Past

by Hadley, Tessa

  Expert from long practice, he manoeuvred the drawer into position and pushed it home. Then he stood behind Pilar while she brushed her hair in front of the oval mirror in the wardrobe, looking not at himself but at her. Her emphatic beauty – it was harsh, even – filled him with a yearning whose point was that it couldn’t be satisfied. The enchanting surface, drawing him again and again, was all its own meaning, not signifying anything – her beauty couldn’t be subject to his understanding. He slipped his hands against her skin under the loose red blouse. — We can go whenever you want, he said. — We’ve shown our faces now, and you’ve met everyone. We could leave Molly here and go off on our own for a few days. I know my sisters can be hard work, Alice was awful the other day. We could go to the Veneto, I could show you the villas.

  Pilar seemed taken aback by his suggestion. She leaned sinuously into his touch. — Oh no, let’s stay. I like it here. It’s the real England, isn’t it? I’m growing fond of it.

  Ceremonially, over coffee in the dining room, Kasim presented Alice with the china boot. — I bought this for you, he said, mumbling and looking away as if he was full of feeling. — I thought you’d like it, and I wanted to thank you, for inviting me down here. It means a lot to me. So I wanted to get you something special.

  Alice, unwrapping the boot, only faltered for the least fraction of a second. Her bright face and performance of charmed surprise were always ready to be touched into life. — Oh, it’s a marvellous boot, darling Kas. Look how cleverly it’s done, with all the leathery little folds! I shall fill it full of flowers. I love it. Thank you.

  She was gracious as if she were an actress practised at receiving tributes. Molly suffered physically from seeing anyone deceived, she couldn’t bear pitying their foolish hope. — He knows it’s not marvellous, Aunt Alice, she said. — He’s just kidding you. We won it in the arcades.

  — Now Molly’s ruined it, Kas said crossly. — Why did you ruin it?

  Fran laughed and said she could remember winning one of those boots herself, when she was a kid. Alice’s expression was still open and smiling, only faintly bruised, looking from face to face, willing to be amused at her own gullibility. — And I was so touched, thinking you’d chosen it specially for me, Kas. I suppose I should have been insulted.

  It was characteristic that, exposed, she didn’t recoil into herself but waded in deeper. She told the others then about her walk and the beauty of the landscape and her happiness, lying in that field in the afternoon. She said it had been transcendent, she’d seemed to feel the pulse of the universe through her own body, and had understood at last all those old myths where the gods took on natural forms to make love to mortal women. Roland was embarrassed for his sister; she ought to keep her ecstasies to herself. Why did she always have to bring everything round to sex? She couldn’t help herself falling into this mode of charged flirtation, even when there was no one to flirt with. Didn’t it occur to her that as far as Kasim was concerned she was halfway to being an old woman, past her best? It was bad enough that her affair with Kasim’s father had dragged on painfully for years. Roland resented having to see his sister through the boy’s eyes.

  Harriet and Pilar were sitting together on the terrace. At the dinner table Harriet had studied, fascinated, how easily the red chiffon blouse fell against Pilar’s brown arms and neck. In the half-light, her shawl slipping down her arms, the red of the blouse retreated and became transparent, so that Harriet could make out what Pilar was wearing underneath it – not a bra, but a glimmering silken slip which slipped and rode over her breasts as she moved. Her silver earrings glinted, catching the light from inside the room. Darkness thickened around them and Harriet gave way to her longing, watching Pilar’s mouth move as she talked: the full supple lips, greasy with crimson, pressing together and opening decisively, her ripe accent taking on sensuous form. Native English, by contrast, seemed a limp, attenuated thing. Pilar was complaining that Molly’s mother was obstructive and difficult; apparently Roland thought Molly should move to a private school for her sixth form. As Roland had always been keen on state education, it was more likely this idea came from Pilar: Harriet wasn’t in sympathy with it, and she liked Molly’s mother. Yet none of this shuffling of opinion and judgement meant a thing. She had drunk a couple of glasses of wine. The kiss in her imagination was brilliant and liquid, scalding; she was falling down inside it like a tunnel.

