Past

by Hadley, Tessa

  — Listen to me, Tom said. — I’m telling you about Paris. A revolution is happening in Paris. The children are tearing down the prison walls. Everything that seemed established and set in stone turns out to be insubstantial as fog.

  — Did you write all that in one of your articles?

  He said that all the students were asking for was an education – a real one. In the Sorbonne the discussion groups were packed out, day and night. Everyone had their copy of the Little Red Book. Did she know that only eight per cent of the university students in France were working class? The Renault workers came to teach the students about factory work, they told their life stories. It was beautiful. The atmosphere was electric. All the time, everyone was listening to the news on their transistors, even the bourgeois, taking them out in the street so as not to miss anything: not the government channels, but Luxembourg or Europe I. — We had dinner in the quartier the other night, and when we came out there was a wall of flame across the street, we had to tie handkerchiefs across our faces for the tear gas. The police are brutes, they beat up the wounded even when they’re laid out on stretchers, they beat up the doctors. There’s rubbish everywhere, no rubbish collection. And burned-out cars. And you were right about the trees. It’s sad about the trees. But they will plant new trees.

  They struck off from the lane into the path through the woods; Jill had brought a torch in her coat pocket. What if it was true? she thought. What if this absolute, creative transformation into a new life really were possible, and it was her fault that she couldn’t see it, and was stuck inside the old one?

  — Journalism’s beginning to disgust me, Tom said. — It’s just being part of the machine. I’m thinking about taking up my painting again. I’ve got some ideas. Doing something real for once. Something that’s really different, part of how everything’s changing.

  She took him to the Goods’ cottage, and they went inside. It was darker and colder in there than outside in the woods. — We could stop here for a bit, Jill said. — If you really want to talk.

  — What is this place? Who lives here? Won’t they mind? It smells creepy.

  — He died and she went off her head. It belongs to no one.

  Their voices were flattened in the stale, tiny room; Tom shone the torch around, picking out torn-out coupons stuffed in front of the plates in a dresser, a crocheted antimacassar, Jesus gazing yearningly at them, a wilted magazine – The People’s Friend – in a wire rack, a dirty crust of sliced bread in a torn plastic bag on the floor. Invisible in the dark aftermath of the torch beam, the room’s sparse furniture was more insistently present. Jill had brought matches and she tried to make a fire in the grate – there was kindling in a bucket, she brought in a couple of logs from the pile outside. But the chimney didn’t draw well and it smoked. Tom went exploring upstairs and came down with an armful of eiderdowns and blankets. — It’s grim up there, he said. — I had a feeling he’d died in that very bed, whoever he was.

  The musty damp eiderdowns and the wood smoke made him wheeze, he had to use the pink rubber ephedrine pump he always carried with him. They spread the eiderdowns on the floor and wrapped themselves in the blankets, then ate the last of the mini rolls; it turned out that Tom had the remains of a quarter bottle of brandy with him too, although he’d said he had no money. Generously, he let Jill have most of what was left in it. Shuffling out of the blankets on her hands and knees, she adjusted the logs in the fire, adding another one – she had a gift for fires and this one had settled in, it wasn’t smoking too badly. While she crouched there on all fours, taking her weight on her arms with her face to the flames, Tom tugged out the elastic band from her ponytail so that her hair fell down loose over her shoulders. Then he slid his hand against her neck underneath it, making a low noise all the time as if he were growling in delight, bending his head down to kiss the back of her ears. At the same time he was sliding his other hand up between her legs from behind, slithering against the hard nylon of her tights, pushing up her skirt out of the way, probing around the waistband of her knickers. Closing her eyes, Jill shifted her weight so that she was pressing back against his hand. She thought then that this was really what she had been wanting all along, it was what she had come for. The wheezing in Tom’s chest was as purposeful as a ship’s engine.

  — I missed you, Tom said. — I missed you so badly, Jilly.

