A Game of Hide and Seek (23 page)

‘You had better not tell her so,' Charles said. ‘She was a famous one in her day, and wouldn't like to be so soon forgotten.'

‘Well, goodnight all!' said Betsy. She wiped her mouth on her hand and her hand on her skirt. ‘Goodbye!' she said to Vesey. ‘I shall never forget how marvellous you were. And you
will
sign my programme as you go? I left it on the hall-table.'

‘You are making him feel like Sir Henry Irving,' Charles said in a pleasant, but not pleasing voice. ‘I hope you are used to these school-girlish enthusiasms, Vesey?'

‘No. I can never get used to kindness.'

‘Now you must tell us all about Harriet when she was a little girl,' Kitty intervened. ‘Some funny things, if possible. To throw a new light. Harriet won't mind.'

‘How could he remember?' Harriet asked.

‘Yes,' Charles said, already attending to Vesey's glass. ‘
I
should treasure it.
I
have only photographs.'

‘Then you have more than Vesey,' said Harriet. ‘
He
has only his memory, which took no impression.'

‘She wore silver bracelets on her wrists,' Vesey said slowly, looking at his glass and then at Kitty. ‘I remember the sound they made.'

‘Oh, you must go a lot further back than that to give us what we haven't got,' Charles said. ‘She wore silver bracelets when I first knew her, and Betsy has them now, so we are used to
those
.'

Vesey struggled with his memory for Harriet's sake; but remembered only her diffidence, her stammer, a bravery he was not disposed to define for them, and that once they had quarrelled (he could not imagine why). Then he suddenly said: ‘My chief picture of her is walking across some fields with a bunch of flowers in her hands. She was always picking flowers.'

By her face he knew that he had distressed her and made her apprehensive. Perhaps the brandy, together with his tiredness, and not having eaten, had confused him. He suddenly remembered – as if some pattern in a kaleidoscope fell into place – the rest of that evening: they had walked across the fields towards an empty house; now he groped back to it across years, recalling her question in the park, her so revealing and piteous question, which at the time he had not understood. ‘What empty house?' he had asked. But she had gently refused to answer, and turned the conversation away towards different things.

‘She always loved flowers,' Kitty said, dwelling on the great jar of forced lilac.

‘I feel that I am dead,' Harriet objected.

‘The house where my aunt lived was always full of dogs,' Vesey said in a more definite voice, more sure of himself now that he was not speaking the truth. ‘Once there was a terrible fight amongst them. No one really cared to intervene. We all hung back. It was Harriet who ran and separated them, unhesitatingly. With her bare hands,' he added.

‘It doesn't sound like Harriet,' Charles said. ‘To have such decision. And she is rather nervous of animals.' No matter how much he smiled, he could not make this sound pleasant. He replenished her glass instead.

‘She must have changed,' Tiny said coolly.

‘Yes, she must have changed.' Vesey looked at her. ‘But she has not changed so much that she can bear all this discussion about herself. It is someone else's turn.' He glanced round him, and at last at Charles, who looked at his cigarette.

‘What was the play like?' Kitty asked. It was the first, not the best, thing to come into her mind. She at once regretted it and hoped to cover the question by answering it herself. ‘I always find it so full of people telling other people not to let somebody out of their sight. Look to this one; wait upon that! Though I was a girl, of course, when last I saw it.'

‘It hasn't altered,' Vesey said.

‘Introspective,' Tiny scoffed. ‘Always gets me down. Bloody unnecessary to say the least.' He flushed. He hated unpleasantness and there was so much in the world. For people to make it up, to fill in the empty air with invented miseries, was what annoyed and puzzled him. It seemed an act in the worst taste, and ‘unnecessary' was what he really thought. ‘Morbid,' he presently added, and stared at the wall, rather high up, where there was nothing at all to look at.

‘Oh, I don't know,' said Kitty airily. ‘When you look round you, I think you see it all going on, though in a rather mumbling way.'

‘Then why make up more?'

‘But Shakespeare only displayed life. Someone else is supposed to have invented it,' Vesey said. ‘I think that his plays are going on all the time, as . . .' he had not remembered Kitty's name, and turned and smiled at her instead, ‘as you have just said. Some more than others, of course.'

