The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley

by Leslie Poles Hartley

  The residue of these happenings in his sub-memory affected his new preoccupation. Helen had not been treated in a guest-like manner, and above all she had not been offered a drink. A long cross-country journey and she had not been offered a drink! She must need one terribly, just as he wanted one terribly; her throat must be parched as his was, and with more reason for (so his mental map told him) she had travelled much further than he.

  But what sort of drink would she like? That was one besetting question. A gin and vermouth, a dry martini, his mind kept repeating. But how could he ask her when he didn’t know where the drinks, if any, were kept? And would a dry martini be specially welcome to someone whose system, like his own, was already on the dry side? Vaguely, incoherently, came back to him the memory of his visits to her, when drinks of all sorts were immediately offered, and every provision for his comfort had been arranged beforehand. And now this. He couldn’t quite remember what happened after her arrival; he didn’t want to, it was too mortifying, too humiliating. Could inhospitality have gone further?

  Where was she now? If she had vanished into the comparatively hospitable night, small blame to her; but no, she was somewhere about, though he couldn’t always locate her: sometimes at his back, sometimes on his left side, sometimes on his right, never in front, because in front of him was the large brass bowl? urn? container? which housed, as it always housed, the King Fern (Osmunda Regalis)—such a beautiful name, and it did not suit her. If only she would stop flitting and fluttering and let him have more than a side-glimpse of her! If only she would be more stable—for in ordinary life she was as stable as an anchor. At last she settled, like a butterfly; like a butterfly she was captive under his net.

  ‘Helen,’ he said, trying to see her expression under her veil, ‘I feel so distressed about your visit, but I really couldn’t have foreseen what was going to happen’ (‘and I can’t now,’ he might have added). ‘But what particularly worries me is that you haven’t had a drink. You must need one after your long journey, and I want one,’ (this sentence had been repeating itself in his mind). ‘But how, and where are they—the drinks I mean? The people are somewhere in the dining-room.’

  He understood Helen to say she didn’t care if she had a drink or not; but he didn’t think this was true, and he himself was assailed by an appalling thirst.

  Suddenly he had an idea which seemed like an inspiration flooding his whole being. The drawing-room, of course! Why hadn’t he thought of the drawing-room? Before, it had appeared quite natural that Helen and he should have been received (welcomed was not the word) at a bare board in the dining-room; now it did seem strange when the drawing-room, the traditional place for hosts whoever they might be to greet their guests, was still available. And a vision of the drawing-room at once crossed his mind, with its cheerful yellow wallpaper counteracting its cold northern aspect, and, most important of all, in the right-hand corner facing the door, a gate-legged table bearing a tray of glasses and drinks, most of them non-alcoholic, for his father belonged to a generation which had not heard of dry martinis, but had heard of whisky and sherry. Better whisky or sherry than nothing. The drawing-room was, for the moment, the only solution.

  ‘Helen,’ he repeated to the face under the veil, ‘let’s go into the drawing-room. We might find something there, something to drink I mean. And at any rate we shall be by ourselves.’

  He thought her slight inclination of the head signified assent and so he led the way, up four steps and then to the right, to the drawing-room door with its pseudo linen-fold panels which were difficult to see because his father, economical in most ways, was especially economical about the use of artificial light.

  Imagine their surprise, therefore, when the door opened to reveal a blaze of light—no fuse here—illuminating every part of the room from corner to corner and from cornice to cornice, and not least the crossbeams in the ceiling which an Italian craftsman, early in the last century, had concealed beneath intricate designs in stucco. But before Valentine had time to do more than realize that the gate-legged table in the corner was still there, his eyes were astonished by another sight. So far, being of an acceptant nature, he had taken everything that happened for granted, but now—!

  There were six or seven little beds in the room, arranged side by side or end to end; and in each was a child, of indeterminate age and sex, asleep. Asleep when he and Helen came in; but when the light shone on their eyes they began to rub them, and having rubbed them, to set up a pitiful wail, each child taking it up from the next.

