The Charioteer (46 page)

“Yes. When I’m with him, sometimes I do.”

“Really, Spud,” said Ralph quietly. “At a time like this.”

He spoke as one rebukes a child who is old enough to see with what dangerous irresponsibility he has been behaving. He had talked often about the war, never about the feelings he had brought to it. Laurie had supposed that his bitterness at his forced inaction had been chiefly for the waste of his own powers. Now, looking at his face, one could see that this wasn’t so; and there was nothing more to say.

“You see, Spuddy, my dear,” said Ralph, speaking with great kindness and with care that Laurie shouldn’t be hurt, “you have a very sweet nature, really, and you let it ride you a bit sometimes. You say this boy has guts, but what you’re trying to do for him is to keep him like a mid-Victorian virgin in a world of illusion where he doesn’t know he’s alive. He mustn’t be told he’s a passenger when human decency’s fighting for survival, in case it upsets his religion. He mustn’t be told he’s a queer, in case he has to do a bit of hard thinking and make up his mind. He mustn’t know you’re in love with him, in case he feels he can’t go on having his cake and eating it. If he amounts to anything, he won’t really want to be let off being human. And if he does want it, then he isn’t worth all this, Spud. I’m sorry, but there it is.”

“But—” As soon as he started he knew it was no good. He could have said that Andrew was essentially more realistic and less sentimental than Ralph himself. He wanted to say, “But he does know that I love him, and I know he loves me.” But as soon as his mind formed words around these things, he saw that they could only hurt Ralph for nothing without enlightening him at all. “It isn’t quite like that. I mean, Christianity on weekdays isn’t really such a soft option. I believe enough in him to feel I’d like to help him be what he wants to be. Not hinder, anyway.”

“Anyone can see that you weren’t brought up in a Christian home.”

Ralph’s face had altered. It looked impenetrable, and no longer even kind. He had taken his hand away and had begun to tap Morse on the arm of the chair.

Laurie paid scant attention to the actual words. He had heard behind them the voice of an unknown boy who wasn’t Jack in
The Coral Island.
As if it were possible to reach into the past, he took hold of the restless hand that was tapping the chair-arm and said, “I don’t think that’s how it was meant to be.”

“Well, anyway, that’s how it comes. The pagans did recognize our existence, at least. They even allowed us a few standards and a bit of human dignity, just like real people.”

He was silent for a moment, frowning; but it was in concentration more than anger, for the hardness had gone from his eyes. Looking out across Laurie’s head he said slowly, as if the words were being salvaged from deep water, “ ‘If a city or an army could be made up only of lovers and their beloved, it would excel all others. For they would refrain from everything shameful, rivalling one another in honor; and men like these, fighting at each other’s side, might well conquer the world. For the lover would rather be seen by anyone than by his beloved, flying or throwing away his arms; rather he would be ready a thousand times to die.’ ”

Laurie couldn’t say anything. He had neither the power nor the wish to hide what he felt.

“It’s only since it’s been made impossible that it’s been made so damned easy. It’s got like prohibition, with the bums and crooks making fortunes out of hooch, everyone who might have had a palate losing it, nobody caring how you hold your liquor, you’ve been smart enough if you get it at all. You can’t make good wine in a bathtub in the cellar, you need sun and rain and fresh air, you need a pride in the job you can tell the world about. Only you can live without drink if you have to, but you can’t live without love.”

Laurie said, “I know,” and then a little later, “Ralph, I’ve got to be alone for a bit, after I get back, and make up my mind about things.”

“Why? You’ll only get all tensed up again like you were before. I know what you’re like without me there; you’ll get into this morbid state when you think if you want something, then you shouldn’t have it.”

“No; I’ve got to find out what it is I really want. You said something once, it was at Sandy’s party; you said it isn’t what you are, it’s what you do with it.”

“At a party? Christ, I must have been stinking.”

“And just now in a different way you said it again. And it’s true, of course, and that’s how it is. I know what I am and I’ve got to think what to do with it. You’re not angry, are you?”

“No,” said Ralph quite quietly. “I’m not angry. But don’t be gone too long.”

