The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley

by Leslie Poles Hartley

  It wasn’t a small room, for few rooms in Venice are small; and it had an unshaded light-bulb hanging from the ceiling, leaving the corners in a mysterious gloom, relieved, or unrelieved, by dim forms that one didn’t want to see, and that I seldom saw because I usually came by daylight.

  The gondoliers didn’t seem to realize the squalor of their surroundings, they were invariably pleasant and invariably brought me a clean towel, and I, ‘à mon âge’, as Mrs. Carteret would have said, didn’t mind the cold water, it was rather refreshing after the ardours and endurances of the lagoon.

  Sometimes my gondolier would come and chat to the other two (for all the gondoliers know each other, even if they don’t always like each other) in their dialect which I couldn’t understand, though the word ‘soldi, soldi’ (’money, money’) kept recurring. Beyond giving me a clean towel and the vest and shirt my gondolier had brought with him, they paid no attention to me, and chattered to each other, almost regardless of my presence. Then suddenly Antonio would get up, put on his black suit and say, almost reproachfully, ‘La signora lei aspetta,’ (’Madam is expecting you’) and usher me to the upper regions. Oh, what a change was there!

  *

  As the years passed Mr. and Mrs. Carteret became ever more conscious of their social position. They relaxed it in the case of certain people with high-sounding names, ‘Those poor realis of—she said, referring to certain royal personages visiting Venice who had not a very good name. And when a woman of rank and title came to Venice and stayed with some Lido-loungers of whom Mrs. Carteret did not approve, she said, ‘When a woman of her position, or the position she once had, goes to France and becomes déclassée, and then comes to Venice and stays with riff-raff—I don’t call that very interesting.’

  Interesting it was—but Mrs. Carteret could not equate ‘interesting’ with what was not comme il faut. At least in certain moods she couldn’t, or wouldn’t. But it was hard to tell what she was thinking, for her eyes were enigmatic under the shadow of that broad-brimmed hat; and when the ‘riff-raff’ who had taken for the season one of the largest palaces on the Grand Canal invited the Carterets to meet their distinguished guest the Carterets accepted, and I remember meeting ‘Anna’ as I had come to call her (though I don’t think she liked the familiarity) at the top of the grand staircase, beneath the loudest clap of thunder I ever heard.

  Afterwards she asked the guest who had demeaned herself by staying with the ‘riff-raff’ to dinner, but she did not ask them.

  No fry was too small or too great to be exempt from Mrs. Carteret’s liberal disapproval. Whether her attitude came from some long-hidden inferiority complex who can say? There was no need for it; the Filkensteins were the first Jewish family to be received into New York society; and Carter was a well-known and respected name in New England, before he added ‘et’ to it.

  Whatever the reason, Anna Carteret enjoyed putting people in their place. It was said that her husband, with his high-pitched laugh and his slight figure, half the size of hers, had his way in matters that were really important; perhaps it was he who bought the palazzo, as it was he who decorated it. She had the intelligence and the personality and the culture but he had the taste and the talent and perhaps the will-power under that fragile exterior, ornamented by an over-large grey moustache. ‘No man can afford to do without a moustache.’ Perhaps it was a secret symbol of authority.

  But to the onlooker, it was Mrs. Carteret who ruled the roost, and above all she who decided who should be received or not received.

  ‘Received’ was a word that loomed large with her. It implied a moral as well as a social standard, though she relaxed it in the case of certain eminent persons, not only ‘the poor realis of—but even of celebrities such as D’Annunzio. ‘He’s like a spider,’ she said with a shudder, as far as that massive frame could shudder, and turned up her nose as far as she could, but she received him all the same.

  Others were less fortunate. She had an old friend who had a house in Venice, to which he sometimes repaired, and whose social status was impeccable in England and in Venice, indeed it was by genealogical standards much higher than hers. But they had a tiff—about what I don’t remember—but I expect it was a trifle, and they were for a time estranged. When he, who was as elderly as she, wanted to bring this misunderstanding to an end he wrote and asked if on a certain day he might come and call on her. To which she replied, that most unfortunately, on the day he suggested she was ‘giving’ a children’s party, and there were no more chairs. It was unlikely that she had ever spoken to a child, much less entertained one.

