The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley

by Leslie Poles Hartley

  ‘What was she like?’ I asked. ‘You haven’t told me.’

  My friend glanced at me and away again.

  ‘I couldn’t describe her, you know,’ he said, ‘feature by feature. She was Venice’s reward to me, but she wasn’t typically Venetian. Venetian women are golden and pink and brown and inclined to be plump when they are young: obvious beauties. They are out in the sun so much, they soak it up. Myself I never cared much for . . . for amplitude, or even for warm colours. I like the Alps, you know, with the snow coming down to the pine-forests. And a sailing ship, when you can see the spars and the rigging. Not all sail set, that’s too oncoming and voluminous for my taste. There’s a kind of opulence that’s rather vulgar, I think: well, she didn’t have it. Her colouring was Northern, though her hair was very dark, nearly black. She had a Gothic fragility and fineness, like a saint from Burgundy or Chartres that had somehow strayed into Venice, though of course there is Gothic in Venice. You remember what Vernon Lee said of Venice, that it was difficult to “isolate the enough”, because of all the claims on one’s attention. Well, it wasn’t so with her. I never felt, with her, that round the corner there might be someone like her. A greeny light filtered into her room, a forest light—just enough to throw a shadow. Too much light hurt her eyes. And yet the room never seemed dark, there was so much white in it. I thought of it as a grove of silver birches. The walls were nearly white, the furniture was white, the muslin on the dressing-table was white, the bed-cover was white, and she . . .’ he hesitated. ‘She was a little pale.’

  ‘And the white wand,’ I asked, ‘that you thought you saw tossed about among the green? Did you ever find out what that was? Was it an enchanter’s wand?’

  He took a long breath and said with difficulty:

  ‘I think it may have been her arm. She was rather thin, you see.’

  After a pause, I said:

  ‘I understand the need for secrecy, and I can understand how it gave . . . at least how it didn’t take away from the zest of the affair.’

  An expression of distaste crossed my friend’s face but I did not regret what I had said. Most of the lovers I have known have thought there was something sacrosanct about their relationship and the word ‘affair’ was too common to describe it.

  ‘But,’ I went on, ‘didn’t you get tired of meeting always in the same room? And wasn’t it even a little risky? I mean, I don’t know Venice well, but I should have thought it offered quite a number of retreats for clandestine couples—all those arches, and doorways, and dark entries.’

  ‘You’re right,’ he said, ‘it does. There are those places, and one seldom passes them, at night, without seeing a couple whispering in them. We often used to talk about Venice—of course she knew it much better than I did. And we went everywhere, you know, to—to the restaurants, and the churches and the islands. And we made expeditions to the mainland too, to Malcontenta and Maser and Asolo and Aquileia—all those places. We lingered a long time at the great gateway in the garden of Valsanzibio that looks towards Padua—the only place I know where the reality is equal to one’s memory and expectations of it. Wherever we went, she was the genius loci; she knew just what to look for and how to feel and what to say. Oh, she was a wonderful guide and there was no fear, going with her, that the churches or the picture galleries would be shut, or that it would be raining; she knew the right day and the right time to choose. I have travelled a lot, as you know, but I’ve never travelled with anyone as far as I did with her never so far afield, never so far from my own base, so to speak.’

  ‘But did you really go about like this?’ I asked him. ‘I somehow thought——’ Suddenly I wondered if he had imagined the whole thing. He looked at me oddly and the light died from his face.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘We didn’t. It wasn’t real, that part. You see, she was a cripple. She’d had an illness, and she was a cripple.’

  I cannot say how painfully, how disagreeably, this disclosure affected me. It was almost as if he had told me he had been in love with a skeleton. And I was angry with myself for not having foreseen it—for it, or something like it, was implicit in everything my friend had told me. I was angry because I had been taken in, angry because he had warned me I should be angry, angry with myself for being angry. I didn’t know what to say, or where or how to look; I did not try to meet his eye.

  To my intense relief he did not seem to notice my confusion, and went on:

  ‘But the rest was real, the one real thing in my life. If only I had foreseen what was coming! If only I had given Adele, straight away, the tip that I meant to give her at the end! Only I didn’t foresee an end. The time-factor had ceased to exist for me; I felt I should stay in Venice all my life. Perhaps Adele felt that too; perhaps she saw the prospect of her tip receding into the dateless future. Afterwards, she was full of excuses She said she never knew him come at that hour. She said he——’

  ‘Who?’ I asked.

  My friend stared at me as though he couldn’t believe I didn’t know. ‘The doctor. She said he found the flat door open and just walked in. But she contradicted herself, she gave herself away, for she also said she was alarmed for her mistress’s state, thereby admitting she had told the doctor. It was all such nonsense! Every time she saw me——’

  ‘Every time who saw you?’ I interrupted. ‘The maid, or . . . or . . . You haven’t told me her name.’

  ‘I couldn’t,’ he answered. ‘At least, I’d rather not. Fate has some power over a name. But she . . . she said that never in her life had she felt so well. Life-giver was one of her names for me: she had so many!’

