The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley

by Leslie Poles Hartley

  ‘Is it serious?’ asked her husband, who was going to Rome on a mission to the Pope. ‘Ought I to stay here?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said the doctor. ‘Signora Carteret has a very strong constitution and besides that, she is especially anxious that you should keep this appointment in Rome. I think it would do her more harm if you stayed than if you went. Signora Carteret—’

  ‘I know what you are going to say,’ her husband said.

  ‘She doesn’t like to be crossed. Speaking as a psychologist, I should say it would be bad for her if you cancelled your visit to Rome. In an illness of this sort,’ the doctor didn’t give it a name or he was not quite sure what it was, ‘as in many other illnesses,’ he added hastily, ‘it is essential to keep up the patient’s interest in life. Mrs. Carteret is, of course, deeply religious and she has set her heart on your being received by His Holiness. Your account of the interview will give her a stronger hold on life than any of my medicines. Equally, disappointment in a matter that means so much to her, would have the opposite effect. She has several times said to me, “I look forward so much to my husband being received by the Pope. It means almost as much to me as if the Holy Father were to receive me myself. My great fear is lest, knowing how concerned James is about my health, he may cancel his appointment and miss this golden opportunity”.’

  Mr. Carteret thought for a while.

  ‘I shall pray for her as I always have. But would it be correct for me to ask the Holy Father to make intercession for her?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘He must have so many requests of that kind.’

  ‘What if he has?’ said the doctor. ‘It is part of his business—il suo mestiere—to pray for others, and you and your signora have been generous benefactors to the Church.’

  ‘So you think I should go?’

  ‘I do, most decidedly.’

  Mr. Carteret went.

  *

  What happened afterwards is confused and not wholly credible, especially as the evidence of the two eye-witnesses, if such they were, sometimes disagree. If only Dr. Bevilacqua (well-named for he was an ardent teetotaller and could have been relied on to give an accurate account of what happened) had not been called away to another bedside! Antonio, the Carterets’ butler and first gondolier, and Maria, Anna Carteret’s personal and confidential maid, were still alive. I sought them out and they remembered me, not I think without affection, as a one-time habitué of the Palazzo Contarini dal Molo.

  Their accounts differed in detail but essentially they were the same. Maria and Antonio, the two most favoured servants, may have been jealous or envious of each other. They were not malicious about Mrs. Carteret in spite of her arrogant ways, for she and her husband had left them well provided for.

  According to Antonio, the doorbell rang at about 10 p.m., by which time (he said) he would have been in bed but for his concern for the signora. It was a stormy night in November; the north wind, the bora, was almost a hurricane. The Carterets’ palace received its full force; hardly any gondolier or any sandolier, rowing a working-man’s seaworthy boat, would venture down the Sacco della Misericordia, where die wind collected and swept down as in a funnel. The only way to reach the palace on such a dirty night (una notte cosi cattiva) was on foot; and who would want to come then, unless it was the doctor?

  Antonio opened the door cautiously and with difficulty, for the wind almost swept it off its hinges and him off his feet; and before he had time to ask who and why, a stranger had slipped in. He was wearing a flimsy raincoat and the red cap that sailors and fishermen sometimes wear; but he was obviously soaked to the skin, and even while he stood a puddle was forming at his feet.

  ‘Cosa vuole?’ asked Antonio. ‘What do you want?’

  The man, with water still streaming down his face, said, ‘I want to see the signora.’

  ‘I’m afraid you can’t,’ said Antonio, who was a big burly fellow. ‘È impossibile. La signora is ill—è molto ammalata—and she can see nobody.’

  ‘All the same,’ said the man who had stopped shivering, ‘I think she will see me.’

  Antonio glanced at the grotesque looking creature from whose meagre garments the rain was still oozing, and like most Italians, he was not devoid of sympathy for anyone in distress. But what to do for or with this man? A thought occurred to him. ‘Rimanga qui’ he said, indicating the gondolier’s room where I had so often changed my clothes to make myself presentable to Mrs. Carteret after sweaty expeditions in the lagoon, ‘stay here, and I will lend you some dry clothes, and dry yours,’ he added, ‘and you can spend the night here and no one need know anything about it.’ He pushed the man into the gondolier’s room. ‘Rimanga qui,’ he repeated, ‘but I shall have to lock you in.’

