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

‘You mustn’t let your coffee get cold,’ Mrs. Carteret would say as her guests pressed their noses against the windows.

Thereupon they turned back into the room itself, which was painted or stuccoed in an indescribable shade of blue, at once dark and light, the changeful blue of the Italian skies, a perfect background for the tapestries and Chinese screens on the walls.

Sometimes Mrs. Carteret would say, when coffee and liqueurs were over, ‘Would you like to take a stroll in the garden?’ much as God might have said it of Eden, and the guests, already bemused by the heady qualities of the house, would follow her down the few steps that led to the garden, Mrs. Carteret preceding them, with careful footsteps. Dressed in beige, or some light colour with a tinge of pink in it (for in spite of her bulk she preferred light colours) she would lead the way, and someone said of her, a quotation I have never been able to trace, ‘She hath a monstrous beauty, like the hind-quarters of an elephant.’

When we reached the fountain (Sansovino? Palladio?) which was the centre of the garden, she might say,

‘I don’t expect you want to go any further. Further on you can see the usual mixture of sandole and bragozze, fishermen plying their trade. I don’t think they’re very interesting.’ And sometimes she would add, “We have a gardener, but there aren’t many flowers in the garden. Italians are not flower-minded. If you point to a rose and ask them what it is, they will say “ É un fiore ”—“it’s a flower”—but they don’t get any further than that.’

By then it was clearly time to go, although luncheon in Italy, with its aftermath, drags on for at least two hours before it is polite to leave.

How the Carterets acquired the Palazzo Contarini dal Molo I never knew. It must have been at some time when houses in Venice were cheaper than they are now. Also, it was far off the beaten track; from where I stayed, on the other side of Venice, the sunny side, it needed half an hour on foot or in gondola to get there.

James Carteret, I am sure, espied its possibilities; his was the artist’s eye; and its connection with the Contarini family, to whom it had once belonged, no doubt endeared it to him. The Contarinis, after having seven Doges to their name, against the Mocenigos’ six, were now extinct. Their last surviving member, at a party, claimed the privilege of going in last. ‘All Venice,’ he said, ‘is my house.’

The Carterets were nothing if not snobs—he a genealogical snob, and she a social one. His name had originally been Carter, of an esteemed New England family. He did not think it imposing enough and when he came to Venice he added the ‘et’ that turned it to Carteret, the name of a distinguished English statesman. As time passed he persuaded himself and tried to persuade others that he was collaterally descended from the Carterets, and had only omitted the ‘et’ in deference to New England democratic feeling. The Anglo-American colony, or what remained of it, and some of the Italians, who were in touch with it, made jokes about this—’Carter-et-, et quoi?’ or ‘Carter-et cetera, et cetera.’ His wife, who had been Hannah Filkenstein, followed suit by changing her first name to Anna. This too aroused ribald jokes in the select circles of Venice.

‘My dear, have you taken to dropping your h’s? You mean Hannah, not Anna.’

But none of these pinpricks pierced the Carterets, who were far too secure with their money and the beauty that they had bought and made for themselves, and that lay within and around them, and with the visitors to Venice who came with introductions and were received by Anna Carteret with varying degrees of welcome. I should never have been received in those hallowed precincts, but for my travelling companion, who had an introduction to her and who bore a well-known name, as a result of which a visiting-card inscribed in the most beautiful copper-plate, ‘Mr. James Carteret’, invited us both in an almost illegible handwriting, to lunch. We seemed to pass the test, at least he did, and when after some years he ceased to be a frequent visitor to Venice, Mrs. Carteret did not withdraw her favour (not her favours) from me, except on certain occasions.

I had formed the habit of lunching in my gondola in the lagoon—a picnic lunch—but it was delightful, and being young then, or comparatively young, I hated to forgo it. Mrs. Carteret, being old or comparatively old, much preferred having guests to lunch than to dinner. ‘À mon âge,’ she used to say, for the French language had then the chic which ours has not, ‘I would rather lunch than dine,’ and it is still a grief to me that I would not always fall in with her wishes. What did it matter, sacrificing a lunch on the lagoon by some dreary uninhabited island, when I could have had it with her and her guests (‘no one to speak of’) to the music of the plashing of the Palladio fountain? For she, like me, was fond of lunching out-of-doors, and the food appeared as though by magic still hot from the inside of the house.

But I did not always refuse these invitations to lunch, which were after all most acceptable and accompanied by amenities of company, food and service that I could never have provided for myself. But still I was unwilling to forgo my daily stint on the lagoon, on which I imagined my physical and mental health depended. During these exertions I worked up a tremendous sweat, and having been warned by my mother that it was dangerous to sit (possibly in a draught) in sweat-soaked clothes—when I was bidden to lunch with Mrs. Carteret I used to take a supply of dry garments, and ask if I might change in the gondoliers’ room.

‘But what do you do there?’ she would ask, having given me permission. ‘Wouldn’t you rather go upstairs and be more comfortable in a bathroom?’

It was a pertinent question, for nothing could be less like the inside of the palazzo, designed for show, than the gondoliers’ room, designed (if designed at all) for use. My plan was really easier and in the end she gave way to it.

In one corner there was a small wash-basin which did not admit hot water, where the two gondoliers presumably refreshed their bodies after their labours at the oar, before they presented themselves as model men-servants in the chambers above. A slight smell of what? of unwashed bodies—lingered around, for the gondoliers, and who could blame them?—did not always have the time or the inclination to transform themselves, skin-high, from their aquatic to their domestic roles. Some guests (of whom I was not one) remarked maliciously of an effluvium of perspiration; but then Venice is so full of smells.

The gondoliers’ room was not meant to be seen by the guests at the Palazzo Contarini dal Molo. Indeed it is doubtful if Mr. and Mrs. Carteret had ever seen it. It was, as far as it was anything, severely utilitarian. There were some ash-trays here and there, perhaps with the name of the hotel they came from on them, and some coat-hangers ditto, on which the gondoliers hung their walking-out clothes. There were a couple of stiff-backed chairs, not affording much relaxation to a tired man, a table or two and the remains of a carpet, which may have been in the palazzo before the Carterets bought it.

It wasn’t a small room, for few rooms in Venice are small; and it had an unshaded light-bulb hanging from the ceiling, leaving the corners in a mysterious gloom, relieved, or unrelieved, by dim forms that one didn’t want to see, and that I seldom saw because I usually came by daylight.

The gondoliers didn’t seem to realize the squalor of their surroundings, they were invariably pleasant and invariably brought me a clean towel, and I, ‘à mon âge’, as Mrs. Carteret would have said, didn’t mind the cold water, it was rather refreshing after the ardours and endurances of the lagoon.