The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley, Page 63

  ‘You keep stirring your drink with that long mushroom thing,’ she said. ‘What good does it do?’

  ‘It takes the effervescence out.’

  ‘You’ve taken the effervescence out of me. You’ve knocked me sideways. Well, you’re here, and I’m here, so what do we care——’

  ‘You’re too young to remember that song.’

  ‘My father used to sing it. “Well”, as you’re so fond of saying, your friend is at Restbourne with Miss Blackmore—not at the Krazie Café, it shut long ago, and not with me, because I’m here with you. It’s amazing, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘You asked him to meet Miss Blackmore in London—I don’t know what you meant by it—and he’s with another Miss Blackmore at Restbourne. Perhaps he thought we were the same.’

  ‘That’s a question for metaphysics.’

  ‘I don’t understand your long words. But it is odd. But don’t let’s let it spoil our evening. . . . He didn’t tell you what her other name was?’

  ‘No. But I have just one clue. She must look exactly like you.’

  ‘Like me?’

  ‘Yes, or else he wouldn’t be with her.’

  Doris frowned, then suddenly her eyebrows lifted and her whole face shone with understanding.

  ‘Why, it’s my sister!’

  ‘Your sister?’

  ‘You don’t remember much, do you? The twin sister I told you about. The quiet one.’

  ‘I do remember something.’

  ‘I don’t keep up with my family much, especially now. I was never any good at writing letters. . . . But it must be her. The sly-boots! She didn’t like her job, and always had a hankering for the Krazie. Yes, Gladys, that’s who it is. It might almost be me, for she’s the dead image of me.’

  ‘The living image.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right. She always was a close one. But why should she bother to tell me? I didn’t tell her when I went to London. Why write a letter, if you aren’t going to get anything out of it? But she’s a good girl, if you know what I mean, and I hope he’ll be good to her.’

  ‘I’m sure he will.’

  ‘What a chance! It might easily have been me, she’s exactly like me, though not so pretty as I am, some people say. Still, good luck to her.’

  The full magnitude of her loss was becoming clear to Doris, and the Pêche Melba lay untasted on her plate.

  ‘It may be just a passing fancy for both of them,’ I said, but I didn’t believe it.

  ‘I wish I was in her shoes. Some people have all the luck.’

  Our conversation languished. I thought wonderingly of Edward. What must have been the pressure on his feelings, to take him back to Restbourne, when he had been assured the bird had flown! And his blind faith had been rewarded: I felt sure that as long as Gladys lived, the Face would vanish from his doodlings.

  It was getting late. We bandied words for a bit, but there was little zest behind her thrusts and parries. ‘If you knew how I felt about you, you wouldn’t look so pleased with yourself’ was the best she could do.

  ‘It makes you feel old, doesn’t it?’ she said suddenly.

  ‘What does?’

  ‘Oh, I dunno, the whole thing—seeing your sister get married before you do. You think he’ll marry her?’

  ‘I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Jolly good. I never wanted to marry—I’ve seen too many people part—and I don’t expect you do.’

  ‘Well, not at the moment,’ I said ungraciously.

  She sighed musically.

  ‘Too comfortable, I suppose. Well, I don’t blame you. I should like to write to Gladdy, though. We call her Gladdy, or Glad—though she never was glad so as you’d notice. Perhaps she’ll be gladder now. I needn’t tell her what I’m doing here—she doesn’t know, none of them do. But I should like her to know I wish her well. Or do you think I’d better wait until she’s hooked him?’

  ‘I think I should.’

  ‘They might not tell me—but he’ll tell you, won’t he?’

  I saw the implication of this, and said rather unwillingly:

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘So if I don’t hear, you’ll find a way to pass it on. All right? I wonder if they’ll invite me to their wedding.’

  ‘I’ve no doubt they will.’

  ‘The more fools they—I shouldn’t, in their place. I suppose it will be ever such a smart wedding—bang on and whizzo. The real McCoy. Heigh ho!’ She gave her musical sigh, and looked up at the clock. ‘Good lord, I must be off. But I must powder my nose first.’

