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

‘She had asked me for a sign—well, now she had it.

‘I meant to tear the letter up, but, as you see, I didn’t. I kept it as one does sometimes keep things, to sharpen the edge of my annoyance. One’s nature demands a sensitive place—a soft spot, a sore spot—that will yield a thrill or a pang: at least mine does. As I had no soft spot at the moment, the sore spot did just as well. It reminded me of all the idle, inquisitive women who had from time to time plagued me unmercifully about my work, wasting my time as freely as if it was their own; and whenever I sat down at my new gazebo I felt I was giving them all a retrospective snub.

‘But habit is sometimes stronger than spite and one morning, without being aware of it, I found myself sitting in my old place. I jumped up, as if an enemy had caught me napping; but at the same moment a nerve of curiosity twitched and I became all eyes. Like eyes, the windows of the palace stared back at me, and I thought I detected in the depths of one which had its shutters ajar a sort of commotion, a confusion, a flurry, and then a movement of withdrawal, as if something long and slender and white—I thought of it as a white wand—had been pulled inwards. I’ve never been quite clear what did happen, but suddenly I felt ashamed of having scared a fellow-creature, and as if I was a sort of ogre, and my confidence in the justice of my feelings was shaken.’

‘Did you then lean out and wave?’ I asked.

‘Oh no, I bolted back to the other window, but I didn’t like the view from there so well. The yellow campanile of Santa Eufemia on the Giudecca looked like a water-tower, just as functional as the chimney-stack beside it. And I saw a lot of other things that I didn’t like, but they didn’t vanish just because I didn’t like them. They weren’t so accommodating as she was. All day long, through the narrow strait of blue sky between the acacia and the palace wall, the swifts came, dive-bombing and screaming. They had twice the lung-power of our English swifts and made a target of me. Involuntarily I ducked.—But I expect you are fond of birds?’

‘Not extravagantly,’ I said.

He gave me a sour smile.

‘Most English people are. Well, after a time and as I began to feel better and have fewer set-backs, my feelings about the unknown signorina— la signorina sconosciuta (for so I thought of her) underwent a change. It seemed quite natural and excusable that she should want to look at me—after all, a cat can look at a king. Convalescence creates an appetite for life: I began to lose my morbid dread of being stared at. And as for wanting me to make a sign, that was excusable in a woman, too. I hadn’t the smallest intention of making one, of course; but I liked to think of her thinking that I might. So I moved back to my old window and sat there rather self-consciously, with I dare say a complacent smile on my face, as if I was sitting for my portrait. And I used to scan the window in which I thought I had seen the white wand, or whatever it was, but I never saw it.

‘After that my routine existence began to irk me. Venice called me. I could no longer pretend I was an invalid; I wanted to join the chattering, clattering throng that drifts through the streets of Venice as sluggishly as the tide flows through its canals. Supposing I did run into Antonio, what matter? And I wanted to see my friends, my friends from whom I had been separated by years of war and my own bad habit of not writing.

‘I owed each of them a letter, some more than one; their letters, like Antonio’s had come by devious routes; they had arrived months, sometimes years, after they were written, they were blacked out and smudged, they told me as little of the sender’s present state as if they had been messages from the grave. And I hadn’t answered, partly from inertia, partly from lack of opportunity, but chiefly from a deeper feeling that with the war friendship had come to an end. In those days I was internationally-minded, and it seemed to me that the breakdown of international relationships meant the breakdown of individual relationships too. Peace is indivisible, as somebody said. I had friends in many countries, some of them countries, like Italy, with which we were at war. I could not hate them because the State ordered me to; but neither could I like them as I had liked them. For me the war dried up the springs of liking; the intercourse between souls seemed an activity as meaningless and out-of-date as the other activities I had enjoyed.

‘I don’t believe I was alone in this, Arthur, I believe that for many people the steady warmth of personal relationships perished in the burning heat of September 1939. Certainly with me it did; I felt I had nothing to give out or to take in and this arid state continued, more or less, until the accident of my Venetian convalescence altered it. I won’t say it has never come back.’

‘So that is the explanation,’ I broke in. ‘We all thought——’

‘No, that was it,’ he said, firmly pushing aside what we had all thought. ‘I felt as though the currency restrictions had—well—made all forms of communication impossible. The blight of political hatred was on everything. I’m not sure that it’s gone yet. I believe people still say to themselves, ‘I will really start to feel —for you, or you, or you—and my feeling will be worth something to us both—as soon as, as soon as—the hydrogen bomb is perfected, or this business in Korea is settled. Then I shall feel for you, and perhaps you will feel for me; but until then our feelings are provisional—we are trying them out—they don’t involve us or commit us—they are on appro. We might make a deal in them on the hire-purchase system, but the day of settlement is infinitely remote. Meanwhile, nothing really counts.” ’

‘I don’t think I feel like that,’ I said.

‘Don’t be too sure. Anyhow, one dismal afternoon,—I’d had a nap—under a blanket and an eiderdown, the day was so abominably cold—I started out to see my friends.

‘I had no telephone and couldn’t forewarn them: I had no one to send, and as for writing letters, I had suddenly become too impatient to wait for the answers. The need for friendship had come on me like a hunger.

‘I decided I would call on three—the three who had meant the most to me. They lived a long way apart, one at San Severo, one—oh, but it doesn’t matter where, it’s impossible to describe where any place is in Venice. They were each under the protection of a local saint, though they were not exactly saints themselves. If you think of Venice as a flat fish swimming towards the mainland, one of my friends lived on its tail, another half-way up the north side of its body, and the third somewhere near its eye. They lived, as I said, a long way apart, and though they saw each other fairly often, they didn’t like each other very much. In those days when I went in for personal relationships—when in fact they were almost my religion—I didn’t like to see any two of these friends, still less the three of them, on one day, because they were so critical of each other. I suppose all that sounds rather priggish to you?’

‘No,’ I said primly. ‘I think it does you credit.’

He shot me a suspicious glance. ‘Oh well,’ he said, ‘I don’t mind now, of course. But in those days I didn’t like to hear one of my friends run down another, beyond a certain point, I mean, and despised myself for not taking the part of the absent one, or only taking it half-heartedly. Then, when I was with someone I was fond of, he or she was like a mirror to me: I don’t only mean that they reflected me myself, which was agreeable, but the other reflections seemed to me true, unflawed and perfect also: I saw the world in a frame—their frame—and I could live in it and accept it. My vision of them and theirs of me were one—or could become one, I believed, and that was what I aimed at: the merging into one focus of our reciprocal reflections—a sort of fusion. Well, each of my friends was quite willing to play this game with me and we had plenty of conversational material, unconnected with the others, to make our meetings fun. They were all cultivated people, who had spent most of their lives abroad; their outlook was at once cosmopolitan and parochial, and they had several languages at their command. They all had taste, too, in their houses. Though Lady Porteous’s house was by far the most beautiful, each of the three interiors had something that intimately satisfied and pleased me.