Past

by Hadley, Tessa

  And at that very moment Molly half-shuffled up on her elbows and reached up her mouth to Kas, who, cupping the curved back of her head in his palm, skewing his shoulders round to come at her from the right angle, reached down his open mouth to kiss her. Their heads moved in deliberate slow rhythm together, like licking at ice cream. This kiss hadn’t occurred to the children as a possibility and they were shaken by what was indecently needy and exposed in it, exchanging glances ripe with derision and dismay. As soon as the lovers heard the children coming they sprang apart as if nothing had happened, and the children pretended they hadn’t seen anything.

  Roland and Alice drank flat glasses of leftover fizzy wine, stretched out on the grassy stubble in the garden in the afternoon sun, sharing a bowl of salted nuts instead of lunch. They had the place to themselves, everyone else was out. Roland was voluble from writing all morning in his room on his laptop, working on a review. Alice said that when she was an actress the reviews had almost killed her. The idea of that kind of implacable judgement was awful to her, pinned down in words on a page which couldn’t be softened or unwritten. For once, instead of countering Alice – did he notice he was doing it, dissenting with a kind of patient forbearance from everything she put forward? – Roland seemed to attend sympathetically to what she was saying. Where had her self-doubt come from? When they were fifteen or sixteen, you’d have thought that Alice was the confident one, she had been so blithe and poised. No one could have imagined that Roland would come to speak with such assurance, such weight of authority behind him.

  — In another era, Roly, you’d have made a wonderful vicar. I mean a really noble one. Founding a monastic order or taking the word to the heathen or something. I can just imagine it. While all of us sat at home knitting warm vests for you, dreadful spinsters, making a cult out of their precious brother and hating him secretly.

  — That doesn’t sound much fun for anyone.

  — Probably more fun for the spinsters. You’d have got yellow fever and been nursed in your last days by a devoted native bearer, but your faith would have sustained you. Do you think our grandfather’s faith sustained him? I mean, seriously, when Mum died. Or d’you think he lost it?

  On the day of their mother’s funeral, Roland remembered, their father had driven off somewhere with Alice in the old Bedford van; they’d arrived back very late when everything was over, and then Alice had thrown up all night from eating too much chocolate. Yet Roland had heard her on two separate occasions, as an adult, talk as if she was present at the funeral – and she seemed to think it had been here in Kington, not in a church in Marylebone. Their dad had claimed he couldn’t stand the religious hypocrisy, and Alice had pretended she felt the same, though she had been too young to know what hypocrisy was. Roland had seen through the pair of them, father and daughter: he knew they were only afraid. Alice had been wearing some kind of punky, slippery, inappropriate silver party dress, which showed up her puppy fat and the small beginnings of her breasts; everything that day had been crazy and disordered, even their grandmother couldn’t put it right. Roland was pierced with a strong pity for his sister sometimes – although this was out of character, and he wasn’t convinced that pity helped anyone. Alice would have been dismayed if she’d known he felt it.

  He pushed his fingers through his wiry curls. — I expect our grandfather believed God’s providence was inscrutable. That’s what the serious Christians think. Which seems reasonable enough. That’s just about what I think, only without God.

  His skin was faintly freckled with brown and he reminded Alice, with his brown eyes, of a speckled thrush; you could see the current of awareness moving in his face like a current in water. Their closeness for a moment was like the old days, she thought. She scrabbled in the bowl for nuts, got mostly salt. — It is inscrutable, isn’t it? I find life pretty terrifying, don’t you? And I’m such a coward. I certainly don’t know what anything means. I mean, even the ordinary things frighten me, just the sadness of change and growing old and missed opportunities. And then there’s the ugly way things are going – with the environment for instance. I know you get annoyed when you think I’m nostalgic for the old days, as if things were always better in the past. Perhaps they really weren’t. But aren’t you afraid of oceans full of plastic, melting ice caps, factory farms with lakes of pigswill? All the forests of Zambia cut down, and the animals becoming extinct in our lifetimes, and grubbing up the earth for filthy minerals, and everyone forgetting how to make beautiful things. Isn’t that all so disgusting and threatening?

