Read Online A Game of Hide and Seek by Elizabeth Taylor, Caleb Crain - Free Book Online

people’s rooms are when there is no one there!’ Harriet thought. It was the next afternoon and she was left alone to type letters.
    The landing was quiet. All through the house, the hall clock could be heard ticking. Caroline had taken the children out to tea. Vesey had not been seen all day.
    As long as she could hear the clinking of crockery far off in the kitchen, Harriet knew that she was safe. She stood half on the landing, half in Vesey’s room, looking in at the neat bed, the book beside it, the white shoe-box on a chair, the blank mirror.
    Her ears still attentive to the sounds in the kitchen, she tiptoed across the creaking floor-boards and stood looking down at the dressing-table. A little clock rustled anxiously, a comb was stuck in an up-turned hair brush. Vesey’s school dressing-gown hung at the back of the door; his sponge dried on the window-sill. The room was poignantly impersonal, as if it rebuked Harriet. The curtains suddenly rattling along their rod, bellying out in a gust of wind, made her start dreadfully. When she was calm again, she took Vesey’s hand-towel from its rail and holding it to her face as if it were some sacred relic, breathed in its beautiful fragrance of Royal Vinolia soap.
    â€˜So Vesey is leaving?’ Lilian said at supper-time.
    Enormous calm and fortitude the young have when they are first in love and hiding it.
    â€˜Is he?’ Harriet asked.
    â€˜So Caroline told me when we were out to tea.’
    â€˜I thought he was staying until September,’ Harriet said vaguely. To give her hands something to do, she took more potatoes.
    â€˜Caroline wants his room for her mother, so that she can come for a holiday. She has been rather out-of-sorts.’
    This phrase sounded odd to both of them, but Caroline had used it and now Lilian handed it on. It hedged: meant nothing.
    There is a game which children play in which they creep up to one who is hiding his eyes; step by step, frozen still with innocence at each quick glance they go tentatively forward, until at last they grow close, close to the point of touching. This evening, Lilian, stealthily, step by step, tried to draw near to Harriet, knowing that one false move would set her back where she began. They gave one another alternate glances across the table. So carefully, each careless-sounding remark was passed. But Lilian was conscious only of check. Fatigue and shock had had the effect upon Harriet of making her warier. Her fit of nervousness sustained her. It did not deceive Lilian, but it baulked her. She was the one who tired first. Back at base, defeated, she felt a great exhaustion of disappointment and misunderstanding. Her daughter, however, was not (which some widows say) all that she had. She had, in fact, Caroline. Caroline would comfort her. She had not wanted to break down her child’s resistance, but she did want to feel reassured that it was right for Vesey to go away, that Harriet’s pain now would save her from worse ones in the future. She hoped that she was right in wanting this, and tomorrow Caroline would tell her that she was.
    With beautiful indifference, Harriet asked: ‘And when is he to go?’ She put her knife and fork neatly together and looked boldly and cruelly at her mother.
    Stunned and depressed, she wrote in her diary before she got into bed: ‘I did not see V. In two days he will be gone.’
    Harriet laid her plans with pathetic cunning. If Vesey must go, her only possible comfort would be if he were to write to her. She could not see any way for him to begin to do this. Even if he should care to – and he had said he was no letter-writer – she thought that some excuse would help him, if she could find one.
    â€˜I am being sent down,’ he told her, looking in as he passed the window.
    â€˜Vesey dear!’ Caroline called from the middle of her herbaceous border. ‘I shouldn’t interrupt Joseph’s lesson if I