The Charioteer

  Sandy, stark naked after the recent struggle, heaved himself into a Dying Gladiator pose. “What do you care? I shan’t tell you.” He collapsed again.

  “Sandy. Listen to me—”

  “No,” said Ralph. He pushed Alec on one side, not unkindly but with finality. “Listen to me. How much more responsibility do you expect Alec to take for you, you fish-bellied, blackmailing little crap? You’re talking to me now. Are you going to tell us what you’ve taken, or shall I send Spud here to phone the hospital? Well? Take your choice.”

  Closing his eyes, Sandy murmured, “Only—aspirin. What there was in the bottle.”

  Ralph looked at Alec. “How much?”

  “Not more than a dozen tablets. He must have brought most of it up.”

  It seemed, indeed, that there was no more to come. They rolled Sandy’s limp form off the bath mat, and Laurie swilled it under the tap. Ralph said, “Better give him a tot, I suppose?”

  “Not if he’s bleeding much. I’ll have a look.” Alec untwisted the toothbrush from the tourniquet. “Good Lord, Ralph, you put this on tight enough.”

  “It’s supposed to be a tourniquet. Not a bangle.”

  “My hand’s gone dead,” moaned Sandy, reviving a little and working his fingers about. A dark red, sluggish bleeding at once started again. Alec stared at the razor cut, drawing his brows together, before he pressed back the pad and put the bandage on.

  Ralph said, “Don’t tell me, I know. It needs stitching.”

  “Yes,” said Alec. His examination of the wound had been confident and decisive; now suddenly he looked up at Ralph, worried to rags, his resources scattered, a civilized mind put out of gear by an uncivilized situation. “What on earth shall we do, Ralph? I’ve got nothing here.”

  “I’ll drive you down to the hospital. You can pick the things up there, surely. Spud’ll cope with everything here all right; won’t you, Spud?”

  He smiled at Laurie, briefly. More than anything till now, the smile evoked a host of memories. For that casual accolade, cutthroat little competitions, all the shrewder for being tacit and undiscussed, had gone on all over the School. It looked strange in this hole-and-corner, squalid setting, touched still as it was with confident assumptions and open skies.

  “Of course I will.”

  Ralph smiled again, which hadn’t happened at school, and said, “Right. Let’s heave him into bed and get going.”

  Alec, however, looked more worried than ever. “The trouble about the hospital is, I might get stuck there.”

  “How d’you mean, stuck?”

  “If the warning goes. I”—he looked down at Sandy, wretchedly—“I’m supposed to be on a casualty team. If there was a raid. Often there’s nothing to do, but if I were in the place I couldn’t walk out of it.” He reached for the dressing-gown and tucked it around Sandy, who was now shivering violently.

  Ralph said expressionlessly, “He’s on call too, I suppose?”

  Alec looked up at him. “Ralph. Have a heart.”

  “Sorry,” said Ralph. Again Laurie felt that he shouldn’t be there.

  “Look,” he said, “before we start getting him out, would you like anything done about the people upstairs? We must have been in here quite a while.”

  “About eight minutes. Yes, Spud, go and get rid of them, will you?”

  As he pulled himself upstairs on the banisters, Laurie found himself foolishly pleased by the fact that Ralph had said simply, “Get rid of them” without offering any directions.

  To the guests he offered Alec’s apologies: Sandy had passed out and at first they had thought he was just tight, but now Alec had taken his temperature, which was a hundred and two. Alec hoped it was only, influenza, but there was a lot of diphtheria about. It was all rather worrying. Luckily the lavatory was well separated from the bathroom and they all knew the way to it.

  Ralph and Alec had got Sandy sitting on the bathroom stool, where he looked like a groggy boxer at the ninth round.

  “All clear,” Laurie said.

  “What did you tell them?” Alec’s voice was getting increasingly overkeyed. It was Ralph who said, “Good show.”

  When Sandy had been maneuvered into the bedroom, Laurie went back to clean the bathroom up. On the floor, under the stool, he found Ralph’s glove, the padding round and firm, the empty part defining the shape of the truncated hand. He laid it where it had fallen, touching it kindly.