  Jill wouldn’t have been able to stop herself going along with the lovemaking, if Tom hadn’t spoken. The spell of this strange place in the middle of the woods, where neither of them were themselves, was very powerful – she was half abandoned to it already. But then she heard such familiar confident satisfaction in Tom’s voice. He was so sure that this would make everything all right. In one bound she sprang away from him, pulling down her skirt: she was still on all fours, but now she was facing him. They were head to head, like two fighting dogs. — How can you? How can you just settle back into this, as if nothing had happened?

  — I’m not settling back into anything.

  — Yes you are! When you say you want to talk, this is what you mean.

  — Don’t be a prude, he said. — Don’t tell me you don’t want it too.

  — You’ve got such a coarse mind. I don’t just mean sex. I don’t mean sex all the time.

  — I know you don’t, he coaxed her. — Neither do I. But this is still all about Vanda, isn’t it? I never thought you’d be so hung up on that old possessiveness. I thought we agreed we didn’t own each other.

  — You haven’t even asked about the children.

  — All right, I’m asking about them now.

  Jill groaned in exasperation, and said it wasn’t just the asking. — It’s the way you are, how you can put them out of your mind for days at a time, or weeks even. Just as if you were free. And I can’t.

  — I said I’d look after them for a bit, if you wanted to go to Paris. Or go anywhere. I don’t mind!

  — You’re not serious about anything. So now it’s painting instead of journalism. What will it be next week?

  — D’you mean like your old man is serious? The serious miserable fucking poet? And by the way, I don’t think sex is coarse. You surely brought me to this weird and wonderful place – I know you – with sex in mind. That isn’t coarse. And now you’re breaking my balls. Look, I’m serious. Look at me. This is the thing in the world I am most serious about.

  Jill looked at him almost tenderly. It wasn’t any wonder that other women threw themselves in his way. The firelight played over his long brown face, which was like her idea of a warrior’s or a cowboy’s: the high, hard, knobbed cheekbones, jutting tense brow. In the grey eyes there was always a suggestion of sleepy satisfaction, something rapt and dreaming. — D’you know what? she said. — I’m going to go back now. I’m going to leave you here.

  — You’re insane, you can’t do that.

  — Don’t follow me. I don’t want you to follow me. I’m going to take the torch, you’d only get lost without it. You’ll be all right in here until the morning. There are plenty of logs. In the morning I don’t want to see you. I don’t want you coming to the house.

  Standing at her window in the dawn light, Hettie saw the strangest thing. The light often woke her up, here in the country: when her eyes flipped open out of her dreams, the new day waiting in the room was so distinctively, surprisingly present that it was impossible – it was almost impolite – to close her eyes again, as if she hadn’t seen it. The children’s bedroom overlooked the front garden, as their mother’s did. And on this particular day, almost as soon as she took up her post between the silky lilac-coloured curtains – in her nightdress, with her bare feet in the ice-cold which pooled ankle-deep on the floorboards – she saw her daddy walking past in the lane outside. He was wearing his big duffel coat, with the hood down.

  In fact she heard him before she saw him; in the stillness of the early morning she had heard the tramp of his boots, coming from the direction of the woods, displacing the little
stones on the road, crunching them and sending them skittering. This made her know that he was real. And then when she did see him it was only the top third of him, because the rest was hidden by the garden wall. But she was so sure that it was him. No one else down here had that long hair and that untidy beard and that intent way of walking with his head down and his shoulders hunched up. Yet how could he be coming from the woods, when it was only just light? And strangest of all, he didn’t stop at their house and come inside to see them. Of course she was expecting him to turn in at the garden gate and come up the path. She was all ready to fly downstairs and be the one to let him in, and the first one carried round in triumph on his shoulders, announcing to the sleeping house that he’d arrived.

