A Game of Hide and Seek Read Free Page B

children. Harriet alone was susceptible, but only to more literary or romantic horrors. The stomach-hook made her laugh, but the story of Mrs Rossetti’s exhumation she listened to chin in hand.
    They – she and Vesey – had known one another since early childhood; but his return this summer of their eighteenth year brought to her own knowledge her love for him. His personality had for long influenced hers, as the moon influences the sea, with an unremitting and inescapable control. Her mother had seen that influence and thought it not always for the good. She found motives for Vesey’s exuberances and, threaded through these motives, disquieting traces of cruelty and cynicism.
    Caroline’s house was Victorian and nondescript, surrounded by worn lawns, ramshackle outbuildings, lurching rose arches. Inside, although threadbare rugs lay crooked on rather dusty floorboards and curtains were bleached by sun and rain, the first impression was of comfort and friendliness, that people mattered more than houses, that children were more important than the covers of the chairs, that dogs were, too. Spaniels flopped up and down the stairs; lay on beds and turned bloodshot and reproachful eyes as doors were opened; stretched out and suckled their young across the hearthrug.
    Hugo Macmillan had still much of that poetic ebullience which distinguished so many young men just before the 1914 war. He suggested in middle-age, a type of masculinity now perhaps vanished to the world; the walking-tours in perfect spring weather, Theocritus in pocket: an aesthetic virility. He had gone on being Rupert Brooke all through the war – a tremendous achievement – and was only now, much later, finding his enthusiasms hardening into prejudices and, sometimes, especially with Vesey, into a tetchy disapproval of what he did not understand. His old-fashioned liberalism now contained elements of class-hatred; his patriotism had become the most arrogant nationalism. His love and sympathy for the women of his youth, his support in their fight for a wider kind of life, made him unsympathetic to the younger women who had come after. Every feminality these young girls (he even called them Flappers) felt free enough to adopt (and they were fewer than usual at that time) he openly despised.
    The time before the war had been so idyllic to him that he measured everything against those days; he could not feel at home among so much that seemed spurious. If we do not alter with the times, the times yet alter us. We may stand perfectly still, but our surroundings shift round and we are not in the same relationship to them for long; just as a chameleon, matching perfectly the greenness of a leaf, should know that the leaf will one day fade.
    Hugo saw little change in himself, could beat Vesey at tennis and swim faster, took his cold bath each morning, loved his wife as dearly now as at the beginning of their marriage, on their honeymoon in the Forest of Fontainebleau after that First World War. (He had taken her to see some battlefields.)
    Vesey constantly irritated and surprised him: his lack of gallantry towards Harriet, his laziness, his cynicism, the gaps in his knowledge. ‘Who in the world is Edward Carpenter?’ he had asked, lolling as usual on the sofa with the wireless on too loud, and had not seemed impressed by Hugo’s exasperated answer.
    On the other hand, Hugo did not know that to Vesey he seemed more old-fashioned than his grandfather. His grandfather would certainly not have spoken of taking a glass of ale at an inn, and those Chestertonian phrases had, to Vesey, such a period flavour as to seem deliberately affected.
    The antagonism Hugo felt for his nephew, although it was in reality impatience with another person’s youth heightened by nostalgia for his own, was fogged by nobody’s having a good word for Vesey. Caroline, Lilian, Vesey’s own father all combined to disapprove. Even Harriet,