Read Online The Charioteer by Mary Renault - Free Book Online

Reg to understand, to win her back.
    “Too true she’s not. But it’s one thing to know you been a mucking fool, it’s another to learn sense.” His face reddened. A shiny rim began to form along his lower lids.
    “You know, my father wasn’t faithful to my mother. She minded a lot at the time, but she’s all right now.”
    “It’s not the same for a woman. That’s their lot, and nature made them to stand it. But a man’s nature’s different.”
    “Is it? It’s bloody hell, Reg, I know. I’m terribly sorry.”
    “Her sister’s a good girl. Looked after the mother and got passed over like. Our dad would have rather I’d picked Ireen, I know. But she hadn’t the life in her that Madge had.” He snatched a handkerchief from the pillow and blew his nose.
    “If she got sick of all this would you take her back?”
    “No. Never.” Reg swallowed convulsively. “I couldn’t never go with her again, thinking of how she’d been with him.” He swallowed again; there was a pause. “But I’d never get used to no one else. She was one of those that know what a man needs—I used to think she only learned it thinking of me.” Suddenly he turned over with his back to Laurie, and held up the book close to his face.
    “Goodness, they have left you in a mess.” It was the Charge Nurse with the dressing trolley, making the bandages good. The doctors had been gone some minutes. The nurse bandaged the leg and straightened the bed, tutting mildly. He lay looking at the ceiling, wondering whether to tell his mother by letter or wait till she came.
    “Qu’est-ce que tu as, Spoddi?” He turned to meet Charlot’s kind, vague eyes. Here was someone who could be told without bothering Reg. If he could tell just one person it was all he wanted. He said in French, “It’s only something the doctor has just said about my leg—that it will always be stiff, and shorter than the other, and that all my life I shall be lame.”
    “That is bad,” said Charlot slowly. “That is a wicked thing.” Suddenly a spasm of extraordinary violence convulsed his face. The filthy Boches. Animals. Pigs. …” Laurie could only guess at the next few words. “When the war is over we shall split the gullets of these assassins. All … all—”
    “Oh, I don’t know. If you hanged the lot of them it wouldn’t put back an inch on my leg.”
    “The world knows what they are. They are—”
    “Yes,” said Laurie soothingly. “Yes, I know.” He had been forgetting the Germans, and was ashamed of his lack of tact.
    “You’re having your stitches out soon,” said a shy, cool voice beside him. “I heard Major Ferguson telling Sister.”
    It was Nurse Adrian. He looked around, smiling. The emotions of the anesthetic were still tangled in his consciousness; he felt at once that it was she all the time whom he had really wanted. Her hand, resting on the locker, looked cool and slim, with nice bones.
    “You’ll be up again before long,” she said. “What’s the matter, is it aching?”
    “Not much, thanks.” He looked at her again, longing to speak; but he could only think of things too simple to say. “I shall always be different,” he wanted to tell her; and some part of his mind expected that she would say “No,” and everything would be changed. “It only aches on and off now,” he said, to fill the pause which already she might be noticing. She had none of that awful knowingness; one could take one’s time with her, hesitate, and she would only be grateful. “Different?” she would say, surprised. “But of course you’re not.”
    “I’ll ask Sister for some A.P.C. for you,” she said.
    “No, really, it’s all right.” As she stood looking down at him in kind anxiety, he saw what his own trouble had hidden before, that she was dog-tired and harried to death. Strands of her fair hair were slipping down damply under her cap; her face was shiny like a schoolgirl’s after hockey; the inside of her hand was soggy