A Game of Hide and Seek (11 page)

Outside, on the main road, cars went by like arrows. It had begun to rain, so that the gravel crunched loosely as they crossed the car-park. When they had said goodbye, Kitty bent and smiled an extra smile at Harriet through the car window, then she drew her collar up round her head and walked away.

Charles drove in his usual silent, steady manner, through a village where the cottages came up flat to meet them in the lamplight, the branches of the trees seemed painted.

Harriet loved this driving at night. This hastening through empty villages and then the deserted streets of the town, was the most undemanding pleasure, like watching a beautiful film without a plot.

Only through the fan-shaped spaces on the wind-screen did the outside scene appear. The rest of the glass was pearly with rain and steamed, so that they seemed cut off from the world in the closest intimacy.

‘Are you happy?' Charles asked.

‘Yes, I do feel very happy.'

Yet when he drove the car under some trees, with the dripping branches all round them and, as he switched off the engines, the sound of the rain on the roof of the car, she felt dismayed and oppressed. This hackneyed situation – according to the girls at the shop – seemed unbelievable in reference to herself.

He turned to face her, an elbow on the back of his seat. Nervily, she awaited the next move, hysterical almost with embarrassment and the sense of their strangeness to one another. Regarding her steadily, his hands breast-high, knuckles interlocked, his thoughts about her seemed explicit upon his face. She watched the tightening of his hands, warily; his signet-ring, his eyes in the ghostly light.

‘I wonder,' he said, ‘how you think of me, if you ever do think of me? Is it as hopelessly older than yourself? As beyond all question older?'

‘I don't think of your age.'

‘My mother has told you, I expect . . . it always delighted her to tell the story . . . I was once just going to marry a girl, but a week before the wedding she went off, abroad.'

‘I am so very sorry,' she said.

‘Did my mother tell you?' he persisted.

‘No.'

‘Perhaps at last she's squeezed all her pleasure from the incident. She didn't go alone; Mavis, this girl, I mean. The appalling thing was that she went off with a friend of mine. I am so sorry to be telling you all this. I expect it is embarrassing to you . . .'

‘No. I only do not know what to say.'

‘There isn't any more to be said by anybody. Though I wanted to tell you.'

He took her hand and held it for a moment against his cheek. ‘I never did love anybody else,' he continued, moving her hand round and kissing it: his eyes shut, his face very stern, she could see in the faint light. ‘Jealousy is the most absurd pain of all. How one resents it! To be made to suffer it in public – the public indignity, the private pain. The shock of it lays dreadful waste in one's soul; it discolours the whole world, cancels every remembrance of tenderness. One becomes so utterly self-tormenting with doubts and questions . . .'

‘Surely it goes in the end?' she asked. ‘Surely now it is better?'

‘Now? Yes, now it is quite over. But for some residue.' He raised his eyes and looked at her. ‘It has its horrible consequences in one's behaviour, one's fears for the future, one's negative caution, one's refusal,' he said, and he clasped his fingers very tightly round her wrist as if in an effort to command himself, ‘one's refusal to commit oneself.'

As soon as he began to make love to her, her nervousness left her. What she had dreaded in suspense and embarrassment, she now fastened to. She embraced him with an erratic but extortionate passion. He was profoundly moved, though shocked, by her desperation, and felt pity for her and a sense of responsibility. But to her, life seemed all at once simplified. She was elevated and appeased.

‘Harriet! Harriet darling!'

But she would not speak to him or say his name as he so wished her to. She clung to him as if something, somebody, might impinge upon them and disrupt them. Was it not Joseph's voice calling up from that garden, echoing round that empty room? When she realised that it was, she shuddered and slackened in his arms. He construed this wrongly, as he always was to, and could not hope to do otherwise.

She sat now as still as a stone, her face furrowed and perplexed.

‘Harriet?'

‘I am so cold.' She began to chafe her wrists and she laughed and looked up at him, her eyes brimming.

‘I will buy you a muff,' he said. He stroked her cheekbone with the tip of his finger. ‘How would that be?'

