A Game of Hide and Seek (27 page)

‘The other day, I saw that it had been unsealed and stuck together again. I never opened it myself. It was enough knowing it was there. I felt cold with fear when I saw, not so much at its being discovered, as at myself discovering such an action in Charles. Wastes of horror and misunderstanding lie between us now.'

‘Keep nothing, my dear one. Don't be a sentimental woman. Have
now
. This evening. All the rest is a dust laden with threats.'

‘I can't. Suppose I were left with nothing!'

‘If scraps of paper are all you have, you
have
nothing. Besides, Charles might want to fight me.'

They came to a small tea-shop in a mean street. In the furred darkness it was a dim oasis. A card saying OPEN hung crookedly against the door, and in the window a plate of cakes lay in a strange light, like fossilised cakes in a museum. They looked so permanent. They could no more moulder away, they felt, than could shells or pieces of stone.

‘They would hardly melt in the mouth,' he said.

They stopped and looked in the window, his arm through hers.

‘I love you stealing my photograph,' he said. ‘I will for ever cherish you. Which would you have of those cakes if you could choose?'

‘Perhaps the Chelsea bun.'

‘Or that cornucopia broken off some garden statue . . .'

‘Fantastic, unappetising cakes!'

‘Let's go in and eat some. Let's have that very plate out of the window!'

But what began as a joke threatened to sadden them and when the cakes lay between them and the bewildered waitress had withdrawn, the joke crumbled and panic swept through them. They could not glance at one another. To discard so affected a piece of playfulness was difficult and the Chelsea bun was uneatable, especially as a joke.

‘A second-hand flower,' he said, laying the rose beside her plate.

She picked it up, but would not look at him.

‘Charles,' he said, bravely beginning to unwind
his
Chelsea bun, ‘would take you to a lovely place at once – with music and forced lilac and something nice to eat. It is tempting Providence for us to go out together.'

‘Because we are alike in some ways, there must be disadvantages, as well as benefits.'

He broke off bits of the bun and began to eat.

He is hungry, she thought. She resented his hunger, deplored his letting her know about it. Very sedately she poured tea, her glove over the handle of the pot.

The shop was empty. The waitress, having thrown coke all over the fire, so annulling it and chilling the room, disappeared through some curtains. They could hear some over-confident voices and some over-confident dish-washing; and all the time, the phlegmy fog thickened the darkness beyond the windows and enisled them there.

With a great effort, he tried to wrench their evening away from disaster, and leaning forward, pushing aside his plate. said: ‘Forgive this horrible place!'

She looked round at the filmed mirrors with advertisements on them, at the green-tiled tables, the antlered hat-stand, the vase of pampas grass like plumes which had been dipped in the fog.

‘It doesn't matter where we are,' she said, and knew this to be true.

‘Do you remember when I made Joseph and Deirdre eat chops?'

‘Yes.'

‘I suddenly remembered that the other day. I can't think why.'

Harriet had never forgotten. She saw him now – the thin, white youth he had been – leaning over to cut Joseph's meat, remembered the exhaustion of her desire.

While he was talking, he stretched his hand down beside his chair, curling his fingers to attract a little white cat, like Harriet's Blanchie, which came sidling to him. Very delicately, she sprang upon his knees and began to thrust her claws into him as if she were stitching his clothes. She was pink and white. The light shone rosily through her ears; the little pads of her feet were covered in pink silk. They both watched her as they talked. She reminded Harriet of home. Trying to forget, she said: ‘Tell me about your lodgings.'

Stroking the cat until her fur crackled, he said: ‘I took down the picture over the bed. Psyche at the Pool. One foot in the water, one hand on the bosom. The landlady thought I did it from moral indignation, but it was only indignation. There's a large oblong now, with the pattern of the wallpaper very bright. The window is over a yard with dustbins and ferns, and by the window there is a marble-topped washstand that I use for a desk – very cold to the wrists. The bath has a green stain running down under the geyser and . . . am I depressing you? It is rather like George Gissing perhaps . . . I eat my meals at the washstand, too, and rather nasty they are, and I wrote those letters to you sitting there. Your letters I keep wrapped up in a paper bag in the top right-hand drawer of the chest. I thought you would like to know. My books are in cardboard boxes underneath the bed.'

