A Game of Hide and Seek (32 page)

In an arcade, echoing, crowded, smelling of old newspapers and the damp sand that was trodden in, he bought a box stuck all over with little yellow shells like grains of maize. On his way home, he saw that he could never send it to her and he felt foolish and baffled. His joke became pathetic, as had other jokes between them.

He began to realise that neglect lay deep in him, too deeply to be eradicated now – neglect of his friends (for he had not made the social effort), his life, his love, his body. It was not his nature to be sorry for himself; but he wondered how he had come to make such a wry thing of his life. At school, masters had criticised what they called his attitude. Casting round for an attitude, though, he had found only blankness. ‘Of course, my mother was a bad lot,' he thought, ‘but I can't blame her. She was always very nice to me.'

In the afternoons, he sat slackly on one of the iron seats which seemed to have grown laboriously out of the asphalt of the promenade, as the shrubs grew out of the baked earth of the ornamental gardens behind him. He felt invalidish and apart, watching the people on the sands below him. All afternoon the light would turn slowly round, making small alterations to the appearance of the scene. He became fascinated by the reddened, blistered youths and the strapping girls who sparred about and slapped at one another; the physical repartee entranced him; the unavailing struggle. ‘Oh, you
are
!' the girls would cry, victorious in their defeat, sprawled out and spattered with sand. Near-by, a nun with her thin face bowed under a complicated coif waited while the orphanage boys, wearing too many clothes, walked at the sea's-edge, their boots dangling over their shoulders. Children built sand-castles, each his own separate castle, sitting back-to-back, talking in busy, rapid sentences, bickering as they patted the sand with little spades. Alone, away from them, a baby sat, making jerky, aimless movements with his arms. He raised his fists and sand flew away out of his closed hands. At tea-time, food came out of baskets, paste-sandwiches, greengages with broken skins, shrimps; even parcels of fish-and-chips, cooling, and dripping vinegar. Little boys would begin to grizzle, holding themselves tightly between their legs. ‘You
would
!' mother would grumble. Father would look indifferently at the sea.

Sometimes, depressed almost to nausea, he rejected it all: at other times, his heart was unbearably touched. In the evenings, as he walked to the theatre, the trodden sands, the empty deck-chairs at different angles, some in pairs, turned towards one another, set a scene for a ghostly conversation-piece. He became conscious again of the sea turning over. When he left the theatre it was dark; then the sound of the sea muffled all others: it dragged without mercy at the sand and shingle: a long way up the coast a lighthouse ticked off the seconds. He thought of Harriet as he walked home. He seemed to have wasted their lives.

In the morning, the rowdy young people, the whining children, the so persistently funny men, would infuriate him, so that life seemed a mean and gibbering charade; but then at night or in the evening his mood would soften. Somehow linked with Harriet were the empty chairs. The attendant who folded and stacked them seemed a symbolic figure, shadowy, Lethean; he erased the day and all remembrance of it.

In a café one afternoon, he saw a little girl who reminded him of Harriet as a child. Her long hair straggled over her shoulders, her thin arms were covered by a tight jersey. She sat at a table with her father and two younger children. When the tea was brought, her father nodded at her with a casual and flattering gesture. Colour rode up in her cheeks. She stood up and lifted the tea-pot with two hands. Vesey could see that the father, so apparently relaxed, was ready to spring to her rescue. The wobbly stream of tea descended into his cup. He took it from her with careless thanks. She smiled. She shone with relief. ‘This is my first time,' she said, ‘of pouring out.' Vesey looked away. He felt a personal guilt towards the grave, successful and beloved little girl, besides a tardy guilt towards Harriet. ‘Love is not difficult,' he thought. In the child's father it had seemed the simplest thing, as was the expression of it. He began to hope that the mother was merely resting for the afternoon, and not dead. But having seen so much happiness, he desired more. He imagined the mother at home in child-birth. ‘I will take the children out to tea,' the husband had said. When they returned, he would run upstairs. He would be excited, not anxious, over his fourth child. He would call to his daughter to come and see. Going sedately upstairs, with her self-conscious little smile, she would imagine a wonderful future, not just pouring out tea, but of pushing prams, of straightening the baby every yard or so and plumping up his pillow, so that he would be a credit to her. ‘But perhaps after all the mother is dead,' he thought, as he paid his bill. ‘Perhaps it is their first holiday without her. He is trying hard: and succeeding much better than those who think they have no need to try.'

