A Game of Hide and Seek (8 page)

Even Lilian's standing mute in the hall looking about her did not spoil her welcome. Julia always came out to meet her guests, running down the shallow steps with a suggestion of drapery flowing back from her, her braceleted arms stretched out in greeting, her palms upturned, denoting eagerness and the proffering of love.

While Lilian was making her silent obeisance, Julia came to kiss Harriet, who felt that here at last was somebody to love her, who had singled her out.

Charles did not run to meet people. He stood with one elbow on the chimney-piece in the drawing-room, one hand in his pocket, waiting. From time to time, listening to the voices in the hall, he glanced at his finger-nails, bent them towards him and gave them an aloof appraisal. He also had a trick, when he was alone or as good as alone, of stretching his closed lips in a tight grimace and rubbing his chin. He did this when his mind was empty, although it gave him a very thoughtful look.

It appeared to Harriet that she was always the one who remembered having seen other people. They never remembered having seen her. She did not like to seem (even to herself) so much more caught up in the importance of others when they cared so little for her. While she was trying to tone down her enthusiasm to something more appropriate, they were attempting to simulate what they did not feel. Sometimes they merely pretended to pretend. Julia could not help but convince.

‘Dr Garrett Anderson once came here for a rest,' Lilian was explaining.

‘Darling, I must confess I never heard of him,' said Julia. ‘My narrow, narrow life and my muddle-headed ways. I am quite a loony about people's names.

‘
Elizabeth
Garrett Anderson,' said Lilian faintly.

‘I would never go to a woman doctor,' Julia said. She put her hand up beautifully to her face, the tips of her fingers curved to her cheekbone, her thumb to her chin. ‘A man is half the battle,' she added mysteriously. ‘Now here is my old stodge. My son Charles. Darling, this is Mrs Claridge and dear Harriet. Say how-do-you-do nicely.'

Harriet guessed that only his mother would ever make fun of Charles.

‘Are you a suffragette?' Julia asked Lilian.

‘No one has any need to be that now, but once I was.'

‘I have never voted in my life, though I would if I were not so ignorant. You and I must have some talks, and you shall tell me exactly what I have to do. What you once worked so hard for, I must not waste. And I should like to vote before I die.' Her eyes misted. She put her hand flat to the base of her throat. There was a moment of nervousness in the room.

Charles had taken Harriet's hand and given it back.

‘Tea,' said Julia, sitting down on the sofa, ‘it always seems such an interruption and not very nice, nor worth . . . and one never knows how much, how little, to provide.'

She had decided on a great deal, Harriet was glad to see, and every little table was laden with scones and layer cakes and Swiss rolls.

‘However,' Julia said, shaking back her bracelets, ‘if we didn't have tea, we could never use the china.'

While she was talking, Charles seemed gravely to await her conclusion and, as soon as she ceased, turned to Lilian with some polite and daunting question which, once answered, only could confer silence.

Julia poured tea gracefully, but it all ran over into the saucers.

‘My grandmother judged people very much by how they poured tea,' Julia rattled on, as she emptied the saucers into the slop-basin. ‘She applied those arbitrary tests, like throwing witches into water. And being a
lady
' (her voice floated derisively at the word: she handed Lilian her cup) ‘that hinged on such little things – whether, for instance, one's gloves were buttoned before one opened the front-door. Only the maids buttoned them on the way out. It is still a check, an inhibition, to me. Such trivial things. And what she knew about it all, I cannot say. She was not even what is called one of nature's ladies.'

Charles hitched his trousers over his knees, crossed his legs. Harriet, trying not to stare at his mother stared too much at him. As soon as she became conscious of this, she began to look about the room instead, at all the pink and grey cretonne, the cushions embroidered with delphiniums, the fire-screen with hollyhocks. In the tarnished brass fender lay all sorts of implements for doing things to fires: long-handled shovels, crooked loose-hinged tongs, pokers, bellows. Not a square foot of wall-paper but was covered with purple water-colours of moorland, or cows wading in ponds, or Persian kittens done in crayon.

When Charles asked her a question, she violently started and he was obliged to repeat it. His mother suddenly lost interest and leant back, fanning herself with a bunch of peacocks'-feathers which she had taken out of a vase. But her smile was at the ready; her look alert. She rarely relaxed more than this, and never unless alone.

