The Charioteer Page 10

  An eddy of air in the quiet lane brought back like an echo the stamp and jingle of the horses, a shake of the bridle and a snort.

  … Let us say, then, that the soul resembles the joined powers of a pair of winged horses and a charioteer. Now the horses and drivers of the gods are of equal temper and breed, but with men it is otherwise. …

  For the first time in months, he had remembered the dirty little parcel done up in newspaper at the back of his locker. It had contained the things saved from his pockets after Dunkirk, when the clothes had been cut away. A pocket-knife; a pipe he had been trying to get used to; a lighter; and the book Lanyon had given him seven years ago, with a brown patch of blood across the cover, and the edges of the pages stuck at the top. At different times he had tried the knife, the pipe, and the lighter, found them ruined, and thrown them away. The book had looked done for, too; but it was still there.

  5

  LAURIE WAS ANXIOUS TO get the gramophone out of the ward before it was noticed; he had not forgotten that a former patient had been accustomed to play his against the radio. Under cover of night he passed it to Andrew, who received it with joy; the c.o.s had had only one gramophone among them, and it had broken down. Laurie apologized for the records; but this proved to be quite unnecessary. A few days later the hospital rang with a new and sensational scandal: eight nurses had been found by the matron in the orderlies’ common-room, dancing with the orderlies.

  The news soon got to the wards, where it divided opinion as decisively as the Dreyfus affair. The hard core of animosity centered on Neames; his cold resentment, which had seemed temperate at the outset compared with noisier indignations, had outlasted them all. Willis was surprisingly tepid. As for Reg, he was anti-matron before anything else. He spent a happy day imputing to little Derek unimaginable excesses; but these two understood each other perfectly.

  It took Laurie some hours of unobtrusive intelligence work to learn that Andrew hadn’t been there. He enjoyed this relief till the evening, when they met, and it turned out that Andrew had merely left before the matron’s arrival, being due on duty.

  “It’s very interesting,” he said, fixing Laurie with his candid gray eyes, “very primitive, you know. Subconsciously they feel we’re a biological loss and ought not to have women or propagate ourselves. John in the kitchen said that was sure to happen, but as a matter of principle we shouldn’t submit to it.”

  Laurie needed a moment or two to recover from this. “But did you want to have any of them?”

  “Oh, not literally.” Andrew looked amused. “I have hopes for John, I must admit; but it’s much too early to say anything.”

  “Who did you dance with?” asked Laurie, who had just ordered himself to change the subject.

  “Most of them, as far as I remember. I danced with Nurse Adrian twice.”

  “Did you find plenty to talk about?”

  “Yes, we talked about you.” Andrew smiled, and settled his head back on his arms. “We were in favor of you,” he added sleepily. He had only just got up.

  They sat on a bank scattered with old beech-mast. Through a gap in the bronze trees, across the stream, the apples of Eden could be seen, blandly shining. It was like Limbo, Laurie remarked.

  “Who is Limbo supposed to be for?” asked Andrew. “I can never remember.”

  “The good pagans, to whom the faith was never revealed. Such as Plato, I suppose; Buddha, Socrates, Confucius, and so on. A sort of eternal consolation prize.”

  Laurie settled his back into the slope, and lit a cigarette. The stream sounded different from this side, mixed with the dry whisper of the beeches. After a few minutes he said, “How would you feel about your mother marrying again?”

  After a pause Andrew said, “I don’t know. I daresay I shouldn’t have cared for it, really. Now, of course, I feel I should be only too glad, if it meant she was alive.”