  This, to Sir Ronald, who knew the house well, and who knew that Mrs. Carteret would never give a children’s party as she knew no children, and that even if she did there would still be at least a hundred unoccupied chairs in the palazzo, was an offence. But he gave way, as most people did, to Mrs. Carteret for she had the whip-hand. I am glad to say their quarrel was afterwards patched up.

  Then I, after several years of happy relationships with Mrs. Carteret, fell foul of her. It was my fault, I should have known. My parents came to stay with me in Venice, and I thought they should be shown one of its less known but more beautiful sights, the Palazzo Contarini dal Molo.

  I should have known that my parents could be of no possible interest to Mr. and Mrs. Carteret socially, genealogically, or publicly.

  Mrs. Carteret was most gracious, she asked us to lunch, and she and James even came to lunch with us, in our palazzino. My parents stayed for three weeks, and towards the end of their visit I thought it only civil to ask Madame Carteret if we could pay her a farewell visit, not a visite de digestion, but just an acknowledgement of her kindness in having received us.

  I suggested a day a week or more ahead, but a telephone message came from Mrs. Carteret saying she was very sorry but she could not receive us as the garden was too wet.

  Would it have been too wet in a week’s time? Or would its humidity have interfered with our call, which had no connection with the garden?

  (À propos, Mrs. Carteret sometimes complained that her guests came to see her only because they wanted to see the garden; or, alternatively, that when they came they never cast an eye on the garden (Palladio? Sansovino?), which was one of the treasures of Venice.)

  I was offended by her refusal to see my parents again on such a feeble, pseudo-meteorological excuse, but I realized that I had mistaken her nature, and it was my fault, more than hers.

  No, it may have been a perhaps perverted and unrealizable wish on the part of Anna (Hannah) to keep up standards, of whatever sort, that made her look so critically on the outside world. From her ivory tower she could afford to, in every sense of the word.

  Another episode occurs to me. An old friend of mine and an old acquaintance of Mrs. Carteret’s, came to stay with me. In her beautiful house in Chelsea she kept a salon to which the old, and even more the young, were only too glad to be invited.

  When I asked Mrs. Carteret if I might bring my old friend (and hers) to call, her brow furrowed. ‘This Boadicea of the South,’ she said, ‘cannot possibly receive this Messalina of the North—and she added in a lower tone, and with a slight closing of the eyelids, ‘You know how quickly news travels in Venice. When I told my dear Maria that the daughter of an eminent Bishop might be coming to lunch, she replied, “But Signora, how can a Bishop possibly have a daughter?”.’

  ‘She is not staying here,’ said Mrs. Carteret, to make the position perfectly plain, ‘she is staying with a friend whom you know.’ (She didn’t mention my name.) ‘It is not for us to judge. Of course, heretics have different ideas from ours, but many of them are good people according to their lights, and so on Friday (no, not on Friday, which is a fast day for us) we will have—and a long list of comestibles permitted by the Church followed.

  But it must not be supposed that Mr. and Mrs. Carteret satisfied their romantic longings by receiving the more important visitors to Venice or (by what gave them perhaps greater pleasure) refu
sing to receive those who were less important. Their romanticism went further than the bounds of snobbery and super-snobbery in which to some extent it fulfilled itself.

  Mr. Carteret had his pictures on the walls of the ante-room. He had no reason to be ashamed of them and when visitors praised them and asked him why he had given up painting—‘Oh don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t!’—he would exclaim, and make his usual excuse for having stopped painting when he began to mingle with the rich and great.

  Mrs. Carteret owed no apologies to anyone. She did not feel the need to exhibit her rather laborious knowledge of foreign languages, accurate and impressive as it was, and acquired—who knows how?—in holes and corners of New York, or her considerable knowledge of art and literature which she perhaps felt was beneath her, to any so-and-so who had been admitted to her presence.

