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

‘Very much better,’ he repeated, as though the information, coming from his lips, had a peculiar authenticity. ‘And now as to plans,’ he continued. ‘I have worked out two programmes for the next five days—one for Mr. and Mrs. Evans and Amelia, and your mother, if she is well enough to go with them; they don’t know Venice. Another, more advanced itinerary for us. Just look here.’ He summoned her to the map, and Lavinia, feeling like a map herself, all signs and no substance, complied; but not without a feeble protest.

‘But I don’t know Venice either.’

‘Ah, but you are intelligent, you can learn,’ he said. Lavinia resented everything in his remark; the implication that her mother was not intelligent, the readiness to agree that she herself was quick but ignorant.

‘I don’t know which end the map is up,’ she said suddenly.

‘What! Not know your compass? We shall have to begin further back than I thought. Now, you’re the North. I’ll set the map by you. Here is the Piazza: do you see?’

‘Yes,’ said Lavinia.

‘Well, where?’

Lavinia pointed to it.

‘Right. Now I’ve drawn a series of concentric circles, marking on them everything we’ve got to see. I don’t count tourists’ tit-bits, like Colleoni and the Frari.’

‘I love equestrian statues,’ declared Lavinia. ‘There are only sixty-four, I believe, in the world. And the Pesaro Madonna is almost my favourite picture in Venice.’

‘Well,’ said Stephen, ‘we’ll see what time we’ve got. Now, here’s the first circle of our inferno. What do you put on it? Remember, you’ve been here nearly a week.’ He turned towards Lavinia an acute questioning glance; a pedagogue’s glance. His brows were knitted under his thin straight hair; his large prominent features seemed to start from his face and make a dent on Lavinia’s mind. Not a mist, not a shadow of diffidence in his impatient eyes; no slightest pre-occupation with her or with himself, only an unabashed anxiety to hear her answer. Lavinia resolved it should be as wrong as she could possibly make it.

‘St. Francesco della Vigna,’ she suggested, putting her head on one side, a gesture that ordinarily she loathed beyond all others.

He looked at her in consternation; then let the map fall to his knees.

‘Why, Lavinia,’ he exclaimed. ‘You’re not trying.’

Tears of mortification came into her eyes.

‘I don’t think I want to learn,’ she confessed.

‘Why, of course you don’t,’ he replied, relieved by this simple explanation of her contumacy. ‘No one does. But we’ve got to. That’s what we Americans come here for. Now, try again.’

‘Perhaps I could do better outside,’ Lavinia temporized. The terrace revealed the Canal, and the Canal, Emilio. He was leaning against a post, expending, it seemed, considerable energy, for the prow of the gondola swung rapidly round. But whatever the exertion, he absorbed it into himself. The economy of movement was complete. There were no ineffective gestures, no effort run to waste; a thousand years of watermanship were expressed in that one manoeuvre. The gondolier saw Lavinia, took off his black hat, and smiled as he draped himself across his platform. There he sat. He smiled when you smiled, generally. He took you where you wanted to go. He forced nothing upon you. He demanded nothing of you. He had no questions, he had no replies. At every moment he was accessible to pleasure; at every moment, unconsciously, he could render pleasure back; it lived in his face, his movements, his whole air, where all the charms of childhood, youth and maturity mingled without losing their identity.

‘There’s a good-looking man if you like,’ Lavinia’s companion remarked.

‘Yes, he’s considered good-looking,’ Lavinia concurred.

‘I call him very good-looking,’ Stephen repeated, as though there was nothing beautiful or ugly but his thinking made it so.

‘No,’ said Miss Evans, speaking, it seemed, for the first time that evening. ‘We shall not stay long in Venice.’ She rose and stretched herself.

They were sitting, all of them, in the Piazza. Dinner had been a failure, and its sequel, though enlivened by a band and a continual recourse to Florian’s refreshments, a disaster.

‘Bed-time?’ muttered Mr. Evans, brushing his waistcoat with his hands. He jingled his watch-chain which had retained flakes of ash, uncertain in which direction gravity, such was the ambiguity of gradient on Mr. Evans’s waistcoat, meant them to go.