  Upstairs they had got Sandy into bed, where he was quietly weeping and holding Alec’s hand. Ralph was sitting on the dressing-table smoking, and Alec was saying to him, “But what will you say?”

  Ralph drew deeply and irritably on his cigarette. “I shall tell him the truth, naturally. Omitting names, and a few other things.”

  “But, Ralph, supposing he—”

  “He’s got a right to know he’s not being mixed up in an assault case. Take it or leave it, Alec. If you’d rather I drove you to the hospital you’ve only to say so.”

  “All right,” said Alec, “if you really think so.”

  “Good enough,” said Ralph. He looked up suddenly. “Oh, there you are, Spud. What happened to you, are you all right?”

  “Yes, of course. I’ve been removing clues in the bathroom.”

  “This boy thinks of everything. Did I leave a glove there?”

  “I didn’t see one.”

  While Ralph was fetching it, Laurie turned to Alec to ask if there was anything he could do. At the sound of his voice Sandy’s sobs redoubled.

  Pretending not to notice this, Alec said, “No, thanks, Laurie. You’ve been awfully good about all this. I feel—” He looked down at Sandy, who seemed about to have a fit of hysterics, and made a helpless ashamed little gesture. In a changed brisk voice he said, “Ralph thinks the naval surgeon at his Station will let him have some needles and gut without being too difficult. He’s just going off to see.”

  “Oh, good,” said Laurie vaguely. He had stopped wondering when he would get back to his own hospital, or what would happen to him. It became evident to him now that this question was distressing Alec to a point where he couldn’t talk about it. Laurie wanted to say it was all right and that he mustn’t worry; but the presence of Sandy, the original host, was inhibiting. In a minute or so, Laurie would be left alone in the flat with the two of them. Just then, like an answer to prayer, Ralph appeared in the doorway fastening his glove. Laurie stepped forward.

  “Can I come with you?”

  “Yes,” said Ralph. His face was in shadow and Laurie thought how this gave his eyes a grave withdrawn look. “Yes, Spud, do.”

  On the landing he picked up his cap and his blue stormcoat and said, “It’s cold tonight. Haven’t you anything warm?”

  “I lost it in the wash, like King John. It’s not that cold, anyway.”

  “Why the army doesn’t mutiny I never know. Here, Alec, I’m borrowing your burberry and a scarf for Spud. I’ll bring them back.” He shut the bedroom door with a relieved kind of finality. “And now, before we do anything else, what’s the telephone number of your hospital and who do I ask for?”

  Laurie told him. Ralph said, “I’ll be five minutes. Wait for me in here.” Laurie wandered obediently into the sitting room. It had the usual debauched look of rooms after parties, and he remembered that Alec would have all this to cope with alone. He collected the glasses, found the kitchen, and washed them in the sink.

  Ralph’s voice behind him said, “For Christ’s sake, Spud, haven’t you had enough tonight? Leave that and come on. I’ve fixed the nurse.”

  “How on earth did you do that?”

  “She hadn’t reported you yet. It seems the Day Sister had the evening off and no one else was sure if you had a pass. The situation now is that I should have had you back in time, but my car was involved in an accident and I’ve been held up making statements to the police. You weren’t in the accident, it was before I arrived, so you needn’t know much about it. Come on, let’s go.”

  Outs
ide he had a big battered sports car, belonging to a year when a resemblance to racing cars—a thick leather strap around the bonnet, the extrusion of copper pipes—was still considered smart. In uncertain starlight they fiddled with its rickety and obstructive hood, nipped their fingers, swore, said it wasn’t as cold as all that, and gave it up. Ralph warmed up the engine with a noise that outraged the quiet street; the car started, they were away. Now for the first time abruptly conscious of being alone, charged with the events of the evening and no longer able to diffuse themselves in activity or among other people, they were isolated together at the fixed center of the huge, swiftly running night.

