A Game of Hide and Seek (3 page)

Hugo saw little change in himself, could beat Vesey at tennis and swim faster, took his cold bath each morning, loved his wife as dearly now as at the beginning of their marriage, on their honeymoon in the Forest of Fontainebleau after that First World War. (He had taken her to see some battlefields.)

Vesey constantly irritated and surprised him: his lack of gallantry towards Harriet, his laziness, his cynicism, the gaps in his knowledge. ‘Who in the world is Edward Carpenter?' he had asked, lolling as usual on the sofa with the wireless on too loud, and had not seemed impressed by Hugo's exasperated answer.

On the other hand, Hugo did not know that to Vesey he seemed more old-fashioned than his grandfather. His grandfather would certainly not have spoken of taking a glass of ale at an inn, and those Chestertonian phrases had, to Vesey, such a period flavour as to seem deliberately affected.

The antagonism Hugo felt for his nephew, although it was in reality impatience with another person's youth heightened by nostalgia for his own, was fogged by nobody's having a good word for Vesey. Caroline, Lilian, Vesey's own father all combined to disapprove. Even Harriet, Hugo noticed, turned her head when he came in and affected to read her book.

Hugo was fond of Harriet. Although not clever, she was not meretricious. Her silky brown hair was tucked back with childish artlessness behind her ears, her face was innocent of make-up, her clothes were boyish and practical. When she walked, as she sometimes did, with him and the children, she knew the old English names of the wild-flowers; she shut gates; carried waste paper home from picnics. Vesey, on the other hand, had been seen walking across a field of winter wheat and was always careless of other people's property; had left a copy of
The Roadmender
(moss-green suede) out on the lawn in a thunderstorm, had found the book, he explained, too little worth reading to warrant carrying it indoors.

Sometimes Hugo was so annoyed that he was fearful of losing his composure and took up the bellows and began blowing steadily at the wood fire. This was a sign that he was on edge and did not wish to hear what was being said; but it was unfortunately a sign which only Caroline heeded. Vesey was not interested: Harriet thought what a nuisance wood fires were.

When she arrived in the mornings, Vesey was still in bed. She would listen for sounds of his rising, watch for him to pass the window. Once, leaving Joseph and Deirdre while she went to fetch painting water, she met him in the hall. He was reading a newspaper and was still in his dressing-gown. The dressing-gown flurried her dreadfully. She had never seen him with so many clothes on. He seemed muffled up; his black hair was unbrushed. Going back through the hall, slopping the cups of water, she would not glance in his direction.

‘Harriet!' He left it till she got to the door, till she was nearly away, as if he were a cat with a mouse.

‘Yes? Yes, Vesey?'

Still reading the
Manchester Guardian
with close interest, in a vague voice he said: ‘Shall we go for a walk this evening?'

With her back to him, she answered, joy unsteadying her voice: ‘Yes. I think that would be all right.'

‘Oh, if you don't care to, you need only say.'

‘No, I think it will be quite all right.'

She pushed the door open with her foot, as her hands were full. He did not attempt to help her. Joseph and Deirdre looked up from the table inquisitively, as if it were not only painting water she was bringing in. She sat down in her chair, her arms through the bars at the back of it, braced stiff, her fingers locking her hands together, excitement broken loose in her.

‘The sign of a good painter,' Deirdre said, ‘is not going over the edges.' She drove yellow to the very edge of a petal and no farther. ‘Or letting it run,' she added. But Joseph had let it run badly. Bluebells ran into celandines and the sky into the grass. His page was so wet, so rucked up, that he pushed it all aside. Vision or nothing, he seemed to declare, kicking at the table-leg. Harriet could not coax him back to work. Neat Deirdre looked up in smug surprise.

For the first ten minutes they were explaining to one another why they had chosen to go for this walk together. Boredom had driven them to it, they decided; a fear, on Vesey's part, lest he should be asked by Hugo to mow and mark the tennis-lawn; a wish, on Harriet's part, to collect wild-flowers for the children to draw. If the walk turned out badly, it could be the fault of neither, for neither had desired it or attached importance to it. In a few years' time, they would be dissembling the other way; professing pleasure they did not feel, undreamed of eagerness. They had not yet learned to gush. Their protestations were of an oafish kind.

