— Hear them doing what? asked Ivy.
— Never you mind, Molly said.
She was shocked and sorry for him. — I know my phone doesn’t really matter, she said. — It’s only a thing.
Roland and Pilar, when they got back, sat with the newspapers in the garden – she had hers open at the financial section but wasn’t reading it, she was dozing in the slanting late yellow sunlight. Her eyes snapped open when Alice emerged from the drawing room to stand at the top of the terrace steps; the French windows behind her seemed to open onto a pit of darkness, as if she came from excavations in an underworld. Roland and Pilar – sitting at a disadvantage below, low-slung on the lawn in deckchairs – were irritated immediately, co-opted into her stage show. Fran was topping and tailing gooseberries on the terrace steps with a pair of scissors, Harriet was reading her book on a blanket on the grass. All the young ones were somewhere upstairs. Alice was dazzled in the brightness, blinking away tears which, because of her theatricality in that moment, seemed like false tears. Her voice was ripe with feeling.
— Listen to this, Roland. Look what I’ve found. These are letters you wrote to Mum when she was in hospital.
— I doubt it. I don’t remember writing any.
— But you did! They’re just beautiful. Dear Mater. Do you remember, you used to call her that? It was kind of a joke, against that old public school thing, but you sort of also wanted to be like one of those boys, and you were having after-school lessons in Latin. Dear Mater, Things go on here much the same, except that without you they’re not the same, they’re pretty dreary.
Roland lowered his paper warningly. — Don’t read from them, please.
— But why not? Don’t be ashamed of having feelings. I expect you’re very sorry for yourself in hospital. I know I would be. So here are some little gems from family life to entertain you. Dad makes us tea but it’s quite awful, he doesn’t have your woman’s touch. Even your baked beans, it turns out, are a manifestation of your culinary genius. He burns the toast and then puts too much butter on. Sometimes when I’m in bed I think I can hear your voice downstairs.
Her brother and sisters sat blenched in the stark light, rigidly still, as if something passing through the garden harrowed them. — You’re really insufferable, Alice, Roland said.
— Mater, I wish you knew …
Getting to her feet, Pilar crumpled her newspaper violently in her lap, then stepped up onto the terrace, snatching the letters out of Alice’s hand almost before she had time to flinch. — You can’t take them from me, Alice cried indignantly. — They’re my mother’s letters.
— I’m afraid they’re Roland’s, in a court of law.
The two women glared, Pilar hugging the letters to her chest. Against the darkness behind them their attitudes seemed frozen, their faces like masks, the light wiping out all nuance in their expressions. — But this isn’t a court of law! Alice exclaimed. — It’s a family, perhaps you hadn’t noticed.
— I noticed all right. Families are always the worst, the most litigious. I prefer the law.
— Well, we’re different. We don’t live by a set of rules. Perhaps you find it difficult fitting in.
Roland sat uncomfortably, accepting the letters when Pilar thrust them at him but not looking at them. She fished her shoes out from under the deckchair and put them on, then strode past Alice into the house; helpless, they all attended to her footsteps, hollow on the uncarpeted stairs. — Well, that was well-managed, Roland said. Smiling only to himself, he put away his glasses and folded his newspaper and then the letter, returning this to its envelope without reading it. He wouldn’t look at his sisters and only conveyed, by the sagging of his shoulders when he followed his wife inside, his patience and resigned tedium at this eruption of stupidity.
— Oh Alice, said Fran. — For goodness sake!
— How could you? said Harriet.
Alice was wounded. — I don’t know why everyone’s so angry with me. Wasn’t it a lovely letter?
— It’s your lack of tact. It was Roland’s letter.
She seemed genuinely bewildered. — Was I tactless?
