A Game of Hide and Seek (35 page)

Barbara dried her eyes carefully, restored her face and continued to pack. She had insisted on doing this while Vesey rested, partly from real alarm at his fatigue and partly as if to atone for a lifetime's neglect with half-an-hour's attention.

‘I shall go to bed,' Vesey thought peacefully. ‘I shall lie in a cool, smooth bed. When my father comes in, I shall pretend to be gravely ill, so that he will not rake up the past.'

‘I can't think why you didn't send for me months ago,' his mother said. ‘Look at these socks!'

But he did not look. He wondered how he would ever walk to the car when Stanley came; felt in a dream of weakness.

Barbara, with the packing finished, waited impatiently at the window.

‘Would that ghastly woman bring us a cup of tea?'

‘Perhaps; if you asked her nicely.'

He knew that she would. She would perch on a corner of the table in that littered kitchen and give of her best, very woman-to-woman, falsely motherly, her condescension barely descernible.

Whenever he heard a car in the street, he wondered if it would be Harriet, or Stanley. He pictured Stanley as a music-hall bounder with a grey bowler and brown buttoned boots. He would call Barbara ‘old girl'; but Vesey's position would bring out the best in him, as it could not in Vesey himself. He hoped that Harriet would come first, that his mother would leave them. He had nothing to say; but would like to see her sitting beside the bed, drinking tea, smiling awkwardly.

Although his eyes ached, he forced them open. When he closed them, he seemed to be floating; the bed dissolved under him.

In the kitchen, he could hear his mother talking about his influenza and a clatter of cups being set out. He heard a car slow and stop outside the house. A door was slammed. The footsteps across the pavement were light and quick. He raised himself and slid his feet down to the floor. The sound of the door-knocker seemed to be banging in his own heart. ‘She is coming,' he thought, and he looked up through a shifting mist and saw her face. She put her bunch of flowers down on a chair and said his name and took him in her arms.

This is a New York Review Book

Published by The New York Review of Books

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

Copyright © 1951 by the Estate of Elizabeth Taylor

Introduction copyright © 2012 by Caleb Crain

All rights reserved.

First published in Great Britain in 1951 by Peter Davies; published in paperback in 1986 by Virago Press

Cover image: Cover photograph: E.O. Hoppé, Passengers on a Bus, 1945; © E.O. Hoppé Estate Collection / Curatorial Assistance, Inc.

Cover design: Katy Homans

The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:

Taylor, Elizabeth, 1912–1975.

A game of hide and seek / by Elizabeth Taylor ; introduction by Caleb Crain.

p. cm. — (New York Review Books Classics)

ISBN 978-1-59017-496-8 (alk. paper)

1. First loves—Fiction. 2. Marriage—Fiction. 3. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

PR6039.A928G36 2011

823'.914—dc22

2011030977

eISBN 978-1-59017-510-1
v1.0

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