A Game of Hide and Seek (22 page)

‘Well, my dear, all right, all right. I can't remember all you've said for years and years and years.'

If ever she looked beautiful, it was when she was angry or embarrassed, he thought.

‘You ought to go to see this
Hamlet
,' he said in a patronising voice. Even
Hamlet
seemed a dubious affair.

‘I am sure it would be very badly done.' She smiled with confidence but did not raise her eyes from her work.

‘You should take Betsy.'

‘But it is only on for two more days.'

‘You knew he was coming here this afternoon, didn't you? You arranged that last night.'

‘Yes. Yes, he did say that he would.' She looked quickly aside.

‘Why didn't you mention it?'

‘I never know when he means to do what he says.'

‘You
never
know?'

‘I mean, I
used
not to know.'

‘Why did you attach so much importance to it that you said nothing? And if you cry, Harriet, I shall . . . I won't have it. I really will not have it.'

‘I didn't think . . . oh, I was sure he wouldn't come.'

‘Do you stammer when you talk to
him
?'

‘Why do you ask?'

‘It is important to me to know.'

‘You know I always stammer with everyone.'

‘I've noticed you do especially with me. It has been something I tried not to know. Do I so confuse and frighten you?'

‘No. But I won't be cross-examined. I am not one of your victims.'

‘And I won't have you sit there crying for Betsy to see if she should come in.' He took out his cigarette-case and held it very tightly in his hand.

‘Then don't upset me,' she said angrily, and put her handkerchief to her mouth. ‘It has never been like this between us,' she thought. ‘Never, never before.' For a second, she felt the elation of having nothing to lose: then the room seemed to yawn open as in a nightmare – the room which Vesey had hated, whose beauty had been a warning to him.

‘Harriet darling, look at me!'

Her eyes were magnified with tears.

‘Forgive me!'

The tears brimmed and fell again.

‘Why didn't you tell me about him?'

‘I couldn't. I know you hate him.'

‘I don't hate him. I don't know him.'

‘I tried to say, at lunch.'

‘But surely, if we love one another . . . we are husband and wife . . . I trust you. Of course I trust you. I want you to be happy.'

‘I know. I know.'

‘You are . . . most precious to me. All you have put into being married to me . . . this house, Betsy . . . you must know that I realise what it's meant. It hasn't been an ordinary home, but something quite
out
of the ordinary – beautiful and well-ordered. For heaven's sake, don't imagine I don't know that a woman couldn't throw away so much – all she's created – nor even put it in jeopardy. If you had had more men friends, been more independent of me, you'd know that; and know that I know it. How could your walking in the park with Vesey affect our life together in this house . . . ?' He broke off, feeling that he was mentioning the house too often, looking too much round the room, as if interior decoration decided everything.

She had stopped crying, was staring down at her lap, turning her handkerchief from corner to corner. ‘She does have rather snivelling ways,' he thought aloofly, and covered the thought as suddenly as he had laid it bare.

‘Forgive me, Charles.'

‘Forgive
me
. I am behaving abominably.'

‘No.'

‘You will tear your nice handkerchief.'

She rolled it up in her hand, and smiled uncertainly, as if she were not sure if she were able to.

‘To show you have forgiven me,' he said, ‘will you give me some proof of it?'

She closed her burning eyes. He saw that she dreaded something, perhaps being asked never to see Vesey again. It was really that she was afraid of going back to the beginnings of their talk.

‘What is it? I mean “of course”.'

‘Will you take Betsy to the play? And when it is over bring Vesey back here for a drink? We will ask Tiny and Kitty in. Then it will all be comfortable and . . . Will you do that?'

‘I don't think I can,' she said wearily. ‘I don't think I care to see him before he goes. We have had too much fuss on his account. I feel I hate his very name.'

‘You would rather
I
hated it? It was something I asked you to do for me.'

‘It would prove nothing.' She imagined his eyes on them and the indignity of their position. Not to accept would be declaring their love for one another.

‘Then if I must.'

‘Not “must”!'