  ‘Look here,’ I said, when she came back, refurbished, ‘I’ve wasted a lot of your time, and it hasn’t turned out as I thought it would. If you are disappointed, so am I. Now what about a little remembrance?’

  I didn’t have to fumble, I had the notes ready in my pocket.

  ‘I’ve told you before,’ she said, rising, ‘and I don’t mind telling you again, you’ve got no respect for a girl’s feelings. You can keep your blasted money! I shall tell Uncle Harry I was ill, and so I am—you’ve made me ill, and I wouldn’t go back with you, not even if you asked me!’

  She glared at me through unshed tears and for a moment the impression of the Face was so intense that I could hardly see hers for it.

  ‘That’s O.K. by me,’ I said. ‘I don’t like these transports so soon after dinner. They give me indigestion.’

  At that she laughed, and by the time we reached the pavement—now her haunt—we were friends again. Only a few steps to the kerbstone, but how the tap-tapping of her heels betrayed her! And then a passing taxi bore her off.

  THE CORNER CUPBOARD

  It was the first September of the Second War, and Philip Holroyd had decided to leave his flat in London and settle in the country out of the way of the bombs. The place he hit upon was in the West of England, about four miles from a middle-sized market town which he did not think would interest the enemy. Being a bachelor, and as helpless as bachelors generally are, and also a writer, as helpless as writers generally are, he knew he could not fend for himself: he must have a cook and a daily woman. The house, like many other houses, was called the ‘Old Rectory’, and was, of course, much too large for Philip; perhaps he would not have taken it but for the urgency of his desire to get away from London. In September 1939 travelling by train was difficult: he paid the house a brief visit, and when he heard that several other people were after it he took it on the nail, being easily influenced by threats. The pride of the well-worn Victorian furniture was a magnificent doll’s house, but there were some good pieces of an older date, which, occurring haphazard with the rest, and not given any special prominence, gave the place a kind of dignity and unself-consciousness. These included, in the room Philip had marked out for his bedroom, since among other advantages it had the inestimable one of being nearest to the bathroom, an old mahogany bow-fronted corner cupboard, which, unlike some of the cupboards and chests of drawers, was empty of the owner’s possessions. It will do for my medicines, thought Philip, who was something of a hypochondriac.

  To find a cook was his most urgent problem. The woman who had looked after him in London, being cockney-born, refused to leave it. He dreaded the thought of having to get used to a new person; he was too timid to give orders with conviction, but at the same time liked things done his way. Having lived for many years alone, he was not at all adaptable and was prone to make mountains out of molehills. Although in London he had plenty of friends his experience with each had become taped: they neither gave nor took from him anything new. The unpredictable was his bugbear. Unconsciously he had withdrawn into himself and grown a shell, albeit a soft one.

  Days passed with no news from the Registry Office in Shuttleworth; and when at last they wrote that they had found someone who they thought would suit him it was too late for him to go to interview her; the man in the Foreign Office who had taken his London flat was on the point of moving in. So he engaged Mrs. Weaver without seeing her,
but not (as might have happened nowadays) without a reference. ‘She is a woman’, wrote her late employer, with whom she had stayed a year, ‘who needs a good deal of special attention and sympathy which, in our rather large and busy family, she has not always been able to find. She is honest and clean and within her limitations a good cook. Where there is only one in family she would, I think, feel more at home. She responds quickly to encouragement and appreciation. The loss of her husband in the First World War seems to have unsettled her in some ways.’

  In her own letter Mrs. Weaver gave her age as forty-six—which happened to be Philip’s own age—and said that she hoped to be able to oblige him in every possible way. All this predisposed him in her favour; the need for sympathy and attention was one that, in spite of being an egotist, he was quite ready to meet; indeed, he rather fancied himself as a consoler. When he arrived at the Old Rectory she was already installed.