  Harriet had noticed the lipstick mess on her sheets in the afternoon but hadn’t said anything, not wanting to get the children into trouble. Then, when she went up to bed at the end of the evening, she found her carefully folded tee shirts all jumbled together in the drawer, and her diary defaced with one page torn. It didn’t occur to her to doubt that it was Arthur who had written Arthur in it, and those other things. She stood staring at his scribbling. Her brother and Pilar were moving around in the next room, preparing for bed, and all the time her awareness of their movements and low-voiced intimacy was raw. How much could Arthur have understood of what he read? He was only a baby, on the first readers in primary school – and she had believed her meanings were more or less hidden in innocent descriptions, available only to herself. Yet the scrawled words made her feel nonetheless as if she’d been found out – he had dragged up out of her diary entries what was most humiliating and raw. U are stupid. Fuck. Fuk. Fuk you. Leeve me alone. She summoned her sane understanding: children were capable of random silly malevolence, she should not take this seriously. But Arthur had seemed to like her. She felt his betrayal, and the truth of the violence of passion – fuk you, fucking, fuck: ugly and awful as a twisting knife.

  Six

  ALICE SAT ON the top gate, one shoulder shrugged up, holding her phone against her ear, talking to friends, one after another. Half absorbed in her talk, she also twisted slowly on the gate, taking in the scene around her which her friends couldn’t see. The morning was resplendent, weightless: light lay on the fields like gauze. Below her the slate roof of Kington House flashed, solar panels on other roofs in the village drank up power. A family of buzzards held their distances from one another as they floated on thermals above the scooped out valley – and she felt as if she floated too in the blue air: the woods on the valley’s other flank were more densely blue, gathering darkness under their canopy. The landscape’s pattern seemed as simplified as a child’s jigsaw puzzle, locking together in bold pieces. Two old horses ambled to a fence to watch her, cocking their ears at her voice which must seem a silly shiny thread drawn across the mute surface of their day. A fire in the corner of a field far off was weakly orange in all the brilliance, its rising smoke filmy against the light, distorting it like old glass. She imagined she could hear its crackle, amplified by the distance.

  — Hello, guess who? It’s me. I know you don’t know where I am. I’m in a retreat – no, not literally a retreat, I haven’t actually taken the veil or anything. Mind you, I really might one day, you never know. I love being cut off from everything, just going deep, deep inside myself. Though I don’t think I could bear the early mornings – I mean, if I was a nun. Anyway, how are you? What are you up to? I was thinking about you. I haven’t been phoning anyone but I wanted to talk to you.

  Quite often she was cut off mid-sentence – the signal wasn’t reliable – and didn’t bother to call back but went on to the next friend. She could have used the landline in the house, but there was something about the old brown phone in the hall which rebuked frivolity; it was better to be perched up here, with the world unfolded around her, a vision of easy possibility. At least half of the friends she called were men. Alice was good at catching and keeping friends of both sexes, she was loyal and involved and generous with her time, and other people hardly knew about the opposite impulse in her, to crawl away from them and bury herself, inert: she told them about it readily enough, but with such joking confidence that they weren’t bound to take her seriously.

  Waking this morning, she had felt so strong and young. She had woken from a rat
her amazing dream of innocent, pleasurable, uncomplicated sex – with someone indistinct, no one she knew. The dream had taken her by surprise; she believed that it must have a message for her, so she had dug out her phone from where she’d pushed it away out of sight in a drawer under her clothes, and plugged it in to charge. Now she was contacting everyone recklessly, promiscuously. One of them must be the one. She was living in such expectation of something happening: there were several possibilities. She felt herself overflowing with sympathetic imagination, ready to fall again, to submit to a new continent of discovery. You were adored, Alice, adored, she heard in the air, teasing her. It could be any one of a number of favourite men of hers: a poet, a real one, who taught at Goldsmiths; or a colleague who worked in front of house with her at the theatre, a few years younger than she was but he might not know that; or the gentle, subtle man who had built her some bookshelves in an alcove recently – she didn’t actually phone him, she had no excuse unless she wanted him to do more carpentry work, which she couldn’t afford.

