A Game of Hide and Seek (15 page)

But now that the evening had come she was more confident. She could even believe that for everybody there is perhaps another person who will not fade on approach; with whom it might be not entirely like those fishes in tanks, crossing and recrossing, weaving their way through the water, fearing only, it seems, to touch one another; gliding upwards and away instinctively when their paths threatened to meet.

She tidied Julia's drawing-room which was a great litter of Sunday papers. An out-of-date magazine with Julia's photograph had its yellowed page exposed as though by accident. ‘The sadness one sees looking about among one's friends,' she thought, and she drew the curtains smartly across the windows as if she were insulting the dark evening outside, ‘is chiefly the sadness of them being themselves. What that seems to do to other people.'

She did not contemplate ever looking back to say her life had been the same. Because she was sure that it would not be, she began to hum as she tidied the room for the evening. A few miracles had happened, others, given time, would no doubt follow. Any morning a letter might arrive, or she would come home from work to Caroline's and find Vesey sitting there.

‘It is lovely to hear you singing,' Charles said when he came in.

‘Was I?'

‘Don't stop.'

‘How could I go on?' She laughed.

‘Oh, darlings, darlings!' Julia cried. ‘Something's curdled. It is so vexing, after all my pains, so devastating!'

She sank down in the middle of the sofa and rolled her hands up in her apron.

‘When I put in the lemon-juice it all went funny . . . speckly, flaky, you know;
curdled
 – that's the word.'

‘Have a drink, mother.'

‘A drink? You can't console me with your drinks. Your answer to everything. Do you realise that, Charles? Pain, loss, disappointment. A drink. So easy to offer, so useless to receive.'

‘A glass of sherry?'

‘Your taste in sherry is hardly mine. Dry, light, sharp, thin. I always loved a full sherry, rich, with some
body
.' She curved a hand in the air. ‘What I find I can now say for your father is that he liked a good sherry.'

‘There is a brown sherry you would like . . .'

‘Then bring it, bring it. Don't stand there like a shop-assistant. I beg your pardon, Harriet. Try not to argue so, Charles, as if you were hoping to sell me something. It's hardly gracious to make such a song and dance beforehand.'

She took her drink and sipped it, sitting there in her apron. ‘There won't be any soup now. I feel so weary. I'm not a young woman any more.' Harriet tried to dispute this, but was interrupted. ‘Oh, how did that old magazine get here?' Julia asked. ‘Where can it have come from?'

‘You must have left it there yourself,' Charles said seriously. ‘I wouldn't have done.'

‘I love a nice talk,' Kitty was saying. She might instead have been pouring out the coffee, Charles thought. He sat watching the empty cups as she chattered, and presently leant forward and managed for her. ‘But how miserly we are!' she continued. ‘Our boring, miserly conversations.' She looked round the little café with contempt. ‘One person brings out a pocketful of coppers, sorts them out, hands over a penny; then the other one fumbles and presently gives a halfpenny change. I should like to find someone who suddenly handed out a five-pound note, wrapped it round a sovereign and threw it into one's lap. One gets so lowered by nice recipes for rice puddings, and what girlie said to Daddy. Oh, what girlie said to Daddy bores me most of all. Funny little remarks the kiddies made! Dear Rose is greatly at fault over that.'

‘Kitty!' said Charles. He leant over the table and gently shook her wrist to stop her talking.

‘It was sweet of you to bring me to coffee,' she said. ‘I had forgotten Tiny was going off to defend the murderer.'

‘Oh, hush, darling. You will do us all irreparable harm. The man's not a murderer until he is convicted.'

‘If he did it, he is,' she said calmly, licking doughnut sugar off her fingers. ‘That's where I so disagree with you. Even if Tiny gets him off, he's still one if he did it. Those things seem simple to women.'

‘Tiny has no right to discuss it with you . . .'

‘He didn't discuss; he mentioned. And not even you can stop me from reading newspapers and coming to my own conclusions. This is the first time you've ever brought me out in the middle of the morning . . . I wish we could do it often and get gossiped about. Those women over there already have their eyes on us . . .'

‘I brought you . . . I asked you to come, I mean . . . for a special purpose; to ask you something – though it's difficult to get a word in edgewise.'