Through the summer, Harriet lived at peace without Vesey, and could have lived a long time thus, she thought, serene in her indecisiveness, freed from the machinery of deceit. His letters flurried her, so that each morning when there was none – and sometimes weeks passed without – her relief was stronger than her disappointment. The future was a foreign country.

She found, though, that love was a disorganising element. Dropped into their midst, it had the power of upsetting other relationships, so that she felt emphasis shifted all about her, as if her world had slipped; as if a general subsidence had taken place. No one was the same. Charles was polite, evasive, Betsy moody and uncontrolled.

Harriet began to hope that the change was only in herself, that she had become morbidly attuned to the inclinations of other people. She hoped that Kitty's anxious – and Julia's malicious – watchfulness were quite imaginary. Tiny, even, behaved differently. She had often heard and read that to be loved has some infection in it; but it was repulsive to her that this should account for all his new attentions. His suddenly intimate manner worried her and she could only fancy that Reggie Beckett had told his story well. At times, her anxieties would seem an hallucination – when, for instance, she entered the tea-shop where her friends gathered for their morning coffee and thought that a silence fell, and at Betsy's Speech Day, when Miss Bell seemed so palpably to avoid her, and reddened as she met her glance. ‘It is a sort of mania,' she told herself, ‘to hear whisperings, to feel oneself the centre of conjecture, and persecuted.' But in such ways provincial life cracks and collapses about the individual. She had seen it happen to others, and was afraid. She felt, too, that she was at the mercy of those who were worse than herself, who merited ostracism, as she did not; but there was no comfort in defiance and she found that, in practice, she tended to propitiate. When she and the other women discussed recipes, children's ailments, clothes, she entered in, and offered up, with forced enthusiasm. ‘It is all my world!' she seemed to declare. ‘To make a really spongy sponge-cake my whole ambition!' When she reached home, she would despise herself, and idly wondered if any of the others were playing the same game.

Betsy's strained manner persisted after she had brilliantly passed her exam. Her rebellious attitude towards Charles, her sulkiness, had been accounted for – successively – by over-work, late nights, anxiety, too much excitement, too little fun, reaction, growing too fast, and perhaps a deficiency in iron. But success and praise, even an iron-tonic, wrought no change. Her manner was put down, at last, as a passing phase. Harriet would have discussed the problem with Miss Bell, if Miss Bell had not been always walking in a different direction.

‘It is true,' she reflected, ‘that we are all members one of another. When one man falls, he takes others down in his arms.'

‘If Tiny goes west, we do, too,' Charles said. ‘Whatever silliness he may be up to will have its repercussions on our livelihood.'

Harriet thought: ‘Men say “livelihood”. Women say “lives”.' ‘Livelihood' was only half-threatening, she felt. It seemed only to mean that they would be poorer. The strictest economy. No
bought
flowers. She said goodbye to Mrs Curzon in tears, but Mrs Curzon would not go. ‘It isn't the money, madam dear,' she wept. ‘It was for better or worse between us two right from the word go.'

‘Harriet, dear, there is no need to cry! It is at the moment only the dreariest suspicion.'

‘Oh, it isn't that. You know how I am. I was thinking of Mrs Curzon.'

Charles put one knee on the piano-stool and struck an arpeggio or two, as if limbering his patience as well as his fingers.

‘Please tell me!' Harriet pleaded.

‘What is the use, when you scarcely listen? Young though you may be compared with me, you are still too old to be this exasperating child-wife you sometimes affect. You make me feel like Carlyle.'

‘My thoughts run on too quickly. Mrs Curzon was really connected with our ruin . . .'

‘Ruin? Oh, Harriet!'

He played the scale of C Major, his eyes shut, his head bowed. Then a chord. Then he shut the piano.

