A Game of Hide and Seek (4 page)

‘I do think,' Caroline was saying in her most reasonable voice, ‘that another time . . . of course, it doesn't matter in the least while we are alone . . . obviously, it's of no importance to me that you take the last rissole . . . I'm not the faintest bit hungry, and, if I were, could have had more cooked . . . but perhaps it would be a bad example to the children if they were here for you just to – without offering it, I mean – to take it as a matter of course. I
hate
having to say this, but it is a question, I suppose, of principle . . . after all, we were always agreed that this isn't one of those houses where the man is lord and master and boss and bread-winner, taking everything for granted . . .'

‘He could certainly not do that,' Hugo said, tipping the nut-rissole on to Caroline's plate.

She flushed. ‘My dear Hugo, surely you have not taken offence because I spoke frankly?'

‘It is what people do take offence at.'

‘You know I couldn't eat another thing.'

She returned the rissole to his plate.

‘And now I could not either,' he said, abandoning some spinach as well and putting his knife and fork together. The rissole was back on the dish where it had begun, among the shapes of the other rissoles which had been outlined by cold fat.

As the meal continued with rhubarb-pie Caroline's explanation also continued. What she simply hated saying she always said for a long time.

Hugo said little. He knew that she was a good wife, though a bore. But even her moral code had its less tiresome side.

When at last she had finished, ‘Vesey is late,' he said.

‘I have put some cold food on one side for him.'

‘I should have thought that he need not put you to such trouble.'

‘But meals are made for people, not people for meals,' Caroline said with smooth serenity.

Harriet strove to measure, to assess, Vesey's consciousness of her: not so much to find out what was his attitude towards her; but if he had an attitude. Her diary, once full of blank pages, became cramped and congested on the days when she saw him. Reading it later, when she was lonely, it did not seem that she had quite told the truth. She stored up all his sayings against the long winter when she would not see him; but the very ink she wrote them in seemed to lay emphasis which did not belong. Some days had only one line: ‘I went to Caroline's. I did not see V.' But the next day might spill back upon that page. (‘Vesey mowed the lawn. Vesey looked tired. Vesey is reading Walter Pater.' Vesey's opinions of Walter Pater would then appear. Two days later, Harriet was reading Walter Pater. She did so agree with Vesey and, should he ask her, would say so, but he did not ask her.) In her diary, she walked right round Vesey and viewed him from every angle and in every light.

On the days when she did not see him, she was sometimes tempted back after supper and would bicycle slowly along the tarred road and past Caroline's house, suddenly staring ahead when she drew level, as if hateful scenes were being enacted on those smooth lawns. Relieved, she would bicycle on in the darkening evening, the air cool against her, her tyres swerving on the gravelly road. Before she reached home, lights would be on in the cottages she passed and she would duck her head seeing the bats slanting, darting between the hedges. Insects would strike her: she feared especially the flying beetles. All anticipation gone, she would be glad to be back. She could not think why she had set out in the first place.

Her mother worked in the garden until late, and the cottage had a deserted stuffy air with no lamps lit. The fires had been laid so long that the paper was sooty and the twigs covered with cigarette-ends and bits of cotton.

The cottage, like most of them in this small hamlet, which house-agents called an artists' paradise, was a labourer's cottage neatly prettified, with diamond panes and new thatch. Geraniums were planted trustingly outside the hedge. The stones in the front path had been cracked to accommodate clumps of thrift. All of these cottages showed their past usefulness by the names painted in Gothic script on little swinging boards – The Old Bakehouse, The Old Malthouse, Cobbler's, Shepherd's Cottage. Lilian and Harriet were at Forge Cottage: across the road at The Old Vicarage, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson had once stayed for a fortnight.

