A Game of Hide and Seek (25 page)

‘I am going to do my nails,' Harriet warned him.

‘Yes, I'll go. I can't bear that smell. But come down soon, darling, come down soon. There's a lovely murder in the paper.' He thought that she had all day to do her manicure.

Betsy was not so upset by the smell of nail-varnish. She even unscrewed bottles and sniffed.

‘Darling, I hate being hung over,' Harriet complained.

‘I had a lovely afternoon.'

‘I'm very glad. Where did you go?'

‘To the heronry. Miss Bell knows everything about birds. I wouldn't have thought them possibly interesting, would you?'

‘Perhaps a lot depends on who explains them to you.'

‘Yes. It must be that. When you can't tell one from another, I never think anything is interesting.'

‘If you knew enough, you could tell all kinds from one another.'

‘I mean, ones of the same kind. I mean, all herons look alike unless they are deformed, which isn't a very nice way of distinguishing them. Another thing I'm bad at is racial prejudice. I don't mean to . . . but I feel I have it awfully badly . . . and I struggle with myself because I naturally know it's wrong. The thing I always think is I couldn't fall in love with a Negro, or a Chinaman, or an Eskimo . . . I absolutely couldn't . . . I try and try . . . but, you see, they just wouldn't be real . . . I mean, not all that much more real to me that people you love ought to be. They would just seem exactly like all the others . . . I should feel so ridiculous . . .'

‘It isn't necessary for you to fall in love with them, my dear. No one expects that of you. Nor indeed with anybody else, for years and years. If you are going to start putting yourself to the test about all the people you don't care to fall in love with, you'll have a wretched, wretched time. There'll be so many more of the one than the other. Do you know that, every night for at least ten years, I've told you to stop playing with those ear-rings? Do put them back into the case carefully. You
should
try, Betsy dear, to think of other people not just in terms of
you
and your emotions about them . . .'

‘I expect you treasure this?' Betsy picked up Lilian's old prison-gate badge and peered at it.

‘Why?'

‘I should treasure anything of yours.'

‘Well, dear, yes, of course, but for heaven's sake don't cry.' Cut out that agony! she willed her daughter, remembering her feelings towards her own mother.

‘Especially if you had been in prison.'

‘Would you have liked me to have been in prison?' Harriet asked in a surprised voice, as she carefully painted her nails.

‘Well, I'd have been proud, I mean.'

‘Would you?'

How things can swing right across the heads of one generation, Harriet thought.

‘They looked so lovely,' Betsy said. ‘In those funny old-time costumes.' Poor Lilian seemed quite cast away into a romantic past, into the dressing-up box. She seemed many, many years back now and a part of history.

‘In those photograph-albums of hers are there none of you and Vesey as children?' Betsy asked.

‘Of Vesey and me? No, I am sure not. Why?'

‘Oh, you've gone over the edge. I wish I could do your nails for you. I'm sure I could. It would be practice for me – though of course I shan't do it myself when I'm older,' she added, thinking of Miss Bell.

‘What put photographs into your head?'

‘I love photographs . . . ones of old people when they were young . . . those of you in swim-suits down to the knees and with little sleeves.'

‘Darling, they were bathing-costumes. Short sleeves, yes; but surely not down to the knees?' Harriet laughed, thinking: ‘I never let my mother know I thought her old.'

‘. . . and funny bathing-hats like helmets – Pallas Athene. Are you sure you haven't got just one of Vesey?'

‘No, dear, no.'

‘Oh, well . . . a pity.'

‘But why?'

‘I adore him,' Betsy said simply. ‘I can scarcely think of anyone else.'

‘You don't know him.'

‘Yes, the funny thing is that I feel I do.'

‘Betsy . . . !'

‘Yes, mother?'

‘It does seem the slightest bit odd to me sometimes . . . I mean, the way you speak of people; of adoring them, for instance.' She stood up and made a great business of waving her hands about to dry her nails, but her face was flushed. ‘
Wouldn't
people think it odd . . . do girls talk like that . . . at your age? Vesey is . . .'