‘Certainly some more than others,' Charles agreed.

‘We are none of us so articulate,' said Kitty.

‘And we say one thing and mean another,' Charles said. ‘As if we fear what we might bring to the surface.'

‘And our rooms are smaller, of course,' Kitty added.

‘It is as well not to bring things to the surface, if they are unpleasant things,' Tiny said, and he wandered across to the pile of gramophone-records. ‘But I never see anything so very shocking going on around
me
 – not even in our job where we might expect to. Most people are perfectly nice and happy and ordinary. Just like all of us here. No better, no worse. Hatred, despair, suicide, murder, all the rest, are the rare exceptions; though from the books you read, the films you see, decency would be that.'

‘Perhaps evil is in the eye of the beholder,' Kitty said brightly. ‘It must be that, since you and I, Tiny, come to such different conclusions from looking at the same things. We shall have to go, Harriet dear.'

She had glanced with some relief at the clock and handed her empty glass to Harriet. Harriet, who took people too much at their word over drinks, leant to put the glass on the table, stumbled, and broke it.

‘My God, you're worse than Elke,' Charles said sharply.

She blushed with vexation and, not able to think of anything to say, dropped to her knees and began to gather up splintered glass from the carpet. Her distress, so feebly covered, infuriated Charles. He had not designed this evening to humiliate her, but to expose to her several truths – his own love and trust and generosity; Vesey's inadequacy, which he did not doubt; and her position in his – Charles's – world. The sight of her gathering up glass from the carpet made him see that anything she suffered only served to separate them.

‘For God's sake, leave it, leave it!' he said impatiently. ‘I'll get you a new glass, Kitty. You must have one for the road.'

‘One for by-byes,' Tiny agreed.

Kitty began to demur, but thought better of it, and her second thoughts this evening were all better than her first.

Only Vesey noticed that Harriet's wrist was bleeding. He put her in a chair and took the little folded, scented handkerchief out of her cuff and wrapped her hand in it. ‘Darling, where's a bandage?' he asked, for the handkerchief was seen to be quite inadequate.

Kitty and Tiny looked in terror at the door. It was not so much the word ‘darling' as his voice which frightened them. ‘I'll get one,' Kitty said, almost running out of the room.

‘Like a brandy, old dear?' Tiny asked, anxious to follow his wife.

‘I am so dreadfully clumsy,' Harriet stammered. Vesey lit a cigarette and put it between her lips.

‘Here we are!' Kitty said breathlessly. Charles was behind her, bringing her clean glass.

Vesey took the bandage and kneeling beside Harriet began to bind her hand.

‘What have you done now?' Charles asked. ‘Really, my dear girl, you have a genius for agitating your guests. I shall never forget – shall you, Kitty? – the time she broke the bottle of brandy?'

‘Certainly tonight is nothing if we measure it against that,' Tiny said, trying to see a joke where no joke was.

‘I dropped a dish of mashed potatoes once,' Kitty said unhelpfully. It was obvious that she was throwing in the dish of potatoes and herself as well to try to rescue her friend.

Imperturbably, Vesey unrolled the bandage over Harriet's hand and the blood starting through it was soon covered, as her nervousness was by his sympathy. She watched his bent head, his expressionless face. He had the power to cut her off from the rest of the room, so that Kitty's rushes of kindness were scarcely heard, and Charles's words no longer mortified her. His silent attention so enisled her that it was as if he bandaged her heart as well as her hand. He heeded nothing else in the room, but what he was doing. His very lack of words upheld her, steadied, even, her love for him, to which this terrible evening, so otherwise devised, had quite committed her.

‘Well, cheers, then!' Kitty said, smiling at Charles. She did not know whom to comfort. Her impulsive movements seemed in all directions.

‘Let us pour whisky on the troubled waters,' said Tiny, raising his glass, meaning less than he said.

When Vesey had finished, he looked briefly at Harriet, then away.

‘Thank you,' said Charles. ‘It was a mercy you were here with your first-aid. If her hand is so bad as that, we should all have been helpless.'