When they had established their lack of interest in being together, they became silent. Harriet gathered a large bunch of quaking-grass from under a hedge. Vesey kicked a stone down the middle of the road.

‘If only,' Harriet thought, ‘there were no
women
at universities! If only they still were not allowed!' (Her mother once had taken tea at Girton with Miss Emily Davies. It had seemed to her well worth going to prison to have been so rewarded.)

But Harriet saw Vesey lying in a punt, his fingers trailing in the water as he watched through lids half-closed against the sun a young woman who was reading Ernest Dowson to him. Her imagination excused Vesey from any exertion, as probability did also. The boat drifted as if by magic past Bablock-Hythe and under Godstow Bridge towards the Aegean Isles. And all this time, Harriet herself sat at the schoolroom-table typing Caroline's letters; for pocket money.

Vesey, whose next steps would take him over the threshold of a new and promising world, wished to go without any backward glances or entanglements. He was not one to keep up friendships, never threw out fastening tendrils such as letters or presents or remembrances; was quite unencumbered by all the things which Harriet valued and kept: drawers full of photographs, brochures, programmes, postcards, diaries. He never remembered birthdays or any other anniversary.

Although he was ambitious at this time to become a great writer, he saw himself rather as a literary figure than as a man at work. At school, he had often turned to the index of a History of Literature and in his mind inserted his own name – Vesey Patrick Macmillan – between Machiavelli and Sir Thomas Malory.

‘Everything seems so certain for you,' Harriet said, as they toiled up the side of a hill towards a wood. ‘So uncertain for me.'

‘In what way?'

He stopped with a hand against his lower ribs, out of condition as his Uncle Hugo never had been in his life.

‘That you are going to Oxford, and can pass exams.'

‘Exams are nothing,' he said. (‘They do not seem to be,' Harriet thought, ‘to those who pass them.')

Both wanted to sit down in the shade at the edge of the woods: neither would suggest it.

‘And then you'll be a schoolmaster and have a great deal of money,' Harriet said without irony, her mind on her own pittance.

‘A schoolmaster?'

Vesey stopped dead, holding back a long springing branch so that she could go by. ‘Why do you say that?'

‘It is what I heard Caroline say.'

He had not held the branch quite long enough and Harriet now disentangled it from her hair.

‘She would! These old-time suffragettes!' Vesey said tactlessly. ‘They are only happy if they can see men in a subservient position.'

Harriet could not see that it was in the least a subservient position. She could scarcely imagine more authority or scope.

‘Then what will you do?' she asked.

‘I have never told anybody, but I mean to be a writer.'

Harriet flushed; both at the confidence and at the nature of it. She bent down hastily and began to tug at some bracken to add to her bunch.

‘To write novels?' she asked.

He preferred the more oblong shapes of books on literary criticism, belles lettres. To become a man of letters, he would make special to himself one smallish aspect of literature, read all the books about it, add another of his own. Anything later encroaching on his territory, he would himself review.

‘The novel is practically finished as an art form,' he replied.

‘I suppose it is,' said Harriet.

‘Virginia Woolf has brought it to the edge of ruin.'

‘Yes,' said Harriet.

‘But it was inevitable,' he added, laying no blame.

‘I suppose it was,' Harriet said, in a slow, considering way. The novel – headstrong parvenu – seemed headed for destruction. No one could stay its downward course and, obviously, it did not deserve that Vesey should try. Virginia Woolf with one graceful touch after another (the latest was
Mrs Dalloway
) was sending it trundling downhill. She had been doing this unbeknown to Harriet who had never even heard of her.

She had wished to include her own future in their discussion and he had not given it a glance. She sighed theatrically, but he failed to ask her why. Plunging through dead leaves, they were obliged to walk in single file, twigs snapped under their feet, briars tripped them. Cool and vast, the wood seemed a whole world; the light was aqueous; when a cuckoo gave its broken, explosive cry it echoed like a shout in a closed swimming-bath – for some reason, chilling and hysterical as those sounds are.

