The Charioteer by Mary Renault Page B

words, of mutual reproach and remorse, made this the most clammily tongue-tied interval of all.
    Laurie watched his mother gathering her umbrella, her bag and gloves. In the perky blue hat, with its soft feather curling into the soft hair, and the fluffy coat, she looked like a plump ruffled bird, dainty, timid, a little foolish, full of confused tenderness and of instinctive wisdom from which, too easily, she could be fluttered and scared away. His throat tightened; he wanted to take her away and cherish her as if she were about to die. But the bus was due in a few minutes, and now they were all walking out toward it.
    Just as they were leaving, the tea trolley came back for the used crockery. This time, little Derek was pushing it instead of the nurse. Mr. Straike’s nose went up, like a pointer’s.
    “Who,” he asked in a loud aside, “are all these healthy-looking young men in mufti I keep seeing about the place?”
    A wave of rage, the piled flood of the afternoon, broke in Laurie’s head. He did not trust himself to reply.
    “Medically exempt?” asked Mr. Straike. Derek had been passing at the time, and must have heard.
    With the cold ingenuity of repressed violence, Laurie gave a prudishly reproving shake of the head. “Male nurses,” he hissed. Mr. Straike said “Urhm.” Laurie indicated his mother with a glance, and pointedly dropped his voice. “Can’t very well discuss it here. Some things”—he paused, with heavy-handed delicacy—“women can’t be asked to do.”
    “Quite,” said Mr. Straike. “Urhm, quite.” He ran a finger round the inside of his collar. Laurie found himself indulging an absurd self-righteousness, just as if it had been true.
    They walked with the crowd down the iron-roofed cement path. Laurie felt his hatred and anger like a sickness. He no longer wanted to justify or fulfill them, only to clean them out of him and be quiet. He looked at Mr. Straike, who was gazing straight before him, grave, judicial; he had a digestive look, as if he were assimilating something, adapting it to his metabolism, settling it in.
    “Well, dear, aren’t you going to say goodbye to me?”
    Laurie saw that the bus had arrived, and people were streaming into it. His mother had come up to him, and had had to touch his arm before he had seen her. He met, defenseless, the reproach in her eyes.
    Back in the ward, Neames and another man were playing chess on a locker. Laurie stood and watched the game till he realized he could not retrace it by a single move. His knee had got worse; little Derek, who always knew without being told when someone was in pain, got him a dose of A.P.C. He turned down his bedcover, sat on the bed, and tried to read. If one ceased the pretense of doing something, one became at once conspicuous, a man thinking, naked to public speculation.
    “Well, Spud, how’s life?”
    “Oh,” said Laurie, “hello, Reg.” For a moment, too full of himself, he expected to be asked what was up; then he remembered. “How was it? All right?”
    “You said it.” Reg was, he could see now, very much moved. His face was pink, his eyes bright; he fidgeted with the things on Laurie’s locker, moving them unseeingly here and there. “Sometime, Spud, I’ll tell you a bit; mean to say, you’d be the first. How it is, I dunno, talk about a thing and the feeling of it goes off, gets more ordinary like. Haven’t felt like that for, oh, going on seven years. Well, just take a turn round the block. See you later.”
    The flowers had been arranged in jam-pots, the cakes and sweets crammed into lockers, the locker-tops wiped over; the disorderly invasion of the visitors left no material trace. The evening dressings had started; but Laurie’s was done only in the morning now; it was nearly healed. The A.P.C. had helped the pain. If he changed the stick for the crutch, which they had left with him for a few days longer, he could escape for a little while. He even knew of somewhere to go.
    Once