Both windows were wide open in Roland and Pilar’s bedroom. The sisters couldn’t help overhearing what went on up there: they hardly needed to understand what Pilar was actually saying, in her torrent of outraged exclamation in Spanish. They couldn’t spare much surprise, in the heat of the moment, at Roland’s turning out to be perfectly fluent in Spanish, responding to her – how come he hadn’t showed this off to them before? What galling restraint for the couple to have always spoken in English in front of his family, how annoyingly considerate of them. And comically, his Spanish was so English: so placatory and reasonable. Harriet grabbed her book and the blanket, Fran her colander of gooseberries: they wanted to retreat away from the consequences of what Alice had done. Then Roland – it was his only vehemence – pulled down the sash windows, making them shudder in their frames, muffling the voices abruptly. But still they could hear the drawers rattled in the dressing table, the wardrobe door banged open on its hinges.
— Is she packing? Harriet was horrified. — You’ll have to apologise, Alice. Go up and speak to her. Go now.
— But I can’t, because I’m not sorry.
Fran bore her gooseberries off into the kitchen to make crumble; Harriet lingered, pained, eavesdropping but uncomprehending, in the garden. Alice fled through the keyhole gap into the churchyard and then even went into the church to hide, where she wouldn’t usually go – she was afraid of it, superstitiously, because of the succession of funerals there had been inside it: her mother’s, then her grandfather’s seven years later, and then her grandmother’s. Behind her she closed first the mesh gate, to stop birds flying in, and then the ancient heavy door; the dimness and coolness inside swallowed her. Sounds resounded around its quiet, like stones dropped in a well: she refastened the loud latch, then stepped into her own echo, crossing the nave to huddle against the whitewashed, clammy, powdery, green-stained wall at the end of a pew, where she’d be invisible, she convinced herself, if anyone came after her. She wouldn’t – couldn’t, ever – look at the brass plaque with her mother’s name on it, and the dates of her birth and death, and the line from her grandfather’s poem. Her grandmother hadn’t been able to forgive him that vanity, choosing the words from his own poem.
Light, with a ripple in it like water, quavered through the clear glass in the windows, tinged green from the trees outside. She tried not to move, so that the church could be as it was when she wasn’t in it. Its cold breath – eloquent of worm-eaten wood, hard iron, greasy velvet, hymnbooks sour with damp, damp stone – had waited for her all this time. It was damper now, if anything, because it was only used one week in four. She looked around her almost with curiosity, like a tourist, at the musicians’ gallery in the west end, at the ancient stone font, its carvings worn almost to inexpressiveness, where Harriet had been christened, but not the rest of them (we ran out of steam, her mother had once half-explained, making Alice think for years that babies were christened in hot water). Her grandmother’s altar cloth – cream and yellow and black, in the style of that era when she’d embroidered it, John Piperesque bold childlike forms – was spotted with mould in one corner.
She throbbed with the aftershocks of her argument with Pilar, or with everyone – it was a jagged pain. But almost at once, even as she sank into her corner in the pew, Alice gave up defending herself to herself. Conscience – like something weightless, cobwebby – settled on her out of the air; the old church must be thick with it, after all the centuries of soul-searching. It was always a relief, she found, to accuse yourself and lose all the arguments. With the same blundering as when she offended, she went straight to imagining herself forgiven, because she was so sincerely sorry. How could she have read Roland’s words aloud like that – making a public parade of his feelings, when he was so private? Probably no one had read those letters before except their mother and grandmother. Sh
e wilted and sighed aloud, watching herself doing it in her mind’s implacably accusing eye. What showing off! Pilar had been quite right to snatch the letters from her. With a pang, she felt all her new sister-in-law’s decency and righteousness mustered in the scales against her, as impeccable as her clothes – which were never studied or too fussy. In a revulsion against her own taste, Alice decided there was something stale in it, that her choices were flaky and unsound; she was always trying too hard.
Ivy and Arthur’s den was hollowed out inside a musty dense hedge on top of the front garden wall, beside the crumbling stone gatepost whose gate had rotted into nothingness long ago. It was easy climbing up from the garden side, but the drop to the stony lane, silted in caramel-brown dust, was much steeper, and so the den was forbidden: Ivy associated danger with the bitter smell of the privet. Arthur muddled up privet and private, thinking they meant the same thing. It was a good place for spying but there wasn’t much to spy on, because nothing came that far along the lane; the tractor and its trailers, laden with hay bales or black plastic bags of silage or a few bleating lambs, turned off down the track to the farm before they got as far as Kington House.
