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

For the first day or two, in spite of his resolution to ladle out sympathy and appreciation, he didn’t see much of Mrs. Weaver. He was busy trying to assimilate the strangeness of his new surroundings. All those outhouses and stables, which the old rectors had no doubt been able to find a suitable use for; couldn’t, indeed, have done without! That weedy courtyard with its central drain, through which the water (it had been raining plentifully) took so long to run away! And the garden with its towering trees, traversed by a sullen but romantic rivulet, how much too large it was for the gardener who was said to come three times a week! And the emptiness and silence, after London! A car coming by (the house faced the village street) was quite an event; one listened to its entire progress, from the first throb of the engine to the last. And soon, if petrol-rationing really became a fact, these irruptions into the silence would be fewer, almost non-existent! Already he could hear his own footsteps, the footsteps of a single man, walking alone. Isolation made Philip Holroyd busy with his thoughts as never before; they had the intensity of sensations. Then suddenly he remembered Mrs. Weaver and her need for sympathy.

‘Excuse me,’ he said, going into the kitchen. Flanked by a larder and a pantry and a second kitchen, and having a back-stairs defended by a door opening out of it, it was a room where meals for twenty people might have been prepared. ‘Excuse me,’ he repeated, for he was a man who liked to err on the side of politeness, ‘but I wanted to tell you how very much I enjoyed the supper you gave me last night. The cheese soufflé was a dream, and it is such a test of cooking.’

Mrs. Weaver looked up at him from the deal table where she was making pastry. Her hands were floury. Her face was round and pink, framed by soft brown hair that was going grey. She parted it in the middle; it was thin and straggled a little, but not untidily. Her figure was short and compact. She had a pleasant, almost sweet expression, which didn’t change much when she spoke.

‘I’m glad you liked it,’ she said. ‘I always say that men are easier to cook for than women.’

‘Oh, do you think so?’

‘Yes, they have better appetites for one thing. My husband——’ She stopped.

‘Yes?’

‘He had a very good appetite. He was a guardsman, you know—in the Grenadiers. He was a fine big man. You remind me of him, sir.’

Philip was slightly above middle height. A sedentary life had thickened his figure, and doubled his chin, but he couldn’t help being pleased at being compared to a guardsman.

‘And for all he was so big,’ went on Mrs. Weaver, ‘he was like a child in some ways. He went on playing with soldiers to the end—he was that proud of his regiment. He hated the Coldstream Guards and wouldn’t hear them mentioned. I nursed him all through his last illness, when the hospital threw him out, saying they could do nothing more for him. I washed him and shaved him and did everything for him. If you were to fall ill, sir——’

‘Oh, I hope I shan’t,’ said Philip hastily. ‘But it’s nice to think——’ he didn’t finish the sentence. ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘is there anything you want? Anything I can do for you to make you more comfortable? I’m afraid your room isn’t very comfortable.’

‘Oh, no, sir, I’m very happy with you. But there’s just one thing——’

‘What is it?’ asked Philip, when she hesitated.

‘Well, sir, it sounds so silly.’

‘Never mind, I’m often silly myself.’

‘I hardly like to tell you.’

‘Out with it.’

‘It’s the small tortoiseshell butterfly, sir. I can’t bear the sight of it. There was one fluttering about the room when my husband was dying. When I see one I go——’

Philip took a hasty glance round the darkening kitchen.

‘I don’t know much about the habits of small tortoiseshell butterflies,’ he said, ‘but I fancy they only breed once a year, in the summer. If you happen to see a stray one, call me and I’ll get rid of it. I’m quite handy with a butterfly-net.’ He made a mental note to buy one.

‘Thank you,’ she answered, without smiling. ‘And I don’t like anything that’s made of tortoiseshell, either. It makes me want to . . .’

‘I’ll see there isn’t any,’ said Philip firmly. ‘I’ll go along now and round up every bit I find. There’s a cigarette-box in my sitting-room—But I’m afraid you must be lonely, as well as having too much to do. Mrs. Featherstone is coming in to-morrow, the daily woman, you know. She lives in the village. She’ll be company for you.’

Mrs. Weaver didn’t seem to welcome this idea.

‘At any rate she’ll only be here in the mornings,’ she said.

Philip bowed himself out and made straight for the cigarette-box. It was a useful object and a nice one, with Cigarettes scribbled across the lid in silver, and silver mountings at the corners. A wedding-present perhaps. But it must go, and so must the buhl clock on the chimney-piece. How bare the room looked without them! What else? Philip ranged the house for the dark, seductive gleam of tortoiseshell, suddenly developing an attachment for the substance that he had never had before; the sense of so many unoccupied rooms all round him gave him an odd feeling; but his search went unrewarded until he came to his own bedroom where, on the dressing-table, lay his comb. He could easily do without it for a day or two; its job was almost a sinecure, he had so little hair. But where to put the culprits so that they shouldn’t offend Mrs. Weaver’s vision and make her do—whatever they did make her do? In the corner cupboard, of course. There she would never see them.

He opened the two rounded doors, and stood and stared. Unpacking, he had heaped his pharmacopoeia (almost his first thought was for it) on to the two lower shelves of the corner cupboard. He had never counted the separate items but there must be nearly thirty. He hadn’t bothered to set them straight or even to stand all of them up: that was to be for another day, the day until which Philip postponed so many things. And now they were all arranged and tidy.

Philip’s first reaction was one of gratitude to Mrs. Weaver, who had taken so much trouble for him. His second was more complex. On the middle shelf the medicines had been put in the way that any tidy-minded person might have put them. But on the lowest shelf they had been arranged in a certain order that betrayed intention and design. They had been drawn up in a kind of formation, the tallest bottles lining the cupboard wall, the medium-sized ones in front of them, and at the feet, so to speak, of these, a third row of smaller vessels, jars and tubes and such-like. The two formations faced each other at right angles, and in between was an empty triangular space like a stage, which seemed to be waiting for something to happen.

Clearly it all meant something: but what did it mean?

Then the meaning flashed on Philip. The bottles were soldiers, two sides drawn up for combat: and the space between them was a battlefield.

He smiled at this odd fantasy of Mrs. Weaver’s; it was some kind of psychological legacy from her guardsman-husband, who in his last illness used to play at soldiers. And yet mingling with his amusement was a faint uneasiness; there was too much tension, too much implied enmity in the little scene for it to have been set for comedy. Philip was sensitive to the influence of objects; he responded not only to their aesthetic but to their personal appeal. Among the bits and pieces that he had brought from London was a silk Heriz rug. He liked all Eastern carpets but the silk rugs of Heriz had a special fascination for him, particularly this one. Framing a brick-red ground its border had a scrolling pattern in crimson; and the crimson reappeared in figures on the ground itself together with other colours, palest buff and turquoise blue. But it was the wooing of the two reds that most delighted him. In favoured moments he could get an ecstasy from contemplating it that amounted to a minor mystical experience. The best moment was when he was called; then, tea-cup in hand, he would fix his eyes on the rug beside his bed and await ravishment.