  But the man said, ‘No, I want to see the signora. I have an appointment with her.’

  ‘An appointment?’ said Antonio, ‘but the signora sees nobody, she is much too ill. And in ogni caso—in any case—she receives no one without a written introduction. Do you know her?’ he asked, suddenly wondering if this sodden creature might be an old friend of the signora’s (for do not many of us come down in the world?) and he, Antonio, might get into trouble for turning him away. ‘Do you know her?’ he repeated. ‘Have you ever met her? What is your name?’

  ‘My name,’ said the man. ‘Non importa—it doesn’t matter—but she will know me when she sees me.’

  Quite what happened then I couldn’t make out. Apparently Antonio pushed the interloper into the gondolier’s room, locked the door on him, and went upstairs to consult Maria, whose bedroom had been moved next to Mrs. Carteret’s and who was sitting up more or less all night during her illness.

  He explained the situation to Maria.

  ‘Ma è brutto, sporco, e tutto bagnato,’ he said. ‘He is ugly, dirty, and wet through.’

  ‘Non si può,’ agreed Maria. ‘She cannot. But if she gets to hear—and she hears everything—that someone has called to see her and been turned away, ill as she is, she may be very angry.’

  The sound of coughing was heard from the next-door room.

  ‘She is awake,’ said Maria. ‘I will go in and see her—è il mio dovere—it is my duty, and say that this person has called.’

  She knocked and went into the bedroom, a splendid state-bedroom, where lay under a magnificent four-poster, the ample, but slightly diminished by illness, form of Mrs. Carteret.

  ‘Cosa vuole?’ she said, with the irritability of a sick person, though she was very fond of Maria. ‘What do you want? I was just dropping off to sleep. I was thinking of the signore—not the bon Dieu,’ she corrected herself, shaking her head on the pillows, for the ‘signore’ was another name for God, ‘but Signor Giacomo, who has gone to Rome to be received by the Pope.’

  Maria explained, as best she could, why she had butted in.

  ‘What is his name?’

  ‘He would not give it. He told Antonio you would know him when you saw him.’

  ‘Has he a letter of introduction?’ asked Mrs. Carteret, whose mind was going back to earlier, happier days.

  ‘No, signora, è proprio un lazzarone—a real layabout—and you wouldn’t want to see him.’

  ‘Have you seen him, Maria?’

  ‘No, signora, Antonio has locked him up in the gondoliers’ room.’

  ‘Tell him, Maria, whoever he is, that I can’t possibly receive him. I am much too ill.’

  She turned her tired head on the ample pillows and closed her eyes. How unlike the Mrs. Carteret of former days, a travesty of her, a cartoonist’s caricature.

  *

  Maria brought her message, it seems, back to Antonio.

  ‘She cannot receive him,’ she said.

  ‘Well, of course not,’ said Antonio robustly. ‘But we had to ask her—he’s so touchy about these things, and he might have been an old boyfriend, chissà?—Who knows? And he might be a thief. Anyhow, he was in a bad way, and I gave him some dry clothes and locked him up. ‘I�
�ll let him out in the morning.’

  Hardly had he said this when the door—actually there was no door, only curtains of consummate beauty that separated Mrs. Carteret’s apartment from the meaner sides of the house (Mr. Carteret had his quarters elsewhere) opened and the stranger, still ugly, still dirty, still dripping, stood before them, an apparition as startling to their thoughts as if they had not been thinking of him, and they turned to each other, dismayed.

  ‘I want to see the signora,’ he said.

  Antonio was the first to recover himself.

  ‘You can’t,’ he said. ‘La signora is much too ill to see anyone. Go back to where you came from.’

  And he took the stranger by the shoulders to push him out. That was his version of the story. Maria was too frightened to remember; but she thought that Antonio’s hand closed on something that recoiled, without giving way, and vanished behind the closed door of Mrs. Carteret’s bedroom.

