The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley

by Leslie Poles Hartley

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Will you have a look, to make quite sure?’

  ‘All right,’ his father said. ‘Anything for a quiet life.’

  There followed a convulsion in the bedclothes, gusts of cool air rushed in. The room grew darker. Standing in front of the low casement window, Roger’s tall figure blotted out the daylight. The outline of his arms down to his elbows, his shield-shaped back and straddled legs showed through the thin stuff of his pyjamas; his head, that looked small on his broad shoulders, seemed to overtop the window—but this was an optical illusion, as Laurie knew. Pulling the bedclothes round him he breathed hard, waiting for the verdict.

  His father didn’t speak at once. It’ll do the boy good to get a bit worked up, he thought; strengthen the reaction when it comes. At length he said:

  ‘Seems to be a lot going on over there.’

  ‘A lot going on, Daddy?’

  ‘Yes, men working, and so on.’

  ‘What are they working at?’

  ‘Can’t you hear something?’ his father asked, still without turning round.

  Laurie strained his ears. Now he could hear it quite distinctly borne in through the open window—the thudding and clanging of the workmen’s hammers.

  ‘What are they doing, Daddy?’

  ‘Well, what do you think?’

  Laurie’s mind went blank. Often it happened that when his father asked him something, a shadow seemed to fall across his mind.

  ‘Is it anything to do with the pylon?’

  ‘You’re getting warm now.’

  ‘Are they—are they——?’

  ‘Yes, they are. They’re working on the concrete platform where the pylon used to stand.’

  ‘They’re not building it up again, are they, Daddy?’

  ‘I couldn’t tell you, old chap, but I wouldn’t put it past them.’

  Laurie’s face fell. If only his father would turn round! His imploring glances made no impression on that broad straight back.

  ‘But if they are, Daddy, I couldn’t go on living here.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to, son, it’s our home, you see. You’ll get used to the new pylon, just as you got used to the old one.

  ‘I shan’t, I shan’t!’ wailed Laurie, hungering more and more for the sight of his father’s face. ‘Can’t you tell them not to do it, Daddy? Can’t you order them?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. They wouldn’t pay any attention to me, Laurie.’

  At the sound of his Christian name, which his father only used for grave occasions, and at the idea that there existed people for whom his father’s word was not law, the bottom seemed to drop out of Laurie’s world, and he began to whimper.

  Then his father did turn round and looked down at his hapless offspring, from whom all stiffening of pride and self-control had melted, huddled in the bedclothes. He stifled his distaste and said what all along he had been meaning to say but had put off saying until the last of his son’s defences should be down.

  ‘Don’t worry. I was only having you on. They’re not building a new pylon. They’re just breaking up the old one’s concrete base. And high time, too. I can’t think why they didn’t do it before.’

  As he turned away from the window the sunshine which his body had displaced followed him back, filling the room with light. He sat down at the foot of the bed.

  The effect of his long-delayed announcement had been magical: it surpassed his wildest hopes. Laurie was radiant, on top of his world, another creature from the abject object of a moment since. He tried to put his relief and gratitude into words, but could only smile and smile, in a defenceless almost idiotic way. To break the silence his father asked:

  ‘What made you frightened of the pylon? Had it done you any harm?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Laurie, recollection contracting his smile into a frown, ‘it had.’

  ‘What kind of harm?’

  Laurie considered. How could he make the pylon’s mischief plain to his father?

  ‘Well, it made me sick for one thing.’

  ‘Oh, that was just something you ate,’ said Roger, well remembering it was not. ‘We all eat things that disagree with us.’

  ‘It wasn’t only that. It . . . it hurt me.’

  ‘How do you mean, hurt you?’

  ‘In my dream it did.’

  ‘In your dream? You’ll have to tell me about your dream. But make it snappy—I’ve only got five minutes.’

  ‘Yes . . . perhaps, sometime . . . You see, in my dream it was much stronger than I was, and I couldn’t get to the top.’

  ‘Why did you want to get to the top?’

  ‘Well, I had to, because of the report, and to see what sort of report they would give me if I did get to the top.’