  For what seemed a long time they drove in silence. Ralph’s two gloved hands, resting easily on the wheel, looked like the hands of any other driver; it was only when he had to change the gear, which was worn and cranky, that Laurie felt in the arm and shoulder beside him the tension of concealed strain.

  “Warm enough, Spud?”

  “Fine.”

  They drove on. Somewhere a clock struck the last quarter before midnight.

  Ralph said, “I suppose I got there about seven-thirty. Four hours.”

  They had come to a bridge over the river. The ground was high here, the river ran between cliffs. Laurie thought how in peacetime, from here, the town would have lain below them like a starry sky. Now, as the bridge gave gently on its chains in the wind that swept along the gorge, there was only a darkling sense of loneliness and height. Ralph showed a pass to a cloaked shadow. It was like a transit of the Styx.

  The road climbed again, through old dark beechwoods. Ralph said out of a long silence, with a quiet and somehow touching simplicity, “What a way to have met.”

  Threading the long vault of black trees under a slaty glimmer of sky, Laurie felt an almost astral detachment. “Yes,” he said, “it was strange. It was like having been lost in a surrealist picture, eyes with iron spikes growing out of them, and dead horses in Paris hats. All done very bright and sharp and looking almost solid. Then something real appears, and it all peels off like wet paper.”

  Ralph seemed to pause over this for some minutes. “Did it really seem as unlikely to you as that?”

  “It does now.” He was in a vivid, dreamlike stage of fatigue.

  Ralph flipped a cigarette-case onto the seat between them. “Light one for me too, will you?”

  Laurie lit two together as he had seen other people do sometimes. When Ralph took it without thanking him it didn’t seem brusque, but as if they had been doing this for years.

  “In some ways,” Ralph said, “it was like meeting during an action. You come out knowing each other a lot too well to begin at the beginning.” He paused to settle his cigarette. “And yet, not well enough.”

  Laurie said sleepily, “So one has to go back or go on.”

  “I’m not good on reversing.”

  As if to give an unmeant point to his words, they had come to a steep downgrade for which he had to put the car in second. Laurie felt the effort being made to conceal effort, and guessed, now, that he had not been driving again for long and that the gear-lever still hurt his hand. It occurred to Laurie that a large number of drivers in this situation would have let themselves be tempted to go down on the footbrake; but Ralph had always hated anything sloppy.

  He said nothing more till he had changed up again, then, as if continuing a quite different conversation: “I think what gets me down most about Sandy is his stupidity. He’s lived a year with Alec and still hasn’t cottoned on to his—his fanatical claustrophobia. Anyone who tries to put a screw on Alec is playing about with something dangerous. I don’t know how far Alec realizes that himself.” He stopped talking while he crossed a main road and added, “Some things about him don’t alter, much as he’s changed.”

  The bitterness he had kept out of his voice seemed to thread itself under Laurie’s skin. Tentatively he said, “He seemed to be worried about something you thought he’d done and he thought he hadn’t. I’m afraid I was rather drunk at the time; I don’t think he said what it was.”

  “He knows what he’s done. It’s not worth talking about.” One should have remembered, Laurie thought, that knack of formidable silence. There must however have been a difference of some kind, or Laurie certainly wouldn’t have felt that it devolved upon him to break it. He said, “This will have taught Sandy a lesson, anyway.”

  As if nothing had happened Ralph said, “That’s what I thought the first time. Oh, yes, and he gave Alec his solemn word of honor not to do it again.”

  “What did he do then?”

  “Phenacetin, or veganin, or something like that. About half the fatal dose. Alec didn’t know that, of course. He was all alone that time, laboring away with emetics and things and nearly going mental. He goes through torments of remorse afterwards. Alec, I mean; not Sandy, of course.”

  “You know, anyone could have fainted in that bath and been drowned.”

  “I think that started to occur to him when he heard me passing the door. It was lucky I did—I suppose. I really don’t think one should be expected to meet his friends; if Alec wants to put up with them himself, it’s his business. I never go there now without wondering whether they’ll start turning up in drag.”

  “In what?” asked Laurie curiously.

  He felt that in the near-darkness Ralph turned his head with an almost startled look; he repeated himself, however, without comment.

