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

‘Of course,’ said Rudy, hardly believing his ears. But he had to believe his eyes.

She looked too ravishing! Among the prison visitors who could have looked like her?

When the gaoler ushered her in he warned, ‘Fifteen minutes, mind, and no larking about.’

An extra five minutes was something. After their embracements, which lasted longer than before, and longer than they ever had in the days of Rudy’s prosperity when the life of action had seemed so much more important than domestic felicity, her right hand, her white hand, moved as before to the black velvet of her corsage , the invitation in her eyes and lips was overwhelming; her left hand, just as white with its slender, curling fingers, lay as it were on guard, in case, in case—of what? Rudy did not ask himself; he stared at his daughter with greedy, staring, incredulous eyes, and eyebrows raised so high that their ridges made semi-circles reaching far up his forehead.

While he was slaking his hunger and his thirst he was oblivious, as he had been before, to what was going on outside; he did not hear the warder’s wary footsteps crossing and re-crossing the door of his cell, or see the helmeted head as it peered inwards.

After a while he drew away like a breast-fed child that has had its fill; and then became aware of the reality round him, his own semi-nakedness which, in spite of its emaciation, still preserved and perhaps emphasized the beauty of his body, contrasting with and yet recalling her fullness and healthiness of form, and the facial likeness between them, as she drew her velvet mantle round her.

‘Aren’t you rather hot in that?’ he asked idly, with a father’s instinctive privilege to criticize, and wiping the sweat off his chest with the weekly handkerchief the prison laundry allowed him.

‘Oh no, darling, it’s much colder outside than it is in here. And besides—’

‘Besides?’

‘Well, I have to be in the fashion. I should be wearing this even if I was on the equator.’

The time was running short. Rudy tried desperately to think of things he wanted to ask his daughter; questions he could ask without risk, and which could be answered without risk, for he didn’t know whether his cell was wired for listening in.

‘How is Trudi?’

‘Very well, I see her quite often. She has people looking after her, I think she’s all right.’

‘And you, Angela?’

‘Yes, I’m all right too. Jacko is a nice fellow’—and she indicated her bracelets and her necklace.

‘And he doesn’t mind you coming here?’ asked Rudy, aware almost for the first time of the claims of personal relationships, as distinct from those of business.

‘He doesn’t know, and if he did, he wouldn’t mind.’

‘You’re sure be wouldn’t?’

Angela made a wide gesture with her arms, her beautiful arms, a very feminine version of her father’s, which had nothing left but the bones and muscles.

‘And you will be able to come and see me again?’

She smiled.

‘Why not?’

The grating of the opening door, the warder’s face, dark under his helmet.

‘It’s time, please,’ he said, though the words were a command, not a request.

Angela rose and kissed her father, and then, bestowing a grateful smile on the grim-faced warder, she departed.

Where has she gone? thought Rudy. In his job it was safer not to ask people their destinations, and still safer not to reveal his own. Safer not to disclose his own locality, little as it mattered, for it wasn’t a destination—if only it had been!—and perhaps he was safer here than anywhere else. He hadn’t been subjected to a formal interrogation or tortured, except by the glare of the electric torch, from which his eyes still sometimes ached and smarted, it could have been much, much worse. Deep within himself, he didn’t think he would escape alive. He was stateless, or rather he had too many states, too many passports, to appeal to any single one: they would all disown him, and none of those he had worked for, as he had so often reminded himself, would want to exchange him for another spy. He awaited his fate.

And yet, since Angela’s second visit, his fate seemed less gloomy than before. Not less settled, not less determined; but somehow less lonely, less beyond the scope and reach and sympathy of ordinary mortals, who lived square vegetable lives, hail-brother-well-met characters, with no problems other than domestic or financial—nothing to compare with the aspect of a firing squad, or whatever agent of death awaited him.

And yet, apart from the physical stimulus, greater than the ordinarily well-fed businessman or working-man could conceive, coming from his daughter’s breast, was something more emotional and more spirited—something that might have been experienced by a baby, who was not old enough to have had any other experience. A feeling of security, of not having to depend on others outside his ken, still less on himself, for his livelihood—in both senses of the word—returned to him. It didn’t convince his mind; his mind still knew he was under sentence of death; but it did release, in his subconscious mind, a feeling of hope.

If Angela had twice come to see him, might she not come a third time, bringing with her the inestimable benefit of her breast and the different but equally inestimable benefit of her presence?

She did come again, quite soon, within a week; and in the joy of their reunion it didn’t occur to Rudy that this was odd, considering, as he knew, that the prisoners were only allowed visitors once a fortnight.

‘Don’t tell Trudi where I am,’ he whispered, as his daughter was letting fall her dress, silk this time, for even she had come to feel that comfort was preferable to fashion, but black still, because it suited her and showed off her white skin and her lovely hands. ‘I’d rather she didn’t know where I was, just tell her I’m alive.’

Angela nodded. She was now wearing her hair in a new style, piled up on the back of her head: it suited her nose which (like Cleopatra’s?) was a shade too long; and the coronal of hair, into which she had introduced fragmentary gleams of shining metal, perhaps silver, balanced it.

Of this Rudy, intent upon his meal, was no more aware than a baby would have been.

Afterwards she lingered with him, talking about the outside world, which had become almost an illusion to Rudy, so distant was it from his personal experience. And then he heard her say—an interpolation in a quite different context—‘I know the way out.’

He nodded in answer, for words might be overheard, and soon after, the door opened to its minimal extent, and the warder said, glancing at Angela, ‘I’m afraid you must go now, Madam.’

Rudy kissed his daughter; after all that was allowed; and surrendered her to the warder. For some reason for which he couldn’t rationally account, he put his ear to the grille which gave him little vision of what was going on in the passage, but did allow him to listen to their retreating footsteps.

Angela’s third visit had renewed his interest in existence: he thought of himself as potentially alive, not as dead. Is it always a blessing to exchange resignation for hope? Rudy couldn’t tell, but he knew that hope was stirring in him. ‘I know the way out,’ Angela wouldn’t have said that inadvertently. ‘The way out’ of what? There were so many predicaments to know, or not know, the way out of, with many of which Rudy was familiar; emotional situations, financial situations, all sorts of situations. Did she mean the way out of prison?

Lying on his palliasse, under his blanket, more heavy than warm (sometimes he threw it off because of the heat) he tried to make sure what Angela meant. As a rule a good sleeper, and still a good sleeper now that he had accommodated himself to his chains, he tossed and turned, and suddenly one of his hands came free from its manacles. He could hardly believe it, but so it was; his right hand was loose, it could do whatever it wanted, or he wanted it to do, scratch him, stroke him, anything. Amazing! And suddenly it came to him why, and how this had happened. Several weeks—months?—of semi-starvation had so reduced his physical frame that his hands and wrists, which used to be larger, as well as stronger, than most men’s had shrivelled, had shrunk to under-handcuff size. He hadn’t freed himself; his captors had freed him, to a certain very limited extent, simply by not giving him enough to eat.