The Charioteer by Mary Renault Page A

was probably right. If it hadn’t been for him I might have fallen for all that, and missed this. I wish I could thank him.
    You may think I have been rather quick to decide I am in love …
    He looked up from the page, and then back to it, in an absurd fear that something of all this might have become stamped on the paper. For the first time, now, the secret between them had shape and outline; it would be real when she sat by him at her next visit.
    She had been very good to him since he had been wounded. He had wished for her sake he could have got his commission first. There had been hints, and he had already been recommended for sergeant when the great confusion descended; but she had never reminded him of his folly in throwing up the O.T.C., though she had been against it at the time. He had always felt that his best wasn’t good enough for her. Now there was this. But after all, however orthodox his sex life might have been, he knew they would never have discussed it; the mere thought would have shocked her to death.
    His imagination wrote on:
… to decide I am in love. But he is a clear kind of person, about whom one has to think clearly.
    He moved his hand across the letter, as if to brush away the invisible words, and sealed it up.
    Suppers were finished; the loose ends of the day’s work were tied off. Laurie’s meditations returned, growing somber with night and weariness. He limped on and on through a darkening maze without a center.
    “ ’S matter, Spud? Tired?”
    “Bit. Sorry.”
    “Get you some A.P.C.?”
    “Later, I think. Thanks, Reg.”
    The ward lights were turned off, leaving only the yellow pool by the Sister’s table, and the glow of the radio dial. The star program of the week was on: a cinema organist, who played request numbers for the Forces, chosen by their people at home. Laurie was tired, and his stomach for this kind of thing was queasy at the best. He got down into the bedclothes, and tried to sleep. The Sister gave the report, added her afterthoughts, and went off duty. Nurse Sims, the Night Nurse, stepped forward with decision to the radio table.
    “Have a heart, Nurse,” said someone as usual. “Suppose there was a request for one of us?”
    “The B.B.C. always sends a—”
    “… And now,” said the radio, its inhuman geniality becoming tinged with a manly pathos, “I have a rather special message for Lance-Corporal Reginald Barker, who is a patient at …” Not so much the name, as the ward’s electrified hush, roused Laurie from his apathy. Beside him Reg, who had just got into bed and had been reaching down for something in his locker, lay frozen in that position by shock. Among all this Laurie had missed a phrase or two. “… to forgive and forget. And she hopes that this lovely melody will recall happy honeymoon days, and bring you both together again. So here it is, for Lance-Corporal Reginald Barker—‘Souvenirs’!”
    The organist did Reg proud. He used the vox humana in the first half, and the vox angelica in the second. It was like sugar with warm treacle sauce.
    Laurie crawled down into the bed. No one could very well suppose him to be sleeping, but there seemed nothing else one could do for Reg. In the Dark Ages, he thought, they only cropped your ears, or branded you in the forehead, or stood you in the pillory. They hadn’t the resources of civilization.
    All activity in the ward had ceased. The man on the other side of Charlot was trying to explain the situation to him in five well-chosen words helped out with mime. At the bottom end of the ward a young man with a passable tenor had begun to croon expressively (filling the merciful gaps in Laurie’s memory) the words of the song.
    The first essential, Laurie thought, would be to see that Reg didn’t put his razor under his pillow and cut his throat during the night. He peeped out cautiously from under the blanket, but Reg’s head, as he had expected, was turned the other way.
    I count them all