  ‘I know what,’ his father said. ‘When you’re a big chap, bigger than me, perhaps, you’d better be a pylon-builder. Do you know how much they earn?’

  Pure numbers had an attraction for Laurie, though he wasn’t good at maths.

  ‘No, tell me.’

  ‘Ten shillings an hour when they’re on the ground, and a pound an hour when they’re in the air . . . You’d soon be a rich man, much richer than me. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘I don’t want to be rich!’ moaned Laurie. ‘I want——’ he stopped.

  ‘Well, what do you want?’

  ‘I want to be safe, and I shouldn’t be if the pylon was there.’

  ‘What nonsense!’ said his father, at last losing patience. ‘It’s nothing to be afraid of.’ He remembered his wife’s words. ‘It’s only something men have made, and men can unmake. You could make one yourself with your Meccano—I’ll show you how. It’s only a few bits of metal—that’s all it is.’

  ‘But that’s all the atom bomb is,’ cried Laurie, just a few bits of metal, and everyone’s afraid of it, even you are, Daddy!’

  Roger felt the tables had been turned.

  ‘You’re right,’ he said, ‘I am afraid of it. But——’ he tried to think of a way out—’I never dream about it.’

  As always, his father’s presence gave Laurie a feeling of helplessness; it was as if his thoughts could get no further than the figure turned towards him on the bed, whose pyjama-jacket, open to the morning airs, disclosed a hairy, muscular chest.

  ‘But I can’t help what I dream, can I?’ he said.

  His father agreed, and added, ‘But you can help being frightened—frightened afterwards, I mean. You’ve only to think——’

  ‘But I do think, Daddy. That’s the worst of it.’

  ‘I mean, think how absurd it is. If you were to dream about me——’

  ‘Oh, but I have, ever so often.’

  His father was taken aback, and tugged at his moustache.

  ‘And were you frightened?’

  It took Laurie some time to answer this. He sat up, wriggled his toes, on which his father’s hand was resting, and said:

  ‘Not exactly frightened.’

  ‘Well,’ said Roger, smiling, ‘what effect, exactly, did I have on you?’

  Laurie shook his head.

  ‘I couldn’t quite explain. Of course, in my dream you were different.’

  ‘Nicer or nastier?’

  ‘Well, not nastier—you couldn’t be.’

  Now it was Roger’s turn to feel embarrassed. He stared at Laurie, and all at once Laurie’s face turned scarlet.

  ‘Oh, I didn’t mean that, you know I didn’t,’ he pleaded. His hands traced circles on the rumpled bedclothes and his head oscillated with them. ‘I said not nastier, because you never are nasty, so you couldn’t be nastier, if you see what I mean.’

  ‘I think I do,’ his father said, mollified and more relieved than he was prepared to show, ‘although I am nasty sometimes, I admit. But how was I different, in your dream?’

  ‘That’s just it, you weren’t so nice.’

  Roger didn’t like the idea of being thought less nice, even in someone’s dream. But h
e had to say something—he wouldn’t let Laurie see he had been hurt.

  ‘What was I like?’ he asked, with assumed jauntiness.

  ‘Oh, you were like yourself, to look at, I mean—not really like of course, because people never are, in dreams. But I always knew it was you.’

  Less and less did Roger relish the idea of his dream personality being made known to him. Would it be cowardly to change the subject?

  ‘Don’t you ever dream about your mother?’ he asked hopefully.

  ‘Oh, no, never, nor about Susie or Victor. Only about you.’

  There seemed to be no escape. Roger grasped the nettle.

  ‘When you dream about me,’ he asked, ‘what do I do?’

  ‘Oh, you don’t do much, nothing to speak of. You’re just there, you see.’

  ‘I do see,’ said Roger grimly, though he didn’t really. ‘And you don’t like me being there?’

  Laurie wriggled; his plump hands left off making circles on the sheet and clasped the front of his pyjama-jacket.

  ‘No, I’m glad you’re there, because I always feel safer when you are, but——’

  ‘But what?’ Let’s get to the bottom of it now, thought Roger.

