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

Sometimes my gondolier would come and chat to the other two (for all the gondoliers know each other, even if they don’t always like each other) in their dialect which I couldn’t understand, though the word ‘soldi, soldi’ (’money, money’) kept recurring. Beyond giving me a clean towel and the vest and shirt my gondolier had brought with him, they paid no attention to me, and chattered to each other, almost regardless of my presence. Then suddenly Antonio would get up, put on his black suit and say, almost reproachfully, ‘La signora lei aspetta,’ (’Madam is expecting you’) and usher me to the upper regions. Oh, what a change was there!

As the years passed Mr. and Mrs. Carteret became ever more conscious of their social position. They relaxed it in the case of certain people with high-sounding names, ‘Those poor realis of—she said, referring to certain royal personages visiting Venice who had not a very good name. And when a woman of rank and title came to Venice and stayed with some Lido-loungers of whom Mrs. Carteret did not approve, she said, ‘When a woman of her position, or the position she once had, goes to France and becomes déclassée , and then comes to Venice and stays with riff-raff—I don’t call that very interesting.’

Interesting it was—but Mrs. Carteret could not equate ‘interesting’ with what was not comme il faut . At least in certain moods she couldn’t, or wouldn’t. But it was hard to tell what she was thinking, for her eyes were enigmatic under the shadow of that broad-brimmed hat; and when the ‘riff-raff’ who had taken for the season one of the largest palaces on the Grand Canal invited the Carterets to meet their distinguished guest the Carterets accepted, and I remember meeting ‘Anna’ as I had come to call her (though I don’t think she liked the familiarity) at the top of the grand staircase, beneath the loudest clap of thunder I ever heard.

Afterwards she asked the guest who had demeaned herself by staying with the ‘riff-raff’ to dinner, but she did not ask them.

No fry was too small or too great to be exempt from Mrs. Carteret’s liberal disapproval. Whether her attitude came from some long-hidden inferiority complex who can say? There was no need for it; the Filkensteins were the first Jewish family to be received into New York society; and Carter was a well-known and respected name in New England, before he added ‘et’ to it.

Whatever the reason, Anna Carteret enjoyed putting people in their place. It was said that her husband, with his high-pitched laugh and his slight figure, half the size of hers, had his way in matters that were really important; perhaps it was he who bought the palazzo, as it was he who decorated it. She had the intelligence and the personality and the culture but he had the taste and the talent and perhaps the will-power under that fragile exterior, ornamented by an over-large grey moustache. ‘No man can afford to do without a moustache.’ Perhaps it was a secret symbol of authority.

But to the onlooker, it was Mrs. Carteret who ruled the roost, and above all she who decided who should be received or not received.

‘Received’ was a word that loomed large with her. It implied a moral as well as a social standard, though she relaxed it in the case of certain eminent persons, not only ‘the poor realis of—but even of celebrities such as D’Annunzio. ‘He’s like a spider,’ she said with a shudder, as far as that massive frame could shudder, and turned up her nose as far as she could, but she received him all the same.

Others were less fortunate. She had an old friend who had a house in Venice, to which he sometimes repaired, and whose social status was impeccable in England and in Venice, indeed it was by genealogical standards much higher than hers. But they had a tiff—about what I don’t remember—but I expect it was a trifle, and they were for a time estranged. When he, who was as elderly as she, wanted to bring this misunderstanding to an end he wrote and asked if on a certain day he might come and call on her. To which she replied, that most unfortunately, on the day he suggested she was ‘giving’ a children’s party, and there were no more chairs. It was unlikely that she had ever spoken to a child, much less entertained one.

This, to Sir Ronald, who knew the house well, and who knew that Mrs. Carteret would never give a children’s party as she knew no children, and that even if she did there would still be at least a hundred unoccupied chairs in the palazzo, was an offence. But he gave way, as most people did, to Mrs. Carteret for she had the whip-hand. I am glad to say their quarrel was afterwards patched up.

Then I, after several years of happy relationships with Mrs. Carteret, fell foul of her. It was my fault, I should have known. My parents came to stay with me in Venice, and I thought they should be shown one of its less known but more beautiful sights, the Palazzo Contarini dal Molo.

I should have known that my parents could be of no possible interest to Mr. and Mrs. Carteret socially, genealogically, or publicly.

Mrs. Carteret was most gracious, she asked us to lunch, and she and James even came to lunch with us, in our palazzino. My parents stayed for three weeks, and towards the end of their visit I thought it only civil to ask Madame Carteret if we could pay her a farewell visit, not a visite de digestion , but just an acknowledgement of her kindness in having received us.

I suggested a day a week or more ahead, but a telephone message came from Mrs. Carteret saying she was very sorry but she could not receive us as the garden was too wet.

Would it have been too wet in a week’s time? Or would its humidity have interfered with our call, which had no connection with the garden?

(À propos, Mrs. Carteret sometimes complained that her guests came to see her only because they wanted to see the garden; or, alternatively, that when they came they never cast an eye on the garden (Palladio? Sansovino?), which was one of the treasures of Venice.)

I was offended by her refusal to see my parents again on such a feeble, pseudo-meteorological excuse, but I realized that I had mistaken her nature, and it was my fault, more than hers.

No, it may have been a perhaps perverted and unrealizable wish on the part of Anna (Hannah) to keep up standards, of whatever sort, that made her look so critically on the outside world. From her ivory tower she could afford to, in every sense of the word.

Another episode occurs to me. An old friend of mine and an old acquaintance of Mrs. Carteret’s, came to stay with me. In her beautiful house in Chelsea she kept a salon to which the old, and even more the young, were only too glad to be invited.

When I asked Mrs. Carteret if I might bring my old friend (and hers) to call, her brow furrowed. ‘This Boadicea of the South,’ she said, ‘cannot possibly receive this Messalina of the North—and she added in a lower tone, and with a slight closing of the eyelids, ‘You know how quickly news travels in Venice. When I told my dear Maria that the daughter of an eminent Bishop might be coming to lunch, she replied, “But Signora, how can a Bishop possibly have a daughter?”.’

‘She is not staying here,’ said Mrs. Carteret, to make the position perfectly plain, ‘she is staying with a friend whom you know.’ (She didn’t mention my name.) ‘It is not for us to judge. Of course, heretics have different ideas from ours, but many of them are good people according to their lights, and so on Friday (no, not on Friday, which is a fast day for us) we will have—and a long list of comestibles permitted by the Church followed.

But it must not be supposed that Mr. and Mrs. Carteret satisfied their romantic longings by receiving the more important visitors to Venice or (by what gave them perhaps greater pleasure) refusing to receive those who were less important. Their romanticism went further than the bounds of snobbery and super-snobbery in which to some extent it fulfilled itself.