— What’s the owl doing? Arthur whispered.
— Killing things, said Ivy matter-of-factly.
Kasim was deeply asleep the next morning when Molly pushed open the door to his bedroom. The intrusion must have sounded an alarm in some deep chamber of himself, summoning him to the surface: he sat up quickly with a yell.
— What are you doing in here? What time is it?
It seemed to him it must be unreasonably early – dawn at least. Molly’s hair was wet and she was wearing a towelling bathrobe; her skin was flushed pink and damp from her bath.
— Nine o’clock. Everyone’s getting up. I’ve got good news. Guess what?
Confusedly aroused and sweaty from his dreams, Kasim felt at a disadvantage: probably his breath stank too. When Molly sat down on the side of his bed he imagined he could feel her wetness leeching into his blankets. Was she naked underneath that robe? She announced with glee that her iPhone had started working again. — The hair dryer must have done the trick, she said. — I never though it would. Isn’t that great? I’m so relieved.
He was aghast at her prattling on about her phone – as if he cared. And when she’d gone out again he felt exposed because she’d seen inside his room that was too tidy and too empty: austere as a cell, with only a thin rug on bare floorboards, the walls painted a horrible icy pale blue. This décor seemed to stand for a certain kind of middle-class Englishness he loathed, chilly and superior and withholding, despising material comfort. His clothes were piled too neatly on the chair, his trainers tucked too obediently underneath it, side by side. He had created a kind of mystique for the others when he retreated inside this room to be alone, pretending he was working. But now Molly had seen inside it for herself, she knew he had no books with him, and that the room was only bleak and bare.
Five
PILAR COMPLAINED THAT she felt out of condition because she was missing her regular swimming sessions; Harriet said there was a pool in a hotel nearby that they could use, and so the two women drove off together in Harriet’s car after breakfast one morning. Harriet had used this place before. It was a gloomy Victorian hotel built of red stone at the top of an inlet on the coast, surrounded by a caravan park; the pool was in a basement excavated underneath the building, lit by artificial light. The girl on reception opened it up for them reluctantly, and had to telephone the manager to find out how much to charge them, as non-residents. Harriet wanted to apologise to her sister-in-law – how dismally claustrophobic this pool must seem to anyone used to swimming outdoors. Then she remembered how Pilar had reproached her for always harking back to Argentina. Perhaps she accepted the silly pool as part of an England she was determined to belong to.
Yellow lamps like half shells were set against its walls all round, casting their light oddly upwards so that the water seemed oily, breaking up into shifting flat forms when they disturbed it. Pilar and Harriet changed into similar plain black swimming costumes. They were both strong swimmers, preferring crawl; really the pool was too short for them, but at least they had it to themselves. Swallowed in the muffling, booming underground acoustic, Harriet felt a kind of equality with the other woman for the first time – in the water her body, sleek and streamlined, didn’t let her down. Perhaps after all they could be friends; Harriet glowed still, because Pilar had chosen to confide in her, or half-confide. For a while they swam up and down ignoring one another, absorbed in the release of physical exercise. Then Pilar challenged Harriet to a race – four lengths of the pool. Harriet knew that she was faster: she was never normally competitive but now she went all out to win, and felt a surge of power – she could have easily gone on for twenty lengths, or forty. Heaving herself half out against the side of the pool, chlorinated water streaming in her nose and eyes, she was breathless and laughing with triumph. They raced again as soon as they got their breath back. All Harriet’s shyness and awkwardness were suspended while she was slicing through the water, buoyed up by her unexpected happiness.
After their swim they stripped out of their sodden costumes and towelled themselves in separate little cubicles, getting dressed side by side, not speaking, hearing each other moving around and bumping against the flimsy dividers. They went outside to drink hot chocolate in the hotel garden, which was built on terraces above a steep wooded coombe, descending to the estuary; the sun on the water below turned its calm surface to a gleaming zinc sheet, too bright to look at. Pilar combed out her wet hair with her fingers. She seemed preoccupied and serious, and began asking questions – brusquely, staring across Harriet’s shoulder – about Harriet’s old life, when she was involved in politics and an activist for various causes. Did she ever regret what she’d done in those days?
