Harriet seemed happy enough anyway, all that day: when she was happy she was surprisingly girlish, chaffing and jokey, bringing up stories from his owlish boyhood until he was annoyed. He didn’t disown the prig he once was, who had worshipped Sir Mortimer Wheeler and pretended to write plays in Latin, but he felt tenderly enough about him to keep him more or less private. He was afraid of seeing the perception dawn in Pilar that he could be thought ridiculous. Harriet’s cheeks as she teased, he noticed, were surprisingly pink – surely she wasn’t wearing something on her skin? And who’d have imagined that his revolutionary sister would one day take her pleasures visiting these shrines to the surplus consumption of the aristocracy, exclaiming with Pilar over a vast billiard table or a cabinet full of lockets with their painted miniature doll-faces and twists of ancient hair? He was astonished when they began working out the relationships between the dolls. Lady Geraldine, she must have been married to the second Earl.
— But don’t you want to send them all to the guillotine?
— Don’t be such a spoilsport, Harriet said. — I’m having fun.
Roland wasn’t in the least revolutionary, but thought nonetheless that the National Trust was opium for the middle classes, and found he couldn’t take much pleasure in it. There were too many holidaymakers – because it was raining outside, and cold, and there was nowhere else to pass the time – tramping damply round the rooms, wondering obediently at the great dining table set out with damask and silver and Wedgwood, glazed plaster fruit and dusty plaster fowl and dusty bread rolls, for the delectation of twenty guests long dead, who’d have despised them. The view from the back of the house, which should have been down a succession of terraces and parterres to the great gothic threadworks where the money came from, and beyond that to a dream of hills, was muffled in grey cloud.
In the cold, wet weather the children’s cult intensified: driven back on themselves indoors, the Dead Women made themselves felt in every shadowy corner blooming with black mould, and were ever more exacting. Ivy interpreted the signs they left with confident authority: a pattern of cracks in a broken mirror, a wet dead mouse left on the terrace, and – unanswerable triumph – a crude charcoal face found drawn on a wall, once, when she tore a secret strip of wallpaper away, above the skirting board beside her bed. She kept Arthur perpetually guessing: was she making all this stuff up, or should he trust her? There was cool calculation in his expression, even while he hurried around after her instructions, digging out Kasim’s old dog-ends from the lawn, stealing salt from the crock in the kitchen, peeing into a cup so she could stir up one of her sacrificial potions. He drew the line at touching the mouse, and in the end Alice buried it; their mother had outraged them, telling them to just throw it into the shrubbery. Ivy couldn’t, Arthur puzzled, have put the drawing ready under the stuck wallpaper; in fact she had looked for a moment as surprised as he was, finding it there. Everything might be a mere succession of accidents, which his sister wove into her story: he dithered between his belief, and the doubt which was both refreshing and disenchanting.
At least the rain meant they weren’t going to the cottage so often, where he had to pay money to appease the Women’s powers. They had got nearly all his savings out of him already. According to Ivy, they were building up to some climax of revelation.
— About Mitzi? Arthur asked.
She was fairly contemptuous. — That’s old news. It’s bigger than that. Something’s going to happen.
This expectation became entangled with the time they spent spying on Kasim’s and Molly’s love affair. The endless kissing and caressing appalled the children but was also enthralling, so that they couldn’t bear to miss any developments. Kasim and Molly sat together in the mess of Molly’s bed for Monopoly and sometimes forgot – in the long pauses between goes, while Arthur made up his mind – that anyone was watching. They would slip further and further down among the pillows, lost to everything but their own convoluted, mostly mute windings around each other, which seemed so oddly bent upon some purpose, although they had no obvious end in sight. Kasim determinedly clambered half across Molly, Molly responded in adjustments and little noises which were half-protest and half-consent. Ivy would nudge Arthur – lost in contemplation of his troubling property portfolio, which she managed for him – with her foot, and signal with a jerk of her head to see what she saw; then the children stared at each other bemusedly. Their laughter coiled inside them, sensuous in itself, until they had to hide their faces.
Arthur burst out once with his hilarity, hot-cheeked. — Are you two going to get married or something? Is he your boyfriend?
