The Charioteer Read online

  “Hello,” he said. “What’s cooking?”

  “What’s cooking? Eh?” Reg wheeled round, so that Neames had to duck to dodge a scythelike sweep of the splint. “Cor, Spuddy, you wait till you hear. This’ll kill you, this will. Listen to this. Who d’you think they’re sending up here, to do for us ’stead of the maids?”

  “German prisoners?” guessed Laurie. Unlikely as it seemed, he could think of nothing else proportionable to Reg’s fury.

  “Oh, come on, wake up, Spud; what Jerry prisoners do we get? Only the Luftwaffe boys. And God’s truth, I’d rather have a bunch of them. They learn them this Nazi stuff in the schools, they don’t know no better, they’ve been had for suckers but they done their duty the way they see it, same as us. Not like these creeping-Jesus, knock-kneed conchies.”

  Laurie took it in. He whistled.

  “C.o.s? God, that’s going to be a bit embarrassing.”

  “Embarrassing?” said Reg sharply. He usually covered up Laurie’s social gaffes, but this was serious. “Too true it is. Embarrassing for them, the muckers.”

  “One way to look at it,” said Neames, making what was evidently not his first speech in the debate, “they’re mouths the country’s got to feed. If they’re kept in prison producing nothing, who foots the bill? We do. Now here we have the nurses wasting half their time on cleaning, and everyone’s comfort going by the board. No fraternization, that goes without saying. But no obstruction. That’s what I suggest.”

  Reg snorted. “Got it totted up like the petty cash, haven’t you? After all we been through, if I was to see one of them muggers coming up with a soap and flannel to wash me, I’d smack it acrost his face. Don’t worry, we’ll soon have them out of here.”

  There was a growl of assent from the meeting behind him. Laurie listened in mounting depression and dismay; his imagination flinched from the series of excruciating little dramas he saw approaching. He said, “You know, they did some pretty fine ambulance work in the last war, right in the line.”

  “Ah,” said Reg, “that would be the Quakers. Not that I hold with them, but that’s a proper religion, what they’ve been brought up to, same as what the Catholics are.”

  “But if—” began Laurie. His knee, which had been aching dully, like a sprain, had begun to ache fiercely, like a burn. Growing cross, he said, “Don’t look now, but it’s supposed to be our religion too, when there isn’t a war on.”

  “If you’ll excuse me saying so, Odell, you’re apt to be a bit too easygoing. Suppose we had Hitler here, and all our kiddies brought up to worship Valhalla and inform on us to the Gestapo. What about religion then?” Laurie perceived in Neames’s sallow face the old stresses of a fierce struggle and hard victory; it gave him, for a moment, almost distinction.

  “Yes, that’s a point. Still—”

  “Good old Spud,” said Reg with sudden awkward kindness; he had recognized the signs of pain and fatigue around Laurie’s eyes and mouth. “Argue the case for Jack the Ripper, he would.”

  “What are you men doing still up?” The Sister, expecting trouble, had scented it from afar. “I know you’ve been helping outside, Odell, and thank you, but get along now. Barker, you’ve been here long enough to know the rule about sitting on beds.”

  Laurie’s leg felt worse before it felt better. He lay trying to forget it, thumbing the pages of a dog-eared magazine. The unshaded electric bulbs revealed mercilessly the cement floors, the wooden lockers with their day’s burden of ash, orange peel, paper and foil.

  Reg Barker, returning from a trip to the lavatory, jerked the thumb of his good hand at the outer door. “Them sods has moved in.”

  “Which?” asked Laurie vaguely. “Oh, yes. Have they?”

  “Just been out and seen them come up in a truck and move into the maids’ block. Proper lot of pansies, too.”

  “Go on, Reg, it’s been dark for hours, you couldn’t tell if they were Zulus.”

  “Wait till tomorrow and you’ll see, then. Same as what they will.”

  “You know, Reg, let’s face it, we’re all a bit on edge here. We can do to take things quietly, for our own sakes.”

  “Then why do they have to send the muckers here, as if we hadn’t got no feelings?”

  “God knows, and some zombie at Whitehall. Still, why make it worse?”