— Why do you ask? That’s a difficult question.
— You don’t look like a revolutionary, Pilar said bluntly.
Harriet wouldn’t have consented to talk about this painful subject with anybody else, but she saw what an effort it took to ask her; mostly Pilar’s conversation was practical and impersonal. Roland had told them how the shadow of Pilar’s uncle’s politics hung over their family – very likely any secrets had to do with him. Harriet said that she hadn’t really been much of a revolutionary, she’d never done anything daring or sensational. — I suppose I did think I was helping the revolution along, which seems ridiculous now. All that campaigning and leafleting, and the meetings and demonstrations. I earned money by temping, in offices mostly – but it was as if the me that worked all day hardly existed. I used to believe I was sacrificing myself for something. I was sacrificing myself – but it was for the wrong thing. It was worse than nothing. It was beside the real political point. Other people were doing the real, political work, trying to change things for the better. We despised them because they were reformists, they weren’t revolutionary enough.
Her story seemed far-fetched, told in the sunshine in the country garden. There was no one else out there with them, it was still early; the blanching, scouring light made the white china cups blaze on the table between them. The plastic cloth was weighed down with stones at the corners against any breezes blowing inland, but at that moment the stillness and heat seemed absolute. Nothing stirred, except the bees and other insects, in the flowerbeds planted with tall spiky yucca and acanthus and ornamental grasses. Pilar was reading Harriet’s face intently. — I’m interested in people who change their minds, she said. — Switch from one thing to the other. Did you change your mind all at once? In one day?
— Of course it wasn’t in one day, Harriet said. And she hadn’t switched from one thing to another: she hadn’t turned into a fascist or a conservative or anything. She hadn’t stopped hating injustice and cruelty and suffering, or believing that it was important to act against them. But she had withdrawn from all the shapes of her old life, leaving it behind her like a shell. And then she had felt that she didn’t have any shape of her own, without it. She hadn’t any energy left over for a new involvement in the world. She had been ill for a while, really quite ill. Christopher had helped her through that bad time – he was an apostate too.
— Revolution here is like a tea party for children, Pilar said. — In England you take so much for granted. You have no idea.
— We have no idea. I know that.
— Where I come from, revolutionaries are terrible people. And the other ones are just as terrible. It’s all death and endless conflict, making trouble for people who just want to live their lives.
— What kind of trouble? For your family in particular. You mentioned something the other day.
Pilar made an angry dismissing gesture, pushing her cup away. — I can’t begin, she said. — I’m not ready to talk about it. I didn’t mean to bring these stupid complications into Roland’s life.
Insanely, Harriet found herself wanting to confess everything. She wanted to explain to Pilar how once she would have judged against her just because of her background and her type – but she didn’t know how Pilar would respond, she didn’t want her t
o recoil. She hated to think now about her old mistaken confidence, when she had divided up the world into the ones who were nobly wronged, and those who wronged them. Needless to say she had imagined her own family – her bourgeois family – on the culpable side. They hadn’t ever been rich exactly, but they had always had education and an assumption of superiority, they were the inheritors and not the disinherited. She had thought that her whole life ought to be a kind of expiation of this privilege. This all seemed histrionic to her in retrospect.
Ivy was alone in the den on the front wall, setting out clock patience again, when – breaking into the peace which had seemed impermeable – the Pattens’ car was suddenly all noisy presence in their lane. Its shiny red roof slid sinisterly close below her, then the car turned into the courtyard of the barn conversion opposite, crackling over the small stones and spitting them behind it. Hopeful, Ivy watched Janice Patten climb out from the driver’s seat: it seemed wholly possible that, through some fluke or break in Ivy’s flawed child understanding, Mitzi might come bounding out of the red car when Janice opened the rear door, and pay her necessary visit to a succession of sniffing places around the yard. Then everything would be all right again. But Claude Patten got out of the car instead, and stood stretching and groaning on the gravel. Janice only took some bags off the back seat. But if their dog was dead, how could they be so ordinary?
