He suddenly became too agitated to answer.
‘But you know her name now?’ I persisted.
‘Yes, I know it now.’
After a moment or two my friend took up his tale.
‘I was furious at the letter and my first reflection was: Now I shall never be able to sit at the window again. You don’t know how essential it is for a writer, at least it is for me, to be able to be absolutely passive, well, not quite passive, but as unconscious of absorbing as the body when it breathes. You can’t do that with someone watching you, watching you in a particular way, I mean; speculating about you, wondering what you’re up to, trying to make contact through their eyes. I had enough of that from Giuseppina. She was always peeping at me. I would look up to see the door ajar, and half a face showing—to be followed at once by the entrance of its owner, looking disarmingly frank and innocent. It was bad enough to have this espionage indoors, but to have it from outside as well, a cross-fire, was really too much. I was seriously put out. You know how it is when one is nervous; the full force of one’s irritation concentrates on a single grievance. Then I realized that by shifting my chair to the other window I could still command a view—the view of the creeper-hung terrace—and be out of sight of the harpy in the palace.
‘She had asked me for a sign—well, now she had it.
‘I meant to tear the letter up, but, as you see, I didn’t. I kept it as one does sometimes keep things, to sharpen the edge of my annoyance. One’s nature demands a sensitive place—a soft spot, a sore spot—that will yield a thrill or a pang: at least mine does. As I had no soft spot at the moment, the sore spot did just as well. It reminded me of all the idle, inquisitive women who had from time to time plagued me unmercifully about my work, wasting my time as freely as if it was their own; and whenever I sat down at my new gazebo I felt I was giving them all a retrospective snub.
‘But habit is sometimes stronger than spite and one morning, without being aware of it, I found myself sitting in my old place. I jumped up, as if an enemy had caught me napping; but at the same moment a nerve of curiosity twitched and I became all eyes. Like eyes, the windows of the palace stared back at me, and I thought I detected in the depths of one which had its shutters ajar a sort of commotion, a confusion, a flurry, and then a movement of withdrawal, as if something long and slender and white—I thought of it as a white wand—had been pulled inwards. I’ve never been quite clear what did happen, but suddenly I felt ashamed of having scared a fellow-creature, and as if I was a sort of ogre, and my confidence in the justice of my feelings was shaken.’
‘Did you then lean out and wave?’ I asked.
‘Oh no, I bolted back to the other window, but I didn’t like the view from there so well. The yellow campanile of Santa Eufemia on the Giudecca looked like a water-tower, just as functional as the chimney-stack beside it. And I saw a lot of other things that I didn’t like, but they didn’t vanish just because I didn’t like them. They weren’t so accommodating as she was. All day long, through the narrow strait of blue sky between the acacia and the palace wall, the swifts came, dive-bombing and screaming. They had twice the lung-power of our English swifts and made a target of me. Involuntarily I ducked.—But I expect you are fond of birds?’
‘Not extravagantly,’ I said.
He gave me a sour smile.
‘Most English people are. Well, after a time and as I began to feel better and have fewer set-backs, my feelings about the unknown signorina—la signorina sconosciuta (for so I thought of her) underwent a change. It seemed quite natural and excusable that she should want to look at me—after all, a cat can look at a king. Convalescence creates an appetite for life: I began to lose my morbid dread of being stared at. And as for wanting me to make a sign, that was excusable in a woman, too. I hadn’t the smallest intention of making one, of course; but I liked to think of her thinking that I might. So I moved back to my old window and sat there rather self-consciously, with I dare say a complacent smile on my face, as if I was sitting for my portrait. And I used to scan the window in which I thought I had seen the white wand, or whatever it was, but I never saw it.
‘After that my routine existence began to irk me. Venice called me. I could no longer pretend I was an invalid; I wanted to join the chattering, clattering throng that drifts through the streets of Venice as sluggishly as the tide flows through its canals. Supposing I did run into Antonio, what matter? And I wanted to see my friends, my friends from whom I had been separated by years of war and my own bad habit of not writing.
