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

The residue of these happenings in his sub-memory affected his new preoccupation. Helen had not been treated in a guest-like manner, and above all she had not been offered a drink. A long cross-country journey and she had not been offered a drink! She must need one terribly, just as he wanted one terribly; her throat must be parched as his was, and with more reason for (so his mental map told him) she had travelled much further than he.

But what sort of drink would she like? That was one besetting question. A gin and vermouth, a dry martini, his mind kept repeating. But how could he ask her when he didn’t know where the drinks, if any, were kept? And would a dry martini be specially welcome to someone whose system, like his own, was already on the dry side? Vaguely, incoherently, came back to him the memory of his visits to her, when drinks of all sorts were immediately offered, and every provision for his comfort had been arranged beforehand. And now this. He couldn’t quite remember what happened after her arrival; he didn’t want to, it was too mortifying, too humiliating. Could inhospitality have gone further?

Where was she now? If she had vanished into the comparatively hospitable night, small blame to her; but no, she was somewhere about, though he couldn’t always locate her: sometimes at his back, sometimes on his left side, sometimes on his right, never in front, because in front of him was the large brass bowl? urn? container? which housed, as it always housed, the King Fern ( Osmunda Regalis )—such a beautiful name, and it did not suit her. If only she would stop flitting and fluttering and let him have more than a side-glimpse of her! If only she would be more stable —for in ordinary life she was as stable as an anchor. At last she settled, like a butterfly; like a butterfly she was captive under his net.

‘Helen,’ he said, trying to see her expression under her veil, ‘I feel so distressed about your visit, but I really couldn’t have foreseen what was going to happen’ (‘and I can’t now,’ he might have added). ‘But what particularly worries me is that you haven’t had a drink . You must need one after your long journey, and I want one,’ (this sentence had been repeating itself in his mind). ‘But how, and where are they—the drinks I mean? The people are somewhere in the dining-room.’

He understood Helen to say she didn’t care if she had a drink or not; but he didn’t think this was true, and he himself was assailed by an appalling thirst.

Suddenly he had an idea which seemed like an inspiration flooding his whole being. The drawing-room, of course! Why hadn’t he thought of the drawing-room? Before, it had appeared quite natural that Helen and he should have been received (welcomed was not the word) at a bare board in the dining-room; now it did seem strange when the drawing-room, the traditional place for hosts whoever they might be to greet their guests, was still available. And a vision of the drawing-room at once crossed his mind, with its cheerful yellow wallpaper counteracting its cold northern aspect, and , most important of all, in the right-hand corner facing the door, a gate-legged table bearing a tray of glasses and drinks, most of them non-alcoholic, for his father belonged to a generation which had not heard of dry martinis, but had heard of whisky and sherry. Better whisky or sherry than nothing. The drawing-room was, for the moment, the only solution.

‘Helen,’ he repeated to the face under the veil, ‘let’s go into the drawing-room. We might find something there, something to drink I mean. And at any rate we shall be by ourselves.’

He thought her slight inclination of the head signified assent and so he led the way, up four steps and then to the right, to the drawing-room door with its pseudo linen-fold panels which were difficult to see because his father, economical in most ways, was especially economical about the use of artificial light.

Imagine their surprise, therefore, when the door opened to reveal a blaze of light—no fuse here—illuminating every part of the room from corner to corner and from cornice to cornice, and not least the crossbeams in the ceiling which an Italian craftsman, early in the last century, had concealed beneath intricate designs in stucco. But before Valentine had time to do more than realize that the gate-legged table in the corner was still there, his eyes were astonished by another sight. So far, being of an acceptant nature, he had taken everything that happened for granted, but now—!

There were six or seven little beds in the room, arranged side by side or end to end; and in each was a child, of indeterminate age and sex, asleep. Asleep when he and Helen came in; but when the light shone on their eyes they began to rub them, and having rubbed them, to set up a pitiful wail, each child taking it up from the next.

Beneath her veil which was so thick that even the brilliant light could not penetrate it, Helen’s face was unreadable. I must get her out of this, he thought; this is worse than the dining-room. ‘Please sit here,’ he said, indicating a stiff-backed armchair which besides being the only chair in the room, commanded a view of the various beds, ‘and I’ll sit here,’ and he sat down on the edge of the bed of a squalling child.

But before he and Helen had time to consult each other, or take in more than a tossing sea of bedclothes, a figure entered the room. It was a hospital nurse, dressed as such.

‘What on earth are you doing here?’ she asked.

Valentine, for the first time in many years, lost his temper.

‘And what on earth are you doing here? What right have you to be here? This may not be my house, but it is the house of my family, the Walkovers, have you ever heard of them?’

The Sister touched her forehead, a gesture that might have meant anything.

‘Yes, I have heard of them. Many years ago the Corporation—’

‘The Corporation? What Corporation?’

‘The Corporation. They bought this house from a family called Walkover, for a home for disturbed children.’

‘Disturbed children?’

‘Yes, here are some of them. And I can tell you that your unwarranted presence here is disturbing them more.’

Wails and screams gave credence to her words, but they only exasperated Valentine.

‘I don’t believe you for a moment,’ he said. ‘My relations are downstairs, and I’ll fetch them up to tell you you are trespassing. Trespassing, do you hear?’

Having to make this scene in front of Helen aggravated his indignation. ‘I’ll order you to get out,’ he shouted, ‘and leave this place to whom it belongs. I came in here to get a drink for my friend Lady Furthermore—’

He wouldn’t subject Helen to the indignity of introducing her to the Sister.

‘There is some milk on the table in the corner,’ the Sister said, ‘and you are welcome to it, if you don’t make too much noise.’

Valentine went to the table, seized a bottle of milk and hurled it at the Sister. A whitish streak, half fluid, half powder, such as might have been exuded by a bomber in the intense cold of the stratosphere—a sort of Milky Way—followed, until the missile struck the chandelier, and for the second time that night, darkness prevailed.

Helen was still with him; how they got out of the room he didn’t know; how they got out of the house he didn’t know; but he did know, or thought he knew, that he had put her on a train to somewhere.

‘Where am I?’ he thought, and then a sense of his proper environment—his bed—came back to him. ‘But why am I so thirsty?’ for he was longing, as never before, for a dry martini. ‘Oh for a dry martini!’

The experience must have been real, from its mere physical aftermath; for never before had he woken up at night pining for a drink. He sat up in bed; where were the ingredients? They were downstairs behind a locked door; and the only thirst-quencher at hand was a long-opened bottle of sherry. He turned over and gradually his throat and tongue resumed their normal functions. ‘I must have imagined it all,’ he thought, ‘and I hope that Helen has imagined it, too.’