  — But you’ve never been to Zambia.

  — I read a book about it.

  Roland stretched out in the sun, closing his eyes. — Am I afraid? At this moment I seem to feel an animal assurance of well-being, against all the promptings of my intellect. Anyway, how did we get so fast to the apocalypse? You bring everything around to the apocalypse, Alice.

  — No, be serious. Own up to being afraid.

  But Roland wouldn’t own up, he smiled with his eyes still shut as if fear were just a phenomenon he was considering among others, interested in working out its implications.

  — I really do think Pilar is gorgeous, Alice said. — You know I didn’t mean what I said the other day, don’t you? I’m sure she can fit in. Though I do find her a little bit intimidating. She’s so organised and dynamic, she must think I’m good for nothing. It’s nice how well she gets on with Harriet.

  Roland clammed up then. He didn’t want to talk with her about Pilar.

  They were all invited across to the Pattens for dinner, including the children. There was something ceremonious in how they crossed the road in the early evening light, bearing bottles; Ivy concentrated, in charge of a glass dish of Fran’s home-made chocolate truffles covered in cling film. Pilar brought white roses, cut from the garden wall. They felt clannish: bound together and identifiable, for once, as a family. Roland had Arthur hoisted on his shoulders as if, male, they ought to combine to overtop the female hordes; Arthur rode his uncle tranquilly, a small smile playing in his expression for no one in particular, steering lightly with his hands in Roland’s hair, the boy-prince easy with acclaim.

  Wordless, they all seemed to collect themselves in preparation for the hours of chatter to come, scuffing up a cloud of dust around their feet in the road, the women’s different perfumes mingling in the disturbed, heavy air. Even Harriet was wearing perfume; even Roland had sprayed on cologne. Harriet carried herself with a self-conscious stiffness which warned off comment; she was wearing the skirt and blouse Alice had given her, and her own little silk scarf knotted at her neck – which Alice would not actually have advised. But Harriet’s pretty earrings, bought apparently in some museum she’d once visited, caught the light, and her face was animated, tanned and pink from her trip to the seaside. And Molly moved, after her kiss, with a new languid fullness which only the children understood; her father, observing her daydreaming, suffered in fact a pang of worry, thinking how childlike and inexperienced she was. Kasim would be late to the supper party because he had chosen this moment to take a bath, though he’d been skulking in his room for hours. Molly hardly missed him: her idea of him was so vivid in his absence, completing her, that she half-dreaded his actual presence, complicating things.

  Light from the low sun slanted through the windows of the church behind them, filling the stone interior and making it appear weightless, floating spirit-like among its graves. From inside the church that morning, while some of them were still slothful in bed, they’d heard the quavering of hymns; because it was used in rotation with the vicar’s other three churches, they never quite remembered to expect it. None of them ever attended, to kneel on their grandmother’s hassocks which were each embroidered with a different local wildflower. If a service was taking place, they only moved around more decorously and guiltily in the old rectory, and everyone was made aware of some pattern of significant time passing, marked out behind the succession of their own days, which were not dis
tinguished one from another. The church kept count, while they were distracted.

  Now, as they stepped into the Pattens’ yard, white doves descended in a kerfuffle of fanned-out feathers, the spread wings backing up before landing with the noise a length of cloth makes when snapped in the air to straighten it. Claude Patten, whatever kind of architect he was (mostly old people’s homes and shopping malls) had known better than to encroach upon the barn’s ancient dovecote. Janice had researched on the internet which doves to choose, and how to keep them. She was waiting now, pink-skinned from her shower, curls damp, dressed up in a caftan of kingfisher-blue shot silk, full of proud-hostess smiles beside the tall glass doors which stood open to the yard. These let out the rich smells of her cooking: meat slow baked with tomatoes and wine and herbs, home-made bread. Behind her, opaque white globes – suspended on chains from the barn’s rafters high above – shone with weak light over the long refectory-style table, laid with blue glass and yellow linen napkins. Alice thought it looked like a showy restaurant. The lamps were still outdone by the big low lemony sun outside – but this was about to sink behind the field of head-high exotic and shabby elephant grass, grown for biofuel, which rose behind the barn to the horizon. Janice hated the elephant grass – it spoils my view but it isn’t that, it’s the ecological issue – and had fallen out with the farmer over it.

