A Game of Hide and Seek (18 page)

Always she seemed to herself to be doomed; could not imagine how she had reached the age of fifteen without disaster, nor why no one had kidnapped her as an infant. At times, she was so certain that she would be arrested for some crime she had not committed that she assumed a special nonchalant way of walking down a street so as to avoid suspicion; sauntered, looked in shop-windows; then, suddenly wondering if she might not perhaps be taken for a prostitute – of whom she had read a great deal – would step out more briskly, her eyes on the pavement.

There had lately been a murder in the town. Every day she felt compelled to go home by the streets which would take in the place of the crime. The little tobacconist's-shop fascinated her. As if she really were the murderer, she was fatally drawn back to the scene. She did not encounter the police, but imagined them watching from upper windows. For this crime, luckily, she had a dramatic alibi. At the very time that the poor tobacconist was being battered with a meat-cleaver, she was being confirmed by the Bishop in St Giles's Church.

Going along to school this morning, she imagined, as she often had, being questioned in court; listening, with a cool and steady smile. Then, just as things were looking very dark for her, her mother weeping softly, Miss Bell moaning audibly, she would ask if the Bishop of Buckingham might be brought in to say a word or two concerning her actions on the evening in question. A little stir, or ripple, then ran (as she had always read it did) around the court. The Bishop was magnificent in gaiters and purple skirts. Little strings tethered the brim of his hat (which he did not remove) to the crown . . . But she could not help thinking that he was most unlike Father Keogh. So little of a sinister nature went on at St Giles's. The Vicar was, in fact, rather stout and merry . . . However, she was confirmed now, safely gathered in . . . the smell of the red-brick Roman Catholic church at the corner only there to alarm and seduce and try her strength.

Her great friend, Pauline Hay-Hardy, had wanted them both to drop in there to Confession one late afternoon after lax-practice. Timidly, they had hung about in what they supposed to be a Byzantine porch. Undermined by the smell of incense they had ventured a step or two into the darkness. A woman with a shopping-basket knelt before a cluster of candles. Pauline retreated a little, her hand at Betsy's elbow. She put her hat-elastic into her mouth, a nervous habit she had. With their backs to the church, they saw that blue evening had suddenly come down. They thought of fires made up especially for their return; of mothers waiting; of the last crumpet in the dish, porous, soggy with butter; sweet tea; swiss-rolls; the day beautifully shut out. ‘We shouldn't have known if we had to pay anything,' Pauline said, when they reached the crossroads where they parted. Always, when she was left alone, Betsy broke into a trot. Then, with a sudden urgency, she wanted to be home. Especially that evening.

Miss Bell was a Du Maurier young lady with strongly marked eyebrows and her mouth was very near her nose. Singing hymns at prayers, one side of her neck and her jaw reddened, giving her a look rather of indignation than of humility, as if she were engaged in some terse and intellectual argument with God. Once, reading the
Antigone
to them, she had taken on the same tinge.

She taught Latin and what Elizabeth Barrett Browning called ‘Ladies' Greek – without any accents'. That the girls were not to be troubled with accents seemed a slur on her sex – an advantage they might have scorned, rather like being allowed over the line at a coconut-shy. She was no feminist, but did not like to waste her capabilities, which she had not so far found less than any man's.

Betsy had made a poor start at Latin with a mistress who aroused no emotion in her; but from the first declension in Greek devotion had been her spur. Later, some drama in the language itself held her – some heightened quality which she recognised as belonging to her own life; in the very sounds of the words voices wailed, lied, vowed constancy, vowed revenge, adored immoderately, accepted defeat with stubborn scorn.

Miss Bell, her girlhood not so far behind her, recalled how she had hoisted herself up from one scholarship to another; eschewing personal relationships, at which she easily failed, possessing small natural gift, and little time to develop what she had. Having reached, at Girton, some eminence, she was now slowly climbing down again, trying to steady herself into a semblance of patience with the stumbling, glancing, sighing girls. Only Betsy seemed to reward her. ‘Perhaps one in a hundred,' she thought, seeing the child's bright face. She could not know that the face was bright for her; that what she had eschewed was now turned intensely upon her, a great glare of adoration. Other people's reactions to herself claimed most of Betsy's thoughts; in obtaining the reaction, she was assiduous, almost stealthy; and she gathered in as a by-product (as she now was gathering in the
Iliad
) both good and bad.

