The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley

by Leslie Poles Hartley

  ‘Because chemists are more particular now than they used to be.’

  For a few moments the three men sipped their drinks in silence. Then the sergeant said to his colleague with a grin,

  ‘Tastes all right, Fred, doesn’t it?’

  Fred nodded assent.

  ‘But if we both drop down dead,’ said the sergeant playfully to Vivian, ‘you’ll be responsible, you know.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Vivian, trying to fall in with his mood, ‘because it isn’t against regulations for me to drink.’

  The sergeant smiled, and still with the smile on his face, looked down at the body crucified on the floor.

  ‘You don’t know who it is?’ he asked suddenly.

  Better not try to deceive the police. ‘Yes, I do, he was a man I used to meet at parties, and who came here once or twice.’

  ‘So he knew his way about?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Vivian. ‘But there isn’t much to know,’ and with an inward-turning gesture he indicated the cramped proportions of his house.

  ‘You didn’t let him in, by any chance?’ asked the sergeant, looking down speculatively at the body, one of whose outstretched hands, tight-fingered, might have been clutching the sergeant’s chair-leg. ‘He’s a good-looking chap, or might have been once.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Vivian. ‘Between them they forced the door open while I was asleep in bed. That’s all I know.’

  ‘Forget it,’ said the sergeant soothingly. ‘No offence meant, but we have to ask these questions. You’d be surprised, Mr. Vosper, if you knew how many men living alone as you do, complain of burglars who aren’t really burglars, but burglars by invitation, so to speak.’

  ‘Then how do you account for the mask?’ asked Vivian, looking at the fragile object which a draught from the two open doors was turning backwards and forwards.

  ‘You never know what they’ll be up to,’ said the sergeant. ‘A mask doesn’t always mean what it seems to mean. I could be wearing this uniform’—he touched the medals on his tunic—‘and not be a policeman at all.’

  Vivian stared at him incredulously.

  ‘Yes, it is so, Mr. Vosper, and that’s why we can’t leave any stone unturned. I’ll take this’—and without any appearance of distaste, he stooped to pick up the frail object, which seemed all the frailer between his thick fingers. ‘You can’t tell me his name, by any chance?’

  ‘I can,’ said Vivian, and told him.

  ‘I thought it might be,’ said the sergeant, ‘I thought it might be. We’ve had our eye on him for some time.’

  ‘Shall I hear any more from you?’ asked Vivian.

  ‘You may—you may. But it won’t be serious. You go to bed, Mr. Vosper,’ said the sergeant, gently.

  ‘What about the front door?’

  ‘We’ll fix it, and have a man on the watch.’ He looked at Vivian again. ‘You don’t remember me,’ he said, ‘but I came here the other time you were burgled and beaten up and tied up. You were in a pretty bad shape, if I may say so.’

  ‘I don’t remember,’ said Vivian, ‘I don’t remember much of what happened after they set about me.’

  ‘I wasn’t a sergeant then,’ said the policeman, reminiscently, glancing down not without complacency at the three stripes on his sleeve. ‘And I hope I shall be a Chief-Inspector before you have to call me in again, Mr. Vosper.’

  The bell rang, unnecessarily, since the street door and the sitting-room door were open, and the sergeant’s colleague let in two men who from their appearance might have been murderers.

  ‘Just take him up,’ said the sergeant, ‘I don’t think there’s any need to be extra careful with him.’

  The men bent down and their practised hands lifted the corpse, with as little expression on their faces as if they had been furniture-removers.

  All the same, for Vivian, something went out of the room into the clear night air that wasn’t a bit of furniture.

  ‘There’s nothing more, I think,’ said the sergeant. ‘You’ve got rid of the eight rats, or did you say nine?’

  ‘Eight,’ said Vivian.

  ‘Well, I hope you won’t have any more, Mr. Vosper. But just to make things straight, do you mind if I lock the door of your sitting-room to keep you safe and to let our forensic expert have a look at it? Just a matter of routine. He’ll come early in the morning, before you are up, or down, perhaps.’

