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

‘Your mother told me that you always saw it,’ his father said, again more sternly than he meant to. ‘And do you know who I think it may be?’

Caught by a gust of terror Peter cried, ‘Oh, please don’t tell me!’

‘Why, you silly boy,’ said his father reasonably. ‘Don’t you want to know?’

Ashamed of his cowardice, Peter said he did.

‘Why, it’s Father Christmas, of course!’

Relief surged through Peter.

‘But doesn’t Father Christmas come down the chimney?’ he asked.

‘That was in the old days. He doesn’t now. Now he takes the lift!’

Peter thought a moment.

‘Will you dress up as Father Christmas this year,’ he asked, ‘even though it’s an hotel?’

‘I might.’

‘And come down in the lift?’

‘I shouldn’t wonder.’

After this Peter felt happier about the shadowy passenger behind the bars. Father Christmas couldn’t hurt anyone, even if he was (as Peter now believed him to be) his own father. Peter was only six but he could remember two Christmas Eves when his father had dressed up as Santa Claus and given him a delicious thrill. He could hardly wait for this one, when the apparition in the corner would at last become a reality.

Alas, two days before Christmas Day the lift broke down. On every floor it served, and there were five (six counting the basement), the forbidding notice ‘Out of Order’ dangled from the door-handle. Peter complained as loudly as anyone, though secretly, he couldn’t have told why, he was glad that the lift no longer functioned; and he didn’t mind climbing the four flights to his room, which opened out of his parents’ room but had its own door too. By using the stairs he met the workmen (he never knew on which floor they would be) and from them gleaned the latest news about the lift-crisis. They were working overtime, they told him, and were just as anxious as he to see the last of the job. Sometimes they even told each other to put a jerk into it. Always Peter asked them when they would be finished, and they always answered, ‘Christmas Eve at latest.’

Peter didn’t doubt this. To him the workmen were infallible, possessed of magic powers capable of suspending the ordinary laws that governed lifts. Look how they left the gates open, and shouted to each other up and down the awesome lift-shaft, paying as little attention to the other hotel visitors as if they didn’t exist! Only to Peter did they vouchsafe a word.

But Christmas Eve came, the morning passed, the afternoon passed, and still the lift didn’t go. The men were working with set faces and a controlled hurry in their movements; they didn’t even return Peter’s ‘Good night’ when he passed them on his way to bed. Bed! He had begged to be allowed to stay up this once for dinner; he knew he wouldn’t go to sleep, he said, till Father Christmas came. He lay awake, listening to the urgent voices of the men, wondering if each hammer-stroke would be the last; and then, just as the clamour was subsiding, he dropped off.

Dreaming, he felt adrift in time. Could it be midnight? No, because his parents had after all consented to his going down to dinner. Now was the time. Averting his eyes from the forbidden lift he stole downstairs. There was a clock in the hall, but it had stopped. In the dining-room there was another clock; but dared he go into the dining-room alone, with no one to guide him and everybody looking at him?

He ventured in, and there, at their table, which he couldn’t always pick out, he saw his mother. She saw him, too, and came towards him, threading her way between the tables as if they were just bits of furniture, not alien islands under hostile sway.

‘Darling,’ she said, ‘I couldn’t find you—nobody could, but here you are!’ She led him back and they sat down. ‘Daddy will be with us in a minute.’ The minutes passed; suddenly there was a crash. It seemed to come from within, from the kitchen perhaps. Smiles lit up the faces of the diners. A man at a near-by table laughed and said, ‘Something’s on the floor! Somebody’ll be for it!’ ‘What is it?’ whispered Peter, too excited to speak out loud. ‘Is anyone hurt?’ ‘Oh, no, darling, somebody’s dropped a tray, that’s all.’

To Peter it seemed an anti-climax, this paltry accident that had stolen the thunder of his father’s entry, for he didn’t doubt that his father would come in as Father Christmas. The suspense was unbearable. ‘Can I go into the hall and wait for him?’ His mother hesitated and then said yes.

The hall was deserted, even the porter was off duty. Would it be fair, Peter wondered, or would it be cheating and doing himself out of a surprise, if he waited for Father Christmas by the lift? Magic has its rules which mustn’t be disobeyed. But he was there now, at his old place in front of the lift; and the lift would come down if he pressed the button.

He knew he mustn’t, that it was forbidden, that his father would be angry if he did; yet he reached up and pressed it.

But nothing happened, the lift didn’t come, and why? Because some careless person had forgotten to shut the gates—‘monkeying with the lift’, his father called it. Perhaps the workmen had forgotten, in their hurry to get home. There was only one thing to do—find out on which floor the gates had been left open, and then shut them.

On their own floor it was, and in his dream it didn’t seem strange to Peter that the lift wasn’t there, blocking the black hole of the lift-shaft, though he daren’t look down it. The gates clicked to. Triumph possessed him, triumph lent him wings; he was back on the ground floor, with his finger on the button. A thrill of power such as he had never known ran through him when the machinery answered to his touch.

But what was this? The lift was coming up from below, not down from above, and there was something wrong with its roof—a jagged hole that let the light through. But the figure was there in its accustomed corner, and this time it hadn’t disappeared, it was still there, he could see it through the mazy criss-cross of the bars, a figure in a red robe with white fur edges, and wearing a red cowl on its head: his father, Father Christmas, Daddy in the lift. But why didn’t he look at Peter, and why was his white beard streaked with red?

The two grilles folded back when Peter pushed them. Toys were lying at his father’s feet, but he couldn’t touch them for they too were red, red and wet as the floor of the lift, red as the jag of lightning that tore through his brain. . . .

Edward Postgate was a one-woman man. Or perhaps it would be true to say, he was a man to whom one facial type appealed. He wasn’t singular in this, for most men have their favourite type. But he was singular in the fact that no other type, or even variation of his own type, seemed to attract him at all. Long before he married Mary Elmhirst, this type was enshrined in his consciousness and most of his friends knew what it was. Not because he told them; he was reserved about such matters, and his marriage, when it came, was a surprise. But the girl’s face was not a surprise, for anyone who had done examinations with him or played bridge with him, or sat with him at a committee or a board meeting, could not help knowing it. He was an inveterate doodler. Sometimes he covered the margin with abstract designs; sometimes with plumes and feathers (he was especially fond of drawing ostrich feathers), but most often it was a face, and it was always the same face, recognizably the same, from whatever angle he drew it. The back view was particularly characteristic, for the girl of his dreams, unlike girls in real life, always did her hair the same way—in a knob low down on her neck. Edward was enough of a draughtsman to be able to show that her hair was dark and shining, her eyes violet blue, her colouring red and white—almost a deep red on the high cheek-bones. Parted in the middle her hair swept round a broad forehead, and was drawn back, but not pulled back, to emphasize the slightly concave line that led from her cheek-bones to her small round chin. However many curves he gave her mouth, it was always a wide one, otherwise her nose, whose low arch made a curve that didn’t vary, might have looked too large.