— Shut up, small boy, Kasim said, muffled. — Nobody asked you.
Kindly Molly explained that you didn’t have to get married just because you kissed someone. Arthur grinned at Ivy. — But you do if you do sex.
Molly sat up abruptly, blushing, pushing Kas away. — You’re not supposed to know anything about that!
Ivy was furious with Arthur for drawing the lovers’ attention, which meant that they were chucked out from the bedroom for a while – but not for long. It was almost as if the children were part of what was unfolding between the young people: or at least they lent them the necessary cover, so that the grown-ups didn’t bother them. Their craze moved on from Monopoly to Scrabble. Alice was sometimes enlisted for advising Arthur and Ivy, although Ivy would agonise between getting a better word and managing by herself; she couldn’t believe that she could only see words of three letters, when she could read much harder ones in her books. — Don’t tell me, don’t tell me! she cried, putting her hands over her ears, scrutinising her tiles fiercely, as if she could glare them into a more sophisticated order. She had finally to turn to her aunt, who was tactful in the extreme. — Look, try this, Alice suggested. — I wonder if this would fit in anywhere?
It turned out that Molly had a gift for Scrabble.
— I’ve always been good at spelling, she said complacently, putting down vortex on the treble word score.
Kasim couldn’t bear it. — But you don’t even know what half of these words mean! What’s a vortex?
— I don’t know! It’s a thing you get pulled into, like a zone or something.
— And what’s a zone?
— Do I have to know? As long as it’s a word.
— But I don’t understand how you can know it, if you can’t use it.
She shrugged. — The word’s just sort of there, I’ve heard of it.
Kasim was a bad loser, and even upset the board and stormed out once, when she and Alice wouldn’t let him have Elvis. — It’s a proper name! You know it is! Alice said, laughing at his indignation.
Harriet was sitting on the edge of her bed, writing in her diary, when Pilar knocked subduedly on the door between their rooms. — Do you mind if I come in?
Hastily, guiltily, she closed the book.
— Of course not.
It was the first time Pilar had been inside this room: Harriet saw her look around and take in with a little involuntary shudder how dismally empty it was. Harriet had never known how to do what Alice did, crowding out any space she occupied with her personality, setting out her possessions as if they composed a little tableau, making everything inviting. Even in this wet weather when Alice hardly got dressed, she’d have both lamps switched on in the middle of the day – one beside the bed and one on the dressing table – so that everything was bathed in the glow from under their pink, pleated shades. Harriet hadn’t thought to turn anything on, she’d been writing in the dull light from the window and the room was chilly.
— Oh Harriet, I need you, Pilar said, and sat beside her on the bed, seizing her hand, enveloping her in perfume; Harriet stared down at Pilar’s wrist, slender in the cuff of her silk blouse, dangling a gold chain. Her English was perfect, and yet there was some nuance in the way that she pronounced Harriet, which made it breathily exotic. — I’m so glad we’re friends. I have to have someone I can talk to. I don’t want to bo
re Roland.
Trouble showed dramatically in her face: all the strong lines were dragged downwards and there were purple smears of shadow under her eyes and beside her sharpened nostrils. Catching sight of her reflection in the swing mirror, she looked away. — I’m an old witch, she said.
— You? You’re not the one who’s an old witch. Harriet squeezed her hand, bird-light bones and flesh, impervious stiff bristle of the rings. — You’re always beautiful.
— You’re so nice to me.
Pilar told her that there was bad news from Argentina: she’d found out when she checked her emails in town that morning. Her brother in Buenos Aires had agreed to have the DNA tests, to help resolve the question over their biological parents. — I don’t know, maybe they got to him, put pressure on him, made him feel bad. He’s been talking to my aunt. And now I can’t tell Roland, it’s too late.
— Well of course it’s not too late, Harriet stoutly said, though she dreaded the idea of Roland being in on their secret.
— He’ll ask why I didn’t tell him before, bringing all this trouble. He likes to think I’m so calm and in control.
If Pilar’s brother took the tests, it was effectively the same as if she was tested. She said she’d spoken to a lawyer friend in Argentina, who was looking to see whether there was any kind of injunction she could take out to prevent him. — You probably think I’m very selfish, Pilar said, — not to give this satisfaction to people who’ve lost their children. I must seem like a monster to you.