  “You know, Spud, it’s right for once what Neames said, you’re too easygoing by half. Why should they get away with it? Sitting safe on their backsides at home and taking our jobs.” A dark flush rose in his forehead. “There’s women that fall for that smarmy sort,” he said, “if they can talk posh.”

  “Did you say taking our jobs? They’re welcome to mine in the kitchen. I say, Reg—before you get into bed, would you mind asking Sister if I can have some A.P.C.?”

  “Knee playing up?” Reg leaned forward; the shape of his splint made him look as if he were preparing a savage blow. Anxious creases divided his brows.

  “Nothing much. You were right, though. I did mess about on it a bit too long.”

  “They got no business to have put you on that kitchen fatigue. I said all along.”

  “Someone’s got to, with all you lucky people in arm splints.”

  “Well,” said Reg with vicious emphasis, “from tomorrow on, those muckers can do it. And like it.”

  Laurie looked ingenuously up at him. “So they can. I shan’t be sorry, I must say.”

  It was not one of his good nights. He was awake till the Night Sister gave him medinal at two. This sent him soundly off; so that a touch on his shoulder, waking him to light and clatter, filled him with impotent outrage. Dimly aware that the offending hand was not a nurse’s, he burrowed into the pillow and growled, “What the bleeding hell is it?”

  “I’m sorry. If I can just take your temperature.”

  Sudden recollection jerked Laurie awake. He looked up into a lean, austere face with a short grizzled beard. There was no doubt that the beard had a chin under it.

  “Excuse my language,” he said uncomfortably. “I was half asleep.” He suppressed what he had meant to say; tomorrow would do. This was silly, for he might have known Reg would never let it pass.

  “He don’t have it taken mornings,” said Reg promptly. “He gets up.”

  The man withdrew his thermometer from Laurie’s arm. “Then I’ve waked you for nothing. I’m extremely sorry. I won’t do it again.”

  “It’s all right. I never sleep much after the work starts.”

  “Go on,” said Reg, more in sorrow than in anger. “Day before yesterday you slept till the breakfast come round, you know that.”

  The bearded man as he passed on gave Laurie a slow smile which seemed, oddly, both sophisticated and good. He went on to Charlot, to whom he spoke in fluent idiomatic French. Reg said, in a hoarse whisper, “Here. What’s he doing here? You’re not telling me he’s still military age. Nor anywhere near.”

  Laurie looked again. “No, of course. He must be a good fifty. Perhaps it was all a mistake.”

  He looked along the ward. Another man, wearing a coarse, gray cotton coat like the first, was pulling out the beds one by one to sweep. No, thought Laurie with sinking spirits, this one wasn’t over age. He was a small man, with a small licked-down mustache, and looked about twenty-six. Eager conscientiousness informed his every movement. Chapel type, Laurie decided; and thinks damn is pretty serious swearing. This really is going to be rather hell.

  “Proper little pipsqueak,” hissed Reg.

  “Doesn’t look as if he’d pass a medical,” said Laurie hopefully.

  “Go on. Course they’re c.o.s. It’s written all over them. Search me what the old boy’s here for, though.”

  Laurie glanced after the bearded man, now several beds away. Neames, looking straight ahead, allowed his temperature to be taken as if by an automaton. The next bed was Willis’s.

  Willis was a towheaded youth, whom Neames had early christened the Missing Link. He had never seemed to resent this, though he was
quarrelsome by nature; Laurie deduced that he didn’t know what it meant. Willis always made him feel uncomfortable. One felt he should have been given a choice at the outset, whether or not to be born. It must have taken generations of conditioning to breed him, in some dockside warren neglected by angels and the borough inspector.

  Reg said, “Watch this, this’ll be good.”

  “Willis gets up,” said Laurie. “He’s only got to say so. What the hell did they send them here for, this bloody Government’ll lose us the war.”

  It was often quite hard to hear what Willis said, even when he was not chewing. It was the prevailing hush which carried his voice along the ward.

  “You can take that—thing away, and put it where the—monkey put the—nuts. I don’t want none of you—’s touching me.”

  The c.o. replied as if to an expected social commonplace. “I expect not, it’s awkward for both of us. Still, we’ll have to get on with it, I suppose.”