  She greeted her guests and kissed them and took grateful possession of the roses and the truffles, telling Roland she was afraid of him because he was so clever. Apologetic, Roland lifted Arthur from his shoulders and deposited him carefully. Claude, Janice insisted, summoning him ringingly from wherever he was lurking, must be put in charge of the bottles. Her guests felt that their long moment of silence, crossing the road, was suddenly a tangibly sweet thing between them, as they noisily broke it.

  Coming late across the road – probably too late, he gloomily and indifferently thought, perhaps he shouldn’t bother – Kas was almost in the dark. The huge evening sky wheeling overhead was a livid, electric blue, pocked with sparks of stars; it stalled him, so that he stood still in the middle of it, in the middle of the road, as if there was something he’d forgotten. His hair was still wet from his bath, picking up the evening’s chill and soaking the collar of his last clean shirt; he had been too proud, or too lazy, to ask where he could do his washing, vaguely he’d been waiting to happen upon a washing machine somewhere. He had seen things drying today, hadn’t he, on a line in the garden?

  The tall windows in the barn were lit up and wide open and a clamour of voices floated from inside, along with the businesslike chink of cutlery and chiming of glasses. Kasim shuddered, entering the yard, not wanting to belong to that conviviality. He felt he didn’t want to be initiated, ever, into any noisy crowd of friends and family, its claim a chummy arm dropped on his shoulders. Now he was alive, now. Apprehension could only be kept keen by being kept apart. Alice was protesting over something in that drawling voice which was always on the verge of either tears or teasing. — I’m afraid of everything, she was saying. — But Roland won’t own up to fear, he just won’t admit to it.

  Disgusted, Kasim imagined them all laughing with their mouths full. But he was bent upon Molly and must go inside: Molly was silent amid the crowd as he was. The memory of their kiss washed over him and he was strained with sexual longing. Then an unexpected fat drop of warm rain struck his cheek, out of the night-blue sky which had seemed cloudless. At first he thought that his wet hair was dripping, then he felt another drop and heard the rain’s secretive patter swelling all around, too quietly for them to hear inside, rustling in the Pattens’ gravel, sending up little puffs of the parched dust.

  PART TWO

  The Past

  One

  JILL FELLOWES CAME home to her parents at Kington in 1968, with her three children, in flight from her husband: she believed that she was finished with him for ever. She had never stopped calling herself Jill Fellowes – in her own mind and, mostly, when she met people – although it was useful being married for the benefit of Harriet’s school, and at the doctor’s. When her mother wrote to her the envelopes were always addressed to Mrs T. R. Crane. Her mother wrote every week, her letters filled with news of the nothing that happened at Kington, salted with her perpetual irony. The big story around here is that the shop has thrown in the towel and refuses to sell anything apart from sliced bread, they say it’s too much trouble, and you know your father won’t eat it. I expect this Sunday’s sermon will be punishing. Every week, dutifully, Jill had written back, dry in return. In return telling her mother nothing, nothing.

  Late one afternoon in May, Jill’s mother, dressed in her oldest slacks and gardening shirt, straightened up from weeding in the front garden of the old white house beside the church, in an empty pause. She was extremely thin – bony, she called it – graceful and washed out, with pale grey-blue eyes and iron-grey hair which grew oddly upwards, like a crest. Was she thinking in those moments of her budding roses, and the shepherd’s pie for supper, like a caricature of a vicar’s wife? Just then a noisy arrival broke in upon the sealed, blissful, tedious peace of the place, and her beloved only daughter and her grandchildren unfurled from an unfamiliar panting, juddering car on the road outside, like an apparition, utterly unexpected. The car was a Morris Traveller, with Tudor panelling.

