A Game of Hide and Seek Read Free

orders. Through inattention, she lagged behind at school; facts she only feebly retained; loneliness, and the imagination needed to combat it, tired her. She could not pass an examination. ‘What brilliant career to choose for her’ became ‘what to do with her at all’, when she left school. The famous look passed from Caroline to Lilian. Although they never mentioned that room at the police-station, it was not forgotten and they were always closer because of it.
    Until they could think of something better, Harriet would go to Caroline each day, to help with her committee work and give lessons to the children. Only a couple of miles lay between the two houses and bicycling to and fro Harriet felt sometimes like a shuttle being passed from one to the other; felt, as she had often been made to feel, that she was nothing very definite herself. She worried about her future, for she knew that she was only marking time, teaching Joseph to read, mending Deirdre’s clothes, brushing the dogs, clacking out on the old typewriter with two fingers badly-spaced letters (the carbon round the wrong way so that at the end the letter would be on both sides of the paper), waiting for Vesey to pass the window.
    She took refuge even more in day-dreaming, in flamboyant situations which she mastered. Her inclination at this time was only to lie and think of Vesey at night before sleep, but day-dreaming of an exhausting and routine kind must set to some sort of rights the world from which she might approach him. Until she had (although only imaginarily) made a place for herself in which she was no longer alien, useless, she could not go to meet him even in her dreams, and before she had solved that first problem she would fall asleep. So Vesey was seldom reached. She did not come to the point of enhancing those still scenes in the loft, nor did she put any words to them.
    Vesey was an only child, too. His mother was not widowed, as Harriet’s was. She was merely too busy to have more children. She did much more like to go out to work and, sitting at her lacquered desk beside perfectly arranged flowers and two white telephones, received, although without rising, clients at a salon for beauty treatment.
    Vesey meanwhile slid about London, swung on to buses, hung about railway-stations, trying to stave off boredom. He found a way of passing time by frightening the housekeeper, would lie on the sofa in the pale, satiny flat trying to detain her while he described anything horrid he could remember or invent. ‘For instance, when people are flayed ,’ he would begin, as she stood with a tray at the door . . . ‘Ah, yes, flayed’ . . . dreamily he lengthened the vowel of this word . . . ‘a small incision at the roots of the hair, say . . .’
    â€˜How dare you think up such wickedness!’
    His way of beginning always with ‘For instance’ or ‘However’, as if some sort of conversation had gone before, trapped her again and again.
    â€˜Nevertheless, should you find yourself passing Madame Tussaud’s the woman with a hook through her stomach is quite an unusual little tableau . . .’
    Before she could shut the door, he would manage to add, flicking over the pages of a magazine: ‘For those, of course, who like that sort of thing,’ as if he merely catered to her own sick fancies or love of the bizarre.
    But when she had gone, the clock began to tick again. The light through the organdie curtains seemed stifled. The blond furniture and carpet (for rooms of that kind were all off-white in those days) could, when viewed through half-closed eyes, suggest dust-sheets and drugget and everyone gone away. If a petal fell from a flower, he was startled, as if he had seen something which, like the progress of the clock’s hands, should be accomplished when no one is looking.
    He read a great deal. He wrote stories in the styles of Wells and Tchekhov, Kipling and