A Game of Hide and Seek (7 page)

Later, Vesey went back some of the way with Harriet towards her home. He pushed her bicycle and she walked beside him, carrying her bunch of flowers. A woolly mist had risen and cows moved knee-deep in it, vague shapes against the gathering darkness. The rasping sound of their breath broke the silence, and, far away, the cry of owls. They walked along the footpath without speaking, trod on the colourless flowers in the bearded grasses.

Time's wingèd chariot was not a thing that they could hear.

When Joseph cried out in his sleep, Caroline put down her sewing and ran to him. Still strange from his haircut, he lay in bed gabbling fast in a worried way as if he had no time to explain before disaster would overcome him.

Caroline smoothed the damp feathers of hair away from his hot forehead.

‘No, Vesey! No, Vesey!' Joseph shouted.

‘What is it, my pet?'

Then incoherence followed. She strained to listen; but the sounds only resembled, were not really words. She woke him gently, settled him again in his bed and when he seemed peaceful at last she went downstairs to Hugo.

‘I shall be glad when Vesey goes,' she said at once. ‘He works these children up to fever-pitch with his sensational stories and his teasing. Only tonight, Deirdre said that he told her Hardy's Farm is haunted. Something fantastic, unwholesome about the boy, and Lilian feels it too. Grey suede shoes! What will his mother think?'

‘Send him back,' said Hugo.

‘How can I? We always have him in the summer.'

‘Say your mother's coming and there's no room.'

Caroline walked round and round considering this. ‘I should like mother to have a holiday,' she said at last.

Harriet's diary had spilled back over yesterday, but she could not cram in all that had happened. She heard her mother coming up to bed and curved her hand secretively across the top of the page, but still her pen raced on. ‘Vesey takes size 8 in shoes,' she wrote.

‘How unbearably pathetic people's rooms are when there is no one there!' Harriet thought. It was the next afternoon and she was left alone to type letters.

The landing was quiet. All through the house, the hall clock could be heard ticking. Caroline had taken the children out to tea. Vesey had not been seen all day.

As long as she could hear the clinking of crockery far off in the kitchen, Harriet knew that she was safe. She stood half on the landing, half in Vesey's room, looking in at the neat bed, the book beside it, the white shoe-box on a chair, the blank mirror.

Her ears still attentive to the sounds in the kitchen, she tiptoed across the creaking floor-boards and stood looking down at the dressing-table. A little clock rustled anxiously, a comb was stuck in an up-turned hair brush. Vesey's school dressing-gown hung at the back of the door; his sponge dried on the window-sill. The room was poignantly impersonal, as if it rebuked Harriet. The curtains suddenly rattling along their rod, bellying out in a gust of wind, made her start dreadfully. When she was calm again, she took Vesey's hand-towel from its rail and holding it to her face as if it were some sacred relic, breathed in its beautiful fragrance of Royal Vinolia soap.

‘So Vesey is leaving?' Lilian said at supper-time.

Enormous calm and fortitude the young have when they are first in love and hiding it.

‘Is he?' Harriet asked.

‘So Caroline told me when we were out to tea.'

‘I thought he was staying until September,' Harriet said vaguely. To give her hands something to do, she took more potatoes.

‘Caroline wants his room for her mother, so that she can come for a holiday. She has been rather out-of-sorts.'

This phrase sounded odd to both of them, but Caroline had used it and now Lilian handed it on. It hedged: meant nothing.

There is a game which children play in which they creep up to one who is hiding his eyes; step by step, frozen still with innocence at each quick glance they go tentatively forward, until at last they grow close, close to the point of touching. This evening, Lilian, stealthily, step by step, tried to draw near to Harriet, knowing that one false move would set her back where she began. They gave one another alternate glances across the table. So carefully, each careless-sounding remark was passed. But Lilian was conscious only of check. Fatigue and shock had had the effect upon Harriet of making her warier. Her fit of nervousness sustained her. It did not deceive Lilian, but it baulked her. She was the one who tired first. Back at base, defeated, she felt a great exhaustion of disappointment and misunderstanding. Her daughter, however, was not (which some widows say) all that she had. She had, in fact, Caroline. Caroline would comfort her. She had not wanted to break down her child's resistance, but she did want to feel reassured that it was right for Vesey to go away, that Harriet's pain now would save her from worse ones in the future. She hoped that she was right in wanting this, and tomorrow Caroline would tell her that she was.