  ‘By all means,’ said Vivian, rising as the sergeant rose. They stood together in the passage, while the sergeant locked the sitting-room door and put the key in his pocket.

  ‘Eight rats are better than nine, aren’t they?’ he said. ‘Goodnight, Mr. Vosper.’

  ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord.’ Vivian brooded on those words as he went upstairs to take his sleeping tablets. They didn’t contain cyanide of potassium, but they were poison, all the same.

  Revenge, revenge. It was an emotion as old as jealousy, from which it so often sprang. It was a classic emotion, coeval with the human race, and to profess oneself to be free of it was as de-humanizing, almost as much, and perhaps more, as if one professed oneself to be free of love—of which, as of jealousy, it was an offspring.

  How many stories of the past, how many actions of the present, were founded in revenge. Vivian could hardly think of one that wasn’t. Even the New Testament, that idealistic vision of the better world, wasn’t free from it, or why should Christ have cursed the barren fig-tree? ‘Revenge is sweet, and flavours all my dealings,’ said, or sang, a character in one of Gilbert and Sullivan’s operas, with playful irony, no doubt, but with a substratum of truth.

  Vivian had got even with his tormentors, and the guilty had suffered for the guilty. Ruat coelum, fiat justitia! Justice had been done, and he, Vivian, had been its instrument.

  Was it something to be pleased about, something to be proud of? He didn’t know, just as he didn’t know if the police-sergeant had accepted his story about the rats. He wasn’t afraid of that. His daily help who, unexpectedly sadistic, had cut off and preserved the end of their tails, tail after tail on a string, because she said, and perhaps she was right, that rats didn’t need telling twice, still less eight times, that a place wasn’t healthy for them. She would confirm it; Mr. Stanforth, the porter, would confirm it; Vivian’s rat-infested neighbours who had tried in vain to get his recipe for rat-bane, would confirm it. So the sergeant’s suspicions, if he had them, could easily be allayed.

  Would the human rats, the burglars who frequented the mews dwellings, be equally perceptive? Vivian asked himself. He couldn’t hang up their tails because, as far as he knew, they hadn’t any; but they had their bush-telegraph, just as the rats had, and the word would go round.

  Vivian rubbed his shoulders and several other parts of his anatomy which still ached and perhaps would always ache from the attentions of the other gang of bandits, how many weeks ago! Well, if one bandit had paid the penalty and was now beyond feeling any ache or pain, so much the better for him. How and why had he fallen into this bad company? Why had he told them—mistakenly—since it had already been looted—that there was something in Vivian’s house worth pinching? When he had come there once or twice for a drink, he must have noted an object or two that caught his connoisseur’s eye. They weren’t there now, nor was his connoisseur’s eye, closed for ever in the mortuary.

  In his medicine-cupboard, half concealed behind ranks of innocent medicines, was the half-empty bottle of cyanide which the police-sergeant had forgotten to impound.

  On an impulse Vivian went downstairs. His sitting-room was locked against him but in the basement he found another bottle of Amontillado.

  Corkscrew in hand he carried it up to his bathroom, opened the door and the window and set the tap running. Then with a trembling hand he poured out a measure of sherry into the washbasin and replaced it with one of cyanide.

  Who was this? Who was he? A Vivian he did not know. But as he stuck on to the sherry-bottle a labe
l (in red ink this time) PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH, and cautiously sniffed the almond-breathing perfume, he had a sensation of ineffable, blissful sweetness.

  HOME, SWEET HOME

  It was his old home all right, as he knew the moment he was inside the door, although who opened it to him he couldn’t remember, for in those days of long ago who could remember who opened the door to him? It must have been one of his parents’ servants who were often changing, and he himself wasn’t a frequent visitor, he had been about the world so much; but the feeling, the sense of the house, as apart from its visible structure—the front hall, the inner hall—were as clear to him as they ever had been: as vivid as a scent, and not exactly a scent but a combination of thoughts, feelings, experiences, an exhalation of the past, which was as vivid to him now, and as much a part of him, as it had ever been.

  He didn’t ask himself why he was here—it seemed so natural that he should be—and then he remembered that he was expecting a guest—a guest for dinner, a guest for the week-end, a close friend of his, whom his parents didn’t know, though they knew about her, and were expecting her, and looking forward to seeing her.