After tea, Charles played the piano. The delicate music and his quick hands following one another up the keyboard only underlined his masculinity, as if he played some girls' game with efficiency and despatch. His cigarette trailed smoke from its ash-tray; at the end of the piece of music, he crushed it out, half-turned towards them, paused, and then continued.

Beating at the air with her improvised fan, his mother closed her eyes. Only Lilian and Harriet were left to look about uneasily. Harriet tried to put on a polite and considering look. She loved the music, but could not allow herself to enjoy it among strangers. Sunk too far back in her too large chair she felt helpless, like a beetle turned on its back; and as if she could never rise again, nor find the right phrases of appreciation.

Lilian sat upright with her head slightly inclined as if it were burdened. It was true that music never delighted, only weakened, her.

Imperviously, Charles went from Ballade to Waltz, from Waltz to Prelude. He played without music; mostly, his glance was sidelong down at the keyboard; but sometimes his jaw seemed to stiffen; he would glance out into the garden in an offhand way. Harriet had not imagined that the playing of Chopin could be turned into such a Caesarist display.

Julia leaning back with such an exhausted look made Lilian suspect that the music was her ruse to take a short rest, and this suspicion antagonised her all the more. She had not cared for Julia from the first; found her subversive and absurd. To have music wreaked upon her was another irritation. ‘Perhaps I should ask Harriet to recite,' she thought scornfully, glancing at her daughter spread out so clumsily in her chair, legs bent awkwardly, an expression of taut discontent (which Harriet herself meant to be serious appraisal) upon her face.

Charles finished as abruptly as he had begun, even closed up the piano as if sealing off that side of his nature, and went to fetch drinks. As the tray came in, Lilian was rising to go. Sherry was poison to her, she explained. Gin was worse. All spirits, in fact, were impossible. Her digestion had never recovered from the times in prison. She mentioned this to support herself, to keep in touch with her own world which had seemed eclipsed.

‘You were in prison even!' Julia said. ‘How wonderfully brave and romantic.'

But no, it had not been, Lilian thought. Because, once there, she had lost her defiance. The weight of disapproval in the air, the cold discipline and impersonality, the loneliness, had made her beliefs seem an uncharming aberration, her behaviour outré. She could not answer, but most of Julia's remarks were unanswerable. She checked conversations so often that she was obliged to rattle on herself.

Harriet hated to hear her mother mentioning prison. She could not bear that she should have been so martyred and now should dwell on her martyrdom; sometimes, in fact, rather revel in it, as on every July the fourteenth, when she pinned on that badge made like a prison gate and went proudly to London to the meeting at Mrs Pankhurst's Memorial. As a child, Harriet had always averted her eyes from that brooch. Now she was afraid that these two would think her mother freakish. Her quick, doubtful look at Charles met his enigmatic stare. She sipped her sherry. Her mother watched her indulgently, as if confident that a glass of sherry would not turn
her
girl's head, that temptation on a larger scale even would be sturdily rejected.

‘And did you go on hunger-strike?' Julia asked in an encouraging voice.

Lilian whitened; but it was to Charles's credit, Harriet thought, that he suddenly (without seeing Lilian's face) sharply said: ‘Mother, you are being impertinent!'

‘I couldn't bear him to say that to me,' Harriet thought. ‘I should die of shame.'

But Julia only smiled. ‘Silly Charles! Women understand one another.' Her smile warmed as it included Lilian, suggested complicity. Lilian's answering smile was the faintest tremor. ‘What an extraordinary statement!' Charles said. He took Harriet's glass and nodded slightly at her. The nod seemed to be instead of a smile. His smiles were rare. Perhaps there were too many in the house already.

‘My head! My head!' Lilian said, as they crossed the road to Forge Cottage. ‘How near she lives to us! That old enchantress!'

‘I rather liked her,' Harriet said sulkily. ‘She was so different.'

Walking in this warm air stirred up her melancholy. Quiet broke quiet. The still early evening had autumn in it. Grass was tawny; hedges dusty. Under trees late wasps tunnelled into sleepy pears; windfalls rotted. Golden-rod and michaelmas-daisies had begun to be the only flowers in the garden.

