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

‘I did sometimes ask myself what I had to give them, that they should make me welcome, and supposed it was that, coming from London, I could feed them with gossip they might not have got otherwise. Like most expatriates, they were keenly interested in what went on at home. Lady Porteous and Denys Constantine were both great gossips; Miranda Collier wasn’t, she preferred to talk about a subject, but she too liked hearing the latest news. I had written a book or two, which gave me a certain status; and I have since thought that I took too much for granted the appreciation they showered on these callow works. I myself was so astonished at having produced them that I assumed too readily that others would share my wonderment—after all, writers are two a penny. Perhaps, being all people who might have written, but had not, they attached too much importance to the accident of literary creativeness. Come to that, their lives were a creation, for they made an art of living.

‘But it occurs to me now—I can see you’re going to laugh—that what I really had to offer was youth. Compared to them I was young. I was—but no matter how old I was. Their ages were carefully concealed, though always a matter for conjecture. (I rarely saw Denys Constantine without his telling me that Lady Porteous was nearer seventy than sixty.) Most of the colony were on the shady side of middle age, and they were glad to see someone who had the sun before him instead of at his back.

‘So it was as a young man that I started out on my sentimental journey that cold, wet, blustery day in June, and as a young man that I faced the prospect of the five-mile walk which I should have to accomplish if I was to carry out my programme. No gondola for me. Few gondoliers would have turned out on such a day. Antonio would have, but he wasn’t available.

‘I got to the Piazza in good order but then I stopped, for it was like a lake, a lake with islands and peninsulas made by the dips and rises in the pavement, which were imperceptible at normal times. On these a few daring pedestrians stood stranded. The arcade by Florian’s was above the flood-line, but so packed with people that one could hardly stir. In the distance, stretching across the façade of St. Mark’s, a flimsy wooden bridge had been put up, and across it two lines of people were moving in contrary directions—if moving be the word: no traffic jam was ever more complete. I looked round and as I did so a stranger smiled at me. After a moment’s hesitation I smiled back: he must, I thought, be some acquaintance from my Venetian past. Confusion spread over the man’s face and he began to explain:

‘ “You are like somebody I know—the Engineer Tremontin—I was to meet him here.”

‘I bowed and we both tried to cover up the awkwardness—he his disappointment, I my pique at being taken for someone else. All at once he smiled:

‘ “Ah ecco! Here he is!” and following his eye I saw a man whose resemblance to me I at once recognized. And yet, I thought, he can’t be really like me—he’s an old man—that white hair, that whitening moustache!—while I’m a young one—and I remembered my age, which, like my friends in Venice, I had taken to concealing, even from myself.

‘It has often happened to me to be mistaken for other men, but never before had my alter ego been almost simultaneously presented to my gaze, giving my vanity no chance to put a flattering interpretation on the likeness. Offence deepened into outrage; I looked with hatred at that Ancient of Days, my double. And the worst of it was we were jammed together in the crowd; and for several minutes, while we shoved or were being shoved towards the end of the arcade, I was forced to look at the greying stubble and the criss-cross wrinkles on the nape of his neck and wonder if mine had them too. Italians deserve their reputation for good manners, and from time to time the couple would turn their heads and made some civil remark, deprecating the crush; but I received these olive-branches so badly that they soon desisted. I was aware of a process of disacquaintance going on in me, which, to judge from their stiffened shoulders and reddening necks was also going on in them, and when we at last debouched it was, I’m sure, with a common hope that we should never, never, never meet again.’

‘You don’t look old,’ I said. ‘No one would ever take you for whatever age it is you are concealing.’ He looked sixty, or thereabouts.

He smiled and answered, ‘I’m not really vain, so it was specially annoying, at that moment, to have to admit I was.

‘My way lay to the left of St. Mark’s, through the Canonica; but to get there I should have to cross the trestle bridge, where progress was visibly slower than it had been even in the arcade. I couldn’t face the sardine tin again, so I picked my way along the high ground of the Piazzetta towards the two columns and the Bacino. It was rather fun, I remember, like walking on a sandbank with the sea coming in both sides. The sea was dark green and white, the gondolas rode madly up and down between their posts, there was, distinct from all the other storm sounds, that unnerving creaking that wood makes scraping against wood; and all along the Molo, almost up to the arches of the Ducal Palace, there was a jagged line of seaweed and orange peel and other vegetable and marine matter, the detritus of the storm. The seashore in Venice! And in contrast to all this untidiness and uproar was a strange Claude-like feature which enchanted me; for where the sea was actually invading the stone floor of Venice, it came not in angry foam-flecked swirls but in tiny level ripples, which advanced with the utmost gentleness at intervals so regular that in the distance they looked like the steps of a staircase—a shallow staircase leading to the sea.

‘Bludgeoned by the blast, I fought my way along the riva, meaning to strike inland when an opening offered—one of them, I knew, would lead to San Severe The insult to my appearance was losing its smart, and I was wondering how I could make a story of it; it would make a good story to celebrate a reunion with an old friend. Not Denys perhaps; his hair was white and his moustache whitening when I last saw him. Nor Miranda; she would not miss the point, but she would not quite see how it affected me, she would generalize and philosophize about it, and perhaps start some theory of doppelgängers. But Lady Porteous—how she would enjoy the malign little episode! How perfectly its malice would accord with hers! She would equally enjoy laughing with me and laughing at me; and from among her inexhaustible annals she would find a much better anecdote to cap it with.

‘I almost wished I had put her first on my itinerary instead of leaving her, like a bonne bouche, till last.

‘Well, I reached my first destination and I reached my second, and was told at each that the person I had come to see had left Italy before the war broke out and never come back. I could have seen them any day in England during the last ten years, but I could not see them in Venice.’

My friend sighed and I sighed with him. Being a happily married man I did not subscribe to his gospel of multiple personal relationships: it seemed to me a pis aller —l was content with one. But I knew how much it meant, or had meant, to him, and perhaps I should have felt still sorrier for him if I also had not been one of his rejects, and had been banished for twelve years, not ten.

‘One has a different self for every friend,’ he was saying. ‘That is their most precious gift to one—a new self. The boredom of being always the same person! I had condemned myself to it all those years—and yet it was not I, it was the war which somehow upset the balance of my feelings, offering them food they would not accept—rationed food, too—and then making what they would once have accepted, unacceptable. A’s name, B’s name, your name, meant as little to me as a column of strange names in the telephone book. I can’t tell you how blighting it was: it’s not much better now.