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

‘He may be on some job,’ said Wendy.

‘Well, good luck to him and good luck to the book,’ he said.

‘To the book!’ he said, and raised his glass. They all drank to it and Fred was suddenly aware of the parcel under his arm. Self-consciously but proudly he began to fumble with the string. This was his moment.

‘Some book!’ the man said, watching him.

Fred agreed. ‘It took me——’ he broke off, remembering he had told them before how long the book had taken him to write—remembering, too, that publishers are not necessarily impressed by the extent of an author’s industry. ‘Well, you know how long it took me,’ he substituted. ‘Time wasn’t an object: accuracy was what I aimed at.’

They both nodded, and out the typescript came. It had at once, for his eyes, the too bulky, too ponderous look of a literary work, however slender, that has always missed its market. Printed in the middle was the title, its worn, faded ink almost indecipherable against the pale blue of the folder, and in the bottom right-hand corner Fred’s name, and his address, which seemed at the moment very far away.

The man took the book from him. ‘I wasn’t expecting a big book like this,’ he said, ‘I must put on my glasses.’ The horn-rimmed spectacles transformed his face and for the first time he looked like a man who might be interested in books. He turned the pages. ‘Middleton, Marston, haven’t heard of them. Oh, here’s Ben Jonson. Where’s the list you spoke of?’

‘You’ll find it at the end,’ said Fred.

The man began to read the names out, and then stopped. ‘Strikes me there’s some mistake here,’ he said. ‘Somebody’s been having a game, he repeated giving the innocent phrase an unpleasant sound. ‘A game with us, it looks like. Somebody has. What do you make of it, Wendy?

He handed his wife, if wife she was, the book: the pages turned rapidly under her reddened nails.

‘I can’t make head or tail of it,’ she said. ‘It might be somebody’s idea of a joke. . . . Perhaps this gentleman will explain.’

Fred cleared his throat.

‘It’s my book,’ he said, with such dignity as he could muster, but with a fluttering at his midriff. ‘My book on the Jacobean Dramatists. I thought you were interested in it. . . . I was told you were.’

‘Who told you?’ the man asked.

It was only when he couldn’t remember his informant’s name—a name he knew as well as his own—that Fred realized he was frightened.

‘But you are publishers, aren’t you?’ he asked.

For a moment it seemed just rude that neither of them answered; then it seemed strange, with the strangeness of their faces, the strangeness of the room, and the strangeness of his being there at all.

‘I thought——’ he began.

‘You thought a good deal, didn’t you?’ said die man. ‘It’s our turn to think now. Someone, as the poet said, has blundered. Someone will be for it, I suppose.’

The repetition of the word ‘someone’ began to get on Fred Cross’s nerves.

‘If you’re not interested,’ he said, half-rising, ‘I’ll take the book away.’

‘Sit down, sit down,’ the man said, patting the air above Fred’s head. ‘We are interested, and we don’t want you to go away, not yet. We haven’t quite done with you, as the saying is. Now as for this book——’

‘It’s quite simple,’ said Fred, trembling. ‘I see you’re not interested in it. I’ll take it away.’

‘It isn’t so simple as that,’ the man said. ‘Someone has found out something that someone has got to forget—or there may be trouble, and we don’t want any trouble, do we?’

‘No,’ said Fred mechanically.

‘I’m not mentioning names,’ the man went on, ‘it’s better not to mention names, we haven’t mentioned names, have we?’

‘You know my name,’ Fred said.

‘Yes, but we’re not interested in your name. It’s our names that matter. She’s Wendy and I’m Bill—those are our names. You can call us by them, if you like.’

Fred Cross had never felt less inclined to be on Christian-name terms with anyone.

‘And you might want to write to us,’ Bill went on. ‘You might want to send us a Christmas card, for instance.’

‘I don’t think I shall,’ Fred said.

‘You never know,’ Bill said. ‘Now here’s an envelope.’ He fetched one, slightly soiled, from a heap of litter on the table. ‘Have you a pen?’

Using the typescript as a desk, Fred set himself to write; his hand was shaking.

‘Mr. and Mrs.——’ he wrote, and stopped. Then he remembered: Whiston, of course. ‘Mr. Whiston, please. A telephone call for Mr. Whiston, please.’ But his hand was shaking too much. To gain time he raised it from the envelope and said:

‘But you haven’t told me your name.’

‘Didn’t we tell you?’ the man asked. ‘It was very careless of us. Are you sure we didn’t?’

‘Quite sure,’ said Fred.

‘What an extraordinary thing. We didn’t tell you our name, or our address, or anything?’

‘Nothing at all,’ said Fred.

‘Could you find your way here, if you wanted to pay us another visit?’

Suddenly Fred wondered if he could frighten them, and rashly said:

‘I think I could.’

‘Oh, you think you could? Well, just to make it easier for you, here’s our name and the address,’ Bill said, standing behind him. ‘Take it down.’

Fred bent his head and set himself to write.

‘Allbright,’ said the dictating voice.

‘Mr. and Mrs. Allbright, Flat C, 19 Lavender Avenue, S.W.17. Got that?’

Fred did get it, but he couldn’t say so, for his head was lying on the typescript, and he was unconscious. When he came to he was in hospital. A policeman had found him stretched on the pavement in a deserted street. Almost his first inquiry was for his precious typescript, and almost the first action when he left the hospital was to get in touch with the man whom he had turned so inhospitably from the door. All the newspapers had reported his misadventure, and none of them failed to observe that the typescript had bloodstains on it. At last it was in the news, and this may have turned the scale in Fred’s favour; at any rate the publisher accepted it.

Yet more publicity followed. The name of Allbright conveyed nothing to the police, but the name Whiston did.

‘You were lucky you didn’t let on you knew it,’ the police told Fred, ‘or you would have got a bigger bashing than the one you did get.’ They had more serious charges against William Whiston than the assault upon Fred Cross, but that was one charge. Another Fred Cross soon figured in the proceedings, a much more sensational one; but he did not altogether steal the limelight from our hero, for the newspapers dared not mention him and his black doings without making it quite clear that he must not be confused with another Fred Cross, the well-known author, whose long-awaited work on the Jacobean Dramatists was soon to be given to the world. But one important piece of evidence in the case, a small black notebook containing a list of the names of a gang against whom William Whiston had a grudge, was never submitted to a publisher.

The trees sloping inwards, and the hedge bounding the field beyond, made a triangle of green in which the pylon stood. Beyond it, fields again and then the railway embankment. Beyond the embankment more hedges making transverse lines, and then the roofs of houses bowered in trees, sloping up to the wooded hill-crest, outlined against the sky. But that was a mile, perhaps, two miles away; whereas the pylon——

There was general rejoicing when the pylon disappeared: Mummy was glad, Daddy was glad, Victor was glad and Susan was glad. The morning when it happened they all crowded to the window as if they had never seen the view before. Nor had they—the view without the pylon. Ever since they came to the house ten years ago it had been there—an eyesore, a grievance. ‘It would be such a lovely view,’ they used to say to visitors, ‘if it wasn’t for the pylon!’