The Charioteer (9 page)

He moved his hand across the letter, as if to brush away the invisible words, and sealed it up.

Suppers were finished; the loose ends of the day’s work were tied off. Laurie’s meditations returned, growing somber with night and weariness. He limped on and on through a darkening maze without a center.

“ ’S matter, Spud? Tired?”

“Bit. Sorry.”

“Get you some A.P.C.?”

“Later, I think. Thanks, Reg.”

The ward lights were turned off, leaving only the yellow pool by the Sister’s table, and the glow of the radio dial. The star program of the week was on: a cinema organist, who played request numbers for the Forces, chosen by their people at home. Laurie was tired, and his stomach for this kind of thing was queasy at the best. He got down into the bedclothes, and tried to sleep. The Sister gave the report, added her afterthoughts, and went off duty. Nurse Sims, the Night Nurse, stepped forward with decision to the radio table.

“Have a heart, Nurse,” said someone as usual. “Suppose there was a request for one of us?”

“The B.B.C. always sends a—”

“… And now,” said the radio, its inhuman geniality becoming tinged with a manly pathos, “I have a rather special message for Lance-Corporal Reginald Barker, who is a patient at …” Not so much the name, as the ward’s electrified hush, roused Laurie from his apathy. Beside him Reg, who had just got into bed and had been reaching down for something in his locker, lay frozen in that position by shock. Among all this Laurie had missed a phrase or two. “… to forgive and forget. And she hopes that this lovely melody will recall happy honeymoon days, and bring you both together again. So here it is, for Lance-Corporal Reginald Barker—‘Souvenirs’!”

The organist did Reg proud. He used the
vox humana
in the first half, and the
vox angelica
in the second. It was like sugar with warm treacle sauce.

Laurie crawled down into the bed. No one could very well suppose him to be sleeping, but there seemed nothing else one could do for Reg. In the Dark Ages, he thought, they only cropped your ears, or branded you in the forehead, or stood you in the pillory. They hadn’t the resources of civilization.

All activity in the ward had ceased. The man on the other side of Charlot was trying to explain the situation to him in five well-chosen words helped out with mime. At the bottom end of the ward a young man with a passable tenor had begun to croon expressively (filling the merciful gaps in Laurie’s memory) the words of the song.

The first essential, Laurie thought, would be to see that Reg didn’t put his razor under his pillow and cut his throat during the night. He peeped out cautiously from under the blanket, but Reg’s head, as he had expected, was turned the other way.

I count them all apart,

And when the tear-drops start,

I find a broken heart among my souvenirs.

It was over. A low buzz of comment quivered through the ward. Nurse Sims stared at the radio, lastingly defeated; she would never be able to turn off a request program again. Laurie turned on his side, the side facing Reg. One could take delicacy too far; it didn’t help to make a man feel like a leper.

Reg turned round. It surprised Laurie vaguely that he didn’t attempt to hide his face. His lower lip was trembling. Tears welled from under his sandy lashes.

“I’ll send her a wire tomorrow, first thing. I never knew she felt like that.”

He fumbled for his dressing-gown, hitching it blindly over his splinted shoulder. While Laurie was still searching for a reply he had gone down the ward. In his wake the buzz rose to an eager, satisfied muttering. If one could have turned all the lights on suddenly, Laurie thought, there would have been applause.

He lay back on the pillow, the only one not running over with gossip and sensation, the odd man out.

The clink and rattle of mugs on a trolley sounded beside him. The nurse usually came around at this hour, putting water on the lockers for the night. He turned over.

“Please, Nurse …” His voice stopped. It was Andrew with the trolley.

The forms, the shadows, the colors in the ward magically regrouped and changed. The pool of light on the Sister’s table had for the first time mystery beyond its rim.

Andrew pushed the trolley up quietly. He was wearing old, white tennis shoes. The light shining sideways on his hair made it look fairer and brighter than in the day. Shadow made the structure of his face emphatic, the eyes deeper-set, the mouth firmer. He looked more resolute, and at the same time younger. When he smiled, as he did immediately he saw who it was that had spoken, it seemed to Laurie almost frighteningly dramatic and beautiful.

Whispering as everyone did after lights-out, he said, “Now I know where to find you. Did you think I was going to leave you out?” He came with a mug and stood it on the locker, pausing, his fingers around the handle.

“What are you doing here, so late?”

