A Game of Hide and Seek (30 page)

‘No.'

Harriet thought: ‘If he moves, I shall pull the communication-cord.' She put such vehemence into her reading – without seeing one word of it – that he was silenced. Gradually, she relaxed. She began to go back over the evening – her waiting in Regent's Park, that dazzling scene with the brilliant water, movement, the flowers in the evening sun; the parrot in the sunlit bar; the restaurant with the seedy, shuffling waiters; the slow walk to the station; their clumsy farewell.

‘How's old Charles?' the man in the corner suddenly asked.

Surprised, frightened, she looked at him again – a dressy man with beautifully polished shoes; full brown eyes and a little trimmed moustache; his features too small, too much in the middle of his round face with its heavy folds of flesh. So many men like him.

‘Do I know you?' she asked in a vexed voice.

He crossed one knee over the other, brushed at his trousers with a careless hand. ‘Yes, dear.' He stared at his swaying foot, smiling; enjoying this train-journey more than he had hoped. ‘Yes, we have met.'

‘I am bad at remembering people,' she said aloofly.

‘Perfectly okay. For my part, I never forget a face. Beckett's the name. Reggie Beckett.'

‘Oh, yes.'

He took his hat from the rack. ‘I get out at the Golf Club,' he explained. He came and stood by the door, close to her. ‘I must leave you with your memories.' He opened the door and stood ready to jump down as the train slowed. ‘Don't worry, old dear,' he said just before he slammed the door.

‘Worry?'

‘Not a word to Charles.'

He winked gaily and nodded and disappeared.

‘Well, there's one thing I am not and never have been, that's a charwoman,' Mrs Curzon said firmly. ‘I said to her “I'm a lady cleaner. That's what we call it in England, and that's how madam herself always thinks of me”.'

‘But, Curzy dear, I don't,' Harriet protested. ‘I just think of you yourself.'

‘No, but in conversation to anyone you'd refer to me as “Mrs Curzon, my lady cleaner”.'

Harriet looked doubtful. ‘The truth is, I never know what anyone is.' (When she had once referred to herself as a shopgirl, Miss Brimpton had corrected her with ‘sales-lady'.)

‘Elke, for instance,' said Mrs Curzon, ‘is a mother's help. That's what they call all them foreign girls. Now, what the devil are you up to, madam dear?'

‘I was going to polish the mirrors.'

‘And can't I be asked to do it? What am I here for?'

‘I asked Elke to do them yesterday when I was in London. I expect she forgot.'

‘Yes, I expect she conveniently forgot,' Mrs Curzon said, breathing sarcastically upon a mirror. ‘I expect she eased it out of mind. When it comes to dodging things, she's as wide as Regent Street, no denial.'

‘I wonder if you should use a chamois-leather,' Harriet said doubtfully.

‘Oh, yes, finish it off with the shammy, of course,' Mrs Curzon said promptly. She did not like to be told; ‘but credit where credit's due,' she thought, ‘she seldom interferes.'

‘Did you have a nice time in London, madam?'

‘Yes, very nice.'

‘Anything much in the shops?' Mrs Curzon asked condescendingly.

‘Oh, I thought so.'

‘Things are coming back. I'm not Labour myself, madam, though Fred is, well before I met him I was, naturally, but you know what it is with his sort – jaw, jaw – “That's right,” I said, “we'll move out the chiffonier and stand a soap-box in its place” . . . “the Union this, the Union that” . . . it gets you down, madam, straight. But I like to speak fairly and, no disrespect, things do begin to brighten up. Grumble, grumble, they do on the bus, mornings. “What d'you expect with this lot in?” they say, the slightest thing goes wrong, like the bus late or the conductor giving them a bit of lip, which richly some of them deserves. I said the other morning “Did the other lot give you so much as a bottle of cough-cure, let alone a set of teeth and such-like?” No, God judge me, madam, I like things set out fair, and when you see things coming back into the shops you must draw your own conclusions. Now what's worrying you, dear?'

‘Nothing, Curzy. I shall polish these desk handles while I'm in the mood. It's a fidgety job.'

‘And couldn't I do it for you?'

‘You're doing the mirrors,' Harriet said without irony. ‘And I must, after all, do something.'

‘You do too much. I said to Fred the other evening: “Madam does far too much.”'

‘And what did Fred say?' Harriet asked.

