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

‘Ah, poor Christopher,’ Constantia said. ‘I wish I could feel we were doing what he wanted us to do.’

‘What did he want us to do,’ I asked, ‘besides look at the flowers?’

‘I wish I knew,’ Constantia answered.

I was glad to find myself growing annoyed. Christopher had somehow turned the tables on us; he had got us into his world of make-believe, his emotional climate of self-stultifying sentimentalism. He had becalmed us with his spell of inaction, which made the ordinary pursuits of life seem not worth-while. He had put us into an equivocal position; even in the conventional sense of the term it was equivocal. Well, I must get us out.

‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like me to go?’ I said. ‘The Tyrrel Arms is only a mile away.’

‘No, no,’ she answered. ‘He wouldn’t want you to, nor do I.’

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘If it was a practical joke it was a damn bad one. You don’t really think he forgot to warn us both that the other would be there?’

‘Warn us?’

‘Well, would you have come if you’d known I was to be here?’

‘Would you?’ she parried.

‘Certainly,’ I said, with more decision than I felt. ‘I would go anywhere where you were, Constantia. It would be a plain issue to me. All the issues are plain where you are concerned. I don’t have to dress them up in flowers.’

‘Ah, the flowers,’ she said, and turned again to the window.

‘If he meant to make us doubt our feelings for each other,’ I argued, ‘he will be disappointed, as far as I’m concerned. He has thrown us together by a trick. He has arranged for us to be alone together in his house. He has put us into the position of an illicit couple. Why don’t we accept the challenge?’

Constantia frowned. ‘He wanted us to see the flowers,’ she said, and she was still saying it, in effect if not in word, when the time came for week-end visitors to separate for the night.

I am usually a good sleeper but I could not sleep and was the more annoyed because I felt that Christopher’s influence was gaining—it had spread from the emotional into the physical sphere. First he had surprised and kept me guessing; now he was keeping me awake. I had a shrewd idea that Constantia too was wakeful; and the irony and futility of our lying sleepless in separate rooms all because of some groundless scruple that Christopher had insinuated into our minds enraged me and made me more than ever wakeful, as anger will. About two o’clock I rose and, turning on the light, I stole along the passage towards Constantia’s room. To reach it I had to pass the head of the staircase where it disappeared into the thick darkness of the hall below. Accentuated by the stillness of the night, the blackness seemed to come up at me, as though it was being brewed in a vat and given off like vapour; and though I wasn’t frightened I felt that Christopher was trying to frighten me and this made me still more angry. I listened at Constantia’s door and if I had heard a movement I should have gone in, but there was none, and I would not risk waking her; my love for her was intensified by my irritation against Christopher, and I could not bear to do her a disservice. So I turned away and deliberately bent my steps towards Christopher’s room, for I knew that he left his letters lying about and I thought I might find something that would let me into the secret of his intentions—if intentions he had; but more and more I felt that the conception of the visit was an idle whim, with hardly enough purpose behind it to be mischievous.

I like a bedroom to be a bedroom, a place for sleeping in, not an extra sitting-room arranged for the display of modish and chi-chi-objects. Christopher’s bedroom was even less austere than I remembered it; there were additions in the shape of fashionable Regency furniture, which I never care for. The bed looked as if it never had been and never could be slept in. And in contrast to this luxury were vases full of withered flowers, lilac and iris; the soup-green water they stood in smelt decidedly unpleasant. The Hancocks were not such perfect servants as Christopher liked to make out. Nothing looks so dead as a dead flower, and the bright light gave these a garish look as though they had been painted. But there was nothing to my purpose; no letters, sketches, no books even; only a tall pile of flower catalogues, topped by a Government pamphlet on pest control.

Pest control! It was the pamphlet, no less than the shrivelled flowers, which gave me the idea that burst into full bloom as soon as I was back in bed. The flowers, I felt, represented that part of Christopher with which I was least in sympathy; his instinct to substitute for life something that was apart from life—something that would prettify it, aromatize it, falsify it, enervate and finally destroy it. These flowers were pests and must, in modern parlance, be controlled and neutralized. Thinking how to do it I soon fell asleep.

I was sitting at Christopher’s writing-table drafting an opinion when, at the hour at which well-to-do women usually make their first appearance, that is to say about half-past eleven, Constantia came in. She was dressed in grey country clothes the severity of which was relieved by a few frivolous touches here and there, and she was wearing a hat, or the rudiments of a hat. I kissed her and asked how she had slept.

‘Not very well,’ she said.

‘Oh?’ I said. ‘Why not?’

‘I was thinking about Christopher’s flowers,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t get them out of my head. I nearly went down to them in the watches of the night. But I’m going now. Will you come with me, Ernest, or are you too busy?’

‘I am rather busy,’ I said, ‘and to tell you the truth, Constantia, I think this flower business is rather a bore.’

Constantia opened her grey eyes wide. ‘Oh, why?’ she said.

I pulled a chair towards the writing-table as if she was a client come to interview me, and sat down in Christopher’s place.

‘Because they distract you from me,’ I replied. ‘That’s one thing. And another is, I have reasons for thinking they are not very good flowers.’

‘Not?’ queried Constantia, puzzled. ‘But Christopher has spent so much time and money on them.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘But I also know that Christopher never gets anything quite right. You must have noticed that yourself.’

Constantia smiled. ‘Poor Christopher, I suppose he doesn’t quite, but still—Ernest, let’s go out and look at them.’

‘I hate the second-rate,’ I said. ‘My motto is, don’t touch it.’

Constantia shifted in her chair and gave her dress a little pat. ‘Oh well, if you don’t want to, I’ll——’ she began.

‘But I don’t want you to, either,’ I said, pointing my pen at her. ‘You’ll only regret it if you do.’

‘Regret it?’ she repeated. ‘Ernest, darling, I quite understand if you don’t want to go into the garden now, but please don’t try to stop me.’ She began to get up, but I motioned her to be seated.

‘Yes, regret it,’ I said, firmly. ‘Do you know why Christopher played this trick on us?’

‘But was it a trick?’ Constantia asked doubtfully.

‘Of course it was! He was leading us, if I may say so, up the garden path. I think he had two ideas in his mind, an upper and a lower one, and both were meant to separate us.’

She looked at me reproachfully and without speaking.

‘The first was, frankly, to compromise us.’

‘Oh, my dear Ernest!’ Constantia protested.

‘Yes, it was. He may not have put it to himself as crudely as that. He may not have meant to publish it abroad; that would have been the natural tiling to do and he doesn’t like the natural. No; the satisfaction he would get—will get—is from knowing that we know that he knows. It will enable him to practise a kind of gentle blackmail on us. We shall never be quite alone together any more; he will always be there, watching our thoughts. He will be like an agent—Cupid’s agent—taking a ten per cent commission on our love. He will expect us to feel guilty and grateful at the same time and it will act like a poison—it will come between us.’