The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley

by Leslie Poles Hartley

  The nearest he got to his divinities was to cut their pictures out and pin them to the wall—where he gazed at them with awe and reverence, and desire, but oh! how distantly.

  Otherwise, he had not had much to do with women, for the second, the material factor in his late development was lack of funds. An only child, he had never mixed much with other children. His parents, who were dead, had scraped together enough money to send him to a small public school, but not enough to leave him any. He had a black-coated job in the City, and being conscientious, over-conscientious, as well as fearful for the future, his work came first with him. Too much so, in a way; for his preoccupation with doing it well made him miss opportunities for advancement which other men, with a keener eye to their own interests, and a wider range of vision, would certainly have seized.

  So the legacy, the very substantial legacy from a distant relation which came to him at the age of thirty-nine, found him totally unprepared, socially, emotionally and mentally. Morally he was not so unprepared; his strong sense of obligation found immediate outlets: all sorts of people, and causes, could be benefited. The material aspect of his new position took him longer to realize: in fact he had to be told that with the money at his disposal he could buy himself a partnership in the firm—a proposal which, when it came, the firm welcomed with enthusiasm, for not only were they glad to have the money, they were glad to have him too, a modest, loyal, trust-worthy, hard-working man who had given them good service and no trouble. It could be truly said that no one grudged him his good fortune or the privileges that went with it—one of which was much more leisure, and another a widening range of social contacts.

  It was not surprising that he found himself accepted in circles hitherto unknown to him. He was well-mannered, passably good-looking and undeniably eligible; and if he could not always tune in to the wavelength of the people he was with, didn’t quite speak their language or understand its nuances, these social shortcomings were readily forgiven him; indeed they were rather welcome than otherwise, for they made him into a kind of pet, a well-meaning animal that has not quite been trained. Several women, one of whom had incidentally been his pin-up girl, undertook to train him and were tireless in trying to raise him in his own esteem. In this they were not altogether disinterested; for they realized that unless a man had a fairly good opinion of himself, he could not be what they would have him be. But the harder they tried, the more deeply they involved him in their silken webs, the more they increased his sense of obligation and apartness. What could he do in return for all this enveloping kindness? Little presents he gave them, flowers and trinkets, presents which were sometimes misunderstood; but rapturously as these tokens were received, they left him with a haunting sense of falling short. They were not enough! They were not enough! Mrs. de Sole, for instance, ‘Délice’ to her friends; after an evening in her drawing-room, with all its amenities of relaxation, conversation, and near-love, he felt he ought to carry her heavy luggage for her, for miles and miles and miles.

  Actually he didn’t find it easy to spend money; the penurious habits of his early life clung to him; he didn’t think he ought to live beyond his income, the idea of spending capital appalled him. Gradually he reached a more realistic view of his financial position, and moved from his small house in the suburbs to a comfortable flat in South Kensington; but it was weeks before he felt he could afford it and months before he dared to give a party.

  The party, however, was a success, for all those present were determined that it should be; and when the last guest left, George was left feeling that at last he had done something for somebody.

  His men friends did not take the same view of George’s potentialities that his women friends took. Their attitude might be described as coarser. They did not, of course, take the same trouble with him, but none the less they had their eye on him—the dark horse, the unknown quantity. Needless to say they didn’t want to get him tied up in married life, but women came into their calculations. They thought of love in terms of money, not money in terms of love. At least, some of them did. Most of George’s new friends were men who talked of money, and with whom money talked; they had chosen him, not he them; he didn’t know his way about in this new world, and was both surprised and flattered when anybody showed an interest in him. The women he gravitated towards were of a gentler and more sensitive type than their husbands, they found George a pleasant change. But the men, being more objective and detached, summed up his position in some ways more accurately than they did.

  ‘What you want, George, is a dog,’ said one well-wisher, more discerning than the others.

  ‘A dog?’

  ‘Yes, something that would wag its tail when you come in, and lick your face.’

  George thought about this.

