Eustace and Hilda

by L. P. Hartley

  Of course we’re on their doorstep, but I shan’t expect Lady Staveley to leave cards on us! As you know, they’re little tin gods in this vicinity—everyone speaks of them with bated breath, though I gather Mr. Dick is quite a lad, or has been. It is so funny to think of him abducting Hilda in an aeroplane! Minney remembers him quite well: I tell her she fell in love with him!

  I cut this snapshot out of Gossip, and couldn’t resist sending it to you, although Jimmy and Minney both begged me not to. Minney was worried because you looked so thin, and Jimmy said he was sure you never wore that lapdog look (actually he’s very fond of dogs).

  With a shrinking of the heart, but overcome by curiosity, Eustace turned the cutting over. His misgivings were more than justified. “Lady Nelly Staveley and a friend take tea in the Piazza,” ran the caption; and there they were sitting at a table at Florian’s—Lady Nelly looking gracious and pleasant and regally inured to being photographed, while he, his shoulders hunched, gazed up at her with a look of dumb devotion. Hastily reversing the snapshot, he returned to Barbara’s letter.

  But I knew it would make you laugh, because you’ve got such a good sense of humour! And of course secretly we’re all thrilled to think of you in such exalted circles—I believe even Aunt Sarah is, though of course she doesn’t say so.

  Oh, how I like to think of people enjoying themselves! Stay as long as you can, Eustace darling, don’t come back till Lady Nelly kicks you out. Really, we’re all quite well. Privately I think Hilda’s been overworking—of course, it would never do to say so, and anyhow she’s better, so don’t worry. I suppose I shouldn’t have told you—but I think it’s so silly, don’t you? to bottle things up—and makes it so much worse when they come out—if there is anything to come out!

  You’ll have guessed what’s the matter with me—and I hope you’ll be as pleased as we both are. I was afraid Jimmy might be annoyed, because I suppose it is rather soon!—but he isn’t. He says it makes him proud of me. It doesn’t make me proud of him, because it’s something that anyone can do; it’s not an achievement, like the clinic, or staying in Venice with Lady Nelly! You mustn’t get too fond of her, though, or perhaps she won’t let you fall in love with anyone else, and that would be a pity, believe me! There, I’m preaching to you, and I’d sworn never to do that—such a cheek from your little sister, anyhow. Not so little either, alas! Forgive this coarse joke—you see, I’m always having to face the facts of life now!

  All love

  From

  BARBARA (AND SON).

  My doctor here is called Speedwell—such a suitable name. He says he remembers you quite well; in fact, he remembers all of us except me! So flattering! He sends you his kind regards, and wants to know if you’ve gone in for any more long-distance running?

  Putting down the letter, Eustace looked out into a changed world, at the centre of which, for a moment, was Uncle Eustace, a fairy godfather bestowing mugs, spoons, silver and coral rattles, and other seasonable gifts on a wrinkled, red-faced baby, who goggled and gurgled delightedly at its uncle. The picture faded into the Anchorstone he knew, where another little boy, perhaps rather like him, was playing on the sands with Minney, and trailing his spade over all the designs, still miraculously extant, that Eustace had left there, muddling the pattern and making nonsense of his past life: a being to be jealous of. The vision passed, but the mood of misgiving remained. He saw the spiritual form of Cambo blocking the gateway to Anchorstone Hall.

  ‘Where did you say you were staying, Mr. Cherrington?’ ‘Oh, at a little house called Cambo, as a matter of fact, Lady Staveley. Don’t bother—er—to do anything—er—about us. This is my other sister, Barbara, the goddess Cybele—Demeter, I should say. She’s only eighteen, but she has done something that neither of us could do. Mother and child have always been a favourite subject with great painters. My elder sister? Oh, Hilda’s a little off-colour; her illness is not so interesting as Barbara’s: just a bilious attack from overwork. No, she’s not at Anchorstone, she’s at our other house, near London. Oh no, Stephen, there’s nothing you can do; if anything needs doing, Dick Staveley will do it. I’m quite helpless here in Venice. Lady Nelly can’t spare me, I’m so useful to her; besides, she needs a friend to be photographed with. You saw that, of course. Wasn’t it a libel?