Laurie knew, from a closeness that already seemed inevitable, what it was that he was resolving not to say.

“I won’t see Andrew again either, until I’ve decided something; that’s only fair.”

“Do what you feel, Spud. I wouldn’t have asked you, you know that.”

“No, I promise I won’t.” As soon as it was out of his mouth he knew he had been wrong. The feeling of justice had been an illusion, he had felt only the emotion of tenderness for Ralph’s pain, and a sentiment, strong but confused, born of all they had shared together, which had made him yield easily to a boyish sense of fair play and had blunted his adult perceptions. There was no real parallel between seeing Ralph and seeing Andrew; for Andrew’s cause was more than his own cause, and if he argued it, it would only be by the fact of being himself.

But it was done now; and as they were changing and collecting their things to leave, he felt that he wouldn’t recall his promise if he could. He couldn’t have borne to deliver Ralph so coolly to the pains of jealousy: at least he could be saved the tension and bitterness of feeling that everything was being won back from him in his absence by someone on the spot. Laurie thought: Yes, if we must part altogether that will be different, a clean cut, finis, the end. But with this thought in his mind he looked around the living room, at the swept hearth, the divan reassembled under its covers against the wall; and a memory, which had been imperceptibly transforming itself into an anticipation, gave a long sigh of protest and whispered, “Never again?”

I
N THE BED WHERE
the old man had died there was another one, who seemed to be having the same treatment for the same disease, and talked much more about it, his monologue from behind the screens making them, indeed, almost redundant. But the boy Mervyn was delighted at Laurie’s return, and he was glad that at the last moment he hadn’t forgotten.

“Here; I’ve brought you something for tea.”

“Coo. What a super birthday cake.”

“Wedding.”

“Go on. You been and got married?” Good manners struggled with disesteem in his face; it was a much better color, mauve-pink instead of blue.

“No—my mother has.” He could say it, he found, as if it were years ago, as indeed it seemed.

“No kidding, Spud?” He considered Laurie gravely, then said, with a mature kind of tact, “Have an acid drop.”

“Thanks very much. You look better.”

“I’ve been having the Wonder Drug. Honest. The doctor said. What sort of a night did you have last night?”

“What did you say?”

“I said what sort of a night did you have. You look kind of tired. I thought you might have had a noisy one, like what we had here.”

“Oh. Was there a raid?”

“Was there a
raid
? We had an incendiary right on the roof. One of the doctors put it out.”

“Did he? Good show.”

“I reckon, with the moon like it is now, we’ll have another tonight, don’t you?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Probably not.” He realized now that the child was a little too bright and cocky to be quite true. “If there is, we’ll just have to tell each other the story of our lives to pass the time, eh?”

“Bags you tell yours first, then.”

Laurie got into bed and, opening a book, tried to think quietly behind its screen. Soon it fell from his hand and, with the clatter of the ward work all around him, he slept like the dead. Later with the noise his dreams grew restless; he thought he was back at Dunkirk, but this time responsible for everything, so that he had to crawl about the beach dragging his broken leg. He heard his name being called, but he couldn’t go any faster; he muttered, “All right, I’m coming, all right.”

“Easy does it. It’s only me.”

He started awake; the lights were on and the blackout up; a doctor in a white coat was standing by his bed. He blinked and saw that it was Alec.

“I can’t really stop. I’ve got to assist with an emergency in ten minutes, but I couldn’t leave you in here any longer without saying hello.” He pulled out the stool from under the bed and sat down, looking just as all the housemen did when they came to take patients’ histories; one half expected him to bring out a patella hammer or a stethoscope. He chatted vaguely about his work, and how to keep on the right side of the Sister; it was all rather dim and dutiful, and Laurie, who was still muzzy with sleep, began to wish he’d go. But he got out the X-rays from the box on the bed-rail, and started holding them up to the light. Laurie was used to seeing doctors enthralled by this pastime; but after saying, “Good Lord, you were lucky with that callus,” Alec became a little absent. He glanced over his shoulder, dropped his voice, and said, “I ran into Ralph for a minute today, just after he left you here.”