‘I owed each of them a letter, some more than one; their letters, like Antonio’s had come by devious routes; they had arrived months, sometimes years, after they were written, they were blacked out and smudged, they told me as little of the sender’s present state as if they had been messages from the grave. And I hadn’t answered, partly from inertia, partly from lack of opportunity, but chiefly from a deeper feeling that with the war friendship had come to an end. In those days I was internationally-minded, and it seemed to me that the breakdown of international relationships meant the breakdown of individual relationships too. Peace is indivisible, as somebody said. I had friends in many countries, some of them countries, like Italy, with which we were at war. I could not hate them because the State ordered me to; but neither could I like them as I had liked them. For me the war dried up the springs of liking; the intercourse between souls seemed an activity as meaningless and out-of-date as the other activities I had enjoyed.
‘I don’t believe I was alone in this, Arthur, I believe that for many people the steady warmth of personal relationships perished in the burning heat of September 1939. Certainly with me it did; I felt I had nothing to give out or to take in and this arid state continued, more or less, until the accident of my Venetian convalescence altered it. I won’t say it has never come back.’
‘So that is the explanation,’ I broke in. ‘We all thought——’
‘No, that was it,’ he said, firmly pushing aside what we had all thought. ‘I felt as though the currency restrictions had—well—made all forms of communication impossible. The blight of political hatred was on everything. I’m not sure that it’s gone yet. I believe people still say to themselves, ‘I will really start to feel—for you, or you, or you—and my feeling will be worth something to us both—as soon as, as soon as—the hydrogen bomb is perfected, or this business in Korea is settled. Then I shall feel for you, and perhaps you will feel for me; but until then our feelings are provisional—we are trying them out—they don’t involve us or commit us—they are on appro. We might make a deal in them on the hire-purchase system, but the day of settlement is infinitely remote. Meanwhile, nothing really counts.” ’
‘I don’t think I feel like that,’ I said.
‘Don’t be too sure. Anyhow, one dismal afternoon,—I’d had a nap—under a blanket and an eiderdown, the day was so abominably cold—I started out to see my friends.
‘I had no telephone and couldn’t forewarn them: I had no one to send, and as for writing letters, I had suddenly become too impatient to wait for the answers. The need for friendship had come on me like a hunger.
‘I decided I would call on three—the three who had meant the most to me. They lived a long way apart, one at San Severo, one—oh, but it doesn’t matter where, it’s impossible to describe where any place is in Venice. They were each under the protection of a local saint, though they were not exactly saints themselves. If you think of Venice as a flat fish swimming towards the mainland, one of my friends lived on its tail, another half-way up the north side of its body, and the third somewhere near its eye. They lived, as I said, a long way apart, and though they saw each other fairly often, they didn’t like each other very much. In those days when I went in for personal relationships—when in fact they were almost my religion—I didn’t like to see any two of these friends, still less the three of them, on one day, because they were so critical of each other. I suppose all that sounds rather priggish to you?
’
‘No,’ I said primly. ‘I think it does you credit.’
He shot me a suspicious glance. ‘Oh well,’ he said, ‘I don’t mind now, of course. But in those days I didn’t like to hear one of my friends run down another, beyond a certain point, I mean, and despised myself for not taking the part of the absent one, or only taking it half-heartedly. Then, when I was with someone I was fond of, he or she was like a mirror to me: I don’t only mean that they reflected me myself, which was agreeable, but the other reflections seemed to me true, unflawed and perfect also: I saw the world in a frame—their frame—and I could live in it and accept it. My vision of them and theirs of me were one—or could become one, I believed, and that was what I aimed at: the merging into one focus of our reciprocal reflections—a sort of fusion. Well, each of my friends was quite willing to play this game with me and we had plenty of conversational material, unconnected with the others, to make our meetings fun. They were all cultivated people, who had spent most of their lives abroad; their outlook was at once cosmopolitan and parochial, and they had several languages at their command. They all had taste, too, in their houses. Though Lady Porteous’s house was by far the most beautiful, each of the three interiors had something that intimately satisfied and pleased me.