Crouched on the mossy flat coping stone that topped the wall, Ivy set out a cramped game of clock patience: her petticoat was a liability in the den, snagging on privet twigs. Arthur watched absorbedly as she turned the cards over, sighing with relief every time it wasn’t a king, irritating her with his optimism; the cards stuck together and she envied Molly’s deft sliding movement. Would it count if she got the patience out now and no one saw? Nobody would believe them. Heavy with her failure to catch Molly’s phone, she cheated once without Arthur noticing. Getting stuck a second time, she gathered the cards up despondently and shoved them into a pocket of the shorts she had on underneath the petticoat.
From their vantage point on the wall, they could see into the yard of the Pattens’ barn conversion across the road. The Pattens weren’t in residence: the yard had been blankly vacant in the sunshine ever since Ivy and Arthur arrived in Kington, roses blooming and going over with no one to pick them, days burgeoning and ebbing unseen – except that the children saw them – against the pink of the high brick barn wall with its slits at the top where the doves eased in and out. It had been ordinary once, if the Pattens were there, for Mitzi to be sloping around their yard, sniffing in corners and signalling results with her plumy tail, or flopped loosejointedly on the cobbles in the heat. Ivy wasn’t even mad about dogs. She had felt fastidiously about Mitzi’s coat – which looked so silky but was greasy to touch – and her bad breath and slobber. Yet now the idea of Mitzi was potent in Ivy’s awareness, like something hidden but present in a landscape; the ruined cottage had simplified in her imagination into a perpetual knot of unease. Away from it, she lost her certainty about what was inside. Weren’t they too young, to be the only ones who knew anything so important?
When Arthur was upset the veins at his pale temples always showed more blue. — Why do you think they closed the door? he asked.
She pretended she didn’t know what he was talking about. — What door?
— Someone might have just shut Mitzi in there for a moment and then gone away and forgotten that they’d done it and been looking for her everywhere.
Ivy was scathing. — Oh, that’s really likely, isn’t it? Unless they suddenly had total amnesia.
— Or otherwise, Arthur went on (he must have been puzzling all this out by himself) — she might have gone in there on her own. When she finished looking round she could have just pushed at the door with her nose, if she wanted to open it wider to come out.
He made a funny little shoving movement to demonstrate, with his own nose. — But she pushed it shut by mistake instead.
Ivy thought this was plausible, though she wouldn’t say so. It was true that Mitzi used to roam for miles in the woods by herself. Pushing the door shut wouldn’t even have seemed like much of a disaster at first: she would have sniffed round again in the room, then barked for a bit, then settled down waiting for someone to turn up. She might have found a comfortable place on a pile of leaves. For some reason this quietly meaningless mishap seemed worse than imagining anybody’s cruelty or neglect. Stoically she refused to show Arthur, by any least gesture of sympathetic feeling, that what he’d guessed at might really have happened. Her face felt iron-stiff with her refusal.
Alice went in search of Pilar, to pour out her abasement. Fran in the kitchen was mashing potatoes for her fish pie. — They’re still upstairs, she said darkly. — But at least it’s gone quiet. I’m making a big pie, on the assumption their departure isn’t imminent.
Alice almost forgot, in her eagerness, to knock at Roland’s bedroom door – remembering, she pulled her hand back from the doorknob as if it burned her. Their voices were not raised now but lowered and tender – she couldn’t tell whether they were speaking in English or Spanish. At any rate, the worst of the row was over. When she did knock, she heard from inside the room a certain muffled bustle and protest which she recognised, and her first instinct was to laugh – how funny to catch out her brother Roland when he’d been making love in the afternoon. Then she reminded herself that her brother wasn’t her intimate any longer, his sex life was none of her business.
— It’s only me, she said apologetically.