She waited, he thought, apprehensively, her eyes anxious above her cup as she began to drink her coffee.

‘What is it?'

She knew by his slight hesitation that he would say something unpleasant.

‘You are a dreadful chatter-box, Kitty, but I always did respect your judgment.'

Yet when he considered her marriage he began to wonder why he had said this.

‘How boring of you,' she said, setting her cup down, glancing out of the window. ‘Oh, Charles,
look
at Rose over at the greengrocer's. Can she know her petticoat is hanging down such yards? Should we lean out of the window and shout to her?'

‘Let me say what I am going to say.'

‘Well, then?' She resigned herself, gave a last look at Rose and said: ‘It will be bound to be unpleasant or you would have babbled it out without all these preliminaries. I hate preliminaries.'

‘It is only, I think, unpleasant – no, not that; vaguely disquieting at most – for
me
. Something about Tiny's attitude to me. It is constantly borne upon me that something is wrong. His avoidance of me becomes something I can't avoid. Please don't say “nonsense” or anything like that. One has to face such things.'

‘Oh, no,' she said quickly.

‘If he knows I am going to a place, he won't go there himself.'

‘It's perhaps Harriet. He feels uncomfortable with the bereaved. They are greatly unpopular with him.'

‘I am not all the time with Harriet. She is not in my office with me.'

‘I wish after all I had not come for this coffee. Even saving sixpence and being gossiped about doesn't make it worth while.'

‘Your hedging convinces me that I am right.'

‘Why not ask Tiny himself?'

‘Yes,' he said uncertainly.

‘You are different from one another. You are so serious . . . perhaps you seem – oh, to
him
, I mean: not at all to me . . .' She laughed and laid her hand over his ‘. . . a bit too solemn; an old stick-in-the-mud.' He felt the pressure of her hand. ‘Unlike his friends. His other friends.'

‘Unlike Reggie Beckett?' Charles said lightly.

‘Oh, awfully unlike Reggie Beckett.'

‘You don't like him?'

‘Well, you see, I don't like any of them. They bore me so madly with their racing-talk – all that about ponies and monkeys. I just call them the b'hoys. They never have come even to adolescence. Have they?' she asked, with her wavering, anxious smile. How can we forgive, she wondered, the one who cries Woe! Woe!, who initiates disaster, who reveals the first cat's-paw across our calm? ‘I mean, they must be panicky inside unless they just are as innocent as children.'

‘You sit there feeling superior?' he asked, suddenly smiling.

‘No, I sit there feeling evil, malevolent, guilty.'

‘You have nothing to feel guilty about.'

‘I have my thoughts,' she said proudly. ‘The same as other people.'

‘Silly Kitty. I adore you.'

‘Speak up, for pity's sake.'

But when he opened his mouth as if he would obey her, she laughed and blushed and put out her hand protestingly.

‘So Vesey is leaving Oxford?' Caroline said. She folded the letter Hugo had given her and put it back in its envelope. ‘Now what will he do?' she wondered aloud.

‘He scarcely gives anything a chance,' Hugo said.

‘His mother spoils him.'

‘He should have been made to stick it out. A mercy for all of us that the war was over in our generation. What all these problem-children would have made of it can be imagined.' ‘Problem-child' was a new term, which attracted him.

‘Vesey is a bad boy,' Joseph said with certainty; then: ‘Why is Vesey a bad boy?'

‘Mind your own business, Joseph,' Deirdre said, her eyes on her mother's face.

One of Harriet's hands clasped her knee tightly, under cover of the table.

‘I foresee a sad future for him unless he pulls himself together,' Hugo said, and glanced at his own son.

‘Yes, I think he
is
a bad boy,' Joseph said. ‘A very bad boy. He did eat some meat,' he added. ‘I saw him once.'

‘Don't tell tales,' Deirdre said loudly, now looking at Hugo for approval.

But Hugo didn't care either way. Other people's failures with their children move one so little: even one's own brother's. The concern so soon turns towards comparison with one's own affairs. ‘Not done too badly,' he thought, meaning Deirdre and Joseph. ‘Sometimes lost patience, been unjust. But on the whole hasn't worked out so badly so far.'

