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

‘No,’ said Cyril.

‘You let them to the Trimbles.’

‘Yes, and I wish I hadn’t.’

‘You’d find me a quiet tenant, Mr. . . .’

‘Hutchinson is the name.’

‘You’d find me a quiet tenant, Mr. Hutchinson. You wouldn’t hear me much or see me much. You’d know what I was doing—you wouldn’t have to keep tabs on me——’

‘I tell you I don’t want to let the rooms,’ said Cyril.

But the man steam-rollered on as if he hadn’t spoken.

‘There are the others, of course.’

‘The others?’

‘Yes, there are seven of us, but we could all squeeze in.’

‘Haven’t I told you I don’t want to let the rooms?’ cried Cyril in mounting exasperation.

‘Yes, but hadn’t you better think again, and take us in, since you can’t keep us out?’

‘Can’t keep you out?’ repeated Cyril, staring at him. ‘You’ll see if I can’t keep you out!’

He jumped to his feet. The man rose too, huge, powerful, immovable, the heaviest single object in the room. But when Cyril threw himself on him he wasn’t there—he had dissolved into a black mist, impalpable to Cyril’s groping hands. When Cyril came to himself he was back in his chair, his mind awhirl with conflicting speculations. Who was he? Where was he? Had he fainted? Had he been asleep?

He glanced at the clock. Nearly half-past eleven. Why didn’t Mr. Snow come? Had something happened to him? Ought Cyril to go in search of him? ‘Mr. Snow! Mr. Snow!’ No good calling him; whether he was upstairs, in his own rooms, or downstairs, in those other rooms, he could never hear, so many doors and staircases intervened.

If anything had happened to Mr. Snow it would be Cyril’s fault for letting him take the risk, an elderly man armed only with a torch. Supposing he wasn’t in the house at all, supposing he had seen something that upset him, and had wandered into the streets? Then Cyril would be quite alone in the house, at anybody’s mercy.

So when the knock came, he didn’t at once answer it, not knowing who the visitor might be. And when it turned out to be Mr. Snow, with his thin Vandyck face and steady eyes, Cyril could hardly refrain from some demonstration of joy—shaking hands with him or even kissing him. Back to normal! Normal might be a dull-sounding word, but how blessed it was when applied to the temperature or the spirits! Down to normal, up to normal, dead normal.

‘I didn’t come before, sir,’ Mr. Snow apologized, ‘because I heard that you had company.’

‘Company, Mr. Snow?’

‘Yes, sir, I heard you talking to someone.’

Cyril was silent; then he said:

‘You heard me talking to someone, but did you hear anyone talking to me?’

‘I couldn’t say, sir.’ Mr. Snow’s tone registered a slight affront. ‘I heard your voice, sir, and then of course I didn’t listen any longer. I thought someone had dropped in to call on you.’

‘But wasn’t the street door locked?’

‘No, sir, nor the door downstairs, because I hadn’t done my round yet. Actually, I came in from the garden through “their” door, you know.’ The Trimbles were always ‘they’ to Mr. Snow.

‘Did you see anyone in the garden?’

‘Well, sir, I might have seen someone, some unauthorized person, I won’t say that I didn’t, but you know how dark it is, I couldn’t be sure. I switched my torch on, because you can’t be too careful, but I didn’t see what you could call a person. Were you thinking it might have been your visitor, sir?’

‘Yes—no—I——’

‘Anyhow,’ said Mr. Snow firmly, ‘I’m glad to be able to report that all is now present and correct. Good night, sir.’ Giving his little salute, Mr. Snow withdrew.

All absent and correct, yes; all present and incorrect, yes; but present and correct, no: the two ideas were mutually exclusive. Conscientious as Mr. Snow undoubtedly was, sharp as his old eyes might be, certain things were outside his range of vision, if not beyond his hearing. He might not see what there was to see, and it wouldn’t be fair, in future, to let him take the risk. Cyril waited till he was out of earshot, then took the torch he had left on the hall table, and with stealthy tread began to grope his way downstairs—an anonymous, questing figure, invisible behind his torch, his whereabouts unknown.

Was he the something his visitor had come to look for? Was he? Was he? He felt lost now: what would it feel like to be found?

Frederick Cross had lost his diary and without it he was, in the face of the future, helpless. He relied on it absolutely. The mere act of writing in it left as little impression in his memory as if his memory had been the sands of the seashore. He had to have the book itself. ‘Bring me my tablets!’

But no one in Smith’s Hotel, where he was staying, could bring them, and retribution had come swiftly, for this very evening he was expecting some people to dinner and he didn’t know who they were. He didn’t know their names and wouldn’t recognize their faces. He just remembered he had asked them for to-night.

It would have been very much worse, of course, if it had been the other way round—if he had been dining with them. That would have been a real settler. The only hope was that they would ring him up to confirm the engagement—a very slender hope. They still might, though it was now half-past seven, and dinner was at eight.

He remembered how the invitation had come about: it had come about, as invitations often do, at a cocktail-party. His host had led him up to Mr. Blank and said: ‘I am sure you will have a lot to talk to each other about, Fred. Mr. Blank has just started as a publisher, and he is very much interested in the Jacobean Dramatists.’

Fred had written a book on the Jacobean Dramatists which no publisher had seen fit to take. With almost indecent haste he had invited Mr. Blank to dinner, and for good measure had included his wife in the invitation. Hardly had he got the words out, and given the publisher his address and the time for meeting, when they were swept away from each other. He had had no time to take in his interlocutor’s appearance; not a single feature remained in his memory, and as for the wife, he never saw her, though he understood she was at the party.

However, in a few minutes the mystery would be solved. He had nothing to do but wait, and the hotel porter would announce his guests. To ensure that this should happen he lingered in his bedroom; the porter would then have to ring him up and notify him of the guests’ arrival.

Punctually at eight o’clock the telephone bell rang and the porter’s voice said: ‘A lady and gentleman to see you, sir.’ ‘What is their name?’ Fred asked, but disappointingly the porter had rung off.

The couple were standing in the lounge, the middle lounge, for there were three: one across the passage, one divided from the middle lounge by a wall of glass. Fred Cross went up to greet his guests.

‘This is my wife, Mr. Cross,’ the man said, introducing a rather florid-looking lady, whose face broke into a smile with many lateral wrinkles. The man was tall and dark and clean-shaven, it wasn’t easy to place him; he didn’t look especially like a publisher, but then what publisher does? He didn’t look like anyone whom Fred remembered; but there was nothing remarkable in that: the party had been a blur of faces.

When they had sat down with their inevitable dry martinis and had exchanged a few platitudes about the weather (it was a coldish night in November) the man said:

‘We are particularly pleased to see you, Mr. Cross, because there is a matter in which I think we could help each other. I daresay you know what it is.’