A Game of Hide and Seek (16 page)

He replaced the book with dreadful vehemence on the top of the bookshelf.

‘They're all right,' Harriet thought. ‘Always have been. Smug, satisfied. Allons, the road is before us, indeed! To be so sure, to be so exclusive!' She could not imagine ever putting such an inscription in a book for Vesey. No road was before her. Only a thicket of briers, she thought, carrying out the last trayful of crockery.

‘Do you remember this?' Caroline asked Hugo. ‘
The Golden Bough
. You read it to me when I was sewing for Deirdre before she was born. It does conjure up Viyella and feather-stitching. And discomfort. I used to twitch so and get a sort of toothache in the ribs.'

‘The headmaster of my prep. school gave me this when I left.
Stanley in Africa
.' He wavered between the two heaps, then blew dust from the pages and put it on top of
The Story of an African Farm
. It had meant something at the time. He thought it always should.

‘I didn't say anything when Harriet was here about Vesey wanting to go on the stage,' Caroline said in a low voice, an open book held up as a sort of disguise in front of her. ‘You know what some girls are like about the theatre. It fascinates them.'

‘If it wasn't one thing, it would be another,' Hugo said vaguely.

‘But Barbara said he has always felt bound to do this. Perhaps it has been the trouble.'

‘Once it was to be an author,' Hugo said scornfully, as if the boy swung from one dubious ambition to another. ‘Well, let him try. Let him be an actor, I say. Let him starve in this repertory theatre. He'll find there's no sort of usefulness in the life unless one goes fairly quickly to the top. Let us see if he will do that,' he concluded, comfortable in the certainty that Vesey never would.

‘I thought say nothing to Harriet for the time-being. Nothing to unsteady her. It may all blow over. What is that you have, Hugo?'

He handed her some pressed flowers – once white violets, now yellow, and tissue-thin.

‘We picked them that afternoon we walked to Stoner Hill.'

‘Yes, of course.'

‘They were in this book.'

She sat looking at the dead flowers. ‘I wish,' she said, after a while, ‘I wish that Harriet would marry Charles: that she could
settle
.' (Her voice matched the word: it seemed to come to rest: she smiled.) ‘As we have done,' she said.

‘Harriet, dear, you do watch me so. It makes me feel uneasy. I know I am not looking my best.'

Harriet blushed. ‘I think you look so beautiful,' she stammered. ‘I'm sorry.'

Maternity-dresses in those days seemed always to be navy-blue with touches of white. Kitty's crossed over discreetly in the front, then tried to avert attention either to her elbows, with a fall of accordion-pleating, or to the frilled jabot at her throat. She now had a much more capable look; planted her feet down more firmly when she walked.

‘I envy you so,' Harriet said simply.

‘It is when one does – at your age, thank goodness, when it is ahead probably, not past. Lucky it's that way round.'

‘When you tuck that cushion in the small of your back and hold your sewing up high over your stomach, I think “one day I hope I'll do that”. It looks so nice.'

‘It isn't playing with dolls. When it comes you'll only feel cumbersome.'

‘I won't mind.'

‘You'll spend your days thinking of the flowered voile you'll have in the summer when it's over.'

‘Is nothing ever right at the time, then?' Harriet asked in bewilderment.

‘I'm teasing. Because you made me feel self-conscious. Once, when I was younger, a man told me I had a lovely profile. Then I had to be so careful not to keep turning it towards him, as if I were asking him to notice or remark on it again. I became very fidgety, shifty. I got into difficulties in cinemas. Began to look at everything lop-sidedly, squinting,
louche
. People who are often complimented are not so thrown out.'

‘Someone is coming up the drive with Tiny.'

‘Man or woman?' Kitty asked. With her weight on her wrists, she struggled up from the sofa, brushing bits of cotton from her creased frock on to the floor. She felt her child heave over, like a disgruntled sleeper, disturbed.

‘A man,' said Harriet.

‘Reggie Beckett,' Kitty said, standing by her at the window. She half-raised her hand, but they did not see her. They came slowly up the gravelled drive, between the ragged shrubs, heads bent as if they discussed some grave matter.