  This caused the inevitable awkwardness and apologies; but a little later he made no difficulty about talking. He had been born into one of those army families where every second or third generation throws off a sport, a musician perhaps, or a brilliant agricultural crank. Andrew’s father had served with distinction through the First World War, and had gone to Germany with the Army of Occupation. Peace had not been signed and the blockade was still on: an undisciplined habit grew up among the Allied troops of giving away their rations to the match-limbed, potbellied German children. An Order of the Day had to be issued about it. In the following week Andrews father, about whom no one had noticed anything odd except a certain taciturnity, resigned from his regiment, arranged his affairs at home in a family atmosphere of shocked silence, joined the Friends’ Ambulance Service, and went back to Germany again. There, some months later, he met and married Andrew’s mother, a lifelong Quaker; they continued working together until she became pregnant. While she was in England awaiting Andrew’s birth, the unit, which was by now in Austria, went to deal with a typhus epidemic. Overworked and under par, Andrew’s father got the disease, and in a couple of days was dead.

  Dave had known both his parents, Andrew said. In fact, Dave was almost his only living link with his mother. He had been in charge of the unit, and it had been to Dave that Andrew’s father, in a more or less lucid interval of fever, had dictated his will.

  At this point, Laurie was shocked to find his mind centered entirely on the unfair advantage this start had given to Dave, who, Laurie thought, on the strength of all this seemed to have assumed almost proprietary airs; there must be something behind it. But Andrew had noticed his lapse of attention, and evidently feared the story was becoming a bore. He dried up, and it took a couple of minutes to get him going again.

  He had been brought up as a Quaker by his mother, to whom, obviously, he had been passionately devoted. If half he said about her was true, she had been an exceptionally gifted saint. When he spoke of her Laurie saw, as he had never seen in him at other times, a strain of fanaticism. She had died very suddenly when he was twelve, leaving no relatives who could do with him. His paternal grandmother, however, had been more than willing. It had been anguish to her all this time to see their good stock running to waste. She had treated him with kindness, and in her way with tact, never slighting his mother’s memory except in the daily implications of the code she taught him. The uncle and aunt, to whom he was passed on at her death a couple of years later, were less tactful. They had tried to send him at fifteen to the family school, which prepared for the army; he had refused to go there; they had insisted; Andrew had written the headmaster a letter which had caused him to turn Andrew down as an unsuitable entrant. There had been a shattering row about it, during some stage of which Andrew had appealed to Dave whom at that time he hardly knew. Dave had turned up, only to be insulted by the uncle and shown the door; but from that time onward, Andrew had kept in touch with him.

  Throughout this crisis, Andrew seemed to have behaved, according to the view one was inclined to take of it, with rocklike integrity or mulish obstinacy; in any case, with determination much beyond his years. His face became a different shape when he spoke of it; incongruously, one could now trace the soldier forebears in the set of his jaw. Laurie gathered that during the row something had been said about the mother which Andrew, if he had forgiven it, couldn’t forget; but he never told Laurie what it was.

  They had sent him in the end to a moderately progressive school, where he had enjoyed the term and dreaded the holidays. Then his call-up papers had arrived, heralding an explosion fiercer than any that had gone before. He talked of this less easily and Laurie could see that he was still raw from it.

  But for the war, he said, changing the subject, he would have been going up to Oxford this autumn. The college he had been entered for was just across the road from Laurie’s, and they reflected solemnly on the fact that they would have missed one another by a matter of a month or two. Quite likely, said Laurie, they would have run into each other somehow or other. Andrew smiled, and said yes, it seemed that
they were meant to meet. Laurie lived on these words for the next two days.

  The week after, Laurie’s own mother wrote to him, announcing her engagement to Mr. Straike. There is only one kind of shock worse than the totally unexpected: the expected for which one has refused to prepare.

  He was still staring at the open letter when he heard Reg creaking and breathing near him, minding his own business with that heavy tact which invites a confidence. Suddenly Laurie craved for those kind flat feet trampling down the sharper edges of his misery. He looked up.

  “Cheer up, cock,” said Reg in a leading voice. “All the same in a hundred years.”

  “That’s right. Not so hot now, though.”

  “How’s that, then?” Reg sat down beside him on the bed.

  Laurie told him the news. He did not canvass Reg’s views on Mr. Straike. When Reg said politely “No kidding?” and then “Bit unexpected, like?” there was perfect understanding between them.

