The Charioteer

  The All Clear was a long time going. I wonder what it was like back there. If anything happened to him, there’d be no one to tell me.

  9

  “HERE, SPUD.”

  “HELLO,” SAID Laurie, peering into the bathroom from which Reg’s voice had come.

  “Thought I recognized your step. Have to listen for it now. Just a bit heavy on the one foot, that’s all.”

  “Want any help?” asked Laurie, coming in. Reg hadn’t needed any since the days of the airplane splint, but he had heard from Madge that morning and Laurie had seen his face as he read the letter.

  “That’s it,” said Reg. He shut the bathroom door. They sat down on the large wooden board which, placed over the bath, made a table for scrubbing mackintoshes. Their embarrassment was enhanced by the precarious nature of their privacy. Laurie said, “Let’s have a fag on it,” and then, “I suppose I can guess.”

  “No prizes offered,” said Reg with bitterness.

  “It’s a damned shame,” Laurie said.

  For a moment they were linked in a vague nostalgic coziness. Then Reg cleared his throat, and consciousness fell between them. Laurie said, “Same chap again?”

  “That’s right. Offered her a job in his business now. Cooked meats and fish bar. Edgware way.”

  “Not much future in that. Can’t you stop her?”

  “Well, see, Spud, that’s it. Don’t hardly like to ask, but can you lend me seventeen and a tanner till next month?”

  “I could.” As a matter of fact he was very short. “But what about asking the Major? Urgent private affairs?”

  “Won’t wait till tomorrow,” said Reg, staring at the wooden bath mat. Laurie realized he hadn’t been told everything.

  “French leave?” he said.

  “I had about enough, Spud. I’m going today and fix it.”

  Laurie looked at his face. “With the chap, you mean?”

  “I’m going to fix it. Never mind the rest.”

  Laurie took another look. The glasshouse, he thought, if nothing worse. Absurdly, the fact that he couldn’t spare the money kept obscuring his judgment; he felt he was being mean.

  He said, “Reg, honestly. I wouldn’t do it.”

  Reg leaned rather elaborately across the bath to throw his ash into the space behind. “Well, Spud, maybe not. It’s all according, see what I mean?”

  His face was crimson. Laurie saw what he meant.

  He was overcome by a sudden, stifling claustrophobia. Charles’s and Sandy’s friends had tried to lock the door on him from inside. Now Reg was doing it from out in the street. There was a difference: he liked Reg much better.

  “Look, Reg, I’m not taking that.”

  Reg stared at him in mute horror. “What you mean, Spud? Not taking me up wrong, I hope?”

  “And what a hope. Not bloody likely. Now look, Reg, there’s nothing fancy about this, I know what you feel, like anyone else. It’s people that matter; if not, what are you worrying about, what’s Madge got that you can’t have for a bob against the railings? You care about someone and they let you down. It can happen to anyone; where’s the difference?” As soon as he had said it he knew that it wasn’t a hundred per cent honest argument, and perhaps didn’t deserve to succeed.

  “That’s right,” said Reg slowly. “That’s true enough, Spud, you got something there. Forget what I said. Half silly with worry, that’s what.”

  “I know.” He considered. No, he thought; Reg is the sort that prison would do something to forever, and she isn’t worth it. “Trouble is, Reg, now I think, I doubt if I’ve got seventeen and six, till I hear from home. I spent a bit in town.”

  “That’s all right, Spud. Forget it.” To his surprise he saw a struggling respect fighting the disappointment in Reg’s face. “You hang on to that. Got to be independent. Make ’em think all the more of you.”

  Suddenly Laurie got it. Christ, he said to himself, has Reg really been thinking … But he won and it was Reg who dropped his eyes. “Hell, Reg, what do you think I am?”

  “You’re okay, Spud.” He knew it wasn’t the apology Reg minded, it was the exposure. “Knew that all along. Shoving my oar in. No offense meant, honest to God.”

  At least, he thought, one could do something for Reg out of this ephemeral ascendancy. “Tell you what. Leave it for today. It can’t make all that difference.” He couldn’t help that, and Reg hadn’t spirit enough to resent it. “I’m going to do a bit of thinking. Okay?”

