A Game of Hide and Seek (20 page)

‘Try to manage,' she heard herself saying.

‘Manage! Of course I will, dear. It takes more than a slip of a girl to upset me.'

‘I knew you would help me.'

‘Madam, dear, what is it?' Mrs Curzon, full of concern, put her arm across Harriet's shoulders. ‘Don't let her haggle you. I've worked for you thirteen years and please God I'll still be here when you say Curzy dear you're in your bloody dotage so here's half-a-crown for old langs syne. You know I'd do anything for you, no question of it.'

‘I know. You've been my dear friend.'

‘
Been? Am
, you mean, dear. I
am
. It would take more than a pack of foreigners to part us two.'

‘She's not a pack of foreigners, you know. She's a poor bewildered girl away from home. We only puzzle her.'

‘Puzzle! She was saying Tuesday week she went out with a Pole. “You look out, my girl,” I said. “You'll get caught hopping. You'll be finding yourself taken advantage of one of these days”.'

‘Oh, dear, you shouldn't. She couldn't have known what you were talking about.'

‘That's right. “Advantage?” she said. “I do not understand advantage”.' Mrs Curzon's voice thinned in mimicry.

‘It must be dreadful for her. When she first came, she could only say “Princess Elizabeth”.'

‘I'll Princess Elizabeth her. Telling me we're all dirty. “Dirty!” I said, “and what about that duster you're using on madam's white paint” – as black as Newgate's knocker without a word of a lie . . . and wiping over the gas-stove with the floor-cloth. She knew she'd gone a step too far. “Oh, well,” she says, “perhaps the French are worse.” “That lot!” I said. “We don't care to be mentioned in the same breath.” No, honest, madam, no disrespect, but she gets you down, no mistake.'

‘She's very young.'

Harriet, at the window, watched the white cat in the garden below. It crept from a litter of dead leaves, walked warily through an imaginary jungle, a leopard hunting its prey, stealthy, powerful. Then suddenly the fantasy collapsed. It sat down peacefully and began to lick the pink underneath of a paw. A clock striking brought Harriet to reality too.

Beyond the Terrace, the houses abruptly stopped. They did not peter out into unmade roads, and scarred building-sites with agents' boards; but concluded neatly at the edge of a park. The town, in this direction, had no twentieth-century fringe. The houses had reached the limits of the park fence in Regency days, and those pale terraces and crescents were much walked by on Sundays, on Saturday afternoons were somehow saddened by whistles blowing, the punting of balls, muffled shouts of encouragement. On weekdays in winter the park was empty. No one walked along its paths. It seemed the depths of the country. The abandoned Queen Anne house on the skyline, with its crescent of trees, was shut. (In summertime, lemonade was sold there.) No one knew what to do with it, and holes in its floors went unrepaired. Dry-rot infested the panelling: fungus stood out like brackets from the pantry walls.

At the end of Jessica Terrace, there were gateposts with stone deer and iron gates padlocked. At the side of these a turnstile kept out bicycles and ensured that no great spate of people should suddenly invade the serenity of the park. Once through this, Harriet and Vesey felt alone in the wintry afternoon.

Indoors, they had started off with an air of recrimination, desire to punish one another. She had been glad to go for her coat. Vesey had looked about him, at the crimson-papered walls, the white paint and the blood-red Venetian glass, with unabashed criticism. Harriet could not forget her lunch with Charles, during which she had not mentioned Vesey, deferring it from one mouthful to the next, until she knew her voice could not be trusted. When Charles had gone, she had flown to her bedroom and had not – perhaps because she so needed to – made the best of her face. Waiting with icy hands and wrists, trying to calm herself, she had suddenly
known
, been utterly and for ever sure, that he would never come, just at the moment when the sound of the front-door bell leapt dreadfully through the house. If Vesey could not forgive her for the beautiful and brilliant room, she could not easily forgive him for what she had endured.

All the time – when she came downstairs in her rather shabby fur coat, went for a word with Elke, finally led him out into the Terrace – she was conscious of him silently
placing
her. He was building up all round her her background and her past. Now, in the park, away from her home, she felt less self-conscious, less watched. Space seemed endless; even Time. For this reason, they struck off along a path in the direction of the lake without talking.

