A Game of Hide and Seek (34 page)

‘But why?'

‘To find out if she's come back; but she won't have.'

‘Well, please don't. I'm busy.'

As he walked away from the telephone, he thought: ‘I don't want to wait here; but there is nowhere I can go.' He imagined himself ostracised at the golf-club or in the Saloon Bar at the Bull; his erstwhile companions turning their backs as he entered, avoiding his greeting.

Drinking seemed to agglomerate all his feelings, so that self-pity and indignation lay side by side with pride and scorn. His lips moved as he played. He argued continuously with himself; explained to Harriet; inveighed against Tiny and Reggie Beckett. After a while, his hands dropped on to his knees. He knew his real bitterness was with Harriet.

He stood up rather shakily and poured himself another drink. ‘You are not fit to be the mother of my child,' he suddenly said, loudly and dramatically; but then the absurdity hit him. His mood crumpled; he felt that everything had been taken from him in one day.

At half-past eight, he began to fear the sound of the telephone and his mother's cruel questioning. He knew, by the strangeness of the room, that he had been drinking too much. The chairs held out their arms imploringly and had a waiting look; the stillness of things seemed only temporary and some objects, for no reason, detached themselves from their background and came very close to him. ‘Too much gin,' he explained to himself, ‘and I must go on like this until closing-time.'

But the sound of a key in the front-door sobered him. He heard footsteps in the hall, and the telephone ringing. The footsteps paused and then retreated. He heard Harriet's light, tired voice. ‘What do you want, Julia? . . . I've been out all day with friends . . . oh, please don't make mysteries . . . of course, I've come back.'

Charles braced himself to hear this over again, but Harriet put down the receiver and went upstairs.

‘Mother didn't get the truth,' he thought. He wondered what Harriet would say to him, and which friends she would choose to have been with. ‘If that were really true, it would be wonderful,' he thought.

When she came in, he felt that there was no chance of escaping her lies. ‘She will be cool and rude and rebuking,' he thought, ‘because she is so desperately defensive.' He saw no way out for either of them. She would not tell him the truth and he could not endure her deceit.

‘Hello, Charles.'

She stood behind a chair, with her hands laid nervously on the top of it. They were blue with the cold. He supposed that she did not express surprise at his presence lest he should retaliate with questions about her absence. He could imagine her falsely haughty replies.

‘You look cold. Would you like a drink?'

‘Yes, please.'

‘Whisky? Gin?'

When he handed it to her, he touched her cold fingers. She went back behind her chair.

‘Better?' he asked, watching her sip.

‘Yes. Thank you. Your mother telephoned as I came in. She wanted to know where I was.'

‘Oh, yes.'

Harriet shut her eyes and drained her glass.

‘I didn't tell her the truth.'

‘Indeed, why should you?'

‘I said I had been to see some friends; but I was really with Vesey.'

Embarrassment stiffened her mouth. She said the name clumsily.

He took her glass and filled it. Now that he had the truth from her, he had no knowledge of how to behave. ‘How sad that we can't speak to one another without a drink to help us along!' he thought. ‘Is shyness the only feeling we are ever to share?'

‘I'm glad you told me.'

‘I was not afraid; but deeply embarrassed.'

‘I know. Either means you don't love me.'

‘One
can
be embarrassed – hopelessly embarrassed – with people one loves.'

‘Perfect love casteth out awkwardness,' he said solemnly.

She glanced at him in doubt. It was plain that he had been drinking too much; but was perhaps masquerading as worse than he was.

‘It was kind of you to come back,' he went on.

‘Not
kind
.'

‘Why did you?'

‘I meant not to . . .'

‘But with the best will in the world you found you must.'

He veered uncertainly from one mood to another: words were more like prevailing winds than any expression of his course, or destination. ‘In this way, we shall come to grief,' she thought, but felt too tired to be so careful.

‘You thought of your husband and child,' Charles suggested. ‘And of the little cat shut up in the shed. Have some more gin?'

‘Not for a moment. Why are you here, Charles?'

‘I had some bad news before I could leave this morning and after that I couldn't leave.'

