Past

by Hadley, Tessa

  Then she sat in the study, with daytime television on. She had bought postcards in town, not quite awful enough to be funny: she chose the one of Exmoor ponies grazing. Dear Jeff, she wrote. The children are missing you. They think I’m a tyrant and that you’re much nicer, which is probably true. Only I’m here and you’re not. With the biro she drew a speech bubble on the front of the card, coming out of the mouth of one of the ponies: I wish I was in a band.

  When the family were at Kington, their habit was to stay bunkered down at home, only driving into town, or a mile or two to the beginning of a favourite walk, or on a well-worn pilgrimage to a favourite second-hand bookshop inland. They excused themselves, saying they never grew tired of the walks which began at their front door. This was more than just a recoil of laziness: the past of the place enfolded them as soon as they arrived, they fell back inside its patterns and repetitions, absorbed into what had been done there before. Afterwards, they couldn’t distinguish one holiday at Kington from another. All the walks and picnics and lazy, long sessions of eating and drinking around the dining table blurred together – sunny days and rainy and snowy ones. Which year was it when Molly brought two friends who hardly spoke, except to complain furiously, when they were alone with her, about the bathroom and the food? Or when Christopher rode all the way from the station on his bike, up over the steep range of hills that lay between? All the Christmases they had spent there looked the same in the photographs: only the hairstyles changed. Slowly they aged, wearing the same paper hats. The babies grew into children, Roland’s wives replaced one another – in a long procession, Alice said, exaggerating.

  Harriet and Pilar were driving all the way to the other side of the moor, to find a beach to swim from farther down the coast, where the estuary became the open sea. The break with tradition felt momentous to Harriet, even though they were only going thirty miles – she wasn’t sure of the way, and had to have Pilar check it for her on the map. Something lifted in her mood as she drove, new perceptions seemed possible. Arthur’s scribbles didn’t mean anything. Her mistake over the dress was only funny, it didn’t matter. Usually the moor’s austerity was reproachful but today the scrubby, knobbled, tufted earth was mild in the sunshine and seemed an invitation to play: mauve and tan distances were airy and light hearted. She had looked all right in the blouse Alice gave her, Alice really was clever with these things. Harriet might put it on when they went over to the Pattens for dinner. Perhaps it was not ridiculous, to be distinguished.

  Everything she thought of was slicked with ease and possibility, because Pilar was beside her in the passenger seat; each time Harriet had to change gear she stole looks at her. The trip had been Pilar’s idea in the first place – and it had been obvious she didn’t want Roland to come: swimmers only, she had said. We want to swim in the real sea. Now that girlish insistence was in abeyance and she was quiet, sometimes staring out at the landscape as if it didn’t detain her thought for long. Her hair was fastened back in a sober low ponytail. Harriet was too shy to ask herself what her sister-in-law might be thinking or intending: the other woman’s presence – a gift of luck whose shining surface dazzled her – was for submitting to, not interrogating. Harriet kept even her own meanings hidden away from herself, buried inside the changing sunlit scenery of each moment. Pilar’s perfume was blown against her in the rush of air through the car; they had to have the windows open in the heat, as needless to say her old Renault didn’t have air conditioning. When they stopped halfway across the moor to have lunch in a pub garden, she didn’t mind that Pilar hardly spoke. Usually she suffered, blaming other people’s silences on her own tongue-tied insufficiency. But her ease with Pilar today, without talking, seemed like evidence of intimacy.

  It was exhilarating to feel much farther south and farther west than usual, more remote from everywhere, when they drove down eventually into the steep little seaside town. Instead of the equivocal distances across the estuary and its muddy tides, the light here opened up and the silver sea ran unqualified to the horizon. Human settlement clung nervously in rising tiers to the valley’s steep flanks; the little Victorian seaside villas were distinctive as if they were cut out from paper, the pretty fretwork fascia boards like fantasies of peasant art. The place was down at heel, locked in its time warp, over-supplied with cafés and fish and chip shops, and the crowd on the beach too seemed left over from another era. Harriet thought these were eternal children, filling their plastic buckets with sand and poking into rock pools the falling tide had left behind. They sculled face-down on inflatables, jumped and squealed in the ceaseless undertow of the waves swelling and breaking, spilling up the shingle in long curling afterthoughts of shallow foam, tugging and sucking at the grit. Where the cliffs along from the beach ran straight into the water, sea smashed itself against them in a dazzling spume.