‘Heaven knows,' said Kitty, ‘how anyone so babyish, so fat, cherubic, could seem to be so closely connected with doom. It is strange how some people
threaten
, by just being their cheery, silly selves.'

‘I can't imagine how
he
does,' Harriet said. Her laugh smeared the window-pane and she wiped away the mark with her cuff. ‘He looks like those angels in the corners of maps, blowing wind out of their fat cheeks.'

‘He'll coarsen,' Kitty said. She turned away from the window. ‘And he does threaten.'

‘I'll let them in,' Harriet said. Kitty sat down again and took up her sewing, waiting to hear their loud and echoing greeting break loose in the hall.

‘So this is your province,' Vesey said as they danced. ‘You know everybody here but me. I know nobody but you. Why did you say that you couldn't tango?'

‘I didn't know that I could. I usually sit down when one begins.'

Most other people were doing that. Almost alone on the floor, she felt watched, especially by her husband who usually went to the bar when the band played anything of this nature, but now sat at their table fanning himself with Kitty's black lace fan.

‘I can't!' Harriet had pleaded, as self-conscious as a young girl. ‘I can't tango.'

‘You can with me,' he said smoothly.

‘But not quite yet!' she whispered, looking at the empty floor.

‘Now.'

He was so sure, that he could risk her humiliation, could take her out to dance alone while her friends turned their chairs a little from the tables to watch. He simply did not allow her to falter and her nervousness began to change to elation. She wished that they might never stop; believed that they might not; for time, with its dwindling, filching ways seemed triumphed-over. They were suspended in some magic which caught up also, meaninglessly, gilt baskets of azaleas, some paper streamers and a great chandelier like a shower of grubby acid-drops. Remotely, the figures of other people drifted at the perimeter of their enchanted space of floor. They dictated their own music.

‘After nearly twenty years, I have had my dance with Vesey,' she thought. ‘There was the other dance,' she said, ‘in this very room. You said you would come, but you didn't: I watched the door for hours over Charles's shoulder, until I could not any more.' For the first time she almost lost the pattern of the dance. His
extra
grip steadied her.

‘We must go on with this,' he said. ‘The alternative would be to go back to that table where they're all sitting and waiting. Charles would stand up and bend over you solicitously as if I had been doing you some harm.'

‘Why
didn't
you come that time?'

‘I can't remember.'

‘When one is middle-aged, one can suddenly ask lots of questions.'

‘Do the answers still matter?'

‘It was nice just dancing,' she explained. ‘Let us not talk again.'

It bore no relation to any other dancing she had done. She had been shuffled, bounced, jostled round the floor, trying to keep up, trying to think of something to say or to guess what had been said, grasped either too tightly or too slackly, smiling, hoping to look starry-eyed with enchantment. Now they danced with perfect, grave precision and in silence. They made some ritual of the dance, some pact, as if they were alone; ecstatic, in its true sense. They made an exhibition of themselves, Charles thought.

He would not in his turn ask Vesey's partner to dance with him. For one thing, he could not tango: for another, he thought that she was drunk. She had left the bar only once or twice when Vesey had led her away on to the floor. Then she had drooped against him: they had scarcely progressed, locked together indifferently, rather as if they were strap-hanging in the tube at rush-hour. Back at the bar, she became, glass in hand, reanimated, the centre of a knot of men, whose laughter at her
double-entendre
seemed to amaze her. Surprised, her eyes unflinching, her glass held in both hands against her breast; at last, the meaning they had got from her meaning permeating her innocence, she flushed, drew in her cheeks, sipped her drink as if it were her bed-time glass of milk. They were bad men, she told them. They thought her an absolute scream. If, they said, she could put up such a good show on the stage they would almost face
Hamlet
and the hard seats at the Town Hall to see her again.

‘I am better when I have a hangover,' she promised them. ‘I am more distracted. I give out flowers in all directions. Sometimes,' she tempted, ‘put in the rude bits that I am supposed to leave out.'

