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

She would know if he had materialized because if he had, the passage would be in darkness. But would it be? Might he not have forgotten to turn the light off? So unpredictable. . . . Just one little peep behind the scenes . . .

But not now. It could wait. She must get ready for bed, a long ritual which included a bath. She always took a bath last thing, because it was said to be good for insomnia, and she had her face to do up. All this made bedtime a moment of crisis, a culmination of instead of a calm from the day’s worries, which good sleepers have never known.

When she opened her door the darkness was almost blinding. She switched on the passage light and saw, outside her stablemate’s door, a pair of large muddy suede shoes. So the Count had arrived and she must restrain her curiosity. In English houses, thought Mildred, visitors don’t leave their shoes outside the door, as they do in hotels—it’s a sort of nuance that a foreigner might not know. The shoes were so muddy they needed cleaning, and no doubt the butler—the temporary butler—would see to that.

Why hadn’t she noticed the shoes before? Mildred asked herself. And then she remembered that soon after she retired to her room, the lights in the passage had been turned off. Now they were on again—of course, she herself had turned them on.

What a fool I am, she thought, what a fool! But it wasn’t the prospect of his over-large shoes which deterred her from knocking at his door, it was just his name on the plain card, fastened between four tiny triangles of brass, that made her hesitate.

She went back to her adjoining room, relieved as everyone is from the danger of self-exposure. She went through her customary bedtime ritual—with her a long process—but she knew she wouldn’t sleep if she didn’t. ‘I’ll have a bath first,’ she thought, ‘and then a sleeping pill.’ Insomnia was her bugbear.

The water was still hot—in some country houses it cooled down after midnight—and she lay with her eyes half-closed and she herself half asleep, in a bath of chemically-enriched foam. ‘Oh to die like this!’ she thought, though she didn’t mean it. Some of her neuroses she had managed to overcome—the claustrophobia of travelling in a crowded train for instance—and some she hadn’t. A friend of hers had died in her bath of a heart attack. There was a bell over the bath (as used to be the custom) but when help came it was too late.

There was no bell over this bath, supposing there had been anyone to answer it, but Mildred had long made a principle of leaving her bathroom door ajar. If someone came in— tant pis —she would shout, and the intruder, man or woman, would of course recoil.

It was well known that a hot bath was good for the nerves—so useful to have medical authority for something one wanted to do!

Mildred was luxuriating under the aromatic pine-green water, her limbs indistinct but still pale pink, when a shadow appeared on the shiny white wall facing her. It might have been someone she knew, but who can recognize a shadow?

It was Mildred’s habit—unlike most people’s—to have her bath with her head to the taps—and the shadow opposite on the gleaming wall, grew larger and darker.

‘What do you want?’ she asked, feeling a certain physical security under her opaque covering of foam.

‘I want you ,’ the shadow answered.

But had he really spoken? Or was it a voice in a dream? There was no sound, no other sign, only the impress of the face on the wall, which every moment grew more vivid until its lips suddenly, like the gills of a fish, sprang open towards its snout.

Nobody knows how they will behave in a crisis. Mildred jumped out of the bath shouting. ‘Get the hell out of here!’ And for the first time in many years she locked the bathroom door.

That would settle him!

But it hadn’t, for when she came back from her physical and mental encounter with the key and looked round her with the ineffable relief of having done something that was hard to do, she saw the shadow, perhaps not so distinct as it had been, but with the upturning fish-like gills clearer than it was before.

So her way of escape was blocked: she was a prisoner now.

But what to do?

She got back into the cooling bath and turned on the tap—but no doubt in response to thermostatic control, the hot water was cooling too. Cold when she got out of it, she was colder than when she got in. Meanwhile, those thin, fishy lips gnawed at something she could not see.

Courage begets courage. ‘I won’t stand for this,’ thought Mildred. ‘I won’t spend the night in this freezing bathroom’ (actually it wasn’t cold, but it felt cold to her). ‘Take this, you beast!’ and she flung her sponge at the shadow. For a moment its profile, which was all she had seen of it, was disturbed until the thin lips resumed their yawning movement.

What next? She hadn’t brought her dressing-gown into the bathroom, it hadn’t seemed necessary: she wrapped her bathtowel around her, unlocked the door, and plunged into the passage. The light was on; had it been on when she crossed the passage to the bathroom, half an hour, or an hour, ago? She thought not, but she couldn’t remember; time was no longer a measure of experience to her, as it was after breakfast, with recognizable stopping-places—so long for letters, so long for her job, so long before lunch—if there was time for lunch. Nearly everyone divides their days into fixed periods of routine. Now these temporal landmarks had gone; she was alone in the passage, not knowing what hour it was.

But as a good guest she must turn the lights off. Had she left them on in the bathroom? She felt sure she hadn’t, but she must make quite sure. With extreme reluctance she opened the bathroom door just far enough to peep in.

It was, as she knew it would be, in darkness; but she could still see on the wall facing the bath the last of the lingering image, lit up by its own faint radiance, its phosphorescence, but hardly resembling a face.

Had it been smouldering there all the time, or had it been relit when she opened the door?

What a relief to be back in the passage, under the protection of Count Olmütz, whose presence or whose proximity was to have saved her from these irrational fears! She had had them all her life, but never before had they taken shape, as it were, to her visual eye as they had to Belshazzar’s.

When had he arrived? She had seen his shoes, his outsize shoes, when she first ventured on to the landing—prospecting bathwards. Then his door was shut, she could have sworn it; now it was ajar; but under the influence of any strong emotion, especially fear, time ceases to be a timetable.

She almost laughed when she remembered that she had asked Joanna whether she should lock her bedroom door! Some women locked theirs even when there was no threat of a nightly visitant, burglar, marauder, raper, or such-like.

She locked hers, too; but she couldn’t lock out the sound from the next room—a sound hard to define—something between a snore, a gurgle, a croak and a gasp. She knew how throaty and bronchial men were, often coughing and clearing their throats and advertising their other physical ailments—a thing which women never did. She had always thought that a snoring husband would be better grounds for divorce than infidelity or desertion or cruelty—though was not snoring itself a form of cruelty?

How ironical that she should have to protect herself from her protector!

Happily she had brought her ‘mufflers’ with her (being a bad sleeper she dreaded casual or continual noises in the night). She stuffed them into her ears. But they didn’t muffle the noise from next door; and suddenly Mildred thought, on her way from her dressing-table to her bed, ‘Supposing he should be ill ?’ One thought of a protector as invulnerable to anything, especially to illness; but why should he be? He might have got ’flu or bronchitis or even pneumonia. Perhaps her hostess had put them side by side to protect each other, in that forsaken wing of the house!