A Game of Hide and Seek (17 page)

But there was Rose at last, hurrying down the drugget to the glass doors. Her husband yelped ungallantly with pain as she trod on him getting into the car. She took off her shoes and put her feet in her muff. Her thighs ached; her toes felt broken.

‘Surely it is time we gave up all this dancing?' she said, settling down. ‘And yet there is Harriet, as fresh as paint.'

‘No, I'm tired, too,' Harriet said quickly.

‘All this dancing!' Charles repeated. ‘Three or four times a year at most.'

‘I can't any longer do the things they have, can you, Charles? Rumbas and so on.'

‘Englishwomen should never rumba,' he told her.

‘But you could not dance with one another . . .'

‘Harriet's tango was something we shall all remember,' Henry said. He sat neatly on the little tip-up seat of the taxi, his eyes shut, his arms folded tidily across his chest. He looked like a collapsible model of a man, especially designed for carrying in taxis.

‘Yes, Harriet's tango! Goodness,
he
didn't look English,' Rose said.

‘There you are!' Charles nodded at Harriet.

‘What do you mean, “there you are”?'

‘I always said he looked a dago.'

‘Holding your hand behind your back in that funny way,' Rose said, yawning and yawning against her fist. ‘I should think you were embarrassed.'

But dancing like that is impersonal, Harriet thought: so formal that it transcends the closest embrace. Though she would not have explained this, even if she had been able.

Rose said: ‘She danced well, though.'

‘And getting up,' Charles complained, ‘the moment the music began. No one else on the floor. No one ever gets up for a tango until it is nearly over. If then.'

‘He's half Irish,' Harriet suddenly said. She could not imagine why she wanted them to know that.

In the cloakroom, leaning to the mirrors, side by side, Kitty had asked her: ‘Who was it?'

Her powder-puff pressed for a moment to her chin, Harriet had said: ‘He is Vesey. Years ago I knew him.'

‘Before you knew Charles?'

‘When I was a child.'

The powder-puff began to rotate again about her blank and puzzled face.

‘I have never heard you mention him. Did you never see him again?'

‘I saw him once,' Harriet said. ‘A few years ago. At a memorial-service to his aunt.'

Kitty dragged her shoulder-straps up, for they cut in to her plumpness. Without taking her eyes off herself in the mirror, she said: ‘You gave no such impression. I felt something rehearsed yet fatal about you, a part of a ballet, perhaps – yes, that – his just coming out of the crowd and claiming you, then disappearing . . . the clock might almost have struck twelve.' She tucked her hair into her fur collar, dropped sixpence into the saucer.

‘Follow me!' she had said, and she put out her hand and took Harriet's as if she were blind and must be guided from the room. Harriet laughed; she felt the warm kid stretched tight across the hollow palm; for nothing Kitty had ever fitted now. Her flesh was always ahead of dressmakers. Rosy, pearly, she was like a great, idle and voluptuous goddess painted on a ceiling. Clouds should have banked about her; cherubs caught at her fluttering ribbons.

Now, in the taxi, Rose was asking: ‘Where did he come from?'

‘The past. From the past,' Charles said, his voice dressing the words up in absurdity. He really was behaving badly.

‘How romantic!' Rose murmured, cramming her feet back into her shoes, for the taxi was running down between laurels to the boys' school where Henry was headmaster.

‘Light on in the small dormitory,' he said, peering up at the front of the house.

‘That will be little Stuart's ear-ache,' Rose said. ‘Matron will be terse with us, and us breathing whisky all over her. Goodnight, my dears.'

‘You danced beautifully,' Henry comforted Harriet, taking her hand. ‘You surprised us all.'

‘I think she did that,' Charles agreed.

As the car turned, crunching deep into the wet gravel, they saw Rose hobbling into the porch; Matron still, at this hour, starched and white, opening the door to her, and Henry standing in the rain against the black wet laurels. He raised his hand as they drove away.