  “Mind you,” said Reg, “it’s a nice position for her. Nice house and that, too, I daresay.”

  Laurie thought of the red, damp Gothic pile of the vicarage, its high, heavy rooms and horrid little lancet windows. He and his mother had lived in their seventeenth-century cottage almost since he could remember. For the first time he realized that this too would have to go.

  “Never told you, did I,” said Reg, “our dad nearly got caught, seven year it must be going on for now. Girl young enough to be his daughter. Never forget him bringing her home to tea. Only had to look at her. Well, I mean, you don’t know how to put it, like, to your own dad. Then my brother Len found out she was in the family way by a chap at his works. He had to tell the old man then. Proper broke him up, for a bit; and poor old Len, he didn’t like to show up at home for a couple of months; missed his birthday and all. Well, one thing, you got nothing like that to worry about with your mum. ’S all aboveboard and that.”

  “Oh, yes. I think he was keen to get it fixed up before I got home.”

  “Ah. On the artful side. Not after your mum’s money, you don’t reckon?”

  “She hasn’t got much. It would help, I suppose.”

  “Well, one way to look at it, you do know who he is. Not one of these fly-by-nights, mean to say. Mind you, Spud, it’s partly just the idea, like, and you get used to that. Still, got to face it, home’s not the same. Here, Spud. No offense and that, but this girl, now; I wouldn’t let her slip off the hook, not if I was you.”

  “Girl?” said Laurie, taken off his guard.

  “Come off it, now, you told me about her only the other day.”

  “Oh, that. I don’t think that will ever come to much.”

  “More fool you, excuse me saying so. Be better off with you than someone with two good legs what kicked her with them Saturday nights, wouldn’t she?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Right, then. That’s how you want to keep looking at it.”

  Laurie agreed to do so. Meanwhile, there was his mother’s letter to answer. After tearing up two versions which read too revealingly, he urged quite simply a pause for consideration. He sealed, stamped, and addressed it, with a heavy sense of its ultimate uselessness.

  The only other person with whom he discussed the news was Nurse Adrian, whom he met at the village post office when he was posting the letter. On the spur of the moment he invited her to tea at one of the rickety tables in the postmistress’s garden, and told her all, or nearly all, about it. It was pleasant, he found, to see her listening, her bare brown arms with their soft down folded on the table, her brown little face, under the straight flaxen hair looped back at the side, looking honest and troubled. At the end she said, “I’ll tell you something if you like I’ve never told anyone. When Bill, he’s my brother, he’s a prisoner of war now, when Bill was engaged two years ago to Vera, who of course is now my sister-in-law, and she really is a terribly nice person, she got pneumonia. I was lying in bed one night and my thoughts were sort of running on, and suddenly I woke up and looked at them, and I realized I’d been planning for when Vera was dead just like one might for the holidays. And she’d always been perfectly nice to me, even when I was in the way. Yet I knew I’d been wishing her dead, can you believe that? So, you see, if a person who’s had such terrible thoughts can get over it, and I have got over it, you’re bound to get over it before long.”

  He saw her looking at him with sudden anxiety; after this confession she was clearly prepared to see him turn from her with loathing. Without thinking much about it he leaned out and patted her folded arms.

  “Get along with you,” he said. “You know perfectly well if anything had really happened you’d have jumped into the river to pull her out.” Her unguarded eyes looked at him across the crumby little table, in admiration and relief. In them he saw himself reflected, a man, protecting, lightly lifting the burden. It did not seem to him specially ironic. His loneliness had preserved in him a good deal of inadvertent innocence; there was much of life for which he had no formula; it had never even occurred to him that he involved himself in various kinds of effort which, by ruling a few lines around himself, he could have avoided.

