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

‘Your friend Victor Chisholm has been on the tiles again,’ I began, and before she could get a word in I told her the story of last night’s encounter. Half-way through I was afraid it might fall flat, for, after all, her guest’s peculiarities were no news to her; but it didn’t. She looked surprised and faintly worried.

‘I oughtn’t to have told you,’ I said with assumed contrition, ‘but I thought it would amuse you.’

She made an effort to smile.

‘Oh well, it does,’ she said, and then her serious look came back. ‘But there’s one thing that puzzles me.’

‘What’s that?’

‘He told me he had had a very good night.’

‘Oh well, he would say that. It’s only civil if you’re staying in someone’s house. I should have said the same if you had asked me, only I thought you would want to hear about Victor.’

Nesta didn’t take this up.

‘But we know each other much too well,’ she said, arguing with herself. ‘Victor comes down here—well, he comes pretty often, and he always tells me if he’s been taking his security measures. I can’t understand it.’

Why does she seem so upset? I asked myself. Does she care more for Victor than she admits? Is she distressed by the thought that he should lie to her? Does she suspect him of infidelity?

‘Oh, I expect he thought that for once he wouldn’t bother you,’ I said.

‘You’re quite sure it was Victor?’ she asked, with an effort.

I opened my eyes.

‘Who else could it have been?’

‘Well, somebody else looking for a book.’

I said I thought this most unlikely. ‘Besides, he wasn’t looking for a book. He was looking at the fire—I think he stirred it with his foot.’

‘Stirred it with his foot?’

‘Well, something made a flame jump up.’

Nesta said nothing, but looked more anxious than before.

Hoping to make her say something that would enlighten me, I observed jokingly:

‘But he’s come to the right place. I saw a row of buckets in the hall and one of those patent fire-extinguishers——’

‘Oh, Walter insisted on having them,’ said Nesta, hurriedly. ‘This is a very old house, you know, and we have to take reasonable precautions. Having a fire-complex doesn’t mean there isn’t such a thing as having a fire, any more than having persecution mania means there isn’t such a thing as persecution.’

Then I remembered something.

‘If he doesn’t want to be taken for a burglar,’ I said, ‘why doesn’t he turn on the lights?’

‘But he does turn them on,’ said Nesta, just for that reason.’

I shook my head.

‘He didn’t turn them on last night.’

The problem of Victor’s nocturnal ramblings exercised me and made me unsociable. I never enjoy desultory conversation, and our pre-luncheon chit-chat seemed to me unusually insipid. So when the meal was over I excused myself from playing golf, though I had brought my clubs with me, and announced that I was going to have a siesta as I had slept badly. There was a murmur of sympathy, but Nesta made no comment and no one, least of all Victor, betrayed uneasiness.

In the middle of the afternoon I woke up and had an idea. I strode down to the village to search out the oldest inhabitant. To my surprise I found him, or his equivalent, digging in his front garden. Leaning over the wall I engaged him in conversation; and very soon he told me what I had somehow expected to hear, though, me so many pieces of knowledge that one picks up, it was difficult to act upon, and I rather wished I had never heard it. What chiefly intrigued me was the question: Did Victor know what I knew? It was clear, I thought, that Nesta did. But had she told him?

I did not think that I could ask her, it would seem too like prying; besides if she had wanted to tell me, she would have told me. What I had heard could be held to explain a good many things.

My secret gnawed at me and made the social contacts of the party seem unreal, as though I were a Communist in a Government office, my only accomplice being the head of the Department.

Suddenly, after tea I think it was, the conversation turned my way.

‘Is the house haunted, Nesta?’ asked one of the visitors, a woman, who like myself was a stranger to the house. ‘It ought to be—it wouldn’t be complete without a ghost!’

I watched Nesta as she answered carefully, ‘No, I’m afraid I must disappoint you—it isn’t.’ And I watched Victor Chisholm, but he kept what might have been called his poker face—if it had been sinister, which it was not. The speaker wasn’t to be satisfied; she returned to the charge more than once, suggesting various phantoms suitable to Monkshood Manor; but Nesta disowned them all, finally suppressing them with a yawn. One by one, on various pretexts, the company disbanded, and Victor Chisholm and I were left alone.

‘I once stayed in a country house that was said to be haunted,’ I remarked chattily.

‘Oh, did you?’ he said, with his air of being politely pleased to listen, while he was saving himself up for something in which one had no concern; ‘was it fun?’

‘Well, not exactly fun,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell you about it if you can. bear to hear. The house was an old one, like this, and the land on which it stood had belonged to the Church. Well, after the Dissolution of the Monasteries they pulled the Abbey, or whatever it was, down, and used some of the stones for building this house I’m telling you about. Nobody could stop them. But one of the old monks who had fallen into poverty, as a result of being dissolved, and who remembered the bygone days when they feasted and sang and wassailed and got fat and clapped each other on the back in the way you see in the pictures—he felt sore about it, and on his deathbed he laid a curse on the place and swore that four hundred years later he would come back from wherever he was and set fire to it.’

I watched Victor Chisholm for some sign of uneasiness but he showed none and all he said was:

‘Do you think a ghost could do that? I’ve always understood that it wasn’t very easy to set a house on fire. It isn’t very easy to light a fire, is it, when it’s been laid for the purpose, with paper and sticks and so on.’

This, I thought—and I congratulated myself upon my subtlety—is the voice of reassurance speaking: this is what well-meaning people tell him, and what he tells himself, hoping to calm his fears.

‘I’m not up in the subject of ghosts,’ I said, ‘but they can clank chains and presumably some of them come from a hot place and wouldn’t mind handling a burning brand or two. Or kicking one. That fire in the library, for instance——’

‘Oh, but surely,’ he said—and I saw that I had scared him—‘the library fire is absolutely safe? I—I’m sometimes nervous about fires myself, but I should never bother about that one. There’s so much stone flagging around it. Do you really think——’

‘I’ve no idea,’ I said, feeling I had the answer to one of my questions. ‘But my hostess at the time was certainly apprehensive. I had to worm the story out of her. It’s a very usual one, of course, almost the regulation legend, very boring, really.’

‘And was the house ever burnt down?’ asked Victor.

‘I never heard,’ I said.

Of course Victor might have been dissembling. He might have known the legend of Monkshood Manor, he might have been afraid of the library fire: neurotic people are notoriously given to lying. But I didn’t think so. Yet the alternative was too fantastic. I couldn’t believe in it either, and gradually (for logic can sometimes be bluffed) I succeeded in disbelieving both alternatives at once.

Before nightfall I took the precaution of furnishing my blue room with books more interesting than Evelyn’s Diary. But I didn’t need them. I slept excellently, and so, to judge from discreet inquiries I made in the morning, did the rest of the party.