The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley

by L. P. Hartley

  ‘What, always, every night?’ asked Mildred. ‘Aren’t you afraid of burglars?’

  ‘Oh no, just at weekends, when he’s able to get away. But he never knows when he can, and sometimes he arrives in the small hours. He’s not in the least like a burglar. But if you happen to hear a noise in the night it will just be him, turning in, so to speak.’

  Mildred thought this over.

  ‘By turning in, you mean—’

  ‘Oh, just dossing down for the night.’

  ‘But won’t he be rather disappointed,’ asked Mildred, faintly malicious and slightly apprehensive, ‘to find himself relegated, exiled to the eastern side? I mean,’ she said boldly, for in these days one could say anything, ‘wouldn’t he rather be nearer you than act as the preux chevalier of an unknown female, in a remote quarter of the house?’

  ‘No,’ said her hostess, ‘decidedly not. There are a good many reasons why not. I needn’t go into them, but I can assure you that for everyone concerned, for everyone concerned,’ she repeated firmly, ‘it is the best arrangement. Listen,’ she added suddenly, ‘didn’t you hear something?’

  ‘You asked me that before,’ said Mildred. ‘There are so many sounds.’

  At that moment the door opened and the butler said,

  ‘Mr. and Mrs. Matewell, Madam,’

  Joanna hastened towards them.

  ‘Oh, darlings, I hope you didn’t have too bad a journey?’

  ‘Oh not bad at all,’ said Mr. Matewell, a burly figure with a roundish squarish head to match, and dark hair growing sparser. ‘Not bad at all except for a slight incident on the M4 which I’ll tell you about.’

  ‘Thank goodness it was no worse,’ said Joanna, fatuously. ‘Now here is Mildred, you all know each other.’

  ‘Of course, of course. The maker of the home beautiful!’ Mildred smiled at this pleasantry as best she could.

  ‘And before we have drinks,’ said Joanna, ‘which I’m sure you must both be pining for’—and she led them towards the drink-tray—’shall I tell you who else is coming?’

  ‘Please do!’

  ‘The MacArthurs, that makes us six, Peter Pearson, such an invaluable man, seven, and . . . and—’

  ‘Who is the eighth?’ asked Mrs. Matewell, noting her hostess’s hesitation.

  ‘Oh, an old and great friend of mine, Count Olmütz. I don’t think you know him.’

  ‘No, but we’ve heard of him, haven’t we, George?’ said Mrs. Matewell, appealing to her husband, who seemed slightly at a loss. ‘And we’re longing to meet him, aren’t we? He sounds such a romantic character. Didn’t he own the house before you had it, Joanna?’

  ‘No, he didn’t own it,’ said Joanna, shaking her head vigorously, ‘he didn’t own it, but he had something to do with it, I don’t quite know what. I’ve sometimes asked him, but he’s rather reticent. He may be here any minute and then perhaps he’ll tell us. Ah, that may be him.’

  It turned out, however, to be the MacArthurs, with the invaluable Peter Pearson. ‘Weren’t we lucky?’ Mrs. MacArthur said. ‘Peter phoned us this afternoon and asked us if we were coming to you. I don’t know now he guessed, but Peter knows everything.’ Peter looked somewhat abashed but Mrs. MacArthur said ‘We were only too glad to give Peter a lift.’

  They settled down to their drinks and Peter turned out to be the life and soul of the party. ‘I wish I could be two men,’ he said, ‘instead of half a man (this shameless admission only evoked a giggle), ‘because you’re expecting another man, aren’t you, Joanna, a real tough man.’ He shuddered, albeit selfconsciously.

  ‘I don’t think we’ll wait for Franz,’ said Joanna. ‘He’s so unpredictable.’ She tried to keep the irritation out of her voice. ‘Don’t change unless you want to, but let’s have our baths—if we want to. Dinner about eight.’

  *

  Dinner was a pleasant meal and no one worried unduly about the absent Franz—indeed, none of them except Joanna knew who he was. They had only heard tell of him, and if Joanna worried about him she didn’t show it. Once, when his name came up, ‘He’s a law unto himself,’ she said. About eleven o’clock they all retired for the night. ‘You know your way?’ said Joanna to Mildred.

