A Game of Hide and Seek (12 page)

But soon Harriet made an excuse and went home.

‘Charles has been turning her against me,' Julia thought. ‘Something has changed.'

She took the little botched-up cushion and held it to her eyes.

A flurried shame had beset Harriet after her evening with Charles. She did not again write in her diary: life became confused yet tasteless; her own part in it dubious. She did not want to meet him again and did not know how to when she must. She never had loved Vesey so deeply as when she had been so demanding of Charles's embrace. Absence had made, she realised, her heart grow fonder and her body weaker. At the most personal moment, she had lost the personality. That this could be so shocked her. Such a revelation, through her own behaviour, of the nature of love was unbearable to her. That Charles took, when they met, no cue from her past actions was a source of gratitude.

He no longer drove her home in silence; for there were people now they had in common, whom they could discuss: Kitty and Tiny especially. On Sunday mornings they met at one of the more falsely rustic pubs near the village; later, the four of them went for long walks across country, coming back in the darkening afternoon with branches of berries. The evening clouding the landscape and engulfing the bare trees smote Harriet painfully. Walking with Kitty, whom she had grown to love, she hoped sometimes that she might find words to express her longing: her loneliness: to share, to confide. But she never could find the strength to indulge in the weakness.

She returned home at tea-time, to the bright cottage room, with the firelight pink in the copper plates on the dresser, Lilian sitting on the rug making toast, one hand to her rosy cheek.

‘You should bring Charles to tea,' she said, turning the toast on the fork.

‘He feels he should go back to his mother.'

‘I hope
you
don't feel the same.'

‘Of course not,' Harriet lied.

Soon church bells would begin to ring – a steady clangour in the sharp air. The feeling of Sunday evening began to pin her down: thoughts of mortality, of the churchyard with its bleached crosses; her mother; guilt; pity; the burden of owing too much. Only when she was a mother herself would she know that those feelings were unnecessary; that she owed her mother nothing; that the pity was mutual and that, far from fearing middle-age, one took refuge in it and felt no tragedy in the mere fact of years having gone by; that at forty she would not envy the girl she was at twenty. She mourned her mother's lost youth more than her mother did, and looking at old photographs, felt sickened by pity for the wise innocence of her mother's face when she was a young woman; how, for instance, maternity was awkward in her: she held her baby, who was Harriet herself, as if she were a little girl with her best doll.

‘Oh, I am getting old!' Lilian said, for her bones cracked as she stood up from the hearthrug. She did not know how her words pained her daughter.

‘Charles always says how young you look,' Harriet improvised.

‘It is kind of Charles,' Lilian said, irritated by the girl's lie. She knew that she looked much older than her years.

Later, they took their sewing and sat down on either side of the fireplace. The long evening began. Lilian bent over her embroidery-frame. The pale wreath of flowers in petit-point encircled Harriet's initials. Sometimes the strands of silk caught against her roughened hands.

Harriet's own work needed little attention. As she cobbled up her stockings, her thoughts ticked over and over in her mind and she glanced across at her mother often when she was not looking.

‘Grey velvet,' Harriet said.

‘But that's absurd,' said Lilian. ‘When you're my age, yes. Then you'll regret all the white frocks you can't wear any longer. A nice simple white frock is always suitable for a young girl.'

A beautiful, not a suitable frock, had been what Harriet had wanted. She could imagine how mottled, how red-elbowed she would look in white tulle.

‘You could have had that black velvet,' Miss Lazenby said, when the subject was opened at the shop. ‘Only some old cat bought it Friday.'

‘Black velvet's always flattering,' said Miss Lovelace.

‘You don't need to be flattered when you're nineteen,' Miss Brimpton said. ‘It's when you're fat and forty like me . . .'

‘Oh, go on!' Miss Lovelace said, dutifully, mechanically.

Evening frocks had suddenly changed. From being short, spangled, fringed, waistless, they now swept the ground. Instead of ostrich-feather fans, there were Spanish shawls to manage. Caroline and Lilian disapproved: long skirts, they feared, would threaten the status of women.