Vesey now had a blister on his heel. He sat down on the fine, transparent grass that grows beneath trees and took off his sandal. His foot was white and veined and rather dirty. He rested it in the cool grass and leaned back against the trunk of a tree. Harriet stood awkwardly before him, feeling too tall.

‘Have you a handkerchief?' she asked.

‘No.' He smiled. He looked rather fagged, as if this evening stroll had been too much for him.

If only her own handkerchief were of the finest cambric, smelling of flowers! She took out a crumpled cotton one left over from schooldays, with ‘Harriet Claridge' printed clumsily along the hem.

‘Why “Harriet”, I wonder,' Vesey asked, reading it. ‘Though it is quite a pretty name.'

‘It was after Harriet Martineau.'

‘Ah, yes, of course.' He smiled again.

‘I could tie it for you.'

‘I cannot bear anyone to touch my feet.'

She rearranged her bunch of flowers and held them out at arm's length to consider them.

‘None the less, sit down beside me,' he presently said.

Surprised, she hesitated, then sat down rather round the tree from him so that they must talk slightly over their shoulders. Her hands, at her side, pressed into dry twigs, the empty cases of last year's beech-nuts.

‘I hope you will be very happy, very famous,' she said. To say this more easily she laid an edge of mockery to her voice.

Her brown, ink-smudged hand pressed down into the dead leaves drew his attention. Looking sideways, he examined it carefully.

‘Thank you,' he said, and his voice, too, sank into mockery. She could not allow to him the same motive as her own and, imagining he had wished to rebuke her, pointed out that it was time to go home. ‘Or you will be late for supper,' she said, as if he were intolerably preoccupied with meals.

Nervously, tenderly, he put his own hand over hers.

‘
You
will be late too,' he said, as if nothing had happened.

‘My mother . . .' she began; but she could not continue. She seemed to have stepped over into another world; confused, as though the demarcation had been between life and death, she imagined herself swimming, floating, in a strange element where hearing and sight no longer existed.

‘Your mother what . . . ?' he asked. He slid his hand up her arm and into her sleeve.

She could not remember what she had been about to say. Watching a velvety grey spider crossing her ankle, she was surprised that she did not experience her usual fear and disgust.

Vesey had turned to face her and the tree. She had never seen his face so close to her own, nor dared to look at him as she looked now. He drew her away from the tree into his arms and rested his head against her, and still she could not move but was locked up in amazement and disbelief. Only when he loosened her, as he soon did, sensing her constraint, did she begin to relax, to tremble. She raised her hands stiffly. Pieces of twig, small stones, were pressed into the creased and reddened palms. She brushed them on her skirt and stared about her. Then a great silence, of despair, ennui, disappointment with herself, widened in her, like a yawn. The trees seemed to march away from her into the darkness; the wood was a chilly vault, the birds had stopped calling. Vesey sat beside her still, prising bits of white flint out of the mossy earth with a stick which kept snapping. Absorbed, he did this. Fatally, she covered her face with her hands.

‘What is wrong?' he asked gently.

He drew her hands away and kissed her cheek. In spite of his seeming assurance, he was not really sure.

‘Harriet?'

‘Yes, Vesey?'

‘Have I done wrong?'

‘No.'

The yawn, the disappointment was contagious. Touching her again, his excitement undiminished, he was at the same time reminded of the dullness of consequences. The tears which she had not let fall cautioned him. He began to wonder if violent embraces are not often induced by not knowing what to do next, of losing one's nerve as much as losing one's control. He put his sandal on again, easing it with elaborate care over the bandage, frowning, as he buckled it.

‘It is only . . .' she began unpromisingly (that daunting opening to long complaints, long confessions) ‘only that sometimes I worry about the future. And hearing you tonight . . . so sure . . . there is nothing for
me
to do, as there is for you. I wonder what will happen to me . . .'

Relief made him robust.

‘Someone will marry you,' he cruelly said. He stood up and brushed leaves away, then he put out his hand to help her to her feet.