  They locked their valuables in the boot of the car so that they could leave just the huddle of their clothes and towels on the sand while they swam. Undressing eagerly, they entered the unstable shallows which dipped and retreated, then returned to flood around them; laughing and exclaiming at the cold, they made their way further out, bobbing upright, still hesitating before plunging, holding up their arms out of the way – until the surface, opaque like dark glass, knotty with its flotsam of skeins of weed, was rising and falling around their waists, touching them intimately like gloved chilly hands. Pilar coiled her hair away, to keep it dry under a pink rubber bathing cap, and her long face was austerely naked, the skin seeming softer and more putty-like, blueshadowed, in the glinting light. Harriet was first to go in, engulfed at once in the huge shock of the different perspective, the horizon settling down at eye level, thick salt water parting before her cleaving hands, the clamour of splashing alternating in her ears with a private underwater peace. The cold of the water began to be translated into her own warmth, buoying her up. — It’s gorgeous, she shouted, with the half-treachery of the first in. Pilar eyed her and hesitated, then with a funny gathering movement, as though she pulled on reins, pursing her mouth, threw herself forward towards the sea.

  They powered far out of their depth, then back again, to roll inshore with the collapsing waves, then out once more to where they were far off from the small fry at play in the surf. Their pleasure in it was inhuman, almost; transposed out of the air into water, consciousness was silenced and intensified, they moved and submerged in place of speech. Gulls wheeled against the sun, wailing and slicing the air with wings like blades – or they rose and fell inconsequentially on the water surface like toy birds, wings folded, glassy gaze averted. Harriet let herself drop down, once, underneath the water. She opened her eyes to see, so that she could remember it later: through the brown-green murk of sand and spinning motes suspended, Pilar’s amphibiously kicking legs, bent beams of sunlight. This seemed a place she hadn’t visited since she was a child, she had forgotten it; when she burst again into the clamorous day she half-expected to come up into another life. Then she saw Pilar waving from further out. They swam until they knew they were too exhausted to be safe; getting out, streaming water, they could hardly lift their knees to walk, or stand upright.

  Harriet’s whole body shook in long spasms; she had to clamp her teeth shut, close her eyes to steady herself, huddled on the hard sand under one of the worn striped towels from the cupboard at Kington. Pilar was anointing herself patiently with suntan oil, the smell of it nutty and spicy like something their mother had once used. No one in England seemed to buy that oil these days. Then Pilar offered to put it on Harriet too. — Come on, you ought to wear something, with your fair skin.

  Harriet dropped the towel and kept her head down, neck bent. Business-like, Pilar began rubbing oil into her shoulders; Harriet closed her thoughts to the shoulders’ whiteness and thin angularity.

  — I can talk to you, Harriet, Pilar said as she ran strong fingers over the shoulder blades, outlining them, then caressingly forwards around the neck, pressing and smoothing up under the hairline, be
hind the ears, around the top of the arms, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. — There are things I can’t talk to Roland about. I want everything to be nice for him, I don’t want to spoil things between us with this worry. Valerie was always nagging at him, wasn’t she? But there is a problem with my aunt. This is partly why I’m not keen on returning home for a visit. She wants me to undergo certain tests, I don’t want to.

  Intelligent thought lagged behind Harriet’s awareness of Pilar’s competent massage. Her body was melted into her sensations; deliriously she allowed herself to imagine the oiled hands slipping underneath the clinging wet of her costume, foraging further and further, onto her longing breasts and past them, down to between where her thighs were clamped shuddering together, blue-white with cold. No one had touched her so easily as this, not for such a long time, perhaps not ever, not since she was an adult. Reluctantly she dragged her mind to what her sister-in-law was telling her. — What kind of tests?