Charles was much respected in the little town where he worked. Solid, serious, astute, he was a strange son for his mother to have borne, people felt. That she was an embarrassment to him, they could easily understand: that there was war between them few realised – war which stimulated Julia and bore her up; but which had effects of prolonged nervous strain upon her son.

As a young wife, imperious, selfish, dissatisfied, Julia had left her husband and gone back to the stage, taking her baby with her. His early life of dressing-rooms, dozing in hampers, long journeys, being petted by sentimental and uncaring ladies; then, later boarding-school, where Julia never sent a letter to him or a cake on his birthday; holidays with aunts; deprived always of his father: still none of this seemed to leave any visible mark upon him. He worked hard; was the child, one might have thought, of ambitious parents who had his future much under consideration. Other boys liked him, as now other men respected him. He grew to resemble his father in appearance: his reddish hair sprang from his forehead in the same arching line. It was uncanny, Julia thought, that even his mannerisms, his haughty glance at the backs of his hands, his way of stifling yawns, were so exactly reproduced from his father, whom he never saw; who, at last, died. We are complete in the womb itself, she thought in terror. We only unfold. This seemed monstrous to her, repulsive. She liked to think that she had evolved herself, gesture by gesture, thought by thought: tempered, made exquisite by the passing years. But her son had grown out-of-hand. Beyond her influence, undeterred, his father unfolded in him. He put on the signet-ring his father had left to him: he stood on the hearthrug as his father had stood: he followed his father's profession.

Julia tired at last. It had been a strenuous life she had led, with little leisure, too much emotion. She set up house with Charles. If he had known, she did not expect him to tolerate her as he did: he need not have done so. But he had different standards, his father's standards. Not for one moment did he hesitate to do what was so distasteful to him – to live under the same roof as her. Her reasons – economy, loneliness – meant nothing to him. Convention, not convenience, swayed him. It was what his father would have done. If he had been married, the matter would have been arranged differently: then different conventions would have predominated, another allegiance held him. But as he was quite alone, he gave up his lodgings; he found the house in the country near his work. His mother filled it with what he thought rubbishy furniture. His own taste was nowhere reflected – it was richer, more solid, inclined to mahogany and leather and red serge: as in his office, where he loved to be, was happiest.

To draw attention to herself had been Julia's life. Teamwork had meant the rest of the cast yielding the centre of the stage to her. As she grew older, her parts limited, she had a wonderful power to disrupt a play, even though she appeared in one act only. The applause, when she walked on, broke all dramatic sequence; her little cameo, as she thought of it, knocked it lop-sided. Her curtain, on her own, was something from another world; for old time's sake, the audience responded: younger actresses were unable to combat the atmosphere of nostalgia. They seemed, beside her, to have only competence.

She could not now reorientate her days without applause. It was as if the sound of clapping were necessary to make her blood flow. Without an audience she was nothing, and she had no audience. Her son was immune to her. She quite failed to captivate the country people, though she had tried at first. She thought that she was ignored. No one asked her to be the president of anything; or to sit on the Bench, which she had intended to do with beautiful mercy, a lovely humanity. She was not even required to open a bazaar, and soon was tired of the Women's Institute which was all she was ever invited to. Listening to other women reading minutes with regrettable diction and phrasing, in sturdy, monotonous voices, or demonstrating how to make deplorable objects such as felt slippers, rabbit's-fur tippets or gollywogs out of old stockings, drove her to an undisguised frenzy. Even at tea-time, all she heard was how pleasant it must be for her to live with her son. Maddened by quite ordinary women, as she thought of them – the lady of the Manor who looked as if she had been bred in her own stables; bossy farmers' wives; Caroline and Lilian, full of earnest talk about child-welfare – she sat with her eyes shut, thinking how hard the chair was. A lot of cottage-women! They made speeches while she remained silent. At tea, no one deferred to her. She was asked to take her turn at washing-up.

