The Charioteer (43 page)

Having accepted this knowledge, he allowed it almost at once to drift out of sight. There is much anodyne to a painful thought in mere lack of concentration. He said to himself, as far as he said anything plainly, that Ralph was here now, that it was more than kind of him to have come, that to be glad to see him was only common decency. Beyond this moment, the future was still free and undetermined.

Canon Rosslow had what is slanderously called the Oxford accent. He made the Homily sound like a piece of respectable cant. Laurie found it all slipping by him like Monday morning chapel at school. Everything he was capable of feeling about this event had been exhausted; he was empty, waiting only for something different to happen. He was, though he didn’t know this, in the state which at funerals inspires the wake.

It was over. The bride and groom were on their way to the vestry. Remembering his duty, he got up and followed them.

He signed the register and kissed his mother. As if she were covered with an impalpable veil, he could feel only that he was kissing a bride. He saw Mr. Straike advancing and wondered for one dislocated minute whether he would expect to be kissed too. But all was well, Mr. Straike gave him a manly handclasp, two hands to Laurie’s one. Soon they were all going back into the church again, and the organ was playing his mother and her husband down the aisle.

He knew he ought to follow, and did so at first; but the organist had set a good cracking pace, and Mr. Straike couldn’t be expected to remember. The best man, though thirty years Laurie’s senior, had a better turn of speed. People were coming out of the pews and he slid into the stream. He wasn’t much held up by civilities, for everyone was hurrying to see the departure outside. Ralph was waiting for him just inside the pew.

“Ralph! How did you manage it?” Admitting the wish but not the expectation, he struck a compromise by which Ralph would not be hurt, nor he himself wholly committed; but he did not think of it like this.

The bridal couple vanished through the west door. Ralph looked him in the eyes and smiled. Someone was here now for whom he came first: it was like a well in the desert.

“Don’t bother about me,” Ralph said, “you’ve got people to see to out there. Get along and get on with it. I’ll follow the crowd.”

“It’s only just down the road. I’ll walk with you.”

“Don’t be silly,” said Ralph briskly. “You’ve got to be there ahead; you’re the host, he isn’t. Get a move on, I’ll see you presently.”

There had been photographs outside for the county paper; so no one had missed him. When he walked into the village hall, he knew that his mother’s new life had begun already. If she had been marrying anyone else, the reception would have been at the George. The boards felt gritty underfoot, there were notices about the Guides and the Mothers’ Union. The venerable hired waiters looked like lay helpers at a Sunday-school tea. All this, of course, set the parochial note in which everything centered upon the vicar.

Some Straike relatives had arrived. They seemed to Laurie rather hard-eyed, the kind of people one envisages quarrelling over wills, and their overconventionality struck him as faintly vulgar. He stood close to his mother, observing how much bigger Mr. Straike’s family was than theirs. Seeing Aunt Olive appear in a travelling coat (he remembered now that she had to get an early train) he decided she was a great deal nicer than any of them. He fussed over her and found her food. In the midst of all this Ralph walked in.

He must have waited till now when the bride and groom had ceased to receive at the door, hoping to be inconspicuous; but in a gathering where the younger element was mostly in the forties, his entrance had drawn eyes from all over the room. He looked around for Laurie and went over to him at once. With the tail of his eye, Laurie saw that Mr. Straike had noticed.

You would have thought that an introduction to Aunt Olive was the one thing Ralph had been hoping for. Laurie remembered suddenly a remark of Bunny’s about Christmas in the orphanage; but he didn’t want to think about Bunny any more.

It would be untrue to say that Aunt Olive had grown suddenly pretty, because women who employ no make-up miss it at such moments, and it inhibits them; but her self-esteem had climbed steeply. Suddenly she gave an arch little squeak of discovery and delight. “
I
know!” she cried. “I couldn’t think
where
I’d seen you! Now I remember!”

Ralph’s charming smile became just a little less casual. He said, as if he wanted to get in first, “I expect you saw me somewhere about the place at school.” As he spoke, he looked around to see who was in earshot, but so unobtrusively that even Laurie only just noticed it.

“School!” cried Aunt Olive in triumph. “I
was
right!” This time no one interrupted her. She turned to Laurie. “Your mother always tells me what a memory for faces I have.
He’s
the boy in the photograph!”

