A Game of Hide and Seek (31 page)

Her eyes were on the page while she thought. When she shut them, she could see white diagrams printed on darkness. She had looked so hard, and seen nothing. ‘I shall never learn it,' she thought. Each time she made an effort to bend her mind to the lesson, her mind, like a threatened creature, wrenched itself free. She wondered what climax could put an end to it; imagined running away, lowering herself out of the turret-window on a string of dust-sheets. She fidgeted with a gas-tap at the edge of the bench, leaned down and breathed the gas. ‘The only time when we aren't lonely is when we're dead,' she suddenly thought. ‘Then we can't be.' The gas made a hissing sound. She was just going to turn it off when Miss Bell opened the door.

Meaning only to open the door, to give her message and go, Miss Bell leant into the room, with her arms, as usual, full of books.

‘What are you doing, Betsy?'

She came in and shut the door. ‘Turn off that gas at once. Surely you mayn't touch those things?' She spoke, from the Classical side, with an aloof contempt. ‘What are you supposed to be doing?'

‘Returned work,' Betsy said flatly.

‘Yes, I had a message from Miss Smythe, that you may go home now. It distresses me that you should be here at all.'

‘Oh, I am always in trouble,' Betsy said lightly.

‘“Always” is not an excuse,' Miss Bell said, leaning against the door. ‘“Always” makes matters worse; not better, as you imply.'

Betsy thought, bowing her head over the bench, swinging her legs from the high stool: ‘Surely, when matters become so bad, one cannot any longer be held responsible?'

‘You cannot take refuge in “always” and “worse-and-worse”. It is all in yourself, of course; nothing from outside. And if you were not staying in for Miss Smythe, you would certainly be staying in for me. The work you handed in this morning was an insult, I thought. An insult to both of us. Perhaps you intended it to be.'

‘No.'

‘It was third-rate work; and you are not a third-rate person.'

The figures in the book slanted away and tears ached in her eyes. She put her hand up at the side of her face to hide them.

‘You had better go home,' Miss Bell said coldly. But Betsy could not stir, nor take away her hand. ‘Or your mother will be anxious.'

At that, Miss Bell could see the tears rolling down the girl's wrist, into her rather grubby cuff. The things she did for other people's good always dismayed her. Because it was not her instinct to be harsh, she was harsher than ever. The means, she believed, justified the ends; but that is a doctrine in which our instincts are often terribly defied. Her impulse now was to take the girl in her arms; but her training would not allow it, and her arms were, in any case, full of books. She did, however, hand over a clean handkerchief; for Betsy was struggling to manage with her sleeve.

The handkerchief finally defeated her. She put her head down on her arms and tears soaked into her blouse and all over her chemistry book. Her hair parted untidily at the nape of her neck and dropped forwards; her shoulder-blades stuck out like wings. Miss Bell put down her books at last and laid her hand on Betsy's arm.

‘What has happened?' she asked. ‘I have to be harsh with you, although it is the worst part of being a school-mistress. Unless you take yourself in hand, you will never pass your exam. I had great hopes for you, you see. I hadn't for anybody else. If you could only tell me what is wrong . . .'

‘But I couldn't.'

‘Perhaps you are in trouble at home?' ‘She is certainly in trouble here,' Miss Bell thought, wondering how trouble elsewhere could explain or simplify matters.

The real
trouble
with Betsy, at her age, was that nothing was explicable, even to herself. When she wept, it was from confusion. Her ravelled emotions fatigued her. She was overwrought from uncertainty, more than from any specific cause.

Dragging confidences from those who wish in the end – but in the end – to tell, requires patience. Miss Bell sat down on a stool and wound her wrist-watch, while she thought of questions she could ask.

‘Have you quarrelled with your friends?'

‘I have no friends,' Betsy said reprovingly.

‘You and Pauline, I thought . . .'

‘Pauline
loathes
me.'

‘Well, you and I were good friends, I always believed. And I think you should talk to me . . .'

‘Yes, only I don't know what to say.'