She went straight up to her bedroom and sat on the side of the bed, her hands locked tight between her knees, her teeth clenched, as if only by hardness of bone against bone, nails driven against knuckles, could she resist the excavation of her flesh by her passion, support herself against the daily riddling away of her resistance, the unexpected agitations (such as this) which broke up her now painful and lonely life.

She heard her mother go out from the house into the garden and then an irregular clop-clop of shears began; a smell of cut privet, bitter and dusty, came through the window. Harriet rocked on the bed, her eyes tight shut. She began to dramatise her grief; desiring to be struck down. If it could not be love, it could be sorrow. Sometimes, when she had heard old people talking of their memories, of the landmarks in their lives, she was surprised at their public quality – the funeral of the Old Queen, Mafeking Night, the Armistice, the first motor-car, the last lamp-lighter. She thought they dissembled. It is never like that, surely? she wondered: not, at the end of a long life, to see other people's sadness and triumph as the key moments? Or do Mafeking Night and the rest stand in the place of the secret and personal, in the place of what cannot be told and must perish with us – moments when for no reason that we can understand – a warm evening, the scent of leaves, a cock crowing far away – all the air becomes distended with grief. A moment such as this. She began to pace all about the room, putting out her hand to touch the furniture, to steady and reassure herself.

Between the pages of her diary was a photograph of Vesey which she had taken from Caroline's album. Glancing through the photographs one day with Deirdre, she had found that one beginning to come unstuck. The next day, when she was alone, she had swiftly ripped it out and put it in her pocket. No one ever mentioned it or noticed that it was gone; but the sight of the album still alarmed her. She knew now that wrong-doing was only a question of how far she might be driven; that what she wanted badly, she would take.

Now she opened her diary and sat down with the little creased photograph before her; studied it carefully, as if something new might come to light. But nothing did. Vesey looked back at her, and so did Deirdre and Joseph on either side. His hair hung down in a fringe; his smile was wide and rather meretricious, that exaggerated photograph-smile so often seen (as if only happiness should be recorded). She could imagine how it had faded the moment the camera clicked. His arms were over the shoulders of the children. They sat bunched together on the grass; their feet out of focus, too large, like a row of up-turned boats. This poorish photograph (the house in the background tilted, the lawn slanted, roses were pale blurs) was all that was left of some forgotten afternoon, perhaps a year ago. Vesey's book lay open, its covers arching up in the heat of the sun, Deirdre was making a daisy-chain, Joseph had a bandage over his knee. The shadow of the photographer – Caroline, most likely – stretched long over the grass before them. She – if it was she – had rallied them into smiling; but it was a row of sandals she had photographed.

Nothing new was yielded up. Harriet gazed and gazed; but Vesey only smiled his false smile; his hands hung loosely on the shoulders of the two children; she could not even read the title of his book, and now would never know.

Stiff with her grief which had flowed at last, as grief does, into a great sea of boredom, she yawned, stood up and went to the window. Her mother, still wearing her silk dress, snipped at the privet hedge; and from the yard across the road came a swishing sound. She could see the side of the Old Vicarage, a wall with iron balconies among vine leaves, an old stable with a gilt weather-vane and turtle-doves which flew in the air together, in following arcs, like birds painted on a plate. On the cobbles, Charles, standing well back, was hosing his car. A cool smell rose. Harriet leant out and watched him. Agony receded into dullness. Far away, like insect-voices, dogs barked, children called. A yellow rose growing on the wall below her loosed all its petals: they fell over the path below. Water came now from under the blue gate, twisted out into the road, bearing dust with it.

When a bell rang inside the house, Charles (she could see him between the leaves) crossed the yard at once and turned off a tap. When he had gone, Harriet turned from the window again, yawning.

The disorder in the room was appalling – but had ceased to fidget Harriet, who now contributed to it, dropped screwed-up face-tissues on the floor, left dirty cups in the sink. She had made several such adjustments in her life, experimenting with cheap make-up, letting down her hems, acquiring all the mateyness she could in the form of small confidences, by helping Miss Lazenby with her hair and adding to the untidiness of this room. At first, willing though she was, the transition was not easy. Although she never really met the glances over tea-cups, she knew that just before she looked, just before they casually turned aside, they were all trying to place her: not with any particular unkindness: it was only, as Miss Brimpton would have said, that they wondered.