  ‘Well, you make me think I’ve been doing something wrong.’

  Roger’s heart sank. It was too bad. Hadn’t he always, throughout his parenthood, tried to give his children just the opposite impression—make them feel that what they did was right? Not so much with Victor and Susie, perhaps; he did tick them off sometimes, he really had to. But he had never succeeded in making them feel guilty; whereas with Laurie——

  ‘Now listen,’ he said. ‘Stop fidgeting with your pyjamas or you’ll be pulling off the buttons and then you will have done something wrong.’ Switching himself round still farther on the bed he stretched his arms out towards Laurie and firmly imprisoned the boy’s restless hands in his. ‘Now listen,’ he repeated, propelling Laurie gently to and fro, making the boy feel he was on a rocking-horse, ‘dreams go by contraries, you know.’

  ‘What does that mean, Daddy?’

  ‘It means that when you dream something, you dream what is the opposite of the truth. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘So, if you dream about me and I seem nasty, or about the pylon and it seems nasty, it really means——’ he stopped.

  ‘Yes, go on, Daddy,’ said Laurie, sleepily. He was enjoying the rocking motion—so different from the pylon’s sickening lurches—and didn’t want it to stop. ‘Please go on,’ he begged.

  ‘It means that we’re both—the pylon and me too, well, rather nice.’

  Before Roger had time to see whether this thought was sinking in, there came a thunderous knocking at the door. Releasing Laurie’s hands he pulled his pyjama-jacket round him and called out, ‘Come in!’

  There was a stampede into the room, a racket and a hubbub like a mob bursting in, and Susan and Victor, fully clothed, were standing by the bed.

  ‘Oh, you are lazy,’ Susan cried. ‘You haven’t even begun to dress, either of you, and you haven’t heard the news.’

  ‘What news?’ Roger asked.

  ‘Awful news, dreadful news, the worst. Isn’t it, Victor?’

  ‘It’s simply frightful. It’s the end,’ Victor said. ‘You’ll never guess.’

  Their faces beamed with happiness.

  ‘Well, why are you so cheerful about it then?’ their father asked.

  ‘Oh, just because it is so horrible,’ said Susan, and their faces glowed afresh. ‘You’ll never guess, and so we’ll tell you.’ She caught Victor’s eye to give him his cue, and at the tops of their voices they chanted in unison:

  ‘The pylon’s coming back!’

  Dead silence followed; even the impression of noise, which had been as strong as or stronger than the noise itself, was banished.

  ‘You don’t say anything,’ said Susan, disappointed. ‘We hoped you’d be . . . you’d be . . . just as upset as we are, and there you sit in your pyjamas . . . like . . . like . . .’

  Her voice died away into the silence which had returned with double force, and seemed to occupy the room even more completely than the uproar had.

  Roger’s voice broke it.

  ‘But you’re wrong,’ he said. ‘They’re not making a new pylon, they’re only breaking up the platform of the old one.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Susie, dancing to and fro. ‘It’s you who are wrong, Daddy. You aren’t always right, you know. You see we’ve been across and talked to the men themselves, and they say they are building a new pylon taller than the last——’

  ‘A hundred and thirty-seven feet high,’ put in Victor.

  ‘Oh, yes, a huge great thing. We were so horrified we couldn’t wait to tell you. It’s true, Mummy, isn’t it?’

  She appealed to Anne who, hitherto unnoticed, was standing by the door.

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid it is,’ Anne said.

  ‘There, we told you! And now the view will be spoilt again for ever!’

  Stung in his masculine pride, shorn of his mantle of infallibility, Roger lost his temper. These wretched children! Ill-mannered brats, why had he spoilt them so? ’ Now you clear out!’ he thundered, adding, ‘I don’t mean you, Anne.’ But his wife had already gone.

  Laurie remained, but where? He had slipped down between the bedclothes, out of sight and almost out of mind. Now he came to the surface and let his stricken face be seen.

  ‘Oh, Daddy!’ he exclaimed. ‘Oh, Daddy!’ But what he meant by it he could not have told, so violent and discordant were the emotions that surged up in him. Indeed, they seemed to sound inside his head, drowning another noise that punctuated but did not break the silence: the hammerstrokes from which would rise a bigger and better pylon.