  Pilar rolled down Harriet’s shoulder straps matter-of-factly. DNA tests, she explained, because some people believed that her mother and father were not rightfully her parents. She hadn’t liked her parents very much, but that didn’t mean she wanted a whole new set of relatives; one family was quite enough, thank you. — You don’t know what these people are like. These campaigners, these leftists: obsessed, thinking of the same thing day and night. I can understand it of course. But I don’t want to belong to them. Do they think any test can bring back their sons and daughters?

  Harriet was puzzling it out. — Do you mean you might have been adopted?

  — Everyone knows I’m adopted, me and my brother. It was at the time of the disappearances, but it was from an orphanage, everything above board and official. We have all the paperwork. Anyway what can the tests prove? I don’t belong to these people, they’re in a different world. My uncle says, what’s gone is gone.

  Digging with her fingers into the gritty sand of the beach, feeling for fragments of shell, Harriet was pierced with guilt and exquisite pleasure both at once: how could she be so selfishly happy, while Pilar was suffering? She knew something about these stories, that the children of the disappeared had been handed over for adoption, to privileged friends of the regime. But she pushed away out of her own sight the complicated justice of the situation, muffled and opaque: immune in her sheltered life, she had no right to enquire into that. What could she know? Pilar seemed magnificent to her, heroic and stoical, living inside the reality of politics, and with the terrible consequences of violence.

  Kasim said it was all right for the children to go inside the ruined cottage. When Molly was anxious it might not be safe, he reassured her airily. — It’s been here for a hundred years, it’ll last for another hundred. Anyway, they’ve been inside before, we all went in, there’s nothing to be afraid of.

  — I’d better go in with them, Molly said. — Even though it’s creepy. It smells bad.

  She shivered fastidiously, like a cat sniffing at cold water.

  Kasim and Ivy had to join forces to dissuade her; he winked at Ivy expressively. — It’s our secret, Ivy darkly said. — You can’t come in.

  — Sit down here on this bank, Kasim said, steering Molly by the shoulders, coaxing her. — Don’t worry about the children, they’re just fine. I fell asleep here, one day before you came. It’s an enchanted place, it makes you sleep. Look, you can still see the outline of where I lay, there where the grass is crushed. Try it.

  — I can’t see any outline.

  He was pressing her down gently but insistently, seemingly intent on her and yet also hardly aware of her, as if he was fulfilling some programme of his own, laid down in advance. She sat cross-legged at first. — No, lie back, you have to lie back. Just try to keep awake, see if you can. Shut your eyes: I bet you’re asleep in half a minute. I should think you’re highly suggestible, aren’t you?

  Obediently Molly lay among the grasses with her hair fallen back, eyes closed, her face exposed to the sun. She was pale, the sun had hardly tanned her but it hadn’t burned her either – apart from a cloud of indistinct freckles across her nose and a faint effect of rust-colour at her hairline, almost as if she hadn’t washed, although he was quite sure she washed exhaustively and often, he heard her running water for hours, day and night, in the bathroom. The purplish lids of her eyes were obscenely huge when they were shut, and her full lips were parted trustingly – they would be cracked and dry, he saw, if she wasn’t always putting on that salve from a tube she carried in her pocket, fussing with it, tending to her appearance because she could never quite forget herself. Her small breasts flattened when she was lying on her back, so that it was mostly the crumpled empty padding of her bra that rose and fell under her tee shirt; her belly button was a raised brown knot in the naked hollow, deep as a pool, between her hip-bones.

  Kasim hung over Molly without touching her, studying her, talking to her soothingly, careful that his shadow didn’t fall across her and disturb her. He thought that if he could just see her clearly enough he would be able to understand her and see through her: what was this effect of her exterior, that blocked and prevented him? This beauty of hers was only a subjective effect of the moment, evanescent; he was preoccupied by his knowledge that she would grow old and change. He thought about Alice’s flirting and the way the flesh was beginning to soften and clot together under her jaw and on her upper arms; not that his mother’s arms, sinewy from the gym, were any better.