Charles's behaviour began to be inexplicable, to himself, and even to other people. His attitude to his mother was part of the change. Now he talked of her a great deal – as she had been as an actress, and strove to remember some of those successes which at the time he had resented. He seemed all of a sudden to know a great deal about the stage without ever having gone much to the theatre. A photograph of Julia as Cleopatra, with hair low on her brow, looped and strung about with pearls and looking bad-tempered, was discovered among some old letters and left propped up on his desk. He often spoke of her precarious and arduous life, although she had been, as he said, at the very top of her profession. ‘So God help those who aren't,' he seemed to imply.

His attitude to Tiny also changed and relaxed. Those suspicions were lulled as others took their place. He went to the Smoking Room at The Bull when he left the office and had a few drinks with Tiny and Reggie Beckett. He was comforted by that solid, men's world.

As his relations with other people improved, his life with Harriet deteriorated. ‘I shall default first,' he seemed to declare. ‘Nothing can be taken from me that I any longer desire.' He defaulted with sarcasm. He withheld from comment on the clumsiness, which he had engendered in her, in a positive, underlining way. Under his scrutiny, cups seemed to fall to pieces, rugs arched up to trip, buttons dropped off clothes.

Betsy changed, too. She began to read Shakespeare aloud in the bathroom, where a slight echo gave, she thought, a haunting quality to her voice. Elke could only suppose that the whole nation was strange, perhaps crazed by the late war. It was the Englishness in them, she decided. Her letters home grew longer and longer, her expression more closed. She became sick for home. ‘She is like Ruth amidst the alien cornflakes,' Betsy thought one breakfast-time. Her best jokes were unrepeatable, though she repeated that one to Pauline Hay-Hardy. They nearly died of laughing. Pauline said: ‘Oh, my
dear!
You'll be the death of me.' ‘She picks at her boiled egg with little red, chipped nails,' Betsy said. ‘Oh,
don't!
' Pauline gasped. ‘I shall
heave
.'

Elke wrote: ‘She shuts herself into the bathroom and shouts at the top of her voice. She wipes her mouth on her hand. She is more like a child with her knees showing. She is allowed to talk at mealtimes.' The first part sounded very amusing in Dutch. Her parents worried over these letters. They hoped that Elke would not try to speak at the table when she returned.

Betsy's ideas of Miss Bell also began to shift round. She descended one level from that on which Vesey now left no room for her, and, descending, she could not help but come nearer to Betsy herself, who felt in her presence rather more ease and confidence than before, since there was less to lose. Miss Bell had seen
Hamlet
, too. It had been an uneven performance, she said: not liking to say that she thought it had been even. Hamlet had conveyed, sustained, the suggestion of great suffering, though chiefly that caused by stage-fright, she was bound to say. ‘And what did you think of Laertes?' Betsy asked. Cautioned by the light in the girl's eyes, Miss Bell tried to recollect anything about Laertes. ‘He was a friend of my mother's,' Betsy said, alarmed suddenly of adverse criticism. ‘I thought he seemed a very nice person,' Miss Bell replied. ‘Oh, he
is
,' Betsy said fervently. ‘I wondered at the time,' Miss Bell added, as if she were speaking of long ago, ‘if he might not have made a better Hamlet than . . . than the one who did.' ‘I
agree
,' Betsy agreed. ‘
I
thought so at the time, too. I am sure he will be a very great actor. One day.'

To depose one adored one in order to confide in her about the latest, was an exquisite pleasure. She found she
liked
Miss Bell more than before. ‘But she is only human,' she thought recklessly . . . ‘I can say anything to her.' It is dangerous to think people human, who once have been divine.

Julia found a new lease of life in her concern for her son. ‘Ah, the meek inherit the earth!' she thought of Harriet, convinced of some shadiness. She was determined to confirm that women are all sisters under the skin. Light, light, was her touch. Her innuendo could scarcely have been taken up but by the most attuned and guilty ear. Everyone else became tiresome.

‘Go and grapple with Miss Bastable's soul,' she told the Vicar when he came to call. ‘I have domestic problems to sort out.'

At least he knew how to treat a woman of the world; was smooth, urbane, though suggesting, to be on the safe side, that this was how he was proof against evil.