  “Okay, then.” Laurie knew he had rushed Reg into this, chiefly by terror of what he might say next. They got up from the bath cover. Laurie stood holding the door, to make sure it didn’t swing back against Reg’s arm. Reg cleared his throat. He hung back. “ ’S okay, Spud. Shan’t be a minute.”

  Reg’s prudery being what it was, there might have been many reasons for this; but this time something arrested Laurie and illumination struck him. Oh, no, but no, he thought in helpless protest: it really was, at last, too much; suddenly it collapsed into an outrageous joke. He stood in the doorway and rocked with laughter. “But it’s—” he gasped. He gazed at Reg and imagined him creeping coyly out after a discreet delay, like a femme galante at a houseparty. It was excruciating.

  Reg was grinning sheepishly. He looked curiously comforted and relieved.

  Laurie leaned in at the door. “I shouldn’t worry, Reg. If you like, I’ll give you a certificate.”

  The post office was only ten minutes down the road. He pulled a telegraph form from the string-tied pad. Reg had had a couple of leaves in between operations; Laurie had written and forwarded letters, and knew the address by heart.

  “Your husband’s condition grave please come immediately.” He signed it with the name of the hospital; Madge wouldn’t notice a thing like that.

  An hour or two later, when it was too late to undo all this, he did what he had known he must, and went to warn the Sister. He would have thought poorly of her if she hadn’t been angry. “I’ve never known a patient take such a thing upon himself, never in all my years of nursing. Perhaps you’ll pay more attention to Major Ferguson in the morning. You’ve been here too long and you’ve got thoroughly above yourself.”

  “Yes, Sister. I’m sorry.”

  Luckily it was in the Staff Nurse’s duty period that Ralph rang up.

  When the message came through he hesitated, wondering whether to send word by someone that he had just gone out. He hadn’t expected to hear from Ralph again.

  On the morning after their last meeting Ralph had telephoned. They had been evasively facetious till it had stuck in both their throats; Ralph had approached the question of next Tuesday with awkward casualness; Laurie had said that he was sorry, this time he would have to get back. Ralph had taken it very quietly; there was no way of knowing what Bunny’s story had been. Now, to know that he had rung again, and was waiting, was full of excitement and inevitability, like a suspense story with a happy ending; but, he thought, still hesitating by his bed, there could be nothing but sadness in these perfunctory gestures of farewell. Involuntarily he felt at the leg-pocket of his battle-dress; he had got into the way of keeping the Phaedrus there again, as he had in the south coast training camp and afterwards in France. Now it no longer stood for something rounded off and complete, but for confusion and uncertainty and pain and compassion, and all the tangle of man’s mortality. And yet, he thought again, it was for such a world that it had been written.

  “Hello, Ralph. I’m sorry I kept you waiting.”

  “Just a minute,” Ralph said. Laurie heard the telephone laid down, and a sound like a door shutting. “Sorry, all right now. Well, Spud, how are you?”

  “Fine.” Yes, he thought, it was going to be that kind of conversation. “How about you?”

  “Fine. Look, Spud, will it be all right if I pick you up this afternoon after the treatment, and run you back? I’d like to have a word with you, and that way it won’t hold you up. One can’t say much on this line.”

 
“Of course. Thanks very much.” Bunny must have kept his story for a day or two, cooking. Now, it seemed, Ralph had decided to have it out. It would have to be got through. … “Odell. Lanyon wants you in his study after prayers.”

  He said, “I’ll wait on the same bench as I did before.”

  “Good.” There was a short pause. “There’ll be no one else coming.”

  “All right.” It must certainly be trouble. “Five-fifteen, then. Goodbye.”

  “Spud, just a minute.”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t worry about anything.” The line went dead.

  Before he left for Bridstow, he wrote a letter. It was for Madge, and was ostensibly an apology for the trouble he had given her. He wrote it with the incident of the Wurlitzer request program held steadfastly before his eyes. Afterwards he read it over to himself, with a kind of fascinated nausea. The thought that Madge might not destroy it, that it might continue to exist, even, by way of ultimate horror, that she might show it to the Major, who would accept it as a fair sample of his style—all this crept in his stomach and in the hair on his neck. The secret of its peculiar gruesomeness was that it wasn’t pure invention. Under the shaming sentimentality, the awful all-jolly-good-sorts-together, it was quite sincere.