  — It’s marvellous here, she said to an old friend, a youth worker who’d recently split up with his wife. — I’m with my brother and sisters and their families. Eating and drinking, sleeping, walking in the fields. Yesterday I lay down by myself under some trees and I felt as if I could really feel the world turning, you know? I thought about the gods and how they came disguised in natural forms to seduce mortal women. I felt like one of those women. Not like Daphne turning into a tree. Is there one who turns into a sod of earth? That’s what I felt like, a constituent part of the earth. This is the most beautiful place in England but don’t tell anybody, we don’t want everyone to find out about it.

  Everyone was friendly and pleased to hear from her; there was flirting. She flirted, she heard herself teasing and lingering, she fell into the familiar motions with a lurching sensation as if some well-oiled, habituated machinery were starting into action. And yet nothing ignited her imagination or penetrated her mood: she liked them all but she only liked them, and saw them in a disenchanted clear light, unmuddied by desire or need. When she climbed down from the gate she was as thoroughly alone as she had been at the beginning of all the conversations. She was perfectly all right – in fact she was safer, intact in her own possession. But it was as if some part of the spectrum of her responsiveness, which she had counted on, had shut down as completely as if it had never been. Was this what was in store for her, in her middle age? There was plenty of warm friendship but there was not the other thing – the deepest immersion, the secret underlying all the rest. But where, then, had her dream come from?

  As Alice returned inside the house, submerging in the half-dark of the scullery and blind from the brightness outside, Harriet waylaid her, asking her to look at something, saying she needed her advice. Harriet led the way upstairs, then closed the door of her room furtively behind them and pulled out a plastic carrier from underneath the bed.

  — You know about this sort of stuff, she said. — I bought this. But probably it’s a disaster. I need you to tell me the truth, Alice. Don’t do that thing you do when you’re just flattering people.

  — You bought yourself a dress! How extraordinary! I haven’t seen you in a dress in a thousand years. But wherever did you find to buy anything, round here?

  Harriet said anxiously that she’d got it from a shop in the High Street, was that a mistake? She was driving to the sea today with Pilar and wondered whether she should wear it. Alice tried not to show in her face that she would not have even looked in the windows of any of those shops. The clothes displayed in them were a kind of doom, she thought – fusty and elderly, unthinkable. Putting them on you would be surrendering all hope of joy. Harriet had bought something flowery and fussy in pink and blue, chiffon lined with cotton, with a full skirt: like a party dress for a little girl. It could at a stretch have looked sexy as a retro parody on a sixteen-year-old, on Molly.

  — It’s pretty, Alice said, hesitating. — No, no: it is, it’s pretty.

  — You don’t like it.

  — You have to put it on, or I can’t see whether it works or not. I wish you had let me come with you.

  With a bitter face, resigned, Harriet stripped off her tee shirt and trousers and then was smothered momentarily inside the dress, emerging with an odd effect as if a weathered old wooden doll had been stuffed into a Barbie outfit, crucified inside it. Her brown arms and brown muscled calves seemed androgynous against the pale chiffon. — Your expression is a picture, Alice! Is it that bad?

  Alice was so sorry. — I’m such a fusspot. It isn’t right. It’s too – you know – frou-frou. The cut’s all wrong for you, and it’s baggy over the bust for starters. Can you take it back?

  Harriet began clowning as if they were still children, marching up and down the room in a funny stiff walk, swinging her legs from the hips and simpering, to make Alice laugh. — I’m the mad old woman you avoid sitting next to on the bus, aren’t I?

  — Stop it, really. You just don’t have any experience buying clothes. It takes years: you have to know what you’re doing, what you want. You have to spend hours of your life actually planning it, concentrating on nothing else. And of course you have to keep up with what the idiotic fashion is. It makes me ashamed of myself, just telling you these things. You haven’t been vain enough, Hettie. Look, I’ll lend you something if you want to dress up.

  — No, I’m going to wear it! Harriet insisted, teasing, escaping into a corner of the room. — I’m going to let everybody see!