Harriet tried to imagine this point of view. In another life, she might have thought that Pilar was a monster. Her idea of the women of that guilty class, heir to privileges bought in blood, might have corresponded very much to how Pilar looked at this moment – groomed and impervious and expensive, something hardened in her expression. It was extraordinary that this creature in all her physical perfection sat here beside her on her own poor bed: she looked as displaced as a queen out of a tragedy, or a god in an old painting, descended from another world to ravish mortals. In the presence of the god, the protests of righteousness were puny. Anyway, Harriet’s old confidence had collapsed long ago, that the world could be sorted out into the damned and the righteous. In flawed reality, who could blame Pliar for her resistance to being enlisted in some horrible old story? It wasn’t her fault, if friends of her friends had once dropped the bodies of dissidents from helicopters into the sea. Who could want to belong to people they didn’t know and be claimed by them, even if their wrongs stretched out beyond counting?
— You’re not a monster, she said, lifting Pilar’s hand to her lips and kissing it. Pilar allowed her to do this, she didn’t pull her hand away. There was knowledge in her face, Harriet thought, daring to look into it: a rich gleam of contempt, mingled with amused acceptance of the homage. — If there’s anything I can do to help. Really, I would do anything for you.
Pilar wasn’t the sort of person Harriet usually got on with: her friends at home were mostly conscientious, wary of judgement, self-deprecating. If Pilar was a queen, it was a drama queen. And Harriet had overheard her say something shocking to Roland once, about Kasim: that she didn’t like Asians, didn’t trust them – she ought to know, she had to work with them. Roland had only mildly demurred, as if her prejudice were amusing, like ignorance in a child. In another life, Harriet might have kept a sceptical distance from Pilar, her lack of irony, partisanship, lack of culture. Had anyone, Alice insufferably said, ever yet seen her with a book? Pilar wanted to belong inside Roland’s family because of Roland: she wasn’t interested, really, in his sisters’ separate selves, and it was obvious that she’d taken against Alice. She had fastened upon Harriet because she needed a confidante, and Harriet was eagerly compliant. Pilar didn’t want to bore Roland.
When Harriet was twelve or thirteen, she’d had a friend at school whom she’d loved and who had used her, sending her on pointless little errands, finding out where she was vulnerable and prodding there, resorting to her company when there was no one more interesting, dropping occasional kindnesses like crumbs. Harriet had tidied this memory away, believing it belonged safely with childish things; now she remembered her mother’s impatience with this friend’s exploitation, and her own inability to explain what she knew about it – that the abjection was not a downside, but the essential fabric of her love.
— We two should go swimming again, Pilar said.
— If it brightens up, I’d love that.
Pilar made a face towards the window, shrouded in its grey. — Will it brighten up? We could go to the little pool in the hotel.
— That awful place. Could you bear to go back there?
— Of course! I liked it!
In an interval of one day which wasn’t sunny, but when at least for an hour or two it stopped actually raining, Kasim took the children off into the woods. Molly was doing something to her hair, in her room, and he didn’t invite her: he thought she needed reminding that he could enjoy himself without her. Fran made the children put on their wellington boots, so that they could splash through the new lakes of red-brown water blocking the path, and around the troughs of sucking mud, knee-deep where cows had wallowed. Kasim had to negotiate these more cautiously – he’d only brought one pair of trainers, and had spurned Fran’s suggestion that he pick a pair of wellingtons to fit him, out of the promiscuous, cobwebby muddle of boots in the scullery. The idea of putting his own foot inside anyone else’s dank old cast-offs upset him. — Suit yourself, Fran said.