For the bunches of flowers Miss Bell (feeling they were laid at Homer's feet) took no credit.

‘Everyone has to be in love with someone,' said Miss Beetlestone, the English mistress, who was engaged to be married. She was arranging chrysanthemums in a vase in the staff-room. ‘We do to be going on with, I suppose, as there isn't anyone else. Though we needn't think ourselves so clever. I am sure I remember that Sarah Bernhardt fell in love with a goat when she was young.'

‘Love?' said the games-mistress, the word obviously wry in her mouth. ‘This atmosphere in the school . . .'

‘There is always an atmosphere in a school,' Miss Beetlestone, who was soon to be out of it, replied.

Miss Bell listened, but did not connect any of this with herself and certainly not with the only sensible pupil she had had.

‘Let us not use words like “love” . . .'

‘But I
know
it is really the same thing,' Miss Beetlestone said with authority, and from her unfair advantage. She jammed the flowers down into the vase, then tried to loosen them. When she laughed, they felt she was mocking them; but she was only happy.

Even so, Miss Bell took Betsy's flowers absent-mindedly; she held them rather on one side, her eyes on the muddy Xenophon as she sorted out the difficult construction which had been so worrying overnight. Betsy was adept in asking intelligent questions just before prayers.

‘I couldn't sleep,' she said. ‘I was still working on it at eleven o'clock.'

‘Yes,' said Miss Bell. She forgot to admonish or console. Working till midnight was the most practical thing to do: she always had herself. She was only astonished that so few of the other girls did so.

Harriet's carnations, browning at the edges, were scarcely noticed.

When Betsy and then Charles had gone, there was a pause in the house, the clocks seemed to slacken their pace. Elke, the Dutch girl, went upstairs and hung her bedclothes out of the bedroom window into the damp air. Harriet took her last cup of coffee over to the fire, re-read her letters, lit her first cigarette. Beginning to recuperate after the ruffle of breakfast and other people setting out, she would usually feel at this time contentment at the morning ahead, loving the ordinary, the familiar, knowing that what she must do was well within her powers.

This morning, however, she was ruffled herself, felt that a real sequence was so broken that the punctual arrival of the milk-man, the charwoman coming in at the back door at her usual time, were small mockeries, piteous pretences, like the first meal after a beloved one's death, not even reaffirming that the world goes on as usual, that in the midst of death we are in life. A circus dog, at last retired from the ring, no doubt continues its meaningless routine, but meaningless it is.

She took her letters to her desk, wrote out Harrods' cheque, answered an invitation. In her domestic life she had grown orderly and business-like. She had tried to please Charles in such ways as she could.

In the glass over Betsy's photograph on her desk she now saw her own face faintly reflected. In some respects the two faces were the same; Betsy's eyes – large, candid – matched her own; the blonde hair hung pale against the darker; but timidity was absent from the girl's expression; she seemed more engaging, more grown-up. Yet, physically, the reflection was something in the future, a forward-going ghost, awaiting the child. The faint lines on the forehead and the less clear outline of the jaw were in the nature of a premonition.

Harriet looked away, out at the untidy wintry garden, with its bare mulberry-tree, the iris-roots heaving up, knotted, contorted, in the otherwise empty borders, the tracks of cats across the wet, rough grass, leaves piling up under bushes. Yet winter did not seem incapable of change as it had when she was young. As soon as the leaves fell now, she felt the possibility of shoots coming up through the hard ground; autumn was implicit in summer; no season
held
. There were no more long summers. The last was when she had played hide-and-seek with Vesey and the children. Since then the years had slipped by, each growing shorter than the one before. It had not seemed a long time, her married life. Summer and winter had run into one another. Betsy had not so much grown up as unrolled – as if she were all there at the beginning, but that each birthday unrolled more of her, made more visible, though suggesting more.