  In her case, as in his, this was a kind of negative romanticism, the rich, cultured, high-born American keeping the profane, vulgar, at bay.

  Yet true romanticism demands more than negation and disapproval: it demands a positive gesture, something creative, something to hand down to the ages.

  It happened before my time, and how it happened I never knew, but rumour told me it happened this wise. Mr. and Mrs. Carteret gave an evening party after dinner in the height of summer, to which everyone who was anyone was invited.

  Refreshments no doubt were served, perhaps under the light of gondola lanterns, antique and modern: I can imagine their ghostly glimmering.

  As the warm evening drew to its close, and the mosquitoes began to make their unwelcome attentions, there was a sudden movement, and there emerged from among the bushes, towards and around the fountain, a rush, a displacement of air quite indescribable—and there, said the guests, who could none of them afterwards agree, were a nymph and a shepherd, representing Mrs. and Mr Carteret. For two or three minutes, hand in hand and foot by foot, they encircled the dim sub-aqueous shimmer of the fountain, frolicking and kicking their heels. Then other lights were turned on, fairy-lights away in the garden, and Mr. and Mrs. Carteret in a guise that was never agreed upon, ushered their guests out.

  So no one ever knew for certain, though speculations were rife, what costumes Mr. and Mrs. Carteret had worn for their middle-aged pastoral idyll. Some went so far as to say they had worn nothing; while others said the whole thing was a hoax and the figures clothed or unclothed, that issued from the bushes and danced round the fountain had been hired by Mr. and Mrs. Carteret to give the impression of an old-time Venetian bal masqué.

  Was this extraordinary exhibition the object of the party—to show Mr. and Mrs. Carteret in their primeval youth?

  The guests never knew; they made their farewells and their exits not knowing what to say, and leaving the shepherd and the shepherdess in the darkness.

  The incident was often referred to by their friends, but not by Mr. and Mrs. Carteret. They lived out, and outlived, their innate earlier romanticism and did not repeat the experiment. There were no more shepherds and shepherdesses in the garden (Palladio? Sansovino?). Only properly attired fashionable guests (with one exception) were entertained there.

  *

  Among the yearly visitors to the Palazzo Contarini dal Molo, was one who always escaped Mrs. Carteret’s lively censure. This was Princess X, who came from a distant mid-European country, but who sometimes deigned to set foot in Venice. For Mrs. Carteret, Princess X could do no wrong. In the early autumn I used to be warned, ‘Someone interesting is coming to stay with us. I hope you will be here.’ The ‘someone’ was never mentioned by name, but I knew who she was. Her sojourns at the Palazzo Contarini dal Molo were brief, but they were much prepared for and looked forward to. When the princess finally arrived after adequate arrangements had been made, she did something which Mrs. Carteret would not have tolerated in anyone else. She was at least half an hour late for every meal. Lateness was something Mrs. Carteret bitterly resented: as she sometimes said to a belated guest, ‘Better never than late.’ But not to Princess X, whose late appearances were designed to make an impression. Wearing her famous emeralds, and her fading beauty, she would walk into the ante-room, looking vaguely around her, as if time was of no consequence, and Mrs. Carteret would rise laboriously to her feet and her husband more agilely to his, to greet her.

  ‘Dear Princess!’

  This was in the middle and late thirties, before the Abyssinian War, and Sanctions, which made relationships between our two countries increasingly difficult. Mr. and Mrs. Carteret, besides being by birth Americans, were old enough to be above the battle; they did not much care what happened so long as it did not happen to them in their secure peninsula of beauty. They were, if anything, for Mussolini who protected what they stood and reclined for. But the other Anglo-American inhabitants of Venice were not in such a happy case, and as the fatal year drew on, they also withdrew, as I did. Exactly what happened to the Carterets when war was declared I never knew. Rumours I did hear, many years later, when I came back to Venice. Mr. Carteret had retired to the South of France, where he died, leaving the Allied cause a large sum of money. Anna had predeceased him, perhaps in the first year of the war, perhaps before. We corresponded with each other until letters no longer reached their destination. Our fragile friendship was overwhelmed in the universal cataclysm.