‘Oh God!' said Kitty Vincent, when Harriet described the conversations to her. ‘I like to
wear
clothes, not talk about them. The same with sex,' she added vaguely. ‘Talk, talk, talk.' She was trimming a hat, for doing which she had a flair. ‘They must drive you well-nigh crazy at that shop. Don't listen to them. What you wear's your own private thing. Whom you love, too . . .' Her glance was carefully for the hat she was trimming in her hand; sidelong and appraising.

‘What has sex, love, to do with this?' Harriet wondered.

‘They say ospreys are pulled out of living birds,' Kitty said. ‘Do you think that is true? One hears such frightful things. It's the middle-man who corrupts us all the time. After all, who would snatch feathers out of a poor bird just to decorate herself? When it is so remote, though, another country, other people . . . furs, too, of course! The other afternoon, at the committee-meeting for the dance, I began to count all the little moles that had gone to make up Mrs Crockett's coat . . . it came to a hundred and something! and I couldn't even
see
the back. What a horrid massacre; what bitches we are! I thought.'

She put on the hat and stared at herself in the mirror with great dissatisfaction.

‘At nineteen,' she asked, ‘does one look forward to dances? I forget.'

‘I look forward,' said Harriet doubtfully, ‘yet half
dread
 . . .'

‘Dread what?'

‘Why, seeming dull, I suppose.'

Kitty laughed. ‘I dread the others seeming dull,' she said. She took off the hat, as if she were cross with it. Her laughter had soon faded. She sat looking into the mirror in an absent-minded way. Presently she sighed, stood up, her hands on the dressing-table. It suddenly occurred to Harriet that she was pregnant.

All the happiness she had felt a moment before at being in Kitty's bedroom listening to her, watching her, dissolved. The intimacy had not, after all, been intimacy. That Kitty should have chattered about feathers and furs and hats and kept secret a matter of such importance made Harriet feel roughly excluded and disregarded. Ten years was still apparently to be a barrier, as it had been in the nursery, at school. Mingled, too, with her feelings of hurt and disappointment, was envy; emotionally, physically, she was envious of Kitty and would not speak, was sullenly antagonistic.

‘There,' said Kitty, tidying her dressing-table. She took up a silver button-hook and swung it from her finger. ‘And as I expect you must notice . . . I can't think why everyone doesn't notice . . . I am quite obviously in the family way. Do not wince, dear Harriet, at the homely expression. I've tried the others over to myself and they're all prim or solemnly poetical or medical . . . I find vocabulary a great drawback . . . one is forced to make jokes . . . though heaven knows it isn't funny. If I could find the right phrase, I could tell even Tiny . . .'

‘I am so pleased,' Harriet said. She sat on the edge of the bed, swinging her feet backwards and forwards. She looked up and smiled, feeling suffused with happiness.

‘It's like “womb”,' Kitty meandered on indignantly. ‘What a word to be stuck with – so sinister, so Biblical!'

Nothing was heard of Vesey. Harriet gave up going so often to Caroline's in the evenings. No crumb of news ever came her way to reward her for the dullness of sitting with Hugo and Caroline after supper in the peace and bliss of their domestic life – Caroline mending, her horn-rimmed glasses slipping down so that she peered over them when she looked at Harriet; Hugo reading a boring book about some war or other, reaching forward from time to time to throw a log on the fire. He sawed these logs himself on Sundays and watched them wistfully as they burned, dusting his fingers on his trousers, watching sap dribbling out and, at last, the great antlers of flame branching up and over.

Lulled by the ticking clock, the sizzling and explosive fire, Harriet would sit fondling the dogs' ears, trying to draw the conversation towards Vesey, without being suspected of doing so: but Vesey had been blown away like a leaf in the wind: he left no mark, it seemed: no remembrances. She was not old enough to know that if she had asked outright, they would have suspected her less, though could have told her no more.

Now that she went there seldom, it was strange to her to cross the lawns again and push open the front door, which once she had entered every day.

It was almost Christmas-time, and the countryside drew apart from the town, uncompromising in its darkness at night, with its dripping trees, the solitary figures of its landscape – the child going with a milk-can in its frozen hands towards the farm at dusk; the woman snatching in her washing hastily as if night were a thief; and now Harriet on her bicycle with its wobbling light cast down upon the rutted lane.