  “Yes, I heard you before, but what does it mean?”

  Ralph said, in a slight clear voice which seemed surrounded by a wide margin of stillness, “Don’t you know what it means?”

  With one of those little jets of irritability which weariness releases, Laurie said, “If I did I wouldn’t ask you.”

  “It means dressed as women.” They had come out of the trees upon a straight open stretch between wire fences. Laurie could see easily, with eyes accommodated now to the night, Ralph’s face looking ahead with an intent frown at the pale stream of road being swallowed by the car. “Spuddy.”

  “Yes?”

  “What do you know?”

  “I know about myself.”

  “Well?” Laurie didn’t answer at once, not from reluctance but because he was tired and it took time to think. Ralph said, deliberately, “If you know about yourself, presumably you know about at least one other person.”

  “There was a man at Oxford. It was all rather silly. He looked a bit like one of the less forceful portraits of Byron. It wasn’t so much he himself who attracted me, though up to a point he did. There are always certain people at Oxford who seem to hold a key. I didn’t know what I expected he’d let me into, Newstead Abbey by moonlight or something. He kept telling me I was queer, and I’d never heard it called that before and didn’t like it. The word, I mean. Shutting you away, somehow; roping you off with a lot of people you don’t feel much in common with, half of whom hate the other half anyway, and just keep together so that they can lean up against each other for support. I don’t think I’ve ever tried to put all this into words before; am I talking nonsense?”

  With smothered violence Ralph said, “Christ Almighty, no.”

  “I started to meet his friends. I’d imagined a lot of rather exquisite people it would be hard work getting to know; but they were all horribly eager, and it wasn’t because they liked me really, I could tell that. It was more like—have you read a story by Wells called The Country of the Blind?”

  “Spuddy, there always was something a bit terrifying about you. Well, don’t stop, go on.”

  “That’s all. He asked me to a party and I ran away in the middle, and he took it rather personally, so that was that.”

  “That was that for how long?”

  “Well, it was at the end of the summer term, and the war started in the vac.”

  “Some types seem to have found the war their great opportunity.”

  “It depends what you’re looking for, I suppose. Anyway, learning to soldier was a bit distracting.?
??

  Ralph didn’t speak for what seemed like some minutes. Then he said, “That’ll teach you to chuck the O.T.C.,” in an almost absent voice, as though he were making conversation. After another silent interval he asked, “What about women?”

  Although women represented just then an absolute nullity in Laurie’s emotions, the question itself, the lack of empressement in asking it, gave him a free and stimulated feeling; it was a relief from the bonded circle at the party, from the bars at the window and the gate on the stairs. “One,” he said.

  “No good?”

  “Well … I didn’t like her much as a human being.”

  “D’you need to?”

  “Yes, I think I do.”

  “That complicates it a bit.”

  Laurie began to say, “Yes, because one can hardly …” but Ralph looked too preoccupied and remote, as if a dangerous bit of road was coming. By the time he knew that it wasn’t, he too was given up to his own thoughts, which, after he had rehearsed so much of his history, were inevitably of Andrew. Here if anywhere, he thought, was someone to whom he could release the pressure of so much uncommunicated experience, who would inevitably understand. He remembered how after Charles’s party, leaning out of his window long into the night, he had thought of Ralph; though it was already years since their brief meeting, the thought had supported him in his isolation. Now there seemed nothing that could not be told; yet something silenced him. It was Andrew’s secret too. Besides, it was holy ground: he was honest enough to examine this simplicity, weigh it, and decide not to abandon it. The result was one of those compromises to which people in such a case will sometimes resort.

  “When I say there was nothing after I joined the army”—he could feel Ralph almost start; he must have been miles away—“there was a time when I felt very much drawn to someone; but it was impossible from the first.”

  “In what way impossible?” Ralph had turned the car onto a bad secondary road. He seemed intent on the driving and sounded a little curt.

  “He told me, or as good as told me, without knowing it, that he’d no time for that sort of thing. It was obvious without telling, in any case.”