Past

by Hadley, Tessa

  — Alice had an accident. She has a bump. It was my fault, I shouldn’t have put her up on the wall, only she kept on begging me.

  — What kind of a bump?

  — On her forehead. But Granny’s cheering her up. And Roly’s written a real word with his letters: plain. He wrote plain, all by himself.

  — That’s a funny word to start off with!

  Jill was in her laughing mood, everything was all right. Hettie explained that he copied it from a cookery book. She expected her mother to be businesslike, hurrying indoors to see the others, but instead she lingered outside in the pinkish light, with its promise of summer. — Isn’t it lovely here, Het? she said. — Look at the swallows going mad in the field. They’re drinking insect soup.

  — What’s insect soup?

  — The air is full of creatures we can hardly see. The birds are feasting on them.

  They stood at the field gate, watching in close companionship, and when Jill lifted Hettie high onto the top bar of the gate, she held her tight so that she wouldn’t fall.

  When she’d put the children to bed, Jill hesitated in the dusk at the foot of the stairs. There was no lamp switched on yet in her father’s study but the fire was lit, its reflection gleaming on the cut glass of the whisky decanter: she was thirsty suddenly for whisky. Perhaps what she’d done that afternoon had opened a door, and she would be buffeted from now on by violent appetites. Stepping inside the room she thought at first she was alone, then realised that her father was kneeling in the half darkness beside the bookcase, not looking round, peering in the firelight to read the gold lettering on the books’ spines, as if he didn’t want her to know that he knew she was there. Jill picked up the decanter she’d never touched in her life before, to help herself.

  — You can pour one for me as well, her father said.

  He was stiff, getting up from his knees. Even while he was strong and only middle aged, she’d dreaded any intimation that he might grow old and weak, and thought she wouldn’t be able to bear it. — I hear you might be moving home, he said. — Your mother told me.

  — It’s probably not a good idea, is it?

  — We miss you, Charlie. We’d love to have you here.

  — Oh well, Daddy, she said, — I miss you. But life goes on. I’ve got three great big children now.

  — You could pick up your work again, if you came down here. Your mother could mind the children, we could try out some translations together. You’ve got such a good intellect, you know. It hurts me to think that you’ve thrown it all away.

  — I haven’t thrown it away. I’m still the same person.

  He made an impatient face of fine discrimination, shadows knotting around the deep socketed, disenchanted eyes. — We don’t think Tom’s such a good idea, you know. Not good enough for you.

  — It’s too late for that, Jill stubbornly said. — And anyway you don’t know him. You don’t know what I know. Nobody does.

  Later that same evening, after it was dark, Jill knocked on the side door at Roddings and asked if she could use their phone. She had the money ready to leave for them, and was sure that they always left more than the actual cost of the call – but it was obvious Eve Smith didn’t think much of her coming round so late. The Smiths might even have been on their way to bed, though it was only half past nine; there was no sound of any television going in the farmhouse. But Jill didn’t care. She knew her apologies sounded insincere and falsely fulsome, in her educated voice, and she was aware for a moment of the person she had been at Oxford, filled up with her cleverness and ambitions for her intellectual life.

  Yet this tempestuous life she had instead wasn’t anything less. It was surely wrong to think that reading and intelligence had to float somewhere above the thickness of real experience. She was so glad to be in her solid woman’s body – used, by men and by her children who’d come into the world through it. Eve switched on the light in the office and retreated to the scullery, not quite out of earshot – Jill heard her running water into a tin kettle. The farm office was chilly, bleak in the light from a weak bulb, all its workmanlike disorder inert while the farm slept. There was no one in the flat in Marylebone when she rang, so she dialled Bernie’s number and some woman answered. — It’s Jill Fellowes. I want to speak to Tom.

  — He’s not here.

  — But I expect he is. See if you can find him.

  The woman pretended to be bemused, but Jill insisted. Eventually Tom came on the phone, breezy and too ready with his innocence. — Did you hear about de Gaulle?

  — I don’t want to talk about de Gaulle.

  She told him he had to come and pick them up in the morning, to take them home.

  — You’ve changed your mind all of a sudden.

  — You’ll have to borrow a car from somewhere, she said. — If you want us back, you have to be here by midday. I mean it.

  Tom reassured her that it was all he wanted. Nothing else mattered.

  PART THREE

  The Present

  One

  AFTER THE PATTENS’ dinner, the rain settled in. Morning after morning they woke in their damp beds to hear it insisting against the windows – not stormily, only steadily, pattering down through the leaves in the big beeches, secretive and pressing. The light and the acoustics in the house were so changed that it seemed a different place, shrunken as if it crouched underneath an assault; landscape diminished to the near-at-hand, airy distances condensed into prosaic grey and crowded close around the windows. The temperature dropped, the clematis dripped on the terrace. A mossy, silvery pattern of wet sunshine bloomed sometimes for a few minutes on a wall on the landing, before it was extinguished again – like a weak message from another existence. It might brighten up tomorrow, everyone said. Sometimes the rain was a relief, Alice thought: less was expected of you than in fine weather, you could turn over and go back to sleep. But Harriet and Roland seemed to be up at dawn, Harriet in her sensible checked pyjamas and Roland in his silk ones, putting buckets and plastic bowls underneath the places where there were leaks, their voices reproachful with practicality. Then water pinged, torturously, into the buckets, and Simon Cummins came round to talk to them about repairs. Alice thought that she could give up this house after all, the claims that it made on them.