With beautiful indifference, Harriet asked: ‘And when is he to go?' She put her knife and fork neatly together and looked boldly and cruelly at her mother.

Stunned and depressed, she wrote in her diary before she got into bed: ‘I did not see V. In two days he will be gone.'

Harriet laid her plans with pathetic cunning. If Vesey must go, her only possible comfort would be if he were to write to her. She could not see any way for him to begin to do this. Even if he should care to – and he had said he was no letter-writer – she thought that some excuse would help him, if she could find one.

‘I am being sent down,' he told her, looking in as he passed the window.

‘Vesey dear!' Caroline called from the middle of her herbaceous border. ‘I shouldn't interrupt Joseph's lesson if I were you.'

Vesey bowed to Harriet and slouched away.

‘“Ned and Fan sat on the log,”' Joseph droned loudly from the old-fashioned primer Caroline had found. Harriet shut her eyes to hide her impatience.

For the rest of the day she did not see Vesey. When she left in the early evening, he was out on the tennis-court pushing the old mower. The blades whirred noisily; he did not, in all that clatter, hear her approaching and she came right up to him holding out a book. He turned in surprise and pushed his hair from his glistening forehead with a trembling hand.

‘It is too hot for you to be doing this,' Harriet said.

‘I know, but I must curry favour. Though I can curry it until I am blue in the face as far as Caroline is concerned.'

‘What have you done?'

‘I have contaminated everyone within my orbit. Given meat to innocent children and encouraged in them sickly ideas about the supernatural . . .'

‘Who said this?'

‘. . . I have given Joseph nightmares. I am decadent and affected. I have interrupted you at your work and tried to seduce you in an empty house.'

‘You say bad things about yourself to stop other people from saying them. You hurt yourself by saying them and that last bit hurt me too.'

‘Don't stammer.'

‘Has Caroline said all that?'

‘I can read Caroline like a book.'

‘How could she guess things which only you and I know?'

‘About trying to seduce you?'

‘You know I . . . you know that I didn't take your remark seriously.'

‘Don't
stammer
. Perhaps you told her,' he suggested.

She did not answer. She looked down the length of the tennis-court, half of it covered with daisies, the other half shaved in irregular lines.

‘Or perhaps,' he went on, watching her closely, ‘I mentioned it myself and it has slipped my memory. What is this?'

‘A book of mine, I thought you might like to read.'

He took it from her and turned its leaves.

‘I have very little time left to me, and a lot of favour-currying to do. I don't want a bad report from here as I had from school.'

‘When are you going?'

‘Tomorrow after lunch.'

‘I hope I see you again.'

‘I hope so too I'm sure,' he said promptly.

He put the book down on the grass and turned to the lawn-mower. He smiled at her and nodded and then at a tremendous pace and with a deafening sound went off down the tennis-court away from her.

In the morning, he was about the house, wearing his London clothes. His suitcase stood ready in the hall. Now that he was going, Caroline relented, enough to pick a basket of apples for him and roses for his mother. At lunch, he seemed excited. The children, Caroline noticed, would not meet his eye. At the sight of Harriet's controlled smile, her over-alertness at passing plates, her over-vivacity, Caroline for the first time began to doubt what she was doing. ‘I have my children to consider,' she begged herself to remember; but she was not a callous woman, nor insensitive, and if there was any misery of her own creation, her own precipitating, for whatsoever good reasons it was done, she did regret it.

‘You may as well go home after lunch,' she told Harriet, trying to find some way to make amends. ‘Joseph can have his rest and all the letters are done.'

‘If you are sure?' Harriet replied with her polite smile. She bent over Joseph and made a border of plum-stones round his plate. ‘This year, next year . . .' she began to count. Joseph looked surprised at this sudden attention.

Vesey came into the hall as she was leaving. In his dark suit he was no longer part of the holidays, nor of anything that had gone before. He seemed strange to her.

She felt no pain, no wish to hasten or prolong this moment in the sunshine at the foot of the stairs.

‘Goodbye, Vesey.'

She only hoped that he would not mention the book which she had lent to him; that, at best, he was keeping it for an excuse to write; or that he would remember later and be obliged to write, and be jogged occasionally by the thought of her.

