She touched his cheek very gently with her hand, then calmly turned away to where the child had his hands up to be taken.
‘That’s the boy, Alex,’ she said lightly, and lifted him, and took him off for his nap.
Vic looked about. He felt let down. Something critical had occurred but his understanding had not caught up with it. He pushed his hands deeper into his pockets and began to whistle again, but his heart failed him and after a bit he dropped it. He stepped from the window and went out to the hall.
There was no one in sight. Treating him as one of the family again, they had simply gone off without ceremony.
He walked up and down on the coloured tiles, feeling the assurance he had built up lapse and drain from him.
He sat down in one of the low-backed cherry-wood chairs that were ranged along the wall. They were ornamental. No one ever sat in them.
He got up quickly and went through the house to the kitchen to see if Meggsie was about. The big tiled room was immaculate, as always, but empty, everything washed up and cleared away.
He came back to the hallway, looked about a little, then went upstairs and tried the door to his room.
It was just as he remembered it. Nothing had changed. It gave him an odd little start, the thought that it had been here, clean, cool, ready, all the time he was up there, always in such filth and with nowhere to lay his head. A feeling of anger and self-pity came over him. He rested his brow against the closed door and clenched his fists.
When his passion had passed he turned back into the room and opened a drawer of the dressing table and saw socks there, underpants, too, all neatly folded.
He stood and looked at himself for a time in the mirror, then lay down full-length on the bed.
He did not sleep, but saw himself standing, as he had just a moment ago, at the open door, and the room he was looking into was empty again.
After a supper of cold meat and salad and his favourite pears and junket, Ma insisted on a game of hide and seek. She was apologetic about it — it was to keep Aunt James happy, who loved to sit in the dark and hear them scampering about; but it was really, Vic guessed, for him. It was a hectic affair. They were playing at play, and to make up for their lack of commitment, banged about more than they usually did.
Upstairs, under a net, little Alexander was sleeping, and Lucille, fearful he might be disturbed by the row they were making, kept one ear tuned for his cry. She was barefoot, her hair damp with sweat. Vic too was only half in the game.
At first Pa was It and he found Ma; then Ma found Vic. While the others trooped off to hide he stood with his face to the wall like a dunce in school and counted to a hundred before he was free to go off in his socks and look for them. Once or twice earlier, while they were rushing about seeking places to hide, he had collided with Lucille, but he was shy of her now. He set off to check the pozzies where one or other of them was sure to be squeezed in holding their breath. He knew all the hiding places.
He had let these rooms and their clutter of familiar objects go out of his life. But now, moving through them in the dark, his foot remembered every loose plank, he could judge without fault the precise distance from table-edge to sideboard. He never once bumped into anything. Whatever he felt for was there.
He covered the hallway, all the rooms down one side of it, including the dining room where Aunt James sat laughing, then crossed to the other. A southerly had come up. Each door he opened set the curtains blowing, and from beyond the windows he heard trees in motion. The moon was up, but all this side of the house was dark.
Hidden behind a curtain in what they called the piano room, Ellie saw the door open a crack and a figure appear. ‘Damn,’ she thought.
There was a time, years back, when she would have been breathless at this point with the wish to fool whoever it was that there was no one here. All she thought now was that if she was found she would be It and they would have to begin all over again.
The crack of half-light widened. It was Vic. She could see the shape of him poised there at the threshold, his body so alert that you could feel the energy of it like a new kind of heat in the room. She drew back against the wall. He wasn’t so much looking as setting himself like an animal to catch a scent. His body was hard-edged, separate, intent.
She had seen this quality in him, or thought she had, from the very first day Pa introduced him, and he had stepped out, very sturdy and solemn, to shake hands; looking, with his hair chopped off short as it was again now, and his ears sticking out, very tough and little-mannish, but watchful too, as if for all his squareness and solidity he could be hurt. He had been hard-edged even then, aware of the precise point where he left off and a world began that might not be entirely well-disposed towards him, and which for that reason he had always to be on his guard against.
He was standing just inside the door, compact, firm, tense with the effort of feeling about for some other presence in the room, his eyes in the darkness taking up the light there was, oily-bright.
‘Like a cat,’ she thought.
Caught like this, with her heart beating fast, she too felt like some creature, a rabbit perhaps, but was determined not to be mesmerised.
Then something happened. He gave up playing, that’s what it was; and having decided there was no one there, simply stood, his body eased, in the belief that he was alone and unobserved.
He stood where the light fell. There wasn’t much, but Ellie was accustomed now to the dark. He was looking straight to where she was but did not see her. The curtain rose and fell like a veil, brushing her face. And something in the way the breeze moved and the leaves of the trees clattered gave her the feeling that they were not inside, not any more, but out in the dark somewhere on an unlighted road, and she had come upon him by accident, sleepwalking there. She was looking past his known face to one she had never seen. It was the one he wore when he was too deep in himself to be aware any longer of what he might have to conceal; the face he showed no one, and which even he had not seen.
She heard him sigh. He was very close. Then, thrusting his hands deep into his pockets, he turned on one heel so that he was in profile. He might have been deliberately showing himself to her: first full-face, now this. She was tense, but the little touch of panic she had felt at the beginning was gone. She had given herself up entirely to looking.
She must have made a sound of some kind, just a breath. He turned his head sharply and his face was covered again. He leaned towards her in the dark.
‘Who is it?’ he said, his voice very low. ‘Ellie? Is that you?’
His brow was creased but he was not perturbed, or did not seem to be, that she had seen him. He put his hand out. She froze.
This was the game now. There were rules and they were in operation again. The tips of his fingers came close to her face. He did not touch her but she felt that he had. Her skin tingled.
There was a smile on his mouth. What light there was, which was really no more than a transparency of darkness, was full on him. But what she was seeing still, behind the smile and the clear roundness of his pupils, was the look she had seen earlier, an afterglow as when a bright light has imprinted itself on your eyeball and remains for long seconds after you have looked away.