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

‘What was she like?’ I asked. ‘You haven’t told me.’

My friend glanced at me and away again.

‘I couldn’t describe her, you know,’ he said, ‘feature by feature. She was Venice’s reward to me, but she wasn’t typically Venetian. Venetian women are golden and pink and brown and inclined to be plump when they are young: obvious beauties. They are out in the sun so much, they soak it up. Myself I never cared much for . . . for amplitude, or even for warm colours. I like the Alps, you know, with the snow coming down to the pine-forests. And a sailing ship, when you can see the spars and the rigging. Not all sail set, that’s too oncoming and voluminous for my taste. There’s a kind of opulence that’s rather vulgar, I think: well, she didn’t have it. Her colouring was Northern, though her hair was very dark, nearly black. She had a Gothic fragility and fineness, like a saint from Burgundy or Chartres that had somehow strayed into Venice, though of course there is Gothic in Venice. You remember what Vernon Lee said of Venice, that it was difficult to “isolate the enough ”, because of all the claims on one’s attention. Well, it wasn’t so with her. I never felt, with her, that round the corner there might be someone like her. A greeny light filtered into her room, a forest light—just enough to throw a shadow. Too much light hurt her eyes. And yet the room never seemed dark, there was so much white in it. I thought of it as a grove of silver birches. The walls were nearly white, the furniture was white, the muslin on the dressing-table was white, the bed-cover was white, and she . . .’ he hesitated. ‘She was a little pale.’

‘And the white wand,’ I asked, ‘that you thought you saw tossed about among the green? Did you ever find out what that was? Was it an enchanter’s wand?’

He took a long breath and said with difficulty:

‘I think it may have been her arm. She was rather thin, you see.’

After a pause, I said:

‘I understand the need for secrecy, and I can understand how it gave . . . at least how it didn’t take away from the zest of the affair.’

An expression of distaste crossed my friend’s face but I did not regret what I had said. Most of the lovers I have known have thought there was something sacrosanct about their relationship and the word ‘affair’ was too common to describe it.

‘But,’ I went on, ‘didn’t you get tired of meeting always in the same room? And wasn’t it even a little risky? I mean, I don’t know Venice well, but I should have thought it offered quite a number of retreats for clandestine couples—all those arches, and doorways, and dark entries.’

‘You’re right,’ he said, ‘it does. There are those places, and one seldom passes them, at night, without seeing a couple whispering in them. We often used to talk about Venice—of course she knew it much better than I did. And we went everywhere, you know, to—to the restaurants, and the churches and the islands. And we made expeditions to the mainland too, to Malcontenta and Maser and Asolo and Aquileia—all those places. We lingered a long time at the great gateway in the garden of Valsanzibio that looks towards Padua—the only place I know where the reality is equal to one’s memory and expectations of it. Wherever we went, she was the genius loci ; she knew just what to look for and how to feel and what to say. Oh, she was a wonderful guide and there was no fear, going with her, that the churches or the picture galleries would be shut, or that it would be raining; she knew the right day and the right time to choose. I have travelled a lot, as you know, but I’ve never travelled with anyone as far as I did with her never so far afield, never so far from my own base, so to speak.’

‘But did you really go about like this?’ I asked him. ‘I somehow thought——’ Suddenly I wondered if he had imagined the whole thing. He looked at me oddly and the light died from his face.

‘No,’ he said. ‘We didn’t. It wasn’t real, that part. You see, she was a cripple. She’d had an illness, and she was a cripple.’

I cannot say how painfully, how disagreeably, this disclosure affected me. It was almost as if he had told me he had been in love with a skeleton. And I was angry with myself for not having foreseen it—for it, or something like it, was implicit in everything my friend had told me. I was angry because I had been taken in, angry because he had warned me I should be angry, angry with myself for being angry. I didn’t know what to say, or where or how to look; I did not try to meet his eye.

To my intense relief he did not seem to notice my confusion, and went on:

‘But the rest was real, the one real thing in my life. If only I had foreseen what was coming! If only I had given Adele, straight away, the tip that I meant to give her at the end! Only I didn’t foresee an end. The time-factor had ceased to exist for me; I felt I should stay in Venice all my life. Perhaps Adele felt that too; perhaps she saw the prospect of her tip receding into the dateless future. Afterwards, she was full of excuses She said she never knew him come at that hour. She said he——’

‘Who?’ I asked.

My friend stared at me as though he couldn’t believe I didn’t know. ‘The doctor. She said he found the flat door open and just walked in. But she contradicted herself, she gave herself away, for she also said she was alarmed for her mistress’s state, thereby admitting she had told the doctor. It was all such nonsense! Every time she saw me——’

‘Every time who saw you?’ I interrupted. ‘The maid, or . . . or . . . You haven’t told me her name.’

‘I couldn’t,’ he answered. ‘At least, I’d rather not. Fate has some power over a name. But she . . . she said that never in her life had she felt so well. Life-giver was one of her names for me: she had so many!’

My friend bent his outraged, protesting gaze on mine, but I looked away, I could not meet his eye: he did not look at all life-giving then. ‘And I could tell, too: I’m not a fool, am I?’ he went on. ‘Didn’t I look at her with a doctor’s eye, as well as with a lover’s? I couldn’t have been mistaken. I noticed every little change, and they were all changes towards health. How could it have been otherwise, when we were drawing all this glory down on us? How could all the other elements have united for her benefit, and one not? I said so to the doctor, once we were out of ear-shot. “You are a physician,” I said, “don’t you know that a patient’s surest road to recovery is happiness? Do you deny,” I said, “that she is happy, now, as she has never been happy before?”

‘But he wouldn’t listen to me; he kept on saying he would allow us one more meeting: “un solo incontro, un solo incontro”. Then I got angry and asked him by what right he was depriving us of this blessing? We walked up and down the vestibule between the Victorian and Edwardian ladies and gentlemen whose coloured photographs hung on the walls. He became as agitated as I was, and poured out a flood of medical terms of which I understood very little. The shock alone, he said, might have killed her. I was still trembling from the shock myself, the irruption into our birch-grove of this alien figure, parting the branches, with the heat and dust and hurry of the streets still on him, holding his professional bag of tricks, wearing, until he saw us, his professional air of wary optimism. It might have been worse, it might have been much worse; but it was bad enough—the secret not only out, but you might say, exploding round us, and the sudden necessity we were under for the first time, to speak, almost to explain ourselves, to a third person.

‘ “I must go back to her,” said the doctor, glancing impatiently at the closed door behind us; but he wouldn’t hear of my going back, not then.