  But he went on walking past the gate, and down the lane out of sight, and he never even turned his head to look at the house, though he knew it as well as they did, and must surely have known where he was. He never looked up to see his daughter watching at the window. And then he was gone, though for a while Hettie could hear the noise of his boots in the distance. The whole thing was so improbable that afterwards, as it settled down into her memory, she thought she must have been dreaming, or that she’d confused reality with an illustration in a picture book. Their dad was in London, or somewhere else, Paris: she knew that really. She never mentioned what she’d seen to anyone, because it couldn’t really have happened, and her mother got angry if Hettie invented things. When she came to a certain page in their book of nursery rhymes – Mr Foster going to Gloucester in a shower of rain, drawn in a purple pencil and wearing a top hat – Hettie turned over quickly, because it brought back a sharp pain of disappointment.

  Three

  THE CHILDREN GOT used to the rectory as the days passed, and began to forget their life in London, as they had done in the holidays before. Hettie settled into not going to school, although from time to time she was aware of the routines of that other existence – which she had been beginning to master – proceeding without her, and had a panicking sense of her deficit. Then she put off this awareness with a quick grimace. They might never go back, perhaps there would never be any more school. The rooms of their Marylebone flat seemed a chaotic muddle in memory – crowded with their landlord’s ugly furniture, and with all the apparatus of toys and baby-life, and their mother’s distinctive efforts at homemaking: splashes of painted vivid colour, exotic textiles draped over sofas or pinned to the walls, art posters and political ones. Jill had found a stuffed heron in a glass case for next to nothing in a junk shop, and a gigantic mirror with dancing, garlanded cupids set into the gilt frame. The sink was always piled with dishes, there were always visitors talking non-stop and drinking tea from chunky ceramic mugs at the kitchen table: alien children were imposed upon them. By contrast, the kingdom of the rectory was theirs alone. There was more space for fantasy in its faded empty rooms – especially in the expectant spare bedrooms upstairs, used for nothing, scarcely furnished except with beds and chests of drawers and skimpy rugs, and smelling thinly of damp.

  Who were those beds intended for? The rooms’ vacancy, which intimidated Hettie at night, was stimulating by day. A statuesque dressmaker’s dummy, like nobody’s shape, loomed in one corner. Little crabbed watercolours, relegated to hang amid their expanses of bare wall, took on a momentousness in isolation: the children stared into the smudgy landscapes and feeble portraits as if they were oracles, speaking of the past and the dead. They invented a game of stampeding along the landing, between the arched windows, shouting, as if they were pursuing something or being pursued – Ali could even join in, if they fixed a chair across the top of the stairs to stop her falling down them. There was an additional delicious pleasure in this game if it was raining outside; the sound of the rain, and the sight of it blowing in wet gusts against the bare tall windows, drove them mad, and they dived onto the empty beds, rolling around in them, shrieking. Of course they could only play this if Grandfather were out. Granny didn’t mind it: you could even tell, from a gleam in her pale eyes, that it stirred a buried desire in her which she could never act on, to join in and throw herself around. It was just possible to imagine Granny as a lanky, watchful girl-child; impossible somehow to imagine their own mother, ever, as anything but the full-grown finished woman, all curves and certainty. She often talked about her childhood, and there were photographs to prove that time existed – but her children didn’t really believe in it.

  For hours, when it wasn’t raining, or not much, Hettie and Roland waded in wellington boots in the stream in the garden, carrying a bucket, looking for eels or sticklebacks. Or they prowled downstairs indoors, where the day’s work proceeded in a way that was more ordered and less fraught than their parents’ way. In the mornings Granny appeared to spring from her bed fully dressed, there was no sticky and fractious long interval of dressing gowns and breakfast mess and getting ready, before things could properly begin. In the dining room a cloth was spread on the breakfast table, there were flowers in a vase, and the children dipped bread-and-butter soldiers tranquilly in eggs fetched from Brodys across the road, as if they had been eating eggs all their lives. When she had finished her tea their grandmother held up her cup against the light and showed them a woman’s face, hidden in the china. Twice a week a Mrs Cummins – she of the scratchy brooches, known to them from church – came to do the heavy chores, not constrained in the sculpted church-suit, but loose and businesslike inside her overall. She manhandled steaming sheets out of the boiler then rinsed them and put them through the mangle, she scrubbed floors on her knees with a contemptuous hissing noise which must have come from her brush, though it seemed to come out of herself.