‘Whatever comes into your head . . . it could be sorted out later, if necessary.'

‘Yes, only I don't know where to start.'

‘Start at the last thing you can remember and go backwards. I will try my hardest to follow. If you could just be not too long. I think your mother may begin to worry for you . . .'

‘Oh, she won't do that. Nor care.' At the moment, Betsy believed it to be true.

Miss Bell cast warily about for something to say.

‘She only thinks of Vesey . . .'

‘Vesey?'

‘I told you about him . . . you remember, in
Hamlet
that time . . .'

‘Oh, yes.'

‘My mother goes to London, to see him.'

‘Yes, you told me they were old friends.'

‘I think of him all the time.' Betsy glanced down at the Chemistry book, as if that would prove the truth of her words. She brushed tears from the page. ‘When he came to the house, I was sent to bed. I leant over the banisters and watched him go. It didn't seem to matter at the time; but, later, I realised how sad I'd been. When I look back on it, I realise how I felt. I never seem to know things at the time, because then I only feel excited.'

‘Do stop fidgeting with that gas-tap, Betsy.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘What are you going to do with your life if you are to be at the beck and call of your emotions in this way? If you are like this at fifteen . . . sixteen . . . whichever you may be – what will twenty-five and thirty be like?'

‘Thirty?' Betsy said, dismayed.

‘You must learn now, before it is too late. Hard work is a great stand-by. You throw it to one side, instead of making use of it.'

She had always found her own support in work – not for the turning aside of obsessions (she never was obsessed); but in saving her pride and covering her loneliness. Betsy's state of mind alarmed her. She was anxious for her present and her future. She could not pass off these revelations with Miss Anstruther's easy formulae – ‘one doesn't,' ‘one is not,' ‘one mayn't'. From fondness of the girl, she would have liked to protect her from those conventional phrases; but she suffered from a strange caution fostered by her failure at human-relationships and a reluctance to be shocked or joked from the neat life she had planned for herself. She was not often at a loss to know how to behave rightly. She had found convention not often at war with her conscience and was brave enough to act according to her conscience if it were. This afternoon, the issue seemed more confused. Her heart and head did not run in unison; her conscience was silent. She felt that she should listen to all the girl had to say; yet was at the same time unwilling for her even to have out her cry, lest the door should open upon Miss Anstruther with her ‘one was rather surprised' look. It would seem – for Betsy's confidence would be respected and concealed – that she was comforting the victim of another mistress's detention.

Now, checked and dry-eyed, though tear-stained, Betsy stared before her. Her forsaken look was pitiable.

‘I will wash this handkerchief,' she said quietly. ‘Thank you for lending it to me.' She spoke as if there were nothing more to be gained by words, with the touch of pride of one who has been offered help and then rejected.

‘Don't you understand,' Miss Bell said desperately, ‘that no one in the world can really help you, but you yourself? You must not be such a slave to your feelings. They're more than strong enough for you to manage, without all this extra embroidery. You said yourself, that it was
afterwards
, not at the time, that you were so overcome, that you felt so . . . bereft,' she concluded, a little surprised at the word, which she had used before only in translating Greek. Andromache, Hecuba; but scarcely Betsy Jephcott.

‘That was before I knew.'

‘Knew what?'

‘That he is really my father.'

Betsy gave her a terrified half-glance. ‘It is out,' she thought. ‘It is settled now.' Once it was in words there could be no more uncertainty.

Miss Bell was lost in the strange landscape which unrolled before her eyes. All of Miss Anstruther's phrases came into her mind, and she could see the use of them. They drew decent veils, they warned away reality.

‘You do realise what you are saying—?'

‘Yes, of course.'

‘Don't cry again.'

‘I am so alone. I don't know what I am supposed to do, or be, or what will happen to me . . .'

‘What reason have you for saying such a thing? I mean, I suppose you
have
a reason?'

‘I read some letters.'

‘You should never read other people's letters,' Miss Bell said mechanically. ‘It is a grave thing to say. I think you have been mistaken.'

Betsy was sure now. She believed wholly what had been a vague conjecture. She was at peace.

