Free A Game of Hide and Seek by Elizabeth Taylor, Caleb Crain Page B

the playing of Chopin could be turned into such a Caesarist display.
    Julia leaning back with such an exhausted look made Lilian suspect that the music was her ruse to take a short rest, and this suspicion antagonised her all the more. She had not cared for Julia from the first; found her subversive and absurd. To have music wreaked upon her was another irritation. ‘Perhaps I should ask Harriet to recite,’ she thought scornfully, glancing at her daughter spread out so clumsily in her chair, legs bent awkwardly, an expression of taut discontent (which Harriet herself meant to be serious appraisal) upon her face.
    Charles finished as abruptly as he had begun, even closed up the piano as if sealing off that side of his nature, and went to fetch drinks. As the tray came in, Lilian was rising to go. Sherry was poison to her, she explained. Gin was worse. All spirits, in fact, were impossible. Her digestion had never recovered from the times in prison. She mentioned this to support herself, to keep in touch with her own world which had seemed eclipsed.
    â€˜You were in prison even!’ Julia said. ‘How wonderfully brave and romantic.’
    But no, it had not been, Lilian thought. Because, once there, she had lost her defiance. The weight of disapproval in the air, the cold discipline and impersonality, the loneliness, had made her beliefs seem an uncharming aberration, her behaviour outré. She could not answer, but most of Julia’s remarks were unanswerable. She checked conversations so often that she was obliged to rattle on herself.
    Harriet hated to hear her mother mentioning prison. She could not bear that she should have been so martyred and now should dwell on her martyrdom; sometimes, in fact, rather revel in it, as on every July the fourteenth, when she pinned on that badge made like a prison gate and went proudly to London to the meeting at Mrs Pankhurst’s Memorial. As a child, Harriet had always averted her eyes from that brooch. Now she was afraid that these two would think her mother freakish. Her quick, doubtful look at Charles met his enigmatic stare. She sipped her sherry. Her mother watched her indulgently, as if confident that a glass of sherry would not turn her girl’s head, that temptation on a larger scale even would be sturdily rejected.
    â€˜And did you go on hunger-strike?’ Julia asked in an encouraging voice.
    Lilian whitened; but it was to Charles’s credit, Harriet thought, that he suddenly (without seeing Lilian’s face) sharply said: ‘Mother, you are being impertinent!’
    â€˜I couldn’t bear him to say that to me,’ Harriet thought. ‘I should die of shame.’
    But Julia only smiled. ‘Silly Charles! Women understand one another.’ Her smile warmed as it included Lilian, suggested complicity. Lilian’s answering smile was the faintest tremor. ‘What an extraordinary statement!’ Charles said. He took Harriet’s glass and nodded slightly at her. The nod seemed to be instead of a smile. His smiles were rare. Perhaps there were too many in the house already.
    â€˜My head! My head!’ Lilian said, as they crossed the road to Forge Cottage. ‘How near she lives to us! That old enchantress!’
    â€˜I rather liked her,’ Harriet said sulkily. ‘She was so different.’
    Walking in this warm air stirred up her melancholy. Quiet broke quiet. The still early evening had autumn in it. Grass was tawny; hedges dusty. Under trees late wasps tunnelled into sleepy pears; windfalls rotted. Golden-rod and michaelmas-daisies had begun to be the only flowers in the garden.
    She went straight up to her bedroom and sat on the side of the bed, her hands locked tight between her knees, her teeth clenched, as if only by hardness of bone against bone, nails driven against knuckles, could she resist the excavation of her flesh by her passion, support herself against the daily riddling away of her