In the woods the light was brooding and subdued. Of course Kas got his feet wet more than once, and muddy, and he cursed, and his pullover was soon soaked and he was freezing, because every bush and drooping bramble shed its load of raindrops if he brushed against it. Streams which had trickled were swollen now and dirty. New undergrowth sprouted livid green, the tan mulch under the pines in a plantation had darkened to ox blood, unripe blackberries were fuzzy with grey mould. Beside a path a bank had sheared away in a smear of red mud; skirting around it they saw into the raw root-gape, like flung arms, of a tree upended, its deep hole whiskery with torn roots. Their senses prickled in the alert quiet; drops merely sifting down through the trees as they passed made them think it was starting to rain again; squirrels startled them, dashing about the tree canopy in crazy fits, sending down showers. Kasim’s silence prohibited frivolity; plodding after him, the children knew better than to propose any chasing game. Arthur only stamped his boot once in a puddle to spatter Ivy with liquid mud – Kas quelled her outrage with one look, before it was even uttered. They were regretting coming out, this wasn’t much fun. Kasim, with a chill, felt the force of the landscape for the first time, now that it glowered at him.
They were almost surprised, in this altered light, that the cottage still existed: but there it was, greyly enigmatic at the turn of the path as usual, hanging out over the twiggy thin finger-ends of the treetops in the valley below, its windows on that side – the side away from the door – filmed with wet and seeming blind because they knew no one could be looking out through them. As they came past the cottage and emerged into the clearing opposite its front door, a squall of rain blew up, and Kasim suggested taking shelter inside. Couldn’t they make a fire in there or something?
— Yes, let’s make a fire, Arthur said, inspired.
Anxiously Ivy said that this wasn’t a good idea, it might be dangerous. It hadn’t occurred to her that Kas might want to come inside, because he never had before: she had planned for one of their sacrifices, Arthur had brought the last of his pound coins. It was awful to have to imagine all over again, with fresh perception, what Kasim would see if he went upstairs – those horrors would become the children’s shaming secret, sticking to them. When Kas regretted that he hadn’t got his lighter, they were stricken with the recognition that this very lighter lay in full sight on the floor in the magazine room, giving away their familiarity with the Women and with everything else. And – Ivy strained to remember – might they not have left
their scissors there on the floor too, along with incriminating fragments of the cut-out pictures? Arthur had developed a knack for cutting out very neatly around the breasts. — Let’s not go in, she said.
But Kas put his shoulder to the door and heaved at it, lifting at the same time, until it yielded and opened wider than the children had ever opened it – they stumbled inside together, and he propped it open behind them with a stick. In the changed weather the tiny dim downstairs room was surprisingly dry but seemed somehow even less human, more like a burrow, hardly differentiated from the earth. Perhaps it smelled less of dead dog, but it smelled more of that same mouldy, mineral, rank underground they’d been uneasily aware of earlier, passing the torn-up tree root in the woods. Luxuriantly, obscenely, the cottage was rotting away. If only a clean wind could blow through it! The children looked anxious, as though this desolation were their responsibility.
— How long since anyone lived here? Kasim said shortly.
He poked with his foot at the packed leaves in the grate and then – as if he were looking for something – officiously pulled open and banged shut again the doors of the cupboards built in on either side of it, which the children had never touched. There was nothing inside, except one empty biscuit tin without a lid; the shelves were lined with thick paper, cut in scallops where it overhung the edges. Fatally, they knew he would try the door next which led to the bottom of the stairs – and he did, vanishing behind it. They heard his springy tread on the few steps, taking two at a time, and then crossing the first room. They didn’t look at each other, but Arthur shrugged.
Upstairs, Kasim hardly noticed the little mess of scissors and cut out bits of paper on the floor – he knocked the scissors accidentally with his foot into a corner before he saw them, and only then caught sight of the lighter. It didn’t occur to him that this was his: it was the cheap kind of disposable you could buy anywhere. He thought simply that someone else had left it, along with some loose change, which he pocketed: presumably whoever had been visiting to enjoy this ancient porn. Trying the lighter, he was surprised that it gave off a strong flame. In one disdainful glance, he spurned the dirty magazines: they mocked and affronted him, the ugly white flesh gloatingly exposed. He hadn’t even seen Molly yet without her clothes more or less on, but his knowledge of her body hidden underneath them – intricately folded on itself, taut with secrets – possessed him. He knew that all the kissing and cuddling and hiddenness at some point would not be enough, and must come to feel like failure; desire in him was bitter sometimes, his own equivocation taunted him. Then all at once this lonely place in the woods struck him as an answer to his difficulty and a vision of his fulfilment. He could bring Molly here, undress her finally and make love to her.
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