“I’ve just gone on night duty. General orderly.”

“But have you had any sleep?”

“Oh, one hardly would the first day.” He lingered, with a curious lack of awkwardness, like a well-mannered child who assumes that, if unwanted at present, he will be dismissed without ill-feeling. Laurie at once found his mind a helpless blank.

“What about the man next you?” Andrew said. “He’d like some water, wouldn’t he?”

“Yes, please.” In a moment he would be gone; Laurie saw “Good night” forming already on his face.

“That’s Reg Barker’s bed, we came off the beach together. Have you heard what happened tonight?”

“No.” Andrew came back easily. There was a kind of trust behind the surface attention in his face. Laurie saw suddenly that it wasn’t the too-easy trust of people to whom everything has always been kind. Thankful that whispering would hide anything odd in his voice, he told the story.

Andrew said, his eyes looking grave under their shadowy lids, “Well, if he loves her.”

“After that?” Like someone touching the edge of a sleeve by stealth, he said, “Could you?”

“I expect, you know,” said Andrew, “he only had room for just the one thing.”

It was the morning of visiting day. Walking patients sat on the edges of their beds, polishing their brass. Supplies of hospital blue had not even yet caught up with the sudden Dunkirk demand upon a stricken commissariat. Many of them had arrived in rags, some half naked, or draped in the wayside gifts of shocked civilians; and few of them had not retained from this experience some traces of a savage, primitive humiliation. Even now those who got up were often dressed partly in items of uniform taken from the dead, and Laurie had asked nobody where his trousers came from.

Matron had just arrived, and done a round. She came poking into the ward, her petticoat showing slightly, defensively frigid; she had been promoted beyond her dreams and it had been a Nessus’ shirt to her. Homesick for her little country nursing home, she peered down the line of beds, noting with dismay how many men were up and at large, rough men with rude, cruel laughter, who wrote things on walls, who talked about women, who got V.D. (but then one was able to transfer them elsewhere). She was wretched, but her career was booming.

“Sour-faced old bag,” said Reg as she disappeared.

“I suppose …” began Laurie vaguely; but the feeling of pathos he had just experienced, meeting her slightly bulging, frightened eye, defied communication. He applied himself to the job of darning Reg’s socks. “God, Reg, I can get my fist through this one. It’ll be the most awful cobble. Why the hell don’t you let me do them when they start to go?”

“Here, you leave it, I’ll wear odd ones.”

“No, I can get it together.” He had invented a kind of blanket-stitch for this purpose. “When’s she coming? First bus?”

“That’s right.” There was a tacit understanding between them that the recent breach should be admitted, but not discussed. “Your mum coming ’sarternoon?”

“That’s right,” said Laurie, trying to sound flat and unexcited.

He had been allowed to dress today, for the first time since the operation. He was getting about briskly now; the stage of transition between crutch and stick had been reached. They had measured him already for a surgical boot.

Presently he slipped out of the ward, and into the square between the huts. He stood on the dirty grass enclosed by the asphalt, sown with coarse weeds and empty cigarette-cartons; the sky shone with the warm, yet delicate and tender blue of early autumn, a huge cumulus towering in it. At this hour, toward midday, it was almost certain that Andrew would have gone to bed. There was just the faint possibility which had become the mainspring of Laurie’s morning. In the afternoon, when the whole of the night staff was sleeping, the tension relaxed; this, if Laurie would have admitted it to himself, was usually the happiest time of his day.

The usual people were coming and going in the square. Watching the traffic, Laurie got little pointers to the degree of acceptance the c.o.s had achieved. A sergeant from another ward, a lonely schoolmaster whom his wound had balked of promotion, was frankly and enjoyably chatting with the bearded Dave. A nurse stopped one of the others, to discuss briefly but amicably some current job. A private from Ward A, whom Laurie didn’t know, observing this conversation spat noisily in the grass. Another soldier offered him a rather awkward “Good morning.”

Reg was back in the ward, supervising Derek’s preparations for lunch. Derek, the little man with the licked-down mustache, had become Reg’s protégé. Willis had soon found Dave and Andrew unrewarding subjects; but this shy and earnest little creature was the ideal victim. Laurie had interfered now and again; but Reg, pricked by the memory of snobberies in his home neighborhood, had found Derek’s refinement as irritating as his name, and decided that a bit of toughening-up wouldn’t hurt him. This attitude had changed mysteriously on a day when Reg’s arm was replastered, and Derek had the tricky and painful job of cutting the old plaster off. This was done in the privacy of the bathroom, and Reg had never volunteered any information about it, except once to say to Laurie that, in his opinion, Derek’s growth had been stunted by always taking other people’s troubles too much to heart.