‘Then, I
will
. Oh, of course I will if it is what you really want. But I expect he won't come. I couldn't
make
him come. I think he doesn't care for going out at night.'

‘If he won't, it doesn't matter. I want you to have asked him.' It was the most that, at the moment, he could give Vesey in the way of pain. ‘Then I shall know that you feel yourself trusted. And your silence at lunch will seem utterly absurd. When he goes away, this scene will be forgotten and we shall have nothing dismaying between us.'

She began to fold up her sewing. ‘Very well, I'll go. I'll ask him. And now I think I should tell Betsy to go to bed. It's late.'

‘I'll tell her. And you should go to bed, too, my darling. You look very tired. I've been so much more hateful to you than I could ever have thought possible. I felt so threatened, though; so cast off by you. Now it is all all right.' He took her hands and drew her up from the sofa. ‘Now it is all all right?' he repeated in a question.

‘Yes, Charles.'

‘Don't say it as if you were a little girl who's been put in the corner.' He shook her hands until he rallied her into smiling, then kissed her. The rallying kiss strengthened until she stood stone-still, her arm crushed to her side, her knuckles white.

‘Darling one, I love you. Never leave me on my own.'

‘Of
course
not.'

‘You are to have everything you want for ever and ever.'

‘There is nothing that I want.'

‘At this moment you are going to bed.' He rocked with her tight in his arms, his mouth on her brow. ‘I wish I could carry you there; but Elke might think it strange.'

‘Perhaps Dutch women are always carried to bed,' she said shakily. ‘So that it might after all seem a normal thing to her.'

‘Have you ever
seen
any Dutch women? Yes, well then, don't be silly. You are to go up, and I shall bring you a nice drink and tell Betsy you have a headache.'

‘You are very comforting.'

‘I kiss you better, but I remember that it was I who made you cry.'

‘It is the worst place to be,' she thought, ‘the verge of tears.' The blue park had vanished. She felt dispirited, her emotions belaboured. ‘We can't not be sordid,' Vesey had said, and that strengthened her now. If he had envisaged it to her as all beautiful, all benign, she would have felt separated from him by shame. She did not know what to think any more and, strangely, it was Charles who consoled her, with the middle-aged comforts which once she might have scorned. To relax in a warm bed in a pleasant room was all she could ask – not to talk, not to think, not to dream.

At the door, she said: ‘I am sorry, Charles, that you have those worries about your work, and Tiny, and that wretched man.'

He smiled confidently. ‘I can deal with them. It is the sort of thing I can manage, you know.'

She went draggingly up the stairs. In the dining-room, Betsy heard her go. She put her pen down very quietly on the table, as if not to disturb her thoughts. Charles sat for a moment on the edge of the sofa, his hand across his mouth, his thumbnail clicking against his teeth. He began to wonder if he had not himself built up what he had just been seeking to break down. He lit a cigarette, then went to send Betsy up to bed.

‘What a long time Laertes is in France!' Harriet thought. For, having given his excellent and embarrassing advice to Ophelia, Vesey had gone and was, it seemed, forgotten. Since then, scene after scene, shot with loveliness, threadbare with use, had lumbered by. The Queen wrung her hands incessantly; Ophelia's gin-husky voice had an unexpected catch of beauty in it. Polonius was murdered; but not, as he so richly deserved, for forgetting his lines, Harriet whispered to Betsy. Betsy frowned. She sat forward, her hands on her knees, her wrists right out of her too-short sleeves.

This was after all, Harriet told herself, a great play – though bungled and made shabby – but she could not concentrate as Betsy was, as if her eyes had never seen the like. She found the seats hard; she was conscious of the photographs of mayors hanging round her. When someone left in the middle of a scene, she watched him all the way out of the hall with interest. You could not have heard a pin drop.