  ‘But I should have to take it out for walks.’

  ‘Not all the time. You are such a glutton for responsibility. Sometimes it would look at you with huge pleading eyes, and then you could rub its ears and fondle it. A dog will absorb far more affection than a human being.’

  ‘Do you think I’m affectionate?’ asked George.

  ‘In a frustrated way, yes, very. These women you go about with aren’t much good to you, you’re half-afraid of them. I’m not saying anything against them, mind, in their way they’re tops, but not for you. They are too complex, you need something simpler, and more natural. A dog——’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, it would fawn on you and you could beat it.’

  ‘What a horrible idea.’

  ‘Or you could fawn on it and it would bite you.’

  ‘Isn’t there anything between the two?’

  ‘Not for you, there isn’t. No, you need a dog, with a strong emotional current uniting you. Not the sort of friendship you have with Mrs. Hake, or Halibut, or whatever her name is. She must freeze the pants off you.’

  ‘I don’t know who you mean.’

  ‘That middle-aged harpy who gets you on a sofa and twangs your heart-strings with her varnished nails.’

  ‘Oh, Délice de Sole! She’s an angel.’

  ‘That’s what I mean. You need someone more fleshly, who would let her hair down, and help you to let down yours. We must arrange a party for you.’

  That was how George met Deirdre. At the party were two other girls rather like her, and decidedly unlike the women that George was in the habit of consorting with. An atmosphere of good-fellowship prevailed. Champagne loosened tongues and George’s feelings. As well as talking to him they talked at him and about him—the industrious apprentice who had made good and come into a fortune, the man who had the ball at his feet, the lucky chap whose name had got into the papers. Much of what they said was quite untrue but all of it was flattering, and even more intoxicating than the wine: under the admiring glances flashed at him, George began to feel the hell of a fellow.

  Presently one of the other couples rose and the man, apologizing, said they had a date. ‘We don’t want to break up the party,’ he added, ‘That’s all right,’ their host said; ‘Annette and I have a date too, at that new place, the Late Session; and it will be pretty late before we’re back. But there’s plenty more to drink; why don’t you and Deirdre, George, stay on, and make an evening of it? It’s only eleven o’clock. That is, if neither of you has a date?’

  George and Deirdre exchanged glances. ‘What do you think, Deirdre?’ he asked. He didn’t know her other name.

  ‘I’m all for staying here,’ she said.

  ‘Well,’ said their host, rising and taking Annette’s hand, ‘we couldn’t be more sorry—it’s too bad that it’s turned out like this. But you will make yourselves at home, won’t you? You know the geography of the house’—he waved his hand to indicate it—‘at any rate Deirdre does. Good-bye, my children, don’t get into mischief,’ and he was gone, with his companion, almost before they had time to thank him for their lovely evening.

  It was the first of several such evenings, some organized by George, to whom
spending money was now becoming easy, even exhilarating. But he grudged sharing Deirdre’s company; after the party he could have her to himself. Himself—his very self, only attainable in Deirdre’s arms.

  But no, it was attainable in other ways. Everything he did for her, every present, every treat he gave her, every wish of hers, expressed by her or anticipated by him, that he fulfilled, gave him, in a lesser degree, the same sense of wholeness and integration. He felt, and even looked, proud of being a man, and walked down Piccadilly with his hands in his pockets, looking as if he owned it. Even thinking of her, he was twice the man he had been. Only she could give him this freedom; with other women, the women he had known, he was still shy and diffident, anxious to please and sometimes succeeding, but always being acted on, not acting. Gradually he frequented them less and less; the silken threads by which they held him were a frail tie compared to the hawser which fastened him to Deirdre.