She built up his life in her mind. It was like reading a novel written by someone one loves: allusive, intimate, between-the-lines reading.

The waitress came through the curtains and turned the card on the door, so that now it said CLOSED. She watched it swinging to and fro. He put the cat on the floor and brushed white hairs off his clothes. He took a handful of money from his pocket and paid the bill, and soon they were out in the street again and another scene, another little coloured picture was left behind.

The street was silent. They walked closely together in the deserted city; sometimes his shoulder brushed her cheek, once he took her hand inside her muff. They could see nothing; only sometimes, as they passed under a lamp, dead leaves stuck to the pavement. The fog beaded their hair and their eyelashes; her muff was stary with it; their coats had a bloom of moisture on them.

In all London there seemed to be no other people; yet when they entered a pub in a mews they found that it was full, and blue with smoke. But the crowd made an island of them, too, like the fog. They sat down unnoticed in a corner. The scene was teeming and Hogarthian. Between the close-packed legs, a dog ran round, nosing at the slopped beer on the floor; voices were too vibrant, and every laugh was like a peacock's scream.

‘When we were young,' Vesey said, ‘I never did know what you were thinking. I had the burden of taking all the risks, initiating everything. Once I purposely brushed against you as we went in to lunch – a little experiment. You blushed, but it might have been in anger. When you sat down next to me, you touched the knives and forks nervously, as if you hesitated. Yes, like a child waiting to say its Grace.'

‘I was feeling that all the happiness in me had broken out into blossom; but doubt soon began. Soon I was sure it was all an accident, you seemed so indifferent again.'

She looked defiantly at a man standing by, who turned his head, overhearing her words. ‘There was a pink azalea in the room,' she went on. ‘I sat and stared at it and at first it seemed that my happiness was like that; a great flight of blossom, a great running up the scale.'

‘Nowadays,' she thought, ‘perhaps always, happiness has to be isolated. Only when we blot out all that surrounds it, can we have it perfect, as we so often have perfect grief.' She felt that she must not grope backwards over her conscience, or forwards over her desires, but keep her contentment in this different climate while she could.

They stayed in the pub a long while and when they came out into the cobbled mews, they walked along slowly, close to the garage doors.

‘What will happen to us?' she asked.

‘Don't worry now,' he said. ‘Don't relate this particular evening to any of the rest of our lives.'

The fog had enfolded their hours together, as if they were jewels in a box. He would go back to his room with the marble washstand, the faded walls. She would sit in the slow dirty train, watching her reflection in the window, no longer combing her hair, no longer chafing her hands in her muff. When Charles came home much later from his Old Boys' Reunion, she would be lying on her side feigning sleep.

Vesey stopped between the dark buildings and kissed her, drew her inside his opened coat. His hands gripped her thin shoulders.

‘At night, I take you to bed with me. You lie down in my arms underneath the square patch where Psyche used to hang. Without you I am quite alone. My life is one long sordid squabble with other people. You were always my beloved, though I didn't know what way to behave. With you in my arms, though, I am always at peace. In my most desperate longing for you, I am still at peace. I lie and remember things – like that time we went in to lunch – and imagine other things. You justify everything, hallow everything. It doesn't any longer matter if I cannot pay the rent.'

She felt, even in the soles of her feet, the palms of her hands, her striving for him, against all matters of time and place, so that she could not loosen her arms from him and believed that her nerves could not endure their separation. She was beset by him, as she had been as a young girl.

‘You will come again?'

‘There are so few chances.'

‘Does it make you feel furtive and unlovely?'

‘No. It is beyond any of that.'

‘To tell lies, I mean.'

‘If I use the lies to get to you, they don't matter to me.'