‘If Amelia wishes,’ his wife primly replied.

‘I do,’ said Amelia.

They parted, Stephen accompanying Lavinia and her mother to their hotel.

‘You must take care of that cold, Mrs. Johnstone,’ he said, as they stopped at the door. ‘And will you lend me Lavinia for half-an-hour? I want her to see the Rialto by moonlight.’

‘I always do one or two things for mother before she goes to bed,’ Lavinia protested.

‘Am I quite helpless?’ demanded Mrs. Johnstone. ‘Am I utterly infirm? You make me feel an old woman, Lavinia, fussing about after me. Take her, Ste, by all means.’

Lavinia was taken.

On the fondamenta, below the Rialto, they encountered an émeute. Cries rang out; there was a scuffle in which blows were exchanged and blood flowed. Terrified by the sight of men bent on hurting each other, Lavinia tried to draw Stephen away, but he detained her, showing a technical interest in the methods of the combatants.

‘Your real Italian,’ he said, mimicking the action, ‘always stabs from underneath, like this.’

Panic seized Lavinia. She felt vulnerable all over. The malignant light of the moon served only to reveal shadows and darkness; darkness under the great span of the Rialto, darkness in the thick foliage that shrouded the Casa Petrarca, darkness in the antic figures which tripped and rose and struggled with each other in the sheet of pale light that carpeted the fondamenta.

At last Stephen yielded to her entreaties.

‘Well, I’m glad I saw that,’ he said. But Lavinia felt that something alien, some quality of the night, had entered into her idea of Venice and would persist even in the noonday glare. It was to Stephen she owed this illumination, or rather this obfuscation, and she could not forgive him.

The narrowness of the mercerie brought them close together.

‘Lavinia,’ he said, ‘I’m going to ask you a question. I suppose you know what it is.’

She did know, and her unwillingness to hear was aggravated tenfold by his obtuseness in choosing the moment when she liked him less than she had ever done. She was silent.

‘Don’t you know? Well, what should I be likely to ask?’

Lavinia trembled with obstinacy and rage.

‘Well now,’ he said, with the air of giving her an easier one. ‘What do I generally ask?’ He pressed her arm; a thrill of hysteria ran through her. ‘Put it another way,’ he said. ‘In your small but sometimes valuable opinion, Lavinia, what am I most in need of?’

Lavinia’s self-control deserted her.

‘Consideration, imagination, everything except self-confidence,’ she said, and burst into tears.

They walked in silence across the piazza, in silence past St. Moses to Lavinia’s hotel.

‘Good-night,’ he said. There were tears in his voice, and she hated him for that. ‘I didn’t know you disliked me, Lavinia. I will go away to-morrow, to Verona, I think. Bless you.’

He was gone. Lavinia listened at her mother’s door; no sound. She went to bed but her thoughts troubled her, and at about a quarter to four she rose and took out her diary.

‘I could never have married Stephen, but I didn’t mean to be cruel to him,’ she wrote. ‘I don’t know what came over me. At the time there seemed nothing else to say; but on reflection I can think of a dozen things I might have said, all without wounding him. And he has such deep feelings, like most unselfconscious people, whose interest in a subject blinds them to the fact that they may be boring others with it. He really cares for me, and I ought to have been flattered by his enthusiasm and zeal for my improvement, instead of wanting him to let me go to the devil my own way. Is that where I am bound? I detected a whiff of brimstone this evening and I’m not sure whether the room is clear of it yet. I wasn’t really angry with him; that’s where he has the advantage over me; I was exasperated and unnerved, whereas he is now plunged, I fear, into real old-fashioned misery, the sort that keeps you awake at nights and is too hard and too heavy to yield to soft analysis. Well, I am awake, too. But that’s because I worry about myself: I am so concerned with self-justification that I whittle away the shame I ought to feel, externalizing it and nibbling bits off it until I grow interested and quite proud of it. If I had a proper nature, instead of this putty-soft putty-coloured affair, my relations towards people would fall into their right places, and not need readjustment at the hands of my sensibility. No one knows where they are with me, because they really aren’t anywhere; I am forever making up my mind about myself.