Afterwards, sighing, dazed, Betsy followed her mother to the car. Blue lighting laid the streets open in a livid glare. Sitting in the car, waiting for Vesey, they watched the small crowds thin out and disperse, as if the dreadful illumination made all human life dwindle and vanish. In Harriet's heart it added to the elsewhere quality of this evening; the cruelty Charles had wreaked upon her in sending her out on such a mission, and his way of exacting such a thing from her. The play, and Vesey's part in it, was something to be got over and forgotten. How could she but feel herself and Vesey mocked by the strangeness of the situation, which neither would have chosen – the very language and costume alienating them; his leap into the grave; those absurdly restrained rapier thrusts, his being not up to such display, for he could parry nothing except with words. If she had caught a gust of amusement in the audience, she denied it, and for some of the time looked at her gloves lying in her lap. Their dance together, their walk in the park, had now for ever its grotesque and piteous other side. She watched him – when she did – with her love in abeyance, as if some harm might otherwise be done to her imagination.

Anger at Charles unsteadied her. She no longer felt guilt in herself or pity for him. Pride made her hope to retaliate; but how she could was beyond her devising. Her resources were all bent on how to manage the rest of the evening, which Charles had so unnaturally prolonged.

‘He was very good, your friend,' Betsy said, striking her fur-gloved hands together. ‘But then, they were all so good, I thought.'

‘It went on rather a long time,' Harriet said. ‘It is later than I had thought it would be.' She imagined Charles waiting at home, glass in hand, his eye on the clock; Kitty perhaps a little the better for drink.

‘Did you know him when you were my age?' Betsy pulled her gloves away from her wrists and blew her warm breath into them.

‘Vesey? Yes, I knew him as far back as I can remember.' Betsy had not imagined her remembering back any further than her own age. That seemed a feat in itself.

‘But when did you stop knowing him?'

‘I didn't stop; but when we grew up we had to be in different places . . . and the war dispersed people, I found . . .'

‘He's a great actor,' Betsy said simply.

‘Darling, don't bite your gloves. You're not a baby.'

Vesey came out of a side door and across a yard, his face mauve in the malignant light, his collar turned up, and an untidy parcel underneath his arm. Harriet started up the engine and her hands tightened on the steering-wheel.

‘I thought you were simply marvellous,' Betsy said, leaning to open the door for him.

‘Oh, he was simply marvellous,' Betsy said to Charles.

‘What will you drink?' Charles asked, over her head. ‘Brandy? Scotch?'

‘Oh, brandy, please.' Vesey now took his second look at the room. White lilac was arranged against the red damask curtains; the white kitten slept on a crimson cushion. With Charles in it, the room's splendour now seemed complete. He handed drinks almost with the assumption that they would all raise them first to toast his triumph.

Kitty sat plumply on the sofa. Harriet stooped to kiss her, drawing off her gloves and putting her cold hands into Kitty's warm ones. Over by the gramophone, Tiny peered at the names on records.

‘Simply marvellous!' Betsy was going on excitedly.

‘Time for bed!' Charles said sharply.

‘Well . . . good luck!' Vesey said, lifting his glass.

Harriet, in her letter, had let him guess why he was here. He did not fear situations, as she did; dreading his own moods more than other people's. To help Harriet, to see her for a last time before he left, he had agreed to come. He felt, though, that it was now for Charles to find something to say, to sound some note, and, going over to warm himself at the fire, thought he would bide his time and look at Harriet. She sat beside Kitty, who still clasped her hands; and she smiled up at him as if drawing him into their conversation. Under the rosy lamplight, her smooth hair had a bronze lustre; pearls were twisted round her wrists where once the silver bracelets had hung.

‘So you were Harriet's little play-fellow!' Kitty said. ‘I imagine a Kate Greenaway picture, with hoops.'

‘Bed!' said Charles again to Betsy, trying to pretend that his irritation was a playful sternness.

She circled her ginger-ale in the glass, drank it down quickly. ‘
I
should like to go on the stage,' she said.

‘I expect Mr Macmillan would discourage you,' Charles said.

‘I
try
not to be discouraging,' Vesey said, and straightened the corner of the hearthrug with his toe.

‘She is going to take after her grandmother,' Kitty said.

‘My grandmother? Oh!' Betsy laughed. ‘I never think about
her
being an actress.'