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

‘There’s that girl again!’ we sometimes said, and hardier spirits even said to Edward: ‘Why don’t you try another type for a change ?’ Whereat he would smile and sometimes scrunch the paper up. Many of us thought that he was in love with an ideal, a Dulcinea who, unlike Don Quixote’s, never had and never would exist in real life: she was an alibi for feelings that he only had on paper. Not that he avoided women’s society—he was attached to several, and they to him; but in his relations with them there was a marked absence of the obsessiveness that showed so clearly in the drawings; he scarcely seemed to prefer one to another, nor did any of them resemble, even remotely, the face he loved to contemplate.

Edward was a well-built, fair-skinned man, with pale-green hair and amber eyes—at least they said so, I couldn’t quite see it. To me he was self-coloured—not in the sense of being an egotist, he was anything but that—but he had no light and shade: he presented a uniform hue, the neutral hue of a good fellow. One didn’t have to like him first to find him likeable; he was likeable at once. Many a hostess finding herself a man short used to say, ‘Can’t we get hold of that miserable Edward?’—only to find that another hostess had got hold of him. In company he always seemed to be holding himself back, as if he had something he didn’t want to part with; it was the energy, I suppose, that he needed for his paper-mistress—his drawing-mistress, as we sometimes called her.

So his marriage, at the age of twenty-eight, came as a great surprise. Mary Elmhirst didn’t belong to any of the circles he frequented, he ran into her at some seaside town, and they were married almost at once. The match was suitable in every way; she was a doctor’s daughter, at once gay and serious-minded; he worked in the City. As a bachelor he had been a social asset and in continuous demand at parties. As a married man he didn’t exactly drop out, but he would go nowhere without his wife; he ceased being Edward, he became Edward and Mary, or perhaps Mary and Edward. In the social and every other sense he lived entirely for her, and it then became more than ever apparent how superficial his previous friendships had been. We accepted this with a smile and a shrug; a few tried, and one or two pretended to find, rifts in the Postgates’ matrimonial lute, but these were so obviously unfounded that they passed into a joke, a joke against the gossips. Happy the couple that has no history, but also the less interesting: Mary and Edward, whether meaning one or both of them, ceased to be names that came up much in conversation, and where they did, it was chiefly as types of conjugal felicity. Nothing more would happen to them except a child, and this, strangely enough, they did not have, though they were going to have one when five years later Mary Postgate was killed in a motor accident.

It was like a looking-glass being broken—the picture was no longer there, nor did the fragments that remained present any coherent pattern. What had happened to Edward? What was happening? What would happen? It was anybody’s guess, and meanwhile, after the letters of condolence sometimes easy to write but in this case next to impossible, we were in a state of suspense and bewilderment, unable when with Edward, or even apart from him, to decide whether ‘yes’ or ‘no’ was the more appropriate word. Did he prefer to see people, or not to see them? Was it better to refer to his loss, or not to refer to it? One felt that he, too, was dead, had died when all he stood for died; but he wasn’t, he was up and going about; and if we could find some definite mode or pattern of thinking and feeling about him, it might help him to find one for himself. Perhaps he had found one, but if so he didn’t disclose it. He withdrew further into his pre-marital reserve. That he was still attending to his business, and wasn’t actively ill, at any rate physically, was all we knew with certainty about him. After a while he began to move about a little socially, he returned to circulation; but he didn’t function as a person, he was like a clock that people still look at even though it has stopped.

Everyone of course was sorry for him, I not least, being one of his oldest friends, and a born bachelor, as he had seemed to be—though not with the facial attachment that he had. I would say to him: ‘Edward, come in for a drink on Thursday—I’m having a few friends,’ and as like as not he would accept, and yet he might as well have stayed away, for he didn’t bring himself with him, not even the muted self we used to know. We were sorry for him, I repeat, but you can’t feel the pang of sorrow indefinitely: the nerve gets overlaid and ceases to respond. He was still a charge on our feelings—‘Poor Edward!’—but he was no longer news.