  ‘I’m here, Laurie, I’m here!’ his father said, but remembering the effect his presence had in Laurie’s dreams he doubted whether it would be much consolation now; for was not Laurie always in a dream?

  MRS. CARTERET RECEIVES

  Mrs. Carteret Receives was first published in Great Britain in 1971

  MRS. CARTERET RECEIVES

  From the social angle, as Proust might have seen it, the great cities of Italy have no counterpart in England. In England there were hierarchies still at the turn of the century and later, as long as each town, large or small, was an entity in itself only to be approached from outside by a long, laborious and possibly hazardous journey in a horse-and-trap or wagonette.

  In such towns there were ranks, conditions and degrees; and a newcomer, be he doctor, solicitor, farmer, or someone not actively engaged in ‘trade’, was carefully vetted before he was admitted into the social club, the tennis club, the cricket club, the Masons’, the Foresters’, or any of the many clubs where men congregate to keep each other in, and outsiders out.

  All this sounds very snobbish, but it was really not so; for certainly in the smaller towns everyone knew everyone else and was hail-fellow-well-met with him; there were no Trades Unions; the carpenter was satisfied with being a carpenter, and had no feeling of inferiority or envy when he talked to a white-clad member of the tennis club (perhaps lately elected) swinging his racquet. There was a kind of democracy based on neighbourliness and familiarity. Enter the motor-car, with its money-borne social distinctions and its capacity to move its owner and his family from a dull town to a gayer one, and this democracy of place and local habitations began to wane.

  Not so in the great cities and even the smaller towns of Italy. There the bourgeoisie had, and no doubt still have, their social rivalries, their jockeying for place, their intrigues, their equivalents for keeping up with the Joneses (though it must be said that most Latin countries, if not so democratically governed, are socially more democratically-minded, than we are, and this is true of all ranks of society). They have not a common parlance, a lingua franca, indeed they have not, least of all in Venice where only a few of the aristocracy can speak the dialect of the popolo, which is almost a sep
arate language. At the same time a duchess could talk more freely to a window-cleaner (if such exists in Venice), and with less sense of the barriers of class than she could here. The Venetian popolo has very little sense of social or intellectual inferiority; cat can look at a king, and address him too. But they have a very strong sense of pecuniary inequality. ‘Questa Duchessa ha molti milioni’ (This Duchess has many millions) and of this discrepancy they take what advantage they can, as their employers, should they be private or public, well know.

  But what I wanted to say was that the social system of Italy in its upper reaches such as would have appealed to Proust, differed from ours in being predominantly urban, not rural. The great families, the Colonna, the Orsini, the Caetanis, the Medicis, the Sforzas, the Estes, the Gonzagas, the Contarinis and Mocenigos, had and no doubt still have, great estates in the country, but the centre of their lives, their point d’appui, was urban, in the city to which they belonged and over which they ruled.

  In England, noble families arc seldom denizens of the towns or counties from which they take their titles. The Duke of Norfolk doesn’t live in Norfolk; the Duke of Devonshire doesn’t live in Devonshire; the Duke of Bedford doesn’t live in Bedford; the Duke of Northumberland does live in Northumberland, but Northumberland is a large county, and many people would not know that his home town was Alnwick, where his castle is.

  At the time of which I write, bridging perhaps half a century between 1890 and 1940, English people, emigrants or semi-emigrants, had established a hold, based on affinity, in many cities of Italy, chiefly Rome, Florence and Venice. Others went further afield; but the lure of Italy, for many English people, especially those with aesthetic tastes, was irresistible.

  ‘Open my heart, and you will see graved inside of it, Italy,’ wrote Robert Browning; and how many of his compatriots have re-echoed those sentiments. The Italians, great and small, seemed to re-echo them too. There was a genuine feeling of affection, based on more than mutual advantage, between the two nations. I remember my gondolier saying to me when the troublous relationships between our two countries began over Sanctions, ‘There was a time when an Englishman was a king in Venice.’