‘He said: “So you always say, Florrie. I'm sure she does,” he said. “Not many like her from all I hear,”' Mrs Curzon improvised easily. ‘“There's some,” he said, “regards theirselves a cut above it, but not your madam apparently” – because I always speak as I find. You know that. I don't say anything I wouldn't say to your face. Well, you know me. Better just fetch the shammy now and give it the final.'

Harriet, tidying her desk, tucked away papers neatly. Vesey's few letters she found, not where she had left them, not as she had left them, hidden and enfolded; but lying loosely upon some other papers and her first sight when she opened the drawer.

She sat quite still, hoping by her stillness to catch some memory unawares – a moment when she herself had left her letters where she now found them. But no such recollection overtook her. She felt that the discovery cancelled Charles's easy, reassuring behaviour on the night before. He was still up when she returned. She heard him, as she put the key in the lock, playing Schumann. With beautiful serenity, the sounds came flowing through the house to meet her. As she stood at the drawing-room door, he smiled and nodded as he played, as if he could not stop, or were playing for her benefit. Above the music, in a sleep-talking monotone, he asked: ‘Did you enjoy yourself?'

‘I must,' she had thought, ‘go over and put my hands on his shoulders.' His very playing asked her to do this. Still at the door, she said: ‘Yes, thank you.'

A scream seemed to struggle up through her silence. Her lungs, withholding it, ached. Then he stopped playing and shut down the piano. He was cheerfully busy about the room. He poured a drink for her. Calm, bland, he asked no questions; made no enquiries after, for instance, Miss Lazenby. He lulled her to bed and there made love to her.

Now, she saw in this, not so much her own distress, as her knowledge of having been duped; one betrayal unfolded to reveal another. All of her treacheries, her husband had cynically observed. He watched her – until she seemed in her own eyes both deluded and delusive; fallacious; trumpery. No
woman
, she felt, could have bided her time, as he had.

She began to regard herself as an enormity, an outcast. She remembered Kitty's words; how she had thrown Madame Bovary in to prove her point. Certain that she wreaked ill on all who came near her, and would ruin her husband and her child, she seemed to herself to infect, to contaminate society, whose rules she had never before been tempted to break; which, with the extra spur of her natural inadequacy, she had, in fact, strengthened and maintained.

When she married Charles, she had seemed to wed also a social order. A convert to it, and to provincial life, and keeping house, she had pursued it fanatically and as if she feared censure. No one had entertained more methodically, or better bolstered up social interplay. She had been indefatigable in writing letters of condolence, telegrams of congratulation; remembered birthdays and anniversaries; remembered bread-and-butter letters and telephone-messages after parties. She had tried to do everything right for her daughter; had never missed a speech-day or an end-of-term concert; had talked to form-mistresses and shown interest, as they themselves put it.

But now she flouted what she had helped to create – an illusion of society; an oiling of wheels which went round but not forwards; conventions which could only exist so long as emotion was in abeyance.

‘But I am not the first, or last, woman, to fall in love with someone not her husband,' she thought despairingly. She wanted not to feel monstrous, or abnormal. But there was no safety in numbers. She could only think of women who, in the name of love, brought down great harm on others and died in poverty and solitude or even – such was her anxiety – on the gallows. But ordinary women, the women who sat in tea-shops drinking coffee in the mornings, these kept their lives within bounds. They did not let loose suspicion and deceit in their homes. ‘But I do not know where to turn,' she suddenly thought, and put her hands over her eyes and brow.

‘Madame ducky, what's up?' Mrs Curzon asked. She dropped the chamois-leather and put her arm about Harriet.

‘I cannot be so
bad
,' Harriet thought, ‘not so through-and-through bad; for Curzy loves me and she is a good woman. Unless I delude her, too.'

‘What is it, lovie?'

‘I have a headache.'

‘Go and have a lay-down and I'll bring you up something. London never suits me, either. My daughter up there – well Hammersmith – she gave one of those cocktail-parties. I wish you'd seen it – port, brandy, lovely ham-sandwiches. Well, next thing, I'm sitting on the lavatory singing. No, I felt bad, straight. Never again. Fred was wild. “If there's one thing gives me the creeps,” he said, “it's a woman had a drop too much.” How I come to work next morning I don't know. I kept thinking “No more London for you, Florrie!” I like a nice drink with the rest, but I like it steady. When we go up to The Jockey darts' nights I always reckon to enjoy myself; but steady. A nice laugh, only no one out of hand. I always think if you stick to gin-and-french . . . you ought to do that, madam, you won't go far wrong. Then, of course, a Guinness is nice shopping . . .'

