A Game of Hide and Seek (5 page)

He did not make any close friends, for he had too much to hide. Since he could not have affection, he thought he would have admiration. His laziness was assumed, to hide his dislike of small failures. What he could not have, he did not care to have. Disruptive, cheeky, he provoked tired sarcasm from masters. The best he ever had from anyone was callous applause, laughter at his antics, and he became the same sort of little monkey that he had been at home.

Caroline and Hugo, so sound, so moral and so earnest, tried to do something for him, but he reacted to their charity with rudeness. Only Harriet showed approval. She had always shown it and now, at a time when he most needed some success with personal relationships, her approval had grown warmer and more positive. What Caroline could not see and Harriet tried to hide, he had begun to perceive. He needed Harriet for his own reasons, to give him confidence and peace. In the shelter of her love, he hoped to have a second chance, to turn his personality away from what he most hated in himself, to try to find dignity before it was too late. Playing the fool bored him. With the failure of school behind him, he hoped to shake off the tedious habit.

Against this need he had for her were set the feelings he had about Harriet herself. He knew her almost too well to be able to realise her clearly; but he began to see that she was brave and candid, oppressed by the ideals of an older generation, enduring boredom and an enforced childishness and loneliness. She would have been surprised that he should find her beautiful, and it was a colourless and wavering beauty that he observed: fleeting, from day to day. Every sign of fatigue showed under her thin skin, in her rather lank pale hair. Set against the smartness of his mother's friends, he found her clothes (still school ones, improvised, altered), her untidy eyebrows, her rough little hands, very touching and delightful; and her voice, too, which was clear and light with, in moments of agitation, a hurried stammer.

Cruelty had, in him, its other side of appalled tenderness. When his nature betrayed him into this tenderness, he would violently retract and cover up in cruelty. Knowing his weakness, he had meant to shield Harriet from both. Having failed once, he was determined not to fail again, was set on helping her out with gaiety and friendliness. Full of a jauntiness he did not feel, he went downstairs this morning to meet her.

Caroline was sitting among a litter of fruit-peelings and letters, dictating. Harriet, with a cup of coffee beside her, scribbled madly on a pad, for she did not know shorthand. She wore a faded blue shirt tucked into a tweed skirt; her bare feet with rather broken nails looked narrow and frail in clumsy, handmade sandals. Her straight hair fell in separate strands over her shoulders. On both wrists thin silver bracelets hung loosely.

Vesey sat at the table and began to shake cornflakes out of a packet, but Harriet did not look up. Only when Caroline had finished dictating did Harriet reach for her coffee, and then, as she began to drink, her eyes turned towards Vesey: he saw her timid glance above the rim of the cup – and smiled. She went on drinking: but her eyes narrowed in response.

Against his mother's knees Joseph lolled, eating an apple. His dry, light-brown hair looked almost grey: it stuck out like feathers all over his large head.

‘Do take him to have his hair cut,' Caroline said to Harriet.

Joseph began to whimper into his apple.

‘Be sensible,' Caroline bade him. ‘And Harriet shall take you for lunch in Market Swanford afterwards.' In her own mind she did not mean this to be a bribe, but Joseph took it to be one.

‘Vesey, your mother writes to say you are to buy new shoes,' Caroline said. ‘I will give you the money. She says you are to spend at least a guinea on them.' Harriet looked with respect at Vesey, but Caroline with doubt, considering this strange extravagance. ‘Well, it will be a little expedition for you,' Caroline went on, ‘and when Harriet has done the letters, you can all be off.'

Harriet began to wonder if she could bear the strain of a whole day-out with Vesey. Anxieties mingled with her delight: anxieties about ordering food, controlling the children, expense, and how to find the ladies' lavatory.

Vesey walked up and down the shop in the grey suede shoes. Harriet and the children sat in a row watching. The shop with its shelves of white boxes was cool and dark. Beyond the open door the street was another world, but that panel of shifting colours in the sunlight emphasised the sombre interior.

