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

‘All right, but hurry up,’ the gaoler said, ‘Ten minutes is the most you’ll be allowed.’

‘I shan’t need ten minutes here,’ answered Rudy, on the threshold of the pissoir .

Natural needs, as so often they do, brought him to a sense of his general situation. Who was it who wanted to see him? For weeks, months, it seemed, he had been cut off from contact with the outside world. He had given up hope of ever seeing it again. He hardly even wanted to see it, so inured had he become not only to the privations but to the utter lack of personal incentive, the desire to make himself known and felt, which is the almost inevitable consequence of even a short spell in prison.

‘Hurry up,’ repeated the warder, just behind him. ‘You’ve only got ten minutes.’

Rudy followed him back, and in a few moments the door of his cell re-opened.

‘Father!’ she exclaimed, but she recognized him before he recognized her, this glorious young creature, dressed in what he imagined was the height of fashion, pearls, bracelets, even a little tippet of fur in case the broiling evening should turn cold.

They embraced and embraced, her beautifully attired body to his half-naked one. But it was the body of her father.

When her tears began to dry she said,

‘But you’re so thin !’

‘ They don’t give us much to eat here,’ he said, as casually as he could.

His daughter had of course seen him in ‘his prime’, how many months ago? when the shield of partition between his sleeping-quarters and theirs, opened to reveal a half-clad figure, asking for something—probably a drink—disappearing almost as soon as it appeared—leaving behind a scent of unwashed masculinity, soon to be washed, for Rudy was particular about that and always had his white-enamelled basin, and his soap, and his washing flannel ready—for anything that might occur. Now he had none of these, he couldn’t even wash, except under supervision.

This question of personal cleanliness was uppermost in his thoughts when he drew away from his daughter and said,

‘You must find me very changed.’ She mistook his meaning and said, ‘Of course you’re not changed, dear Father, except for those nasty handcuffs, and because you look so thin . What can we do about that?’

‘Nothing,’ said Rudy, ‘so far as I know. This miserable country can’t afford to give its subjects let alone its refugees, let alone its prisoners, a decent meal, so why should I be favoured?’

His daughter didn’t answer for a moment; she knew their time together was getting short; she could see the gaoler pacing up and down the passage, with an eye on his watch for he was soon to be off duty, and a look through the grille inside to see how things were going on. Darkly his helmet gleamed.

With the sudden impulse of a woman Angela said, ‘There’s something I can do. If you agree to it, Father. Only we have to be quick.’

Smiling at him with the intensity of affection she had always felt for him, she raised her right hand to her black velvet bodice; her left hand, lovely-fingered, played around her waist in a vague semi-circle, as if awaiting a cue from the other. Her head bent forward; her smile grew more inviting as if it was the very messenger of love.

He was sitting on his straw bed, she on the hard chair opposite. He looked at her with incomprehension, alarm, almost hostility.

‘What do you mean?’

The beautiful hand drew down her black velvet bodice, and exposed her breasts. ‘I have a wet nurse,’ she said, ‘should I need one, but I have plenty of this to spare.’

For a moment Rudy could say nothing. He, who had relied so much on eating and drinking, had spent many weeks almost deprived of both. He fixed his altered face, so pale and shrunken within its covering of untutored hair, on his daughter’s, beautiful in itself, still more beautified by art.

‘What do you mean, Angela?’

She said nothing, but with a still warmer smile, leaned, full-bosomed, towards him.

Then he took the meaning, and wracked by thirst and hunger, took, like a child, what she offered him; nor did he desist until the shadow of the warder, passing the grille, warned him that the feast must be finished.

He wiped his mouth.

‘Another time, another time?’ he murmured.

‘Yes,’ she said, but before they had time to say more, the warder was in the cell.

‘Now you must go, Madam,’ he said.

His daughter’s visit, and her gift of fresh milk, so different from the milk he was used to, so long in bottle and so often sour, completely changed Rudy’s whole outlook. He was not forgotten! He was still in contact with the world outside! And with his own family! Until now he hadn’t realised how much they meant to him; at the thought of them his whole being seemed to revive. He hadn’t time to ask Angela how, or where, her mother was; he hadn’t time to ask her how she had tracked him down; he hadn’t time to ask the hundred questions he wanted to ask. He had been, quite literally, like a baby at the breast, whose one desire is to slake its thirst and its hunger and can only utter inarticulate sucking sounds meanwhile. In the process he lost all sense of shame; he didn’t feel that he, a grown man, should not be finding this kind of sustenance from anyone, least of all his daughter; he didn’t care that the warder, passing and re-passing his cell, could see through the small iron grille just what was happening; his physical need was so great that it quite overcame all civilized feelings. He was a starving animal, and nothing more.

When she had gone his mood began to change. The renascence which her presence, and her present, brought him didn’t at once fade; the first sustained his spirit, and the second his body. It was surprising how much better he felt for both—united to the world, not only the outside world, which he could only dimly perceive through the grating in his cell, or a little more amply, over the shoulders of the surrounding walls—but to the world of the flesh which, in the days of his triumphant health, he had always taken for granted. The idea of being ill was too ridiculous!

But since his daughter’s visit he realised how far he had gone downhill (down-ill, he thought, for he had English in his blood and was still capable of a play on words). Not only was he unattractive to look at, as his little mirror showed him, but his invincible health was failing him. Angela with the benison of her breast, had for a day or two restored it: but when, if ever, could he expect to see her again?

He knew, and had always accepted the conditions of the kind of life he led; but foresight, and experience are very different things.

If only she would come again! It wasn’t only his thirsty mouth that asked this question and his whole physical system, deprived of all the dainties that used to succour it; it was the longing for home , not that he had ever had since he could remember a real home, but somewhere, however transient it might be, where he could expand , take his shoes off, throw his clothes down, asking nobody’s permission, and then expect a good hot meal; and later, if he wasn’t too tired, but he was never tired, the dividing curtain would come down, and Angela would take his place outside and he her place inside, as the case might be.

How far away it seemed from his present life, if life it could be called. Angela’s visit had brought back a whiff of it which recalled the happy past; but as it faded, it left a feeling of unbearable desolation. She would never come again, she would never come again! It would have been better if she had never come at all.

She did come, however. The gaoler, with a faint smirk, said, ‘There’s a lady to see you. The same one as last time. Shall I let her in?’