So Vesey's falling-off only spread complacency in Hugo's heart, and ‘We've done all we could,' he said, ‘though it's worrying for his parents, I've no doubt.'

‘There are the books to sort out for the Jumble Sale,' Caroline said. ‘Yes, I agree. Very worrying for poor Barbara, I expect.'

She was not, when she stood up with the tips of her fingers resting on the table, saying Grace; but collecting her thoughts. As she grew older, this became more difficult. Many affairs were on her mind: many people. Sometimes she failed to recognise acquaintances, but they had grown so thick and fast upon her as her busy life went on that her mind and memory could contain no more: for there was a limit (she excused herself in her own heart as she could not to the offended) to what one can retain. When new people come in, after a certain point others must drop out. So many faces, in the village, the town, on committees, at meetings, that she could not tidy them in her mind. She had not weeded them out, as she was now, moving away from the table, about to weed out her books.

It was assumed that Harriet would clear the table. As she went in and out of the room, she could hear how they progressed with this weeding-out. It was much more, she thought scornfully, the opportunity of ridding themselves of rubbish than beneficence which made them so zealous. That clearing the house might have the by-product of bolstering-up the Liberal Party gave great satisfaction.

The dining-room books were only an overflow, so that any reason for wanting to keep them was likely to be sentimental, any reason for wanting to buy them second-hand utter lunacy. Who would be inclined to read them? Mottled, clenched together, they had the unpleasant smell of books which have been behind glass. Caroline, sneezing, took them out in armfuls, kneeling on the carpet.

‘We should be quite ruthless, Hugo,' she said, pushing her spectacles up her nose, peering at a row of titles. ‘They are only decaying here and it would be a wonder if we ever took any of them out to read. What an enormous spider! It amazes me that they can go on living shut up in a cupboard year after year: years it must be since I opened this door. Oh, it is dead, anyway. Well, there's one we don't want, to begin with.
The Roadmender.
Falling to pieces. Smelling bad.'

‘That was Vesey. He left it out in the rain and ruined it. Scarcely apologised afterwards. I was very annoyed at the time. My brother gave it to me.' Hugo turned the book sadly in his hand.

‘In that case . . .' Caroline said.

‘No. After all, we said we'd be ruthless and we must be. It's useless to harbour it.'

At the Liberal Party Jumble Sale he felt a good home would be found for it, as if it were a shabby kitten. He threw it into the arm-chair with the other rejects.

‘
Mothercraft Manual
,' Caroline said sadly. ‘No more call for that.'

‘We hope,' Hugo said, as husbands feel they should.

Caroline remembered how she had turned those pages in anxiety and despair. Few of the horrors had happened to her – neither of the children had had convulsions or pushed beads up its nose. She threw a pile of Jules Verne into the arm-chair.

‘Steady!' said Hugo. ‘Joseph may like those later on.'

‘Oh, I doubt it. Boys don't like the same books nowadays.' She tossed some more of Hugo's youth away – Captain Marryat, Ballantyne.

‘But, Caroline, this was a
prize
,' he protested.

‘Oh, was it, dear. Sorry. Keep it then.'

‘I intend to. All right for this
Little Women
to go, I suppose? There's another one in the sitting-room.'

‘I think I'll keep that for Deirdre. It's rather a nice copy. My Aunt Hester gave it to me.'

‘Well, then, the one in the sitting-room can go. Harriet, I wonder if you'd mind fetching it?'

‘My mother gave me that one,' Caroline said in a shocked voice. ‘She used to read it to me after tea. We both cried dreadfully.'

‘All right, dear, all right.'

He carelessly tossed aside another book, then some memory checked him. He retrieved it and cautiously glanced at the flyleaf.

‘Well, here's one we
won't
send. Here's one there's no argument about. Harriet, look! There's a book I'd never surrender. Never. The first book – I think I am right in saying – that Caroline ever gave me. You'll see, she's written in it.
The Story of an African Farm
. “Allons, the road is before us,” she's written. “Hugo from Caroline”. We were just engaged. I've always treasured that and always shall. The Liberal Party can go bankrupt before I'd be induced to give them that.'