  So for two years he was entirely happy. She could do no wrong for him. Her moods and caprices, the small slights and snubs, rebuffs and disappointments, by which she sought to make herself more precious to him, all seemed part of her; he scarcely distinguished between her melting and her stony moods. But then something in him became sensitized and if she was unkind to him it began to hurt. Now there were two Deirdres instead of one; and the second made him suffer. In vain he told himself that she had always been like that; it was unreasonable that something he had always taken for granted and not minded should suddenly become a grievance. He blamed himself more than her for his resentment, and was miserable until, at whatever cost to his pride and sense of fairness, he had made it up with her. He tried to make these tiffs and reconciliations into a habit, part of his emotional routine; an item on his experience account; but it didn’t work out so. His feelings, instead of toughening, grew more tender; his eyes had a hurt, anxious look, which his other women friends, on the few occasions when he saw them, remarked upon. How quick they were to notice changes in him! He couldn’t conceal from himself that he was unhappy; the joys of reconciliation and forgiveness (forgiveness of himself rather than her) became of shorter duration; soon, as an anodyne, they hardly counted. He was forced into making a distinction, which he had never made before, between her acts and her: Deirdre was one thing, what she did was another, so he told himself; but try as he would he couldn’t keep them apart. It wasn’t only the smart of the disappointments, which she was so expert in inflicting, that made him miserable; it was the nature that prompted them, his sense of which was like a smell that persisted even through her most fragrant and most yielding moments, and had something frightening about it: the smell of cruelty.

  One evening at a party, a rather smart party that he had taken her to at her request, though not quite sure she would fit in, he suddenly felt ill—food poisoning or gastric flu—he didn’t know what it was. He caught sight of his face in a looking-glass, and it more than confirmed what he was feeling. It wasn’t easy to detach Deirdre from the young man she was talking to, but at last he did, and told her of his plight as well as he could, for by now the room was spinning round.

  ‘I don’t want to go now,’ she said, ‘I’m having a good time. You’ll be all right. Get a hot-water bottle and go to bed.’

  ‘Oh, do come back with me,’ he begged her. ‘I feel so odd, I don’t know if I shall be able to get home.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘You know what an old fusspot you are. I’ll look in and see you on my way back, if it isn’t too late.’

  He lay awake shivering and sweating, with his bedroom door open, hoping to hear her key turn in the lock, but he hadn’t heard it when, towards three o’clock, he fell asleep.

  His daily help was busy in the room when George woke up. He had had a dreadful night with bouts of vomiting and diarrhoea, sometimes alternating, sometimes simultaneous; and the blackness before his eyes, as he plunged across the passage to relieve them! Once he had to crawl. He didn’t always get there in time, as his bedclothes bore witness.

  ‘Never mind,’ said the daily help, ‘I’ll change them for you. Don’t try to get out of bed—I’ll change them with you in it.’

  He rolled from one side to the other, and somehow the distasteful task was done.

  He could have had a servant living in, but most of his spare cash went to Deirdre, to keep her flat and her; for he had persuaded her, as much for his sake as for hers, to give up her secretarial work. With this she sometimes taxed him. ‘You’ve taken away my livelihood,’ she said.

  She said, she said . . . Something that Deirdre had once said, and which he couldn’t remember, was vexing George’s throbbing brain when the telephone bell rang.

  ‘Perhaps you’d rather I went away?’ the daily woman suggested. ‘It may be something private.’ He nodded weakly.

  ‘Hullo, is that George? I didn’t recognize your voice, you disguised it.’

  ‘I’m laid up in bed.’

  ‘Speak a little louder, can you?’

  George repeated it.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I’ll come round and see you. I couldn’t come last night—it went on too late.’

  ‘When will you come?’

  ‘In half an hour or so.’

  The morning passed; the daily help, who usually left at twelve o’clock, went out to buy some fish for his lunch—‘I’ll boil it for you,’ she said.

  George protested that he couldn’t eat it.

  ‘You must get something inside you,’ she said, ‘after all that vomiting.’

  How kind she is, he thought, but the thought made him uneasy—she was doing something for him, meeting what she believed to be a wish of his—she was putting him in her debt, making him dependent on her. Receiving a favour, he felt uncomfortable. But Deirdre would be here any minute now, and for her he could do something—but could he, bedridden? He heard the click of the key turning—Deirdre at last! But no, it was the daily help again, for sounds came from the kitchen. At last the telephone bell rang.