  “You—off and get on with it somewhere else. See?”

  “This is a lot of silly bull,” said Laurie. He sat up, and reached for his crutch. But the little c.o. had just pulled out his bed from the wall where it was, and he couldn’t reach it.

  “I say, Reg.” But Reg had hitched his dressing-gown over his shoulder, and was shuffling down the ward.

  “Here,” he said to the c.o. “Didn’t they give you no list of the men that gets up?”

  “No,” said the c.o. with a friendly smile. “I ought to have asked for it.”

  “You only want it mornings. Evenings they take them all round, barring the chaps out on passes. I reckon that’s soft, not giving you no list. Asking for it, that is. Here. You turn that paper over and I’ll give you one now. Save tempers all round, that will.”

  When they had finished he turned around. “And when you done your funny number, Willis,” he said over his shoulder, “you remember there ain’t been no comfort in the ward since the maids went, and if this lot’s transferred there won’t be none again. What you want them to do, go through the whole flipping war without working?”

  Just then Laurie’s bed moved. The little c.o., having swept behind it, was putting it back. His face confronted Laurie over the end of it, as he shoved earnestly with all the force of his thin arms. Laurie said encouragingly, “Next time give me that crutch first, then you can have the pram without the baby.”

  “Oh, beg pardon. Yes, of course.” With helpless concern and irritation, Laurie saw that he had blushed to the ears. Perhaps he thought his physique was being sneered at. Suddenly Laurie felt that, early as it was, his nervous system had had enough. He would get away for a bit, he thought, before he lost his sense of humor over some trivial annoyance. He was not allowed to dress yet, but with luck the bathroom might be free.

  The lavatory was too filthy to linger in—no one could have scrubbed it since the maids went—but he was lucky with the bath. Although he couldn’t get into it properly because of the dressings on his leg, at least the water was hot. The window was steaming up; he opened it; an apple tree in a cottage garden looked faintly gold against a cool blue autumn sky, and he caught the smoky tang of sun on frost-caught leaves.

  Behind the noise of the taps, the jerry-built hut echoed with every thud and bang of the morning work. He could hear someone scrubbing the floor just outside, and whistling quietly. The whistling stopped almost as soon as he turned the taps off. The last notes had sounded like a phrase of Mozart, but he had probably imagined it.

  As he dried himself, the sun went in behind a cloud; easing himself slowly and stiffly into his pajama trousers, he got a waft of watery haddock from the kitchen. Just another day, he thought. He put on his dressing-gown, reached for his crutch, and opened the door into the lobby.

  The cement floor outside was wet; a voice said quickly, “Look out for the bucket.”

  Before he had seen around the door, some instantaneous reflex caused Laurie to say “Oh, thanks very much” in a conversational, instead of an automatic way.

  He came out. In the open doorway of the lavatory, the boy who had been scrubbing the floor sat back on his heels and smiled.

  Laurie stopped in his tracks, balanced himself between the crutch and the bathroom doorpost, and smiled back. Well, he thought after a moment, one can’t just stand grinning like a fool. “Hello. What was that bit of Mozart you were whistling just now?”

  The boy put down his floorcloth, wiped his hand on the seat of his trousers, and with the back of it pushed the hair away from his eyes. It was fairish, the color of old gilt. He had a fair skin which was smoothly tanned, so that his gray eyes showed up very bright and clear. He was working in old corduroy trousers and a gray flannel shirt with rolled sleeves.

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “I was thinking about something else.” Fearing perhaps to have sounded unsocial, he smiled again.

  Laurie had become touched with a feeling of panic, like someone confronted with a locked door and a strange bunch of keys, none of which may fit. He said with a jerk, “I thought it might be the Oboe Quartet in F Major.” This simply happened to be one of the few he could identify by name. The boy said in a willing way, “It might have been; it’s one I’m very fond of” and stirred the cloth in the bucket, sending up a clean bleak smell of carbolic.

  “Was it this bit?” Laurie said. He tried to hum a few bars of the first movement. The boy sat with a listening expression; at the end he said with serious courtesy, “Yes, it probably was that bit,” and then, as there began to be a pause, “Have you ever heard Goossens play it?”

