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

‘Dear Fergus,’ I read,

‘I saw two figures quite distinctly, yours and Julia’s, but not a third, and I’m driven to think that Hilary doesn’t exist—at least for me. I only exist for her—so why go on? I don’t blame you for wanting me to make sure—I am sure now. You’ll find me like Polly Flinders.

I ran to the window, where the glare came from, but it was not so much the glare that filled my eyes as the huge gap, black and ominous, like a cauldron hung over a furnace, where the pampas clump had been. Beneath it the flames still ran and leapt and spurted on their glowing bed of ashes. Outside the french window I felt their scorching breath upon my face and was soon beaten back. It was not until later, a good deal later, that I and one or two others found the charred remains and near by the twisted shard of the burst pistol which was still too hot to touch.

‘Have you ever tried to live a story?’ I once asked a friend of mine. I hadn’t seen him for a good many years, and in the meanwhile he had made his name as a novelist.

‘Well,’ said he, ‘I try to live my stories while I’m writing them.’

‘I didn’t quite mean that. I meant, have you ever read or been told a story which took your fancy so much that you tried to translate it into real life, your own life?’

‘You mean a sort of day-dreaming?’

‘No, something more definite. I mean a deliberate attempt to make certain events which you’ve heard about come true, and happen to yourself.’

He thought for a bit.

‘I can’t say that I have,’ he said. ‘But if you have, tell me. There might be something in it for me.’

After this slender encouragement I began.

‘Well, this is the story. It was told me by someone who had read it—I didn’t read it myself. There was a man, a big, strong fellow——’

‘Like you,’ my friend said.

‘Yes, to some extent. I couldn’t have put myself in his shoes—identified myself with him, or whatever you call it—if he hadn’t been. And he was about my age—I was twenty-eight at the time——’

‘How long ago was it?’

‘About six years. Like me, he was an athlete in a sort of way, and we had other things in common. I worked for a firm in the City, as I daresay you remember——’

‘Yes, I think I do.’

‘And they used to let me off for Rugger matches, even in the middle of the week. I think they felt I gave them some prestige—though God knows how. The fellow in the story was a policeman——’

‘You look rather like a policeman,’ said my friend.

‘Yes, I’ve been told so. He went in for wrestling, and sometimes he was excused duty, to take part in a scrap on the mat. Well, this policeman was in love with a girl, but she didn’t care for him—I mean she quite liked him, but she was in love with another fellow, a violinist in an orchestra he was, with spectacles and hair falling over his eyes—not the sort of man you’d think a girl would take to.’

I regretted having said this, for my friend was no oil-painting. He was undersized and he wore spectacles. But he was so well known in his own walk of life that I didn’t think his appearance mattered to him.

‘Did the policeman and the violinist ever meet?’ he asked me.

‘No, but she used to tell the policeman about him when she was explaining why she couldn’t marry him.’

‘Oh, they were on those terms?’

‘They walked out together quite a lot. She explained that she felt protective towards the violinist, which she couldn’t towards a policeman, and this policeman was a particularly protective type, besides being a grappler.’

‘And you?’ my friend said.

‘I was courting too, and the girl had a boy-friend, but she was different—she was cagey about him and never let on who he was. But she did say she felt protective towards him. “It’s a man’s job to protect a woman,” I used to tell her, but she couldn’t see it that way. In the end I got thoroughly fed up.’

‘You’re telling your own story now.’

‘Only to show the similarities and the differences. I was on a spot just like the policeman was. His mat-work suffered, he lost his appetite, and when he was on the beat he started imagining things—a man with a sack on his shoulder who went into a cul-de-sac (no pun intended) and disappeared—I can’t remember the details. And something about seeing an old illuminated manuscript in an ash-can, and when he went back for it, it wasn’t there. He thought he was going potty, and all because of this girl.’

‘What was she like?’ my friend asked.

‘I think she was slight and dark and not specially pretty, but she had it for him. Well, one morning about nine o’clock he was strolling along some London street in a dazed sort of way, not having slept—they didn’t use sleeping-pills so much in those days—and he slipped on a piece of banana-skin and fell down and couldn’t get up. Of course he knew about First Aid and those things, and he knew that something must be wrong. So he just lay there. As it happened there weren’t many people about, but presently a girl came up to him, and it was——’

‘You needn’t tell me,’ my friend said. ‘It was the girl he was in love with. Talk of coincidences!’

‘But they happen, don’t they? And many people’s lives turn on them. Well, she saw him lying there, looking very pale, with his helmet in the gutter and his leg twisted under him, and in spite of that she recognized him and called for help, and they got him into an ambulance and took him to hospital, and it turned out that his knee-cap was fractured, pretty badly. The surgeon made a mess of setting it, so in the end not only did he have to give up wrestling, he had to leave the police and get a job as a doorman. But——’

‘The girl married him,’ my friend said.

‘How did you guess? She was sorry for him, you see. She thought she could give him something that he needed.’

‘And they lived happily ever after?’

‘No, not quite. He took to drink, as doormen often do; they work such long hours, they often drop in for a quick one—and the glow of self-sacrifice got a bit dim and sometimes she wished she hadn’t made it. That’s life, of course.’

My friend agreed. ‘But where do you come in?’

‘Well,’ I said, and somehow it wasn’t easy to go on. ‘I kept thinking about the story and the more I thought about it the more I got into the policeman’s state of mind—half-desperate, you know. I hadn’t minded so much before I heard it. I had other girls in my life but the policeman’s story seemed to pin-point this one.’

‘What was her name?’

‘Rosemary.’

My friend made no comment, and I went on, ‘Then it occurred to me, Why don’t I do what the policeman did? And then I laughed because of what you were saying, was it likely I should slip on a banana-skin just as Rosemary happened to pass by? The chances were too much against it. All the same, the thought kept nagging me, and one evening when she told me she had almost made up her mind to marry this chap—whoever he was—are you married, by the way?’

‘No,’ my friend said.

‘Take my advice, and don’t be. Well, that piece of news jolted my imagination and gave me an idea. Why shouldn’t I stage an accident like the policeman’s? Not a serious one like his, of course, though I should make it look so—I should hobble away, leaning on her arm—and not just anywhere, I wasn’t too far gone to see how silly that would be. But I knew of course where Rosemary worked—she was secretary to some sort of executive in a street off Knightsbridge. I used to wonder if he was the man, typists so often fall for their employers. And I knew what time she had to clock in by—nine-thirty in the morning. We used to save up things to tell each other—I more than her. I had learned her daily schedule by heart—or all of it that mattered to me—so that whenever I thought about her, I should know what she was doing, at any given time. She took the bus along Knightsbridge and then walked down this side-street.’