‘. . . old enough to be my father,' Betsy thought. She was sure her mother had almost said that, and for some reason stopped.

‘I know your father would be quite annoyed to hear you speaking so extravagantly.'

She was walking about the room. When she turned, Betsy was sitting on the dressing-table stool, looking steadily into the mirror with a look of engaging innocence, her hands clasped loosely in her lap as if arranged there by a photographer.

After supper, Charles, throwing the white cat, who had been sick, out into the garden, reported a red glow in the sky.

‘Across the park towards the farm.'

‘You did throw the poor little thing viciously. Imagine feeling sick oneself and being hurled out into the unknown like that.'

‘
Because
it was sick I threw it. This house is like . . .'

‘The cat-house at the Zoo,' Harriet agreed.

Charles sighed. ‘It seems whatever I do is wrong.'

‘It does seem that.'

Harriet was desperate, for Vesey seemed to have vanished again; had neither telephoned nor written. ‘If he had always been either less cruel or less kind!' she suddenly thought. ‘I'm sorry, Charles. I was really not thinking what I said.'

‘Shall we stroll round the park and see what it is?'

‘See what what is?'

‘All this red in the sky.'

‘If you would like to.'

‘Oh, can I, too? Can I? I'd love to,' Betsy cried.

‘No, you do your homework and then go up to bed,' said Charles.

Harriet folded her sewing. ‘I'll wash up the coffee-cups first. I think Elke has broken enough for one day.'

‘I wish I could go,' Betsy said.

Charles waited for Harriet impatiently. When she came back, he could not even let her fetch her coat, but threw over her shoulders one of his own. He imagined the fire crackling away without him, something immense, obviously – a church, or, better still, the Park Hotel. He could quite picture the tiny figures in grotesque attitudes, black against the flames, as they jumped into outstretched blankets, women in nightgowns moaning on the lawns, frantic activity with ladders, and then, just before he arrived, the great building leaning, bowing, collapsing. By the time he got there, the ambulances would have gone, the spectators thinned, someone would turn and say to him: ‘You should have seen it go down.'

‘Charles, I can't keep up at this pace!'

He slackened for a moment, but the sound of a fire-engine not far away, set him off again. He could definitely smell burning in the air.

‘The weight of this coat!' Harriet said.

Betsy felt very little like work. The beautiful afternoon had unsettled her. It had been weird and solitary out there – the strange birds and the great trees clotted with nests. There had been a fight with some rooks. The sky, the empty marshland had echoed with harsh cries.

Miss Bell had talked of her own schooldays, and her days at Girton. Once or twice she mentioned the name of a rather famous writer she had met. It was rather dragged in, this name, Betsy thought; but the idea immediately horrified her. She quickly brushed away this little speck of disloyalty.

Miss Bell had invited her back to her bed-sitting-room for tea, had drawn the dark blue curtains and lit the gas fire. Betsy had not been there before and could scarcely believe that she now was. Sitting in front of the fire with a piece of bread wobbling on a fork and refusing to change colour, she looked carefully round the room. It was a nice mixture of pagan and Christian. A highly-coloured triptych of the Holy Family had one place beside the clock, a yellowing plaster copy of the Winged Victory, with rather more broken off than should have been, had the other. Dusty crosses from Palm Sundays were stuck behind photographs of the pediments of the Parthenon. Examination-papers, half-corrected, lay about, weighted down – though nothing would fly away in this dead room – with lumps of stone from the Excavations at Cnossus. Betsy admired it all very much, imagined Miss Bell sitting by the fire, in the blue dressing-gown which hung on the door, drinking her bedtime cocoa. Bulbs came shinily up out of bowls on the window-sill; the kettle sang on the gas-ring. But the toast went black before ever having been brown.

Miss Bell made her room serve an educational purpose. She explained about the Excavations, and pieces of stone lay about on the hearthrug for Betsy to look at as she ate. On the bureau, she could see a photograph of what she supposed was the famous author – an elderly woman, with a pen held to a piece of paper; rows of books behind. She was glancing up as if she heard heavenly music. The photographer had caught her in the nick of time, thought Betsy, who hated other people's affectations; a moment later and inspiration might have spoilt it all, the head bending, the pen ruining the nice sheet of paper. She was a little jealous of the famous author for having her photograph in Miss Bell's room. As soon as she could, she began to talk about Vesey. She needed no more encouragement than silence. When she went home, she left a very worried young woman, sitting over her gas fire staring at the pieces of stone but thinking of other, livelier things.

