A Game of Hide and Seek (10 page)

‘She
was
an actress once.'

‘No doubt. But all actresses aren't the actressy type. Look at Sybil Thorndike. Charles, of course, may differ from his mother. Not having had the pleasure of meeting him, I wouldn't be prepared to say.'

‘I'm glad there's something you aren't prepared to say,' Miss Lazenby observed. ‘Who'd have thought it?'

‘Anyone else would be insulted at your remark,' Miss Brimpton said.

‘Quite.'

‘Pass the nail-file,' Miss Lovelace called. She was doing her nails while she stood over the broth she was making from yesterday's chicken-carcase. A smell of nail-varnish remover mingled with the gluey smell of the soup.

The picture of herself evading Charles's embrace had been insinuated by the others into Harriet's mind so long ago that the journeys that really took place, with Charles looking ahead, driving fast, saying nothing, seemed not true either.

Miss Lovelace removed her chicken-broth from the gas-ring so that Miss Lazenby could heat the little pan of wax. As it melted, it added its smell to the others in the room.

‘We spread it on and tear it off,' Miss Brimpton directed.

‘Then we'll have the chicken-broth.' Miss Lovelace put the pan back on the gas-ring.

‘On the upper lip first, dear,' Miss Brimpton advised Harriet. ‘Slightly downy, if I might say so.'

‘Anyone else would be insulted,' Miss Lazenby said dreamily. ‘I call mine a bloody moustache.'

‘Well, that's up to you, dear, what you call it. No one else implied anything. It really does smart at first, doesn't it. I hope the juniors don't come up.'

Harriet obediently spread the melting wax round her mouth.

‘I'm doing my beard as well,' Miss Lazenby said recklessly. ‘Has that soup caught, Lovelace? Something smells funny.'

‘Now rip it off,' Miss Brimpton commanded.

‘You do it first, Harriet.'

‘I can't. I'm afraid.'

‘The soup
has
caught, Lovelace.'

‘Miss Claridge wanted on the phone,' one of the juniors said breathlessly, putting her head round the door; withdrawing quickly, with a changed expression.

Harriet clapped her hand over her mouth; tears in her eyes. ‘I can't. I can't ever take this off.' She stared in the mirror at her wax-encrusted face.

‘Look, like this, oh, Christ!' Miss Lazenby urged her.

‘But, dear, the phone!'

No one had ever telephoned her at the shop before. A wild thought of Vesey sprang into her mind and she began to panic. She took an edge of the wax, and giving herself a mad courage with Vesey's name, shutting her eyes, she tore it from her face. She was afraid to look into the mirror or to put her hand to her mouth.

‘Dear, you must hurry.' Miss Brimpton felt that she could not bear it herself, if whoever it was rang off.

‘Vesey! Vesey!' thought Harriet as she ran downstairs, her skirt floating out at each turn of the staircase, her hair flying back from her shoulders. ‘But it could not be,' she told herself, trying to arm herself against disappointment. Yet who else? ‘And if people ever do break through into one another's loneliness, is it not always done as a miracle; so may not that miracle happen to me? But it will not happen to me,' she thought, her foot on the last stair.

She shut herself into the dark cupboard where the telephone was, picked up the receiver and said ‘hallo' in a voice which did not sound to her like her own.

‘Oh, Harriet! This is Charles.'

Her affability was too stressed, she knew. ‘And I expected nothing,' she assured herself. ‘It could not have been Vesey. How could I have thought it was?'

She held the receiver clumsily as if it were very heavy: she smiled in the darkness and her voice was bright and welcoming.

She went back up the stairs very slowly, dragging herself up, her hand on the banister.

The others were already drinking their chicken-broth. Their glance scarcely shifted from their spoons, and their casual manner was a symptom of the restraint which telephones, letters, ‘other people's affairs', set up in them. But they would not begin any conversation which might cover her awkwardness or enable her to frustrate their curiosity. If she meant to get herself out of the silence without confiding in them, they would not help her; not being prepared to go beyond minding their own business.

Miss Lovelace scooped up some broth with a broken cup and handed it to her without a word. Harriet began to drink. Miss Brimpton looked steadily in front of her.

‘It was Charles,' Harriet said, unable to bear any more.