  Beneath her veil which was so thick that even the brilliant light could not penetrate it, Helen’s face was unreadable. I must get her out of this, he thought; this is worse than the dining-room. ‘Please sit here,’ he said, indicating a stiff-backed armchair which besides being the only chair in the room, commanded a view of the various beds, ‘and I’ll sit here,’ and he sat down on the edge of the bed of a squalling child.

  But before he and Helen had time to consult each other, or take in more than a tossing sea of bedclothes, a figure entered the room. It was a hospital nurse, dressed as such.

  ‘What on earth are you doing here?’ she asked.

  Valentine, for the first time in many years, lost his temper.

  ‘And what on earth are you doing here? What right have you to be here? This may not be my house, but it is the house of my family, the Walkovers, have you ever heard of them?’

  The Sister touched her forehead, a gesture that might have meant anything.

  ‘Yes, I have heard of them. Many years ago the Corporation—’

  ‘The Corporation? What Corporation?’

  ‘The Corporation. They bought this house from a family called Walkover, for a home for disturbed children.’

  ‘Disturbed children?’

  ‘Yes, here are some of them. And I can tell you that your unwarranted presence here is disturbing them more.’

  Wails and screams gave credence to her words, but they only exasperated Valentine.

  ‘I don’t believe you for a moment,’ he said. ‘My relations are downstairs, and I’ll fetch them up to tell you you are trespassing. Trespassing, do you hear?’

  Having to make this scene in front of Helen aggravated his indignation. ‘I’ll order you to get out,’ he shouted, ‘and leave this place to whom it belongs. I came in here to get a drink for my friend Lady Furthermore—’

  He wouldn’t subject Helen to the indignity of introducing her to the Sister.

  ‘There is some milk on the table in the corner,’ the Sister said, ‘and you are welcome to it, if you don’t make too much noise.’

  Valentine went to the table, seized a bottle of milk and hurled it at the Sister. A whitish streak, half fluid, half powder, such as might have been exuded by a bomber in the intense cold of the stratosphere—a sort of Milky Way—followed, until the missile struck the chandelier, and for the second time that night, darkness prevailed.

  Helen was still with him; how they got out of the room he didn’t know; how they got out of the house he didn’t know; but he did know, or thought he knew, that he had put her on a train to somewhere.

  ‘Where am I?’ he thought, and then a sense of his proper environment—his bed—came back to him. ‘But why am I so thirsty?’ for he was longing, as never before, for a dry martini. ‘Oh for a dry martini!’

  The experience must have been real, from its mere physical aftermath; for never before had he woken up at night pining for a drink. He sat up in bed; where were the ingredients? They were downstairs behind a locked door; and the only thirst-quencher at hand was a long-opened bottle of sherry. He turned over and gradually his throat and tongue resumed their normal functions. ‘I must have imagined it all,’ he thought, ‘and I hope that Helen has imagined it, too.’

  With a vision of her stranded on some wayside railway platform, drinkless, even milk-less, it took him a long time to go to sleep.

  ‘Anyhow,’ he thought, ‘she is well rid of Castlewick House.’ He ha
dn’t remembered the name of his old home until now.

  THE SHADOW ON THE WALL

  Mildred Fanshawe was a bachelor woman in her early forties. She was an interior decorator, and valued as such by quite a wide circle of customers and friends. But she was better known, to most of them, by her neuroses. Of these she pretended to make fun, just as they, without pretending, made fun of them to her. ‘Have you seen a single magpie lately, Mildred? I mean a magpie without a mate?’ ‘Have you seen the new moon through glass?’ ‘Have you broken a looking-glass?’—‘You must have, because looking-glasses are part of your stock-in-trade,’ and so on.

  If such enquiries were half teasing, they were also meant to be therapeutic, a way out for Mildred from the tyranny of her superstitions—if tyranny it was. Her friends were too fond of her to think she was making them up, much as they laughed at them. Laughter, even unkind laughter, they thought, is one way of curing an obstinate obsession.