The last king – diamonds – appeared too soon; Ivy collected her cards together and climbed down from the wall, then wandered inside the house. Alice was playing something melancholy on the piano in the drawing room, and the music filled her with superstitious dread. She retreated upstairs, not announcing to anyone that the Pattens had arrived. Alone in her bedroom, she climbed under her duvet and began reading a book she had borrowed from the shelves in Alice’s room, and had read at Kington before. All the time she was aware of voices coming and going downstairs, and felt herself passed over. When at some point she smelled baking she realised, martyred, that she hadn’t had lunch. Finishing the book she put it back and took another one. Reading was consoling, when you knew in advance everything that had to happen.
Roland drove into town while Pilar was out with Harriet, to get the newspapers and check his emails – although Alice said they didn’t want newspapers, not at Kington. — Can’t we not know the news, just for a while? The world will get along fine without us being aware of what’s happening in it.
— No one says you have to read them.
— But if I don’t they sit expectantly, the news leaks out of them.
Molly asked to come: she wanted to show Kasim the amusement arcades she had loved when she was a child. On the way into town the young ones sat together in the back seat of the Jaguar; Roland imagined Kasim’s hand on Molly’s leg, bare under her shorts, against the leather upholstery – although he’d never actually seen them touching and there was no sign of anything more between her and Kasim than a frisson of attraction. Roland had always been delighted by his daughter – her easy compliance, her grace; he loved her easily, with a strong current of feeling. Because it was obvious she wasn’t intellectual, he had never put any pressure on her to do well at school; that dreary parental fixation on achievement seemed to him a distraction from the real values of art and thought. Now he was taken aback by how much the idea of her sexual life troubled him. He didn’t like Kasim; it was a strain keeping ahead of him in conversation, negotiating with his ignorance, his quick cleverness, his high opinion of himself. He flattered Roland almost negligently, as though he were bound to be pleased by it, and cheerfully pronounced his bleak verdicts on politics, on the economy, on the future of the planet. Roland was glad when, after he parked behind the Co-op, they agreed to go their separate ways.
In the library he was scrupulously polite, charming the librarian, then checked his emails among the spider plants and oversized romances and the tiny chairs in the children’s section. A publisher wanted a foreword for a new series of film scripts; someone wanted a keynote for a conference on film iconography; his agent had forwarded him some nice remarks on a piece he’d written for the Guardian – it all reconnected Roland with his public self. He couldn’t imagine a life without work at its heart; it was a frame redeeming everything flawed and incomplete. What he dreaded was coming to the end of his interest, finding himself bored; in his thirties he had panicked, feeling trapped inside his university department, then made strategic efforts to develop a career reaching beyond it. He tried to imagine how it must be for Alice, having pinned all her aspirations on her personal fulfilment and her relationships. Perhaps everything would be different if she had succeeded as an actress.
When he had finished in the library he bought himself coffee and a sandwich, and sat with his newspaper at a café table on the pavement; catching sight of Molly and Kasim wandering past, he pretended not to notice them. Kasim was biting into a burger wrapped in a greasy napkin, Molly was licking ice cream. Strolling along with the crowd of desultory holidaymakers, they didn’t look quite like everyone else. No matter how scruffily and carelessly they were dressed they were marked out by their class and education, and by Kasim’s brown skin – these old-fashioned resorts were still remarkably white, it was striking when you were used to the crowds in the big cities. Roland couldn’t help himself chafing at the narrowness and dullness of the little town. Sitting out like this on the street in any small town in France or Tunisia or Brazil, he’d have felt alive and stimulated, observing everything excitedly, drinking it in. He couldn’t enjoy this place, it was too familiar, it was home.