  — My father hasn’t got a clue, he said, rambling just to keep her there, just so that Molly didn’t open her eyes and return his gaze. — He’s such an old leftie, you know? You’d think by now he might be wondering, well, maybe my generation didn’t work things out so well, maybe despite all our efforts we didn’t really get the socialist dream project off the ground, it all seems to have pretty much ended in the shit. But no: it’s never him, it’s never his fault, it’s always someone else’s. If only they’d listened to me and my mates, he thinks, we wouldn’t be in this mess now. It’s all just one big lost opportunity. That’s what I can’t stand, Molly, I really can’t stand it. He’s so energetic. Whoa! Dad! Time to slow down there. Don’t start another fucking co-operative whats-it for black youth, just please don’t.

  Kasim felt an actual gust of irritation at the idea of his father then, as if Dani’s pre-emptive maleness cast its shadow over the afternoon. Molly smiled, with her eyes closed. — Stop going on about it, she said. — Never mind, it doesn’t matter. Anyway, I thought you said he lived in Pakistan?

  — Wherever did you get that idea? He lives in Ladbroke Grove. That’s where I live with him, part of the time, when I’m not at the university or at my mum’s. I’ve got to get out, man.

  Inside the cottage a kind of braggadocio came over Ivy. She needed to make free of the place and so she stamped around downstairs, hallooing and kicking at the mass of dead leaves packed in the grate, sending them skittering across the red cement floor. Among the leaves, against her jelly shoe, she felt something softer and more yielding too, which she ignored – though she didn’t kick it again. Dead bird? She might have felt the light snap of feathers, or bird bones: any dreamed-of horror was possible. She was showing off to Arthur, asserting her primacy in the cottage, boasting that she’d been here all alone once, without him.

  — When?

  — The other day, while you were busy playing.

  Already that solitary visit seemed enshrined in myth: she could hardly believe in the audacity of that other Ivy, venturing bravely by herself to her tryst with the things upstairs. Arthur was visibly sceptical, jingling coins in his shorts pocket.

  — I did come here, I really did! Anyway, why have you brought your money, stupid? There isn’t anything to spend it in on in the countryside.

  He said he’d thought that they might pass a shop; Ivy was scornful, but it gave her an idea. — It’s a good job that you brought it actually. It will do as part of the sacrifice we need to make.

  �
�� What sacrifice?

  She lowered her voice piously. — I told you. Because of the Dead Women.

  Arthur took some persuading before she could get him to part with his pound coin – she had to peel back pale fingers finally, one by one, from where he clenched his treasure in his palm. Once he’d let go of it, however, he submitted gracefully to the ritual Ivy invented: upstairs, in the first room, they tore little washed-out pink pieces of body out of the pages of the magazines, and crumpled some of these, arranging them in a heap around the pound coin on the floor. Other samples, as Ivy called them, she thrust in her pocket. Bustling round, preparing the sacrifice, she sometimes almost forgot to be afraid of where she was, opening the door once into the last room almost casually, as if she was simply checking Mitzi was still there. Mitzi was, of course. She wasn’t going anywhere – her remains in fact appeared diminished and contracted into a smaller, blander shape, into something leathery. She was beginning to seem part of the same substance as the room, and her smell was changing: still nasty, but more stale and ancient. Ivy’s offhandedness, glancing at her, was proprietorial, like the habituated priestess of a cult. Arthur spent longer taking Mitzi in than Ivy did – she was the old hand.

  Using Kasim’s lighter – which Ivy had picked up from the desk in the study, because Kas didn’t need it any longer – they set fire to the twists of paper; these curled and turned brown at the edges as the flame licked round them, and one of the women looked for a moment as if she was stretching, uncoiling luxuriantly to her full length, before she was consumed in a brief flare of heat and light. When they’d scuffed out the last spark responsibly Arthur wanted to have his coin again, but Ivy told him that would be unlucky, it belonged to the Women now; reluctant, gazing behind him over his shoulder when he left, he let it stay there. Their going downstairs wasn’t at all like the first time, when nightmare jostled at their heels. Ivy eased the front door open where she had closed it behind them, lifting it on its hinges, Arthur pushing past her into the gap. Both of them saw at the same moment Kasim and Molly on the grassy bank some little way off: framed at eye level in the opening, dazzling and confusing in the suddenly blazing light, oblivious to the children watching.