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

‘But now there’s no room for the real picture—the one Mr. Blandfoot wouldn’t show us.’

‘Oh,’ said he, still from the top of the steps, ‘that’s hung already.’

‘But we’ve been everywhere,’ protested Mrs. Pepperthwaite, who couldn’t forgo the appearance of curiosity as easily as could Mrs. Stornway.

‘No,’ said Mr. Blandfoot, his voice conveying reproach, ‘not quite everywhere.’

Both of the other women suffered while Mrs. Pepperthwaite racked her memory for places they had not seen. Her mental processes were becoming clear even to herself when Mrs. Peets cut in:

‘Not in the coal cellar, for instance.’

‘No,’ said Mr. Blandfoot. ‘The picture has never been there.’

‘So it walks about, does it?’ said Mrs. Peets. ‘How curious.’ She was still ruffled, as they all were, by the practical joke that they felt had been played on them.

‘I usually take it with me,’ Mr. Blandfoot admitted.

‘Then it must be a miniature,’ declared Mrs. Pepperthwaite triumphantly. Her less sophisticated nature quickly threw off its mood of sulkiness, but her companions still stood on their dignity.

‘No,’ said Mr. Blandfoot, who always seemed pleased to disagree. ‘It’s a fair size—the ordinary size.’

‘What is the ordinary size?’ demanded Mrs. Peets.

‘Oh,’ Mr. Blandfoot replied, making a wide gesture on his airy perch, ‘the size that fits the circumstances.’

‘What are the circumstances?’ Mrs. Peets persisted.

‘Well, the flesh, for example, is the circumstances of the soul.’

The three women received this dictum in silence. Doubt and disappointment appeared in their faces. What a tame dull ending to an enterprise that had seemed so full of promise. Mrs. Pepperthwaite began looking behind the sofa for her bag; Mrs. Stornway picked up hers and started to put on her gloves. Only Mrs. Peets held her ground. She looked up thoughtfully at Mr. Blandfoot, who had the appearance of an umpire at a tennis match.

‘I don’t suppose you want to sell your picture?’ she inquired. Her voice suggested that, little though it would fetch, the thought of selling it might easily have occurred to such a man as Mr. Blandfoot.

‘Oh no,’ said he, ‘we are inseparable.’

‘But if its value goes up, wouldn’t you consider parting with it then?’

‘I hope,’ he answered rather gravely, ‘I shan’t have to part with it for many years,’ He came down the steps, but so tall was he that Mrs. Pepperthwaite, whose grasp of facts was feeble and at the mercy of her imagination, could scarcely believe he was not still aloft. With various shades of ungraciousness they accepted his thanks for their kind offices, but something in his manner made them unwilling to show their disappointment openly. As they stood on the doorstep Mrs. Peets made a last appeal:

‘So you won’t show us the picture after all?’

For a moment he looked as though he might really oblige them, and all their curiosity flooded back.

‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do,’ he said suddenly. I’ll show it to Mrs. Marling.’

He smiled down into their bewildered faces; and as he shut the door, they could still see, though his face was turned away, the smile lingering on his large, spare, yellowish cheek.

‘I know the word to describe that man,’ exclaimed Mrs. Stornway, who had just learned it and used it more often than the occasion warranted. ‘He’s sinister!’

Directly she reached home she telephoned to Mrs. Marling. Mrs. Marling, it was well known, resented the telephone as an intrusion upon private life: she was as inaccessible to it as to all other demands on her attention. But finally she came.

‘Who’s that?’

‘Eva, Alice, Eva.’

‘Eva Alice Eva: I don’t know the name. Alice is my name: would you kindly spell yours?’

Mrs. Stornway spelt it.

‘My darling Eva, how good of you to telephone, though of course you know I hardly ever use it, it makes me feel so deaf. Can’t bear to feel deaf at my age. Had you anything to say, dearest?’

‘Oh, Alice, I’ve got such heaps to tell you. May I come round tomorrow?’