‘I did sometimes ask myself what I had to give them, that they should make me welcome, and supposed it was that, coming from London, I could feed them with gossip they might not have got otherwise. Like most expatriates, they were keenly interested in what went on at home. Lady Porteous and Denys Constantine were both great gossips; Miranda Collier wasn’t, she preferred to talk about a subject, but she too liked hearing the latest news. I had written a book or two, which gave me a certain status; and I have since thought that I took too much for granted the appreciation they showered on these callow works. I myself was so astonished at having produced them that I assumed too readily that others would share my wonderment—after all, writers are two a penny. Perhaps, being all people who might have written, but had not, they attached too much importance to the accident of literary creativeness. Come to that, their lives were a creation, for they made an art of living.
‘But it occurs to me now—I can see you’re going to laugh—that what I really had to offer was youth. Compared to them I was young. I was—but no matter how old I was. Their ages were carefully concealed, though always a matter for conjecture. (I rarely saw Denys Constantine without his telling me that Lady Porteous was nearer seventy than sixty.) Most of the colony were on the shady side of middle age, and they were glad to see someone who had the sun before him instead of at his back.
‘So it was as a young man that I started out on my sentimental journey that cold, wet, blustery day in June, and as a young man that I faced the prospect of the five-mile walk which I should have to accomplish if I was to carry out my programme. No gondola for me. Few gondoliers would have turned out on such a day. Antonio would have, but he wasn’t available.
‘I got to the Piazza in good order but then I stopped, for it was like a lake, a lake with islands and peninsulas made by the dips and rises in the pavement, which were imperceptible at normal times. On these a few daring pedestrians stood stranded. The arcade by Florian’s was above the flood-line, but so packed with people that one could hardly stir. In the distance, stretching across the façade of St. Mark’s, a flimsy wooden bridge had been put up, and across it two lines of people were moving in contrary directions—if moving be the word: no traffic jam was ever more complete. I looked round and as I did so a stranger smiled at me. After a moment’s hesitation I smiled back: he must, I thought, be some acquaintance from my Venetian past. Confusion spread over the man’s face and he began to explain:
‘ “You are like somebody I know—the Engineer Tremontin—I was to meet him here.”
‘I bowed and we both tried to cover up the awkwardness—he his disappointment, I my pique at being taken for someone else. All at once he smiled:
‘ “Ah ecco! Here he is!” and following his eye I saw a man whose resemblance to me I at once recognized. And yet, I thought, he can’t be really like me—he’s an old man—that white hair, that whitening moustache!—while I’m a young one—and I remembered my age, which, like my friends in Venice, I had taken to concealing, even from myself.
‘It has often happened to me to be mistaken for other men, but never before had my alter ego been almost simultaneously presented to my gaze, giving my vanity no chance to put a flattering interpretation on the likeness. Offence deepened into outrage; I looked with hatred at that Ancient of Days, my double. And the worst of it was we were jammed together in the crowd; and for several minutes, while we shoved or were being shoved towards the end of the arcade, I was forced to look at the greying stubble and the criss-cross wrinkles on the nape of his neck and wonder if mine had them too. Italians deserve their reputation for good manners, and from time to time the couple would turn their heads and made some civil remark, deprecating the crush; but I received these olive-branches so badly that they soon desisted. I was aware of a process of disacquaintance going on in me, which, to judge from their stiffened shoulders and reddening necks was also going on in them, and when we at last debouched it was, I’m sure, with a common hope that we should never, never, never meet again.’
‘You don’t look old,’ I said. ‘No one would ever take you for whatever age it is you are concealing.’ He looked sixty, or thereabouts.
He smiled and answered, ‘I’m not really vain, so it was specially annoying, at that moment, to have to admit I was.
‘My way lay to the left of St. Mark’s, through the Canonica; but to get there I should have to cross the trestle bridge, where progress was visibly slower than it had been even in the arcade. I couldn’t face the sardine tin again, so I picked my way along the high ground of the Piazzetta towards the two columns and the Bacino. It was rather fun, I remember, like walking on a sandbank with the sea coming in both sides. The sea was dark green and white, the gondolas rode madly up and down between their posts, there was, distinct from all the other storm sounds, that unnerving creaking that wood makes scraping against wood; and all along the Molo, almost up to the arches of the Ducal Palace, there was a jagged line of seaweed and orange peel and other vegetable and marine matter, the detritus of the storm. The seashore in Venice! And in contrast to all this untidiness and uproar was a strange Claude-like feature which enchanted me; for where the sea was actually invading the stone floor of Venice, it came not in angry foam-flecked swirls but in tiny level ripples, which advanced with the utmost gentleness at intervals so regular that in the distance they looked like the steps of a staircase—a shallow staircase leading to the sea.
