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

‘I like things to be over-life size,’ he replied. ‘I have a passion for the grand scale.’

‘And here you are able to indulge it,’ I said, glancing towards the great house which made a rectangle of intense dark in the night sky.

‘But service isn’t what it was before the war,’ he rather platitudinously remarked. ‘The trouble I’ve had, looking for a footman! Still, I think you’ll find your bath has been turned on for you.’

I took the hint and was moving away when suddenly he called me back.

‘Look!’ he said, ‘don’t let’s change for dinner. I’ve got an idea. Fairclough hasn’t been before; it’s his first visit, too. He hasn’t seen the statues. After dinner we’ll play a game of hide and seek. I’ll hide, and you and he shall seek—here, among the statues. It may be a bit dull for you, because you’ll be in the secret. But if you’re bored, you can hunt for me, too—I don’t think you’ll find me. That’s the advantage of knowing the terrain—perhaps rather an unfair one. We’ll have a time-limit. If you haven’t found me within twenty minutes, I’ll make a bolt for home, whatever the circumstances.’

‘Where will “home” be?’

‘I’ll tell you later. But don’t say anything to Fairclough.’

I promised not to. ‘But, forgive me,’ I said, ‘I don’t quite see the point——’

‘Don’t you? What I want to happen is for Fairclough to mistake the statue for me. I want to see him . . . well . . . startled by it.’

‘He might tackle it low and bring it crashing down.’

My host looked at me with narrowed eyes.

‘If you think that, you don’t know him. He’s much too timid. He won’t touch it—they never do until they know what it is.’

By ‘they’ I supposed him to mean his dupes, past, present and to come.

We talked a little more and parted.

I found the footman laying out my dress-suit on the bed. I told him about not changing and asked if Mr. Fairclough had arrived yet.

‘Yes, sir, he’s in his room.’

‘Could you take me to it?’

I followed along a passage inadequately lit by antique hanging lanterns, most of which were solid at the bottom.

Fairclough was changing. I told him we were to wear our ordinary clothes.

‘What!’ he exclaimed. ‘But he always changes for dinner.’

‘Not this evening.’ I didn’t altogether like my rôle of accomplice, but Fairclough had the weakness of being a know-all. Perhaps it would do him no harm to be surprised for once.

‘I wonder if Postgate changed,’ I said, broaching the topic which had been exercising my mind ever since I set foot in the house.

‘He must have done,’ said Fairclough. ‘Didn’t you know? His dress-clothes were never found.’

‘I don’t remember the story at all well,’ I prompted him.

‘There’s very little to remember,’ Fairclough said. ‘He arrived, as we have; they separated to change for dinner, as we have; and he was never seen or heard of again.’

‘There were other guests, weren’t there?’

‘Yes, the house was full of people.’

‘When exactly did it happen?’

‘Three years ago, two years after Vayne resigned the chairmanship.

‘Postgate had a hand in that, hadn’t he?’

‘Yes, don’t you know?’ said Fairclough. ‘It was rather generous of Vayne to forgive him in the circumstances. It didn’t make much difference to Vayne; he’d probably have resigned in any case, when he inherited this place from his uncle. It was meant to be a sort of reconciliation party, burying the hatchet, and all that.’

I agreed that it was magnanimous of Vayne to make it up with someone who had got him sacked. ‘And he’s still loyal to the old firm,’ I added, ‘or we shouldn’t be here.’

‘Yes, and we’re such small fry,’ Fairclough said. ‘It’s the company, not us, he’s being kind to.’

I thought of the small ordeal ahead of Fairclough, but it hardly amounted to a breach of kindness.

‘I suppose we mustn’t mention Postgate to him?’ I said.

‘Why not? I believe he likes to talk about him. Much better for him than bottling it up.’

‘Would you call him a vain man?’ I asked.

‘Certainly, Vayne by name and vain by nature.’

‘He seemed rather pleased with himself as a sculptor,’ I remarked.

‘A sculptor?’ echoed Fairclough.

I realized my indiscretion, but had gone too far to draw back. ‘Yes, didn’t you know?’ I asked maliciously. ‘He’s done a statue. A sort of portrait. And he talks of doing some more. Portraits of his friends in plaster. He asked me if I’d be his model.’

‘I wonder if he’d do one of me?’ asked Fairclough, with instinctive egotism. ‘I should make rather a good statue, I think.’ Half-undressed, he surveyed himself in the mirror. Long and willowy, fair complexioned as his name, he had a bulging knobby forehead under a thin thatch of hair. ‘Did you say yes?’ he asked.

‘I said I couldn’t stand, but if he would make it a recumbent effigy, I would lie to him.’

We both laughed.

‘Where’s his studio?’ asked Fairclough, almost humbly.

‘Underground. He says he prefers to work by artificial light.’

We both thought about this, and some association of ideas made me ask:

‘Is the house haunted?’

‘Not that I ever heard of,’ Fairclough said. ‘But there’s a legend about a bath.’

‘A bath?’

‘Yes, it’s said to be on the site of an old lift-shaft, and to go up and down. Funny how such stories get about. And talking of baths,’ Fairclough went on, ‘I must be getting into mine. You may not know it, but he doesn’t like one to be a minute late.’

‘Just let me look at it,’ I said. ‘Mine’s down a passage. You have one of your own, you lucky dog.’

We inspected the appointments, which were marble and luxurious, and very up to date, except for the bath itself, which was an immense, old-fashioned mahogany contraption with a lid.

‘A lid!’ I exclaimed. ‘Don’t you know the story of the Mistletoe Bough?’ Fairclough clearly didn’t, and with this parting shot I left him.

In spite of Fairclough’s warning, I was a few minutes late for dinner. How that came about occupied my thoughts throughout the marvellous meal, though I could not bring myself to speak of it and would much rather not have thought about it. I’m afraid I was a dull guest, and Vayne himself was less animated than he had been before dinner. After dinner, however, he cheered up, and when he was giving us our orders for the evening, editing them somewhat for Fairclough’s benefit, he had recovered all his old assurance. We were to divide, he said; I was to take the left-hand range of yew compartments, or temene, as he liked to call them, Fairclough the right. From the top of the terrace steps, a long steep flight, he indicated to us our spheres of action. ‘And home will be here, where I’m standing,’ he wound up. ‘I’ll call “coo-ee” when I’m ready.’

He strolled off in the direction of the house. Fairclough and I walked cautiously down the steps on to the great circle of grass from which the two blocks of temene diverged. Here we bowed ceremoniously and parted. Fairclough disappeared into the black wall of yew.

At last I was alone with my thoughts. Of course it was only another of Vayne’s practical jokes; I realized that now. But at the moment when it happened, I was scared stiff. And I still couldn’t help wondering what would have become of me if—well, if I had got into the bath. I just put my foot in, as I often do, to test the water. I didn’t pull it out at once, for the water was rather cool. In fact I put my whole weight on it.

‘Coo-ee!’

Now the hunt was up. Fairclough would be peering in the shadows. But mine was merely a spectator’s rôle; I was Vayne’s stooge. His stooge. . . .