‘I could never go again,' she told Charles in the evening. ‘That awful village hall and all those dretful women smelling of the lunches they'd just cooked. One's own gardener's wife telling one to pass things along – you know, they hand their repulsive exhibits round, so that one can see how to make them – as if one ever would! Carpet-slippers, I think they called them. Quite unnecessary.'

Boredom drove her for a while to illness. She often had her hand pressed to her ribs – a fatiguing but unspecified complaint. The pain began to be there, even when she was alone. ‘You should see a doctor,' Charles said, passing the buck.

‘
Are
there doctors in the country?' she asked scornfully.

‘Does Charles take care of you nicely?' she said to Harriet one day.

She was walking about the room, a little cushion in her hand, the fringe she was sewing to it trailing after her on the ground.

‘Of course.'

‘He won't turn you into one of these little suburban gin drinkers?'

‘Why should he turn me into anything?'

‘Why indeed? I shouldn't touch that china, dear, if I were you. It
is
rather riveted.'

A whole chariot race in Meissen china streamed across the chimney-piece. Harriet often rearranged it. Now she stopped, and sat down.

‘So you met the divine Kitty?' Julia went on, spite driving her. But spite rarely exhausts itself: it is insatiable.

‘Divine?' said Harriet, and now she infuriated Julia by picking up a piece of unfinished embroidery and glancing at it without interest.

‘Darling! You are in the most fidgety mood. Do stop touching things. Divine? Why, yes, divine. Does she not try to be a goddess all the time – a lovely, blonde, boring Wagnerian goddess?'

‘I find her far from boring.'

Julia took her cushion over to the window, stood with her back to Harriet, as if she could not see her stitches. Her hands were trembling.

‘Then you and Charles have a lovely lot in common,' she said. ‘A lovely, lovely lot to chat about.'

She did not want to turn Harriet against her, but the scene was almost beyond her control. Her toe tapped the carpet; long breaths came up from her lungs, as if she would soon let loose upon them a great flight of words.

‘How is your mother?' she asked in a haughty voice.

Harriet sucked in her cheeks quickly to hide her smile.

‘She is very well,' she said meekly.

‘Then she is a fortunate woman.' Julia turned from the window, the cushion held out with a tragic gesture, one hand to her ribs.

‘Are you ill, Julia?'

‘Yes, my darling. Madly ill. Ill and bad-tempered – oh, do not,' she cried, her arm stretched out forbiddingly, ‘do
not
say about the
doctor
, as that silly Charles always does. I am beyond all doctors.' Now her arm bent with a movement most heavy, most tragic; her knuckles touched her brow. (‘You never do see a young actress who can use her
arms
,' she told herself.)

‘But, Julia!'

(‘How these girls throw away a scene, let it drop to the floor and then shuffle about among the pieces,' she thought, cross with Harriet and her ‘But Julias'.)

‘I am sorry I spoke unkindly of your friends,' she said.

‘They are Charles's friends, not mine.'

‘Poor Charles. He does have a disappointing time. He was going to marry a girl – Mavis, or some such name – quite sweet, rather the cocktail type, but what else can they do in these remote places? As long as Charles thought the world of her, as he did indeed seem to, what did it matter? . . . don't interrupt me when I am just going to say something interesting – alas, alas, poor little Charles! Everything ready for the wedding; invitations out; presents in; bridesmaids fitted; banns read; then, oh dear, she wrote a touching little note on pink paper – I am inventing the pink paper. I could not possibly remember – and by that time she was in Paris with the best-man's brother. Such a hue and cry! I was the only one not inconvenienced. I had nothing new . . . some affair I was wearing in
Hay Fever
 . . . grey with feathers . . . a bit grubby round the collar, but quite good enough for a provincial wedding. You can imagine Charles – the set jaw, the stalking about. Oh, God, we all felt fools . . .'

‘Please don't!'

‘Please don't
what
?' She was getting into her stride, beginning to cheer up.

‘You shouldn't tell me. It
is
Charles's story. No one else's.'

‘No one else's! It was the whole town's. Nothing but that all round the coffee-shops for weeks. Don't be such a little prig. I hate a woman not to like to gossip.'