‘Curzy, if you will let me get a word in, I will say that my headache is nothing to do with getting drunk . . .'

‘All the same, dear, you want to lie down. I'm sure the master would say the same.'

‘I'm better now.'

‘Shall I make a cup of tea?' Mrs Curzon asked hopefully.

‘Yes, yes, do that.'

When she was alone, she tore the letters across and dropped them on the fire. ‘Keep nothing,' Vesey had said. ‘If that is all you have, you have nothing.'

Betsy, from a turret window, watched the other girls going home. She could hear their bicycle-wheels on the loose gravel and car doors slamming. When at last they were all gone, out-of-sight beyond the budding trees in the avenue, the school seemed an echoing shaft at the foot of which the caretaker tramped the stone passages, bucket-handles clanked and sharp voices rose from the kitchen. The rosy sunset was absorbed by the rosy brick school building, castellated, machicolated, in the Edwardian style. Mullioned windows flashed ruby. Glossy poplars shimmered.

The turret was one corner of the Science Room. All round, on windowsills, tadpoles darted in weedy tanks, frog-spawn floated, bleached shoots edged out of splitting chestnuts. Against the walls were what Betsy thought of as merely curious contraptions – tubes of glass and rubber and flasks of coloured liquids. Nothing here touched her imagination. She had spent tedious and unprofitable hours sitting before a balance with tweezers and paper-thin weights. She could not bear to be so accurate that a thumb-print or a fleck of dust might affect, as she was warned, her calculations.

She loved the personal, the particular, to adore and to be herself adored. But here, in this room, she was the protagonist of no drama. The cold compiling of facts had so little emotional appeal. The search for truth was the bleakest pursuit. At one end of the scale were the over-large personalities, the clash of wills, which she read about in Greek. Even at her faltering stage of learning she grasped, and was quickened by, the thrust and colour of this drama. Her inaccuracy was but a racing-on. At the other end of the scale were this neat room; and precision; the tadpoles, all alike; and the book full of figures and diagrams which she now sat down to study.

She bowed her head over the book, but was not learning. It seemed beyond her now to bend her mind to anything but thoughts of Vesey and her mother. The figure of Vesey himself, she exploited in her imagination; she tracked him down and fastened to him. She pursued him in any way she could, ransacking her mother's desk for letters, importuning her with oblique questions, sifting evidence.

At some moments she felt shocked and afraid at the way her thoughts ran on; at other moments, only bitterly excluded. But at all times Vesey obsessed her. When she read them, she felt that his letters – attenuated, allusive as they were – by-passed her mother and were meant for her.

She was separated from her family and friends by the very enormity of the thoughts which haunted and burdened her. She had forgotten her life before she had such thoughts and she did not want to be deprived of them; she could not return to the days in which there had only been Miss Bell, and she believed that with her new love and knowledge she would play some momentous role.

In the light of this idea, her lessons seemed trivial; but the punishments which fell upon her isolated her more. Shut in after school, as the day faded and familiar sounds receded, she felt a solitariness more profound than she had imagined possible. ‘For make no mistake,' she warned herself, ‘we are all alone. There is no one going along beside us.' This seemed a horrifying discovery to have made; as horrifying as to see for the first time that there is not always justice in the world. Lately, she had been made, by her companions, to feel beyond the pale. Even Pauline had fallen from dark comments into silence. There were limits to rebellion, she said, as there were limits to compliance. One can be as embarrassing or irritating as the other. And Betsy had made too swift a descent. ‘No one's perfect, I'm not myself,' Pauline had said generously; but she was tired, she implied, of championing her friend. Altogether tired. ‘I can't understand you,' she despaired: and Betsy could believe that no one would. What now went on in her head was so different from other things which they had shared – religion, for instance (they had been confirmed together), and literature. Both had fallen in love with Lord Nelson. Then, later, with Edgar Allan Poe. Later still, with Robert Helpman. Pauline had not shared the enthusiasm for Miss Bell, as she leaned herself more towards adoration of Miss Beetlestone; but both had agreed that the feelings they experienced were different from, and more serious than, the absurd deliriums of other girls.