Vesey had to speak, for he felt the music to be unwinding to its conclusion. He knew himself to be at the stage which initiates falling in love, that he was committed to it and would feel pain if he turned away, did not give in to the desire to unpack his life in her presence, to lay before her treasure after treasure (or, rather, loss, laughter, disappointment). As, when a child, his mother had returned from abroad – the cases lay opened round the room: carrying frocks over her arm, casting crumpled underclothes into a basket, ‘That is for you,' she would sometimes say, tossing a little package to where he sat on the bed (a musical-box from Switzerland, a tie with a design of postage-stamps from Charvet, a bunch of sugared almonds arranged like flowers): out of the boxes she would shake her more recent life. He would finger the bottles and jars, sometimes explore, impertinently she apparently felt, for she would snap things away in drawers, saying repressively, meaninglessly: ‘That is
mine
,' meaninglessly, because he had not supposed that it was not. To share the unpacking, delving, with Harriet would delight him: to do so in no sort of order, to be arbitrary, indiscreet, and she the same.

‘Next week I go on to Guildford,' he told her. ‘Though that's not important. It doesn't matter where I go. I want us to talk to one another.'

‘You must dine with us,' she said allayingly.

‘Don't be absurd. Dine! I haven't dined anywhere for years. I have to be at the theatre. I never go anywhere except late at night like this.'

The music had stopped. He stood clapping vaguely, looking at her. ‘When?' he said.

‘Vesey, it's no good. I am afraid it might make Charles unhappy.'

‘Can you not have your own friends?'

‘Yes. Don't play with words.'

‘You played with words, asking me to dinner.'

Everything she had once wept for, now, offered, confused her. They were walking slowly back to the table.

‘I have a daughter of fifteen,' she said.

‘It is hard to believe,' he said with weary sarcasm. He swept her daughter on one side with the sort of answer he despised. He ignored her implication. They had wasted time out there, just dancing. ‘Tomorrow afternoon, meet me somewhere, anywhere.'

‘You could come to the house then,' she said primly.

‘I don't want to. If it's a thing that will make some difference to you, I will, though. Do you ever see anything of Joseph or Deirdre?' he asked in a more social voice.

‘I see them themselves,' she replied.

Charles stood up, his hand on the back of a chair, rather posed-looking, as if he were having his portrait painted. Vesey stood beside him. They seemed to be encouraging dignity in one another. A slight awkwardness had fallen over them all, though Rose Elliot tried to overcome it with compliments on their dancing. ‘Quite Spanish,' she insisted. The awkwardness only grew. Harriet felt exposed, but by her own hand. They deprecated what they congratulated, she knew. When Vesey went away they relaxed a little. ‘Dark horse, Harriet,' Tiny said.

At the bar, Ophelia waited with mad impatience for Vesey to return. When he did so, she pretended that it was she who had erred, who had abandoned him. She drooped with penitence. She made a shelter for her eyes with her hand, caught-in her lower lip, seemed to await a reprimand.

‘I'm going home,' Vesey said. ‘I'll get a taxi.'

‘I'm not ready,' she said steadily, not any more a drooping little girl.

‘That's up to you.'

‘You bad-tempered little so-and-so,' she said swiftly.

Tiny had come up to the bar and she leant her shoulder against him.

‘I have to go home,' she said pathetically.

‘Nonsense. Only just beginning. The first five hours are always the worst.'

Vesey thought: ‘If she doesn't come I'll save the taxi-fare.' He would walk all the way back to the boarding-house. But she went, lingeringly, protestingly, to fetch her tweed coat from the cloakroom. She hung it over her shoulders then put her arm through Vesey's. He did not look back towards Harriet. She saw them go, in a swift glance, as she leaned forward to unstrap and strap her shoe-buckle, not wanting Charles to notice her look.

‘The air is lighter,' Charles was thinking, ‘sweeter. May we never be so menaced again!'

The band played so much nonsense nowadays that it was some time before there was a proper fox-trot and he could ask his wife to dance.

One by one, the other cars slipped off into the darkness; but here
they
still shuddered, pulsated, at the kerbside. Rose Elliot had gone back for her gloves. Charles tapped his shoe to some imagined music – a martial tune, Harriet was sure, looking at him.

‘Kitty's getting fat,' Henry Elliot said, watching her getting into their car, which went down on one side as she put her weight on the running-board.