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

‘But we can’t go away!’ I cried.

The gondolier said nothing, but rowed with all his strength. Then he began to talk under his breath. ‘It was a good oar, too,’ I heard him mutter. Suddenly he left the poop, climbed over the cushions and sat down beside me.

‘When I found her,’ he whispered, ‘she wasn’t quite dead.’

I began to speak but he held up his hand.

‘She asked me to kill her.’

‘But, Mario!’

‘ “Before it comes back,” she said. And then she said, “ It’s starving, too, and it won’t wait. . . .” ’ Mario bent his head nearer but his voice was almost inaudible.

‘Speak up,’ I cried. The next moment I implored him to stop.

Mario clambered on to the poop.

‘You don’t want to go to the island now, signore?’

‘No, no. Straight home.’

I looked back. Transparent darkness covered the lagoon save for one shadow that stained the horizon black. Podolo. . . .

It was late July in Venice, suffocatingly hot. The windows of the bar in the Hotel San Giorgio stood open to the Canal. But no air came through. At six o’clock a little breeze had sprung up, a feebler repetition of the mid-day sirocco, but in an hour it had blown itself out.

One of the men got off his high stool and walked somewhat unsteadily to the window.

‘It’s going to be calm all right,’ he said. ‘I think we’ll go in the gondola. I see it’s there, tied up at the usual post.’

‘As you please, Dickie,’ said his friend from the other stool.

Their voices proclaimed them Englishmen; proclaimed also the fact that they were good clients of the barman.

‘Giuseppe!’ called the man at the window, turning his eyes from the Salute with its broad steps, its mighty portal and its soaring dome back to the counter with the multi-coloured bottles behind it. ‘How long does it take to row to the Lido?’

‘Sir?’

‘Didn’t you say you’d lived in England, Giuseppe?’

‘Yes, sir, eight years at the Hôtel Métropole.’

‘Then why——?’

His friend intervened, pacifically, in Italian.

‘He wants to know how long it takes to row to the Lido.’

Relief in his voice, the barman answered, ‘That depends if you’ve got one oar or two.’

‘Two.’

‘If you ask me,’ said Dickie, returning to his stool, ‘I don’t think Angelino, or whatever his damned name is, counts for much. It’s the chap in front who does the work.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said the barman, solicitously. ‘But the man at the back he guide the boat, he give the direction.’

‘Well,’ said Dickie, ‘as long as he manages to hit the Lido. . . . We want to be at the Splendide by eight. Can we do it?’

‘Easily, sir, you have got an hour.’

‘Barring accidents.’

‘We never have accidents in Venice,’ said the barman, with true Italian optimism.

‘Time for another, Phil?’

‘Three’s my limit, Dickie.’

‘Oh, come on, be a man.’

They drank.

‘You seem to know a lot,’ said Dickie more amiably to the barman. ‘Can you tell us anything about this chap who’s dining with us—Joe O’Kelly, or whatever his name is?’

The barman pondered. He did not want to be called over the coals a second time. ‘That would be an English name, sir?’

‘English! Good Lord!’ exploded Dickie. ‘Does it sound like English?’

‘Well, now, as you say it, it does,’ remonstrated his companion. ‘Or rather Irish. But wait—here’s his card. Does that convey anything to you, Giuseppe?’

The barman turned the card over in his fingers. ‘Oh, now I see, sir—Giacomelli—il Conte Giacomelli.’

‘Well, do you know him?’

‘Oh yes, sir. I know him very well.’

‘What’s he like?’

‘He’s a nice gentleman, sir, very rich . . .’

‘Then he must be different from the rest of your aristocracy,’ said Dickie, rather rudely. ‘I hear they haven’t two penny pieces to rub together.’

‘Perhaps he’s not so rich now,’ the barman admitted, mournfully. ‘None of us are. Business is bad. He is grand azionista— how do you say?’ he stopped, distressed.

‘Shareholder?’ suggested Philip.

‘Good Lord!’ exclaimed Dickie, ‘I didn’t know you were so well up in this infernal language. You’re a regular Wop!’

The barman did not notice the interruption.

‘Yes, shareholder, that’s it,’ he was saying delightedly. ‘He is a great shareholder in a fabbrica di zucchero—— ’

‘Sugar-factory,’ explained Philip, not without complacence.

The barman lowered his voice. ‘But I hear they are . . .’ He made a curious rocking movement with his hand.

‘Not very flourishing?’ said Philip.

The barman shrugged his shoulders. ‘That’s what they say.’

‘So we mustn’t mention sugar,’ said Dickie, with a yawn. ‘Come on, Phil, you’re always so damned abstemious. Have another.’

‘No, no, really not.’

‘Then I will.’

Philip and even the barman watched him drink with awe on their faces.

‘But,’ said Philip as Dickie set down his glass, ‘Count Giacomelli lives in Venice, doesn’t he?’

‘Oh yes, sir. Usually he comes in here every night. But it’s four — five days now I do not see him.’

‘Pity,’ said Philip, ‘we might have given him a lift. But perhaps he has a launch?’

‘I don’t think he’s using his launch now, sir.’

‘Oh well, he’ll find some way of getting there, you may be sure,’ said Dickie. ‘How shall we know him, Giuseppe?’

‘I expect you’ll see him double, my poor Dickie,’ remarked his friend.

The barman, with his usual courtesy, began replying to Dickie’s question.

‘Oh, he’s a common-looking gentleman like yourself, sir. . . .’

‘I, common?’

‘No,’ said the barman, confused. ‘I mean grande come lei —as tall as you.’

‘That’s nothing to go by. Has he a beard and whiskers and a moustache?’

‘No, he’s clean-shaven.’

‘Come on, come on,’ said Philip. ‘We shall be late, and perhaps he won’t wait for us.’

But his friend was in combative mood. ‘Damn it! how are we to dine with the chap if we don’t recognize him? Now, Giuseppe, hurry up; think of the Duce and set your great Italian mind working. Isn’t there anything odd about him? Is he cross-eyed?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Does he wear spectacles?’

‘Oh no, sir.’

‘Is he minus an arm?’

‘ Nossignore ,’ cried the barman, more and more agitated.

‘Can’t you tell us anything about him, except that he’s common-looking, like me?’

The barman glanced helplessly round the room. Suddenly his face brightened. ‘Ah, ecco ! He limps a little.’

‘That’s better,’ said Dickie. ‘Come on, Philip, you lazy hound, you always keep me waiting.’ He got down from the stool. ‘See you later,’ he said over his shoulder to the barman. ‘Mind you have the whisky pronto. I shall need it after this trip.’

The barman, gradually recovering his composure, gazed after Dickie’s receding, slightly lurching figure with intense respect.

The gondola glided smoothly over the water towards the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, the slender campanile of which was orange with the light of the setting sun. On the left lay the Piazzetta, the two columns, the rich intricate stonework of St. Mark’s, the immense façade of the Ducal Palace, still perfectly distinct for all the pearly pallor in the air about them. But, as San Giorgio began to slide past them on the right, it was the view at the back of the gondola which engrossed Philip’s attention. There, in the entrance of the Grand Canal, the atmosphere was deepening into violet while the sky around the dome of the Salute was of that clear deep blue which, one knows instinctively, may at any moment be pierced by the first star. Philip, who was sitting on his companion’s left, kept twisting round to see the view, and the gondolier, whose figure blocked it to some extent, smiled each time he did so, saying ‘ Bello, non è vero ?’ almost as though from habit. Dickie, however, was less tolerant of his friend’s æsthetic preoccupations.