  ‘Hilda, Hilda, aren’t you pleased about Barbara? Oh, I forgot you had a bilious attack—perhaps it was drinking that champagne at the Ritz. If you don’t like it, it probably doesn’t agree with you. Don’t tell anyone, but I suffered in the same way on the lagoon a few days ago. We often used to have the same illnesses when we were children. When you’re better, you must go down to Anchorstone and stay with Barbara. Oh, why not? It would do you good.’

  Eustace looked at his watch. It was no longer really his, it belonged to Lady Nelly, who had taken such a fancy to it, who thought the blue line so chic. If he minded parting with it, so much the better: there was more virtue in a present that cost you something to give. Perhaps he would find time to go to the watchmaker’s this morning, before he joined Jasper Bentwich for a cocktail. The watchmaker, he remembered, was in the Merceria San Salvador—resounding name—and he must give himself plenty of time, for he had to buy two watches, one for Minney, dear Minney, and another for himself—that could be quite a cheap one. Indeed, it must be, or again he would have to write to Hilda for money, unless he wired—a telegram saved explanations. He still had 4,000 lire (about thirty pounds, Stephen) from her last consignment.

  He was to meet Jasper in the Wideawake Bar of the Splendide and Royal Hotel at twelve o’clock. Jasper was giving luncheon to some people there. He’d invited Eustace too, but Eustace had regretfully declined, for he was to lunch with Lady Nelly at the Excelsior on the Lido. She went there every morning now, with the Morecambes, and bathed and sun-bathed. She seemed to have given the sea a lesson in deportment; it crept to her feet, bowed, and altogether behaved as if it was indoors. She didn’t seem to mind if Eustace stayed until the afternoon or didn’t go at all. “You must get on with your book,” she said.

  Lord Morecambe, running down the staircase with a sheaf of tennis racquets under his arm, used to say the same. And, oddly enough, Eustace had got on with his book, and much faster since the night of the Redentore. The ritual bath had reconciled him to those aspects of the story which conflicted with his wishes for his characters and their wishes for themselves. This objectivity of view visited him when he took up his pen, and deserted him as soon as he put it down; in the moment of creation, his creatures lived in a world more real than his.

  There lay the exercise book, pegged down (though in so little danger of running away) by the present from Anchorstone, which Dick had thrown to him with such a careless gesture. A font! By association of ideas, the warmth of his feeling for Barbara and his pride in her achievement sent him hot-foot to the grey-green writing-table. Grey-green: so much more attractive on wood than on the human countenance. His heroine was now safely married to her lord, and of course, in the course of nature, they must have a baby. Several babies, in fact, for one of the ideas of the book was to show the younger generation growing up to a life that fulfilled their natures. He had meant to skip the part about them coming into the world; but why should he? Only his heroine didn’t seem to want to have a child, certainly not at the big house in Little Athens. The more his thoughts tried to surround her with the comforts required by her condition and made possible by her estate the more she eluded him, and he saw instead his aunt’s bedroom at Cambo, and Barbara, monstrously swollen, cracking jokes with Dr. Speedwell, while Jimmy, outside the door, walked up and down with strides as long as the little landing allowed, and in another room Minney and an unknown woman in white were boiling kettles and rolling up bandages. Only Barbara’s trills and screams, and Jimmy’s agitated footfalls, broke the expectant silence.

  Baffled, Eustace replaced the paper-weight and went to have his bath. The other two letters lay tantalisingly unopened, ripening, maturing, awaiti
ng the moment of their birth-pangs. He would put them in his pocket for later in the day.

  “Well,” said Jasper Bentwich, “I’d about given you up; but as you’re here, you’d better have a drink, I suppose.” From its bosky setting his eye-glass flashed at Eustace. “You look rather hot; what have you been doing?”

  In the corner the electric fan, with a stealthy motion, wove its arc from side to side.

  “Running,” said Eustace, whom breathlessness made brief.