‘Really, dear. Salt, Lovelace, if you please.'

Miss Lovelace threw across a screw of paper.

‘Is he meeting you tonight?' Miss Brimpton asked; now free to go ahead.

‘He wanted me to go for a drink . . .'

‘Yes, well, dear, you remember what I said . . .'

‘And then to go dancing.'

‘That's much more the idea. Is it the Hunt Ball?'

‘I think it is really just a sort of road-house.'

‘Never mind. It may well be very nice.'

‘But I have nothing to wear.'

‘You know you don't have to worry about that.'

‘And my mouth is hurting dreadfully.'

‘Mine's giving me hell, too,' Miss Lazenby said. ‘It was one of our lousier ideas, I must say.'

‘I could certainly never go through it again,' Miss Lovelace agreed.

‘How strange!' thought Harriet. ‘He really did ask me to go dancing. I am actually telling them the truth.' Because she had implied it all to them before, they were not as surprised as they might have been. She was even not as surprised herself.

‘I should borrow the cornflower-blue crepe from stock,' Miss Lazenby was saying.

‘Blue is always nice,' Miss Brimpton added.

‘A new frock?' Charles asked.

‘Not terribly.'

‘You should always wear it.'

(‘No hope of that,' thought Harriet.)

‘Blue suits you. Have you got toothache, darling?'

‘No, Charles.'

Harriet took her hand away from her mouth and smiled stiffly.

‘Have another gin, then.'

‘Yes, please.'

Her mother had said: ‘Where
did
that dress come from?'

‘I borrowed it from a girl at work,' Harriet had lied.

‘How could you borrow clothes? Apart from everything else, they are such personal things. They reflect one's personality.'

‘Then I've got precious little personality,' Harriet said tartly.

‘It took us years to get rid of those cumbersome skirts and now you all go meekly back in them like a herd of sheep. And all this make-up. You look like a woman of uneasy virtue,' Lilian had said with vague distress.

‘I always like blue,' Charles now said, rather defiantly.

Kitty Vincent, who had tried to try on the blue dress that morning in the shop, said nothing. It was the first of her many kindnesses to Harriet. She sat at the table, her elbows among the glasses, her chin on her hands. Her sleeves fell away from her plumpish arms. She swayed to the music, her eyes half-closed. When her husband spoke to her, she smiled dreamily and went on humming the music and then, suddenly, she opened her eyes. She put her arms up with a lovely gesture – rather like a child asking to be carried – and they moved away across the dance-floor.

‘How beautifully she dances,' Harriet said.

‘Kitty does everything beautifully,' Charles said unhelpfully. He kept spinning a half-crown round on the table and slapping it flat. She watched with eyes grown heavy in the smoky air, her hands leaden on the arms of the chair. More half-crowns were added: they lay in a neat row and he played with them absent-mindedly until the waiter brought their drinks. Harriet continued to stare at the ringed and sticky table where the half-crowns had been. She could not move her head, or speak.

Running below the beat and braying of the music was the steady needle-scratch on the gramophone record. Each sound had another underlying sound. She felt that if she could concentrate she would unpeel the outer sounds from the inner one, the one now buried, the last sound before complete silence – the tick of the blood in her wrist, she thought, turning her hand on the chair; the voice of her own mind. There were these layers of sensation. Below the smell of smoke she could also detect the chill smell of the newly painted walls; rough, scumbled plaster like outer walls; for the room had turned itself inside-out and, in spite of its ceiling, its dance-floor, was pretending to be a courtyard. Linen vines, papier-maché wistaria hung on a green trellis; lanterns, shutters, garden furniture did not complete any illusion, but added incongruity. Striped sun-blinds canopied the bar, made a bright booth of it, where grenadine and crême-de-menthe flashed like the bottles in a chemist's shop.

Each time Kitty Vincent passed, she lifted her hand a little from her husband's shoulder and smiled.

Her husband, Tiny, was a bustling man, who was Charles's partner. For brains, he substituted bonhomie and he did not let this flag. He always was asked out a great deal because his spirits were dependable. He also remembered things about people, asked after aged mothers, inquired about rheumatism, bad legs, children's tonsils. It was felt – it was a piece of unexpressed etiquette – that one would not give him a pessimistic reply. Children were suddenly seen to be better, mothers on the mend. ‘Good! Good!' he would say, beaming, rubbing his hands together. Tiny is so kind, people thought. Anyone boorish enough to go on being depressed, threw him out a little. ‘Oh, bad luck!' he would say, hitting them across the shoulders sympathetically. His flitting eyes would seek the bar.

