Tessa Hadley - The Past

— Not just peasants. It’s the way that people lived more slowly, and kept the same things all their lives, and took care of them. Our whole relationship to the things we owned was different. I hate how we throw everything away now.

Alice was more of an actress in her private life, Roland thought, than she ever was in the years when she had tried to be one on the stage. She had so wanted to be an actress, always — yet in any role apart from her own, to everyone’s surprise, her performances had been tentative and lacking in conviction. Roland knew his sister so well. When her words tumbled over one another in this self-dramatising way, he knew she wasn’t faking or pretending, it was her real effort to communicate the truth. Pilar asked whether, if she didn’t like modernity, she didn’t want anaesthetics when she had an operation.

— Of course I’m glad we have those modern things — medicines and sewage and hot showers and low infant mortality. Of course I am. With the treatments they have these days for cancer, our mother could still be alive, probably. But isn’t some of it false improvement, false betterment? We’re making the world too ugly. We’ve forgotten how to live.

— You’d be surprised, said Roland, — how long people have been saying that.

— You are an incurable romantic, Alice. Harriet sounded so bitter that everyone looked at her.

— Perhaps I am. Isn’t the world ugly, though? And getting uglier.

— You don’t know the peasantry, Pilar said briskly. — It’s easy to idealise them, but their way of life is very backward. If you saw them, you might change your mind.

Alice was silenced for a moment, unpicking conscientiously her shocked reaction to that word backward . After all, what did she know about the Argentinian peasantry, or peasantry anywhere? Roland’s sisters looked cautiously at him — he might be scorched, feeling how thoroughly his new wife didn’t fit inside their well-worn family forms. Also, they wondered how well this idea of backwardness would go down at his university. Stolidly Roland resisted their interest, keeping his own counsel as he always had, even when it hadn’t interested them so much. He knew Pilar didn’t enjoy these kind of discussions where there was no practical outcome, no decision to make. She believed social occasions ought to be lubricated with an agreed civility, limited and shallow.

Pilar began clearing the breakfast things onto a tray, refusing help when Harriet offered it. She was wearing a white shirt, and jeans that fitted her curved slim haunches precisely. When they began living together, Roland had been surprised that she put on clean clothes every day — and they were always spotless, never crumpled. At the end of each week, he discovered, she sent everything she’d worn to the dry cleaners or the laundry. This had seemed profligate to him at first, but lately he’d begun to do the same. And Pilar haggled rather brutally if there was the least grease spot or crease when their clothes were delivered back. The people at the cleaners seemed to admire her for it.

— We’re going to drive into town, he said to Alice now, — to pick up the papers and find somewhere to check emails. If we do decide to keep the house on, you know, we ought to get broadband. It just makes life easier.

— But that’s just what’s precious here, Alice protested. — That we’re not in connection with everything outside. It’s a sanctuary.

Kasim had acquired a map from the study. He led them to the waterfall a different way, through a tunnel where a railway line had once passed overhead, then across a stretch of high scrubland with wooden fire towers set at vantage points. They wouldn’t pass the ruined cottage until they were on their way home. In the woods they threw pine cones again: Molly screeched unselfconsciously when she was hit, racing flat-footed along the path, throwing cones back hard at Kasim — she and Arthur seemed to be in league together against the other two. Collaborating with Kasim, Ivy was happy. Her movements seemed perfectly attuned to his, running among the trees, collecting ammunition and then waiting in ambush.

The waterfall when they eventually arrived was a disappointment. In Ivy’s anticipation it had tumbled in a crystal stream, foaming into the pool below; in reality it was a swelling silver rope in a long curtain of vividly green moss. There was no authoritative thunder of falling water, only a subdued trickling. Because she’d talked it up as the climax of their walk, she felt humiliated. Kasim and Molly hardly looked at it. Molly flopped down in the grass and closed her eyes as if she was sunbathing, Kasim sat nearby and began reading a book which he took out of the back pocket of his shorts. In truth they were both — briefly — disappointed too: they had longed, without knowing it, for the éclat of something spectacular and greater than themselves, to overwhelm them. The abrupt cutting off of their attention was a surprise to the children, who were used to being bathed in adult awareness, at least for as long as adults were present. If her mother had been there, Ivy might have made a scene — this exposure, when something fell flat which she had longed for and promoted, was famously one of her tipping points. But she couldn’t risk disaster’s crescendo with no one to anchor it against. She brought out the story of cutting her foot on a piece of glass in the pool under the waterfall; reduced to words it seemed truncated and paltry and no one listened.

Molly and Kasim appeared to have forgotten each other entirely; then Ivy noticed that while Kasim frowned seriously into the pages of his book he was at the same time tickling Molly’s bare midriff with a long piece of grass. He did it so casually that at first Molly didn’t know it was him and brushed the grass seed head away carelessly without opening her eyes. When the tickling persisted — as if the grass had a will of its own, nothing to do with Kasim — a smile of knowing came on Molly’s face and, still without opening her eyes, she snatched at the seed head and held onto it, crushing it. Kasim’s face showed nothing.

Excluded, Ivy was suddenly shy and wanted to do something childish: she went to paddle in the pool with Arthur. Water babbled in there secretively. A freckled yellow light, refracted in the tea-coloured depths, gilded a scatter of pebbles on the sandy bottom; insects sculled the surface, dodging into the darkness under the ferns. The water was vivid against Ivy’s legs as socks of cold. They were wearing their jelly shoes — it didn’t matter if you got them wet, and you were safe from glass. Arthur was sternly preoccupied in some game with the thermos cup, pouring water out of the pool into a cleft in the rock. Ivy pressed her palms against the soaking moss of the waterfall — until she thought there might be slugs, and pulled her hand away smartly. Then she was seized by the sensation of seeing herself from a far distance, from the skinny tops of the fir trees stirring high above the clearing: miniature, alone inside herself, cut off at the knees by water.

Kasim picked another stem of grass and dusted its drooping, plumy head, heavy with seeds, against Molly’s cheeks and her closed, protuberant, mauve eyelids. With her hair fallen back from her face, he thought, and from his odd angle, she looked quite different — a sleek water animal basking on a rock.

— What are you doing? she said. — Don’t! It tickles.

He had forgotten Molly herself, he was so intent upon his explorations — of her ear now, which stood out childishly from her head, its cartilage golden-pink and transparent. Trailing his grass around the whorls of it, he speculated aloud that the grass stem might be sharp enough to pierce its long lobe, then prodded at it.