‘Ruin? You see how you romanticise! There's no ruin. There's perhaps a loss of pride, a falling-off of confidence, so consequently a falling-off of income. Mean little economies, such as I despise. Perhaps sell the piano,' he added, with impressive nobility – for he was the only one who ever played it. Harriet thought: ‘Very well! I was only saying good-bye to Mrs Curzon, as you are to the piano.'

‘But what makes you suspect Tiny?' she asked dutifully.

‘You know I think that he and Reggie Beckett make schemes . . .'

Her mind swerved at the name. ‘Yes, I remember you said so.'

‘When I go into Tiny's office, Reggie is always sprawling there on a chair . . . ‘Just popped in for a cuppa,' he says – he has all those mannerisms of speech . . . or they are talking about racing . . . the place blue with smoke . . . how any work gets done . . . Once or twice I've seen clients I always dealt with myself by-passing my office and disappearing into Tiny's. Just dropped in for a cuppa too, I suppose. I might as well pack up and open a café. If I question Tiny, he becomes so painfully evasive that I find myself embarrassed too. I have half a mind to tackle Reggie himself before it is too late, if it isn't too late already. I feel like taking him by the scruff of the neck and dropping him out into the street.'

‘I don't think I should,' Harriet said quickly. The less Charles confronted Reggie, the better. To do so in anger might loosen his tongue dangerously.

‘Can you imagine me? But whether Tiny likes it or not, I shall tell him to spend less time with us . . . difficult to be really unpleasant, though, I suppose . . . I meet him in a bar and he insists on buying me a drink. I can't refuse, and then I have to buy him one back . . . always these awkwardnesses in a little town. It isn't easy to be ruthless, and having enemies is embarrassing for everybody. If only Tiny didn't so want to get rich quickly . . . to get rich, I mean. Kitty gets greedier as she grows older. And lazier. It takes some living up to on an ordinary income . . . if she is never to do a hand's turn in the house . . . sit about eating Turkish-delight all day and reading
Vogue
 . . . and her grand schemes for Ricky . . . He's as bad . . . utterly spoilt. In many ways I am sorry for Tiny, saddled with them both.'

‘Kitty thinks Betsy is spoilt.'

‘All children are spoilt,' Charles said impatiently, not to be side-tracked by
that
argument.

Miss Bell had nowhere to go in the holidays. She stayed on in her bed-sitting-room and saved her money. Next year, she hoped to go on a tour of Greece, which she scarcely apprehended as geographical; but rather as some shifting image in the air, to which the Hellenic Society would magically convey her. Since Miss Anstruther had given her a term's notice, however, the image had receded. She had never really believed that she would go.

The holidays seemed long to her. She made little treats for herself – a day's walking, bus rides, lunch in a café. She wondered if the girls at the library despised her for changing her book so often. Sometimes she saw Betsy at church.

‘You should ask her to tea,' Harriet said.

‘Oh, she wouldn't come.'

‘Why not?'

‘She said once that she hates going out to tea.'

‘To have sherry with us before supper then . . .'

‘Oh, no, she doesn't drink.'

‘You seem to have all her habits by heart.'

Harriet felt the poor young woman's loneliness. She had seen her sitting alone in the café, though Miss Bell would not catch her eye.

One Sunday evening, Betsy walked home from church with her. It had been a heavy and colourless day. Winter never has such a darkness as this day had had with its obliterating leaves. The pavements were gritty and hedges dusty. Winged seeds lay in the gutters under the sycamore trees. Women sat at upstairs windows, slackly watching the passers by. The air seemed caught up with the suspense of waiting for rain, and nothing could allay Miss Bell's ennui and depression. She had tried all the afternoon to walk it off but it trotted along at her side like some unwanted dog. All she could hope for now was to begin a better day tomorrow. Even conversation with Betsy was an effort.

‘I daresay they were pleased with you at home about your examination?'

‘Oh, they were pleased enough,' Betsy said grudgingly.

‘Well,
I
was very pleased. I was pleased with your work, and that you had the character to do it.'

To this, Betsy could find no answer. She made an ungracious scoffing sound.

Miss Bell said, in an off-hand way: ‘I am leaving at the end of next term. The other girls won't know for a time. Perhaps you'd keep it to yourself until they do.'