‘I’m afraid I’m engaged to-morrow.’

‘Wednesday then?’

‘Wednesday is no good.’

‘What about Thursday?’

‘Dearest Eva, you mustn’t let me take up your whole week! Couldn’t you tell me now?’

‘It’s about Mr. Blandfoot’s picture.’

‘His brick shirt?’

‘No, his picture.’

‘Oh,’ in disappointed tones. ‘Have you seen it?’

‘No.’

‘I thought not. Then what have you got to say about it?

‘He wants you to see it, he wants to show it to you.’

‘To me? Oh no. That wouldn’t do. Oh no. Not at my age. I’m too old to look at pictures: I make them myself now.’

‘Well, that’s what he said.’

‘Darling, how frivolous you are. Come and see me on Friday. Yes, Mr. Hesketh will still be here. There’s no sign of his going away.’

It was two days later. Dinner was over, and Mrs. Marling and Mr. Hesketh were sitting over their port: over his port, that is. It had ceased to circulate. As Mr. Hesketh raised his glass, his rich booming voice caused tiny tremors to appear on the surface of the wine.

‘You ought to drink more port,’ said Mrs. Marling. ‘It’s well known to be good for the throat.’ Her pose was upright and her slender body never moved; but there was a hint of weariness in the lines round her eyes.

‘Very kind of you, my dear Alice, I’m sure,’ replied Mr. Hesketh, refilling his glass and staring into it. ‘I shall take your advice to heart. How long has this very excellent port wine lain in your cellar?’

‘You must ask Dodge,’ said Mrs. Marling. ‘He has the key. But I believe my husband put some down the same year that The Logic of the Grape came out—twenty-five years ago?’

‘Thirty.’

‘To look at you,’ said Mrs. Marling, with one of her rare smiles, ‘who would have thought it? Of the two vintages, if I may say so, I prefer your novel.’ She sipped her wine.

‘It has often occurred to me to wonder, Alice,’ remarked Mr. Hesketh, pleased by the compliment—as everyone was pleased when Mrs. Marling said something nice to them, so clearly did she go out of her way to do it—‘why, when Richard died, you stayed on here, a triton among minnows?’ He put his hands on the table-edge and looked hard at her, as though he really wanted an answer.

‘But does that matter when whales like yourself, great, gambolling, famous, good-natured whales, come to stay with me?’

‘Unfortunately, I can’t be here all the time,’ said Mr. Hesketh a trifle heavily.

‘But you’re here a good time—at least I mean when you’re here I have a good time,’ said Mrs. Marling.

‘You are quite right,’ the novelist agreed. Like many people slightly under the influence of alcohol, he was appealing to the Past to give up a decaying friendship, and he thought the best way of recovering it was by a series of intimate references to their common memories. ‘With your talents, if you had lived in London, you might have done almost anything—you might have gone far, very far.’

‘I’m afraid so,’ replied Mrs. Marling. ‘But don’t you think it’s better that I should be somebody in Settlemarsh than almost nobody in London?’

‘Oh, my dear Alice,’ Mr. Hesketh exclaimed, ‘don’t mistake my meaning. I was talking to Dick Gresham the other day, and Richard Gresham is not a man to use words lightly, and he said, “Of all the women I ever knew” (and he’s known a great many) “the most brilliant by far was Alice Ingilby” (that’s you, of course). “Most provincial towns are deadly,” he said, “and Settlemarsh not least; but when you had met her, say just coming away from church, the very bricks and slates sparkled, and the streets were alive with joy!” Once, he said, when he had met you he counted all the palings between his house and Chittlegate, it was so impossible, after one had talked to you, not to find the world interesting! And now I come and I see you surrounded by wretched second-rate people swarming in jerry-built bungalows, with no feeling for the art of life, only an idle curiosity in what the day brings forth and a pitiful competitive snobbishness that has its goal, as it always had, in you.’