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

‘Where was I? Oh, yes, under the statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni, one of the two great equestrian statues of the world. Was there friendship in it? There was not. There was pride, and insolence, and success, and glory; the glory of war and conquest: every quality the statue had, except the quality of art, repudiated every quality I valued. I nearly turned back; but then I remembered Lady Porteous and the extraordinary power that she had, and that her house had, of imposing their standards on one. They were not standards I would be altogether prepared to defend; they were worldly, they were snobbish, they were based on exclusiveness.

‘Do you want me to go on?’ he asked, suddenly and resentfully. ‘I suppose you know what’s coming?’

‘I’ve not the faintest idea,’ I said.

‘Well, what Lady Porteous had—what even her husband Sir Hilary, the light-weight satellite who circled round her, had—was the gift of imparting her own sense of superiority. She made one a present of it—her wealth, her cleverness, her taste, her ability to see everyone as stuck at various levels lower than her own, struggling to reach hers, and failing. Humour was her weapon; she knew something about everyone that made them slightly absurd; the most august figures of our acquaintance, the most feared and revered figures in the world outside—Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin—seemed figures of fun when Caroline Porteous had done with them. There was a story, which I did not believe, that Mussolini had once called on her and had not been received. She obviously liked the story, would not altogether deny it, but she was too clever to authenticate it. Her version was that it was a muddle on the part of the servants, who were so overcome by the visitor’s identity that when they announced him to her they got his name wrong. She would have admitted him, I’m sure. But “No Admittance” was her watchword. How ignoble, you will say, but it wasn’t altogether, for along with much which hadn’t the polish or the glitter to get in, she kept out a lot of things that were better kept out. She had a sort of moral shrewdness, though she was apt to relax her standards in favour of those whom she ironically termed “the great”. Anyhow she had never kept me out, or only once or twice, and suddenly I felt an intense longing for her immense blue drawing-room. You could say it looked out on to the garden and the lagoon; but it would be truer to say that the garden and the lagoon looked into it—they had too much personality, they had sat too often for their portraits, by Guardi and others, to be merely landscapes. She was a little jealous of them, these illustrious outsiders (she would have thought it bourgeois not to be jealous) and didn’t like one looking at them too much.

‘ “What am I here for?” she would ask, plaintively, if one stared out of the window. But she was also proud of them, and if one didn’t look, and kept one’s eyes in the boat, so to speak, she would grow restive and say: “You’ve not looked at the garden. But then you’re not interested in gardens.” One never quite knew where one was with her.

‘How invulnerable she was, or seemed to be! And as one sat, listening to her unpredictable malice, which always had the note of collusion in it, one was almost aware of the subject’s accessories strewn about the floor, as in a picture by Velasquez: the shield, the breastplate, the gauntlets—all the apparatus of defence. And as one by one the idols were thrown down, by hints at this or that little weakness, laughable and belittling, so, piece by piece, one put on the whole armour—not of righteousness, for Lady Porteous was too mundane to clothe herself in that—but of ridicule, which in some circumstances is a defence hardly less strong. I always left her feeling twice the man I was, for she had established the fallibility of mankind on such a firm foundation that with her one could laugh at anything, even at death itself. Indeed, I remember once writing an imaginary dialogue in which Death called at Lady Porteous’s palazzo and was told he could not be received as he lacked the necessary social qualifications—he was in fact too common . So, snubbed, he turned away, leaving her immortal. I used to wonder whether I could show her this, for in certain moods she enjoyed a joke against herself, though she preferred that she should tell it.

‘But I found that in my absence he had called, and had not been turned away; indeed, he had called twice and of the two it was the frail Sir Hilary who had put up the stiffer fight. The joke had been turned against Lady Porteous at last.

‘And it had been turned against me, for I had boasted, not quite truthfully, that she was always at home to me. Perhaps her spirit enjoyed the joke, for she never liked one to call without having rung up first. “I might be out if you didn’t ring up,” she threatened. But Death hadn’t been civil enough to make an appointment with her: she died of a stroke, I was told.

‘I left the palace to its alien occupants,’ my friend said, ‘and got home somehow, feeling half the man I was. I hadn’t counted on the weakening effect of my illness, and the long walk, punctuated by disappointments, was too much for me. I seemed to see “No Admittance” written on every door I passed. Closed doors, closed shutters, iron grilles, cats grimacing at me from behind the grilles: Venice on a wet day is barred like a fortress. I took to my bed again and was too much discouraged to write to my other friends who, in any case, didn’t conjure up the real meaning of the word. But the expedition had created in me a hunger which I couldn’t assuage. The idea of death haunted me as it sometimes does in Venice: the churches, the bells, the beauty, the overwhelming vitality of the people: all this insistence on what the senses can give one, on life: if one cannot accept it, what remains but its opposite, death? In Northern countries there are so many degrees of living: one can turn life down, like a gas-fire, and live by its dull glow: but Italy is a land of contrasts, not of half-tones. I felt that time was pressing and I had a legacy to give someone: myself.

‘For my second convalescence I returned to my first window and when I looked out it wasn’t in the spirit of a railway passenger, finding something in everything, pleased with just seeing: I had a particular object in view. Only the object was not in view. The palace had twenty-seven windows visible from my flat: it was not exactly opposite, it stood at a slight angle and the windows on the nearer side of the deep courtyard were hidden from me. Those I could see, and from which I could be seen, were of many shapes and sizes, some as tall as a modest-sized house, some squat and longitudinal. I scanned them all, and from time to time I would get up and lean out of my window and wave; and then, dazzled by the glare outside, turn back blinking into what seemed the darkness of my own room. But there was never an answering gesture.

‘My month in Venice was running out and I had nothing to show for it. I had scarcely written a word. I had been ill and got better, I had been ill and got better, and I had made one expedition into Venice; otherwise my existence had been as pointless and unfruitful as the Lady of Shalott’s, and far less decorative: you could not have made a poem out of it, you could not have made anything. All I had to show was the money I had ear-marked for Antonio’s wages. On this I could live beyond the time-limit I had prescribed for myself. It was the fruit—the very tangible fruit—of my quarrel with Antonio, and as such had a bitter taste. A sense of utter futility and failure possessed me. It was both personal and moral. Moral for the feeling of time wasted that haunts every unproductive artist: that I was used to. And personally I was a failure: I hadn’t made any contacts. I was used to that, too. But I was not so used to the idea of having let myself down by letting someone else down. La signorina sconosciuta who had found my appearance so interesting and who was so sure that I was interested in her: yielding to a small, spiteful impulse, I had snubbed her, I had rebuffed her, I had taken the line that my privacy was sacrosanct, I had behaved as if a chorus of admirers was egging me on.