  ‘Oh yes, it’s along the main passage, and then to the left.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ said Joanna. ‘Your name’s on the door—I keep that old-fashioned custom—but you might not see it in this poor light. I hope your room won’t be too uncomfortable—the bathroom is just opposite.’

  They stopped where a sort of visiting card stuck to the door, ‘Miss Mildred Fanshawe’, made clear whose bedroom it was. ‘And Franz is next to you,’ she added, indicating his name-card, ‘Count Olmütz’. ‘Don’t worry if you hear noises in the night. He sometimes comes in late. I’ll leave the light on in the passage to guide him on his way—if it’s turned out, you’ll know he’s arrived. Here is the switch if you want it, but I hope you won’t. Goodnight.’ and Mildred found herself alone in her bedroom.

  It was a comfortable room, with a wash-basin and mid-Victorian water-colours on the walls, but to Mildred’s expert eye it sadly needed doing up—it was ‘tatty’. Suddenly she had an almost irresistible impulse to look at the room of Count Olmütz, her next-door neighbour.

  She would know if he had materialized because if he had, the passage would be in darkness. But would it be? Might he not have forgotten to turn the light off? So unpredictable. . . . Just one little peep behind the scenes . . .

  But not now. It could wait. She must get ready for bed, a long ritual which included a bath. She always took a bath last thing, because it was said to be good for insomnia, and she had her face to do up. All this made bedtime a moment of crisis, a culmination of instead of a calm from the day’s worries, which good sleepers have never known.

  When she opened her door the darkness was almost blinding. She switched on the passage light and saw, outside her stablemate’s door, a pair of large muddy suede shoes. So the Count had arrived and she must restrain her curiosity. In English houses, thought Mildred, visitors don’t leave their shoes outside the door, as they do in hotels—it’s a sort of nuance that a foreigner might not know. The shoes were so muddy they needed cleaning, and no doubt the butler—the temporary butler—would see to that.

  Why hadn’t she noticed the shoes before? Mildred asked herself. And then she remembered that soon after she retired to her room, the lights in the passage had been turned off. Now they were on again—of course, she herself had turned them on.

  What a fool I am, she thought, what a fool! But it wasn’t the prospect of his over-large shoes which deterred her from knocking at his door, it was just his name on the plain card, fastened between four tiny triangles of brass, that made her hesitate.

  She went back to her adjoining room, relieved as everyone is from the danger of self-exposure. She went through her customary bedtime ritual—with her a long process—but she knew she wouldn’t sleep if she didn’t. ‘I’ll have a bath first,’ she thought, ‘and then a sleeping pill.’ Insomnia was her bugbear.

  The water was still hot—in some country houses it cooled down after midnight—and she lay with her eyes half-closed and she herself half asleep, in a bath of chemically-enriched foam. ‘Oh to die like this!’ she thought, though she didn’t mean it. Some of her neuroses she had managed to overcome—the claustrophobia of travelling in a crowded train for instance—and some she hadn’t. A friend of hers had died in her bath of a heart attack. There was a bell over the bath (as used to be the custom) but when help came it was too late.

  There was no bell over this bath, supposing there had been anyone to answer it, but Mildred had long made a principle of leaving her bathroom door ajar. If someone came in—tant pis—she would shout, and the intruder, man or woman, would of course recoil.

  It was well known that a hot bath was good for the nerves—so useful to have medical authority for something one wanted to do!

  Mildred was luxuriating under the aro
matic pine-green water, her limbs indistinct but still pale pink, when a shadow appeared on the shiny white wall facing her. It might have been someone she knew, but who can recognize a shadow?

  It was Mildred’s habit—unlike most people’s—to have her bath with her head to the taps—and the shadow opposite on the gleaming wall, grew larger and darker.

  ‘What do you want?’ she asked, feeling a certain physical security under her opaque covering of foam.

  ‘I want you,’ the shadow answered.

  But had he really spoken? Or was it a voice in a dream? There was no sound, no other sign, only the impress of the face on the wall, which every moment grew more vivid until its lips suddenly, like the gills of a fish, sprang open towards its snout.

