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

Presently one of the other couples rose and the man, apologizing, said they had a date. ‘We don’t want to break up the party,’ he added, ‘That’s all right,’ their host said; ‘Annette and I have a date too, at that new place, the Late Session; and it will be pretty late before we’re back. But there’s plenty more to drink; why don’t you and Deirdre, George, stay on, and make an evening of it? It’s only eleven o’clock. That is, if neither of you has a date?’

George and Deirdre exchanged glances. ‘What do you think, Deirdre?’ he asked. He didn’t know her other name.

‘I’m all for staying here,’ she said.

‘Well,’ said their host, rising and taking Annette’s hand, ‘we couldn’t be more sorry—it’s too bad that it’s turned out like this. But you will make yourselves at home, won’t you? You know the geography of the house’—he waved his hand to indicate it—‘at any rate Deirdre does. Good-bye, my children, don’t get into mischief,’ and he was gone, with his companion, almost before they had time to thank him for their lovely evening.

It was the first of several such evenings, some organized by George, to whom spending money was now becoming easy, even exhilarating. But he grudged sharing Deirdre’s company; after the party he could have her to himself. Himself—his very self, only attainable in Deirdre’s arms.

But no, it was attainable in other ways. Everything he did for her, every present, every treat he gave her, every wish of hers, expressed by her or anticipated by him, that he fulfilled, gave him, in a lesser degree, the same sense of wholeness and integration. He felt, and even looked, proud of being a man, and walked down Piccadilly with his hands in his pockets, looking as if he owned it. Even thinking of her, he was twice the man he had been. Only she could give him this freedom; with other women, the women he had known, he was still shy and diffident, anxious to please and sometimes succeeding, but always being acted on, not acting. Gradually he frequented them less and less; the silken threads by which they held him were a frail tie compared to the hawser which fastened him to Deirdre.

So for two years he was entirely happy. She could do no wrong for him. Her moods and caprices, the small slights and snubs, rebuffs and disappointments, by which she sought to make herself more precious to him, all seemed part of her; he scarcely distinguished between her melting and her stony moods. But then something in him became sensitized and if she was unkind to him it began to hurt. Now there were two Deirdres instead of one; and the second made him suffer. In vain he told himself that she had always been like that; it was unreasonable that something he had always taken for granted and not minded should suddenly become a grievance. He blamed himself more than her for his resentment, and was miserable until, at whatever cost to his pride and sense of fairness, he had made it up with her. He tried to make these tiffs and reconciliations into a habit, part of his emotional routine; an item on his experience account; but it didn’t work out so. His feelings, instead of toughening, grew more tender; his eyes had a hurt, anxious look, which his other women friends, on the few occasions when he saw them, remarked upon. How quick they were to notice changes in him! He couldn’t conceal from himself that he was unhappy; the joys of reconciliation and forgiveness (forgiveness of himself rather than her) became of shorter duration; soon, as an anodyne, they hardly counted. He was forced into making a distinction, which he had never made before, between her acts and her: Deirdre was one thing, what she did was another, so he told himself; but try as he would he couldn’t keep them apart. It wasn’t only the smart of the disappointments, which she was so expert in inflicting, that made him miserable; it was the nature that prompted them, his sense of which was like a smell that persisted even through her most fragrant and most yielding moments, and had something frightening about it: the smell of cruelty.

One evening at a party, a rather smart party that he had taken her to at her request, though not quite sure she would fit in, he suddenly felt ill—food poisoning or gastric flu—he didn’t know what it was. He caught sight of his face in a looking-glass, and it more than confirmed what he was feeling. It wasn’t easy to detach Deirdre from the young man she was talking to, but at last he did, and told her of his plight as well as he could, for by now the room was spinning round.

‘I don’t want to go now,’ she said, ‘I’m having a good time. You’ll be all right. Get a hot-water bottle and go to bed.’

‘Oh, do come back with me,’ he begged her. ‘I feel so odd, I don’t know if I shall be able to get home.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘You know what an old fusspot you are. I’ll look in and see you on my way back, if it isn’t too late.’

He lay awake shivering and sweating, with his bedroom door open, hoping to hear her key turn in the lock, but he hadn’t heard it when, towards three o’clock, he fell asleep.

His daily help was busy in the room when George woke up. He had had a dreadful night with bouts of vomiting and diarrhoea, sometimes alternating, sometimes simultaneous; and the blackness before his eyes, as he plunged across the passage to relieve them! Once he had to crawl. He didn’t always get there in time, as his bedclothes bore witness.

‘Never mind,’ said the daily help, ‘I’ll change them for you. Don’t try to get out of bed—I’ll change them with you in it.’

He rolled from one side to the other, and somehow the distasteful task was done.

He could have had a servant living in, but most of his spare cash went to Deirdre, to keep her flat and her; for he had persuaded her, as much for his sake as for hers, to give up her secretarial work. With this she sometimes taxed him. ‘You’ve taken away my livelihood,’ she said.

She said, she said . . . Something that Deirdre had once said, and which he couldn’t remember, was vexing George’s throbbing brain when the telephone bell rang.

‘Perhaps you’d rather I went away?’ the daily woman suggested. ‘It may be something private.’ He nodded weakly.

‘Hullo, is that George? I didn’t recognize your voice, you disguised it.’

‘I’m laid up in bed.’

‘Speak a little louder, can you?’

George repeated it.

‘Oh, I’m sorry. I’ll come round and see you. I couldn’t come last night—it went on too late.’

‘When will you come?’

‘In half an hour or so.’

The morning passed; the daily help, who usually left at twelve o’clock, went out to buy some fish for his lunch—‘I’ll boil it for you,’ she said.

George protested that he couldn’t eat it.

‘You must get something inside you,’ she said, ‘after all that vomiting.’

How kind she is, he thought, but the thought made him uneasy—she was doing something for him, meeting what she believed to be a wish of his—she was putting him in her debt, making him dependent on her. Receiving a favour, he felt uncomfortable. But Deirdre would be here any minute now, and for her he could do something—but could he, bedridden? He heard the click of the key turning—Deirdre at last! But no, it was the daily help again, for sounds came from the kitchen. At last the telephone bell rang.

‘Darling, how are you feeling?’

‘A bit better, thank you, but not much. When will you be round?’

‘Isn’t it too bad, I’ve been asked out to lunch, I may not get to you till tea-time. I’ll make you some tea, but you’ll have to tell me where you keep it.’

‘I’m not sure if I know myself.’

‘Oh, well, I’ll find it. I must dash now.’