A Game of Hide and Seek (19 page)

‘Deirdre is being sensible,' Vesey said. ‘Caroline would have liked that. We must hope it is not missed.'

‘What is it like in the army?' Harriet asked shyly, her glance swerving away from his uniform.

‘I didn't go until I was invited. I have scarcely given it a chance. Hugo could tell you better.'

‘I mean for
you
.'

‘You see, I never have liked undressing with other men. Naturally I always feel meagre and pathetic. But it is really only boring and silly, living miles below the subsistence-level. Then office jobs I never cotton to much – copy lists of numbers on to ration-cards – you make mistakes because it's so easy – do a pile, and then say Oh Christ, October has only thirty days, correct them all, smudges and blots, ink to the elbows, and then, oh damn, it's November only has thirty. All this in a sort of dirty post-office place, dust, broken nibs, ink-bottles full of sludge. And stuffy.'

By his mocking voice, she imagined that he had not said any of this before, and could picture his desolate patience in that odd world.

‘Once,' he said, as if he could not stop now that he had begun, ‘once they gave us Weetabix, if you please, for breakfast. I thought little babies in high-chairs had that . . . The worst of all, though, was Christmas dinner.' He looked away through the yew-trees. ‘You know, the officers being decent and matey' – his glance dwelt on Hugo – ‘and us cheery, but each his own private self. I thought “Poor men and soldiers unable to rejoice.” Perhaps not, though. Perhaps all enjoying themselves like hell.' He disavowed his vision and compassion, looked back at Harriet, suddenly asked: ‘Do you still cry as much as when you were a girl?'

‘No, of course not.' At once, the tears rushed to her eyes.

‘I suppose we mustn't be the last guests to go.' He began to walk slowly down the path, treading uncertainly on the narrow grass verge as if the gravelled part were only wide enough for her.

‘I'm sorry. I've bored you with my long complaint. How women must hate soldiers' stories.'

‘I only can't bear to think of the Christmas dinner.'

‘Oh, I enjoyed it like mad, really.'

They paced along with their heads bent, not heeding other people.

‘How is your husband?' he asked politely.

‘Very well, thank you.' She brushed aside Charles, who was, as it happened, in bed with influenza.

‘Good.'

‘Are you going to tea with Hugo?'

‘No. I have a train to catch.'

Held up now by groups of people on the path, he glanced impatiently at his watch. ‘I don't know what we say to them, do you?'

‘It doesn't matter what we say.'

‘But say something we must. I never know, never manage to hit the right note. I can hardly say “Bad luck, Hugo,” but he seems to forbid anything more. Difficult to know what they expect. They are certainly not wearing their hearts on their sleeves . . . Joseph's are so taken up with rings that there wouldn't be room anyhow. It would be nice to slip out by some back way . . .' He looked desperately round him. But the little clots of people had thinned out. They were brought – unprepared – face to face with Hugo. Vesey suddenly remembered to salute.

‘It was good of you to come, Vesey,' Hugo said.

Harriet kissed Deirdre uncertainly. She had felt there might be a law against kissing women officers.

Joseph was easily modest of all his attainments, the rings on his sleeves, his father's pride in him. Hearts glowed to see him. He seemed young to bear the burden of all their lives. More symbolic than anyone in the army could be, much more of an individual saviour, they felt that he went out alone to defend them. They had watched him grow up: he had scarcely had time to finish doing so.

‘There is no living up to them,' Vesey said to Harriet in a low voice. He was smiling.

She had watched him go off down the road, scrunching the gravel with his great boots; and had not seen him again until last night.

A tremor in the air, as if the air flinched with apprehension, was resolved by the telephone ringing. Harriet dipped her pen in the ink. By the time Mrs Curzon opened the door, she was busy writing.

‘It's your mother-in-law, dear.'

‘How are you this morning, Mrs Curzon?' Harriet asked on her way to the hall.

‘Chronic dear, thanks. Three o'clock this morning, I thought I'd die, and I wished I would. You know how it is, with the bed swinging one way and your stomach the other. A couple of hours earlier I hadn't a care in the world. Laugh! I fell on the rockery going up the path; there I was sitting on top of the clinkers in the rain . . .'