  My friend bent his outraged, protesting gaze on mine, but I looked away, I could not meet his eye: he did not look at all life-giving then. ‘And I could tell, too: I’m not a fool, am I?’ he went on. ‘Didn’t I look at her with a doctor’s eye, as well as with a lover’s? I couldn’t have been mistaken. I noticed every little change, and they were all changes towards health. How could it have been otherwise, when we were drawing all this glory down on us? How could all the other elements have united for her benefit, and one not? I said so to the doctor, once we were out of ear-shot. “You are a physician,” I said, “don’t you know that a patient’s surest road to recovery is happiness? Do you deny,” I said, “that she is happy, now, as she has never been happy before?”

  ‘But he wouldn’t listen to me; he kept on saying he would allow us one more meeting: “un solo incontro, un solo incontro”. Then I got angry and asked him by what right he was depriving us of this blessing? We walked up and down the vestibule between the Victorian and Edwardian ladies and gentlemen whose coloured photographs hung on the walls. He became as agitated as I was, and poured out a flood of medical terms of which I understood very little. The shock alone, he said, might have killed her. I was still trembling from the shock myself, the irruption into our birch-grove of this alien figure, parting the branches, with the heat and dust and hurry of the streets still on him, holding his professional bag of tricks, wearing, until he saw us, his professional air of wary optimism. It might have been worse, it might have been much worse; but it was bad enough—the secret not only out, but you might say, exploding round us, and the sudden necessity we were under for the first time, to speak, almost to explain ourselves, to a third person.

  ‘ “I must go back to her,” said the doctor, glancing impatiently at the closed door behind us; but he wouldn’t hear of my going back, not then.

  ‘ “To-morrow if she is well enough, to-morrow, and for the last time.

  My friend paused. All this time with his face and his voice he had been dramatizing his interview with the doctor: first he was one, then the other.

  ‘I can’t pretend he underestimated what the separation would mean to us,’ he said, ‘he spoke with a gravity which made it seem more than ever final. “And supposing she doesn’t consent?” I asked him. “Then you must make her,” he said. “You must plead with her, for her sake, and yours too, to give up this suicida
l folly. Do you want to kill her?”

  ‘ “Do you want to kill her?” I retorted.

  ‘We had our last meeting. I won’t say anything about it—it was in almost every way so unlike the others that it hardly counted. You see, they were all outside time, but, in this one, Time was so present he might have been standing over us with his scythe and hour-glass. The moment of real parting came much earlier, the doctor brought it in his bag, like a prescription. It took us unawares, like sudden death. Afterwards we were like ghosts, planning our reunion beyond the grave. I remember that even her voice sounded different. It had been ours, just as a song belongs to the listener as much as to the singer, but it became hers, a lovely voice expressing what she thought, but not what we thought, another person’s voice. I believe we even argued a little about how soon she would be well enough, etc., and whether she shouldn’t consult another doctor. I remember the long pauses, when we were thinking what to say, better than what we said. There had been no pauses before, only the sort of pauses that there are in music, leading up to the next theme. It seemed extraordinary that the world outside should be more real than the world contained in this room. We were only going to be as we had been before we met, it was no worse than that; and yet it seemed to both of us that such an existence, the existence we had known before, would be unbearable. Almost deliberately I tried to keep my thoughts away from hers, there was a refuge in egoism, for to think of her pain doubled mine. So I sat by her bedside as correct as a doctor, as unimplicated as a district visitor; and the love duet, without which no opera is complete, instead of swooning itself away in long, heart-broken phrases, grew more and more tense and staccato and inconsecutive with the things we had to say to keep silence at bay, but hated saying, until somehow I got myself out of the room, and out of the flat, and out of the palace, on to the Zattere where the heat blasted me, but it would have been the same if it had been freezing—I couldn’t have recognized myself in any environment.’

  My friend stopped as abruptly as if his memories had come up against a concrete obstacle. I was still uncomfortably aware of seeing the whole thing at an angle different from his, and of withholding some of the sympathy I should have liked to give; and all I could think of to say was:

  ‘So she agreed to the parting?’

  ‘Yes,’ he answered listlessly, ‘she agreed to it. In a way, she decreed it, for I should never have consented. But she was not herself that day.’

  ‘No?’ I said.

  ‘No. It was the shock, of course, the mortal shock of the . . . discovery and then the strain of those last hours. She reproached herself a good deal . . . for having written to me. That was all nonsense. I could see she was not herself. But how could you expect her to be? I wasn’t, either.’ He added, with an effort: ‘She had to take her tablets.’

  ‘Had she never taken them before?’ I asked.

  ‘Never in my presence, I swear. They were for emergencies, you see. She kept them by her bed, in a tortoiseshell box. But the maid said she had taken them quite often, between times, and that was one reason why she was alarmed. I didn’t and don’t believe it.’

  ‘You saw the maid again?’

  ‘Oh yes, I saw her every day. I went—to ask, you know, and in case the . . . ban should be lifted. I couldn’t keep away. And I wanted to make up to the maid for what I had left undone. But, do you know, I couldn’t induce her to take it. She changed towards me completely, and was as grim as she had been on the first day. She wouldn’t let me come any further than the door. She said she wished she’d never let me in.’

