A Game of Hide and Seek (26 page)

‘We could go perhaps to Italy,' Charles said. ‘I could get away in a week or two.'

His voice now was conciliatory.

‘Italy?' Harriet felt that her troubles were already too many, without Italy being thrown in to worsen the confusion.

‘We need a change. We haven't been getting on well together lately.'

How they were to get on better entirely on their own, thrown together by a foreign country, day in, day out, Harriet could not see. She felt that he was putting too much faith altogether in guide-books and sightseeing and the boredom and annoyances of travel.

‘Well, Charles . . . who could look after Betsy?'

‘She could go to stay with my mother.'

‘They don't get on well, those two.'

‘I think they're so exactly alike . . . let them fight it out between them . . . fun for both.'

‘And Elke? She's too young to stay in the house alone.'

‘She could go, too. And fight it out with Miss Bastable.'

‘Poor Elke! You mean shut up the house? In which case, what about the cat?'

‘The cat,' Charles said, nodding patiently.

Then after all, she said: ‘I don't think I want to go.'

‘You always said you would love to go to Florence.'

‘Did I? Oh, you know how things are nice to talk about, but such a very great effort when it comes to putting them into practice.'

Italy began to worry her dreadfully. She thought of the two of them sitting opposite one another in trains and in restaurants, wandering together in strange streets or, catalogue in hand, along the walls of art galleries. She felt a panic as if someone she had never met before had asked her to go away. I should be less frightened with a stranger, she realised. I should fear less the things that he might say.

As if she were recovering from a serious illness, Charles took her arm and, walking at half the pace of their outward journey, held before her what he thought were tempting little pictures of the future – the sun, the sea, flowers, Florence. Rome. Miserably embarrassed, she listened; ungraciously, she replied.

When they reached home, standing on the steps while Charles unlocked the door, she looked back over the park. The sky was quite dark now, black branches sawed across it. No one walked in the empty streets; but in one house she could hear a piano being played.

‘This cat's indoors again,' Charles said. ‘How did it get in?'

‘Perhaps someone came,' Harriet said, glancing at the telephone-pad. The house was very quiet; Betsy and Elke both in bed.

‘Mr Birdcat – it looks like – belled-up for Meinheer,' she read. ‘I love “belled-up”.'

‘Birdcat?' Charles paused at the front door, the kitten tucked into his overcoat. ‘I suppose it was “Beckett”.' Very gently this time, he put the cat down on the top step.

‘Since she took the trouble to seal it and hide it, she could not have forgotten it,' Betsy lay and thought in bed. ‘That wouldn't happen.'

She hugged her scalding-hot water-bottle. Her stomach and the inside of her arms were almost permanently mottled with scorch-marks. It was heaven to be in bed. Often she lay and made up scenes in which, for instance, she rescued the detested science mistress from a ledge of rock and coolly left her in the middle of a spate of uncharacteristic gratitude; or nursed Miss Bell through an illness of such an unsavoury nature that no one else would approach her.

She rarely drew these scenes to their conclusion: sleep overtook her. Tonight, it overtook her, too; but thoughts of Vesey and of her mother tumbled about in her dreams as they had done in her waking mind. Romance, passion, seemed out of her mother's orbit. The revelation was not disenchanting, but the shock of it placed her mother in a different light. It was a shock which brought her out of her sleep again and again, to lie and wonder. Harriet had concealed the truth, then kept it hidden by a lie. She had talked very little about her girlhood. Betsy had few pictures of her, few stories. When questioned, nothing seemed to have been remembered. She did not say ‘When I was a child' or talk about the past. Once she had laughed in a puzzled way, saying that her own mother's stories of childhood had bored her. ‘But didn't she tell you of the olden days?' Betsy persisted. ‘It didn't seem “olden days” to her,' Harriet tried to explain, ‘and my childhood doesn't to me.' ‘Then you should remember it all the more.' ‘One remembers,' Harriet said, ‘such silly things, nothing worth telling; no stories, certainly.' ‘But didn't your mother tell you about going to prison and marching in Emily Davidson's funeral procession?' Harriet said, ‘I tried not to listen, I hated it so.' ‘I wish I had known her,' Betsy said. ‘When I have children, I shall tell them all about the war – having evacuees here, and the bomb that fell in Prospect Park. I shall say “I'll never forget that night” and things like that.'