  ‘Darling, how are you feeling?’

  ‘A bit better, thank you, but not much. When will you be round?’

  ‘Isn’t it too bad, I’ve been asked out to lunch, I may not get to you till tea-time. I’ll make you some tea, but you’ll have to tell me where you keep it.’

  ‘I’m not sure if I know myself.’

  ‘Oh, well, I’ll find it. I must dash now.’

  Presently the daily help came in, bringing the boiled fish on a tray, laid out very neatly. ‘And I thought you might like some peas and potatoes.’ His mouth watered at the sight of the food, but his stomach warned him, and he put the forkful down, while he tried to decide how serious the warning was. ‘Hadn’t you better have the doctor?’ she asked. ‘You don’t look any too good.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so, you see my temperature is normal.’

  ‘Well, try to eat a bit, and then have a nap and I’ll come in and give you your tea.’

  ‘It’s very kind of you,’ he said, ‘Mrs. Buswell’—suddenly remembering her name. ‘But Miss O’Farrell’s coming in to do that. By the way, where is the tea kept?’

  She always left the tea-tray ready when she went away.

  ‘In the cupboard beside the fridge, on the second shelf. Well, bye-bye for now, sir, and I’ll come later on and give you your supper.’

  ‘How good of you,’ he said. . . . But he didn’t feel quite happy about the arrangement. He ought to have been giving her her supper.

  Struggling with nausea he swallowed down some fish, picked at the peas, nibbled the potatoes; after an initial revolt, his stomach seemed to tolerate it, and, as often happens after eating, he felt better—well enough, in fact, to take the nap that Mrs. Buswell had recommended. (Was she taking one? He hoped so.) But when he woke he felt feverish and his sense of touch was out of order. Warm things felt cold; cold things felt colder; getting out of bed, wondering whether to be sick or not, he shivered in the August warmth. No matter, it was past four o’clock. Deirdre would soon be he
re.

  Just at the moment when expectation had reached its peak, the telephone bell rang.

  ‘Darling, it’s me. I hate to disappoint you—if you are disappointed—but I’ve gone down to the country—it is so heavenly now, we’re going to have a bathe—so I shan’t be there to give you your tea. And I was so looking forward to it. But you’ll be able to get it for yourself, won’t you? And I’ll come round in the evening.’

  ‘What time?’ George asked.

  ‘Oh, any old time, but well before your bedtime. So long, my dear. Think of me taking a header. Ugh!’

  She rang off.

  George wrestled with his disappointment, but again and again it reared itself and struck at him, thriving on successive decapitations like a hydra. Even more than his body, his mind was troubling him, and if he tried to play off one against the other they united and made common cause against him.

  He took his temperature. It was 101. He derived some comfort from the thought that his body was showing fight against the poison; but all the same he wished his temperature had been normal. Perhaps he had better call in the doctor. He dialled the number, only to be told that his doctor was away on holiday. Another doctor was attending his patients: would Mr. Lambert like to call him? In a frenzy of frustration George said no, then wished he hadn’t, and sheepishly rang up again to ask the other doctor’s number. Again his energy petered out; he couldn’t bring himself to summon a strange doctor. He worked himself up quite a lot over this, then lay back and tried to relax and think it was another person suffering, not he—a device that succeeds, if at all, only when one is feeling nearly well. He tried various forms of mental consolation—that he wasn’t bankrupt, that he was in bed, the proper place, not exposed in the desert being slowly devoured by ants, that he had friends who would be sorry for him if they knew. But would they be, when he had so shamefully neglected them?

  This brought him back to Deirdre, who did know but didn’t seem to be specially sorry. ‘That’s Deirdre all over!’ How often had he used this phrase in her defence, in the days when what she was made anything she did seem unimportant. But now it didn’t help.