She must have taken the short silence that followed as a tribute to her gifts, for she smiled radiantly.

In the next few minutes, before she left, Laurie had time to think. It had been obvious to him from the first that Andrew couldn’t have come here without the risk of being exposed to insult. It must, he thought, be a symptom of the way his generation had been torn from its roots, that he hadn’t till now perceived the risk to Ralph.

The Head and the staff had tried, naturally, to hush his expulsion up. It was possible, though unlikely, that they even thought they had succeeded. The fact was, of course, that Hazell’s hysterical confidences had made it the most resounding scandal in the history of the School. The sensation had been proportionate to Ralph’s immense, and rather romantic, prestige; and it was a certainty that there hadn’t been a single boy, down to the lowest and most friendless fag, who hadn’t known at least something about it.

Although Laurie still felt very close to these events, it was in a purely inward and personal way. Externally, seven years was half a lifetime. He had grown in them from a boy to a man; he had met pain and fear, love and death; his comrades had been men for whom his old world had not at any time existed. Now, looking at the guests around him who had been adults longer than he had been alive, he saw that for most of them seven years must be only the other day. It was unlikely that Ralph hadn’t thought of it. The people who are vulnerable to these things are less absent-minded about them.

When Aunt Olive had gone Ralph lifted one eyebrow, smiled at Laurie, and murmured, “Whew!”

“You’ve not had a drink yet.” Laurie gave him one, and as they drank tried to thank him in a glance; but the glance didn’t turn out exactly as he had meant. He said quickly, “Come along and meet my mother.” As they went he saw, for the second time, Mr. Straike turning from his conversation with Canon Rosslow to eye Ralph with curiosity.

If you knew as much as Laurie had learned by now, you might perhaps get as far as a speculation about Ralph; but even then you wouldn’t be sure. He had reviewed his own weaknesses early in life, and with untender determination trained them as one bends a tree; the resolution this had demanded had stamped his face with most of the lineaments of strength. The fastidious severity of his dress and carriage hid, no doubt, a personal vanity by no means extinct; but it had the air of a fine, unconscious arrogance. Laurie, as he walked beside him up the hall, was looking at Mr. Straike and thinking, He’d have liked to be the one who brought him here, to put me in my place. Too bad he belongs to me.

At the last moment, Laurie’s mother was caught up by friends, and Mr. Straike came to meet them instead.

The next few minutes did Laurie a world of good. He discovered at once that Ralph hadn’t lost the famous manner; perhaps if one had known him well one might have detected a crease or two and a whiff of moth-balls; but it was more than good enough for Mr. Straike. “By the greatest good luck we happened to run into each other at Dunkirk” (he made it sound rather cosmopolitan, like Shepheard’s or the Long Bar at Shanghai), “so we were able to pick up the threads again.”

“Now I think of it,” said Mr. Straike suddenly, “I can’t recall that I ever asked your mother the name of your House, Laurence. Very remiss of me.”

“Stuart’s,” Laurie said. It had been Stuart’s when he first went there.

“Stuart’s, Stuart’s. That has some association for me. Wait, I have it. That’s the House that was taken over by a school contemporary of my own, dear old Mumps Jepson. Surely that would be within your time?”

“Yes. Mr. Jepson took it over when I was fairly senior, but you know how the old name sticks.” Almost unconsciously, he had closed his shoulder up to Ralph’s as if they were in battle.

“Ah, interesting. I wonder what impression he made on you. Poor old Mumps, he was something of a hypochondriac; I remember thinking he had scarcely the requisite—hrm—guts for the job. We’ve lost touch, I’m afraid. But I did meet him, at an Old Boys’ Dinner, if I remember, a year or two after he took up his appointment; he was very full then of his trials and his responsibilities, very full indeed. Would it be in ’33? It might even have been in ’35.” He looked at Ralph again. “I’m afraid I heard your name very imperfectly; Langham, did you say?”

There was a short and, for Laurie, terrifying pause. He didn’t look at Mr. Straike because he had, in a sense, forgotten about him; and he did not look around because he dared not, for he had felt the finger of some past evasion touch Ralph and dim him, like a quick smudge.

“No,” said Ralph. “It’s Lanyon.”

