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

at the foot of the stairs.
    â€˜Goodbye, Vesey.’
    She only hoped that he would not mention the book which she had lent to him; that, at best, he was keeping it for an excuse to write; or that he would remember later and be obliged to write, and be jogged occasionally by the thought of her.
    â€˜Goodbye, Harriet.’
    He smiled kindly and looked into her eyes. They hesitated, and then shook hands formally. As she stepped over the dogs which lay sleeping at the open door and began to walk down the garden, he leaned back against the chimney-piece, his hands in his pockets, and watched her go.
    Departure in the afternoon is depressing to those who are left. The day is so dominated by the one who has gone and, although only half-done, must be got through with that particular shadow lying over it. She could not return to her mother at that hour. Tomorrow, she would begin the desolate task of ticking off the days of her life until Vesey should come again; today her despair was too dreary. She walked on the common which lay near to her home. The glades, dark, with their bracken smell, offered her a shelter which her home denied her. Deep in the bitter smell of the bracken she lay down and closed her eyes. She thought of Vesey pacing up and down the platform of the little station until his train came: imagined him waiting, pale in the intense heat of the afternoon, and at last borne away round the curve of the cutting, into the tunnel, and gone. With her face in her hands, her body hidden in the bracken, she began to weep. She did not so much indulge herself in this great torrent of weeping as become passive while the weight of tears was cleared from her.
    A year is too long to wait for someone beloved. In the morning, she would set about living that year, comforting herself across the great waste of days. This afternoon she could not begin. At the end of her weeping, when words began to come again into her head, ‘It is too long,’ she cried. She rested her throbbing face in the cool, harsh bracken. She felt that she had cried all the tears of the rest of her life.
    In the morning, Caroline, with a kind look and kind untrue phrases, held out her book to her. ‘Vesey asked me to give you this, and thank you very much. He said I was to be sure not to forget to give it to you.’
    Harriet took the book and smiled. In the first few pages a blade of grass was stuck to mark a place.
    â€˜Tonight, will you play hide-and-seek?’ Deirdre asked. She took Harriet’s hand and spun herself round in a pirouette, absorbed by her twirling skirt, her own fascination.
2
    We cannot always remember our first glimpse of those who later become important to us. Feeling that the happening should have been more significant, we strain back through our memories in vain. But Harriet could always remember that it was through a piece of flawed glass that she first saw Charles Jephcott. In the bus window his figure wavered and thinned, broadened, slanted, so that she had no idea if a fat man or a thin, old or young, would presently enter the bus. Curiosity made her turn her head to see.
    To her he seemed so old as to be outside the range of her interest. He sat down in front of her, steadying himself as the bus began to move – an elderly man of about thirty-five. His profile, turned to the passing hedges, was commanding as if it were stamped on a coin, his sandy hair sprang in a straight line from his brow; a heavy signet ring on one hand – a hairy, freckled hand – seemed a further sign of his authority, as was his way of shooting his wrist out of his cuff so that he could see his watch. He sat in the bus with an aloof air as if he were unaccustomed to doing so. A faint smell of spirits came from him. No one in Harriet’s world drank anything intoxicating, except at weddings, and she associated that smell with the last bus home and a staggering rowdiness. His manner, though, was so unlike this that she