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

When accosted I had not, as some men have, a polite formula of refusal ready: I swerved or dodged or walked straight on. But one evening I couldn’t, for my solicitrix, who had risen from a seat a few yards farther on, planted herself in front of me and blocked my way.

‘Hello, darling,’ she said.

If her face hadn’t been almost touching mine I should have recognized her sooner. If I had been less put out I should have recognized her sooner.

‘Doris Blackmore!’ I said at last.

‘The same,’ she answered. ‘I’ve seen you several times doing your nightly dozen, or whatever you were here for, so I thought, “Why not me as well as one of the others?” ’

‘I don’t come here to pick up women,’ I said.

‘I thought not, but one can’t be sure, I haven’t had much experience you see. Even the older ones can’t always tell.’

‘They can’t, indeed,’ I said.

‘No need to be snooty. You might be wanting something—other men do.’

I made no answer.

‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘yours is the first face I’ve recognized since I’ve been on the game.’

‘On the game?’

‘Well, on the batter, hustling, there are lots of names for it.’

‘I could say the same,’ I said. ‘Yours is the first face that I’ve recognized among your crowd.’

‘You’re one of the lucky ones,’ she told me, without rancour. ‘You can pick and choose, whereas we—Well, so long. Nice to have seen you.’

She was strutting off, with that peculiar stiff gait they all affect, when I caught her up.

‘Why on earth are you doing this?’ I asked.

‘Oh, I dunno. It’s a break, at any rate. I got browned off at Restbourne. After you came——’

‘Yes?’ I said.

‘Well, I just felt I wanted to do something else. That’s all there is to it.’

‘You’ll get browned off doing this.’

‘There’s more variety and much more money, too. Some of us make forty pounds a week. I’d sooner go the whole way with somebody than natter with them at a tea-table. Some men think they’re men just because they’ve been accosted. Some just come to look at us. We’re not all so bad. I’ve heard of a Tom who blew a policeman’s whistle for him when he’d been kicked in the groin and couldn’t move.’

‘I wasn’t criticizing you,’ I said, ‘or them.’

‘It’s not a bad life. Most men are all mouth and trousers—well, I like the trousers best, if you see what I mean.’

‘You mean without the trousers.’

‘Yes, I suppose I do. Well, bye-bye, Mr. So-and-so. You didn’t tell me your name. London’s such a big place. It’s nice to think we’re neighbours.’

‘Look here,’ I said.

‘I can’t afford to waste another minute. Big Harry will be after me.’

‘Are you here every night?’

‘Yes, till they send me somewhere else.’

‘Good-bye, good luck,’ I said, and shook her hand. ‘Perhaps I shall be seeing you.’

As a rule, on my nightly rambles, my thoughts follow their own course. But this time they wouldn’t, they kept returning to the problem of Doris and Edward, digging straight lines from me to them, making an angle which, when I came into it, assumed the dignity and completeness of a triangle.

But I didn’t come into it much. The wave of tenderness I had felt for Doris the waitress didn’t reach to Doris the whore; I could only see her as a member of her profession, for which I felt no sentiment at all. An uneasiness, a twinge of guilt I did feel, wondering if my visit to Restbourne, and the kindness I hadn’t meant to show her, had been the last straw which broke the back of her virtue—if she was virtuous then.

But Edward, that unknown quantity, would he mind what her calling was, if she had the face he dreamed about? Like most of his circle, Edward was well off. It was taken for granted that any of us had unlimited supplies of gin and vermouth, or whatever drink was in favour at the moment. He had dropped some money over his marriage, for the settlement he had made on Mary came back to him at her death much reduced, when the Inland Revenue had had their whack. More than once, in expansive moments, he had praised the wisdom of parting with one’s money in one’s lifetime—at which some people pricked up their ears. ‘But,’ he said, ‘most of my friends are my own age, and better off than I am, so where would be the point? I must give some of myself with the gift, or it’s no fun; and nearly everyone I know has much more personality than I have—they couldn’t do with more.’ So it became a sort of game to find for Edward a possible legatee, and many very odd ones were suggested, though not, of course, to him. He was right about his lack of personality; he was more real when he was being talked about than when he was present. He used to say his friends invented him. But the current of his being flowed in a secret channel invisible to us.

Of all the suggested recipients of his bounty none was quite so fantastic as Doris Blackmore. Yet was she really so unsuitable? Besides having the Face, hadn’t she almost all the qualifications, including lack of personality? Having been all things to all men, she might find it the less difficult to be one thing to one.

‘Edward,’ I said, one evening when we were together, ‘excuse the question, but have you ever been with a prostitute?’

He frowned, and fixed his amber eyes on me.

‘Why, no,’ he said.

‘Does the thought of them repel you?’

‘I’ve never given them much thought.’

‘Nor had I until a night or two ago when one accosted me in the Park, and do you know, she rather took my fancy.’

‘Did you get off with her?’ asked Edward.

‘Well, no, it isn’t in my line. But I talked to her and found her interesting and sympathetic. Does that shock you?’

‘Not in the least,’ said Edward. ‘I’m not shocked by sexual irregularities or even’—he smiled—‘by sexual regularity.’

‘Would you care to meet her?’

‘Not in the street, perhaps.’

‘No, at some restaurant. She wouldn’t look different from other girls—I’d see to that.’

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘But can she get away? I mean, their bosses keep them pretty hard at work.’

‘I’d give her something she could show for herself.’

‘Well, let me in on that. What do you think—a fiver?’

But when I told her that a friend was going to join us, she seemed disappointed.

‘I thought it was only you,’ she said.

‘Only me? You’re not flattering,’ I said. ‘But yes, you are. Still, this friend of mine, he’s a nice fellow, and of course I need a chaperon.’

‘I should have thought you were old and ugly enough to look after yourself.’

‘That’s where you’re wrong. At my age I can’t afford to take risks.’

‘I suppose you want me to get off with him?’

‘Good lord!’ I said. ‘But if I did, would you object?’

‘Object?’ she repeated. ‘Girls like me can’t afford to object to anything.’

‘Oh, come,’ I rallied her. ‘Your life is one long record of objections—all that I know of it, which isn’t much. You objected to the Krazie Café; you objected to being talked to, you objected to not being talked to——’

‘Only because you were so inconsiderate.’

‘Inconsiderate?’

‘All right,’ she said, ‘I’ll come.’

Doris’s conversation wasn’t dull—at least not dull to me—but it was limited. She liked it to be a sparring match; she also peppered it with catch-words of the day—euphemisms and verbal subterfuges. ‘Fair enough’ for something that wasn’t quite fair; ‘Jolly good’ to make something sound jollier and better than it was; and ‘All right’ with an interrogative inflexion to cover something that was not quite all right.