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

‘But it isn’t good-bye,’ cried Olga. ‘We want you to take us home.’

He shook his head. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I have been unkind to her. I am not worthy of her. She must go where she wants to go.’

‘But you must take her, you must!’ Olga besought him. ‘Look at her, she has hurt her foot and can’t walk.’

For the first time he brought himself to look at her, and went up to her and wonderingly touched her foot.

‘Do you really want to come with me?’ he asked.

‘Yes, yes,’ she murmured. ‘But do you know the way?’

‘I know the way all right,’ he said with a touch of his old arrogance, and stooping down he lifted her in his arms.

Suddenly they saw written on the signpost, which had been blank before, ‘The Land of Heart’s Desire’.

It pointed straight back the way they came. And the moment their feet were turned towards home they began to laugh and sing, just as the others had.

That August in Venice, an August between the wars, the mosquitoes were particularly poisonous and voracious. Even the Venetians, who are usually immune, being inoculated against these pests, sometimes appeared with reddened wrists and swollen faces. Nor did the insects abide by their own rules; they did not wait for twilight to begin their feasts; they bit by day as well as by night. Hotel proprietors and their staffs, even while covertly scratching themselves, would not admit that there was anything abnormal in the visitation; ‘E la stagione,’ they would observe philosophically: ‘It is the season.’ Most Italians take comfort in the thought that manifestations, however unpleasant, are following a natural order, and are apt to say they are, even when they are not. But the visitors to Venice, waking with puffy eyelids and twisted bumpy lips, after perhaps many an hour spent crouching or kneeling under their mosquito-nets, trying to make their bedside lamps shine into the dark folds where the mosquitoes lurked, were not so easily satisfied, and many of them took wing like their tormentors, and flew to mountain resorts, which were said to be above the mosquito line. The only section of the community who profited from the outbreak were the chemists, who did a roaring trade in oil of citronella, small coloured candles guaranteed to suffocate mosquitoes, and other forms of insect-bane; it was before the days of Flit and DDT. But their triumph was short-lived for they were soon sold out—not only of preventives against the bites but even of remedies for them, and were reduced to fobbing off their customers with sunburn lotions and beauty preparations which, so they declared, would have the same effect as antiseptics.

To add to this misfortune a heat-wave of almost unexampled virulence struck the city. Indeed, it struck the whole Italian peninsula. Every day the local paper, the Gazzettino , and the national papers, the Corriere della Sera and the Stampa , published a list showing the maximum and minimum temperatures of all the large towns in Italy, including Benghazi which then formed part of the Italian empire. Benghazi was always top with upwards of 40 degrees Centigrade; but whereas of the others, Rome, Milan, Naples, Florence and Bologna always had a maximum temperature higher than that of Venice, which never rose above 35, Venice always had the highest minimum temperature, for it never fell below 26. Shallow and tepid, the lagoon, which had no chance to cool off, embraced the city like a permanent and inescapable hot-water bottle. Sometimes the more mathematically minded of the English and American tourists, those who were still capable of making the effort, might be seen at some café table, pencil in hand, making the complicated calculation that reduces Centrigrade to Fahrenheit. ‘Ninety-four today,’ they would lament, ‘one degree lower than yesterday, but the humidity is greater—eighty-nine per cent, only two degrees less than in New York.’

The nights seemed hotter than the days. In the afternoon the wind would veer from north to south, from the borino to the scirocco, and by six o’clock—the one tolerable moment of the day—it would be blowing lustily: the visitors snuffed it up, auguring each other a cool night: but by eight o’clock the breeze would have died down, and then the baking pavements and lukewarm canals gave off all the heat they had stored up during the hours of sunshine. Later the full moon would show its rim, fiery as a conflagration, behind the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, and slowly mount until the whole of its great disc, blood-red, and swollen as if it too had been mosquito-bitten, would rise above the roof-tops. Clouds surrounded it and sometimes streaked it, indigo clouds edged with rose, like the clouds in Tintoretto’s pictures, making the hopeful think a storm was brewing; but they were only harbingers of heat, and presently the moon swung clear of them and climbed into the dark vault of the night, losing as it went its ruddy hue, changing from copper to amber, and at last to shining white, a waxen death-mask pitted with blue shadows.

Dining late on the terrace of his hotel, against which the ripples of the Grand Canal lapped softly, Mr. Henry Elkington watched it, while he waited for his wife and daughter who, however late the hour, were always later. The terrace was the coolest place, as cool as any spot in Venice, he imagined; yet he felt the sweat collecting on his forehead and saw it glistening on the backs of his hands. Every now and then it would trickle stealthily down his chest and he knew, though he could not feel it, that it was also coursing down his back, for when he leant against the upholstered chair and then leant forward, the chair stuck to his white linen coat. A dark patch must have formed there, an unsightly mark and one that would leave a stain; but at fifty-odd he didn’t mind that as he would have minded twenty years ago. He minded the discomfort more, however, and grudged the physical effort of flipping at the mosquitoes. Guided to him unerringly by the red-shaded table-lamp, as by a beacon, they announced themselves with a venomous ping—where were they exactly? His face and head and hands he could to some extent defend with whirlwind gyrations like those of a demented windmill; but his calves and ankles, which were their happiest hunting-ground, those he could not protect. And, tired by sleepless nights, his mind kept telling his sense of self-preservation that it would be better to give up the struggle, adopt a policy of appeasement and let the little creatures have their fling.

Apart from all this he wasn’t feeling well; he had some psychosomatic disorder that made his flesh creep even when the mosquitoes were not stinging it. He felt as though his skin didn’t quite fit him, it was loose in some places and tight in others; and much as, in one way, he welcomed every breath that blew, another part of his sensorium shrank from it. He was hot and cold by turns; perhaps he had a fever.

Hope stirred in him, however, for his wife, before she went to dress, had promised she would ring up Countess Bembo and say that after all they were afraid they would not be able to stay on for her party, two days hence. He, Henry, was not well, that was to be the excuse: the mosquitoes and the heat had got him down, and the three of them were departing on the morrow for the Dolomites. The Dolomites! The mere word, with its suggestion of fresh mountain air, mosquito-free, breathed new life into him and he called the waiter for another dry martini.

He had had the greatest difficulty in persuading Maureen to take this step. Not that she was, normally, indifferent to the needs and even the whims of a husband who had given her almost everything she asked of life, except romance. She knew what was due to such a husband, and she did not grudge it him. But this was a special case. Countess Bembo was an important Venetian hostess, perhaps the most important, and her party was to be one of the highlights, perhaps the highlight, of the season. It would be a thousand pities to miss it. For herself she, Maureen, would not mind; but Annette would be so terribly disappointed. Annette was only twenty and it was her first visit to Venice. Venice had gone to her head; she could find no flaw in it. She wasn’t worried by the heat and the mosquitoes, she thought them rather fun—part of the tremendous fun she was having at the endless parties to which she was invited. Young men buzzed round her—Henry could not keep count of the Nino’s and Nini’s and Gigio’s and Gigi’s, or tell them apart, they were as like each other as mosquitoes; but he had to admit that they were good-looking and had excellent manners, and Annette obviously found them far more interesting and exciting than the young men she knew in England. Sailing, bathing, playing tennis, dancing, she went off with them for hours at a time. Henry was slightly worried by these absences, but Maureen seemed to know exactly how far her daughter should be chaperoned, and would draw the line, or not draw it, in circumstances that to Henry’s thinking were precisely similar. One thing had always been clear: no conjunction of circumstances whatever must be allowed to prevent Annette’s attendance at the Bembos’ party.