  What time of year was it? What time of day? Dinner-time, certainly, for the light that filtered through the big north window was a diluted twilight when it reached the hall, revealing not so much the outlines as the vague, shadowy almost insubstantial shapes of the pieces of furniture he knew so well. And yet his inner mind recognized them as intimately as if they had been floodlit—perhaps more intimately, since they were of the same substance as his memory.

  But while he was still under the spell of their rather ghostly impact on his consciousness, his awareness of himself as expressed in them, another thought, more practical and more immediate, penetrated it—where was Helen Furthermore, for she was the object of the exercise, and the reason why he had returned so unexpectedly to his old home? She needed looking after, and it was his job to look after her, for she did not know the rest of the party, who he somehow divined, were his relations, mostly older than himself, but he couldn’t be sure, for he hadn’t seen them—but they must be somewhere about—nor did they know her.

  She might be late, of course, but she wasn’t often late; she prided herself on not being late, but perhaps the taxi they had ordered for her—they must have ordered one—hadn’t recognized her at the station, and she was wandering to and fro outside its precincts, with the desolate feeling that the non-met visitor has—what to do next, where to go next—for there wouldn’t be another taxi at that wayside station. He could almost see her passing and repassing her little pile of luggage—not so little, for she never travelled light—growing more indistinct with each encounter in the growing gloom and more indistinct to herself, also, as the question of how to reach her destination grew more and more pressing until it began to occupy her whole being.

  And then, quite suddenly, there she was—not in front of him, but behind him and round about him, a presence rather than a person. Someone must have let her in, as he had been let in, he couldn’t quite remember how, because the front door opened on a little hall divided by a pair of glass doors from the middle hall where he was standing.

  But it was she all right. He turned and recognized her not so much by her face, for it was covered by the dark veil she sometimes wore, but by the unmistakeable shape that was as much a part of her personality as she herself was.

  ‘Valentine!’

  ‘Helen!’

  They must have exchanged those salutations and no doubt others, in a medium for him and perhaps her, of uncontrollable relief as if some terrible disaster had been providentially averted. He didn’t see how, but he had the impression, that her impedimenta had been suitably removed; and the next thing was a compulsive necessity—for his mind could only harbour one idea at a time—to introduce her to her fellow-guests.

  Why should they be in the dining-room and not the drawing-room? He didn’t know; but he took it for granted that they were, and he was right, for when he opened the door for Lady Furthermore, he saw them all under the bright light of the chandelier, six or seven of them, seated round the dining-table, which was not laid for dinner, but rather like a board-room table surrounded by directors (bored indeed, for goodness knew how long they had been sitting there).

  They all looked up and Valentine, who felt he must make an apology for himself as well as an excuse for her, said ‘Here we are, late I’m afraid. This is Helen Furthermore,’ and he was retreating behind her to let her make the effect which she always made, when the lights went out and the room was filled with darkness.

  What to do now? Valentine’s social conscience was still in the ascendant; come what might, he must introduce Helen to her fellow-guests. But how, when they were invisible even to him? No doubt the light would come on again. But it didn’t, and meanwhile there was a slight muttering round the table which boded no good, as though Valentine himself had fused the lights.

  It did not seem to surprise Helen to be ushered into an almost pitch-dark room, with in the middle a vague impression of heads and forms ranged round an oblong table. But she was noted for her social tact which had served her on many occasions more important, if less surprising than this; and Valentine, taking courage from her acceptance of it, with the additional encouragement of her hand in his, which nobody could see, began a tour of the table.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked, bending over the first head that presented itself, if presented be the word, in the gloom.

  ‘I’m your Uncle Eustace.’

  ‘Uncle Eustace, this is Lady Furthermore,’ (he hadn’t meant to give her her title, but the situation seemed to demand it) ‘who has come to spend the weekend with us, as I’m sure you know. May I introduce you to her?’

  The head turned round, showing a pallid cheek, that certainly recalled Uncle Eustace.