  “You needn’t tell me that; but what were you doing before you started running?”

  “I was buying some watches.”

  “Some watches! How many?”

  “Well, two.”

  Jasper’s tongue clicked.

  “My dear fellow, you can’t buy watches in Venice. You must be mad. And why two? Yes, Tonino, a dry Martini for Signor Cherrington, and I’ll have some orangeade. Why two watches?”

  “They were presents,” Eustace explained.

  “For two twenty-first birthdays?”

  “Oh no, just ordinary presents.”

  “I never heard of such a thing. You know where Dante put spendthrifts on the slopes of the hill of Purgatory? I won’t trouble you with the Italian, but you remember the reference, of course—’You have spread too wide the wings of spending’?”

  “No,” faltered Eustace. Unversed in Dante, ignorant of Italian, detected in extravagance, trebly condemned, he could not look Jasper in the eye.

  “Do you distribute watches like collar-studs? And are you sure they go?”

  “They were going when I left the shop,” said Eustace.

  “Not very well, if they told you it was twelve o’clock.”

  Eustace blushed and took up his glass.

  “Here’s to the book,” said Jasper. “How’s it going?”

  “Oh, it’s getting on.”

  Jasper heaved an impatient sigh.

  “You needn’t keep that up with me.”

  “But it is getting on,” cried Eustace.

  “My dear Eustace, we all appreciate your loyalty to Nelly, but nobody believes you are writing a book. Why, only yesterday Laura Loredan said to me, ‘Quelle sottise de notre chère Nelly d’essayer de nous faire croire que le petit Cherrington écrit un livre.’”

  “Oh!” said Eustace, the ground slipping under his feet. He was sailing under false colours, then; but how different from those he had imagined. “Do they think I’m an impostor?”

  “No, but neither do they think that Laura’s friend, Nino Buoncampagno, is a champion hurdler, or whatever she says he is. I don’t suppose he’s ever seen a hurdle.”

  “You wouldn’t come to Venice to practise hurdling,” Eustace said.

  “And you might to write a book? I agree yours is a more plausible profession. But you needn’t expect us to take it seriously. I’m sure Nelly doesn’t.”

  “She keeps on asking me about the book,” muttered Eustace.

  “Laura often asks Nino his latest time for the hundred metres.”

  Eustace was silent. Then he said, “I was going to show her what I’d written.”

  “Then you really are writing something?”

  Eustace no longer expected to be believed whatever he said.

  “Yes.”

  Jasper’s eye-glass fell out. He stretched himself irritably in the round-backed wooden chair, twitched his shoulders and gave an angry sigh.

  “You don’t keep to the rules. What are you writing, may I ask?”

  “Well, a long short story.”

  Jasper’s face brightened.

  “Hopeless, my dear fellow. No publisher and no magazine editor will look at it.” His brow darkened again. “However, for Heaven’s sake let me see it before you go any further.”

  “I only started it because of what Lady Nelly said,” moaned Eustace.

  “Yes, yes, I appreciate that. She has much to answer for, that woman; but I don’t think she’s ever made anyone write a book before. A book,” he repeated under his breath, as if a book was the final outrage. “And I suppose you’ve been neglecting your real work?”

  “Well, I have, just lately.”

  There was a silence.

  “Tonino,” Jasper said, “give Signor Cherrington another Martini.”

  “Oh, ought I?” said Eustace.

  “Yes, you don’t look very well. I hear you bathed on the night of the Redentore. What possessed you to do that?”

  “I thought everyone did,” Eustace said. “I thought it was a kind of ritual.”

  Jasper Bentwich laughed.

  “No wonder English visitors to Venice get such a queer reputation. Have you felt seedy ever since?”

  “Not really,” said Eustace. “In some ways I think I feel better.”

  “In what ways? You don’t look better.”

  The second Martini increased Eustace’s sense of well-being and loosened his tongue.

  “Well, I don’t mind the thought of dying so much as I did.”

  Jasper looked at Eustace as though he had mentioned something improper.

  “Do you attribute that to the bathe?”