In those years Vesey had in no way threatened her. Sometimes at night, his name in her mind comforted her; but she heard little of him, nothing from him. All that Hugo had forecast was seen to have been true, though not amazingly so. He had, after all, only foretold what no one else had cared to say. For Vesey had not prospered. The little touring-company had not been a stepping-stone, or if it was, Vesey had still not moved on to the next one; and barely, if all that Deirdre implied was true, retained his hold on that, though Harriet thought that she may have spoken from the old enmity she and Joseph felt for Vesey.

At the Memorial Service to Caroline, who had died during the war, Harriet had sat behind Vesey, wedged in amongst the Women's Institute. The little village church was filled with representatives from all the departments of Caroline's public life. In the front pew, Hugo and his two children were all in uniform – Deirdre and Joseph in blue, Hugo in khaki – all with commendably high rank. They made Caroline's seem a strangely civilian death. Behind them, Vesey looked clumsy in battle-dress. His neck seemed rubbed raw by the rough khaki; his short hair gave him a shorn, outraged look; his boots, Harriet saw over the top of the pew as they knelt down, were huge and studded. She could hardly bear to look at them.

Hugo, Deirdre and Joseph behaved beautifully. Pale and proud, they seemed at attention and to be relied upon. Vesey's eyes were large with tears, as Harriet's were. Once he ran a knuckle under his lashes. Turning his head and seeing Harriet as she came into the church, he had looked with desperation at the women who hemmed him in on either side. They did not quite know how to greet one another: the occasion laid a welcomed restraint upon them. They were not in Deirdre's position to be able to scatter bright smiles and be thought brave: bright smiles might have been wrongly interpreted: their stately acknowledgement was more suitable.

Hearing Caroline celebrated, they were presented with a stranger. The Vicar summed up what they had never known. To set this right they both tried to picture Caroline in some less formal light – the look of her, for instance; voices are impossible. Vague, earnest, good, she sat (for Harriet) at the breakfast-table in a dream; her spectacles slipping on her nose; the children ran in and out (for meals were made for people, and not people for meals), eating when they cared to; almost in rags, the villagers thought. But her ideas had triumphed. Standing there bravely in the front pew they were a credit to her, her children; their bearing now justified their upbringing, as their good health had always justified their vegetarianism. Hugo looked old. The last time he had been in uniform, he had been like Rupert Brooke: now he was quite grey, his manners rather irritable. Harriet suddenly recalled the book Caroline had inscribed for him when they were young.
Allons
, the road is before us! ‘I was a fool to remember that!' she thought, wrenching her mind back to Caroline at the breakfast-table, which did not make her weep.

But it was obvious that the Vicar and most of those now present could not see Caroline as vague or informal. For them, she must always have a sheaf of papers in her hand, would speak with authority, know statistics and believe in them. She had been to prison and this (but not straight away) established her public integrity.

Harriet had wondered if her own tears were perhaps for her mother. She could not imagine whom Vesey's were for. They had neither of them deeply cared for Caroline, beyond being used to her (which amounts to a great deal more than we suppose).

This morning, sitting at her desk, with the ink dry in her pen, she knew that they had both wept nostalgically, for their own youth, of which Caroline had been very much a part, for the long summers, the last especially; paining themselves unnecessarily, and they alone of all the congregation behaving badly.

Outside, in the churchyard, they had spoken to one another. Movement, action, steadied them. Even coming out of the church was a deliverance and a relief. The sky was bitterly white above the clipped yews: daffodils all slanted one way in the wind. ‘It might snow,' people said, ‘though late in March.' They felt braced with paying homage and ‘Fight the Good Fight'.

Deirdre, with enviable aplomb, shook hands with acquaintances: standing at the lych-gate, charmingly speeding them to their cars which were parked all down the road, she might have been giving a party.

‘How are you, Harriet?' Vesey asked. His face was mauve with the cold. She wondered how he could ever stand army life.

She put up the collar of her dark red coat (for ‘no mourning' was as imperative as ‘no meat') against her cheek, as if she had toothache.