A Game of Hide and Seek (21 page)

So at supper, Harriet was obliged to say to Charles, ‘Vesey called this afternoon.' She almost had not had to. Trying to seem casual, barely interested, her voice was flat. Not only guilt inhibited her, but the knowledge that anything about Vesey was what Charles could not bear. The matter had not much arisen; but was acknowledged. Almost as if it were a physical irritation, an allergy, he reacted in strange, betraying ways; his jaw perceptibly moved; his eyes looked down, or aside; imperiously, as one who scorned discussion, he waited for the pain to pass.

For it was Vesey who had undermined their life together; the idea of him in both their heads. In their few disagreements, he knew to whom her thoughts flew; discouraged, he remembered her girlhood's inconsolable love, and her silence ever since. Many times, when she had thought of nothing, had simply sat and stared, he believed she thought of him. He had always known that one day he would walk back into their presence as he had done the previous evening, unexpectedly. Harriet had whitened. She had presently bent her head and looked at the floor in front of her, as if disavowing a ghost. Charles could not know that many times before she had thought Vesey coming towards her in the street; her heart leaping, she had scarcely dared to look up at the stranger who eventually went by, usually a man quite unlike Vesey. Seeing one face continually in crowds is one of the minor annoyances of being in love.

‘Water, Betsy?' Charles asked, with the jug held almost threateningly above her glass.

‘We went for a walk in the park,' Harriet said, thinking she had not said enough.

Charles filled his own glass. He had nothing casual to say. ‘Flash needed some exercise,' he managed at last. Flash was what could only be called ‘a brown dog'.

Again, because of Betsy, Harriet had to say: ‘I forgot to take him.'

That sounded strange and Charles made it stranger by not answering.

‘Why
did
I forget?' Harriet wondered. ‘I could so easily have taken him.'

Now even Betsy began to sense something wrong, looking from one to the other uncertainly. After supper she always stayed in the dining-room to do her homework. Tonight, she felt that her mother and father both lingered, as if they were unwilling to leave her and be alone together.

When she had helped Elke to clear the table, she sat down and drew her satchel towards her. This satchel seemed so familiar as to be a part of herself, and her link between school and home. Smelling its inky, biscuity smell as she pulled out her books was a little reassuring. The light rained down peacefully over her; the clock ticked; bubbles of ink and blots came out of her pen. Yet her mind was disturbed and the evening not really like others.

She fluttered the pages of her book, sighing; drew spectacles on Julius Caesar, filled in his eye-balls with ink, signed her name several different ways on the title-page. She listened for her parents' voices; but they were silent. In the kitchen, Elke knocked plates against taps, dropped knives over the floor. Mother likes him; father doesn't, Betsy thought. As for herself, she had felt a sense of complete strangeness, of being suddenly out of her element: not altogether pleasant, for it was rather like lifting a foot for a step that is not there; but exciting.

Years before, she had printed inside her satchel,

Elizabeth Lilian Jephcott,

8, Jessica Terrace,

Market Swanford,

Buckinghamshire,

England,

Europe,

The World,

The Universe.

Going thus from the particular to the general,
she
had not seemed to dwindle. On the contrary, her importance was emphasised. It was the world, the universe, which dwindled away into nothing. Thumbing her way back through the pages, she added drop ear-rings to Caesar and an Elizabethan ruffle. Later, but absent-mindedly, a pipe and a halo. She wondered why her parents were so quiet, and could not seem to settle to her work. She took her autograph album from the little front pocket of her satchel. Pauline Hay-Hardy had done a crinolined lady in Indian ink. Across a peach-coloured page, in her cramped and screwed-up handwriting, like a doctor's, Miss Bell had written ‘It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.'

Elke had switched on the electric fire in her bedroom soon after tea, so that by nine o'clock the room was nicely warm. Harriet never invaded her privacy here: she could rely on that, which was a good thing as the cupboard was full of broken china that she was hiding. She broke a great deal of china. If she cracked a plate one day and it fell in half the next, she could always excuse herself because it was cracked: if it broke in half at the beginning, she thought it best to hide it in her room.