Along these paths she had pushed Betsy in a pram, or dawdled with her as she stumbled along in gaiters. Her bored gaze had taken in this scene, winter and summer. The park was a place linked in her mind with ennui and loneliness. Lovers, on warm evenings, going off down the narrower paths, had only emphasised this. Lately, she had not come.

At the edge of the lake there were iron seats. When they sat down, some ducks came up through the reeds as if waiting to be fed. After a while, they dispersed again, diving into the water disconsolately. Vesey put his arm inside Harriet's coat and drew her close to him. Sitting with his cheek against her hair, he did not kiss her, but stared across the water of the lake. For a long while they sat peacefully together.

‘Would
you
know where to begin?' he asked at last. ‘Or does it at all matter? Are we perhaps practically strangers? I suppose at some point my idea of you must have diverged from you yourself. In that churchyard that time I didn't find any discrepancy. In your house, I did. The photograph of your daughter, for instance. I felt quite hopeless in there. Did you?'

‘Yes.'

‘Every bloody ornament on the mantelpiece seemed to warn me off, every chair seemed a booby-trap. I felt that Charles was hiding behind one curtain, and . . . what's-her-name? . . . Betsy . . . behind another. I was angry that you made me go there. And it all looked polished up for my benefit.'

‘It is always polished up,' Harriet said, and she smiled, turning her brow against his cheek in sensuous bliss. ‘Last night, I thought I could make it seem unclandestine. I thought we could be above-board. I thought I could tell Charles.'

‘Oh, no,' Vesey said airily. ‘We can't not be sordid. A little squalor does not come amiss. We should only get frightened if it were all beautiful like this.'

‘All? There only
can
be this.'

She shifted away from him and when he took her hands she drew them at once from his.

Dusk, like a sediment, sifted down through the bluish sky. The surface of the lake was ringed over from the pebbles Vesey began to throw in, one after another, with little vicious spurts of energy.

‘I want to tell you about Charles,' she said, ‘but you distract me so.'

He threw away the rest of the stones and put his hands in his pockets. There he was reminded of cigarettes and pulled out a squashed packet. She shook her head and he put them back sadly, as if she had said no for him too.

‘Charles,' he prompted her gloomily.

‘We are happily married,' she said in a distressed voice. ‘I could not betray him. Everybody else seems to do so.'

‘Some people ask for it,' Vesey said roughly.

‘No, he's a good man. I love him.' Her voice wavered over the word. ‘Betsy, you see, too. She's not a child now . . . I could not . . . when one is growing up, one needs one's mother to behave.'

‘One does indeed,' Vesey said grimly. ‘Mine didn't.'

‘What are you thinking, Vesey?'

‘You didn't grow out of your stammer.'

She looked aside quickly.

‘My beloved Harriet,' he added, almost in the same breath.

‘I'm too old. We are too late.'

‘I see why you married him. It was sensible of you. It was the best thing you could do, after all. People do marry because they are frightened. How could
I
ever have helped you? I do the reverse. I do now, and shall much more. And I never have any money . . . If you are shivering because you are cold, we could walk on a bit . . . I never think fur coats
smell
very nice, do you?' he said in a conversational voice, putting her collar up for her.

An elderly man, very much wrapped up, walked briskly towards them, his terrier running with its nose to the gravel. He eyed them sternly as he passed. After that, the path, mounting towards the desolate house, seemed lonelier than ever; the house itself in its haze of branches looked as if it were painted on silk.

‘He knew about us, that man,' Vesey said. ‘I could tell by his eye. He, I daresay, could tell by ours. Oh, he knows all that we are up to, all that we are going to do . . . secret meetings, lies, evasion, kisses – like this one . . . heavens, your cold face, darling – hundreds of forbidden kisses, waiting for one another in strange places . . . You make me feel about seventeen. You are so shy.'

She tried not to think of other women, who had not been shy. They walked on, close together, in step, thigh against thigh.

The great house, with its flaky, scabrous walls, confronted them now. Between overgrown urns, they approached the windows; but, inside, shutters were drawn crookedly across.