  “No. Only on a record. Have you?”

  “Only the record.”

  There was another pause. The boy started to work again, though not in a dismissing way, and moved his bucket into the lavatory doorway. “This is a bit of a dreary job for you,” Laurie said.

  “Here. Move that mucking bucket, you lazy—, d’you think we’ve got all day?” Laurie hadn’t heard Willis coming up behind them.

  The boy had started a little, but repressed it quickly; he moved the bucket, civilly but without apology. Willis stepped forward to pass it. There was a kind of forced clumsiness in his gait, a crude preparation for knocking the bucket over. Laurie swung out on his crutch and, silently, caught Willis’s eye. It was a look he had not tried on anyone since his last year at school, but apparently it still worked. Willis’s face slumped soggily, seeming to mirror a defeated ancestry as long as Banquo’s line of kings. He went inside and slammed the door. It was over in seconds.

  The boy stood up. Laurie could see that he was shyly, but doggedly, working up to something. “That was very kind of you. But it will have to come out sometime, if that’s how he feels. We have to cope with all that ourselves, I mean. It’s the least we can do, after all, isn’t it?”

  The brush with Willis had fortified Laurie’s self-confidence. “Well, to you it probably seems to be your business; but to me it seems to be mine. I have to live here.”

  “Have you been here long?”

  “Oh, I more or less crept out of the woodwork, I—”

  The face of the bearded man came in at the door. He looked at them with kindly detached interest and said briskly, “When you’ve finished in there, Andrew, will you take the swill bucket down to the main kitchen? They’ll show you there what to do with it.” The boy looked up, smiled with casual but affectionate ease, said, “All right, Dave,” and bent to his scrubbing again.

  Andrew, thought Laurie; the name slipped into place like a clear color-note in the foreground of a picture. Mechanically he stepped aside as the lavatory door opened; Willis came out and went off without a backward glance. “Andrew what?”

  “Raynes. But we don’t use surnames much.”

  “Are you Quakers? Sorry, I’m never sure whether that’s rude or not.”

  “Oh, it stopped being rude about 1700. We mostly say Friends.”

  “Here,” said Laurie suddenly, “you washed all that before.” He looked past Andrew into the open door.
“Stop that. Leave it just as it is. I’m going to fetch him back and rub his face in it.”

  Andrew, busy with the cloth, said over his shoulder, “Well, I can’t stop you. If you think it’ll do any of us any good.”

  “This is my show. Just leave this to me.”

  “Look. This man’s had nothing since he was born but his two hands to work with; and he’s given one of those. You can’t expect him to welcome us with flowers. Give him a chance.”

  “Willis,” said Laurie crisply, “is suffering from a self-inflicted wound, caused by gross incompetence. He fumbled a grenade in the practice pit. It killed his instructor, a very good man who was decorated in the last war, and he’s never shown the slightest sign of giving a damn. I shouldn’t waste any beautiful thoughts on Willis, if I were you.” They stared, with very mixed feelings, into each other’s faces. Suddenly Laurie laughed and said, “I saw the ’potamus take wing, Ascending from the damp savannas—’ ”

  Andrew laughed too; his teeth showed clear, like his eyes, against the tan. He backed out of the doorway and Laurie saw that the floor was clean again.

  “You’ll hear me called Spud about the place, but actually it’s Laurie. Laurie Odell. I’d give you a hand with that, but this strapping’s a bit tight on my knee.”

  “I can see Dave’s face if I let you.”

  “That chap with the beard?” Jealousy breathed on him, like the first shiver of sickness. “Who is he exactly?”

  “Well, he’s just Dave. I mean, nothing officially. He did a lot of this work in the 1914 war. He’s voluntary now, of course.”

  “Do you like him a lot?”

  “Oh, I’ve known Dave a long time.”

  Laurie saw that the last patch of floor was nearly finished. “If I only had my gramophone here, we could have had some Mozart, sometime.” He tilted his shoulder against the wall; the crutch felt a little shaky. “I’ve got quite a bit of Tchaikovsky, ballet music mostly. It’s all right when you feel like it, or don’t you think so? I read somewhere once, Tchaikovsky was queer.”