A Game of Hide and Seek (28 page)

‘Not without me.' She did not tell him how she had been evading Italy for the last month or two.

‘I thought all husbands went off sometimes to conferences and so on. I've seen jokes about it in
Punch
.'

‘The point is – Charles doesn't.'

‘If he did, would you come away with me?'

She felt terror at the idea. She gripped the ropes of the swing, trembling. Hating danger, she could foretell the difficulties and embarrassments, the perhaps disastrous consequences.

He caught at one of the ropes and steadied her, drew her back against him, his hands over her breast.

‘Then that is settled,' he said. ‘We need only await the opportunity. Alas, no one's love-making ever was so long-deferred as ours!'

He pulled her away from the swing and lay down with her in the fine grass among the budding daffodils. The warm sweetness in the earth seemed magnetic, dragged at their limbs, silenced them. She lay with her head on his outflung arm. His hand reaching at last the bareness of her breast lay so tenderly upon her that she felt a pause in herself, her blood seemed, she fancied, to make a deep curtsey. Held up, checked, she breathed a long breath to bring her bosom closer to his hand, gathered his head against her shoulder. In his eyes, she saw her own face reflected and above them, beyond the trees, a wall of the house and windows, and all the curtains drawn across.

‘So you've cut yourself a fringe?' Julia said in a patronising voice. ‘It makes you look all eyes.'

‘But Mrs Jephcott has such beautifully expressive eyes,' Miss Bastable said.

‘Beautiful, perhaps: expressive, no. Expressive eyes, my dear Miss B., have to express something. Harriet's remind me of that fairy story – what is it? Bluebeard – “I see nothing but the sun making a dust and the grass looking green”.'

She lifted her ruined face, her voice rang ominously. Her hands – a little contorted with rheumatism – looked too big for her slight wrists; her sleeves fell away from her now shrunken, blue-veined arms. Her gestures were less impetuous, more tragic, perhaps more beautiful. Her eyes had a waiting emptiness, which was her imitation of Harriet.

‘What
could
you express, darling? What have you suffered in your sheltered life? Married out of the schoolroom . . . ?'

‘I was working in a shop at the time,' Harriet said, laughing.

Julia glanced at Miss Bastable, who quickly took up her embroidery.

‘All sunny,' Julia intoned. ‘All sunny. Your husband's loving care. He spoilt you. He was afraid you'd run off like the other one.'

‘Behave yourself, Julia!'

‘Perhaps, Miss B., you'd be good enough to put the kettle on for tea, if you can tear yourself away from your tatting.'

‘You're a cantankerous old woman,' Harriet said, when Miss Bastable had quickly rolled up her work and fled. She was either snatching it up in confusion, or tucking it away from sight. ‘Cruel to that poor woman,' Harriet continued.

‘Poor?' Julia echoed. ‘She lives here in the lap of luxury, as they say. She will see out her days in gentle pastimes. Nothing “poor” about her.'

‘She is a pathetic character.'

‘Don't
mumble
at me. You either mutter or stammer. I see nothing pathetic about her. She has her fancy work. She has her famous gentility and her memories of her late papa, as she calls him. I think she is rather more to be envied than I am. She has more life to live, for one thing; and I love life and hate the thought of death. Age improves her, I do believe. She is certainly more handsome now that her moustache is grey, don't you think?
Much
more distinguished. Why, I wonder – since we are talking of improved appearances, or changed appearances – why all this furbishing and renovating and hair-trimming you are going in for yourself?'

‘I felt a dreadful weariness and distaste one day when I looked into a mirror. Although I didn't feel like that inside, it was clear that was how I looked – frayed at the edges. What I wanted was never to see that again, to be as different as I could and in any way I could . . .'

‘False, betraying hearts!' Julia said, staring at her own crooked hands. ‘To leave us schoolgirls inside, and to destroy us from without in so many dreadful ways; stiff joints, knotted veins, cushions of fat, ruined bosoms, uncertain teeth . . . darling, I do know what one feels and with what appalling suddenness it is too late. One moment one is scorning lovesick young men; the next, and everything has suddenly gone, young men are lovesick for other women, one is alone, a figure of fun, perhaps. You must take what is offered at the time. I never think infidelity is a thing one ever regrets . . .'