Molly and Kasim had played ice hockey in the arcades, skimming flat discs on a table, then fished for furry toys with a mechanical arm. They had exchanged the reams of tickets they won for a white china vase in the shape of a crumpled boot, which Kasim said he was going to give as a present to Alice, just to watch how it put her on the spot, having to appear grateful when it was the ugliest thing she’d ever seen. They had passed a tattoo parlour on their way up the street, and now he was trying to coax Molly into having a tattoo.
— Just a teeny, teeny little one. Just a tiny butterfly, say. On your ankle.
— You’re joking! You must be joking. I’d rather die.
— I don’t know what you’re worried about. Come on, I gave up smoking, don’t you think I’m suffering? It’s only a little needle pricking away at the surface of your skin, just the very surface. It doesn’t take that long. A couple of hours, say. Little needles full of ink. That’s all. They keep them very clean. Your ankle’s a long way from your brain.
— You’re doing it deliberately, she exclaimed, only half enjoying it. — You’re teasing me! I know you are.
Ivy’s mother, looking in suspiciously from the bedroom door, asked what she was up to. — Why aren’t you playing outside in this lovely sunshine?
— Why should I? I hate everyone.
— Don’t be silly. The Pattens have arrived, and Janice has come over. Alice has made a cake. Needless to say she’s left a fine mess in the kitchen.
— I wanted to make a cake, Ivy said. — It’s not fair.
Her mother shut the door and went away.
When Ivy heard Janice Patten’s voice downstairs in the drawing room – deep as a man’s, but chattier – she left her book open on her pillow and dawdled reluctantly down the staircase, first hanging over the banister to listen, then trying to enter the room invisibly: she would have liked to snake along the floor on her belly then conceal herself under a chair. But Janice was on the lookout. — I spy with my little eye, she said in a sprightly, fake-surprised voice, — I do believe it’s Princess Ivy.
Janice had an idea that her neighbours were arty and eccentric, and saved up stories about them: they were part of the local history along with their grandfather, even if they were letting that lovely old house decline into a dreadful state. Ivy had forgotten she was wearing the silky petticoat. It was stained and torn now and she had only put it on again this morning as a kind of penance. Giving up
snaking, she plonked herself, pouting, in a chair.
— Someone’s in a mood, Fran apologised.
— I wanted to do cooking, Ivy said. — Mum, you promised I could.
— Darling, I wish you’d been helping me, Alice said. — Why didn’t you say? My cake’s a disaster, it’s flat as a pancake. Listen, Janice, if you’d rather have a biscuit …
Janice reassured her insincerely.
Alice contemplated her cake. — Actually, it is a biscuit.
Fran and Alice were so eagerly hospitable – fussing round Janice, bringing out the old story about the lady with the flowing hair in the teacups (Janice was expert in antiques) – that Ivy could tell they wished Janice hadn’t come over. She was tall and bulky with a small head and pink skin and small quick blue eyes glancing everywhere; her surprising shock of yellow silky curls was beginning to grey and her silk shirt was tight over her bosom, its button straining under pressure. — Talking of moods, she said, — Claude’s taken to his bed. He claims he’s exhausted after the journey even though I drove all the way.
— It is exhausting, Alice sympathised. — I’m a back-seat driver and I know just how he feels. In fact I’m exhausted just thinking about driving. I could climb right in there with Claude. Well, not literally with Claude, obviously.
Janice said Alice was welcome to him, warning that he snored and kicked like a horse. Cross-legged on the floor, Arthur was painting his fingernails with Molly’s clear varnish, dipping the little brush in the bottle with scrupulous concentration. — Doesn’t anyone think they ought to stop him? Ivy said wearily. — Isn’t he bound to get varnish everywhere? That clear stuff is a waste of time anyway. Nothing looks any different afterwards.
— It strengthens your nails, said Arthur.
— He’s making a lovely job of it, Fran said. — Molly won’t mind.
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