A Game of Hide and Seek (14 page)

Charles, seeing her still in her velvet dress, felt suddenly that he himself had driven her to some act of desperation or recklessness. She could not at first make him understand, her teeth so chattered with the cold.

Julia came out of her room and leaned over the banisters, superbly furious at being disturbed; her hair on her shoulders, her wrap trailing. It was as much as she could do not to call down, ‘How now!'

While Charles was telephoning and trying to send his mother to bed, Harriet went back to Lilian. She began to light a fire, attempted other little jobs, abandoned them all and returned to her mother.

‘Darling, I was so hateful to you before I went out. I can't forget it.'

‘Caroline! Caroline, where are you?' Lilian cried, piteously. Tears ran unchecked out of her eyes and over her face. Last words have no more meaning, perhaps, than any others; but those were her last words to Harriet.

When she was taken to hospital, she was unconscious. For two more days Caroline and Harriet sat on either side of her bed, but although she opened her great sunken eyes and moved her mouth, she did not speak again and was not anyone they knew or recognised.

‘If only she would speak!' Harriet whispered. She stroked her rough hands. ‘Can she hear?'

‘No, I think she can't.'

It began to snow. The flakes turned slowly over the hospital gardens, and against the leaden sky, drifting hopelessly across the dusk. Harriet went to the window and watched them. She was only waiting for death, she knew. She prayed that she would behave well. Then, ‘I wasn't good to her,' she suddenly said.

‘You were always good.'

‘No. We quarrelled.'

‘It can't be helped. One takes it out of one's nearest and dearest. It doesn't matter. It's the other side of love, part of the same thing.'

‘The doctor blamed me.'

‘No. You did all you could.'

‘If I had been quicker . . . I should have been quicker. She must often have been in pain and said nothing.'

Caroline had tears as hard as bullets beneath her lids. She could not comfort Lilian any more: could only try to console her daughter. A long intimacy was over. It had been compounded of trust and suffering and love. It had no flaw in it, as Harriet's relationship with her mother had flaws. At the moment, with middle-age upon them, which they had awaited together, she felt she could dispense with this friendship less than anything else in her life. Now she would have no one to run to with her few jokes, her many enthusiasms, her allusions, her memories. ‘We went to prison together,' she thought. ‘I held her bouquet at her wedding. I comforted her when she was a widow. She took new-born Deirdre in her arms to Hugo; but more than that we had our day-to-day life; the subtle and allusive letters women write to one another; the informality; the insinuations; the ease.' She put her hand to her aching throat and watched Harriet at the window playing with the blind-cord.

From time to time a nurse came in and took Lilian's wrist between her fingers, then laid her arm back on the quilt, as if there were no more to be done.

Harriet watched the cabbages down below in the garden filling with snow. In the roads it scarcely lay, but the gravel paths showed footprints already and the cabbages were soon white like peonies.

The Matron came in as if she had some instinct of approaching death which had summoned her from another part of the building. Harriet put her hands over her ears, her brow against the window pane. Her eyes were hot with tears.

‘She's gone,' the Matron said, and she drew Harriet's head down against her shoulder, briskly kind. A nurse went hurrying along the corridor.

Harriet went over to the bed and looked at her mother's hands. She could not yet look at her face. All the Sunday evenings of her life seemed to oppress her with piteous strangeness. There was a small scar on a knuckle, which would not heal now, she thought. She could only be distracted by such little things: could not take in the enormity of loss.

Then, with great resolution, she looked at her mother's face. Calm, austerity, a remote nobility were the same barrier as the wildness of pain had been. Her mother was never any of those things. She had been reserved, but timid: full of wavering courage and unwavering integrity: nervous, ill-at-ease, uncompromising, loyal.

She put her hand for a moment on her soft hair. As a child, she had often stood on a stool behind her mother's chair and brushed her hair and combed it while Lilian sewed, or read.

‘Come, Harriet, we want you with us now,' Caroline said. She bent and kissed Lilian's forehead, then put her arm along Harriet's shoulders. Harriet looked desperately round the room. Then she followed Caroline. They walked down a long corridor, past half-open doors. Outside, it was dark. Charles was pacing up and down on the snowy gravel beside his car.

