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

This was the first time for days that they had dined alone. Annette was her father’s darling as she was her mother’s and Henry would not have dreamed of depriving her of a pleasure if he had not felt that his health was at stake. Those newspaper paragraphs grew every day more frequent: ‘Colto da malore’, struck down by sudden illness, this or that middle-aged man (they all seemed to be in the decade between fifty and sixty) had fallen down in the street and been taken to hospital, where he had either instantly expired or been adjudged curable in (at the least) twenty days. Sudden death or three weeks’ confinement, three weeks’ grilling in a Venetian hospital! Henry, who was of a full habit, trembled at the thought. Now, looking out at the Venetian night, at the gondolas passing below him, dipping and prancing, at the whole medley of small and large craft, hung with lanterns, some silent, some with solitary singers, some with concert parties thrumming mandolins, he tried to recapture the fascination, the sense of heady joy, that the scene had once held for him. But now it spoke to him of nothing but the wish to get away and slake his suffering, sweltering body in the cool air of the mountains.

There was a touch on his shoulder, light as a mosquito settling, and he looked up into Annette’s radiant face. ‘Mummy’s just coming,’ she said.

This was not quite true. Maureen appeared about ten minutes later. Henry could not tell from her expression what the verdict was to be: Maureen seldom introduced an important topic until the conversation had turned on other matters. Then unobtrusively she would slip it in. While they confidently munched their scampi and Henry was toying with his grilled sole, Maureen remarked:

‘I didn’t forget to telephone to Loredana Bembo, Henry dear.’

Hope surged up in him.

‘Oh, and what did she say?’

‘She couldn’t have been sweeter about it. First she said she was frightfully sorry you were feeling the heat—she sent you all sorts of affectionate messages.’

Henry’s heart sank.

‘And she said she entirely understood your wanting to go away. She wished she could herself. But Henry, she implored us not to fail her. She said that so many people had chucked—because of the heat, you know, and the mosquitoes—that it would hardly be a party at all—about thirty people for dinner at the most. She said that except for us there wasn’t a cat in Venice.’

‘I’m not sure that I like that,’ said Henry with a feeble attempt at jocularity.

‘Well, you know what she meant. And it is hard on her, isn’t it, when she’s made so many preparations. And she said the nicest things about Annette. I really don’t think we could let her down now—do you, darling?’

‘Perhaps not,’ said Henry doubtfully.

‘And oh, Henry—I nearly forgot—she said you needn’t be afraid of the mosquitoes because there wouldn’t be any. She’s thought of the most amusing way of keeping them out. She thought of it entirely for you, she said. It’s to be a secret until the evening of the party.’

Henry realized that there was nothing for it but to give way with a good grace.

Somehow or other he managed to survive die next two days, but not unscathed, however. Taking his morning stroll to the flower-shop in San Stefano (he had to renew the flowers in their sitting-room every day, for after twenty-four hours they had wilted from the heat) he suddenly felt dizzy: the sun seemed to strike right through him, like a sword, as if the proper defences of his body had ceased to operate. ‘Colto da malore’! In a panic he looked about for shade but there was none: the sun stood right over the long, acorn-shaped campo. Then he espied an awning and staggered to it. Standing in its exiguous shadow he felt as a shipwrecked man might feel on a rock, with the ocean raging round him. But where next? Frightened though he was, he didn’t want to risk the moral defeat of going back without the flowers: besides, Maureen would be so disappointed. Half-way to the shop a projecting doorway lent a modicum of shade. He gained it, and gaining it retained some of his lost confidence. It was all nerves! But no, it wasn’t, for scanning the campo he saw other pedestrians pursuing the same policy as his; avoiding the torrid centre where the statue was, they were slinking round the circumference, hurrying from one island of shade to the next. Still, none of them dropped down dead, and soon he plucked up courage, and almost swaggered into the flower-shop, where the flowers were being sprayed with jets of water and the sudden coolness was unbelievably delicious.

But he didn’t go out again that day till after sundown, and the next day, the day of the party, which dawned as hot as noon, he gave the flowers a miss and didn’t go out at all until their gondola drew up to the brass-railed landing-raft and Maureen said to the gondoliers, ‘Palazzo Bembo, sa!’ as if, on that evening, there could only be one destination.

Casa, Maureen should have said; house, not palace. In some ways the Bembos were old-fashioned, and affected the nomenclature of an earlier day than that in which the houses of patrician Venetian families came to be styled palazzos. Theirs was one of the few ancestral homes in Venice inhabited entirely by the family who built it, and kept up in appropriate state. This evening that state had been much augmented. If there was not a powdered footman on every step of the grand staircase, there were a formidable number, all the same; and if they were not professional footmen, but farm-workers imported from the Bembos’ country estate and put into livery, the effect was none the less magnificent. Passing them on the staircase, and vaguely noting their white-gloved hands and red, perspiring faces, Henry felt that afflatus of the spirit which earthly glory sometimes brings. Other Venetians gave parties that were like parties everywhere; but the Bembos’ party had its special cachet.

Light-headed but heavy-footed he stumbled, and clutched at the plaited rope of crimson silk that, threaded through stylized hands of polished brass, hung in festoons against the wall. Good luck! said somebody. A step or two ahead of and above him were Maureen and Annette: what energy was displayed in their sprightly, springy tread! His ankles were swollen under his black socks, and the slight exertion of climbing the staircase was bringing the sweat out on his back.

In an ante-room off the sala stood Loredana Bembo, an imposing figure, splendid in jewels, and by her side her husband, a short, thickset, baldish man, but with an unmistakable air of authority about him. ‘it was so good of you to come,’ she said to Henry. ‘And I promise you a hundred lire for every mosquito-bite you get to-night.’ A hundred lire was something in those days; it will pay me to get a bite or two, thought Henry, and waited for the buzz, but it didn’t come, and when at last they all sat down to dinner, he saw why; the windows were defended by thin metal grilles, of mesh so fine that even a mosquito couldn’t find its way through. He had seen them before, of course; his own sitting-room in the hotel was fitted with them. They couldn’t be the secret Countess Bembo had spoken of.

He wasn’t sitting next to her, an ambassador and a man of title occupied these coveted positions. Of his two neighbours, one was an Italian, one an Englishwoman who always came to Venice at this time.

‘What is Countess Bembo’s secret?’ he asked her. ‘Or haven’t you heard of it?’

‘There is something,’ she said.

‘Do you know what?’

She shook her head. ‘Loredana always has something up her sleeve,’ she said. ‘Let’s hope it won’t be too peculiar.’

A member of one aristocratic Venetian family, married into another, Loredana Bembo was a law unto herself. Conventional when she chose to be, if the fit took her she would flout convention. At such times a reckless look would come into her eyes. ‘E originale,’ her friends said of her, ‘she is an eccentric,’ and if they sometimes criticized her they were also proud of her and a little afraid. What she said went, what she did got by.