She was a large blonde girl with a complacent yet driven expression which put other people very much in the wrong. Harriet was often reminded of cows being herded along a lane, at each whack on their rumps their faces looking more wounded and yet more smugly right. Sometimes too, Elke would break into a lumbering run, which was a reproach in itself.

England bewildered and bored her. There seemed nothing for young people to do. She could not accustom herself to all the absurd contrasts – the continual bathing, and the filthy shops; women doing men's jobs, men pushing prams. The old-fashioned motor-cars made her laugh; the trains belching smoke appalled her. Conversation was especially puzzling. She thought the English were as taken up with the weather as they sounded; not knowing that it was a refuge. All experiences in the war were apparently dully unmentionable. People who told stories about air-raids were thought bores.

Sunday was a strange day. They wore, not their best, but rather shabbier clothes than on other days. In old flannels, an elbow out of his leather-patched jacket, Charles would first clean his car and then go out for a drink. When guests came for sherry before lunch, they were all shabby too. Instead of a holiday, it seemed the day for doing all the odd jobs. Harriet washed the hair-brushes and her powder-puffs. After lunch, the day seemed to peter out: streets emptied: Sunday papers made a great litter: smoke hung in a haze. Charles dozed. If people called unexpectedly before supper, they were hailed, and no wonder, as a relief to the marooned. Drinks were again brought out. Betsy went on with her homework. No one went to Church but her.

All of this, Elke tried to explain in her long letters home. Tonight, after coating over her peeling nail-varnish, she settled down to continue her observations. Harriet was sometimes nervous at the thought of those long letters. She saw how vague and indecisive she must appear and was ashamed, personally, of the state of the butcher's shop, where flies crawled about the bloody marble and carcases lay on sawdust on the floor.

Elke put a large sweet in her cheek and began to write. Mevrouw had gone walking all the afternoon with a strange man. Meinheer was angry. Being much older than Mevrouw, he was naturally jealous. Mevrouw had even forgotten to take the dog, who was so sweet, really the only friend she, Elke, had in the whole house; but the English do not like dogs. She was not allowed to have him in her bedroom. If she nursed him Meinheer was angry. Yet the girl, Betsy, always nursed the cat, which she, Elke, could not bring herself to touch. Mevrouw had asked another Nederlander to tea, but she had turned out to be a country girl with bad accent. It was impossible to speak to her. Apparently the English think that to have the same language is enough. They would scarcely themselves wish to mix with all classes, though certainly Mevrouw drank tea with the rough woman who came to do the scrubbing. They called one another ‘dear'. When Mevrouw went away for a week, Mrs Curzon kissed her goodbye. On Mrs Curzon's birthday, they drank gin together. Mevrouw said ‘Many happy returns, Curzy dear.' ‘And many more years with you, Madam, to be sure.' Both had tears in their eyes. When the cat before this one was run over, Mevrouw cried; but when the King was ill, she remained calm. Her mother's death she had referred to once very coldly, as merely a date – ‘I remember it was the year mother died.' When the girl, Betsy, went to a hospital to have her tonsils out, both she and her mother went off laughing. They stopped the taxi on the way and called in at a café for ice-cream as if it were just a merry jaunt. That very night a guest had been put up in Betsy's room. For Mevrouw was very cold, very callous. She asked no questions and took no interest; never inquired what was in letters, nor why people were late home. Unluckily for her, Meinheer was not so incurious. He was probably at this moment asking a great many questions down in the drawing-room.

Elke's stay in England would not turn out to be a valuable experience. She deduced little from it. Her parents were sometimes disturbed.

Down in the drawing-room, Charles and Harriet sat without speaking. The wireless usefully filled the gap. Charles read
Persuasion 
– his favourite book, to which Harriet imagined he resorted when wounded. She sewed name-tapes on to Betsy's blouses, thinking of the blue, enchanted park.