  ‘Of course, my dear boy, I am very happy to meet Lady Furthermore. I hope she will forgive me for not getting up, but in this darkness I feel I am safer sitting down.’

  His voice quavered. How old could Uncle Eustace be?

  ‘Please don’t move,’ said Lady Furthermore. ‘I look forward so much to seeing you when . . . when the lights let me.’

  Always groping, she and Valentine advanced a step or two. Then Valentine bent forward over a bowed head.

  ‘Who are you? Please forgive me asking, but it’s so dark I can’t see my hand before my face—or your face,’ he added, hoping it sounded like a joke.

  ‘I’m your Aunt Agatha.’

  It was rather annoying that ‘they’ should recognize him and not he them. But voices change; hers sounded very old.

  ‘Dear Aunt Agatha. I am so glad to see you—at least I should be, if I could see you!’ The joke, as he knew, fell rather flat. ‘But I want to introduce you to a great friend of mine, Lady Furthermore, who has come to spend the weekend with us.’

  ‘Lady Furthermore? I seem to know that name.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure you do.’

  ‘She was a child when I—’

  ‘I’ve always been a child,’ interposed Helen, ‘and I know that when we really see each other—’

  ‘Yes? Yes?’ said the old lady, who was obviously a little deaf.

  ‘You will realize that you have weathered the storm better than I have.’

  ‘Oh nonsense,’ the old lady said. ‘I can’t see much, I couldn’t, even if it wasn’t dark—but I’ve never seen a picture of you since I don’t know when that didn’t look like what you have always looked like.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Helen said, more moved than she cared to show, but what matter since it couldn’t be shown.

  Together the two went on, addressing and being addressed, till they came to the chair at what must be the head of the table.

  ‘Forgive me,’ said Valentine, ‘but who are you, if I may ask?’

  ‘I’m your father.’

  It took Valentine several moments to recover himself. He wondered if Helen had heard. ‘Dear Daddy,’ he began, ‘th
is is a great friend of mine, Lady Furthermore. You’ve often heard me speak of her—’

  At this moment there was an extraordinary noise between a crash and an explosion, and lights broke out, where it was impossible to say. Yet they were not lights in the sense that they banished the darkness: they were blue flares, wedge-shaped like arrows, piercing the room from end to end. And Valentine said to himself, ‘Of course, it’s the gas!’ For many years ago, when the lighting of the house had been changed, much against his father’s wish, from gas to electricity—‘gas gives a much better light,’ he used to say—he had a gas-bracket left in every room in case the electricity broke down, as he rather hoped it would. And now the gas—not like ordinary gas, but like flares at an old-time fair—was penetrating the room from every angle, blue arrows that like lightning flashes revealed nothing except themselves, and a sickly sheen of terror on the faces round the table.

  Valentine grasped Helen’s arm. ‘Let’s get out of here!’ he said, and in a moment they were safe in the hall without apparently opening the dining-room door or shutting it.

  Out of sight, out of mind. Valentine’s memories of what had just taken place, perhaps from the excitement of the moment which often obliterates the details of a sensational happening, perhaps from some other cause, were already growing dim; they hadn’t quite passed away, they had left a residue—of feeling? of sensation? of subconscious conviction?—that still lingered. The house didn’t belong to him as he now realized, for there were other claimants. But he never suspected that it still belonged to his father. And this added very much to his new and growing preoccupation. Whoever might own the house, Helen was his guest as they all knew; and so far she had been treated very scurvily. She had not been shown her room: where was it? Upstairs, of course, but which room, the East Room? the South Room? When he tried to think of the bedroom accommodation and its access to bathrooms his mind became confused. All this should have been arranged by whoever the house belonged to, his father presumably, for his mother was long since dead—or was she? She was not at the table with him, at least he didn’t think so, for he had not had time to complete his tour of introductions round the table before the gas fireworks began. Somebody would know, of course; but where was somebody? Where was anybody? He had an invincible reluctance to re-enter the dining-room with its shafts of blue light (those he could remember) playing on the upturned, frightened faces of his elderly relations and perhaps setting the house on fire despite his father’s faith in the innocuousness of gas.