A Game of Hide and Seek Read Online Free PDF Page A

stopped calling. Vesey sat beside her still, prising bits of white flint out of the mossy earth with a stick which kept snapping. Absorbed, he did this. Fatally, she covered her face with her hands.
    â€˜What is wrong?’ he asked gently.
    He drew her hands away and kissed her cheek. In spite of his seeming assurance, he was not really sure.
    â€˜Harriet?’
    â€˜Yes, Vesey?’
    â€˜Have I done wrong?’
    â€˜No.’
    The yawn, the disappointment was contagious. Touching her again, his excitement undiminished, he was at the same time reminded of the dullness of consequences. The tears which she had not let fall cautioned him. He began to wonder if violent embraces are not often induced by not knowing what to do next, of losing one’s nerve as much as losing one’s control. He put his sandal on again, easing it with elaborate care over the bandage, frowning, as he buckled it.
    â€˜It is only . . .’ she began unpromisingly (that daunting opening to long complaints, long confessions) ‘only that sometimes I worry about the future. And hearing you tonight . . . so sure . . . there is nothing for me to do, as there is for you. I wonder what will happen to me . . .’
    Relief made him robust.
    â€˜Someone will marry you,’ he cruelly said. He stood up and brushed leaves away, then he put out his hand to help her to her feet.
    â€˜I do think,’ Caroline was saying in her most reasonable voice, ‘that another time . . . of course, it doesn’t matter in the least while we are alone . . . obviously, it’s of no importance to me that you take the last rissole . . . I’m not the faintest bit hungry, and, if I were, could have had more cooked . . . but perhaps it would be a bad example to the children if they were here for you just to – without offering it, I mean – to take it as a matter of course. I hate having to say this, but it is a question, I suppose, of principle . . . after all, we were always agreed that this isn’t one of those houses where the man is lord and master and boss and bread-winner, taking everything for granted . . .’
    â€˜He could certainly not do that,’ Hugo said, tipping the nut-rissole on to Caroline’s plate.
    She flushed. ‘My dear Hugo, surely you have not taken offence because I spoke frankly?’
    â€˜It is what people do take offence at.’
    â€˜You know I couldn’t eat another thing.’
    She returned the rissole to his plate.
    â€˜And now I could not either,’ he said, abandoning some spinach as well and putting his knife and fork together. The rissole was back on the dish where it had begun, among the shapes of the other rissoles which had been outlined by cold fat.
    As the meal continued with rhubarb-pie Caroline’s explanation also continued. What she simply hated saying she always said for a long time.
    Hugo said little. He knew that she was a good wife, though a bore. But even her moral code had its less tiresome side.
    When at last she had finished, ‘Vesey is late,’ he said.
    â€˜I have put some cold food on one side for him.’
    â€˜I should have thought that he need not put you to such trouble.’
    â€˜But meals are made for people, not people for meals,’ Caroline said with smooth serenity.
    Harriet strove to measure, to assess, Vesey’s consciousness of her: not so much to find out what was his attitude towards her; but if he had an attitude. Her diary, once full of blank pages, became cramped and congested on the days when she saw him. Reading it later, when she was lonely, it did not seem that she had quite told the truth. She stored up all his sayings against the long winter when she would not see him; but the very ink she wrote them in seemed to lay emphasis which did not belong. Some days had only one line: ‘I went to Caroline’s. I did not see V.’ But the next day might spill back