Harriet waited politely, the receiver in her hand, while Mrs Curzon cheered herself up. ‘Yes, laugh! “Won't some gent be so good as to kindly lift me down off of here?” I was asking. Talk about the fairy on the Christmas tree . . . terrible hiccups . . . you'd have enjoyed it, madam . . .'

‘One moment . . .' Harriet put the receiver to her ear. ‘Good morning, Julia.'

‘What is going on, Harriet? Who are all those people?'

‘There are only Mrs Curzon and I.'

‘Well, for heaven's sake set her to work. You must feel a great deal better than I do at this hour of the morning.'

‘We were both at parties last night. I expect we feel worse.'

‘I was thinking that it would be a good day for you to come to tea . . . Miss Bastable is going out . . . she gets on my nerves, God knows, but I sometimes wonder if it isn't worse without her . . . next door to the churchyard and all those graves . . . one begins to feel like those dretful Brontë girls . . .'

‘But, Julia, there's not a grave in sight . . . and you could never be like any Brontë girl . . .'

‘Well, it's very sweet of you to say so, darling. You always cheer me up. Tea, then. Be early because of Miss Bastable going out.'

‘I can't today, Julia. Tomorrow . . .'

‘Oh, tomorrow's no good. Miss Bastable will be in. We shouldn't be able to say a word.'

‘I couldn't today . . .'

‘But why?'

‘One moment . . . I can't hear. I shall just tell Elke to switch off the Hoover.' Harriet put down the receiver and went and sat on the stairs for a moment, trying to think. She could hear Julia's voice, tinny and indignant. The respite was no use. She had to return to the telephone and Julia's pettishness with nothing ready-made to say.

‘Where did you go? Really, Harriet, I haven't all morning to hang on this while you go and talk to servants. Where were we before you dodged away?'

‘I was saying I couldn't come to tea.'

‘And I was asking you “why”?'

‘I have a previous engagement,' Harriet said sedately.

‘You sound so mysterious. I shall think you have a lover.'

‘Why, of course it is that. How clever of you, Julia!'

‘I don't believe a word of it. You are just being thoroughly underhand.'

‘It is what people are about such things.'

‘Well, I can't waste any more of the morning. I shall go back to my gravestones.'

‘I will imagine you there.'

‘Don't think that after this you can just drop in to meals at any time that suits your convenience, will you?'

‘No, I won't Julia, dear. I promise.'

‘I dislike just being made use of.'

‘Of course you do.'

‘And stop soothing me. You know I hate to be soothed. There was some rhyme Charles's Nannie used to say about “He that will not when he can, may not when he shall”. Something like that . . .'

‘It sounds reasonable. Good-bye, Julia. The Hoover's starting again.'

That Julia became more contentious as she aged was pitiable. It was the course she took when she could no longer invoke adoration: if she could only summon discord from them, it was at least a reaction of some violence. She did not want to be loved for her own sake; never having known what her own sake was. When Harriet mollified her, she felt destroyed. Charles had always menaced her. Feeling them aligned against her – but indifferently, in rather loose ranks – she went back to what she called her gravestones; in reality, her bullying of poor Miss Bastable.

Miss Bastable was silly as a hen. Dividends dwindling, she had nothing to sell but her own company, which most people would have paid to avoid. Julia, afraid of ghosts, feeling herself predisposed to visions, hauntings, was glad of her about the house after dark and pleased to persecute her all day. ‘I've worked hard all my life,' she thought. ‘If I can't have someone to fetch my slippers for me now . . .' Miss Bastable had never worked and could not, at her age, demean herself. She thought Julia a common woman – which no doubt she was – and considered herself sufficiently sacrificed in being under her roof. ‘We cannot live on one per cent,' she excused herself to her father's photograph when Julia had been outrageous. Her position was undefined. When she was in one room, she thought perhaps she should be in another. If Julia had visitors, she could not make up her mind whether to go or stay. She hovered, starting nervily if spoken to. Julia loved pouring out tea and Miss Bastable handed the slopped cups and saucers, hoping that the guests would notice that her own hand was steady. All of the little jobs which a companion might have done without losing face, Julia liked to do herself. ‘Leave those bloody flowers alone!' she would thunder, ‘I've spent hours on them,' or ‘Don't touch the Meissen china. I always wash that myself,' or ‘I can sort out my own silks. I'm not blind.' At the beginning, Miss Bastable had once suggested that she should read aloud to Julia, for she had heard that companions sometimes did so. She would never forget how Julia took off her spectacles and stared at her, her book lowered to her lap. After a long pause, in which Miss Bastable was expected to reflect upon the poor quality of her voice, Julia raised her book again and put on her spectacles. ‘I do any reading aloud that's to be done,' she said augustly.