“M-m, no. I fancy it would be a little after your—”

“Laurie, darling.” It was the measure of Laurie’s feelings that he had been unaware of his mother’s arrival. For the last ten minutes people had been assuring her of her happiness; she had had a glass of champagne; she was expanding like a rose in a warm room. “This
is
delightful. How
could
you not tell me that you’d asked
the
R. R. Lanyon to come? Were you keeping him as a surprise?”

“Yes,” said Laurie, “as a matter of fact I was.” He presented him.

“Well, my dear boy—because I shall never think of you as more than eighteen even when you’re an admiral—you mustn’t laugh at me, but, really, I can hardly believe you’re true, it’s like meeting a unicorn. Of course, I know it’s all worlds away now to both of you, but to me it seems yesterday when Laurie used to bring home legends about you, just like my generation with the Prince of Wales.”

“You must let him live it down,” said Ralph, “after all this time.”

“Hrm,” said Mr. Straike. “Lucy, my dear …” Laurie realized that the healths were about to begin.

His response for the bride was one of the things that had kept him awake till the small hours. But now he had forgotten all about it, and came to it fresh, with a suddenly revived self-confidence. While the guests were still clapping, and his mother looking at him with pride, he was wondering already whether Ralph had thought it was all right.

Few men were there and no other young ones; he and Ralph were kept busy. For ten or fifteen minutes they scarcely met. There was probably no moment of this time when, if he had been asked where Ralph was, he couldn’t have given the answer without looking. At last somebody broke a folding chair. With an air of conscientious helpfulness, Laurie went over to the corner where it was and tinkered about with it. Ralph came up and steadied the chair for him, and they bent over the brown varnished wood with their backs to the room.

“This is what you’re looking for.” Ralph handed him a wing nut from the floor. Laurie couldn’t answer. He had heard in Ralph’s voice that secret overtone only half of which is created by the one who speaks, the other half by the one who listens, and which says in any language, “By and by all these people will have gone.”

After a while, Laurie said, “This is a hell of a party for you to drive all this way for.”

“I’m sorry about that just now, Spud. I only hope nothing serious comes of it.”

“
You’re
sorry?” Laurie looked up. There were still people fairly near; he only looked for a moment.

“I should have said it was Langham. What if he runs into Jeepers again before he forgets? You’ll be the one to get the backwash.”

“So I ought to be.”

“No, I shouldn’t have done it. It was just a rather tarty bit of exhibitionism, really.”

Laurie looked at the nut in his hand and slid it unseeingly over the worn screw. “You know why you did it. Because I wanted you to.”

When Ralph spoke again it was so quietly that no one else could have heard at all; but he only said, “Did you?”

Laurie fixed the nut to an unworn scrap of thread at the bottom, and heard the soft wood crunch faintly. Staring down at it, he said, “Yes.”

“Laurence, my dear boy, if I may make a suggestion.”

Laurie knew that in the moments of Mr. Straike’s approach they had been silent; he clung to this certainty, and quite soon was able to look around.

Later, while he was perambulating with sausage rolls, it occurred to him to wonder why Mr. Straike called him Laurence with such determination, when he must long have known that no one else did so. He realized that in Mr. Straike’s considered opinion Laurie was a sissy name, such as would be wished by a woman on a fatherless boy. He was being rechristened as a bracer. With this thought, he looked around for his mother, and couldn’t find her. She had gone to change into her going-away things.

For a moment he thought of following her home, so that he could say goodbye to her alone. But if she had wanted it, he thought, she would have told him where she was going; and he oughtn’t to leave the guests for so long. He gave up the idea, with a relief for which these reasons seemed enough. The house he had inherited was waiting for him. It wasn’t fitting any longer that he should encounter her in it.

At the other side of the hall Ralph had stopped to talk to a girl. She was a Straike guest, a Wren in uniform. Looking at his face, Laurie could tell that he was talking service shop with a conventional garnish of sex which he had found to be expected. They both seemed to be enjoying it. For a moment Laurie felt sharply jealous; but almost at once the feeling became unreal, and he went on watching Ralph with a tolerance in which pleasure was barely concealed. The girl had become a shadowy figure to him, a demonstrator of something in which she had no rights.