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

An hour later there came a tap on my bedroom door. It was Oswald again. He peeped in furtively, as though fearful of committing a trespass on my absolute occupation.

‘You’re sure you don’t mind?’

‘What?’

‘Changing for dinner. I was afraid you might think it silly and pretentious when we’re just to ourselves.’

‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘I expected to. Look at all my finery. It would have broken my heart not to wear it.’

Still as if on sufferance, he sidled appreciably farther into the warm, light, admirably appointed room.

‘Oh, so he has put them out for you. Then that’s all right. And it suits you, dining at eight?’

That had been the object of his first visit, to obtain my sanction for the hour of dinner.

‘Eight o’clock is quite my favourite time,’ I assured him.

‘Good,’ he said, and discreetly withdrew.

Ever since he had greeted me on the steps of that solid red-brick house, voluble explaining and regretting his failure to meet me at the station, he had been—he had ‘gone on’, I felt inclined to say—like that. Apologetic, conciliatory, concerned, he had raised point after point, problem after problem, neglect of which, he seemed to think, would jeopardize my happiness. And though I had tried to meet his misgivings half-way with contra-assertions and confirmations, I couldn’t convince him that I was satisfied, that I had made up my mind, as it were, to stay. He seemed to think that at the smallest domestic rub or breakdown, failure of the bell to ring or of the bath water to boil, I should stalk out of the house. The utmost he seemed to expect of me, his guest, was that I should consent to remain, that, like a captious newly-engaged servant, I should waive my prerogative of impermanence and ‘settle’.

At first I was flattered. It hardly seemed necessary to congratulate myself on my success, it had come so easily. I even planned, in the interval before dinner, to write to my unluckier friends and tell them how deeply I had struck my roots. They, no doubt, had had to clean their own boots and wash at the pump in the stable-yard; whereas I was met at every turn by gratifying traces of the slaughter of the fatted calf. For them Oswald had been at his most casual—indifferent, irresponsible, careless of their creature comforts. For me, how different. In compliment to me he had put off his ordinary manner, the genial feckleness that sat on him so light, and assumed the air of an anxious housewife bristling (so far as his sobered attenuated demeanour allowed him to bristle) with petits soins . They were even embarrassing, these attentions, in their insistence, in their hydra-like quality of springing up double where one had been scotched. And so I went on, multiplying the instances, deepening the contrast, until the sound of a bell, hastily smothered like a rising indiscretion, invited me to dinner.

It was to be the keynote of my visit, I reflected, as I lay in bed—invitation. The bell had invited me to dinner; Oswald’s man had invited me to take wine. Oswald himself in his first remarks, delivered ever so courteously across the oval table, had the air of inviting reply. He began:

‘Perhaps you’ve never been in this part of the world before?’

I was encouraged to say ‘No.’

After a moment’s reflection in which, I supposed, he was passing the countryside in review, he said:

‘There’s Clum Abbey near by; would you care to see it?’ I hesitated, not wholly from lukewarmness but because I was at a loss how to frame my answer, how to appear politely eager. He misinterpreted my silence. ‘Don’t feel obliged,’ he said; ‘only I generally take people there.’

Was this a threat? I longed to say, ‘Take me anywhere else.’ To my lively apprehensions the innocent ruin took on the hues and horrors of a Blue Chamber. But I complied; I succumbed to Clum.

Other invitations had followed: to smoke, to inspect the house, to play picquet, to take the younger hand first, to name the stakes.

‘Give me some indication,’ I said, wishing that he hadn’t, after the insinuating fashion of the odd-job man, ‘left it to me’.

‘Do you think a shilling?’

‘A point?’

‘Just as you like,’ he said.

I saw myself a financial cripple, perhaps a bankrupt; but it seemed impossible without vulgarizing the lofty accent of our intercourse, to suggest a humbler sum.

‘The game generally ends all square, doesn’t it?’ I said, flying in the face of experience.

‘I have known it not,’ he admitted.

‘You think, perhaps——?’ Longingly I eyed the ignoble straw, not daring to clutch it. But he had seen it too.

‘Well, I really meant a shilling a hundred.’

We were saved. But with what expense of spirit, with what reckless doles of hostages to misunderstanding! The appearance of whisky, with all its mitigating accessories, turned on a cascade of major and minor invitations. Fortunately for this contingency I was armed with ready desires; I directed, encouraged and restrained with a will; and, as a small return on my former prodigious outlay of reluctant adaptability, I did find the water hotter the whisky smoother, the sugar sweeter, the whole brew more grateful and harmonious, for the fact that it had been extracted, fought for, out of the inmost pattern and texture of polite behaviour. It was a stolen water, and if I had received it with some natural colloquialism such as ‘Whisky, not half!’ it would have tasted brackish and bitter. Instead, all the pleased propitiated forces of convention and propriety came to its aid, and poured their cautious sweetness into the cup. When, like a climacteric, the last invitation came, the invitation to bed, final and inevitable as I felt it to be, I detected stirrings of revolt, I almost jibbed. A defiant impulse came to me, as it might come to one on the summons of the Last Trump, to turn a deaf ear, to tender a qualified compliance, to suggest an alternative; almost to refuse.

But here I was in bed, and I had gone quietly enough. Refusal! that was the obverse of the golden coin that we had tossed each other, with rigid dexterity, throughout the evening. But only at the last had I managed to catch a glimpse of it; invitation’s suave, deferential head was ever uppermost. I pondered over classical invitations: Weber’s to the Valse; Shelley’s less specifically to Jane. They didn’t help because, from their buoyant confident tone one could see they didn’t contemplate a refusal. But to all Oswald’s invitations an engraved, an almost embossed R.S.V.P., was palpably subscribed. If he had just said ‘Come away!’ without troubling to call me ‘best and brightest’ or comparing the weather unfavourably with me, I would have gone with a light heart, ready for any enterprise, even excavations at Clum. Or if he had piped to me in Weber’s florid strain I would have cried shame on my poor spirit, and plunged into the dance. And that was what he would have done before my visit, or the mysterious cause that determined my visit, had cast its blighting spell. I should have been given no time to decide; my hesitations and doubts would have been overridden or tossed aside, my self-consciousness anaesthetized. Instead of losing myself in this delirious experience I was condemned to sit eating unpalatable blackberries at a respectful distance from the still smouldering embers of the Burning Bush—for its blaze and crackle illuminated memory, unquenched by the berries’ bitter juice. And for music I had the refrain of ‘Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, join,’ well what? The figured, frigid capering of conventional ghosts. I didn’t want to, and I didn’t want not to. Oswald flattered himself when he took such elaborate precautions against a possible refusal. It was a strain, too, negotiating his insipid proposals, threading my way through the tiresome labyrinth that promised no Minotaur.