Halfway through that morning she wondered suddenly if Harriet had not been dreadfully artful in conceding a lover. She did not seem quite up to such duplicity; but Julia liked to believe her to be. It was a mystery – and a reproach – that Harriet should have borne Charles so much longer than Julia had been able to bear his father. At some point, she believed, the crack must become apparent. That it should come with Harriet in command of herself, gay – as she had sounded – and behaving trickily was not to have been expected. Julia had rather given up looking for misdemeanours. No flaw had ever been revealed. Charles had flourished. Dutifully, Harriet concealed from him – as much as could be done in these days – the workings of the house, presenting him with calm, though sometimes by the skin of her teeth. He had never had to wait for a meal: if meals ever waited for him they did not seem to have done so. Julia had thought her daughter-in-law dull and slavish. ‘You hover about him like a praying mantis!' she deplored. ‘And the milieu! That provincial band of married people. I should call them a
set
. Those dretful cocktail-parties, and going in gangs to those chichi clubs at Maidenhead. I know all about your dreary little round. How
dull
you all are nowadays, and common!'

This morning, going round the conservatory with a watering-can, she wondered if it were all as dull as it had seemed. Did not the setting more easily conceal the forbidden, illicit? The idea deliciously beguiled her. ‘Miss Bastable!' she called. ‘Will you come and mop up these shelves?' Miss Bastable ran to fetch her rubber gloves. Julia thoughtfully sprayed a little extra water over the white-painted slats.

Harriet tidied her bedroom. Downstairs, Mrs Curzon shouted at Elke, whose English was poor. She implied that Elke had headaches merely to annoy. If she did not invent or encourage them, they were certainly her own fault.

‘Perhaps you're constipated,' she now accused her.

‘I do not understand “constipated”.'

‘Have you been upstairs this morning? I mean.'

‘I have not yet finished the Hoover . . .'

‘I mean have you done your duty upstairs?' Mrs Curzon almost screamed with exasperation. ‘England for the English' her voice seemed to proclaim.

‘I have made my bed.'

‘What's that got to do with it? What I'm getting at is have you been to the W.C., the lavatory, the toilet?' Her voice mounted. ‘The House of Parliament,' she threw in to add to the confusion.

Silence followed. A door shut. Even the door sounded offended, Harriet thought. She went to dust Betsy's room. Here, something seemed always to forbid her entry. The young have so many secrets. Harriet remembered her own diary and her own ways with her mother.

What could only be called a snapshot of Miss Bell had gone crooked in its Woolworth's frame. She looked, Harriet thought, a brave and rather lumpish young woman, standing on some steps, wearing a gown with white fur. From a matching frame, Robert Helpman seemed to swoon towards her. But Miss Bell looked steadily ahead, her chin up, her hands clutching a book as if for safety, and her mouth trying to smile; honest and innocent and kind, she looked. Harriet felt that Betsy, not always so stable, showed discrimination in this love. Miss Bell was better than the girl from Betsy's form, who had gone in the Christmas holidays to dance in a pantomime and always looked so cute and pert and made even her school uniform seem fashionable, and wrote such long, long letters with such long, long postscripts and even mysterious scrawls on the backs of envelopes, in coloured inks.

‘That girl!' said Mrs Curzon. ‘She ought to have been in service in my young day. I wonder why she takes the trouble to come here?'

‘It's a cheap way of learning how to speak American, I suspect,' Harriet said in a disillusioned voice. She went to the window and looked down into the garden. Roofs sloped away, cowls veered on the skyline. The town, embowered in a haze of naked branches, lay below. She imagined Vesey ascending the hill in the afternoon. At lunch, she must tell Charles of this. Yet if he did not come – and she began to think now that he would not – she must incur Charles's displeasure, and his scorn, for nothing. Vesey's word was scarcely to be relied upon. She had waited for him before in vain. By now, she was so attuned to the idea of their meeting that she could not, she felt, face tomorrow and the other days of her life if he did not come.