A Change of Ownership by L.P. Hartley

A CHANGE OF OWNERSHIP

“; it oozes a kind of bright sticky froth, and if you could bring yourself to do it, you could shove your arm in up to the elbow….”

“…perhaps shared a bedroom with three or four others, perhaps even a bed! What fun for him, after these constricted years, to come home to a big house of his own,…”

Now “no vociferous callboys, no youthful blades returning singing after a wet night.” Where has this story been all my life? It is a genuine classic of the weird gestalt! No ifs, no buts, nor even any passion of a reading moment to be used as a reason! It is what it is and ever will be. Of its times. I could quote it all! An amalgam of Robert Aickman, Elizabeth Bowen and, indeed, Charles Wilkinson’s house ownership torts etc. 

A tale of the different natures of loneliness and aloneness. A tale of Ernest, the supposed New Proprietor of a property after a life of laddish flat sharing, a very large, many-roomed property with a tower in a semi-rural street, and frightening, politically reprehensible sash windows (“the windows being visible as patches of intense black, like eyeless sockets in a negro’s face”) and a high box room with ‘vulnerable’ entry point for feet foremost or knees foremost or even elbows, with lackadaisical health and safety concerns relating especially to the use of its gas supply. Ernest arrives home in Hubert’s seemingly prehensile car after a stuffy night in the theatre, and they flirt together almost beyond naive bromance, tantalisingly debating whether to stay together for the night. And there are “important shadows”, a sensitivity to time ticking like clocks or ticking like gas meters, and “Number double o double o infinity” as a missing telephone number. And a lawn the gardener would find difficult to mow, a potential landscape to match our severe drought today: “it was like the form of an enormous hare, and each blade of grass was broken-backed and sallow, as though the juice had been squeezed out of it.” — “And of course he likes the trees; he doesn’t notice that the branches are black and dead at the tips, as though the life of the tree were ebbing, dropping back into its trunk, like a failing fountain.”

With Hubert gone, and Ernest locked out by what he had left as an unlocked house, locked by someone who has locked it from within, like this very story itself, he makes the most dangerous climb and grappling with windows, and frightening visions of hands halting his way inside. The house seems as prehensile with sounds and motives as Hubert’s car, with Ernest tantamount to becoming its burglar. Burgling himself, as it were. The puckish inverse of Puck of Stithies. Or he has become his own wicked policeman? Elbows first. “Half kneeling, half supporting himself on his elbows,…” an elbow moment that presages much genuine horror about loneliness and aloneness and self-identity as he seeks entry — and makes me think that the smeared marks the charlady finds at the end upon the box room window are really elbows!

“The imprint of a man’s knees perhaps?”

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The full context of this review: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/08/04/the-travelling-grave-and-other-stories-by-l-p-hartley/#comment-25202