  *

  What next? Presence of mind is a rare quality and Antonio and Maria had spent whatever they had. They leaned their ears against the door and this is what they heard.

  ‘Chizzè?’—the Venetian patois for ‘Who is it?’ The listeners were astonished, they had no idea that Mrs. Carteret knew the Venetian dialect, for though she knew many languages, they did not think that she knew theirs.

  It was a deep voice, unlike hers; was she asking him, or he asking her?

  The next sentence settled this. ‘Who are you? Have you a letter of introduction? I am ill, and I cannot receive anyone without that. My husband is away—he is being received by the Holy Father—and I cannot imagine why my domestici let you in. Please go away at once, before I have you turned out.’ Her voice, which had been unexpectedly strong, suddenly weakened, ‘Who are you, anyway?’

  The two outside the door waited for an answer.

  A voice in no accent that they knew replied, ‘I need no introduction, Signora. I am a common man, un uomo del popolo, a man of the people, but sooner or later I get to know everyone. In the end everyone has to receive me, and so must you.’

  ‘Must? I don’t understand that word—non conosco quella parola—I receive whom I want to receive, and I don’t want to receive you.’ Her voice grew fainter, but they heard her say ‘What is your name?’

  They could not hear his answer because he whispered it, perhaps he bent down and whispered it, and a cry pierced the silence, too thin to be called a scream.

  Hearing this, Antonio put his shoulder to the door which was unaccountably locked, and went in. The electric light had recovered from the storm and was painfully brilliant; there was no sign of the stranger, but Mrs. Carteret’s head had fallen back on the pillow. Was she asleep, or was she—?

  They crossed themselves, and Maria closed her eyes. Leaving the bedside Maria noticed the dirty, wet footprints on the floor. ‘I’ll clean those up,’ she said. ‘La signora wouldn’t have liked them. Vadi giù,’ she added, ‘go down into the gondolier’s room and see if the man is still there.’

  Key in hand and still looking frightened, Antonio went down to the room which had so often witnessed my post-lagoon ablutions. Coming back he said, ‘No, non c’è nessuno.’ ‘There is no-one.’

  THE SILVER CLOCK

  Nerina Willoughby (so named because her parents, now dead, had liked the flower) had inherited their large house, as was right and proper, for she was their only child. Perhaps on that account she had never married; and was used to being, if not the idol of two people, at least their main object, the centre of their thoughts, and although she had had more than one offer of marriage, she had refused them. She was now thirty-one. Better be an old man’s darling than a young man’s slave, so ran the proverb; Nerina was good-looking, in a rather austere way, and well-off; her suitors were much younger than she, as perhaps Penelope’s suitors were. So far, no middle-aged or elderly prétendant had presented himself, and lacking this rather doubtful incentive to matrimony—for though she was sure she didn’t want to be a young man’s slave—she wasn’t quite sure she wanted to be an old man’s darling. Her parents had doted on her, their ewe-lamb, much as a middle-aged husband might. But their devotion, in season and out of season, fretted her and demanded of her an obligation of gratitude to which she couldn’t always respond and which gave her a feeling of guilt.

  Independence, independence! Independence from human ties which are often, as they say, a bind. Better be by oneself, if sometimes lonely, than attached to another human being, probably more selfish than oneself, whose every move of oncoming or withdrawal, and the emotional strain and re-adjustment they entailed, must be met by a corresponding reaction on her part.

  And so Nerina, who was far from wanting in affection, in fact too sensitive to its demands and too little inclined to impose her own, took to dog-breeding.

  With dogs you knew to some extent where you were. They had their tricks and their manners, as the doll’s dressmaker said; no dog was like another, each had to be studied; each had to be cherished; they gave what they had or withheld what they had; but they were, for Nerina, at any rate, objects of devotion on whom she could spend her care and affection without feeling that, sometime or other, they would try to get the upper hand of her. Difficult they often were; but they depended on her, as much as she on them; she never had to say (for at heart she was a disciplinarian) ‘I must give way to Rex’ (or whatever his name was) as so often women had to, with their husbands.