  ‘Did you see the doctor again?’ I asked.

  My friend hesitated.

  ‘Yes, but only once. He didn’t want to see me, in fact he refused. I didn’t know his name, so I couldn’t go to his house, and the maid wouldn’t tell me the hours when he made his visits. But I knew he came every day, so once more I kept watch outside the palace and caught him as he came in, about midday, it must have been.’

  ‘What did he say?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, the same technical stuff about her illness, and that she wasn’t so well, and he was anxious about her, and would I kindly keep away, and so on. I waited till he came out again, a long time, but he wouldn’t speak to me, he just shook his head and hurried off.’

  ‘How unkind,’ I commented.

  ‘Yes, wasn’t it? And I came to have a hatred for the place, for Venice, I mean, so in the end it wasn’t so difficult to leave. I gave my address in England to the maid, and begged her to write to me as often as she could, since she said her mistress wasn’t allowed to; but I only got one letter.’

  ‘What did it say?’

  ‘Oh, it was stuffed with lies.’

  ‘What sort of lies?’

  ‘Oh, ridiculous accusations against me, and against the English generally, and Sanctions, and the war, and how badly England had always treated Italy, and how we had won the war and were worse off than before, and she was thankful for that, and a lot more in the same vein.’

  ‘But what did she accuse you of?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, she said I had broken into the house like a burglar, and had been very wicked, and thought only of myself, and I wouldn’t go away, and I ought to have been prosecuted, and the doctor had said this and that, and everyone agreed with him.’

  ‘You could afford to disregard all that,’ I remarked.

  ‘Of course. And that the whole thing had been too much for her, and that she only went through with it because I forced her to, and that she would have sent me away only she was sorry for me, but it went on too long and that was why she died.’

  ‘She died?’

  ‘Yes, she died. That was the one fact in all that string of falsehoods.’ He lowered his eyes and his voice. ‘But I know one thing. It wasn’t being with me that killed her—it was being without me. She died of a broken heart.’

  He was silent for a time and then said:

  ‘You agree with me, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Because if I thought otherwise, I couldn’t, I really couldn’t——She died because I was taken away from her. You see that, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course,’ I repeated.

  ‘I don’t value my life very much, and if I thought there was a word of truth in that letter, except the one fact of her death, well, I should want to kill myself. But there wasn’t. You would agree there wasn’t?’

  ‘Of course,’ I repeated.

  ‘You are quite sure?’

  ‘Quite sure.’

  ‘Will you say it again?’

  ‘I’m sure there wasn’t a word of truth in it,’ I pronounced firmly. He sighed.

  ‘Thank you, thank you, Arthur. What a good friend you are!’

  The tears were running down his face. I could not leave him like that, late as it was; I stayed with him and tried to comfort him, and it was not, until he had disagreed with me several times that I felt that I could, without unkindness, leave him to himself.

  APPLES

  ‘Uncle Tim, Uncle Tim!’ There was no escaping the voice. Uncle Tim hoisted himself out of his chair and limped towards the window. It still looked a long way off when the cry began again; close to, this time. ‘Coming!’ called Uncle Tim, but it made no difference; the mournful importunate anapaests followed each other without a break. ‘Uncle Tim, Uncle Tim!’ It was like a weary goods train climbing an incline. Uncle Tim threw open the window and leaned out.

  ‘Yes, Rupert?’

  ‘Oh, Uncle Tim,’ said the child, and stopped, as though hypnotized by his own incantation.

  ‘Well, Rupert?’

  ‘I want an apple,’ announced Rupert, with an air of detachment, and as though fetching his thoughts from afar. He proceeded with quick gasps. ‘I want you to get me one. They’re right up on the tree. Silly old tree!’

  ‘Why is the tree silly?’ asked Uncle Tim. He tried to speak indulgently, but a shadow of annoyance crossed his face.

  ‘Because I can’t get the appl
es,’ answered Rupert, his voice growing shrill. ‘Do come, Uncle Tim, please. I did say please.’

  Uncle Tim was moving away when Rupert called him back.

  ‘Uncle Tim! Come through the window, it’s ever so much quicker. I must have the apples . . . I want them. I’ve wanted them ever since breakfast!’

  ‘I’m afraid I’m not an acrobat,’ said Uncle Tim.

  ‘You’re always thinking about your silly old leg,’ argued Rupert. ‘Mummy says so. It won’t hurt you.’

  ‘I’m not going to give it a chance,’ said Uncle Tim, and he definitely withdrew.

  Rupert was standing by the apple tree when his uncle arrived, leaning against it with one hand as though to introduce it to its despoiler. Around him on the grass lay instruments of assault, stones, sticks, toy bricks, even a doll that belonged to his little sister. There was a horrible gaping hole in its brilliant cheek, and its dress wanted smoothing down. Overhead the apples gleamed in the morning sunlight, each with a kind of halo, intolerably bright.