Tessa Hadley - The Past

Vaguely she was aware of Molly playing something melancholy on her guitar in her room — the same little sad, tentative thing over and over, always breaking down at the same place. Eventually the music faltered altogether. Molly was standing beside Alice’s window seat, staring down at her anxiously.

— Aunt Alice, are you all right?

Alice smiled up at her through her tears. — I’m reading something I used to read when I was a girl. This story makes me so happy. It’s brought back so many things.

— Oh dear, Molly said helplessly. — I’m sorry.

— Don’t be sorry, I don’t mind.

Molly was embarrassed by her aunt’s excess of emotion. Guiltily, she mentioned to Harriet later that Alice had been reading old books and getting upset. Harriet only said that Alice got upset very easily. How like Alice, Harriet scolded in her thoughts, to make a parade out of her private feelings for everyone’s consumption, bewildering the children.

Ivy made a scene when they got home, saying she wouldn’t eat the risotto Alice was making; when Fran said that if she didn’t she’d go to bed without eating anything, she lay racked with sobbing for a while on the grass in the garden.

— She has to learn to eat what’s put in front of her, Fran said.

But Alice couldn’t bear it and said she could have cheese on toast instead. Then Ivy and Arthur played before supper in the stream which ran across the bottom of the garden, building the dam they always built, or tried to build. From the kitchen came the rattle of china and cutlery, pan lids chiming, Alice banging the wooden spoon on the side of the pan after stirring. The sun was low and the stream was mostly in shadow. Bare-legged and barefoot inside clammy wellingtons, they fell into a concerted rhythm, satisfied by the push of the water up against their boots as they splashed through it, Arthur following Ivy’s orders. They were drawn on by a vision of a spreading, still lagoon, while the stream, hastening over its stony bottom, forced its way through all the gaps they left. Urgent, responsible, Ivy rapped out her instructions. Once, memorably, in a different summer and when the children were sitting on the bank, cows — gigantic at close quarters — had come swishing along this stream, making a tremendous racket in the water, stirring up the mud from the stream bed, playing truant from their ordinary lives in the fields.

— It was Mitzi, Arthur paused to say, a stone in each hand.

Ivy was contemptuous. — Are you still thinking about that old thing?

— But it was.

— I don’t care. Who cares?

She shrugged her skinny shoulders, fending off some intimation through a great effort of will. The real evening was brimming and steady around her like a counter-argument to horror, its midges swarming and multiplying in the last nooks of yellow sunshine.

After supper, when Fran had put the children to bed and Molly and Harriet were finishing the washing up, Alice visited the bathroom upstairs and then slipped secretly into her brother’s room. She carried the tooth mug full of water, pretending she wanted to top up their flowers. Roland and Pilar and Kasim were sitting outside on the terrace with their coffee and brandy; their voices floated from below through the open windows. Kasim was opening up to them at last — perhaps too much. It sounded as if he was boasting about how he found his university lecturers boring, how stupid most of them were.

Alice found her flowers put aside indifferently on a windowsill, out of the way of all the toiletries and bottles and kit crowded on their dressing table: not only Pilar’s expensive make-up and scent but cologne and moisturiser for Roland too. Alice saved the surprise of these for Fran later — after a short and crabbed conversation with Jeff, on the phone in the hall so that everyone could hear her side of things, Fran was watching some detective thing on the grim little television in the study. Who would ever have thought their brother would use moisturiser, or Acqua Di Parma? Alice felt tugged between fond respect for him and a puff of laughter. At dinner there had been a little fuss when he dropped something on the white trousers; crouching beside him, Pilar had mopped at it so seriously and efficiently.

She peered around the bedroom in the dusk, helped by the light from the landing behind. Cases stood open and half-ransacked on the floor: Pilar’s dresses and a blouse — in simplified bold shapes and colours, black and white and red — were ghostly presences on their hangers, hooked over the carved rim of their grandmother’s huge old wardrobe. Fingering a red chiffon blouse, admiring it, Alice caught sight of herself in the foxed oval mirror in the wardrobe door and was taken aback by something dated and fusty in her own appearance. She had put on that vintage bolero again. Was she letting something slip, had she failed in her vigilance, keeping up her style? Or sometimes too much vigilance was disastrous, as you grew older. A floorboard creaked and Ivy called out subduedly. Alice hurried out through Harriet’s room then into her own. — Go to sleep, she said from across the landing.

— I can’t!

Alice put her head round the door of the children’s bedroom. Ivy was mournful, eyes glittering in the half-dark. She lay flat on her back in bed like a little girl in a folktale, her sharp nose pointing up, her two plaits angled neatly on the pillow.

— Yes you can. Shut your eyes and think of nice things.

— What nice things?

Alice cast around for ideas. — Ice cream? Kittens? A pair of magic shoes to carry you away on an adventure?

She began to tell Ivy the story of the doll’s-house dolls, but Ivy only sighed, rolling over, turning her back on Alice. Her eyes were still staring open and she was portentous with her despair, beyond the reach of childish consolations.

Harriet stepped into her room later, closed the door behind her, and stood in the dark in the relief of her own space at last, feeling the evening’s sociability drain out of her. Almost at once she was aware that the door in the other wall, which led into her brother’s room, had been left open — although she had been careful to close it earlier. The light wasn’t on in there either, but she could hear Roland and Pilar moving around; they had come upstairs to finish their unpacking. Embarrassed because they hadn’t noticed the door, Harriet slipped out of her shoes and went stealthily across the room to close it. The full moon had risen and was shining in at all the windows on the back of the house; blue light spilled through the open door into her room. Her brother and his wife must be bathed in moonlight.

She put out her hand to close the door — it was only open a few inches. Then through the gap her attention was caught by a movement she couldn’t at first interpret — moonlight itself seemed to be coiling and uncoiling inside the looming shape of her grandmother’s heavy wardrobe; Pilar’s dresses, hanging like pale body-shapes, swayed in time to it. Whatever Harriet was watching, she realised, she was seeing reflected in the wardrobe’s mirror: some knot of light and dark busied upon itself, intent as nothing ever was intent, urgent. It seemed more like work than play. She had watched for too long, too deeply drawn in, before acknowledging that she knew what she was seeing, or half-seeing: the newly-weds were making love. By then it was too late. Putting her forehead against the wood of the doorframe, she touched her own breast with her hand, outside her shirt, unable to leave off looking.

Then a cloud covered the moon and blotted out the light, and she stepped back from the door. She was too horrified to close it now — anyway, they might hear her, and know that she’d heard them. The purposeful low noises of their love-making racked Harriet; in the aftermath (settling sounds, the appreciative hum of fulfilment, a low laugh) she was hollowed out, humiliated. Standing drawn upright, alone in the quiet room, imagining herself like one of those emaciated worm-eaten medieval carvings, she was assaulted by outrageous longings. Where had these been locked away inside her? With Christopher and with others, she saw now, she had only ever had the husk of the real thing, the dry rehearsal. Creeping out through Alice’s room, she shut herself in the bathroom; and then when she returned she came noisily into her bedroom, put on the light, crossed directly to the other door, and closed it firmly. She took out her diary from under the tee shirts in her drawer, and sat with it on the side of her bed as she usually did; she put down the date, then hesitated with her biro poised above the page. After a moment she began to write.