  But much as friends may laugh at you and much as you may laugh at yourself, it isn’t an inevitable cure for something—difficult to define, more difficult to avow—which has got well below the surface.

  Naturally in the course of business Mildred was asked to spend half-days or days or weekends with her clients or would-be clients. The day-by-day visits she didn’t mind, indeed looked forward to them; but she rather dreaded the weekends, because when she was left to herself, especially in a strange house, her irrational fears were liable to get the better of her.

  Her friends knew of this peculiarity and were tolerant and sympathetic, even while they smiled at it. ‘We must have the house exorcised before we ask Mildred to stay!’

  Joanna Bostock was a good customer and a good friend. Mildred had worked for her and knew her house well—that is to say, she knew parts of it well. The entrance hall was supported on each side by two honey-coloured columns that divided the main structure of the ground floor. To the right was the large dining-room with two long windows balancing the façade of the house; to the left was the main staircase, with its stained-glass windows, of Victorian date, and to the left of the staircase, a library and a drawing-room from whose doors, sometimes shut and sometimes open, Mrs. Bostock and her guests, when she had any, parted for the night, slowly going upstairs, politely making way for each other—‘No, you, please’—until the hall was left unoccupied and Mrs. Bostock, or her butler, if she had one, turned out the light.

  Mildred had been to Craventhorpe many times in the exercise of her profession, and knew its outside well. Around an oval patch of lawn crowned by a fountain said to be by Bernini, which was supposed to play but never did, a gravel sweep led to the front door. Long, low, and built of the most beautiful pink-red brick, this was the aspect of the house which was meant to catch the beholder’s eye. Leaving her car, Mildred, who was by nature over-punctual, would sometimes walk to the left, where the west wing of the house, no less beautiful than the front, overlooked the garden and the tulip-tree, a truly monumental arboreal adornment which many people (for the house was sometimes open to the public) came from far to see. How it soared into the air! How its blossoms, not very like tulips, but near enough, gave it an exotic, an almost fabulous appeal! It was said to be the tallest tulip tree in England. Be that as it might, Mildred could never look at it without awe.

  Generally, at this point, where the garden sloped down to a duck-pond, where the ducks were said to drown their redundant offspring, Mildred would turn back to the front door to announce her arrival.

  But sometimes she made a circuit of the house. Its northern and its eastern aspects were very different—they were its back parts, they were almost slums! Joanna had never asked Mildred what to do with these outside excrescences, botched up at such or such a date and, architecturally, not fit to be seen. It was not true, as some people said of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century builders, that they couldn’t go wrong. They built for show, for outside or for inside effect. And if it didn’t show, they couldn’t care less.

  Craventhorpe was built in the shape of a hollow E; and the hollow, over which the architects had taken no trouble, was an eyesore to Joanna Bostock. What to do with it? Make it a sanctuary for wild birds? But they had the pond to disport themselves on or in and indulge their instincts. (She was fond of animals of all sorts.) Or grass it over? Or make it a miniature maze with an occasional garden statue, naked except for being bearded, leering over the edge of the hedge at the visitors laughing, but half frightened, by their efforts to find their way out?

  Joanna hadn’t consulted Mildred about this outside job, which didn’t need curtains or carpets or colours for the walls; nor had she consulted her about the east wing, one side of which looked down on the empty space, and was seldom used except for children and grandchildren. (Joanna was a widow whose husband, dying young, had left her the house and the children to go with it.)

  *

  Afraid of arriving too late, afraid of arriving too early, Mildred was the first guest to be announced. (For some reason she was relieved that Joanna had found a temporary butler.)

  After the usual embracements, ‘Darling,’ Joanna said, ‘I am so glad you came before the others. Now come and have a drink, I am sure you need one.’

  She led the way to the library where the drinks stood on a glass tray with gilt handles, a glittering array.