‘It's the way people treat you,' Miss Brimpton said. ‘As if you can't be a lady just because you work behind a counter.'

‘Well, of course you
can
,' said Miss Lazenby. ‘If you want.'

‘Sometimes circumstances force you to do things one wouldn't have thought possible. It isn't very pleasant when they're the very people you've been brought up to treat as one's equals.' She smoothed her dress with her plump hands, brushing biscuit crumbs on to the floor. ‘Starvation itself,' she added, ‘wouldn't keep me in a post where I was not respected.'

‘Oh God!' said Miss Lovelace, looking out of the window at the street below. ‘If only I could be one of those women down there shopping. Even a poor one with a great fish basket and someone's supper to buy cheap. Someone to haggle for.'

She dropped her cigarette-end on to a passing bus and shut down the window.

‘That's better, dear,' said Miss Brimpton, shivering.

‘
Need
you fry meat in here, Lazenby?' Miss Lovelace said. ‘The smell gets into my clothes and I'm going out tonight.'

‘I'm not frying: I'm grilling.'

‘One of the juniors is going to Lyons for me. I thought I'd have a nice individual fruit-pie,' said Miss Brimpton. ‘Being pay-day. Harriet, dear, won't you join me?'

She offered the individual fruit-pies instead of words of consolation, which they had between them decided to eschew.

‘A nice black-currant one, say? There, you will? That's a good girl. I'll tell her to bring two. Your chop has caught, I think, Lazenby.'

They were dubious and a little jealous that Miss Lazenby should do herself so well. Miss Brimpton with her cheese-rolls and tarts and sugared buns was in a state of perpetual fullness and yet perpetual hunger; and catarrhal, too: but buying meat for oneself seemed a peculiar extravagance.

Miss Lovelace ate nothing. She had bought some satin instead. She pushed the cups and newspapers to one end of the table and wiped it down with Miss Lazenby's face-flannel, which she hung back on the dresser. Then skilfully and beautifully, she began to shear away at the peach-coloured satin. They watched it lying in a voluptuous, lustrous pool on the table – Miss Brimpton doubtfully, Miss Lazenby enviously, and Harriet without seeing it at all.

The strange viability of the body – she had seen it in her mother – she now seemed to experience herself. Divorced from, divested of personality, she was yet alive; as she supposed her mother must be said to have been alive in the last days before her death. But it was no existence to which she had previously a clue, and only mechanically did she rise in the morning and go to work, and perform the leaden, tiring movements of her daily life. She could sit still for a long time without moving her eyes even, but she did not feel that she suffered or felt any emotion. She was thought – by Caroline and Hugo, by Charles – to be behaving too well; but it was more true that she was not behaving at all. They had hoped that with the ordeal of the funeral over, she would allow herself some expression of grief. When Charles gave her a large brandy, she drank it calmly as if it were a glass of milk. It was her stomach which refused it; as if it was, all along her body which pulsed, breathed, dictated, forbade, demanded. As much as she wished anything, she wished to be at work, to have her daily life in the shop with the other girls – to feel time passing over her, as if it did so above a crust of ice. And Miss Brimpton, with her fruit-pies, did as well as anyone else with her: and better than many – better than Julia, with all her enfolding drapery: better than Caroline with her careful carelessness. Tiny avoided her. He jibbed at all grief which could not be brushed aside.

‘You will get over it, Harriet, I promise you,' Charles had tried to assure her. It had been the moment when she most nearly faltered, picking up the book her mother had been reading, the place marked by a letter. She took the letter out and put the book back on the shelf, afflicted by her utter non-comprehension of the mystery of death. Her arm dropped against her side. He was pained to see the heaviness of her movements and tried to prevent her faltering again; tucked away from sight all the reminders of how recently her mother had been about the house. When, later, she found Lilian's petit-point, the half-finished garland of flowers, thrust into a cupboard, she knew that Charles must have done this and was touched by his concern for her. With something perhaps more painstaking than imagination he tried to circumvent her distress, to help her through days which could only pass, hoping that she would use him as she must, to lift herself out of darkness as soon as the will to do so came back to her.