‘I merely complained about my shabby looks,' Harriet protested.

‘You think I want to enliven my old age by dwelling on your affairs?'

‘I do not. What a horrible idea! And I have no affairs.'

‘I know otherwise. Although I ask no confidences of you . . .' She paused and looked about the room, as if it were somewhere strange to her. ‘No, I really don't care to know,' she said, when Harriet remained silent. ‘So depressing! Modern love affairs seem such sordid, morbid little concerns. Drinking gin in bars, cars parked at road-sides – imagine making love in a car! It is beyond me to think how such a thing could be done. The gears, as I believe they are called . . .'

‘Believe? You know perfectly well.'

‘And once I saw a film . . . a middle-aged couple in raincoats, and it all took place on a railway-station . . . can you believe me? In my day, we should never have cared for that . . . we did such things at home, in the proper place . . . when our husbands were out . . .'

‘You conjure up such a lovely picture of salmon-pink satin boudoirs and lace négligées. What if the husband should come back in the middle?'

‘The middle? The middle of what?' Julia sounded aghast. Miss Bastable was bringing in the tray. ‘We will discuss this when we are alone.' Her voice became loud and toneless.

‘We will do nothing of the kind,' Harriet said. ‘We will leave it there, in the pink boudoir, if you please.'

Harriet thought of the drinking in bars, lingering in tea-shops, railway-stations, benches in parks; in streets under a dark building, in the darkest place between two lamps. The course of unlawful love never does run smooth; or with dignity; or with romance.

Julia was now – affectedly laborious – discussing the lengthening daylight, as if to imply to Miss Bastable that nothing more intimate could be mentioned in her presence. ‘That little spell after tea before we light the lamps, so very welcome,' she said in a high-pitched social voice. ‘And one is so grateful for it in the early mornings. The birds singing,' she added vaguely. ‘Soon it will be summer. That's another thing, you'll notice,' she said in a lowered voice to Harriet, ‘the way the seasons go flying by.'

All through Lent, Betsy went to church a great deal. Miss Bell noticed her there, with misgivings which she could not clearly specify. Although religious herself, Betsy's own devotions seemed to her in line with a general agitation she manifested, and with a falling-off in her Greek. Work undone, yawnings, stupidity, were in Miss Bell's mind whenever she glanced at the pale girl with the pale gold hair and the beret set straight on the top of her head. She sat always in the same place, by a pillar, as if she hid there. When she knelt down to pray, she kept her eyes ahead, her long hands on either side of her face, her pathetically red wrists thrust out of her too-short sleeves.

She had, these days, a vacant, a distracted air. She did not sleep well. She sat sometimes on the edge of her bed, in a state of suspended consciousness, feeling only the slightest ruffling on her spirit of time passing by: once was so disembodied that it seemed she need only lift her arms to drift away, to float, to fly. She lifted her arms, but remained bound by such heavy roots, her imagination was so confounded, that tears came into her eyes.

Once, passing through the school hall which smelt of furniture-polish, was hung with brass rubbings and shields, and in whose parquet, grand-piano, mirrors, the bitterly white sky outside was reflected, Miss Bell found Betsy rather mopish, standing beneath the green baize notice-board, her hands on a radiator. From all the rooms near-by came the authoritative, raised voices of women teaching.

‘Why do you palely loiter?' Miss Bell asked, in the schoolmistressy, quoting voice which sometimes dismayed her.

‘I was sent out of Scripture.'

Miss Bell hoisted her books up her arm. It was not the girl's defiance which checked further questions, but the rule that she would not enquire into her colleagues' reasons or methods.

‘You will have to pull yourself together,' she said curtly; her neck reddened as she went off down the hall.

Through her misted eyes, Betsy read again all the little notices and lists pinned to the board. Her hands patted the too-hot radiator. She was so deeply into trouble now that she was sure she could never right anything. She prayed for catastrophe, for a break of great violence after which she might be permitted to begin again. She felt that if she complained of pains in her side her mother might send her at once to hospital. Her grandmother had died of appendicitis. They would be unlikely to delay an operation. Afterwards, frailer, thinner, she would return to school and find her slate wiped clean. Or she would indulge herself in a nervous-breakdown up to the very verge of madness. Like Hamlet she would voice many opinions which she now repressed, creating special circumstances, spreading alarm.