  “In a way I do,” said Eustace. “You see, I dreaded it, quite unreasonably, but when I came to the point it wasn’t so very unpleasant. You see, there were so many other people doing it, and they didn’t seem to mind.”

  “But what people, my dear Eustace! I grant you they wouldn’t be missed. But I can’t understand this new craze for bathing at the Lido. It’s bad enough by day, when the people are more or less clean, even if the sea isn’t; but in the middle of the night, and among sewers and sewer rats—no, no. If you want reconciling to the idea of death, the ceiling here is much more helpful.”

  Eustace turned his eyes from the bookcases of bright bottles behind the semicircle of the bar and looked up. The ceiling was painted a pale clear grey; and stuccoed on it in white in very low relief was an Assumption—possibly of the Virgin—but the feeling was of a social not a religious occasion. Between the fat clouds that billowed and (to Eustace’s dyspeptic eye) seemed to sway, cherubic faces, some with bodies attached, peeped in respectful ecstasy; while nearer the middle a bearded saint in the meanest and scantiest apparel, and, facing him, a clean-shaven gentleman soberly but richly dressed, turned their rapt gaze upon the central figure. With eyelids drooping, but less it seemed in modesty than in pride, she floated upwards; above her head, extended in horizontal flight, a naked cherub held a crown. Crowded in each top corner multitudes of the heavenly host, some blowing trumpets, some with hands outstretched, waited to receive her; and at the very zenith a head and shoulders, forming a shallow triangle of little height but imposing lateral spread, suggested that her welcome was to be even more august.

  Dizzy, Eustace dropped his head and found himself facing the two windows. They gave on the Grand Canal, and through one he could see the sparse Gothic windows and long low lines of the Abbazia, through the other the tremendous upward surge of the baroque Salute; and himself and Jasper in the mirror between them.

  “I daren’t look again,” he said; “but I saw what you meant.”

  Noticing in his reflection some flaw in his appearance, imperceptible to Eustace, Jasper corrected it.

  “One needs a looking-glass for these Italian ceilings,” he said. “Perhaps one needs one for everything. I don’t care for a direct view.” His features mantled with irritation, and his eye seemed to be avoiding Eustace. “I don’t think much about death myself; but if I did, it would be in terms of this ceiling, not of a tipsy bathing-party. But I’m afraid I shall have to hurry you off. What do all your new watches say?”

  Shy of producing his team of time-keepers, Eustace consulted Miss Fothergill’s.

  “Oh, dear, it’s twenty to one.”

  “What time are you lunching?”

  “Well, at one o’clock.”

  “You’ll only be half an hour late.”

  They rose, and were going out when the barman said to Jasper:

  “Shal
l I put these down to the Countess of Staveley?”

  Jasper hesitated a moment. “Of course not. I’ll pay.” Rejoining Eustace at the top of the little staircase, he said, “You knew that Nelly kept an account here for her guests?”

  “I remember now, she did tell me,” said Eustace.

  “But you haven’t availed yourself of her hospitality?”

  “I quite forgot to.”

  Jasper made a sound of impatience.

  Looped with arches, walled with crimson damask, glittering with vitrines exposing bottles of perfume and examples of highly gilt Murano glass, the interior of the Splendide and Royal Hotel dazzled Eustace, and would have dazzled him more had he not come to think of such magnificence as his proper environment.

  ‘For Eustace well deserves this state,

  Nor would he live at lower rate.’

  As they were passing the concierge’s desk Jasper said, “It won’t make you really any later if we glance at his book to see if anyone’s turned up in Venice.”

  The concierge was a fat man with a greasy, sallow face, who looked like Iago in later life. Without asking his leave, without acknowledging his conspirator’s smirk, Jasper pulled the heavy book towards him. Flicking back the pages, he scanned the arrivals of the past few days.

  “Not a cat,” he said disgustedly. “All Levantines and Jews.”

  But Eustace had seen a name out of the corner of his eye, and asked for the book, which Jasper relinquished with a shrug. The entry merely told him that Mrs. E.N. Alberic had arrived yesterday from India.