She was with him a great deal; polite, silent, smiling. At night, he took her to Caroline's. Harriet acknowledged their kindness, their goodness to her; but the only time when reality touched her was when, on the day after her mother's death, when Vesey had gone back to London, saying nothing, she found a little piece of folded paper in her jacket pocket. She carried it with her to work. It was never away from her, and in moments of stress her fingers felt for it and held it, the only writing of his she had ever had – ‘Dear Harriet, I am sorry. Love, Vesey.' It had seemed – and still did seem – a message from some outside and more natural world: brusque, simple, it comforted her. She carried the paper secretly with her and its words always in her heart.

Once, when she thought she was alone, Charles saw her go over to the window and take the note from her pocket. Rapt, reflective, she looked out at the wintry garden. When she turned round, he had his back to her. He stood at the chimneypiece and – his old trick – was examining his finger-nails.

‘What is it, Charles? I didn't know you were here.'

Her voice had its first lift in it, its first unestimated calm.

‘You are so precious to me,' he said in his off-hand way, ‘and I such a bore to you.'

‘The old-fashioned ways were easier,' she thought. ‘When one had refused a proposal, one kept away. Not this drifting on, always together. Yet what should I do without him?' she wondered in a sudden flash of honesty. It was difficult to imagine.

Later, seeing her discarded jacket on a chair when he was alone in the room, temptations from what seemed terribly long ago beset him; pains he had forgotten. It was as if an unkind hand raked up dead leaves in his heart. He took the paper from her pocket and read it. His face was scornful because of his contempt for himself; contempt at having so weakly fallen into the old ways, of pain and secrecy and suspicion.

He went over to the window where she had stood and looked out at the darkening garden. His mother came up the path with a red and silvery cabbage in one hand, a knife in the other. She held the cabbage away from her, as if it were some loathed thing. It might have been John the Baptist's head, so dramatically did she carry it.

‘Vesey', he thought. He barely knew him: and that but as a young boy. Feckless, penniless, indolent. But young. He remembered – walking up and down the room, and sometimes stopping short when intolerable ideas presented themselves – firstly, Harriet's embrace in the car; secondly, her comforted face as she had read that note. What hopes did she have from one so debilitated? (Yet so young!) And if hopes; then built on what?

In the kitchen, Harriet helped Julia; chopping, shredding, rubbing pans with garlic, larding with anchovies. Julia was in one of her cooking phases. A cabbage was a great labour to prepare; into it went onion and apple, vinegar and sugar, cloves, butter.

‘I have Russian blood in my veins,' she said, and held out her wrist to Harriet as if something special might be visible there. ‘On my mother's side.'

‘She will soon tire of this,' Harriet thought. ‘Then someone else will have to clear it up.'

‘At Christmas,' said Julia, ‘we'll have the most wonderful tree. I have some little trumpets made of silver glass and some spun-glass birds. What poetry there is in ordinary domestic life, the rhythm of a house . . . what are you sniffing at, darling?'

‘This,' said Harriet, dubious over a basin. ‘What is it?'

‘Sour cream for the bortsch. Don't tell me you are like Charles and loathe it?'

‘Who is she cooking
for
?' Harriet wondered. Aloud, she said: ‘How dark it gets!' Her low moods were physical like a nearness to fainting: without warning they gathered her up and enveloped her, especially now in this time – the late afternoon – which was like a gulf between living and dying, full of terror and poetry and panic: isolating, it drew a moat around her. To be moving was a little comfort to her – it proved that she could – or to speak. She crossed the kitchen quickly and snapped on the light. It rained down harshly on the litter of bright food, the tableful of crockery.

‘Darling, what a sudden glare,' said Julia.

Later, on her way to the drawing-room, she met Charles in the passage. It seemed strange that though they hesitated, neither could discover any words trivial enough for the occasion. Surely, both felt, they could find some phrase to say to the other: but no words came, and they went on without speaking; he sinking back against the wall to let her pass. It seemed to Harriet that they were like total strangers glimpsing one another as they sped by on opposite escalators, borne apart, incurious.