“Oh, yes, did you?” He didn’t feel in a state to deal with it, and hoped his face had given nothing away. The reserves which Ralph had broken down felt, in reaction, shy and raw at the approach of anyone else.

Alec looked around for a moment under his brown eyelids, with his disarming throw-away smile. “I didn’t keep him. He was looking incandescent and elevated, like a candle burning at both ends.” After a faintly hesitant pause, he added, “Don’t keep him on a string too long, he hasn’t the temperament.”

Laurie didn’t answer. He was violently embarrassed and, in any case, could think of nothing to say. Alec looked at the X-ray again.

“He hasn’t been talking. But I know him pretty well.”

“Yes,” said Laurie. “Of course. I hear you got it quite heavy here last night.”

Alec gave him another swift neutral glance. “We’ve had worse. Sandy got a third-degree burn on the arm from an incendiary, picking it up with a coal shovel. It’s making us very short on Casualty. Well, I must go. See you sometime.”

Laurie shut his eyes again, to protect himself from conversation. He felt oppressed and dejected. He didn’t blame Ralph, at least not consciously. As if a few threads of contact still linked them like the streamers that cling to departing ships, he felt what must have happened: Alec had offered felicitations, Ralph, out of sensitiveness or superstition, had been driven to qualify them a little. As Alec had remarked, they had known each other very well. Laurie wondered whether he had had time to give the news to Sandy yet.

Through the blanket he had pulled around his ears he could hear the evening mouth-washes being poured out. Muffled like this, the clink and splash and talk sounded like party noises. He could imagine the party conversation as well. “Goodness, where have you
been,
you’re
weeks
behind. Why, that’s deader than the Alec affair. Bunny’s with Peter now and Ralph’s with this Laurie boy. No, you wouldn’t have, he’s new, Sandy picked him up in the street originally; he’s the boy Sandy and Alec had that row about. Funny boy, a cripple, awkward about mixing. However, Ralph’s
madly
in love with him at the moment. I thought
everyone
knew.”

You don’t get away from it, thought Laurie; once you’re really in, you never get away. You get swept along the road with the refugees, till you find you’ve been carried through the gates without noticing, and you’re behind the wire for the duration. The closed shop.
Nous autres.

It would never be like that with Andrew, he thought. Talking in the hospital kitchen at night, they had felt special only in their happiness, and separate only in their human identities. How good it would be to see him now! At least one could write; and getting down into the bedclothes, he spent comfortingly in this way the next half-hour. It was not till he reread it that he realized how far it was falsified by what had been left out, and by that time it was too late to write it again, without missing the early morning post.

He was asleep when the sirens went. Used at the other hospital not to associate their sound with very much urgency, his subconscious mind dismissed it and let him sleep on. But the guns were linked with other memories, and waked him at once; the bombs began a few minutes later.

The other patients said at first that it wasn’t as bad as last night; then they seemed to decide that comparisons were odious, and made no more. Laurie remembered how in France, before he was wounded, he had begun to get his second wind, helped by the stimulus of action and the comradeship around him. It hadn’t been so good lying passively on the beach with the Stukas coming over, after one had had a sample already; but the morphia had helped most of the time. It had been light, too. Hearing two old gaffers joking together on the other side of the ward, he realized he was much more frightened than they were; and he remembered with shame Ralph, who hadn’t been too drunk that night to know what he was doing, falling asleep in Bunny’s deep chair. When he had set the wheels moving for Laurie’s transfer from the country, he would scarcely have considered small inconveniences like this. Accustomed to communicate his own courage to those around him, no doubt he believed most people to be braver than they really were.

“Spud. You awake?”

“Hello,” said Laurie, sitting up. “Yes, I am, but I didn’t think you were. Do they still wake you up at two for the Wonder Drug?”

“No, only ten now. But it’s a bit noisy to sleep, isn’t it?”

Indeed, no one was attempting to do so, and the nurses had sensibly decided that it was better to keep the patients cheerful than quiet. But children will sleep through almost anything, and Mervyn’s stillness had been deceptive. He looked feverish, Laurie thought, and it would be partly that which was making him shiver. Laurie lit himself a cigarette, and got up.