  He stuck it down quickly before he had time to dilute it, and gave it to the Sister when he went to catch his bus. She glared at him; but she had made herself his accomplice. She hadn’t told Reg anything.

  Miss Haliburton’s puppy was noticeably bigger. The department was rather less busy than last week and she spent more time with him, asking questions about the leg. Something he said, which hadn’t seemed to him of the slightest significance, seemed to excite her. She whipped him out of the apparatus, put the boot on his bare foot and leg, and made him walk around the cubicle. To his extreme embarrassment she got down and, as he moved, followed on hands and knees; it was like being investigated by an Old English sheepdog. The bare leg with the boot on it already seemed to him pure Salvador Dali; he felt that, even for hospital, the macabre was being overstressed. He could hear her tut-tutting under her breath. The puppy waddled beside her, breathing eagerly.

  “Who made this?” she barked suddenly. He presumed that it wasn’t the leg to which she was referring, and replied that it had been made by a small man with cross eyes and thick glasses, whose name he didn’t know.

  Miss Haliburton called a senior student to her, and made a speech. “… everything so slapdash. No conscience about their work. Look at it, Miss Cardew. Look at this rotation here. Put your hand on the peroneus. (Just walk a few steps again, Odell.) There, feel that. And when the boy gets pain, first they give him aspirin three times a day and then they order faradism. Really, sometimes one despairs. How does a government like that expect to win a war?” Almost before he knew what was happening, she had him out of the boot again, drew lines on it with chalk, and, to his alarm, handed it over to a deliberate old character with a walrus mustache, who poked it with a blunt pencil, explained why he wouldn’t be able to make a right job of it, and took it away.

  “You’ll have to have a new one, of course,” she said as he was watching it vanish. “But this will help meanwhile.”

  At first he could think of nothing but the delay. It was nearly five-fifteen already; he felt he could bear anything except that Ralph should think he had run out on him, with things as they were; and he knew hospital too well to suppose there was any possibility of sending a message. It was only gradually that he began to understand what she was still trying to tell him. Hope trickled slowly, through a half-choked channel, into his mind. Pain had become as inevitable to him in these last weeks as any of the body’s natural demands, differing from them in being insatiable. Even now he wouldn’t trust himself to anticipation, but he remembered to thank her.

  “Don’t thank me, my dear boy; I’m saving myself trouble in the long run. Now this bit of intensive treatment we’re starting will really do something for you. Ah, here’s Arthur. Now we’ll see.”

  It was after five-thirty. He was almost too worried to notice what Arthur had done to the boot, which was largely a matter of altering the tilt of the thickened sole. It felt odd for the first moment, then very quickly seemed natural. He thanked everyone again and escaped.

  When he couldn’t see Ralph anywhere in the hall, a wave of such misery struck him that he stood stock-still where he was, saying to himself stubbornly that it wasn’t true. He looked around again, refusing the facts, and, as if created by his act of will, Ralph was there after all. He was sitting on one of the benches, his back turned, listening attentively to what looked like a long story from a very old man. When Laurie had approached within a couple of yards he saw him, smiled, and motioned him to wait. Laurie heard him say at the end, “Well, sir, I can see I’ve missed a lot not shipping with you. I’ve enjoyed this very much.”

  He fell into step beside Laurie, telling him, as if they hadn’t been separated for more than an hour, the old man’s story: the start in sail, the wool-clipper, the Chinese pirates, the torpedoing in 1917. Out of the tail of his eye Laurie saw the ancient captain, a stocky figure in a shiny old blue suit, look after Ralph with an old man’s sour approval, before settling down again to his long wait.

  “Thanks for waiting. I was afraid you’d write me off.”

  “Good Lord, I know hospital. I shouldn’t have started worrying for another hour. Did they tell you anything?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, this time they did.” He explained about the boot; he was getting used to the feel of it now, and it did begin to seem more comfortable than before. Ralph listened carefully and at the end said, “Nothing else?”