It was as if her mother had deliberately built up an unmemorable past. Vesey had been covered-over: she had kept him in hiding. And had treasured things about him. One walk in the park with him had somehow illuminated her – as Betsy now saw, remembering their return that twilight. Her own love for Vesey suffered nothing. She felt no anguish or resentment for Harriet. She was too young – in spite of all her romantic and dramatic ideas – to feel for him anything but a fixedness of attention. If he and her mother once were lovers – as she, on no evidence, supposed – then he was only brought nearer to her by the fact. Her feeling – on sight of him – had been so strong that she began, in the early hours, to wonder if there were not some distinct affinity. Life, as she had so far known it, heeled over, her vision slanted, some assumptions were submerged, others were exposed to the strange, disturbing element of air. She began – with some passion – to exchange the idea of Charles for that of Vesey. With the intensity she would one day turn to selecting a lover, she now selected a father. Charles appeared at once remoter and nobler. She loved him no less because she adhered to Vesey. He had always seemed old and rather negative to her. She was the sort of girl who occasionally turned over in her mind thoughts of her own illegitimacy, not with repugnance but a sense of importance. She was self-infatuated enough to repudiate ordinary origins. Her mother – apparently – could not be doubted. Her father – Greek literature confirmed it – could. She did not fly as high as royal personages, but few middle-aged actors of any looks or presence had escaped her conjectures. Even a poet laureate was not, in her opinion, beyond suspicion. That life was so unlike Greek literature had been the worse for life, to her mind. Tonight it came – on the strength of a cryptic note, a faded photograph – magnificently near to it.

In the morning, she began a bombardment of casual and oblique questions – about Harriet's early life, betrothal, marriage. Harriet herself barely noticed. It was a thick, foggy morning. When she came down, there was a letter from Vesey. At first, she had not known his writing. Then, suddenly sure, she slipped it, unopened, inside a book. Now she waited feverishly for them to be gone. ‘You look tired, Betsy,' she forced herself to say.

Betsy hoped to exploit this look, for she had not done her Greek homework.

‘Why didn't you wear white when you were married?' she asked in an offhand way.

‘For one reason, my mother was too recently dead.'

‘What was the other reason?'

‘I should have felt absurd, I suppose.'

‘But why?'

‘Darling, do eat your breakfast. I daresay I just hate dressing-up.'

‘What a funny thing to hate.'

Harriet turned on Elke her including look and speaking more loudly, said: ‘You wear white in Holland for weddings?' as if the Dutch were a little-known tribe.

‘Always,' Elke said uncompromisingly.

‘What
did
you wear?' Betsy asked.

‘I've told you before – a grey suit.'

‘Grey!' said Betsy. ‘I don't know how you could've.'

The fog lay close to the windows. The train seemed to be grovelling its way towards London, but the banks on either side were obscured. Harriet wondered if they were passing open fields or the backs of factories, and she cleaned a space on the window with her glove, but all she could see reflected were her own frightened eyes.

Although it was only late afternoon, the cotton-wool fog had been discoloured into darkness, and the people in the carriage seemed tired already; lulled with boredom, they sat with their arms folded, and stared at pictures of Lincoln Cathedral, or old houses at Norwich, untempted ever to travel there; and yawned.

Heat rose steadily round their ankles. The evening papers were all discarded. The train was not yet late enough to make an excuse for conversation. Harriet wondered if perhaps the English, great talkers though they are, long for a crisis to unlock their tongues, which fear of rebuff imprisons. ‘Perhaps that is why we talk so much about the weather,' she thought. ‘So much more than we care.'

They sat and wondered about one another. Harriet was the woman in the corner who kept combing her hair, and chafing her hands in her muff. She had tried to stop doing that, for her hands were not really cold.

