The Charioteer by Mary Renault

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.”
    He seemed to wait hours for the upturned face to change; but the pause was in his own imagination, as he realized when Andrew said with mild interest, “Was he? I hadn’t heard. He was never actually shut up, surely?”
    “No, it never came out. Though I believe—” He saw his mistake, and with a painful jolt caught himself up just in time. “Not mad, you know. Just queer.” He waited again.
    “You mean a bit … Oh, yes, I see.” Andrew wrung out the cloth in the bucket. “I find all Russians slightly mysterious, don’t you? Perhaps if one met more of them.”
    Laurie said yes, that was the trouble, probably. He leaned heavily on the door-jamb; he had been standing too long. He hoped that Andrew wouldn’t look up for a minute; he knew that with these cold turns he went sensationally white. It would pass off, it was all a matter of will-power. His brain felt drained and light; he thought: If he’s seen it in the Bible and guessed what it meant, that’s about as much as he knows.
    Andrew stood up and tipped the dirty water into the lavatory. “I must do the swill,” he said, and paused. “I say, you do look tired. Let me see you back to bed before I go.”
    “God, no. I’m officially up. I’m all right. Are you detailed to this ward from now on?”
    “I don’t know yet, we’re just filling in till the lists are done. Thanks for coming to talk to me.” He colored suddenly. Laurie saw why: he had let down the side, he shouldn’t have thanked a soldier for talking to him, as if he belonged to something that had to apologize for itself.
    “Thanks for putting up with me, under your feet. Goodbye.”
    “Goodbye.” He moved to the door, with young pliant awkwardness, swinging the bucket. Laurie said quickly, “Oh, by the way—” but it was too late, he had passed into the clatter of the corridor and didn’t hear. The clank of the bucket sounded for a moment, receding. Laurie’s armpit felt wrenched by the pressure of the crutch; his arm was numb, and his leg had started to ache again. The breakfast trolley, with the haddock, was being wheeled into the ward. He followed it. There was nowhere else to go.

4
    L AURIE SIGNED HIS LETTER to his mother, and reread it. He used to write her rather good letters once, he remembered. “Major Ferguson went over the leg the other day. He says it will always be a bit stiff, and I shall have to wear a thick sole on my shoe or something.” She knew already about his discharge, so there had been little more to say. He went over her last letter again, looking for something that would give him another paragraph; but the best he could find was that the vicar still felt the loss of his wife very much, though it was a year now since her death. Desperate for material, Laurie added a short postscript in which he said he was sorry to hear this.
    He sat staring at the letter on the writing-pad, and imagining it rewritten.
Darling Mother,
    I have fallen in love. I now know something about myself which I have been suspecting for years, if I had had the honesty to admit it. I ought to be frightened and ashamed, but I am not. Since I can see no earthly hope for this attachment, I ought to be wretched, but I am not. I know now why I was born, why everything has happened to me ever; I know why I am lame, because it has brought me to the right place at the right time. I would go through it all again, if I had to, now that I know it was for this.
    Oddly enough, what I feel most is relief, because I know now that what kept me fighting it so long was the fear that what I was looking for didn’t exist. Lanyon said it didn’t, and after meeting Charles’s set I thought he