‘What was it?'

‘It has all been rather a day.' He put his hand over his eyes for a moment as if he could not sort out his thoughts. ‘Reggie Beckett has disappeared, leaving Tiny to clear up the sort of mess that never can be cleared up.'

Harriet came cautiously from behind her chair, and held her hands out over the fire. ‘Yes?'

‘Oh, you wouldn't understand. Kitty, for instance, finds it all terribly tedious.'

‘Explain, though!'

‘Reggie wanted some capital for a company he had floated . . . oh, this was some time ago. All he needed was a patent from some man . . . quite up in the air, but Tiny saw himself making a fortune, and he put in money. Then, of course, he was in a good position to find other people to do the same . . . Reggie offered him five per cent on all he could get invested . . . they were all our clients, of course . . . used to coming to us for advice, easily persuaded. I wish you would have another drink.'

‘In a moment.'

‘Their trouble was that the patent was sold to someone quite different, who has put the thing into production, and it is they who will make the fortune, not Tiny, or Reggie. They have all thrown their money down a deep, deep well. First, restlessness set in; then suspicion. This morning, it was all made clear. I blame myself; I shut my eyes to a good many things.'

‘Charles, I am so sorry.'

‘Kitty's first words were “Are we going to be poor?” You emerge from the test better.'

‘I wonder what will happen?'

‘Perhaps we can rise above it,' Charles said grandly.

‘Don't have another drink.'

‘Oh, Harriet, darling, why did you come home? I am afraid that you just thought that I might be here.'

‘No.'

‘Then why?'

She rested her arms on the chimney-piece and her head on her arms. ‘I will be different. You shall never be worried again. If you could forgive me . . .' She made a fence of little phrases, which seemed a treachery to herself.

Waiting in terror as he came across the room towards her, she felt his shadow fall over her and wondered how she could bear the moment when he touched her. Instead, he put out his hand and took up the cigarette-box.

‘I won't ever ask you why you came back, or what happened. I'm jealous of Vesey, but I don't want you to love me in that way. Marriage seems serious to me. I despise people who give in. And I like the idea of you as my wife and the authority, the position, we have together. Patience is needed to make a marriage – a pity to throw it away. And now that I'm in deep water, this house, and you in it, means more. If you had really gone – and on this particular night – you'd have taken my pride and courage with you. As long as you're here, it's all merely a challenge to me. The sort of thing I can manage – dealing with people, and earning our living.'

Then, feeling that more confidence was returning to him than was justified, he quickly lit a cigarette and began to walk about the room.

‘I think I should like another drink now,' Harriet said. She watched him as he poured it out, and then before she lifted the glass, said: ‘I hope I can help you. I will try. And won't worry you in other ways.'

‘My dear girl, don't cry, don't cry! It would be the last straw.'

She smiled. ‘Then I won't.' But, choking a little over her gin, she felt the tears began to fall. She turned her back to him, and wiped them quickly away.

‘Of course, Italy's out of the question now,' Charles said.

At the end of the assembly hall, across the great lake of parquet, Miss Bell was decorating the Christmas tree for what Miss Anstruther called ‘the Poor Children's Party'. The next day, her girls would distribute its presents and hand round gaudy jellies. The children would call them ‘miss'. Some of the nicer girls would feel foolish and false; others would glow with their good work. Miss Bell, hanging up frosty bells and coloured balls, merely carried out orders.

Outside, the light thickened into darkness; the hall with its smell of yew and floor-polish looked mysterious and exciting to Betsy. She took a little slide towards the Christmas tree and walked round it admiringly.

‘You are here late,' Miss Bell said.

‘I had a talking-to. About my essay on Rossetti. She said it was morbid.'

‘She?'

‘Miss Matherson-Smith. I thought she meant just anything about Rossetti, and I wrote about him digging up his wife's body to get at the poems he'd buried with her . . . nice and gruesome . . . her hair came away with the poems . . . madly decomposed, of course.'

‘My dear Betsy, please!'

‘Well, it ought to have been about “The Blessed Damozel” . . . Can I put some of the stars on?'