‘Dear Henry!' Harriet said. ‘Dear irritable Henry,' she thought to herself – for his very faults seemed a refuge to her at this moment, part of the fabric of her daily life with which she had for long camouflaged her desires. ‘My world and my province!' she thought, and she turned her head sharply as if to avoid that word of Vesey's, which he had used earlier in the evening. She tried to look out of the window, but beyond the silver drops on the glass, which turned gold when they passed a lamp, she could see very little. A string of blurred lights went up and over the hill. The quiet avenues and crescents were darkened and rain-swept.

Charles, who had had so much to say in the others' presence, now had nothing to say. His coat collar was up to his ears, his hands were deep in his pockets, he sat hunched up in the far corner, away from Harriet. ‘Marriage does not solve mysteries,' she thought. ‘It creates and deepens them.' The two of them being shut up physically in this dark space, yet locked away for ever from one another, was oppressive. Both were edgy.

‘Coming on faster now,' said the driver, over his shoulder.

‘Yes,' they both tiredly agreed.

‘Shouldn't wonder if it went on all night . . .'

Charles stifled yawns against his gloved hand. Harriet began, too; for it was infectious, she found.

‘Once it's begun,' the driver added.

‘Here we are,' Charles said sharply.

Jessica Terrace looked like a row of paper houses. No lights shone from any of the windows or the fan-shaped glass above the doors. The evergreens were glossy in the rain, unseparated from the pavement, for the iron-railings had been taken in the war. The façade seemed to have so little depth that even Harriet, who had lived here for sixteen years, could scarcely believe that, behind it, passages ran away towards kitchens; that in remote parts the front-door bell could not be heard, and that, in back rooms overlooking the narrow gardens and level with the top branches of a mulberry-tree, her daughter and the young maid were asleep.

She loved the lulled sensation of being driven at night and was reluctant to leave even this musty car. ‘Wake up!' Charles said crossly. They had stopped by the familiar street-lamp. She said goodnight to the driver and hurried towards the steps, her head bowed in the rain.

The lamp shed light down through ivy-leaves upon the white door. Waiting, shivering, for Charles to sort out his keys, she stared before her at the iron knocker – a hand grasping a wreath of roses. Tomorrow – in a few hours really – Vesey would stand here. Inside the house, she would have been awaiting him, tense in the middle of the room, away from the windows, listening for the sound of his banging with that iron ring upon the door. ‘If he did not come!' she thought. ‘If something happened, so that I never saw him again!'

‘I am being as quick as I can,' Charles said; for her shivering he took as a reproach. Perhaps as a result of years with his mother, he was very prone to take things as a reproach.

Inside the narrow hall, the little white cat, Blanchie, made her uncertain, sideways approach, wove her way between their legs, purring. On a chair, Betsy's satchel was packed ready for the morning beside a bunch of flowers for Miss Bell.

‘I wonder if Elke did the hot-water bottles,' Harriet said, beginning to go upstairs. As she went, she looked over the banisters at Charles. He had pulled off his white scarf and stood there swinging its fringe at the cat, looking thoughtful and absorbed. She could not guess what his thoughts were. Against him, against his calm and decision, she felt confused and incoherent; and, looking back on her married life, it seemed a frayed, tangled thing made by two strangers.

Betsy awoke at the sound of a car door slamming. She had fallen asleep in bed over her homework with the light on. The corner of the book on which her forehead had rested had engraved a ridge into her flesh; one hand, bent up awkwardly under her ribs, had pins-and-needles. She could not bear the high-strung, tingling sensation as she tried to uncurl her fingers; but now she heard her mother's muted, late-at-night voice in the hall below. She put out her numbed and wobbly hand and switched off the light, then hid her book secretly against her breast, her poor hand drawn down under the bed-clothes, diffusing its prickling up the inside of her arm, so that it was difficult to lie still and feign sleep, even with her mother's step on the landing. She felt dreadfully the need to turn her head and stifle giggles into her pillows. When her mother came into the room, her eyelids wavered uncertainly. She felt that if her life depended on it, on pretending death, as she had read of people doing in books, the rising hysteria could not have been controlled; she was certain that she would cry out to break the strain, that she would begin to laugh helplessly.