  Alice made her take off the dress and brought her better things to try. — You need to dress to flatter this wonderful figure, she said. — You’re so lucky to be so lean, without even having to worry. This shape looks marvellous under clothes.

  In a spirit of genuine selflessness – she liked these things herself, and never had enough money to buy what she wanted – Alice gave Harriet a grey cord straight skirt and a cream silk shirt with a pretty scooped collar. She stood behind Harriet when she was wearing these new clothes and did something to her hair, pushing her fingers into it tenderly like a hairdresser, fluffing it up, scrutinising in the mirror. — There, she said. — Grow it a little bit until it’s softer round your face. We’re getting older, we can’t afford to be so hard on ourselves. And you need beads or something: just a single strand, nothing fussy. I’ll have a look at what I’ve got. You see, you should go for this understated thing, that the French women do. It suits you, you look distinguished.

  — Distinguished, Alice? What’s that a euphemism for?

  — Not for anything. It’s what you are.

  Alice rested her cupped hands a moment longer on her sister’s head, feeling the warmth in her skull, the stillness of her unexpected submission. She wanted to tell Harriet about last night’s dream of sex and how it had coloured her morning, making her mysteriously happy: but of course she couldn’t. You couldn’t describe those things aloud in your waking life: that move and then this, the affectionate faceless nameless lover, those suffusing pleasurable sensations. There were no words to fit their innocence. Translated into words they would turn into something cheap, Harriet would be disgusted with her.

  Ivy and Arthur were supposed to tidy their own beds. They only had to put their pyjamas under their pillows and straighten their duvets yet they groaned and protested, dragging their feet as if the work exhausted them. Then while they cleaned their teeth in the bathroom their mother stood over them, plaiting Ivy’s long hair, twisting the stretch bands around the ends of the plaits to fasten them in a habituated deft movement.

  — Dad never makes us clean them, Ivy complained. — Not in the mornings as well as at night.

  — That’s just his irresponsibility. Do you want to have bad teeth like your father’s, full of fillings?

  — His are quite brown, Arthur said thoughtfully.

  — This is really unfair. They’re waiting for us, they’ll go without us!

  — Of course they won’t. And you have to be se
nsible while you’re out, Ivy. You’re in charge of making sure Arthur doesn’t go too near the edge of the path, if it’s steep. Do everything Molly says.

  Spitting into the sink, Ivy cast her mother a look heavy with world-weariness. Fran kissed both children while she was drying their mouths on the towel; they twisted their faces away impatiently, though not in hostility, and when they had set off along the road with Kasim and Molly she was at a loss what to do without them. Alice was reading her old letters, Roland was writing something in his room, Harriet and Pilar had gone off to swim. At the end of each term, when the school holidays were approaching, Fran would be longing to escape from her job and get back to her private life, stale from the long enforced confinement with her pupils, chafing at school’s repetitions. After a few weeks of holiday her interest began to point the other way, back to the ordered routines of her classroom. Fran was a popular teacher, although she was strict and unsparing, with a biting wit sometimes at the students’ expense; she pushed them hard and got them their results. It was a point of honour with her, that she expected as much from the difficult students as from the docile ones. But every day in Kington was so shapeless; she was daunted, having to invent the ways to fill so many empty hours.

  Plugging in the radio in the scullery, she began the slow work of washing and rinsing dirty clothes by hand in the big enamel sink. There was always at least this bottom-line grim satisfaction of grinding one’s way through the list of things needing to be done. Their grandmother’s monstrous ancient electric spin dryer had to be manhandled from its place against the wall; juddering with stunning violence on the stone floor, it spat gouts of its own rust into the rinse water, which Fran collected in a plastic bowl under the perished hose. Every year they expected the dryer to die, or at least electrocute somebody: improbably it persisted, built with the solidity of a tank. Eventually there was pegging out wet clothes in sunshine on the washing line, which for its moment was bucolic. At home Fran had an automatic washer and a tumble dryer. She had half forgotten the fulfilment of pegging out.