But Betsy herself was stimulated beyond any settling down to work. The thought of the fire, of the glow in the sky, had finally unsettled her. To get a better view she went up to her mother's bedroom and drew aside the curtains. Branches stood very picturesquely against the stained and lightened clouds. It must be at the side of the park.

Below her, a wedge of light widened and Elke stepped out of the front door. The white cat took the opportunity to slip in. Her hands making a shelter on her forehead, Elke surveyed the scene. Perhaps another war was beginning (and water lay between her and home, as well as between her and the enemy. With characteristic phlegm and stupidity, the English had scarcely moved away from their wireless-sets). Or was it another strange festival, like the one in November, whose origins they had tried to explain? The more they had explained them, the less reason she saw for firework-displays or any sort of rejoicing. She went indoors again. Betsy dropped the curtain.

Before she went to bed, she thought she would try on a few of her mother's things. Sitting before the mirror, she fixed Harriet's pearls in a loop on her brow and a bunch of violets behind one ear. They could not be back for ages, she knew. If Elke said anything, she could always drive her into silence with some remark like ‘What about Thursday evening?'

Busily clipping on ear-rings, lifting the trays of the little jewel case, she came upon a sealed envelope, rather rubbed and faded with age, but with no writing on it. What do people conceal at the bottom of jewel-boxes? she wondered. Instructions in the event of death, perhaps (in which case she would love to read them); or a love-letter (in which case she would dearly love to read it). She imagined the first rather than the second, and with the bunch of violets still tangled in her hair, held the envelope against the light, but it was too opaque. Then, for her curiosity was too great by now to brook even a slight delay, she took a nail-file and ran it along under the flap as neatly as she could.

She drew out an old photograph and a folded piece of paper. On the paper was written ‘Dear Harriet, I am sorry. Love Vesey.' The photograph was rather a yellowed one of three children sitting in a row on the grass. The middle one was undoubtedly Vesey as a boy. An hour or more ago, her mother had denied ever possessing such a photograph. Trembling now, Betsy ran to her own room to glue down the envelope. She could not make it look as it had been, but was fearful of her mother's return. She hid it again at the bottom of the case. In the next tray she dropped the ear-rings and the pearls.

‘What you do?' Elke asked at the doorway, in her slow and guttural voice.

‘Just trying a few things.' But the violets caught at her silky hair. She sat there pulling the blonde strands out of the flowers, willing Elke to go away.

‘I think your Mamma do not like you to go in here . . .'

‘What about last Sunday?' Betsy asked in a threatening voice, but her hands were frozen. She longed to be alone.

After all, it was only a hay-rick on fire at the edge of the park, by the farm. First of all through the empty streets they had tracked it down. When they met anyone, Charles stopped to enquire. It was a wholesale newsagents', gutted completely: it was the Nurses' Home by the Hospital: or cow-sheds, perhaps; for someone had heard cows lowing.

‘Cow-sheds!' said Charles scornfully. He had not come so far merely to see cows being rescued. But the cow-sheds were untouched, and the rick blazed undisturbed now; the firemen for some reason had let it go. They watched it; standing by the beautiful fire-engine. Water ran all over the road, plaited its way down the hill in wandering streams.

‘What a good job,' Harriet said, ‘that it was no one's house!'

‘Well, of course,' Charles agreed irritably.

They had bickered all the way there, until their hearts were tired: now the flames lulled them. They stood in silence watching – Harriet, in the big coat with its turned-up collar, her hands in her pockets. Charmed and transfixed by the flames, held back to a certain point by the heat of them, their voices useless against the crackling and the steady roar, they watched for a while and then, as if by mutual consent, turned away, stepping over the rivulets of water and walking, with heads bent, back along the road.