  Sophy wasn’t really thinking of shepherd’s pie. She had slipped, as she often did when she was alone, into the dark pool of herself, beneath conscious awareness: she might have been standing, dreaming of nothing, for five seconds or five minutes. So that when she saw her daughter she really thought in that first instant – uncharacteristically, because she was rational and sceptical, the faith that bound her slender sometimes as a thread – that she was subject to a vision. Of the Stanley Spencer kind: a domesticated miracle. The children were beautiful as angels but also sticky and filthy, Hettie was ghastly pale, Roland’s glasses were mended at the bridge with sticking plaster, baby Ali’s curls were flattened with sweat, as if she had been roused from sleep against her mother. Whining at being put down on the road, she stumbled after Jill, clinging to her coat so that Jill almost fell over her.

  — Keep hold of her, Hettie, will you?

  The Morris Traveller wasn’t Jill’s. She couldn’t drive and anyway couldn’t possibly have afforded a car. They’d come from London on the train, then the bus, and then finally as they set out to walk the two miles from where the bus put them down, through the winding lanes into Kington – looking like refugees from the dust bowl or something, Jill said – someone passing had taken pity on them and given them a lift. When she had heaved the folding pushchair and a suitcase from behind the back seat, Jill leaned in through the open front passenger window, smiling, and Sophy heard her daughter fulsome and charming as she’d been brought up to be. So very kind of you … saved our lives. The Morris reversed into the Brodys’ farm entrance opposite, and was off by the time Sophy had dropped her trowel and hurried down to the gate.

  — My dear ones, my best boy and girls, she said. — What’s happened?

  — We stink, Jill said flatly. — They’ll have to open all their windows to get rid of us. Harriet was sick on the bus, I had nothing to wipe it up with except her own cardigan. The whole journey’s been sheer hell. And they weren’t actually coming to Kington, they made a detour just for us. No idea who they were, only they seemed to know us. We’re badly in need of a bath.

  — Oh, but who was it?

  Sophy worried about an intricate network of obligations and favours. — How nice of them! I’d like to thank them.

  — I pretended I knew. Cunningly I said, So, how are you all? But their lives were too bland for identification. A daughter called Penny, who rides? Anyway, they were nosy, they wanted to know why Dad hadn’t picked us up at the station. I said we’d just come on an impulse. Which we have.

  — Darling, you could have phoned the Smiths. How can I feed you all? The loaves and fishes thing doesn’t work with shepherd
’s pie, when it’s such a tiny one. And you know that the Smiths really don’t mind. It’s only your father’s obstinacy, that he won’t have a phone put in. Now the shop’s shut. I’ll have to go over to Brodys for some eggs.

  — We don’t eat eggs.

  Roland broke the news solemnly.

  — Oh god, said Jill. — I really began to think we’d never get here, that we’d just have to sleep under a hedge or something. And you’re worrying about a little thing like eggs.

  — You shouldn’t say god, said Hettie. — Grandfather doesn’t like it.

  — He isn’t here. He’s visiting the sick.

  — Thank god for the sick, said Jill. — We can swear until he gets back.

  Sophy put the kettle on for tea. It was astonishing that Jill and her children were suddenly real, and in the house with her. Usually before their visits – or before her own visits to their chaotic, unsuitable flat over a shop in Marylebone High Street – she had time to prepare to be astonished. If only she’d had time at least to change out of these old clothes. She had become more familiar, she realised, with the wistful dream of her daughter than with this actual woman: decisive, her face keen with the extreme leanness of young motherhood, her colouring which made Sophy think of a thrush, the careless switch of her tawny hair swinging from where she pulled it into a ponytail high on her head. Her crumpled shirt dress was so short – she had taken up the hem herself, Sophy could see, sewing in childish big stitches. Pale lipstick had seeped into the cracks in her lips, and she had painted her eyes. When she lowered her gaze, the heavy, strongly convex mauve lids could have belonged to a saint in a vision, but the eyes when they looked up took in everything with too much appetite.