  So Nerina was absorbed in the dogs; they were her interest, her occupation, almost her religion. In this she did not differ from many people who find in animals something they miss in human beings. A sort of rapprochement, not always to be relied on, for animals have their moods, as well as we, and sometimes more so, and the discipline, or self-discipline, which we try to impose on them, doesn’t always work. An old friend, an animal-lover, once said to her, ‘Cats don’t see why they should do what you want them to do.’ She was not averse to cats, and she recognized and accepted their independence of attitude.

  But a dog, it is unnecessary to say, is not like a cat, it is essentially a dependent creature, and needs a great deal of attention paid to it, for which, as a rule, it repays a great deal of attention in return. The relationship is reciprocal but the onus of responsibility lies on the dog’s owner. A dog cannot take itself for a walk, or if it does, it is liable to get lost or run over. At stated hours, therefore, it has to be taken out for exercise or to relieve nature which, for some reason, dogs seem to find a more pressing, as well as a more satisfying outlet for their feelings than do other animals.

  Nerina’s dogs, large shaggy creatures, though not the subject, I hope, for a ‘shaggy dog’ story, were almost a whole-time job; for besides the daily demands of each adult, for food, exercise, and so on, there were births, marriages and deaths. There were also illnesses; for dogs, perhaps owing to their long association with human beings, were subject to all kinds of epidemics; classic distemper was the most frequent and the worst, but there were always new ones cropping up—hard-pad, for instance—and happily dying down, almost as suddenly as they appeared. Nerina had to be always on the watch, by day and night, for some outbreak of ill-health in the kennels; and so did the vet, for although by this time she had almost as much experience of dog-ailments as he had, she relied on his trained opinion, and, to some extent, on the remedies he prescribed.

  This was a bad day in the kennels, for some of the dogs, fifteen of them in all, old, middle-aged, young, and newly-born, had developed symptoms for which she couldn’t account and they were clearly spreading She had, as so often before, summoned the vet, for even if she knew as much about their ailments as he did, it was always better to be on the safe side. However, he couldn’t come; he had been called out by the R.S.P.C.A. to separate some fighting swans, or rather to attend to the needs of one who seemed to be dying from the encounter. He didn’t want to let down Nerina, who was a good client of his, still less to offend her, for there were other vets besides him, but, as he told
her on the telephone, ‘you wouldn’t believe how often I am called out to deal with fighting swans, especially at this season, when they are mating. I daresay that if they weren’t monogamous, they wouldn’t get so excited, but they know that if they have set their hearts on a certain female to be their partner for life—their very long life—they say to themselves, “It’s either him or me.” You would hardly believe how savage they can be—no holds barred. It’s twenty miles away, and I shall probably arrive too late, but I may be in time to give the loser an injection, if he’ll let me, and the winner a good kick. I don’t know why people are so fond of swans—they wouldn’t be if they had to assist at their matrimonial proceedings. I’ll come on to you directly afterwards, but it may be an hour or two. Meanwhile, from what you say, some salicylate of bismuth might allay the symptoms.’

  Nerina had already administered this medicament, and was walking up and down the kennels, which were at a short distance from the garden, which itself was a long distance from the road, to see how effective it had been in staunching the alarming flow from the poor animals’ insides, when she looked up and saw five or six youths, between seventeen and nineteen, who were following her movements with eyes that were cold and hard under their long hair.

  They were trespassing, of course; but Nerina was too much absorbed in the plight of the dogs to pay much heed to them. She thought of offering them, sarcastically, a dose of salicylate of bismuth, but they appeared not to need it (though her kennel-ground had been used, in the past, by interlopers who had been ‘taken short’); and she tried to dismiss them from her mind.

  But they didn’t go away; on the contrary, they came nearer, and as though by a pre-conceived plan, kept pace with her, almost step by step, and only a few yards away, on her sentry-go as she looked into the various kennels to see if the dogs were responding to treatment.

  However, after a time this double perambulation, which had the air of an ill-natured mimicry, began to get on her nerves, and deflect her attention from the welfare of the dogs, which was her chief concern.