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

‘Yes, Rupert?’

‘Oh, Uncle Tim,’ said the child, and stopped, as though hypnotized by his own incantation.

‘Well, Rupert?’

‘I want an apple,’ announced Rupert, with an air of detachment, and as though fetching his thoughts from afar. He proceeded with quick gasps. ‘I want you to get me one. They’re right up on the tree. Silly old tree!’

‘Why is the tree silly?’ asked Uncle Tim. He tried to speak indulgently, but a shadow of annoyance crossed his face.

‘Because I can’t get the apples,’ answered Rupert, his voice growing shrill. ‘Do come, Uncle Tim, please. I did say please.’

Uncle Tim was moving away when Rupert called him back.

‘Uncle Tim! Come through the window, it’s ever so much quicker. I must have the apples . . . I want them. I’ve wanted them ever since breakfast!’

‘I’m afraid I’m not an acrobat,’ said Uncle Tim.

‘You’re always thinking about your silly old leg,’ argued Rupert. ‘Mummy says so. It won’t hurt you.’

‘I’m not going to give it a chance,’ said Uncle Tim, and he definitely withdrew.

Rupert was standing by the apple tree when his uncle arrived, leaning against it with one hand as though to introduce it to its despoiler. Around him on the grass lay instruments of assault, stones, sticks, toy bricks, even a doll that belonged to his little sister. There was a horrible gaping hole in its brilliant cheek, and its dress wanted smoothing down. Overhead the apples gleamed in the morning sunlight, each with a kind of halo, intolerably bright.

Uncle Tim steadied himself against the lichen-coated trunk and shook it. The rigid trunk gave a little and vibrated with a strong shudder, as though in pain; the apples tossed, noiselessly knocking each other in frantic mirth. But not one fell. Flushed with his effort, Uncle Tim turned and saw Rupert, his face parallel with the sky, staring into the branches with a bemused expression.

‘Why, they’re not ripe,’ said Uncle Tim. ‘They won’t be ripe for a month.’

Rupert’s jaw dropped and his face crinkled like a pond when a breeze crosses it.

‘Don’t cry, Rupert,’ said Uncle Tim. ‘In a month’s time you’ll have heaps; you won’t know what to do with them, there’ll be so many.’

‘I shan’t want them then,’ said Rupert. ‘I want them now.’ He burst into tears.

The passing of thirty years had made a difference to the apple tree; even by the light of the candles Uncle Tim noticed that. There were five candles: four on the bridge-table and one on the improvised sideboard that held, rather precariously, the glasses and decanters. The tree seemed to have shrunk. Some of its lower boughs were dead; its plumpness was gone; its attitude was set and strained; its bark less adhesive. Even its leaves were sparse and small. But Rupert had bloomed. Not into a passion-flower, exactly, thought Uncle Tim, pausing just beyond the reach of the candle-light. The September night was dark, and very warm and still; the unwinking flames irradiated dully the great orb of Rupert’s face. It glowed like tarnished copper and seemed of one colour with his lips, as his features shared their generous contours. His head lolled on the back of a basket-chair whose cushioned rim creaked beneath its weight; but his half-closed eyes, independent of those movements, never left his partner. She was playing the hand, but at times her jewelled fingers came abruptly across, twitching her fur with a gesture always provisional, always repeated. Suddenly she stopped.

‘Four,’ said Rupert. ‘That’s the rubber.’

Uncle Tim came out of the shadow.

‘Isn’t it very damp?’ he said. ‘And rather late? It’s nearly three.’

Rupert was adding up the score and nobody spoke. At last Rupert said, ‘I make it twelve hundred. Anybody got anything different?’

No one challenged the score.

‘How do you feel about another?’ Rupert asked, still ignoring Uncle Tim.

The man on Rupert’s left found his voice.

‘It depends what you mean by another. Another whisky, yes.’

‘Help yourself,’ said Rupert, ‘and get me one too. It’s Crème de Menthe for you, Birdie?’

‘I don’t mind,’ said the lady so addressed.

During the pause that followed Rupert lit a cigar with great deliberation.

‘Well, who’s for going on?’ he asked. Again there was a silence, broken finally by the other woman. She spoke in a tone that sounded extraordinarily cool and sweet.

‘I think your uncle would like us to go in.’

‘Oh, him,’ said Rupert, rising heavily from his chair. ‘He has such Vic—Victorian ideas. Haven’t you, Uncle Tim?’

‘I don’t want to influence you,’ said Uncle Tim. ‘I only thought you mightn’t have noticed how late it was.’

‘Yes, it is late, deuced late,’ Rupert drawled, refilling his glass. ‘That’s what I like about it. Whisky, Uncle Tim? Drown your sorrows.’ He held the glass out with an unsteady hand. Meanwhile all the players had risen.

‘I want to go to bye-bye,’ said the other man.

‘Put me in my little bed,’ carolled Birdie, and they laughed.

Everyone blew out a candle except Rupert, who could not extinguish his, and finally knocked it on to the ground where it continued to burn until smothered by his foot. The sudden darkness was confusing. Even Uncle Tim felt it; but Rupert lost his balance and fell heavily against the trunk of the apple tree. It seemed as though all the fruit had ripened simultaneously. It thudded softly on the turf, pattered sharply on the card-table, and crashed among the glasses. Uncle Tim struck a match to ascertain the damage. It was negligible. The fruit was lying all round in pre-Raphaelite profusion. Rupert recovered himself.

‘Apples!’ he cried. ‘Look at those bloody apples!’ He stooped to pick one up, but his stomach revolted from it and, clutching the tree, he tossed it, wounded by his teeth, away into the darkness.

The match went out.

‘What about these things?’ called Uncle Tim, who could not keep pace with the others. It was beginning to rain. ‘Shall I leave them, Rupert?’ There was no answer.

It could not have been long after midnight when I found myself awake, and so thoroughly awake, too. I did not feel the misty withdrawal or the drowsy approaches of sleep. I had apparently been reasoning, for some seconds, with admirable lucidity on the practical question: how had I come to wake up? The night was still. The ridiculous acorn-shaped appendage to the blind-cord no longer flapped in its eddying elliptical movement. And what of that odious bluebottle fly? Doubtless it had crept into some corner, a fold in the valance, perhaps. I could not believe it was asleep. It might be scratching itself with one foot, in the way flies have; a curious gesture that seems to imply a kind of equivocal familiarity with oneself—an insulting salute, a greeting one couldn’t possibly acknowledge. Flies have a flair for putrefaction; what had brought this one to my bedside, what strange prescience had inspired its sharp, virulent rushes and brought that note of deadly exultation into its buzz? It had been all I could do to keep the creature off my face. Now it was biding its time, but my ears were apprehensive for the renewal of its message of mortality, its monotonous memento mori . That spray of virginia creeper, too, had apparently given up its desultory, stealthy, importunate attack upon the window. Perhaps it had annoyed the window-cleaner, and he, realizing the trouble it gave, had cut it off and dropped it to lie withering on the grass. I seemed to see its shrivelled, upturned leaves, its pathetic, strained curve of a creature that curls up to die. . . . Surely this was not particularly sensible. A thought came to me suddenly.