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

‘We didn’t take things lightly,’ she boasted, ‘we made life hard for ourselves. We thought that prosperity followed a good conscience, not, as they think now, that a good conscience follows prosperity. We did not find an excuse for wickedness in high places.’ Unaccountably the rhythm of her thought faltered; it had felt itself free of the heavens, but it was singed, and drooped earthward with damaged wing. ‘If Hester Prynne had lived in Venice,’ she thought, ‘she needn’t have stood in the pillory.’ For a moment she wished that Hawthorne’s heroine could have found a country more congenial to her temperament. It was my ancestors who punished her,’ she thought. ‘They had to: they had to stick at something. One must mind something, or else the savour goes out of life, and it stinks.’ She glanced uneasily round the room. It had taken back its friendship and had an air of lying in wait for her to disgrace herself. ‘Take that,’ she muttered, slamming the wardrobe door. But it swung back at her, as though something inside wanted to have a look. ‘All right,’ she threatened, ‘gim-crack stuff in a paste-board palazzo. At home, if I shut a door, it shuts.’ But the brave words didn’t convince her, and when she tried to visualize her home, she couldn’t. The breakdown in her imaginative faculty alarmed her. Suppose that, for the remainder of her life, when she wanted to evoke an image, it wouldn’t come? Tentatively, not committing herself to too great an effort, she trained her mind’s eye upon the portrait of her great-aunt, Sophia. There was a blur, then a blank: and in turn, as she called upon them, each of the portraits evaded her summons. ‘It is unkind of you,’ she murmured, almost in tears, ‘after I have given you all such a good character.’ Then suddenly, as her mind relaxed, the images she had striven for flooded uncontrollably into it, bending their disapproving stare upon her, proclaiming their hostility.

Who was she to commend them? Small thanks would they have given her for her praise: they could only relish a compliment if it came from a virtuous person. They wouldn’t want her even to agree with them: they would distrust their very thoughts if she said she shared them. In whom, then, could she confide and to whom could she go for help? Not to the dead and gone Johnstones, for by no act of renunciation could she ingratiate herself with them. She could plume herself with their prestige if she liked; they could not stop her making a snob of herself. But any closer identification, any claim on their long-preserved integrity, any assumption that she, for what she should now give up, was entitled to take her place beside them—this, their grave displeased faces, still circling about her, positively forbade. She might trade on their name, but their goodwill, the vitality of their tradition, could never be hers. They disowned her.

‘Well, let them go,’ thought Lavinia. ‘In the face of life, what use is a recipe from the past? I have fed myself too long upon illusions to want to add another to them.’ She was aware of the grapes going sour; in her mouth was a bitter, salty taste; in her eyes the vision of her fate, limitless, agoraphobic, its last barricade thrown down; in her ears, perhaps, defunctive music, the leave-taking of the gods she loved.

The glory of the Johnstones seemed to crumble; root, branch, and stem they were stricken and the virtue passed out of them. She walked up and down the room, conscious of an amazing exhilaration. The rivers of her being, long forced uphill, turned back upon themselves, joined and flowed away unhindered in one dark current. At last she had reached a state of mind that did not need working for, that could be maintained without effort, that absorbed her and left nothing over. The sense of being at odds with herself disappeared; the general awareness of friction and unease that had subtly cramped her movements as well as her thought slid from her; her very skin lay more lightly on her.

‘I am lost!’ Lavinia cried. It was a moment of ecstasy, but it passed and she burst into tears.

‘Well, I don’t want you to go, but you must be back by eleven. Remember we’ve got to get up early.’ Lavinia heard her mother’s voice, the firm voice of the recovered Mrs. Johnstone, but it sounded a long way off. She closed her bedroom door and locked it.

‘ “Amo” is all right,’ she muttered, fluttering the leaves of a dictionary, ‘though it has a smack of the Latin Grammar, but should I say “ io ” too? “ Io ” is emphatic, it might be taken to mean that I love him but other people don’t; “ io ti amo ”: “I love you to the exclusion of”—and that would offend him and be silly besides: everyone must love him. “ Ti amo, ti amo ”, I must remember that.’ Lavinia breathed quickly and lay down for a moment on her bed. She rose, restless, and looked at the place where she had lain. There was a small depression, scarcely noticeable, and the pillow had filled out again. ‘I make very little mark,’ she said to herself, and the thought, absurdly enough, filled her with self-pity. She went to the looking-glass and stared at her face as though she would never see it again. ‘I ought to have had a photograph taken,’ she thought inconsequently. ‘I could have done: I had time.’ Still standing in front of the mirror she opened her purse; it was empty. Quickly she went to a box, fidgeted with the key and walked slowly back, a bunch of notes in her hand. One by one she stuffed them in her purse. ‘Another?’ she muttered and looking up, met her questioning eyes in the glass. She shuddered and walked unsteadily into a corner of the room behind the wardrobe, as though it were not enough to keep out of her own sight. To the intruder she unconsciously feared, she would have presented the appearance of a naughty child, taking its punishment. ‘One more?’ she muttered, in her new, stifled voice. ‘How can I tell?’

‘Comandi, Signorina?’ Emilio asked. Lavinia started. ‘Alla musica,’ she said, ‘e poi, al Canal grande Mia Giudecca.’

They drifted slowly towards the swaying lanterns, and drew up alongside another gondola. The Toreador’s song blared across the water; a man was singing it also, at the second barge, the serenata of St. Mark, only a few hundred feet away. The unfortunate coincidence gave Lavinia a feeling of insanity. The song became a kind of canon; each singer paused to hear where the other had got; the little orchestra hesitated, scraped, decided to go on. Lavinia could not endure it. ‘ Alla Giudecca ,’ she said.

‘ Va bene, Signorina .’

The canal opened out, very black and very still. They passed under the shadow of a trawler.

‘ Ferma qui ,’ said Lavinia suddenly.

The gondola stopped.

‘Emilio,’ Lavinia said, ‘ Ti amo .’

‘Comandi, Signorina ?’ murmured the gondolier, absently.

‘I shall have to say it again,’ thought Lavinia.

This time he heard, and understood.

At what time would she like to be home?

At eleven.

‘ Impossibile .’

At half-past eleven?

‘ Si, Signorina .’

Rapidly the gondola pressed its way alongside the Fondamenta delle Zattere. With each stroke it shivered and thrilled. They turned into a little canal, turned again into a smaller one, almost a ditch. The V-shaped ripple of the gondola clucked and sucked at the walls of crumbling tenements. Ever and again the prow slapped the water with a clopping sound that, each time she heard it, stung Lavinia’s nerves like a box on the ear. She was afraid to look back, but in her mind’s eye she could see, repeated again and again, the arrested rocking movement of the gondolier. The alternation of stroke and recovery became dreadful to her, suggesting no more what was useful or romantic, but proclaiming a crude physical sufficiency, at once relentless and unwilling. It came to her overwhelmingly that physical energy was dangerous and cruel, just in so far as it was free; there flashed across her mind the straining bodies in Tiepolo and Tintoretto, one wielding an axe, another tugging at a rope, a third heaving the Cross aloft, a fourth turning his sword upon the Innocents. And Emilio with his hands clasping the oar was such another; a minister at her martyrdom.