Harriet, not much used to shopping, still experienced a feeling of crisis when she stepped off the busy pavement into a shop, where she seemed awaited and was to be judged. Her stammer increased. Shop-assistants looked blankly patient listening to her, waiting for her to be done. Just now, at the grocer's, with Vesey standing by, she had been in a panic to know how to seem off-hand enough; had rehearsed in her mind the giving of the order, but they still had to say ‘pardon?', they still brought Bisto instead of Rinso, and when she had asked for petit-beurre biscuits in French, as she thought she should, they had not known what she had meant. Almost showing the list, as if she were a child, she had blushed, dreading to try again; but Vesey had laughed very much. He had said ‘Petty burr, dearie' in a loud voice. It had saved her; but she had not wanted to be saved by him. Her shame in the eyes of the shop-assistant was not so painful as Vesey's having witnessed it.

She was glad now to be only a spectator. No more was demanded of her than to take Vesey's side against the shop-assistant and this she did spontaneously and whole-heartedly. All three of them were united in their praise of Vesey's choice and as the shoes were only eighteen and elevenpence there would be two shillings left which Vesey said he could quite justifiably spend on ice-cream.

Harriet admired the way in which he took his time, discussed his plans, and had shoes lying about all over the floor. The assistant, who had begun with tan Oxfords, now withdrew from the discussion, wearing the look of aloof distaste Vesey had grown so used to seeing on the faces of schoolmasters.

At the confectioners', Deirdre suddenly remembered that she would get infantile-paralysis if she ate ice-cream that had not been made in her own home. She pushed the dish stubbornly on one side and was only appeased when it was shared out among the others. Smug and relieved, she nibbled at a limp wafer and watched them taking their great risk.

Joseph, with his bony temples now bared, the tendons of his neck shaved close, looked a different child. What hair was left showed the furrows of a comb drawn through the thick brilliantine.

Carrying the box of shoes and the basket of groceries, Vesey led them round the market-place, in one entrance of Woolworths (where they were told not to touch) and out of the other, examining the graves in the churchyard, reading the menus outside cafés and public-houses. The pavement burnt through their thin sandals; they felt the warmth of brick walls as they went lingeringly down the street. Deirdre tagged along behind Vesey; Joseph held Harriet's hand. They felt the complete identity with their surroundings which children know, especially in summertime when, relaxed and opened out like flowers, they drink the sun. They drift, tack across pavements, trailing hands along railings; stare; bemused, idle; given up to growing; they string out along the roads, separate, humming to themselves; heedless of time passing.

Only hunger jolted them. Like middle-aged parents, Vesey and Harriet settled the children to their lunch at a window overlooking the High Street. The Tudor Café had beams of stained deal tacked across the ceiling and diagonally across walls. Bottle-glass windows of a greenish shade obscured the light, coats-of-arms and wicker furniture looked wonderful to the children.

When the waitress came, Harriet decided quickly. Indeed, for vegetarians there was no choice. She was lucky in liking macaroni-cheese.

‘A chop,' said Vesey, and if he had ordered a magnum of champagne Harriet could not have been more alarmed. ‘Have a chop, Deirdre,' he added.

‘I don't know what is a chop,' Joseph wailed.

‘A chop is meat,' Deirdre said, glancing at the waitress as if for confirmation.

‘Please, Vesey!' Harriet whispered timidly.

‘Old stick-in-the-mud Harriet!' he laughed.

The waitress took the weight off one leg and stared out of the window above their heads, yawning.

‘I don't know what is a chop,' Joseph said again.

‘A chop is a little piece of meat with a bone and some fat and it is grilled,' Vesey said, so distinctly that people at other tables could hear him.

‘I don't know what is grilled,' Joseph said, enjoying himself.

‘Three chops, one macaroni-cheese,' the waitress said, beginning to write.

‘They have never eaten meat,' Harriet told Vesey.

Deirdre turned accusing eyes on him, but said nothing. She gave him a steady assurance of blaming him later. Innocent party, her face said.

‘Four chops,' Vesey said suddenly. He nodded mockingly at Harriet.

‘Vegetarians live cheaper,' Deirdre said, reading aloud from the menu. ‘Macaroni-cheese is only eightpence.'

‘Hush!' Harriet implored. ‘You must lower your voice, Deirdre. You are not at home.'