Charles turned pages theatrically. He knew that Harriet had expected Vesey that afternoon, though she had not mentioned him at lunch. His mother, who had dropped into his office to ask about her investments, had worried him, letting fall hints, asking advice and not listening to his answers; above all, perhaps, asking advice. She had plainly sought to enliven her own afternoon by disquieting him. Like her grand-daughter, she preferred a painful scene to no scene at all. Her attitude towards his marriage was detached and cynical. Years ago, when they had told her of their engagement, she had patted Harriet's hand in a dismissing way, as if sending her away to play in the nursery. As an afterthought, she had said: ‘
You
won't leave us stranded, will you, dear? A second time I should look upon as a clear disgrace.' Even in the vestry after the wedding she had been malicious. Wound in broken marabout, she had dominated everybody. ‘So you have really seen it through!' she said, praising the bride for her tenacity as if she could not for any other reason. Should he be forced into the absurd and humiliating role of elderly husband to straying wife, would it not be only what she had awaited, and what could give her a new lease of life?

As he read, he passed his hand over his hair, with the impatient quick gesture Harriet knew. His hair was greying but, as with many fair people, without much altering his appearance. At irregular intervals, he turned pages; once or twice he glanced at the fire, but never at his wife. Harriet sat very still, and wary. Her needle plucked at the cloth. However hard she tried to concentrate on her task, the blue park with its blurred vistas rose before her, its magic engulfed her as if it were only the park she was in love with. When Charles turned a page, her eyelids lowered, her mouth tightened. She wondered if he were reading the chapter on women's constancy; for the book became a reproach all by itself.

‘What a novel to choose!' Charles thought. ‘Only the happy in love should ever read it. It is unbearable to have expression given to our painful solitariness, to rake up the dead leaves in our hearts, when
we
have nothing that can follow (no heaven dawning beautifully in Union Street), except in dreams, as perhaps Jane Austen herself never had but on the page she wrote.'

‘What is wrong, Charles?' Harriet suddenly asked. She felt that he would never speak; that he would punish her for years and years, in silence. ‘What are you thinking about?'

He snapped the book together in one hand as if shutting her out from his experience there. Getting up, he walked about the room, yawning against his fist, saying: ‘What do you mean? Why do you ask?'

‘I thought you were not really reading,' she said bravely.

Everything she said, he took up and repeated, looking surprised.

She thought ‘I will never see Vesey again, for I cannot bear my punishment.' As if he did not want her to suspect that he suspected her, he said: ‘The truth is, you know, things go on at the office which disturb me. For a long time now, they have. I begin to wonder what Tiny's up to.'

He watched her nervousness flatten out, listened to her voice relaxing, as she said ‘But what
could
Tiny be up to?'

‘No good at all. With Reggie Beckett.' In a devilish way, he half-enjoyed watching her face clear, her hands with the sewing lying loose in her lap. Yet he had often wanted to tell her of these very anxieties; had often held back, hating to burden her. Now that the worries seemed nothing in the light of worse ones, he used them to cover the truth; he bided his time with them, and he trapped his wife.

Relief ran all over her face. Her sympathy was nourished by her guilt.

‘Reggie Beckett? I've seen him at Kitty's, I believe. But not for years.'

‘He's been away.' Charles looked very sternly at his finger-nails. That meant, she knew, that he was waiting for something, measuring something. ‘Yes, he's been away behind the scenes. In war-time, he had other fish to fry. A pity he didn't stay and fry them where he was. I'm afraid Tiny is easily used. He likes money too much. That's Kitty's fault, of course.'

‘Oh, no!'

‘Oh,
yes
! She's idle and extravagant. She doesn't do Tiny any good. Nor me, indirectly.'

‘How could she affect you?'

He was a long time answering, tapped his foot on the brass fender, watched her. ‘I am proud of my practice,' he said after a while. ‘I want nothing wrong about it.'

He had observed the change in her. Her reverie of doubt and love and guilt had vanished from her eyes. Now, at this minute, she was an indignant woman. On his behalf.

‘Is that Vesey any good?' he asked abruptly. ‘As an actor, I mean?'

She picked up her sewing again and said very steadily: ‘I have never seen him act. You must know that.'

‘No, I'd forgotten. I thought you mentioned last night having met in the war . . . I didn't know when . . .'

‘But I told you at the time. It was at Caroline's funeral – Memorial Service, I mean.'