sunshowerdandelion | 11.02.2025 (2): Affecting Passage

I'm reading A Game of Hide and Seek by Elizabeth Taylor (not the famous actor, but the author) and this part really affected me. Harriet and Vesey's love affair has been so rocky and desperate in quiet ways that this brief sunlight moved me greatly. This is the only scene in a 260-page book where the love is a little less complicated (Harriet has dropped a glass, broken it, and Vesey is bandaging her wrist in a room full of people, and also Harriet's husband).

Imperturbably, Vesey unrolled the bandage over Harriet’s hand and the blood starting through it was soon covered, as her nervousness was by his sympathy. She watched his bent head, his expressionless face. He had the power to cut her off from the rest of the room, so that Kitty’s rushes of kindness were scarcely heard, and Charles’s words no longer mortified her. His silent attention so enisled her that it was as if he bandaged her heart as well as her hand. He heeded nothing else in the room, but what he was doing. His very lack of words upheld her, steadied, even, her love for him, to which this terrible evening, so otherwise devised, had quite committed her.

The above might be read as pretty standard, but within the book's tortured love, I'm so happy Vesey and Harriet had at least one moment of uncomplicated love. And this is it. I think a lot of people don't manage that, and I'm happy that while the book's filled with so much loneliness, desolation, unsaid things and withering of love, there is still this affirmation.