‘Half-an-hour late,' the man opposite at last complained. ‘A frost on top of this will be a treat.'

‘No fear of frost,' said another. So they began to talk about barometers and weather-forecasts. Then they paused, staring at one another's feet. Presently, they decided to continue; but gradually, sloping away through dahlias, chrysanthemums, potato-crops, towards the Government (‘This lot we've got now'). Soon, one was saying: ‘I'm a fairly ordinary chap, but it strikes me . . .'

‘How untrue!' thought Harriet. ‘I can never believe that anyone thinks himself ordinary. I never think that I am an ordinary woman.' She glanced again at her reflection in the steamy window. ‘There is no one else like me,' she told herself. ‘I represent no one. I am typical of no one. No one else thinks my thoughts or understands my hopes or shares my guilt. I am both better and worse than I would admit to other people.'

‘But why should the train be late?' a large girl rather like Elke was asking. She smiled round the carriage. She looked the soul of goodness, Harriet thought, the salt of the earth; her face was honest and unadorned. She spoke English with contemptuous ease, invoking hostility from all sides. It was felt that, though it is necessary for foreigners to speak English, to do so easily is an affront. ‘In Switzerland,' she said, ‘the trains are punctual, and not so dirty.'

After a brief silence in which the others all came together and sank their differences as if they were in an air-raid shelter, not a railway-carriage, the obvious spokesman said: ‘The fog, of course. On account of the fog he can't see the signals.'

Yes, that perfectly explained, they all felt. As for the dirty train, it was theirs; they enhanced it by being its possessors. The dear train. The beloved fog.

‘In Switzerland, we do not have such fog,' she said simply.

‘What hope is there for world peace if people travel about from one country to another?' Harriet wondered.

Now the more experienced travellers began to predict the end of the journey. They took out their tickets and sat a little more on the edge of the seats as if that might hasten matters. When at last blurred lights ran up to meet them, Harriet's heart lurched with pain.

Stepping out on the platform, she suddenly felt that Vesey would not be there, and could not look at the people waiting by the barrier. ‘He must claim
me
,' she thought. But it would be too difficult. Her own difficulties had been so very great, and if his matched them how could they ever manage such a marvel as to find themselves at last in the same place at the same time? So she walked quickly, as if she had some destination; but if he were not there, she had none. She was afraid that it was despair she was walking towards and she pressed her hands together in her muff and her look was not nonchalant, as she would have had it, but anxious. She made little plans to cover her humiliation, which now seemed certain – a brandy when the bar opened and then home by the next train. Charles would never know about the excursion. She would be, in a way, saved. If her will had not ensured her good behaviour, circumstances would have done so. (‘In Switzerland we do not commit adultery,' she seemed to hear that forthright voice explaining.)

‘Why are you smiling?'

Vesey took her by the elbow and they went through the barrier. Under the broken arched glass, the station was like a scene in hell. Sulphurous mist thickened the air, slime covered the platforms, figures disentangled themselves and scurried away, all to some evil end, one felt; but they moved within a greater stillness and though they seemed free to come and go, they were all enclosed.

Outside, the fog was a smoke breathed out by some foul mouth. Obscurely, it enfolded them. It was a night to have chosen, they said: part of their general helplessness.

A beautiful woman hurried past, and disappeared, and a rose, falling out of her furs as she ran, dropped at Vesey's feet. He picked it up. The sound of the woman's heels clicked away from them and was lost in silence.

He walked beside her with the rose hanging from his hand. The taste of the fog was at the back of their throats. They could see only the shape of one another and, when they spoke, so private, so safe did they feel that they neither paused nor dissembled. In this blurred world, words were more beautiful and they used them more truthfully than at other times.

He stripped himself of his despair about his work; she shed her anxieties and her fears.

‘When I was young,' she said, ‘I stole from Caroline a photograph of you. I had nothing. That, and the note you left for me when my mother died I put into an envelope and sealed it down and always kept it.'

He was unbearably moved and afraid to speak.