  Nobody knows how they will behave in a crisis. Mildred jumped out of the bath shouting. ‘Get the hell out of here!’ And for the first time in many years she locked the bathroom door.

  That would settle him!

  But it hadn’t, for when she came back from her physical and mental encounter with the key and looked round her with the ineffable relief of having done something that was hard to do, she saw the shadow, perhaps not so distinct as it had been, but with the upturning fish-like gills clearer than it was before.

  So her way of escape was blocked: she was a prisoner now.

  But what to do?

  She got back into the cooling bath and turned on the tap—but no doubt in response to thermostatic control, the hot water was cooling too. Cold when she got out of it, she was colder than when she got in. Meanwhile, those thin, fishy lips gnawed at something she could not see.

  Courage begets courage. ‘I won’t stand for this,’ thought Mildred. ‘I won’t spend the night in this freezing bathroom’ (actually it wasn’t cold, but it felt cold to her). ‘Take this, you beast!’ and she flung her sponge at the shadow. For a moment its profile, which was all she had seen of it, was disturbed until the thin lips resumed their yawning movement.

  What next? She hadn’t brought her dressing-gown into the bathroom, it hadn’t seemed necessary: she wrapped her bathtowel around her, unlocked the door, and plunged into the passage. The light was on; had it been on when she crossed the passage to the bathroom, half an hour, or an hour, ago? She thought not, but she couldn’t remember; time was no longer a measure of experience to her, as it was after breakfast, with recognizable stopping-places—so long for letters, so long for her job, so long before lunch—if there was time for lunch. Nearly everyone divides their days into fixed periods of routine. Now these temporal landmarks had gone; she was alone in the passage, not knowing what hour it was.

  But as a good guest she must turn the lights off. Had she left them on in the bathroom? She felt sure she hadn’t, but she must make quite sure. With extreme reluctance she opened the bathroom door just far enough to peep in.

  It was, as she knew it would be, in darkness; but she could still see on the wall facing the bath the last of the lingering image, lit up by its own faint radiance, its phosphorescence, but hardly resembling a face.

  Had it been smouldering there all the time, or had it been relit when she opened the door?

  What a relief to be back in the passage, under the protection of Count Olmütz, whose presence or whose proximity was to have saved her from these irrational fears! She had had them all her life, but never before had they taken shape, as it were, to her visual eye as they had to Belshazzar’s.

  When had he arrived? She had seen his shoes, his outsize shoes, when she first ventured on to the landing—prospecting bathwards. Then his door was shut, she could have sworn it; now it was ajar; but under the influence of any strong emotion, especially fear, time ceases to be a timetable.

  She almost laughed when she remembered that she had asked Joanna whether she should lock her bedroom door! Some women locked theirs even when there was no threat of a nightly visitant, burglar, marauder, raper, or such-like.

  She locked hers, too; but she couldn’t lock out the sound from the next room—a sound hard to define—something between a snore, a gurgle, a croak and a gasp. She knew how throaty and bronchial men were, often coughing and clearing their throats and advertising their other physical ailments—a thing which women never did. She had always thought that a snoring husband would be better grounds for divorce than infidelity or desertion or cruelty—though was not snoring itself a form of cruelty?

  How ironical that she should have to protect herself from her protector!

  Happily she had brought her ‘mufflers’ with her (being a bad sleeper she dreaded casual or continual noises in the night). She stuffed them into her ears. But they didn’t muffle the noise from next door; and suddenly Mildred thought, on her way from her dressing-table to her bed, ‘Supposing he should be ill?’ One thought of a protector as invulnerable to anything, especially to illness; but why should he be? He might have got ’flu or bronchitis or even pneumonia. Perhaps her hostess had put them side by side to protect each other, in that forsaken wing of the house!

  However unconventional it was to beard a stranger in his bedroom, she felt she really must find out. Conscientiousness was part of her nature. Over-conscientiousness was the cause, together with guilt, of many of her neurotic fears.

  Putting on her dressing-gown she went back into the passage. It was again in darkness, but she knew where the switch was.