‘I wish I were rich,' he said carelessly, glancing away over her shoulder, down the mews. ‘I wish you hadn't that Betsy. I wish we were eighteen again. Talking eases me, breaks up the concentration of my body. I am not saying anything that means anything. I also have to know that you and Charles are together in the night. I am glad you are saved that pain. I mean, of thinking in that way of me. You see how unselfish I am? I take the worst part willingly. Never think of me on those occasions, will you? I beg your pardon for mentioning it. But if you could possibly banish me . . .'

‘I can only bring you near me when I am alone . . .'

When they walked on again, the rose that he had tucked into her coat, fell down on to the greasy cobbles. They stooped to look for it, but couldn't find it. Each time he struck a match to help them to see, the little splutter of light seemed to drive the beautiful fog back into his face.

At the beginning of the spring, Hugo fell ill. It was uncertain weather: a queasy sunshine alternated with a glowering violet sky; a choppy wind set all the bushes jigging.

Hugo's illness was Harriet's only way of seeing Vesey. They sat on either side of his bed staring at one another. Then at times, she would feel whipped up into excitement. She moved consciously, with his eyes on her: what she said to Hugo was always for Vesey's benefit. Hugo found her good and gentle. Although shy in her dealings with him, she was more soothing than Deirdre. He was not such a fool that he thought Vesey good to be there, but the loveliness in the room invigorated him, he felt part of the exquisite tension and drew strength from it. Sunlight came in with them. He suddenly saw that life is short and happiness a good thing, to be made much of. He lay there, feeling washed up and discarded, saw that they made use of his illness. There they could be together without blame. His death would remove their chaperon, and send Vesey back to lying and scheming. He did not think that Harriet would lie or scheme, not knowing that they acted in unison and that one could not be separated from the behaviour of the other.

Although he brought them together, he was a brake upon their love; he kept it a matter of glances, of sudden downward looks, of hands accidentally brushing together. He wondered what would happen to them. His wondering took him from one day to another. Feeling no pity for them, not judging them nor abetting them. They might have been characters in a play, though less interesting since it was a play whose conclusion he would not see.

In the end, they were not there. He died in Deirdre's arms; his son standing at the foot of the bed. They had been a happy, loyal family. He thought, in his last hours, and when he was able to think at all, that something had been accomplished. Perhaps Harriet and Vesey had no place there.

The next time they met, the blinds were drawn. Joseph and Deirdre were once more polite, composed and well-behaved.

‘I always remember,' Harriet said, as she and Vesey walked in the tangled garden, ‘how he helped me when my mother died. I had never been to a cremation before. He made me sit down and listen to all that would happen, so that nothing could shock me. When the coffin began to slide away, he said I should think of a liner on a slipway, beginning its voyage, a sad and yet a noble occasion. He spared me nothing, but when the time came I was all right. I was grateful to him. He was kind, and didn't jib at difficult things.'

‘He didn't cotton to me much,' Vesey said. ‘He always made me feel tricky and emotionally disorderly.'

A half-blind spaniel waddled at their heels. When Vesey threw a stick, trying to make the dog run, it only turned a watery and indifferent eye.

In the dell, Deirdre's old swing was caught up on the branch of an apple tree. There were the remains of a house Joseph had begun to build in an oak many years ago.

Vesey unhooked the swing and Harriet sat on it. It was sheltered there; the first warmth of the spring seemed breathed up from the earth. The newly-unfolded leaves of wild daffodils and lords-and-ladies looked varnished and brilliantly green among dead leaves and broken twigs.

‘This is the last day then,' Harriet said, swinging a little, but with her toes dragging on the ground.

‘We shall have to meet in London,' Vesey replied. He leant back against the trunk of the tree, the palms of his hands pressed into the rough bark.

‘The other day, when I went there shopping, I was dreadfully questioned . . .'

‘We could make up some lies, invent some places for you to go to, to have been to.'

‘We are making a monster of Charles, which he really is not.'

‘Is. Is not. It couldn't matter less. We need not waste time discussing him. Doesn't he ever go away anywhere?'