  ‘Now what?’ she asked. ‘Which?’ She had a way of making invitation seem still more inviting.

  ‘Oh, a very little for me,’ said Mildred. ‘Just some Dubonnet, perhaps.’

  Joanna poured it out for her, and whisky on the rocks for herself.

  ‘Darling,’ she said, ‘I’m very glad you came early—you could never come too early—’ She paused and added, ‘You’ve never stayed here before, have you? I wonder why?’

  ‘Perhaps because you never asked me,’ said Mildred, sipping her drink.

  Her hostess frowned. ‘Oh no, I’m sure I’ve asked you scores of times. But you’re always so much in demand.’ She paused again, and poured out another tot of whisky. ‘Isn’t it awful how this grows on you? Not on you, dear Mildred, who dread nothing,’ she laughed, a little tipsily. ‘Not even a mill, and we haven’t one round here, not to speak of, unless you dread a thousand things?’ She laughed. ‘Now what was I going to say?’ She seemed to rack her memory. ‘Oh, yes, our other weekend guests. I won’t say who they are, even if I could remember, but you know most of them, and they will be overjoyed to see you, even if you—’

  She stopped, and Mildred remembered Joanna’s reputation for forgetfulness.

  ‘So we should be eight for dinner, and I hope we shall be, but there’s a man I can’t rely on—he has some sort of job, half international, I suppose—you wouldn’t know him, Mildred. He’s called Count Olmütz—’

  ‘No, I don’t remember that name.’

  ‘Well, he’s an old friend of the family if I can call myself a family.’

  ‘Oh, Joanna.’

  ‘Yes, I mean it. But what was I going to say?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Well, this man Olmütz should be coming in time for dinner’—Joanna glanced at the clock, which said 6.30—‘if it’s only to make the numbers even. We can have general conversation, of course, and you are so good at it, dear Mildred, but eight is a better number than seven, more cosy—and he has a lot to say, too much perhaps. But what was I going to say?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Oh, now I remember,’ Joanna said. ‘I know you don’t much like staying away from home.’

  She stopped and gave Mildred a piercing look. ‘But what I wanted to say was, you needn’t feel nervous in this house. You have done so much for it, you know it so well. Indoors it’s your creation, except for that eyesore that looks down on the courtyard—’

  ‘I’ve seen it, of course,’ said Mildred. ‘I know the rest of the house much better.’

  Voices could be heard in the hall.

  ‘Well, what I wanted to say,’ said Joanna hastily, ‘before
the immigrants break in, was, that in case you should be nervous in that long, rather lonely passage, I’ve put Count Olmütz in the room next yours, to keep you company, so to speak.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Mildred smiling, ‘then I ought to lock my door?’

  ‘Oh no,’ said her hostess, apparently shocked. ‘He’s not at all that kind of man. I put him there well, as a sort of background, background music. He doesn’t sing, but I’m afraid he might snore.’

  ‘I remember the passage,’ said Mildred, drawing her wrap round her, for the house, like many country houses, wasn’t overwarm. ‘You never asked me to do it up—perhaps you didn’t want it done up?’

  ‘Oh, I think it must look after itself,’ said Joanna carelessly. ‘A house is a hungry beast, and the more its appetite can be kept at bay the better. But there was something I wanted to say to you—can you remember what it was?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Oh, now it comes back to me. This old friend of mine, Count Olmütz, is—what shall I say?—a man of irregular habits. Now, don’t look alarmed, Mildred—not irregular in that sense, or I shouldn’t dream of putting him within . . . within striking distance of you. No; I mean he’s irregular in relation to the time-factor. I never quite know when he is coming, and I don’t think he knows himself.’ She heard a sound and looked round. ‘Could that be a car driving up? Well, it might be him, coming back from one of his errands, his missions as he calls them. I hope he will be here for dinner because he’s so amusing and will make our numbers even, but if he isn’t, tant pis! He drives himself and may arrive at any time. We have that arrangement—c’est entendu—and the front door is always left open for him.’