One of the prefects, eyeing her aloofly, came into the hall, took up a great brass bell and swung it to and fro. In the classrooms, desk-lids banged, the authoritative voices were raised above scuffling confusion, then one door after another was thrown open; polite murmurings accompanied the mistresses out of the rooms, noise mounting when they had gone. Soon, girls came out, eating biscuits out of paper bags. They strolled in the hall and perched about in clusters on the window-seats. It was too cold to go out. A bitter wind raked the shrubbery. They were all in quarantine for mumps, feeling their necks expectantly from time to time, fancying little symptoms.

‘You
are
a fool,' Pauline Hay-Hardy said. ‘You'll be sent to Miss Anstruther in the end.'

Betsy smiled faintly; but she felt singled-out and victimised, in a position of solitary danger.

‘And it puts her in such a hell of a bate with us,' Pauline complained.

‘You must look after yourselves.'

‘Well, there's no need to be rude. Have a ginger-nut. They're quite nice and soft.'

‘I like them hard,' said Betsy.

‘You always want to be different to other people.'

‘Different
from
,' said Betsy. ‘Anyhow, I
don't
want to be different. If ginger-nuts were meant to be soft, they'd make them soft in the first place.'

‘Look what you said about Saint Paul.'

‘I meant it.'

‘No one pleases you these days. Vanessa said she wouldn't ask you to her party; you'd only turn your nose up.'

Betsy had watched the invitations handed round, her heart as still as a stone.

‘I probably should,' she agreed. ‘Look how boring it was last year. All those girl-guides' games, and forfeits. Postman's Knock, too; of all things.'

‘You and Ricky Vincent kept cheating so that you went out together.'

‘Ricky Vincent!' Betsy said in a withering voice. ‘We were practically in our prams together. I'm so used to him, I wouldn't cross the road to say hallo. Besides, he's conceited. And he calls his mother “Mummy”. I would cheat
not
to go out with
him
.'

‘That's right! Fly into a bate. Someone else you don't like.' Pauline screwed up her biscuit bag and took a slide across the parquet to the waste-paper-basket. Betsy's heart turned over when the prefect took up the bell again. Mademoiselle appeared promptly, while they were still herding into the form-room. Betsy sat down and clasped her hands under her desk; her verbs unlearnt; her reading unprepared.

Harriet sat on a seat in Regent's Park waiting for Vesey. Only the faintest breeze wrinkled the lake. Flecks of dazzling colour, the tiny new leaves dotting the trees, the broken sunlight, gave a painted look to the scene. The bushes sprang apart, then closed, as birds burst out of them. Pale, flaking houses enclosed the tender greenness. People with coats swinging open, walked on the paths, admiring the tulips which still, though it was early evening, were flat open in the sun. A middle-aged woman sitting near Harriet seemed flat open in the sun, too; lying back, relaxed, indifferent, sleeping like a cat. When she stood up suddenly and clapped on a red hat without a glance in a mirror, she became a different woman, guarded and suspicious. Harriet smiled, watching her assembling herself and striding away towards the gates.

Beside her on the seat a man and a girl held an uneasy conversation in lowered voices. ‘Surely you have something to say for yourself after all this time.'

The girl smoothed her gloves.

‘Ah, now, I see what's wrong, what's different, I mean,' her companion said. ‘You've been plucking your eyebrows. Trying to look sophisticated, eh?'

The girl turned an ugly red. She had hoped to have improved herself, had taken trouble over this dreadful meeting.

‘Suppose it were like that between Vesey and me!' Harriet thought, glancing away in the direction he would come.

‘Seen any of the old crowd?' the man asked the girl.

‘Only Phil.'

‘Oh, yes, I remember.'

‘Have you?'

‘I?'

‘Seen any of them?'

‘Not a glimpse. You know how it is. One loses touch. Other places, other people. And then after a while, well . . . quite frankly . . .' he, not quite frankly, laughed . . . ‘one loses the urge, you know.'