‘Goodbye, Harriet.'

He smiled kindly and looked into her eyes. They hesitated, and then shook hands formally. As she stepped over the dogs which lay sleeping at the open door and began to walk down the garden, he leaned back against the chimney-piece, his hands in his pockets, and watched her go.

Departure in the afternoon is depressing to those who are left. The day is so dominated by the one who has gone and, although only half-done, must be got through with that particular shadow lying over it. She could not return to her mother at that hour. Tomorrow, she would begin the desolate task of ticking off the days of her life until Vesey should come again; today her despair was too dreary. She walked on the common which lay near to her home. The glades, dark, with their bracken smell, offered her a shelter which her home denied her. Deep in the bitter smell of the bracken she lay down and closed her eyes. She thought of Vesey pacing up and down the platform of the little station until his train came: imagined him waiting, pale in the intense heat of the afternoon, and at last borne away round the curve of the cutting, into the tunnel, and gone. With her face in her hands, her body hidden in the bracken, she began to weep. She did not so much indulge herself in this great torrent of weeping as become passive while the weight of tears was cleared from her.

A year is too long to wait for someone beloved. In the morning, she would set about living that year, comforting herself across the great waste of days. This afternoon she could not begin. At the end of her weeping, when words began to come again into her head, ‘It is too long,' she cried. She rested her throbbing face in the cool, harsh bracken. She felt that she had cried all the tears of the rest of her life.

In the morning, Caroline, with a kind look and kind untrue phrases, held out her book to her. ‘Vesey asked me to give you this, and thank you very much. He said I was to be sure not to forget to give it to you.'

Harriet took the book and smiled. In the first few pages a blade of grass was stuck to mark a place.

‘Tonight, will you play hide-and-seek?' Deirdre asked. She took Harriet's hand and spun herself round in a pirouette, absorbed by her twirling skirt, her own fascination.

We cannot always remember our first glimpse of those who later become important to us. Feeling that the happening should have been more significant, we strain back through our memories in vain. But Harriet could always remember that it was through a piece of flawed glass that she first saw Charles Jephcott. In the bus window his figure wavered and thinned, broadened, slanted, so that she had no idea if a fat man or a thin, old or young, would presently enter the bus. Curiosity made her turn her head to see.

To her he seemed so old as to be outside the range of her interest. He sat down in front of her, steadying himself as the bus began to move – an elderly man of about thirty-five. His profile, turned to the passing hedges, was commanding as if it were stamped on a coin, his sandy hair sprang in a straight line from his brow; a heavy signet ring on one hand – a hairy, freckled hand – seemed a further sign of his authority, as was his way of shooting his wrist out of his cuff so that he could see his watch. He sat in the bus with an aloof air as if he were unaccustomed to doing so. A faint smell of spirits came from him. No one in Harriet's world drank anything intoxicating, except at weddings, and she associated that smell with the last bus home and a staggering rowdiness. His manner, though, was so unlike this that she supposed his bout of drunkenness to be over.

The next time that she saw him was in his own home. His mother had come to live at the Old Vicarage where once Dr Garrett Anderson had stayed. Lilian, who had never entered the house before, paused in the hall and looked up at the ceiling, round at the walls, disregarding her hostess for a brief moment, as if there were homage to be paid first.

Julia Jephcott was in her sixties. Mad, raffish, unselfconscious, she had the beautiful and calm air of one who has all her life acknowledged compliments. This air, associated with beauty, lingered after the beauty itself had collapsed and fled. She seemed to be lovely still to herself, as if no amount of looking into mirrors could ruin her illusion. For this reason, perhaps, she wore the clothes of much younger women and a pale, haphazard make-up, which wretchedly emphasised the wrinkled eyelids, the drawn throat. Her white hair was patchily gilded as if it had been brushed over with yolk of egg. Her charm was unflagging. She had learnt it diligently in Sir Frank Benson's Shakespearean Company. Hours of walking with books on her head had given her a deportment which was now unconscious, and years of being kind to her admirers, of smiling (though one word could not describe the great range of her smiles – tender, gay, brave, mocking, sly, wistful) at nothing, of stressing her words and lowering her voice for scarcely any reason at all, had made it impossible for her now to speak to her gardener or pay a bus-fare without seeking to please and beguile. She was still their servant. She thought nothing of herself.