‘Bludgeoned by the blast, I fought my way along the riva, meaning to strike inland when an opening offered—one of them, I knew, would lead to San Severe The insult to my appearance was losing its smart, and I was wondering how I could make a story of it; it would make a good story to celebrate a reunion with an old friend. Not Denys perhaps; his hair was white and his moustache whitening when I last saw him. Nor Miranda; she would not miss the point, but she would not quite see how it affected me, she would generalize and philosophize about it, and perhaps start some theory of doppelgängers. But Lady Porteous—how she would enjoy the malign little episode! How perfectly its malice would accord with hers! She would equally enjoy laughing with me and laughing at me; and from among her inexhaustible annals she would find a much better anecdote to cap it with.
‘I almost wished I had put her first on my itinerary instead of leaving her, like a bonne bouche, till last.
‘Well, I reached my first destination and I reached my second, and was told at each that the person I had come to see had left Italy before the war broke out and never come back. I could have seen them any day in England during the last ten years, but I could not see them in Venice.’
My friend sighed and I sighed with him. Being a happily married man I did not subscribe to his gospel of multiple personal rel
ationships: it seemed to me a pis aller—l was content with one. But I knew how much it meant, or had meant, to him, and perhaps I should have felt still sorrier for him if I also had not been one of his rejects, and had been banished for twelve years, not ten.
‘One has a different self for every friend,’ he was saying. ‘That is their most precious gift to one—a new self. The boredom of being always the same person! I had condemned myself to it all those years—and yet it was not I, it was the war which somehow upset the balance of my feelings, offering them food they would not accept—rationed food, too—and then making what they would once have accepted, unacceptable. A’s name, B’s name, your name, meant as little to me as a column of strange names in the telephone book. I can’t tell you how blighting it was: it’s not much better now.
‘Where was I? Oh, yes, under the statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni, one of the two great equestrian statues of the world. Was there friendship in it? There was not. There was pride, and insolence, and success, and glory; the glory of war and conquest: every quality the statue had, except the quality of art, repudiated every quality I valued. I nearly turned back; but then I remembered Lady Porteous and the extraordinary power that she had, and that her house had, of imposing their standards on one. They were not standards I would be altogether prepared to defend; they were worldly, they were snobbish, they were based on exclusiveness.
‘Do you want me to go on?’ he asked, suddenly and resentfully. ‘I suppose you know what’s coming?’
‘I’ve not the faintest idea,’ I said.
‘Well, what Lady Porteous had—what even her husband Sir Hilary, the light-weight satellite who circled round her, had—was the gift of imparting her own sense of superiority. She made one a present of it—her wealth, her cleverness, her taste, her ability to see everyone as stuck at various levels lower than her own, struggling to reach hers, and failing. Humour was her weapon; she knew something about everyone that made them slightly absurd; the most august figures of our acquaintance, the most feared and revered figures in the world outside—Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin—seemed figures of fun when Caroline Porteous had done with them. There was a story, which I did not believe, that Mussolini had once called on her and had not been received. She obviously liked the story, would not altogether deny it, but she was too clever to authenticate it. Her version was that it was a muddle on the part of the servants, who were so overcome by the visitor’s identity that when they announced him to her they got his name wrong. She would have admitted him, I’m sure. But “No Admittance” was her watchword. How ignoble, you will say, but it wasn’t altogether, for along with much which hadn’t the polish or the glitter to get in, she kept out a lot of things that were better kept out. She had a sort of moral shrewdness, though she was apt to relax her standards in favour of those whom she ironically termed “the great”. Anyhow she had never kept me out, or only once or twice, and suddenly I felt an intense longing for her immense blue drawing-room. You could say it looked out on to the garden and the lagoon; but it would be truer to say that the garden and the lagoon looked into it—they had too much personality, they had sat too often for their portraits, by Guardi and others, to be merely landscapes. She was a little jealous of them, these illustrious outsiders (she would have thought it bourgeois not to be jealous) and didn’t like one looking at them too much.
The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley Page 36