  “Well, not yet.” This reserve reminded Laurie of the caution he had urged upon himself. “They wouldn’t say much more till they’ve seen how it works.”

  “Good luck to it, anyhow.” They had got to the car. When they were in, he hesitated a moment. “I suppose you’ve not got time for a quick turn round the Downs?”

  “Oh, I think so.”

  Ralph drove in silence through the pink stone streets, took a half-turn around the Downs, and pulled off the road at the spot where cars stop to admire the gorge. Twilight was falling and no other cars were there. The steep side of the gorge with its sheer faces was out of sight below them: opposite were wooded slopes, with a scoop of quarry. The ebb-tide river flowed sluggishly at the bottom, a muddy thread between two long slopes of slime.

  “It’s all right, Spud. I told you, there’s nothing to worry about.”

  “I wasn’t worrying.”

  “I brought you up here to tell you a bit of news, just in case it makes any difference to anything. Bunny’s gone.”

  What had he done? With what clumsiness had he floundered in other people’s complex and dimly comprehended business? Playing for time, he asked, “Has he been posted?”

  “Oh, no,” said Ralph coolly. “As a matter of fact he hasn’t even left his room. I can hardly expect him to, seeing what he’s spent on the fittings. I shall find another myself, as soon as I can. Still, he’s gone, in a manner of speaking.”

  “Ralph, I—I’m most terribly sorry.”

  “Sorry? Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “You mean it’s my fault. There doesn’t seem very much to say. Except that I’d give anything for it not to have happened.”

  “Oh, come, Spud, don’t make yourself out a bigger fool than you are. Bunny was a long hangover after a short drunk. Far too long.”

  The relief of this was at first enormous. Then he wondered what, exactly, had happened, and whether it hadn’t made Ralph a good deal more unhappy than he cared to admit. “I’m glad if that’s how it is.”

  “By the way,” Ralph said in an almost impersonal voice, “I owe you an apology for last time.”

  “If you mean about driving me back, you don’t. I can tell you now.” With more satisfaction than he liked to admit to himself, he explained about the water-jug.

  “Good God,
what a corny one to have fallen for.” He laughed, but Laurie already felt ashamed. He lit cigarettes in silence and for a minute or so neither spoke.

  “I have a feeling,” Ralph said presently, “that a few other apologies may also be due. He did actually deliver you at the hospital, I suppose?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “I know I wasn’t very discreet that evening; did he make a scene about it?”

  “No.”

  “Something happened. All right, never mind; I expect it was embarrassing enough without being cross-examined on it.” Laurie let this go, hoping he would drop it. He did in fact fall silent for a couple of minutes. Just as Laurie had opened his mouth to change the subject, he said abruptly, “Look, Spud, this is shooting blind, but he didn’t try anything else on, by any chance, did he?”

  Laurie had been thinking, the moment before, that after all some partings are only final for the first forty-eight hours; provided, that is, that no one interferes. Now neither truth nor lying seemed quite justified. In his irresolution he waited too long.

  “Well,” said Ralph. “I see.” He spoke with a curious, precise flatness; he sounded almost bored. Yes, Laurie thought: all that about a short drunk is what he’d like to feel now. God, there’s no need to rub his face in it.

  “It wasn’t serious, you know. I think it was just a sort of experiment to see how one would behave.”

  After a pause Ralph said, in the same colorless and exactly pitched voice, “I suppose it’s all for the best that I didn’t know this sooner.” He took the cigarette out of his mouth, examined it, and put it back again. Speaking now conversationally, he remarked, “We began with a minor disagreement, and one thing led to another.”

  “Yes?” Laurie said. He was feeling that he had managed badly. Knowing Bunny, one could have been sure that the showdown hadn’t been as complete as Ralph imagined, and that all sorts of things could still come out.

  “Well, Spud, there it is. You saw enough for yourself: there’s no point in prettying it over. About all I can say is that I never told myself many lies about it; and whether that’s a recommendation or not depends on the point of view. Main thing is, it’s finished. Do you feel like believing that?”