  What should she say to him? How should she explain herself? ‘I am sorry to burst in like this, Count, but I heard a noise, and I wondered if you were quite well? Forgive me, I hope I haven’t woken you up.’ (This would be rather disingenuous, for the only deterrent to an inveterate snorer is to wake him up.) ‘Oh, you are all right? There’s nothing I can do for you? I am so glad, goodnight Count Olmütz, goodnight.’

  She rehearsed these words, or something like them, under the bright unshadowed bulb in the passage; she made that movement of bodily tension known as ‘pulling oneself together’ that one often makes before doing something one dislikes. And then she stretched her hand out to push open the door which had been ajar; but it wasn’t, it was locked, and no amount of rattling the handle (as if one wanted to break into a lavatory) would open it.

  She could have sworn the door had been open, yawning, agape, the last time she crossed the passage; but how often had she crossed it? Fatigue and fear confused her memory; moreover, they confused as such things will her idea of what to do next, or what to do at all. But the stertorous sound, rising and falling as if a body was arguing with itself, came through the locked door plainer than ever.

  Back in her bedroom she tried to reason it out. What should she do? Was it any business of hers if her next-door neighbour suffered from bronchial catarrh? Many people, many men at any rate, subside into wheezings when they lie down in bed. It was a sign of age—perhaps Count Olmütz wasn’t very young? There was a bell in her room—there were two in fact—close by her bed, one of which said ‘Up’ and the other ‘Down’. ‘Up’ would be the one to ring: presumably the household staff would be ‘up’ and not ‘down’. But would they be ‘up’, in another sense of the word, at one o’clock in the morning, and would anyone answer if she did ring? And if some flustered housemaid—supposing there was one—appeared, what would Mildred say? ‘The gentleman next door is snoring rather loudly. Can you do anything about it?’

  It would be too silly.

  ‘Leave it till the morning, leave it till the morning.’ She had done her best, and if Count Olmütz chose to lock his door, it was no concern of hers. Perhaps he had decided to lock it against her, as she had once thought of locking it against him.

  She got into bed, but insomnia is a relentless watchdog and would not let her sleep. The sounds were growing fainter—the donkey’s bray seemed to be petering out, when suddenly it took a new tone—a combination of gurgle, gasp, and choke, which made her jump out of bed.

  It was then that she saw—and wondered how she could ever have forgotten—the door of partition, the door that divided her room from his.

/>   She switched on her bedside lamp. She had her electric torch with her and she switched it on too. ‘More light!’ as Goethe said. The key turned in the lock, but was the door locked on the other side too? No, it wasn’t; whatever his motives for secrecy, Count Olmütz had forgotten to lock the door on his side.

  ‘I mustn’t startle him,’ she thought, putting her small hand over the torch’s beam; so it was only gradually that she saw, piecemeal, what she afterwards thought she saw—the arm hanging limply down from the bed, the hand trailing the floor, the averted head and the familiar shadow on the wall behind—but with this difference that the gash, or gape, between nose and throat was wider than the fish’s gape that she had seen before.

  There was no sound. The silence was absolute, until she pierced it with a scream. For the head—the nearly severed head—was not the head of Count Olmütz, whoever he was; it was the head of a man she knew quite well, and whom Joanna knew quite well, in former days. There were all sorts of stories about him, some of which she knew; but she had not heard or thought of him, still less seen him, for a long, long time: not until tonight in fact.

  But was it him? Could she be sure, she asked herself as with hands trembling with haste she began to pack her suitcase. A distorted face, with a gash under it, need it be somebody she knew? Recognition isn’t an easy problem; on an identification parade could she have picked out a man, with his head thrown back and something blackish trickling down him, as somebody she knew?

  No; but she dared not go back to confirm it or deny it.

  She seized a sheet of writing-paper from the table at the foot of her bed.

  ‘Darling, I have had to go. A sudden indisposition, ’flu I think, but I don’t want to be ill on you, especially as I know you are going abroad next week. Lovely visit.’ She hesitated a moment. ‘Make my apologies to Count Olmütz.’

  Like many women, she travelled light and packed quickly: then looked round to see if she had left anything behind. ‘Why, I’m still in my pyjamas!’ The discovery made her laugh hysterically. She slipped them off, put on her travelling attire, took a glance at herself in the mirror to see if she was properly arrayed for a long drive in the small hours.