  If their Grandfather was at home, then everything revolved around the invisible work that went on behind the closed door of his study. But even the prohibitions that came with this, the whispering and secrecy – and occasionally, the door torn open, the blast of his cold complaint – had their reassurance and romance. Because he was getting on with what mattered, the women and children could fill their time without responsibility. There was always work to do, women’s work – but that was not lofty or exacting like religion or poetry. And then when he did go out, some spring which had held them tightly was released, so that they felt free. Even Jill, at the ironing board or at the sink, could seem to be caught up in the air of mild, sly, jubilation – as if she were another kind of woman, a more ordinary one. When the cat’s away, their granny said, the mice can play – though their grandfather couldn’t really be called a cat, or any kind of tyrant. Granny would put the kettle on although it wasn’t teatime. Peculiarly, this liberation couldn’t happen so long as Mrs Cummins was there: she kept them up to the mark in the minister’s absence.

  In his study even the smells were different to the rest of the house: the smoky brown notes – of pipe tobacco, books, cold cinders in the fireplace, whisky – were half offensive, with their suggestion of something meaty. Hettie and Roland had investigated the cut-glass decanter once, and discovered that the whisky, which looked and smelled promisingly like liquid caramel, tasted poisonous. Could anyone actually drink it for pleasure? It must be one of those forbidding adult initiations, commensurate with the impossible books on the shelves. However Hettie pored over the words in these, spelling them out one at a time, the sentences remained obdurately outside her comprehension. Grandfather told them he was writing poems about somebody in the fifth century who had translated St John’s gospel into Greek verse, and also wrote hymns to a pagan god. Roland was maddening, with his calm presumption that he would understand all of this very soon. Hettie couldn’t see why the grown-ups found this charming. She reminded him sternly that he couldn’t even read yet.

  — Grandfather said that doesn’t matter, because I’m already thinking about things.

  — What things?

  — Sorting out what I need to learn, about history and science and stuff, and people speaking different languages.

  After lunch their grandmother retired mysteri
ously to her room, and came down later in a different dress, unless she was gardening. In those late afternoons, their mother sometimes played the piano, and the sound came floating out past Alice, eating through the daisies in her playpen set on the lawn, to where Hettie and Roland were busy in the stream, building a dam across it, Hettie snapping out orders to Roland. The music while it lasted seemed to frame and characterise their life in a way which was poignant and satisfying, as if they could see it from a long way off. The children were always surprised that their mother could play at all; the piano seemed to speak quintessentially of acres of empty time, dedicated to dreamy introspection – which they did not associate with her. Then Jill would break off impatiently, when she made a mistake in the middle of some rippling passage, crashing both her hands down on the piano keys crossly, slamming the lid shut. They were half-aware that their mother was boiling up with trouble, the whole time they were adapting to life in Kington, settling down there. — I can’t bear this, she said aloud once rather calmly, with her hands still raised in that impressive way, curving and passionate, poised above the notes.

  — What can’t you bear? Sophy said.

  She was patting out a soft dough for scones, with floury hands, on the kitchen table. Jill had come in to cook the baby’s supper and was crouching, banging through the saucepans in a corner cupboard, looking for a small one.

  — Not being able to play through those pieces I used to know. It’s so frustrating.

  Her mother began pressing a glass into the dough, cutting rounds of scone and setting them out on a baking tray, while Jill sat back thoughtfully on her heels on the linoleum, with the saucepan in her hand. — And that’s not all. There’s quite a lot I can’t bear, just at the moment. My husband, for instance, if you really want to know. That marriage is pretty much over, I should say. I made a mistake with Tom, and it hasn’t worked out. So there we are.