‘Do you remember the other empty house?' she asked him. Depending so on his answer – which she had tried for years to guess, not knowing that she would ever be able to ask – she could not look at him, but leant her back, the palms of her gloved hands, against the rough wall of the house. They were high up now. The blue town lay in the hollow; lamps pricked the blurred distance. The factories, on hill-slopes which had merged into the sky, were like lighted ships.

He was watching her and he did not answer. When she turned, he put out his hand. They could not be out of one another's arms for long. Walking back, dreading ever to come to the edge of the park and to other people, ‘What other empty house did you mean?' he asked.

The streets drew out in the dusk and faded; strung with blurred lamps, arched over by gathering darkness. Strange contrasts of vague perspectives and vivid close-ups made a film-world of it, Betsy thought, and was inclined to glide up cobbled alleyways, close to the walls, hesitating at yawning entrances, her face paper white, she imagined, her blond hair gleaming. She regretted her school-satchel, feeling for the moment like some girl in a French film; shabby, embittered, passive, poor. Glimpsing herself in a shop-window mirror, she was surprised to see that she was only stony-faced.

She stared haughtily at what really beguiled her – old posters peeling off walls; black, alarming warehouses; the little shops with their door-bells, their indifferent lighting, their flyblown window-displays. At one house, she could see right into a room, glimpsed a clothes'-horse before a fire, a littered mantel, an old man with his waistcoat open dozing in a chair. A woman was sitting at a sewing-machine, and white material flowed away from it to the floor.

One moment she felt above all this, very powerful and free; and the next, passing a churchyard, and graves, was frozen with incredulity and a stilling horror. In the busy, lighted street, the patch of darkness checked and menaced her. Unconcernedly, bicyclists passed. Women dragged home with their cares, their shopping. Under those mossy stones, beauty had collapsed, she told herself, pausing by the railings, into an absurd collection of bones. It could not happen to me, she thought. It will, she thought. Not for years and years and years, she comforted herself. All the same, she knew that the graves, in their silence and darkness, were prepared to wait. Whatever time was to her, it was nothing to them. Black ivy, with hairy, twining branches, grew everywhere as if it drew extra strength here; little pots of flowers were set about like a dolls' tea-party, wretchedly pathetic. A street-lamp flung the shadow of slanting railings across a granite slab.

‘What a strange girl!' Father Keogh thought, as he passed.

Life slapped at her like some clown with a balloon, she thought. Going off at a tangent from the graveyard, she recoiled from him. Though with a scarf round his neck he looked nothing. ‘It is the collar,' she decided, skipping along at a faster pace, death forgotten. ‘Without that, he seems even a bit boring.'

She began to plod uphill away from the shops. Houses here lay decently back behind gardens. Schoolboys came down the hill in clusters, scuffling, tripping, snatching caps. She scorned them. When one of them whistled at her, she stared at the pavement, outraged. Then she noticed that her heart was beating. Presumably it always had, but she had not thought of it. Now she could actually hear it. She was also quite breathless from her climb. She went more slowly, worried about her health, wondering if she had angina pectoris, which she had often read about.

When she turned into Jessica Terrace, it seemed really dark. That cul-de-sac, blocked by the gates of Prospect Park, was like a silent backwater, over which houses, not trees, secretively hung.

Two people coming slowly from the other direction stopped at her gate.

Her mother, who was already putting out her hand, made a wider gesture with it to include her daughter. ‘This is Betsy,' she said, as if the fact had some tremendously dramatic and embarrassing significance.

Betsy hitched her satchel up higher on her shoulder and shook hands. She looked up into Vesey's eyes. They seemed to search her face. He had forgotten that he was holding her hand and she did not know how to remind him. Her mother lingered awkwardly at the gate. Standing on a step, she looked over Betsy's head.

‘Well, goodbye, Vesey,' she said brightly, as if to a child.

He looked up at once and gave Betsy back her hand. She felt rather short, standing there between them.

‘Goodbye, Harriet.'

The fan of light above the door fell on Betsy's bright hair. Harriet's head was bent as she raked about in her handbag for her key. Before he reached the end of the Terrace, he heard the door shut. The echo of it seemed to come down the street after him.