyes; he felt both a fool and a fraud. “I do hope it will come right for you both, someday.”

“I don’t suppose so, really,” he said, and slanted-off the conversation. They were both young enough to be capable of solemn abstract discussion about love; and in this way, with its pleasantly painful stirring of the emotions, they made their way back to the turning where hospital people who had been walking out used to part discreetly. As they neared it, he knew that he didn’t want her to go. Now that he wasn’t going on with it, he began to idealize what might have been, and to soften the deceits and the dangers. “Would you mind if I wrote to you, sometime? I don’t want us to lose touch with each other.”

“Oh, what nonsense, of course not. You’re just taking on something that’s going to be nothing but a burden to you, because you want to cheer me up.”

“No. You’ve made a great difference, more than I can explain. I shall never forget you.”

She said, “If you mean that, of course I should love you to write,” and he saw her look away to hide her sudden hope. For a moment he felt guilty; but after she had gone, he realized that, in the deep essentials, he had meant what she had believed him to mean.

When he got back to the ward, Charlot’s empty bed seemed to dominate it like a grave. There was no sign of Reg. Madge was still here and they were spending the day together. Neames was there, and one or two new men he hardly knew and didn’t much care for. His solitude seemed all the more insistent because this time he had bought it for himself.

In the asphalt walk he was drawn into conversation by Willis, of all people. Laurie couldn’t remember having ever before had speech with him alone. It emerged that he had got his discharge for the same day as Laurie’s transfer. He was going to Roehampton, to be trained to use an artificial hand and to learn a trade; he had been an unskilled builder’s laborer before the war. He seemed quite cheerful about his future. The real surprise came a few minutes later: Willis was engaged. The girl was an evacuee who worked at one of the farms. They had been walking out for some time and this morning, on getting the news, he had “got it fixed up regular.” Laurie realized that it was weeks since he had paid anything but the most perfunctory attention to Willis; in the interval there had been a considerable change. Suddenly he said, “You wait till young Derek hears about Shirl and me. This’ll shake him, not half.”

“Pal of yours?” asked Laurie, concealing his astonishment with some care.

“Comes from down our street, Derek. We bought our groceries off of his dad. Ain’t you heard, then? Come up and told me. He was bright at school, see, got scholarships, that’s how he comes to talk posh. Nothing toffee-nosed about him, though. Reads me his mum’s letters with all the home news, every week regular.”

“Good show,” said Laurie. He thought of Derek’s little refinements, of the kind to have been fiercely instilled and as fiercely cherished.

They had exhausted for the moment their store of communicable thoughts, and were strolling mutely, when Reg came up the path from the gates, Madge hooked to his arm.

Laurie was delighted to see him. They wouldn’t see much more of one another; there was a lot to talk about. Reg’s last X-ray had been a good one; he would be discharged too before long. Already they were full of plans for a celebration before Reg went back to his unit again. Seeing him approach between the huts, Laurie felt that this at least was solid. It had stood everything and there had never been any cheating.