  She was reading gradually through all the children’s books on her shelves, losing herself inside them one after another. If Ivy and Arthur joined her in her bed she read to them, and they finished a whole volume of Doctor Dolittle together – not one of the good ones. Kasim drifted into the room and while they watched from the bed he searched through the things on Alice’s dressing table and in her handbag without asking or even looking at her, for the cigarettes she didn’t have. — No, it’s a good thing, he said, when she suggested Fran could drive him into town to buy some. He explained that he’d given up, and was only tempted to start again because he was bored. But when she said they could take him to the station if he wanted, he looked surprised and said that he was all right, he wasn’t in any hurry to get home. It might brighten up tomorrow. He liked it here. He didn’t mind being bored.

  And then he sidled into Molly’s room, the children following him, still in their pyjamas, and behind that closed door they seemed to play interminable games of Monopoly – really interminable, one starting up again as the last one finished, Kasim winning every time (Well, I am supposed to be studying economics), Molly tranquilly indifferent to losing. Ivy stormed out in a temper, slamming the door behind her because Arthur wouldn’t play properly, he wouldn’t buy any property, he only wanted to hang on to the money he was given at the beginning. — Don’t you understand the idea of it? she shouted. — The idea of it’s that you use that money to make more money! Arthur looked from under the blond fringe that hung into his eyes, apologetically but shrewdly, as if he knew better than to trust anything so far-fetched. Between Monopoly games, when Molly was sometimes busy – ‘getting ready’ – Alice found Kasim slouching on the window seat on
the landing, blankly engaged in nothing. She tried to lend him a novel to pass the time, but he said gloomily that he didn’t see the point of fiction. — I don’t see what it’s for. Why would you put out any intellectual effort, understanding something that wasn’t actually true?

  By the time Alice got up to get dressed, it was often midday, or one o’clock; then in the afternoon she carried more letters upstairs from her grandmother’s bureau, or from the drawers of her grandfather’s desk in the study, and lay on top of the eiderdown to read through them. She kicked off her shoes and after a while she would slip for warmth into that consoling space between the eiderdown and the top blanket. Dear Mr Fellowes, I can’t tell you how much I was moved and excited by your new collection. It speaks to our moment with a directness and urgency like nothing else I’ve read this year.

  Roland made a fire in the sitting room in the afternoons, though the chimney didn’t draw very well. Pilar sat hunched over it with her shoes slipped off and her long feet tucked under her, reading through the newspapers, or through the legal papers she had brought with her, making notes. She was determinedly cheerful. Fran and Alice agreed in lowered voices in the kitchen that she made everything worse, made them feel the dreariness of the place which they wouldn’t have minded if they’d had it to themselves. — We’re used to it being crap, Fran said. — Now I feel like I have to keep apologising for it.

  — Why don’t they just go? If they’re so obviously bored to death?

  — But it’s only Roland who’s bored to death: Pilar actually claims to like it. She must be mad.

  — She’s needy, Alice said. — She needs something from us. I don’t know what.

  Harriet went for long walks despite the weather, and came back humming to herself, then went upstairs to change her clothes and confide in her diary. She had to hang out her wet things to dry – they steamed in front of the fire, depressing Alice. The postman delivered packages of DVDs for Roland, and he and Pilar cuddled together under a duvet in the study to watch them – Roland had bought a new DVD player in town. He bought an oil-filled electric radiator too, which he plugged in wherever they were sitting. — He thinks he can purchase his way out of boredom, Fran said. — Well, of course you can purchase your way out of it. But not down here.

  Then Roland had to sit on the gate at the top of the field in the rain, trying and failing to send off reviews from his phone: on the way down the hill he even slipped on the grass, getting red mud on his trousers. Preoccupied when he returned inside the house, he hurried up to Molly’s room and went in without knocking, to ask for her help – perhaps she could get a better signal on her phone. She and Kasim were sitting on her bed – upright, it’s true, and fully clothed, but disarrayed, hot-eyed, pulled hastily apart, who knew which layers untucked or buttons undone? Scalded, banging the door shut again without saying a word, Roland couldn’t forgive either Kasim, or himself for his own idiocy. How had it not occurred to him to knock? His sisters would have put two and two together, they would have been deliberately noisy, coming upstairs, they would have knocked, or not even dreamed of going into her room in the first place. Why was he missing those instincts? For the first time in his life he wished he was more ordinary.

  — You know what’s going on? he said to Alice.

  — Well of course I know: isn’t it sweet?

  — I don’t find it sweet. I think I should step in, before things get any worse. What possessed you to bring that boy along in the first place?

  — Don’t be silly, Roly. What do you mean, worse? Young love: it’s a glorious thing. You’re just jealous.