His relations with Kitty were very rallying, very public. Rarely uneasiness was felt – then only for a moment. Did he not lay an edge of hatred to his teasing: the friendly smack on the bottom, was it not a bit on the vicious side? But then Kitty would smile lazily. They are very understanding with one another, was the general opinion. ‘I can take it,' Kitty told herself. Apathy, apathy sank through her. Since her marriage, she had grown fat, because she no longer bestirred herself. ‘Kitty looks well,' Tiny's mother said. Now she had begun to think she was pregnant. The thought of food fascinated her. She read cookery-books, but could not bring herself to eat. She did seem to be ill, retching in the mornings until her wrists were frozen, her legs trembling. ‘The old girl's hangover,' Tiny said. She said nothing about her suspicions for the time-being; for they never discussed anything seriously, except money, and she dreaded all the coy and humorous references. She applied herself gaily to the pub-crawl, the cocktail-party, the Sunday morning session. ‘I wish Tiny and Kitty would come,' anxious young hostesses would think when parties bogged down. And Kitty, needing people so much, did not mind where she found them. She was not discriminating, she had found to her cost.

As she danced with her husband, she glanced at Charles and Harriet, sitting rather far apart – each, now, with a drink in hand. She thought Harriet looked a little drawn and blurred. She blamed Charles about the gin.

‘We should go home,' she told Tiny; for her own sake as well as Harriet's.

‘As you say, darling. Anything you say. A dead loss of an evening, who can deny it? Charles in one of his moods; little what's-her-name pie-eyed. You half-asleep.'

‘One more drink!' said Charles when they returned. ‘And then home.'

‘I'd like a nice leafy drink,' Kitty said. ‘Mint especially.'

When it came, she stood at the table and breathed it. The smell tantalised her. She took a leaf of the mint and pinched it. It was the most exquisite, sensuous pleasure; but teasing. Her senses seemed dreadfully heightened. Even light struck her more forcefully, so that she felt bereft of her outer skin, some poor shelled creature. But she could not drink. As soon as she put her lips to the glass, ice touched her mouth. No, she could not bear it. She put the glass down and turned to Charles. They went to dance. Harriet was left with Tiny, who said: ‘And how do you feel, sweetie?'

‘I feel all right.'

‘Good. Good. Let's dance then, shall we?'

Her eyes had been so much on one level that when she stood up, the room seemed to change.

Tiny was a bouncy dancer. He took a firm grip of her and steered her very masterfully; his thumb in the palm of her hand pressed rather automatically: the other hand fidgeted in the small of her back, even snapped an elastic through her dress. Sometimes, he hummed in her ear, other times gathered her up with a little squeeze.

‘Your Harriet looks tired,' Kitty told Charles.

‘I know.'

‘What are you aiming at, Charles dear?'

‘Girls of that age . . . I seem to have forgotten . . . I seem not to get very far.'

‘And how far do you want to get?'

‘Well, how can you know until you have been some of the way at least? Day after day I drive her home. We never do say a word to one another.'

‘Of course, you are known for your caution, your prudence, dear Charles.'

‘When you've so wretchedly, so publicly, failed with one woman . . .'

‘But that was years ago.'

‘It made me self-conscious, unwilling to commit myself. I hate to fail. Now I feel stiff and heavy. Can't do all the nonsense like Tiny. I envy him that. You can see how he's making Harriet laugh this minute. I never can make people laugh.'

‘He doesn't always evoke suitable laughter,' Kitty said.

‘I envy him,' Charles repeated. ‘I particularly envy him
you
.'

She smiled.

‘Ah, there you see, it is what I mean. Heavy gallantry. All I am capable of.'

‘I took it as a lovely compliment.'

Harriet was beginning to get the hang of the evening, too late. Tiny helped her. He guided her feet one way, her conversation another – although it was not so much conversation, as, like the dance, a set of steps to be taken. She felt elated with both and when they were to go, was sorry.