A Game of Hide and Seek Read Free Page A

Edgar Allan Poe. He was bored at school, bored at home, bored on his country-holidays with Aunt Caroline and Uncle Hugo. His stories of flaying, of stomach-hooks, were here suppressed. Joseph and Deirdre may not be told stories of buryings-alive: ghosts, Caroline said, were not frightening, only silly; in the way that some words were not clever, but silly; and some anecdotes not funny, not in the least rude, only silly. Vesey and the children did notice that ‘silliness’ was what made Caroline’s neck redden most of all; more perhaps than rudeness or obscenity; but that they could never prove, for nothing was obscene or rude. ‘Sensible’ was Caroline’s favourite word. ‘There’s a sensible girl’ was the highest praise Deirdre received. To be silly was to be not sensible. As time went on, Deirdre began to wonder if her mother had been altogether sensible on all occasions, to suspect that she herself had come into the world because of silliness. Try as she would, Deirdre could not regard the sexual act, with which she was at this time rather taken up, as sensible. As she had observed it in animals, it seemed at best ridiculous, at worst daunting and frantic. She could regard it in either light. Relating it to her own parents, as children must and will, she did not retract in horror; but laughed. Strictly utilitarian as she believed the act to be, she limited Caroline’s occasions of being not sensible (in fact, of being utterly and frivolously and fantastically silly) to twice – herself and Joseph. It was strange that the very thing her mother hated most – not being sensible – had given her what she loved the best; her two children. Deirdre did not doubt that she and Joseph were loved most. She had a happy childhood and when she grew up she had many a happy surprise.
    Caroline was rather torn in two about Vesey’s mother’s attitude to her son. That women should be emancipated she had fatigued herself in her youth and endured mockery; but Vesey had not grown up a robust or happy child and she could not but lay blame for his paleness on the London flat, or his boredom and restlessness, upon lack of attention. ‘If it were for something worth while . . . !’ she hedged. As far as she could imagine, nothing could be less worthwhile than pandering to the vanity of rich London women, the idle, the predatory (who had once cut her, or laughed at her as she marched in processions). Picturing the smooth flattery of Vesey’s mother, she could only think the child (even her own ideals) sacrificed for nothing. But, white-skinned, even in the country he never tanned or coloured. Early in September he would return to London like a ghost, faintly mauve across his brow and his sharp shoulders; (for, stripped to the waist, as Caroline would have him, he would only, week after week, become more and more gnat-bitten: his chest remained white; the bones showed in rows). She never managed to send him back looking like a reproach.
    In the flat, while the housekeeper was out shopping, he made one or two experiments at his leisure. Every opened bottle in the cupboard he had tried from time to time. He would smoke with his head out of the bedroom window. In his mother’s room one day he put on her jewellery, sniffed at her scent, varnished his nails, read a book on birth control, took six aspirins, then lay down like Chatterton on the window-seat, his hand drooping to the floor.
    When the housekeeper returned, he had half-opened his eyes. ‘I am doing away with myself,’ he had said. ‘I have supped my full of horrors.’ When she had rushed out for salt-and-water, he had turned his head to the pillow to stifle his giggles; but, strangely, some tears had fallen upon the oyster satin.
    His love of teasing and sensationalism was thwarted somewhat in the country. Caroline and Hugo scorned such nonsense themselves and were vigilant over their