  For the first day or two, in spite of his resolution to ladle out sympathy and appreciation, he didn’t see much of Mrs. Weaver. He was busy trying to assimilate the strangeness of his new surroundings. All those outhouses and stables, which the old rectors had no doubt been able to find a suitable use for; couldn’t, indeed, have done without! That weedy courtyard with its central drain, through which the water (it had been raining plentifully) took so long to run away! And the garden with its towering trees, traversed by a sullen but romantic rivulet, how much too large it was for the gardener who was said to come three times a week! And the emptiness and silence, after London! A car coming by (the house faced the village street) was quite an event; one listened to its entire progress, from the first throb of the engine to the last. And soon, if petrol-rationing really became a fact, these irruptions into the silence would be fewer, almost non-existent! Already he could hear his own footsteps, the footsteps of a single man, walking alone. Isolation made Philip Holroyd busy with his thoughts as never before; they had the intensity of sensations. Then suddenly he remembered Mrs. Weaver and her need for sympathy.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said, going into the kitchen. Flanked by a larder and a pantry and a second kitchen, and having a back-stairs defended by a door opening out of it, it was a room where meals for twenty people might have been prepared. ‘Excuse me,’ he repeated, for he was a man who liked to err on the side of politeness, ‘but I wanted to tell you how very much I enjoyed the supper you gave me last night. The cheese soufflé was a dream, and it is such a test of cooking.’

  Mrs. Weaver looked up at him from the deal table where she was making pastry. Her hands were floury. Her face was round and pink, framed by soft brown hair that was going grey. She parted it in the middle; it was thin and straggled a little, but not untidily. Her figure was short and compact. She had a pleasant, almost sweet expression, which didn’t change much when she spoke.

  ‘I’m glad you liked it,’ she said. ‘I always say that men are easier to cook for than women.’

  ‘Oh, do you think so?’

  ‘Yes, they have better appetites for one thing. My husband——’ She stopped.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘He had a very good appetite. He was a guardsman, you know—in the Grenadiers. He was a fine big man. You remind me of him, sir.’

  Philip was slightly above middle height. A sedentary life had thickened his figure, and doubled his chin, but he couldn’t help being pleased at being compared to a guardsman.

  ‘And for all he was so big,’ went on Mrs. Weaver, ‘he was like a child in some ways. He went on playing with soldiers to the end—he was that proud of his regiment. He hated the Coldstream Guards and wouldn’t hear them mentioned. I nursed him all through his last illness, when the hospital threw him out, saying they could do nothing more for him. I washed him and shaved him and did everything for him. If you were to fall ill, sir——’

  ‘Oh, I hope I shan’t,’ said Philip hastily. ‘But it’s nice to think——’ he didn’t finish the sentence. ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘is there anything you want? Anything I can do for you to make you more comfortable? I’m afraid your room isn’t very comfortable.’

  ‘Oh, no, sir, I’m very happy with you. But there’s just one thing——’

  ‘What is it?’ asked Philip, when she hesitated.

  ‘Well, sir, it sounds so silly.’

  ‘Never mind, I’m often silly myself.’

  ‘I hardly like to tell you.’

  ‘Out with it.’

  ‘It’s the small tortoiseshell butterfly, sir. I can’t bear the sight of it. There was one fluttering about the room when my husband was dying. When I see one I go——’

  Philip took a hasty glance round the darkening kitchen.

  ‘I don’t know much about the habits of small tortoiseshell butterflies,’ he said, ‘but I fancy they only breed once a year, in the summer. If you happen to see a stray one, call me and I’ll get rid of it. I’m quite handy with a butterfly-net.’ He made a mental note to buy one.

  ‘Thank you,’ she answered, without smiling. ‘And I don’t like anything that’s made of tortoiseshell, either. It makes me want to . . .’

  ‘I’ll see there isn’t any,’ said Philip firmly. ‘I’ll go along now and round up every bit I find. There’s a cigarette-box in my sitting-room—But I’m afraid you must be lonely, as well as having too much to do. Mrs. Featherstone is coming in to-morrow, the daily woman, you know. She lives in the village. She’ll be company for you.’

  Mrs. Weaver didn’t seem to welcome this idea.

  ‘At any rate she’ll only be here in the mornings,’ she said.