  — Is it glorious? But I’m so anxious for her.

  Alice qualified, more truthfully. — Well, it wasn’t exactly glorious for me. But that’s only because I was so tortured. Molly’s straightforward. I think she knows how to be happy.

  Disconcerted, Roland sat down to a long session with Chopin at the old out-of-tune piano whose damper was warped. It didn’t soothe him when Pilar marvelled at his performance, because he had no illusions about his playing – in fact it struck him that if she had a cloth ear for music it could be a problem between them. Then when he went upstairs to his own room, he found Ivy and Arthur huddled up against the door to Molly’s bedroom, each with a glass tumbler pressed to the door and an ear pressed against the tumbler, listening to whatever was going on inside. Roland roared at them and they fled: even he thought this was amusing as well as alarming. Shortly afterwards, when he was on his way downstairs again, Kasim came out from Molly’s room, hands in his pockets, whistling and kicking at the skirting board with exaggerated innocence. Roland thought that the house was intolerably too small and they were all going to go mad if it didn’t brighten up soon, piled incestuously like this on top of one another.

  — There’s something funny going on with those kids, Fran said when he told her about the eavesdropping. — I’ll show you what I found in their pockets.

  She fetched the little folded scraps of ancient paper from where she’d buried them, perturbed, under her clothes in a drawer upstairs: she was even blushing as she handed them over. After a moment’s squinting, Roland and Alice could make out women’s body parts, faded to an unhealthy grey-pink. Alice laughed.

  — Where on earth could they have got these from? Fran said. — And there’s another thing. I’ll swear there’s money going missing from Arthur’s savings. But what’s he spending it on? Not just pennies: several pounds I think. They’re never out of my sight when we’re in town. You don’t think that they’ve been buying porn?

  — I know this is the country, Roland said, — but even down here no newsagent in his right mind would hand over dirty magazines to two infants clutching their pocket money.

  — Anyway, these magazines are ancient, they smell of old damp.

  — Oh, don’t sniff them Alice, how can you! Maybe they’re buying them from some other kid or something.

  — Or from Kasim? Roland suggested. — They don’t know any other kids down here.

  — Roland, that’s just an evil thing to say, Alice protested. — You can’t mean it seriously, about Kasim.

  — All right, I’m not altogether serious. I suppose the children have stumbled on someone’s ancient stash, from years ago. No one looks at porn in magazines nowadays. Simon Cummins? He’s got a leering look, hasn’t he? Or Christopher?

  — Christopher? Don’t be ridiculous. Whatever made you think of Christopher, of all people? He’s only even been here once or twice. And surely he’s a feminist or something. He wouldn’t look at porn.

  — Only an idea. Those Lycra cycling outfits are a kind of sex perversion in themselves. And the feminists are probably the worst.

  When Alice suggested she ask the children directly, Fran confessed that, to her own surprise, she’d found she couldn’t. — I don’t want them to know that I know they’ve looked at anything like this. But I’ve no idea what I’m supposed to do. And now they’re voyeurs as well! It can’t be natural.

  — I’m sure it’s absolutely natural, Alice said. — Do you want me to ask them?

  — Perhaps it’s best to just ignore it. Really, though, don’t you think Jeff ought to be here?

  The sorry little scraps of obscenity on their softened, felty paper contaminated something, Roland thought. Those women with their bloated breasts and shaved pudenda weren’t even protected by the sheen of an unreal mannequin beauty; they looked like any housewife he might have met shopping in the streets of the little seaside town, and unsettled him more than he could acknowledge, even to himself. Something overheated and uneasy seemed to have taken possession of their whole household, under siege from the everlasting rain. His own lovemaking with Pilar was more inhibited, as if he was aware of everyone listening in, as if those children might have their glasses pressed against his door. Once or twice he even jumped up out of bed, flinging open the door onto the landing, only to find no one on the other side. Wrung out of him against his will, however, his pleasures seemed particu
larly acute. In the mornings at breakfast he was ashamed to think who might have been listening.

  He tried to persuade Pilar that it was time for them to go, but she was determined that they see out the whole three weeks. — It’s such a long time since I had a rest, she said. — I feel very comfortable, here at home with your family.

  — But the weather’s awful.

  — I don’t mind the weather.

  They drove for a day to look round a great Victorian baronial pile an hour’s drive away, on the other side of the motorway, but at the last minute Harriet asked if she could come with them. She said she hadn’t seen the place for years, and he didn’t know how to refuse her; then he felt his kindness, which was his fixed habit with Harriet, strained through a long afternoon. He had wanted to be alone with his wife, to give her his whole attention, and to have hers – nothing smothering or soppy, quite the contrary. Before Pilar met his family, he remembered, their communion had been simplified and minimal. When he’d told her things, she had lifted a shapely eyebrow, or curved her lips in a responsive smile: she only spoke if she had something to say. This had answered to his deepest need, and he’d never intended for Pilar to be initiated – and so willingly, even eagerly! – into the scruffy, unsound, makeshift excesses of his own family, which were just what he wanted to escape from.