Lilian Claridge had, in middle-age, a soft prettiness and transparency. Her fine, thin skin was like crumpled tussore, darker than her prematurely white hair and deeply shadowed under her eyes. If she were brave, she was brave with a tautness she could not for long sustain: if she were angry, she was angrier than she intended. She, not Caroline, had wept at the police-station; but she had dealt the first blow: nervousness hastened her. At Harriet's age, she had kept a diary, too; but more evenly and consistently. It had been a five years' diary, thick as a Bible, with brass corners to the covers and a little key. Turning the pages now, she could not see that the key had been necessary. In the years when it might have been, she was too busy for diary-writing. But then, the days had gone innocently by: Miss Brown had scolded, had exhorted, had kissed her goodbye when she left school. She went to tea with old ladies; she pasted scraps on to a screen: she trimmed her hats and sewed insertion round her camisoles. Once, it was recorded, she had tried to make a great fruit cake with eight eggs and crystallised cherries; but when she took it from its tin the middle had fallen out and she had shut herself in her room in tears. Always in tears. Tears with the family when she threw in her lot with Mrs Henry Fawcett, tears with Mrs Henry Fawcett when she left her for the Pankhursts and prison, tears every night in prison. Her face had not stood up to so much crying: crumpled and bruised, it begged her friends to beware, betrayed her to her enemies.

She and Harriet lived uneasily together: they were more intimately placed than suited either. Harriet's failures at school had been a matter of agonised embarrassment for both. Success is always less awkward. It does not make claims upon pity or tact: congratulations are easier to give than condolences. Her mother's timid smile, her way of saying ‘It doesn't matter' had the opposite effect to what had been intended. ‘I have failed as a daughter, too,' Harriet would think.

In her last term at school, she had concentrated all her hopeless confusion upon the examination papers. The clock ticked, the time went and the confusion grew tighter, denser. Waiting after school on the day the results were pinned to the notice-board, she could not run to see, as the other girls did; eagerly and excitedly. Numbly, she approached the edge of the semi-circle. Under a thick ruled line her name was isolated. ‘Oh,
bad
luck!' the smiling girls paused to say, pushing out of the crush to hurry home. She dreaded her own moment of entering the house. Her mother, drawn time after time to the window, was caught there looking out as Harriet opened the gate. She tried, having seen her daughter's face, to fade back into the room. She put on a careless look, her embarrassed smile, and went with a quick light tread and a dismayed heart into the hall.

‘Oh, mother!'

‘But it doesn't
matter
. We didn't truly expect, and we truly don't care. You are so late home that I must make fresh tea.'

With her quick and casual manner, she thrust back Harriet's tears which would have been much better shed.

Now, later, she was paying for her mistakes. Harriet was sealed off completely; not only by good manners, self-control, reserve; but also by lies. She told lies about meeting Vesey and her habit of staying late at Caroline's. She made excuses and gave wrong reasons.

Lilian did talk to Caroline. Both disapproved of Vesey. They thought him callous and affected. His lazy cynicism was an irritation to them. He had been badly brought up and was not to be trusted.

‘But I think she doesn't much
like
him,' Caroline said. ‘We see no sign of it here: rather the reverse.'

Although Lilian was not confided in, she could not ignore the evidence of Harriet's excitement and all the bicycling about. She felt a desperation in the girl's behaviour and as fast as she tried to comfort herself, could only see that she knew nothing about her: neither how far she would commit herself; nor what she would be likely to feel. Unlocking her old diary, Lilian found no clue there. She found only floods of tears, and there was no proof that Harriet ever cried.

Harriet's own diary, which had no lock and key, would have told her mother all she did not want to know; but a woman who has been to prison for her principles does not discard them so easily, and the thought, which did go so far as to enter her head, retreated immediately in shame. Harriet had not described her love in writing; but Vesey's most trivial doing or saying, crammed up and down the margins, obliterating headings about Pheasant Shooting and the Phases of the Moon, would have plainly revealed to her mother the pitiful and one-sided truth.

