Tessa Hadley - The Past

In the field above Bardon Huish I found what I’d never seen before: a waterfall hidden in a cleft in the ground, grown thickly over with brambles. The berries still very green and hard. The little fall of water jetting off its miniature cliff curved purely and perfectly as glass, yet not still but in perpetual motion. I interrupted it with my hand, feeling its force, indifferent to me. Touched myself with the water as if it was a blessing, although of course I knew it might be poisonous.

KASIM DAWDLED IN the garden the next morning, waiting for Molly to come downstairs. He was setting fire with his lighter to bits of the dried cut grass which lay around, just to annoy Ivy, who hovered on guard nearby, tormented with the responsibility, rushing to stamp out all his little conflagrations, half-delighted and half-exasperated. He knew that Molly was up because he’d listened outside her door hours ago and heard her moving about in her room — they still hadn’t spoken one word to each other. Planning to intercept her, he’d lounged for a while on the window seat on the landing with its padded striped cushion, pretending to read the book he’d picked up from the shelf in Alice’s room, until the hot sun through the glass made him too stuffy. Arthur had come puffing up the stairs, frowningly intent on some baby purpose: not noticing Kasim, he had knocked on Molly’s door and been admitted, swallowed up inside. Then had come a faint noise of the guitar being strummed, first by Molly, who was scarcely competent, and then by Arthur, who was not competent at all. Kasim gave up and took the book downstairs.

What was she doing up there, for fuck’s sake?

— Getting ready, Ivy explained.

— Getting ready for what?

When Molly finally appeared, stepping out through the French windows carrying a bowl of muesli and with Arthur devotedly in train, she showed no signs of elaborate preparation. She could have pulled her jeans and cropped tee shirt on in two minutes, she wore no jewellery apart from a plain silver bangle, he could scarcely see that she wore make-up; her ears weren’t even pierced. There was something naked in fact in her pretty, neat face — high forehead, slanting long eyes, wide mouth; no wonder she kept the glossy wing of her hair falling forward, to hide it. Her hair had glints of rusty red in it, so did her lashes, and she was dusted across the nose with a few rust-coloured freckles, not too many. She sat on the step, flat belly folding into a neat crease, eating her muesli self-consciously and slowly while Ivy interrogated her. Smiling with her mouth full, Molly only nodded or shook her head in response. Did she like her school? No. What was her favourite lesson? Shrug. Did she have a boyfriend? No: blushing. What did she want to do when she grew up? Shrug. Did she like butter? Yes — a buttercup held under her chin reflected yellow.

Kasim knew Molly knew that he was watching, that she was performing for his benefit and the children were a convenient sideshow as he and she took each other’s measure. Molly’s self-possession was mysterious as a still inland lake; he hadn’t decided yet if she was very deep or very shallow. Now, when she took out her iPhone from her jeans pocket, it was his moment; he saw Ivy open her mouth to explain and sternly he forestalled her, frowning. — What network are you on? There’s no signal.

— Oh! Ivy was furious. — I wanted to tell her!

— I’m used to it, Molly said. — I’ve been coming here for years. Just thought I’d try.

— But it’s possible: I’ll show you. We have to walk up to that top gate in the field. If you sit on it you might get something.

— I feel cut off without my phone, she confided. — You know?

He was lofty. — I’m not bothering to check mine. Who cares?

Ivy almost protested — he had checked! — then closed up her small mouth upon his fib. The four of them set out up the field in a procession. Kasim reminded the children that they had to stay this side of his line and surprisingly they obeyed, planting their feet as if his new law was a fact of life. Then he leaned on the gate and pretended to be gazing out at the view basking in sunlight, blue-dusky woods and motionless ranks of golden crops, distant birds suspended in the air’s pale blue, scrutinising the earth beneath. Molly meanwhile, her bare brown midriff on a level with his eyes, was all absorbed in her phone, giving squeals of satisfaction when she got her signal, growling with real irritation if she lost it again. He stole glances up at her expression, which as she read and texted was the most animated he’d seen it; when she’d finished with her texts she checked Facebook, fingers adept at scrolling, smiling and reacting secretively in collusion with an invisible company of like minds elsewhere.

— Let’s take a walk, he said decisively. — Molly, would you like to come for a walk?

The children would accompany them, he calculated: at least on this first excursion. They were his pretext and his cover. Thrilled, Ivy suggested they could go to the Buddhist retreat. — There are people wandering around meditating, and they won’t speak to you even if you ask them things.

— No, let’s go to the waterfall again. This time I want to actually see the waterfall.

Ivy turned on him, if he’d noticed it, a face that was clouded with complications and reluctance. She accepted stoically, however, that because she was only a child she couldn’t determine where they went, could only adapt to what the others chose. Anyway, she half-desired to return to the scene in the cottage, even as she half-dreaded it.

— Will we go in that cottage again? Arthur asked her privately on their way down the field.

— What for? We’ve seen inside. It’s only boring.

In the dining room Fran replenished everyone’s cups with fresh coffee. They were using the good china from the sideboard, the cups weightless and fine, transparent. If you held them up to the light when they were empty you could see set in the base a picture of a woman’s head, strands of her loose hair blowing behind her — their grandmother had shown them this miracle when they were children. Alice, still in her dressing gown, was talking too much, leaning animatedly forward across the table among the ends of crust and pots of jam stuck with spoons, showing her cleavage, holding forth in one of her diatribes against modern life. She said everyone was losing the sense that everyday things could be substantial and beautiful. In the old days a peasant carved a bowl and a spoon out of a piece of wood, then used them to eat the food he’d grown in his own garden. — Now everything is banal, objects have no meaning, they’re interchangeable.

— I wonder if that’s what the peasant thinks, her brother said.

— He’s better off carving bowls than working in a factory.

— Well, you’d better ask him.

Roland felt impatient with how Alice simplified — she wanted shortcuts, but the truth about these things could only be understood through a lifetime’s intellectual endeavour. It wasn’t possible for him to lay out in casual conversation all the complex hinterland to his conviction, his own formulations interwoven with the thoughts of others. — I’m wary of your evaluative judgements, he said. — This is good and that’s bad. The peasant might be better off in the factory and have more leisure time and disposable income. You have to factor that in.

— But is it always stupid, to see the value in other ways of life, and realise what’s wrong with our own?

— You have to ask how you know what you think you know, about value.

— It’s a bit late for peasants carving bowls, Alice, Fran said. — I don’t think you’re going to get that particular genie back into its bottle.