And then somebody remarked, who had been with him at a meeting, that he had started to draw the face again. All the years that he was married, and for some years after, he hadn’t drawn it. Possessing it he hadn’t needed to, and losing it he hadn’t the heart to—at least this was the explanation generally given. The face, so my informant told me, and this was soon confirmed by others who had seen it in other versions, was still the same face, hadn’t altered in any particular—it was even the same age it used to be. I felt a little sceptical about these rumours, but one evening, when I was playing cards with him, I saw it myself, decorating the bridge-marker. Time, as someone said of Dr. Johnson, had given him a younger wife. But was she still his old wife, Mary, or a potential new wife? Or just his obsession with his ideal?

Nothing happened for a long time, and then a mutual friend called Thomas Henry told me that at a café in Restbourne where he was having tea he had been served by a waitress, whose face was the facsimile of Edward’s model, the spitting image, he said. Thomas Henry was a fussy little man, twice married, and as meddlesome as a woman; he was fond of starting hares, especially matrimonial hares, for other people to follow up. Now he was all agog. ‘But what can we do about it?’ I asked him.

‘Well, bring them together.’

‘But how?’

‘Tell him to go down to the café and see for himself.’

I deprecated this—it seemed too crude.

‘We don’t know how he feels,’ I said. ‘It might upset him terribly—you can’t monkey about with people’s emotions in that way.’

‘All the same,’ said Thomas Henry, ‘it might be the saving of him and bring him back to life, and think how nice for her!’ That aspect of the case hadn’t occurred to me, nor, I must say, did it appeal to me. A waitress in a café! Without being a snob I thought it most unsuitable, and said so. ‘Why,’ said Thomas Henry, ‘you old diehard, we live in a classless society, or soon shall, and all he cares about is the Face. He doesn’t care about anything else.’

‘Oh, nonsense,’ I said, ‘he’s an idealist through and through. It wasn’t just chance that Mary was as nice as she was nice-looking. The Face is the face of a lady—besides, it may not be his face—the face he thinks about—at all. We’ve only your word for it.’

‘Well, go and see for yourself,’ he said.

It happened to be very inconvenient for me to do this, and besides, I didn’t want to spend the day going to Restbourne, just to have tea and come back. And what a wild-goose chase! I was Edward’s age, nearly forty, and doing things I didn’t like was becoming increasingly hard for me. Self-discipline is all right for the young, but for those of riper years it is just another brake on the already overclogged machinery of living. All the same, for the sake of my old friendship with Edward I decided to go to Restbourne and inspect the waitress.

I saw her the moment I got inside the Krazie Café, and seeing her I saw what Thomas Henry meant. I hovered, looking for a table at which she would be serving; luckily she came up to me and showed me one. I scrutinized her as she stood waiting for my order. Yes—the resemblance was most striking—even to the deeper colour on the high cheek-bones—though that, perhaps, owed something to art, for she was more made-up than Mary had been. Her voice was made up too; it had an obvious overlay of gentility but Edward didn’t draw voices. I called her back to ask her for some jam; the hands that brought it were innocent of a wedding-ring: they were larger than Mary’s, and not so pretty, but Edward didn’t draw hands. What was she like in herself? Like Mary? How could I tell? She didn’t chat much to the other customers, and they paid her no special attention. How tantalizing it was! Before I left I must say something to her—something to draw her out. But I was hopeless at that sort of thing: I hadn’t the right touch: least of all the light touch. I couldn’t leave it to the moment of settling the bill; at the risk of being a nuisance I must again ask for something. But how could I, when the table was groaning with food and I never ate tea anyway? Distaste for my mission increased: I longed to get it over. Never a chatterbox myself, the waitress seemed the last person in the world I wished to talk to. I must; but not at the cost of eating my way through all those viands. Hastily pouring all the hot water into the teapot, I caught her eye.