Doing penance, she waited a long time on the landing before, soberly, Roland opened the door. Then he stood blocking her way in, fully dressed but barefoot, and as tousled as was possible with his short haircut. She thought he looked her up and down to see what new difficulty she might be landing him in – like a policeman checking whether she had come armed. — I’m such an idiot, Roly, she pleaded. — Can you forgive me?
This didn’t get round him – he frowned, wary of more complications. — I was so out of order with Pilar. Does she know that I’m just jealous? I’m like a great baby, wanting all the attention, making a mess of things. My therapist says I’ve never got over Fran coming along to displace me.
Roland said he hoped her therapist didn’t charge too much, if that was as good as she got – but then stood back, relenting, from the door. Both windows in the room were open wide again, frail shadows from the alder trees stirred in the sunlight on the pink wallpaper, the children’s voices floated from the garden. Pilar was sitting at the dressing table in her slip, pinning up the rich swathe of her chestnut hair. The flesh of her raised arms was brown and firm and Alice thought she was replete with sexual pleasure, and pleasure in being loved. She met Pilar’s eyes in the mirror and stoutly, keeping faith with her new humility, refused to see any sly triumph in them. — Pilar, I’m so sorry for what I said. I was completely in the wrong, and you were right.
Pilar in her reflection held Alice’s gaze but hardly unbent, made no gracious protestation that she was guilty too, or had overreacted. — It’s water under the bridge, she only said, as if she was trying out a new phrase she’d learned, to see its effect.
— I’m so oblivious sometimes, Alice hurried on, — to other people’s feelings.
— Don’t overdo it, Roland said. — That will suffice. You’re no more oblivious than the next man.
His sister threw her arms round him, embarrassing him; firmly, smiling, he extricated himself. Roland had been very close to Alice for a few years, in that painful early teenage time – they were both clever at school and had done their homework in a frenzy of competition. Later, although she was younger, she had seemed to leap ahead of him into adulthood, beginning to have boyfriends and sex and to be in love while he lagged shamefully behind, hopeless at everything except in the world of his books and his study. It was in this time lag, when he was so crippled by his social ineptitude, that he had gained his advantage educationally over his sister, and found his path through to his adult self.
Now she had embarked on this project of reading over their grandparents’ correspondence. She said she was going to write a book about their grandfather but he didn’t believe she would
do it, she didn’t have the discipline. When they got home from their excursions she was sometimes asleep in bed in the middle of the afternoon, or she looked up at them from along the piles of old letters, face smudged with dust, as if she hardly knew them or was expecting someone else. Roland worried about how she drifted. Since she gave up trying to act she had had a long succession of jobs: waitressing and in bars, front of house for various theatres, some private tutoring. She managed on very little money. She had had a few poems published but she had never given herself over to writing with the ruthlessness that it required; her poems were too slight, he thought, they tried too hard to please. When he suggested they should talk about their plans for the house, Alice pleaded for more time; there was plenty of time, she said. Very soon, they must sit down and have their important discussion. But they didn’t need to decide anything just yet. They were enjoying themselves so much, it would be a such a shame to spoil things. Well, she had very nearly spoiled them.
In bed that night, the children invented a new game. The cave under Ivy’s duvet was some sort of underground hall or temple, and she and Arthur returned there between forays into a dangerous world. They often came back hurt and used magic pine cones for healing – Arthur was particularly moving with his groans and his fainting, eyelids fluttering half open. If the grown-ups heard them playing from downstairs then they took no notice. Ivy snapped out instructions to Arthur. She only mentioned the Dead Women in passing, in an undertone, as if he must know whom she meant: they ordered the children to tie their pyjama tops around their heads, or they made them bring sacred water in a tooth mug from the bathroom. The Dead Women weren’t their enemies exactly, and yet she spoke about them warily, in a guarded voice. The fields outside were staring with blue moonlight and the moon-shadows seemed more substantial than daytime ones. They heard the male owl calling and the female’s more subdued response, like a flurry of talk.
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