  Philip bowed himself out and made straight for the cigarette-box. It was a useful object and a nice one, with Cigarettes scribbled across the lid in silver, and silver mountings at the corners. A wedding-present perhaps. But it must go, and so must the buhl clock on the chimney-piece. How bare the room looked without them! What else? Philip ranged the house for the dark, seductive gleam of tortoiseshell, suddenly developing an attachment for the substance that he had never had before; the sense of so many unoccupied rooms all round him gave him an odd feeling; but his search went unrewarded until he came to his own bedroom where, on the dressing-table, lay his comb. He could easily do without it for a day or two; its job was almost a sinecure, he had so little hair. But where to put the culprits so that they shouldn’t offend Mrs. Weaver’s vision and make her do—whatever they did make her do? In the corner cupboard, of course. There she would never see them.

  He opened the two rounded doors, and stood and stared. Unpacking, he had heaped his pharmacopoeia (almost his first thought was for it) on to the two lower shelves of the corner cupboard. He had never counted the separate items but there must be nearly thirty. He hadn’t bothered to set them straight or even to stand all of them up: that was to be for another day, the day until which Philip postponed so many things. And now they were all arranged and tidy.

  Philip’s first reaction was one of gratitude to Mrs. Weaver, who had taken so much trouble for him. His second was more complex. On the middle shelf the medicines had been put in the way that any tidy-minded person might have put them. But on the lowest shelf they had been arranged in a certain order that betrayed intention and design. They had been drawn up in a kind of formation, the tallest bottles lining the cupboard wall, the medium-sized ones in front of them, and at the feet, so to speak, of these, a third row of smaller vessels, jars and tubes and such-like. The two formations faced each other at right angles, and in between was an empty triangular space like a stage, which seemed to be waiting for something to happen.

  Clearly it all meant something: but what did it mean?

  Then the meaning flashed on Philip. The bottles were soldiers, two sides drawn up for combat: and the space between them was a battlefield.

  He smiled at this odd fantasy of Mrs. Weaver’s; it was some kind of psychological legacy from her guardsman-husband, who in his last illness used to play at soldiers. And yet mingling with his amusement was a faint uneasiness; there was too much ten
sion, too much implied enmity in the little scene for it to have been set for comedy. Philip was sensitive to the influence of objects; he responded not only to their aesthetic but to their personal appeal. Among the bits and pieces that he had brought from London was a silk Heriz rug. He liked all Eastern carpets but the silk rugs of Heriz had a special fascination for him, particularly this one. Framing a brick-red ground its border had a scrolling pattern in crimson; and the crimson reappeared in figures on the ground itself together with other colours, palest buff and turquoise blue. But it was the wooing of the two reds that most delighted him. In favoured moments he could get an ecstasy from contemplating it that amounted to a minor mystical experience. The best moment was when he was called; then, tea-cup in hand, he would fix his eyes on the rug beside his bed and await ravishment.

  Here was another kind of symbolism and Philip didn’t altogether like it. . . . But the top shelf was still unoccupied. Into it he put the little clock, the cigarette-box and the comb, all the gleanings of his tortoise-shell harvest. He thrust them to the back, without any regard to military formation, and in front of them erected a barricade of miscellaneous objects—a long roll of cotton-wool in a blue wrapper, some packets of paper handkerchiefs, and other things of vaguely medical use, which effectually obscured them.

  Putting the matter out of his mind he was turning to go when a thought struck him: Why not lock the medicine-cupboard? He went back. The cupboard had a lock, and it had a key; but the key didn’t turn in the lock, and the tongue of the lock had no slot to fit into-the slot had been torn out. Philip frowned. The vandalism of these days! The deception, so characteristic of them, of fitting a sham lock which didn’t do its job! The eyewash! Then he smiled at himself and almost blushed. What had induced him to think of locking the cupboard, as if it was some sort of Bluebeard’s chamber, as if it harboured a threat! It was too silly, and might offend Mrs. Weaver, whose only fault was that she had been kind enough to tidy up for him. Besides, she would have no reason to go to the cupboard again; it would be the daily woman’s job to ‘do’ his bedroom; Mrs. Weaver wasn’t even under contract to ‘do’ his sitting-room—the ‘lounge’ as she called it.