  She gazed at him with respect, and presently asked his opinion on the probable course of the war. Silly little dumbbell, he thought; but he could not analyze his affectionate amusement. The fact was that he found her a refreshing relief, and was already cutting and fitting himself a special personality to oblige her. He could be no more than three or four years her senior, but it felt like fifteen. Ever since he grew up he had been unobtrusively avoiding girls, whom secretly he imagined to be applying subtle and sophisticated tests to him, and observing the results with hidden scorn. Watching her off, he thought that she wore slacks well, as if she didn’t think about them; she had the right kind of shoes, and moved from the hips. He smiled and waved, and, as he turned away, wondered what the brother was like.

  Back in the ward, with the radio blaring “Roll Out the Barrel,” the thought of his mother came back to him, burning with all its implications deeper and deeper in; whole vistas of the future, as he reviewed them, suddenly becoming consumed and blowing away. He longed for the evening which would bring the relief of telling Andrew.

  “Been out?” said Reg as they waited for supper.

  “Not far. It’s nice outside. Warm.”

  “Sharp frost this morning. Nice now, is it?”

  “Yes, nice out of the wind.”

  “Here, Spud. No offense and that.”

  “Uh?” Laurie went deep into his locker after a cigarette.

  “Well, see, Spud, I know how it is. No one here can’t say you ever done any highbrow act. But what I mean, these lads come along, college boys like yourself, reading literary books and that. Well, stands to reason, ordinary, you have to keep a lot of your thoughts to yourself. I watched you when you didn’t know it, time and again.”

  Laurie came crimson out of the locker, where he longed to remain. “Christ, Reg, the bull you talk.” They sat, not looking at each other. Laurie knew his protest had been too weak; it should have been something more like “What would I want with that bunch of sissies?” Why, he wondered, was it the people one held in the most innocent affection who so often demanded from one the most atrocious treachery?

  “They interest me,” he said, doing his best. “You can’t help wondering what’s at the bottom of it, whether they just don’t like the idea of getting hurt, or what. Well, having seen a bit of them I don’t think it’s that. It may be with some of them; but not this lot.”

  “Ah, go on, Spud, don’t tell me you’ve been this long working that one out. I could have told you that, first day they come here. I watched them, I never said nothing. Not even Neames don’t think they’re yellow, no matter what he gives out. It’s just the idea, like, that gets him. Same as what it does me, and that’s a fact”

  “Fair enough, so it does me in a way. But as people, you know—”

  “That kid that does the ward at night, the young
one, properly took to you, hasn’t he?”

  “Me?” said Laurie. He went back quickly into the locker again. “Can’t say I’ve noticed it specially.”

  “What I’m getting at, Spud, you want to watch it. No offense.”

  “Come again?” said Laurie into the locker.

  “I mean the law,” said Reg with deliberation, “that’s what I mean.” He paused to push back the wet shreds into the end of his cigarette. “ ’Course, Spud, if you can talk some sense into him, good enough. But if he tries to start in on you, that’s where you want to watch it. Because that’s an offense. Seducing His Majesty’s troops from their allegiance. High treason, that is. Got to look out for yourself in this world, ’cause no one won’t do it for you.”

  “That’s right,” said Laurie. He took a long steadying draw on his cigarette. “I appreciate it, Reg. Don’t worry, I guarantee that if any seducing goes on it’ll be done by me.” He held his breath. Look out you don’t cut yourself, Reg had once said.

  Reg said, approvingly, “Ah. That’s more like it. That’s all a lad like that wants, someone to make a man of him.”

  After a restless night, he was awake in time for the six o’clock news. It seemed to him to contain more than the usual number of euphemisms and it occurred to him that fresh ones were steadily being coined, which met with less and less resistance. One by one the short bloody words, which kept the mind’s eye alive, were vanishing: a man-killing bomb was an anti-personnel bomb now. He remarked upon this to Neames, who was standing beside him.

  Neames hitched his dressing-gown, giving Laurie a hard sideways glance. The two of them were always getting involved in arguments; but, as the only men in the ward who acknowledged the rules of logic in debate, they put up with each other for the sake of conversation. “Morale’s a munition of war,” Neames said.