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

The pylon used to stand between two trees, a fir-tree and a copper beech, directly in front of the window, just beyond the garden. Instead of concealing it, they framed it. Every so often Victor, the optimist, now sixteen, would say, ‘Daddy, I’m sure those branches are coming closer together! Next year, you’ll see, they’ll hide it!’ And his father would reply, as like as not, ‘They’re not growing any nearer—they’re growing farther apart! Fir-trees and beech-trees don’t agree, you know!’

There it stood, between the trees, rearing its slender tapering height against the wooded hillside, the line of which it maddeningly broke, topping with its incongruous yard-arm the ancient earth-work that crowned the hill.

Now it was gone, and in its place they saw the trees that it had hidden and, more especially, two Lombardy poplars growing so close together that if you walked a little distance, either way, they looked like one.

And Laurie, the youngest of the family, too, was glad at first, or thought he was. When he heard his parents saying to visitors, ‘Isn’t it wonderful, the pylon’s gone!’ he would echo, in a grown-up manner ill-suited to his eleven years, ‘Yes, isn’t it wonderful?’ Not that he disliked the pylon on aesthetic grounds, but he thought it was the proper thing to say.

But whereas their grievance against the pylon had been vocal for many years, their gratitude for its departure was comparatively shortlived. They would still say, ‘How marvellous without the pylon!’ but they didn’t really feel it, and after a month or two they didn’t even say it, taking their deliverance for granted, just as when an aching tooth is pulled out, one soon ceases to bless the painless cavity.

With Laurie, however, it was otherwise. Being outwardly a conformer—indeed a rather zealous conformer—he had joined in the delight his elders showed over the pylon’s downfall. He tried to gloat over the square patch of concrete, marking its site, which the demolition squad hadn’t bothered to clear away. But when he stood in front of the window, whichever window it might be—for having a southern aspect, most of the windows of the house had once looked on the pylon—and set himself to gloat, sometimes he would find his eyes straying, even shying away from, the remnant of its ruin. To the others the pylon had been an eyesore and a grievance; to him it was a landmark and a friend. How tall and proud it used to be—one hundred and seventeen feet high—the tallest object in the neighbourhood—taller than the hill itself, he liked to think, though his mind told him that its superior height was only a trick of the perspective.

From surveying the pylon-less gap with a lack-lustre eye it was a short step to trying to imagine it with the pylon there. And then Laurie realized that something had gone out of his life—some standard, was it, by which he had measured himself? No, not exactly that, nor only that. The pylon had symbolized his coming stature, his ambitions for himself as an adult. One day his short, plump body would shoot upwards, tall and straight as the pylon was; one day his mind, that was so dense in some ways, and so full of darkness, would fine down to an aery structure that let the light in everywhere and hardly cast a shadow. He would be the bearer of an electric current, thousands of volts strong, bringing light and power to countless homes.

The pylon, then, had served him as a symbol of angelic strength. But in other moods it stood for something different, this grey-white skeleton. In meaner moods, rebellious moods, destructive moods, he had but to look at it to realize how remote it was from everything that grew, that took its nourishment from the earth and was conditioned by this common limitation. It was self-sufficient, it owed nothing to anyone. The pylon stood four-square upon the ground, but did not draw its sustenance from the ground. It was apart from Nature; the wind might blow on it, the rain might beat on it, the snow might fall on it, frost might bite it, drought might try to parch it, but it was immune, proof against the elements: even lightning could not touch it, for was it not itself in league with lightning?

And so he, Laurie, in those moods when nothing favoured him, when everyone’s hand was against him and his hand against theirs, insulated by the flawless circle of himself, he, too, enjoyed the pylon’s immunity, its power to be itself. Whatever stresses might be brought to bear on it, it didn’t care, nor, looking at it, did he, Laurie, care.

All that was over now; his companion was gone; and Laurie-the-pylon was no more.

Deprived of his second self he shrank, his imaginative life dwindled, and with it his other budding interests. An east-wind blight descended on his mind, dulling his vision, delaying his reactions. If he was spoken to, he didn’t always hear, and if he heard he didn’t always answer. ‘But you don’t listen !’ Susan would chide him, in exasperation, and his brother, who went to the same day-school, would defend him: ‘You see, he’s so tiny, his ears haven’t grown yet! They’re really little baby’s ears!’ Then Laurie would lunge out at him, and in the scuffle regain the sense of immediate contact with reality that he had lost.

His mother and father, oddly enough, took longer to notice the change in him, for he had always been more talked against than talking. In fact they might never have noticed it but for his end-of-term reports. These made them think, and one, from Laurie’s form-master, made them quite indignant.

‘I wonder what’s come over the boy,’ his father said, knitting his heavy brows and tapping his finger-tips against his teeth. ‘He used to be the clever one. Not quick and sharp like Victor, but thoughtful and original.’

‘I expect he’s going through a phase,’ his wife said, placidly.

‘Phase, indeed! He isn’t old enough for phases.’

‘You’d better speak to him, but if you do, be careful, darling. You know how sensitive he is.’

‘Sensitive my foot! I’m much more sensitive than he is. You ought to warn him to be careful.’

‘I only meant we don’t want anything to do with Oedipus,’ his wife said.

‘You shouldn’t spoil him, then. You should be much nastier to him than you are. I’ve more reason to worry about Oedipus than you have. Laurie might marry you, O.K., but he would murder me. It’s I who am to be pitied. No one ever pities fathers. No one ever pities Oedipus’s father, whom Oedipus bumped off. I think I shall expose Laurie on Mount Cithaeron, having first struck the toasting-fork through his toes.’

All the same, he put off ‘speaking’ to Laurie as long as he could, and when the time came he approached the subject warily.

‘Well, old man,’ he said, when he had got Laurie alone, ‘take a pew and tell me how you fared last term.’

Deliberately he seated himself at some distance, for fear the nearness of his large strong body might arouse the wrong kind of response and inflict a Freudian bruise.

‘Well,’ echoed Laurie, heavily, ‘I didn’t do very well, I’m afraid.’

‘You’re growing too fast, that’s the trouble,’ said his father. ‘It takes it out of you.’

‘I only grew an eighth of an inch last term. They measured me,’ Laurie added, almost as mournfully as if the measuring had been for his coffin.

Drat the boy, his father thought. He won’t use the loop-holes that I offer him.

He pulled at his moustache which, unlike the bronze hair greying on his head, had kept its golden colour. Proud of its ability to keep its ends up unaided, he wore it rather long, a golden bow arched across his mouth and reaching to the wrinkles where his smile began. Tugging it was a counter-irritant to emotional unease. But was such an adult masculine gesture quite suitable in front of a small boy?