Her mother straightened the slithering eiderdown, even lightly touched her hair. Betsy lay rigid, feeling Harriet's presence heavy above her, smelling what she politely thought of as her mother's party-smell. When Harriet had tiptoed from the room, the need to laugh went with her. Relaxed and deflated, Betsy found a less theatrical attitude, knees drawn up, ankles crossed, her hands bent towards her chest like paws. Compact, folded, she might have been lying in the womb, as she composedly awaited sleep. She was glad that her head ached. She hoped to look tired tomorrow for her lesson with Miss Bell. She hoped to work with a pale intensity, a brittle fervour; to keep going by her nerves only; to be driven by her will. It would be wonderful if Miss Bell should think this, or comment on her fatigue – if only she could avoid her mother (who was more likely to do so) remarking on the same at breakfast.

Life was quite beautiful, she thought. It unfolded wonderfully from one Greek lesson to another; and every day was happy with the proximity of her loved one.

The bedroom was untidy, for they had gone off in a hurry. Harriet unpinned the carnations from her frock and put them in water. She had promised Betsy that she could have them for Miss Bell (for whom all flowers had been designed), though it did seem impolite. In the end, even knowing things to be wrong, she usually gave in.

When she had done that, she began to undress quickly, as if it desperately mattered to her that she should be in bed before Charles came up. Beyond their familiarity and nakedness, they could now sense their true isolation and were more perfectly strange to one another than people passing in a street.

She was only washing when he came in.

‘That kitten!' he began at once as he closed the door. ‘Now it has wetted the hearthrug. It will have to go.'

His eyes rested with indifference upon her as she dried her arms.

‘Yes, she will have to go,' she agreed.

‘The place smells like the cat-house at the Zoo.'

‘I know.'

She began to brush her hair.

‘Tired?'

He looked carefully at his face in the mirror, as if to discover if he were tired himself.

‘A little,' she said cautiously.

Getting into bed, her feet recoiled. Elke had, of course, forgotten the hot-water bottles.

‘I'll fill one for you,' Charles said.

‘Oh, of course
no
.'

‘You won't sleep. You'll lie and talk.' To save himself from this, he went off.

She sat up in bed, patting skin-food round her eyes. Down in the kitchen, Charles pottered about: the kettle began to hum. The house was full of noises – sometimes Betsy turned, with a murmur, in her sleep; Elke, the Dutch girl, snored relentlessly; ivy hit the pane; water lurched in the pipes.

When Charles came back, she took the hot-water bottle gratefully, for her teeth were chattering. She went over on her side in a ball, curled round its warmth. When Charles got into bed he tried to unclench her, as if she were a hedgehog rolled up for protection. She went tighter and tighter.

‘My darling Harriet,' he said, lying on his back, away from her, resigned. ‘No one there tonight was as beautiful as you. I always know that, wherever I go, no other woman will be as lovely.' But he could not uncurl her with flattery either.

He put out his hand for hers. She grasped it hurriedly as if to stave him off. Tears ran silently out of her eyes, slanting across her face into the pillows. He knew by her quietness that she was weeping. ‘Habit teaches me nothing,' he said. ‘All these years can't prove to me that you are mine. The disbelief dies hard.' He ran his arm along under her shoulder and kissed her, careful to avoid her tears.

By morning, the rain had dwindled into a fine mist. Betsy's red woollen gloves were furred over with moisture, her blonde hair hung lank on the shoulders of her reefer-coat. The clothes she wore now and those Harriet had worn as a schoolgirl were almost the same – the felt hat with its band and cockade, the blouse and tunic and tie. Less than anything in England, Harriet would think, has the English schoolgirl altered. Checking the clothes at the beginning of the term, she felt, as regards herself, a mixture of nostalgia and relief.

Betsy, even at this early hour, on a morning which people called ‘raw', felt quite gay with anticipation as grown-up women are inclined to feel after tea. She went along at an uneven pace which varied as her thoughts varied. When Father Keogh, startled by her steady look, said ‘good morning', she almost shied back against the railings, and certainly dropped her Xenophon in the thin mud on the pavement. ‘He is trying to convert me,' she thought, feeling herself menaced from all directions – Rome, for instance; and then there was the White Slave Traffic, of which she had heard. Desired, endangered, she went on precariously to school, her Xenophon held awkwardly in her gloved hand.