‘If you are careful. They have to last from year to year.'

‘Yes, they were here when I first came.'

A sadness fell over them. Miss Bell switched on one of the lights. It shone down over the tree and a brass-rubbing of a crusader on the wall behind.

‘You
will
give me your address?'

‘Yes, of course, Betsy.'

Miss Bell could foresee the carefully chosen Christmas-card; the letters, growing shorter; and by next Christmas, no card at all.

‘I think perhaps you ought to be getting home,' she said.

‘Just let me hang up a few more. The tinsel's dreadfully tarnished. I love Christmas . . . everything about it . . .'

‘Are you happy now?'

‘If only you weren't going. I wish you would tell me where it is.'

‘A school in London, to teach Latin.'

‘And Greek?'

‘Latin,' Miss Bell said flatly.

‘Miss Bell . . .'

‘Yes?'

Betsy plunged her hands right into the prickly branches to hang up a frosted ball; she felt the sharp needles on her wrists and suffered them as if they were a punishment. She wanted to say: ‘I sometimes said things without knowing if they were true.' But she could not. She was obliged to let Miss Bell go with whatever vision of her mother she had in her mind.

‘What is it, Betsy?'

‘Nothing. I am sorry you aren't going to teach Greek as well.'

‘Yes, it is a pity.'

Miss Bell took out from its tissue-paper a rather discoloured wax fairy doll, and mounted the steps to tie it to the topmost branch.

Vesey said: ‘Mother, please not to pry. Just throw all the papers into the suitcase.'

He sat down suddenly on the edge of the bed, feeling dizzy, frozen round the mouth.

‘I'm not prying: but other people's things are so intriguing. Whose photograph is it in the paper-bag?'

‘Harriet's.'

‘I do think it is touching of you to love your childhood's playmate still.'

‘Why is it so much against people to have known them a long time?'

‘It does work that way. The further one looks back, the duller and duller one's friends seem to have been.'

‘You are a strange sight, mother, in this shoddy room.'

She could not resist glancing in the mirror. Dressed in pale grey, her only touch of colour was her lavender hair.

‘Well, dear, there it is: it need never have happened.'

Vesey swung his legs up on to the bed and lay back with his eyes shut.

‘When Harriet comes, there is a fiction I want you to support. I'm going home with you, you understand, only for the time-being; then I am off to South Africa. Father is sending me.'

‘And he would, my love, if it is what you want. It has all been nonsense between the two of you . . . both so self-willed.'

‘It is only what I have told Harriet. She is coming to say goodbye to me before sailing. Even her husband feels I am a poor challenge to him now.'

‘Well, I do wish she would hurry. Stanley's coming for us in the car at five.'

‘And who is Stanley?'

‘Surely you remember? He's an old friend of the family.'

Vesey smiled at her new euphemism.

‘One of those dull ones from the old days?'

Barbara took some bronze chrysanthemums out of some bronze-coloured water, and stood there while slime dripped from the stalks. ‘Where can I put these? God, what a stench!'

‘In the waste-paper-basket by the chest-of-drawers,' Vesey said tiredly.

‘Doesn't that woman ever clean your room? Everything is so filthy. And your shoes, Vesey! They have great holes in the bottoms. No wonder you are always having influenza.'

She opened drawers and bundled his clothes into the suitcase. In the middle of doing so, she suddenly sat down on a chair and began to cry.

Vesey turned his head weakly, irritably, towards her and asked: ‘What is it? Please don't!'

‘No, I mustn't, because of Stanley coming. Yet I can't stop. I didn't ever mean it to be like this. When you were a little boy, I always imagined we'd have fun when you grew up . . . go out together. I can't think how it has all happened so differently . . . finding you in this terrible slum, this dirty room, and your shirts an absolute disgrace . . . I suppose that, as usual, I am to blame.'

Vesey lay with his hands clasped above his head. He tried to remember his father's flat: the blonde satin; the pale furniture; the jardinière with strange ferns; the lacquer cabinet full of bottles. But he expected that it would all be changed – a different fashion now; perhaps Victoriana, with wax fruit and plush curtains.