Thinking about these things in a general way, Laurie became aware of a thin, tinny warble, the hospital’s Imminent Danger siren. There had been no big daylight raids hereabouts, so, though officially everyone out of doors was supposed to take cover, in fact a few extra people came out to scan the sky.

Presently there was the deep contrapuntal hum of many engines together, and in the broad square of sky between the roofs the dogfight appeared: small black plane after small black plane, weaving and circling. At that distance the motion looked joyful, like a dance of gnats. Then in the fresh sky one of the Spitfires turned away out of the battle. It glided for a while, then seemed to slip sideways. Something broke off from it; it fell over and over, like a toy thrown by a child from a high window, and disappeared behind the roofs. Nobody spoke. One of the nurses, who had an Irish face, made the sign of the cross.

But the Messerschmitt which had shot down the Spitfire had been engaged at once by another. Suddenly the German plane leaked a dribble of smoke, there was a silent flash, then as the sound overtook it, the explosion. A scatter of black shards fell at leisure. The battle passed out of sight, the planes catching the sun in silvery flashes as they turned, pretty and brisk as minnows in the high clear air.

A little mounting cheer ran around the group in the square. The Irish nurse, waving at the voided sky, looked as if someone had given her a present. Laurie was cheering too, his pent-up emotions escaping thankfully in the general release. Then on the outskirts of the group he saw Dave. At first his face seemed almost expressionless, till one looked at his eyes.

“Here,” said Reg in the ward, “whassup with you, Spud? You look properly cheesed. Have done for days. Trouble at home?”

“No. Oh, I don’t know, Reg. One thing and another.”

“Leg’s been a long time. Playing up and that. Bound to lose patience, stands to reason.” He looked as if he were anxiously balancing a large handful of tact, without quite knowing where to put it down.

“It’ll never be up to much: I heard Ferguson say so.”

“Ah,” said Reg. He had evidently tried to strike a note of surprise, but without much success. He rubbed the back of his head. Laurie realized that Reg had been anticipating this moment, trying to prepare consolation in advance, worrying about it. “Well, Spud, what our mum used to say, you never know if them things is meant. What I mean, say that one missed you. Advance ten paces, stop another one; might have been your head. See, you never know.”

“No,” said Laurie. “That’s right. You never know.”

“Cheeses you off, though. You know, Spud, what I reckon, do you more good than anything? Start to go steady. Meeting all the girls you must have, college and all, bound to have one marked down, don’t tell me. Eh?”

Laurie bent quickly to hunt for something in his locker. “Well—sort of, I suppose.”

“Ah. Well, Spud, only way to look at it, if she loves you, won’t make no difference. If not, better off without her. Can’t get away from that, can you?”

“No. That’s right—I’ve never said anything to her, matter of fact. I don’t think it would work. I’m going to forget all about it.”

“Ah. One thing you got to remember: let it run on too long and it’s got you, see? That’s where the trouble starts. Well, it’s nice your mum coming up today. Takes you out of yourself. Getting the news from home, and that.”

“Yes. I’ve been bloody awful company lately, Reg. I’m sorry.”

“Ah, nark it. Here, you get used to that stick soon as you can, we can pop over on the bus to the pictures.”

Laurie found himself counting the hours till his mother arrived. He thought of her coming with inexpressible comfort although, if challenged, he could not have told anyone what he trusted in. She loved him; but she was apt to offer or withhold her love in a system of rewards and punishments, as she had during his childhood. He scarcely concealed from himself the fact that what she called looking on the bright side was what he would have called wishful thinking in anyone else. But among his own uncertainties, all these settled attitudes of hers gave him a sense of stability and rest. In the deep places below his thinking, she had kept the old power to make Providence seem a projection of herself; if she approved, it too would approve and reward him. Now he had committed himself to courses which only lunacy could have supposed her to sanction; yet instinctively he still transposed into this different medium the basic lessons he had learned at her knee: own up to what you do, never break your word, never hurt anyone’s feelings unless there is something or somebody to be defended; always kick a banana-skin off the pavement, someone might slip on it and fall.