Leslie Hartley: The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley

Leaving her companion behind, she hastened back to the gondola. Mr. Kolynopulo was asleep, sprawled across the cushions, his head over-weighting the hand that sought to sustain it. Emilio, also, was resting, but as she came he threw himself across the poop into an attitude that absurdly caricatured his fare’s. Lavinia laughed and clapped her hands; gone was her sense of isolation, gone her wish to re-create herself by a sentimental communion with the past. The darkness, palpable and unnerving in the cloister, fell into its place, dwindled into a time of day, was absorbed by Emilio and forgotten. Something that had stirred and asserted itself at the back of her mind fell asleep, seemed to die, leaving her spirits free. She resolved to avail herself of a security, a superiority to circumstance, that might vanish as suddenly as it came.

‘Mrs. Kolynopulo,’ she said, pronouncing the ridiculous name more seriously than ever before, ‘you said I might ask you a question: do you remember?’

‘No, dear; I can’t say that I do.’

‘It was about the gondoliers.’ Lavinia’s buoyancy remained, though she detected a wobble in her flight.

‘What about them, dear?’ Mrs. Kolynopulo enquired.

Lavinia realized then that her difficulty in putting the question was in itself a partial answer to it; but she had gone too far to draw back.

‘You said that married people did not—had not . . . . certain . . . . dealings with the gondoliers that unmarried people had. I wondered what you meant.’

‘Why, you’ve got it, my dear,’ Mrs. Kolynopulo chuckled. ‘You’ve said it yourself.’

A sensation of nausea came over Lavinia. She felt degraded and shown up, as though, in a first effort to steal, she had been caught red-handed by a pickpocket of older standing.

‘What have I said?’ she muttered. ‘I haven’t said anything.’

‘Oh yes, you have,’ her mentor rejoined. ‘You said that certain people had dealings with gondoliers. “Well, they do. Relations, it’s generally called.’

‘Why do they?’ Lavinia murmured stupidly.

‘Who, dear? The people, or the gondoliers?’

Oh, the agony of answering that question, the effort of bringing her mind to bear upon it. She turned the alternatives over and over, as though playing heads and tails with herself. The words began to have no meaning for her. At last she said:

‘The gondoliers.’

‘Well,’ Mrs. Kolynopulo answered in a tone of considerable relief, ‘you may be sure they don’t do it for nothing.’

Lavinia said not a word on the way home, and when she went to bed her diary remained unopened. She seemed to have become inarticulate, even to herself.

The following evening, however, she resumed her record. ‘I wish I could have left yesterday out of my life, as I left it out of my diary. I didn’t mean to refer to it; indeed I didn’t mean to add another word to this confession. It is false; it is a sham; there is a lie in every line of it. So, at least, I thought this morning. I have always been, and always shall be, the kind of character the last few days have proved me to be: I am the Lavinia who was cruel to Stephen, who snapped the head off a poor hairdresser, who shocked her mother with an indecent word, and imperilled her health with a lie, who worried two boon companions into disclosing a scandal as untrue as it was vile. This is the house Lavinia has built, and a proper pigsty it is; but real, quite real, unlike the decorous edifice whose pleasing lines are discernible in the pages of this diary and which is a fake, a fallacious façade with nothing behind it. I have lost the power to regulate my life; I feel as though it had suddenly grown too big for me; it fits only where it touches, and it touches only to hurt. I feel that all appeals that are made to me are sent to the wrong address. Lavinia Johnstone passed away early in the week and the person who wears her semblance is a very different creature, who would as soon spit in your eye as speak to you. It is a relief to talk of myself in the third person, I get rid of myself that way: if only I could isolate the new me, and enclose the intruder in a coffin of wax, as bees do! What distressed me in reading Elizabeth’s letter this morning was to find that, already, I had ceased to respond to the touches which were meant for me as she knew me; they fell on a dead place. But it will be a long time before my friends notice the change, before I become as strange to them as I am already to myself! And, meanwhile, I can feed their affections with the embalmed Lavinia. It is not a disgusting thought: Mummy was once merchandise—Mizraim cured wounds—Pharaoh was sold for balsams. No doubt many people before me have had to meet the public demand for versions of themselves which, though out of date and superseded, please better than their contemporary personalities could hope to do.’

At last the Kolynopulos had gone; gone without leaving Lavinia the reversion of their gondolier. All day she had struggled to put her plea before them; a hundred times she had changed the wording of her request. Elaborately casual it would have to be; she would breathe it as a random gust flutters a flower. It must seem the most natural thing in the world; she would slide it into a sentence without damaging a comma. It must be a favour; well, she would only ask them one. It must be a command; but had she not always commanded them? ‘He will be a bond,’ Lavinia rehearsed it—’a visible—a sensible—a tangible memento of your kindness.’ But, however she phrased it, she could imagine only one response: Mrs. Kolynopulo’s coarse laugh and her husband’s complementary wink.

They went before breakfast. Lavinia had no time to lose. The concierges hung about together, in twos, even in threes. She must get one by himself. She must not be haughty with him, she must not let him think her afraid of him. The first one scarcely listened to her and then told her what she wanted was impossible. She withdrew to her bedroom in great agitation. The room looked as if it had slept out all night, and she could not bear to stay in it. The newspapers in the lounge were torn and dog-eared, and three days old. Envelopes, envelopes everywhere, and not a sheet of writing paper. She tried to light a cigarette, but the matches were damp, and the box, though it sprang open as if by magic and revealed a quotation from Spinoza, declined to strike them. One after another she tried, holding each close to the head, wearing a sore place on her finger which the flame, when it at last arrived, immediately cauterized. She gave a little cry which made everyone look at her. She hurried from the room, conscious of everything she did—the pace at which she walked, the way she held her hands, the feel of her clothes. She tried to give her movements an air of resolution; she dropped into a chair as though utterly worn out, she rose the next moment as though a thought had struck her. Then she asked another concierge, only to be told that she must wait until the gondolier came to the hotel and arrange matters with him herself. ‘He will never come.’ she thought. ‘If he does come, someone will snap him up, and if they don’t I can never make him understand.’ She pictured herself conducting the negotiation, shouting to Emilio across the intervening water, while the servants and the visitors looked on. ‘Oh for five minutes of Mamma,’ she thought. ‘How she would chivvy them! How she would send them about her business! I try to treat them as human beings; there’s nothing they hate so much. They are like dogs; they know when one’s afraid of them, it’s the only intelligence they have.’ At that moment she heard a sound at her elbow and looked up; a concierge, a tall melancholy-looking man she had not noticed before, was setting an ash-tray at her side. The simple attention confounded Lavinia; she thanked him through a mist of tears. He still hovered, gravely solicitous. Lavinia cast her line once more. Yes, he would get Emilio for her, he would telephone to the traghetto; there was no difficulty at all.