Caroline's windows were yellow; the fir-trees raised great tasselled arms about the house; the garden creaked and dripped. When she pushed open the hall-door, dogs padded towards her; there was a smell of vegetarian food, a far-away sound of washing-up. No voice answered her call. When she opened the sitting-room door only Vesey was there.

‘I . . . I wanted Caroline's fan,' Harriet stammered foolishly, shocked.

Vesey put out a hand and turned off the radio, but did not rise.

‘Is that all you have to say to me? That you wanted Caroline's fan? How disappointing of you, Harriet!'

‘I didn't know you would be here.'

‘You could still have welcomed me.'

‘I do,' she said faintly, and sat down on the edge of a chair. She stared with great absorption at the fire. ‘How are you?' she went on, mustering an arch sociability. ‘How is Oxford?'

‘Full of bicycles and tea-shops, you know,' he said vaguely. ‘It smells of umbrellas. Umbrellas and toasted tea-cakes, worm-eaten wood, damp clothes.'

‘Don't you like it?' she asked eagerly.

‘Even in bookshops the rain runs off umbrellas into little puddles on the floor.'

‘But it can't rain so very much more than in other places, surely?'

‘Probably not,' he said carelessly. ‘It would not be so noticed, elsewhere.'

Oxford, it seemed, had not come up to expectations. Harriet tried to be sorry; but was only cheered.

‘Why, Harriet!' said Caroline. ‘I didn't know you were here.'

‘It is surprises all round,' said Vesey.

‘I came to ask if I could borrow your fan for the dance; the grey feather one. I would take great care of it.'

‘Of course, if Deirdre hasn't broken it. Vesey is here, you see.'

‘Yes.'

‘What dance is this, Harriet?' Vesey asked. ‘I had not visualised your life so gay.'

‘It is just a dance at The Bull,' she said.

He felt a sense of change, of loss. He longed to say to someone – and who could it be but Harriet? – ‘I can only fail. Never expect anything. Because of some flaw in me, some wrongness, I can neither succeed nor admit defeat and between the two wait cynically for nothing whatsoever. When I am touched, I give a false note, like a cracked glass's. A note of cruelty, or scorn.'

‘You should come too,' Harriet was saying.

Caroline had gone off to fetch the fan, and Harriet went over to him and stood near-by. ‘Prove to me,' she willed him, ‘that love is not what other people describe, not what has happened to Kitty, not what the girls at the shop discuss – a trap, an antagonism; or, as it is under this roof, a dull habit.' She stood very still, her head raised a little as if she were straining to hear something. ‘If I could find out,' she thought, ‘if it meant the same to him – being in that empty house that evening, or if he has forgotten already – for people forget such important things: or they pretend that they forget.'

‘Would you like me to come?' he asked.

‘Yes.'

‘Who is taking you?'

‘Charles. Charles Jephcott. But it would be all right.'

If it wasn't, she didn't care.

‘What are you going to wear?' he asked her.

Then a surprising, a beautiful thing happened. He leant forward in his chair and took her hand, sat studying it carefully, parting her fingers one from the other.

‘And this evening, when I set out,' she thought, ‘I had no idea . . . I expected nothing miraculous.'

‘Your frock,' he insisted gently, pressing her hand.

‘It is grey velvet.' Now the frock seemed wrong. She wished that she had not won that battle with her mother.

‘Speak up now! You have nothing to fear,' he said. ‘A pink rose you
must
have, tucked in the waist.'

There were no waists that year, but somehow she would have one.

‘Or bosom,' he added.

She blushed. There were no bosoms either. Her own was flattened under a pink elastic bust-bodice.

He folded her fingers into the palm of her hand, enclosed them tenderly in his own. ‘Your poor little bones,' he said, crushing them together.

Then, hearing someone on the stairs, relinquished her. He turned aside and switched on the wireless. It was his favourite toy. The ranging from station to station matched his own restlessness.

‘Here we are,' said Caroline. She flicked open the fan and belaboured the air with it.