‘We certainly aren't
there
,' Joseph said, as the chops were put in front of them. He became very loud and swaggering and took up the too-large knife and fork and began to cut his meat, which was on a level with his shoulders. Vesey took off his own jacket and folded it neatly for a cushion. Perched on this, Joseph wobbled insecurely. ‘Blood comes out,' he said looking uncertainly at his plate.

Across the table, Vesey and Harriet smiled at one another, Harriet catching in her lower lip with her teeth. ‘Caroline will be angry,' she said.

Vesey touched his tie and cleared his throat. ‘My children!' he began. ‘It is clearly understood, I hope, that this repellent orgy of corpse-eating will not be mentioned to either of your parents . . .' Deirdre smiled to herself as she chewed . . . ‘and, in fact, will be obliterated from your minds the moment we leave the precincts of this more-or-less baronial hall . . .'

‘We cannot teach them to tell lies,' Harriet said in a low voice.

‘We cannot do that,' Vesey agreed. ‘We should have come to the task too late. We can only prevent them from telling the truth.'

‘Meat is nice,' Joseph said.

‘We do not often get the chance,' said Deirdre.

Harriet thought that she and Vesey threw out a beautiful protection over the children. Everything she shared with him seemed hallowed, even this guilt of eating chops.

‘We can get bread any day,' Joseph explained to the waitress who handed him a basket of rolls. His elbows stuck up like wings as he tried to cut his meat. When Vesey leant over to do this for him, Harriet whitened – she felt her face blanching – with an extreme tension of love, with a momentary awareness of his personality so sharp that her own seemed to be nothing. She was only eyes looking at Vesey and heart recording her confusion.

‘It has been an experience,' said Deirdre at last, putting her knife and fork together.

Going back in the bus, Vesey seemed abstracted. He sat in the seat next to Harriet with his arms round the basket of shopping, his fingers fringing his bus-ticket, his eyes narrowed at the tunnel of branches through which they wound their way. In those days, trees laced together above many a road; buses took perilous journeys, with twigs scratching at either side; cars, meeting them, backed up into gateways. The bus-conductor was like the conductor of an orchestra. He guided the conversation, drew out the shy or bored or tired, linked the passengers together, strangers spoke to one another through him; on the last bus of the day it was he who controlled the badinage, helped the drunks up and down the steps, chose his butt and his allies, and made a whole thing out of an assortment. This afternoon, heat and the dullness of the hour discouraged him. A few words about Joseph's haircut and he subsided disconsolately, whistling through his teeth. When a woman began to shell the peas which she had bought in the market into her straw hat, he sat down beside her to help.

Harriet watched the woman's plump hands deftly cracking open the pods, stripping the peas into her upturned hat, the calm accuracy of her wrist and fingers, the unhurried pace; and, beside her, the man's clumsiness, the sudden bursting open of the pods, his groping on the slatted floor for the peas which bounced about the bus like bullets. Each empty shuck went over the woman's shoulder and out of the window.

‘It is like
Hansel and Gretel
,' Harriet whispered.

Vesey looked slowly, uncomprehendingly at her, as if he were returning from some remote place, surprised to find her at his side.

‘The trail of pea-shucks,' she tried to explain.

He turned his head to look. ‘The birds will devour them,' he said. ‘Nothing will ever be known of our whereabouts.'

The long tunnel of leaves began to look impenetrable; each turn of the road revealed only greenness. His face reflected a greenish pallor.

Joseph knelt at the window looking out, humming tunelessly. Deirdre slumped back, watching, as if she were hypnotised, the woman shelling the peas.

‘It has been lovely . . .' Harriet began, but her stammer caught at the words and she looked away, out of the window, her throat moving – he could see – with embarrassment, so that she was unable to continue.

‘What has been lovely, my dear girl?' he asked.

She pressed the palms of her hands close together between her knees. ‘It will be so dull when you go back,' she said with sudden bravery, and resolve.

Considering the changes, the promise, of his own near future, he did not know how to answer what seemed the obvious truth without condescension or discouragement.

‘You will be all right,' he said, smiling, denying her any comfort.

‘If Mother asks us,' Deirdre suddenly turned round to enquire, ‘what do we say we had for lunch?'