Miss Bell had been brought up in poor respectability. Miss Anstruther's girls were brought up in well-to-do respectability. Harriet had been the one mother above others on whom Miss Bell had pinned faith, the one who had listened, discussed, encouraged. Betsy's work had reflected the solid worth of her environment. If the environment fell to pieces, then her work must also. The flesh, the devil, came close to Miss Bell; nudged her. Loneliness she understood: fear she understood. She did not expect others to be as brave as she had had to be herself. Pity over-rode her. She took Betsy in her arms; as Harriet never did. She comforted her; as Harriet would not have dared. Her eyes felt congested with tears.

‘You must never tell anyone what you have told me,' she said in her clipped, authoritative voice. ‘That will be the consequence of learning things you were not meant to know. But I will always help you, if I can. And I shall be thinking of you, though you may sometimes doubt it – for I must always be impartial. When you need me, I am here.' She smoothed Betsy's tangled hair. ‘And if you try, if you work, and overcome your . . . difficulties, I shall know. You will know that I secretly applaud.'

Betsy, with one of her grandmother's gestures, which, if Miss Bell could have recognised it, would have cancelled out all that had been said, put her wrist against her throbbing brow.

That looks are inherited none dispute. Character goes down the years. Temperament is handed on. Genius skips from one generation to another, crops up strangely. That gestures should do so is strangest of all. More strangely betraying, they are also more miraculous: they hold the significance and the wonder of human personality. The way in which a hand is lifted in farewell, may have been learnt, determined, unfolded, in the womb.

In the summer, Vesey went to the seaside in a play. Far from Harriet, he could only write to her. She hid the letters about for a day or two and then destroyed them when they were learnt by heart.

In the heat, Vesey flagged. The large resort seemed to exhaust itself with its own noise – the military band on the promenade playing ‘The Two Pigeons'; the sea behind; the peevish gulls above; and, against the reedy trills, the clashing pom-poms, people's inextricable voices running on and the slow, slow scuffle of their feet along the hot asphalt; and children crying. The streets were congested; even the shops flowed out on to the pavement with bunches of wooden spades and canvas shoes; piles of buckets; revolving stands of picture post-cards.

He stayed in one of the boarding-houses which went off at right-angles to the promenade. In the bay-window a table could be seen set out with engraved tumblers and napkins folded like fleurs-de-lys. The hydrangea by the front door faded through innumerable shades of blue. Between the outer door and the glass hall-door sometimes crabs languished in buckets. Children forgot their vague purpose in bringing them there and, when next they needed the buckets, found the poor creatures dead in an inch or two of cloudy, rusty water. ‘What a horrid smell!' their mothers said.

On Saturdays the fresh intake arrived. Vesey would watch gloomily. The nice silence, the whispering first meal would soon be exchanged, he knew, for what could only be called larking about. The young men in blazers would soon be making apple-pie beds and suggestive remarks. Catchwords from the wireless were the common coinage of their talk. Precocious children joined in these exchanges and were exhibited. Mothers grew tireder as the holiday went on and thought of the piles of dirty clothes in the trunk upstairs.

Vesey did not wholly escape the exuberance. For him, it was the background of the entire summer, not only a fortnight. People, thinking him lonely, drew him into their conversation. Sometimes girls tried to coax him out on the front steps for a photograph. When cheery men hit him across the shoulders as they came into the dining-room, he tried not to cough. He wondered how all their spirits were kept up at such a level. They behaved as if they were drunk, he thought; but drink did not enter into their lives. Only once or twice in the summer two husbands might chum up and slip out for a light ale while their wives were tidying the children for lunch. The strangeness of this could be judged from the wives' level looks above the children's heads as they bent to tie on bibs or cut their food. A chill was on the air.

The younger ones mystified Vesey. He did not know how people could behave so badly unless in the last stages of inebriation. ‘I love only the gaiety of those who can be grave,' he wrote to Harriet. ‘The other side to this is just low spirits. You would pour cool scorn, holding your lovely head high.'