After their walk in the woods, Harriet faced the day's page uncertainly. There was either far too much space or only one-hundredth part enough. Time had expanded and contracted abnormally. That morning and all her childhood seemed the same distance away. ‘I cannot put down what happened this evening,' she wrote mysteriously. ‘Nor is there any need, for I shall remember all my life.' And, although she was so mysterious, she was right. Much in those diaries would puzzle her when she turned their pages in middle-age, old age; many allusions would be meaningless; week after week would seem to have been wiped away: but that one entry, so proudly cryptic, would always evoke the evening in the woods, the shadows, the layers of leaves shutting out the sky, the bronze mosses at the foot of the trees, the floating sound their voices had, and that explosive, echoing cry of the cuckoo. She would remember writing the words in the little candlelit bedroom. Outside, her mother trundled the wheelbarrow laden with weeds down the gravelled path. Harriet closed the diary and shut the window against the moths. Later, when she was in bed she tried to return to the wood where Vesey had kissed her, but doubt and disappointment overtook her again. She could not believe that caution and uncertainty could have so wickedly crippled her happiness at such a time. She longed for a second chance, to have the moment at her disposal again. The story began to be how she imagined having behaved. But the recollection of that walk back in single file through the trees, shuffling in the dead leaves, stiff, self-conscious, hinted that they had reached some stubbornness in one another, that they had broken the past in such a way that nothing could repair it. In despair she lay awake wondering about the morrow. With one of her few flashes of perception she imagined Vesey peacefully asleep.

Another day is another world. The difference between foreign countries is never so great as the difference between night and day. Not only are the landscape and the light changed, but people are different, relationships which the night before had progressed at a sudden pace, appear to be back where they were. Some hopes are renewed, but others dwindle: the state of the world looks rosier and death further off; but the state of ourselves and our loves and ambitions seems more prosaic. We begin to regret promises, as if the influence of darkness were like the influence of drink. We do not love our friends so warmly: or ourselves. Children feel less need of their parents: writers tear up the masterpiece they wrote the night before.

So Harriet met Vesey bravely in a more sober world. While she was propping her bicycle against the wall of the house, he called to her from an upstairs window. She waved with what she thought was a beautiful negligence and disappeared into the house.

Because he realised how Harriet tumbled the same thoughts about and about in her head, Vesey had regretted his experiment of the evening before. He had lost no sleep over it, though. He could not make a fuss in his mind about such triviality. He had his life before him, he assured himself. ‘After all,' he thought this morning, watching himself in a mirror as he combed his hair, ‘we are children: no more.' He did not know that at his age most youths believe that they are men.

The streak of cruelty which Lilian had perceived in him was real enough, but used defensively. He would not have wished to be cruel to Harriet, who had not threatened him. Indeed it had begun to seem to him that only she was set against the great weight of disapproval he felt upon him. His mother treated him, at best, with an amused kindliness. Among her friends she drew attention to him as if he were a beloved marmoset on a chain, somehow enhancing her own originality, decorating her. After her day's work, while she bathed, he brought her drinks, carried messages to and from the telephone. In later years, the word ‘mother' brought to his mind the steamy bathroom, the picture of her creamy-yellow body with its almost navy-blue hair, the hands and feet with their darkly varnished nails. This was his only time alone with her. As soon as she was dressed, she belonged to other people. He was the quaint little monkey handing round olives and cigarettes, sipping gin to amuse them. His father always went straight to his study when he arrived home. His appearance in the drawing-room was a signal for his wife's friends to scatter. With his own especial remote geniality, he would drink his one sherry and speed them all on their way: large and formidable, he underlined their flimsiness, and ‘Poor Barbara!' they would laugh, bundling into their little cars, sitting on one another's knees. ‘What a bloody old bore he is!' In search of a gayer host, they would drive away.

When Vesey went to school, he realised at once that this background was better not mentioned, but he felt – for he was quick to atmosphere – that its influence upon him was not un-noted: certainly not by masters who seemed to be waiting for him to commit some outrage, to manifest some unwholesomeness; and not even by the boys, who were dubious and suspicious. He suffered very much at school occasions when his mother came looking like an elder sister, and still more when, which was more often, she did not come at all.