  When I went back after the war there were many changes: the Palazzo Contarini dal Molo had passed into other hands, hands as unlike those of its previous owners as could well be imagined. The suore (the nuns of Santa Chiara, that noble and austere sisterhood) had bought it, and could there be anything more unlike its present situation and meaning to the world outside than it had in the days of Mr. and Mrs. Carteret? The worldly and the other-worldly could not have been more violently contrasted. The only resemblance between its present and its former owners was the extreme difficulty of being received. The nuns, by rules ordained by their illustrious foundress, could not receive people from the outside world. Those who wanted admission had to have special reasons, religious passports so to speak, before they could be let in. In the Carterets’ day it had been just as difficult to obtain admittance; but how different were the obstacles then! Then they were purely social; now they were purely spiritual.

  But, thought I, the revenant, as I walked along the extreme northern fondamenta of Venice, past the Madonna dell’ Orto with its wonderful Tintoretto, past the Sacco della Misericordia—hated by the gondoliers in bad weather—and looked down on the long curve of the Fondamenta Nuove—so beautiful, so sunless—and then up at the closed and shuttered windows of the palazzo—is it fair to think that Anna and James Carteret would have minded so much the idea of their cherished and lovely house being occupied by nuns?

  Was it quite true that they stood for everything the nuns did not stand for?—for material and snobbish values, and above and beyond them, the values of art and literature, the aesthetic values which they never ceased to uphold and to proclaim?

  Looking up at the dull, uninteresting façade of the place, I thought that never, never again even if the suore would receive me, would I venture into those rooms, where beauty had once reigned and which were now dormitories, refectories, toilets, and so on.

  Anna Carteret, née Filkenstein, was a Jewess; when she came to Venice she became an Anglican Protestant; after a while she was received into the Roman Catholic Church. Her husband followed at a short distance—non lungo intervallo—these religious mutations of hers. It was a grief to the Anglican Church in Venice, to which the Carterets had presented a fine pair of bronze doors, when the Carterets left them and went over to Rome.

  These Vicar-of-Bray-like proceedings did, of course, excite hostile comment not only from the faithful Protestants but also from the Italians, who from afar and not much concerned took a cynical view of their tergiversations and said ‘I signori Carteret will adopt whatever religion suits them best at the moment.’ The Anglican Chaplain felt especially bitter because when the Carterets removed their patronage the Church had to
close down.

  Well, it was a rather shabby story and yet I could not help feeling that Anna and James had, besides religious snobbery, some better reason for turning their coats so often. Would any one as secure as they were in their social position have changed the forms of their religious faith so often if they hadn’t been really interested in religion? They lost face with many people, Protestants and Catholics alike, by doing so. They did not mind such criticism for as Belloc said (mutatis mutandis)

  The trouble is that we have got

  The maxim gun, and you have not.

  The maxim gun was in their case, of course, money and social prestige. But I couldn’t help feeling there was more in their changes of front than that; money and social prestige they could have retained if they had been Jews, Protestants, or anything else. I preferred to think that their changes of mind had been genuine movements of the spirit. But was I right?

  Gradually, when I went back to Venice, I began to hear stories—they were not altogether rumours for I knew their gondolier, Antonio, and I knew their doctor, and I knew Anna’s faithful maid and confidante Maria. Their accounts as to what happened to Anna Carteret in her last hours did not always tally, but neither do the Gospels (no levity intended) in their accounts of what happened in the life and death of Jesus Christ, such a different character except in being an outstanding one, and critical of human behaviour—from Mrs. Carteret.

  She had seldom been ill, but now, in her late seventies, she was ill, and she knew she was. Her doctor, greatly daring, told her she must stay in bed.