Tessa Hadley - The Past

Molly squealed in protest and sat up: both of them were shocked, looking one another in the eye again after such intimate contact.

— Why don’t you pierce your ears? Kasim asked severely. — Or your nose, or at least something.

She explained that she would love to wear earrings but had a horror of the pain of piercing. In fact she couldn’t bear the idea of any pain: she told him this solemnly, with innocent self-importance, as if she were telling him she disliked Marmite or classical music. — I’ve never even had to have a filling at the dentists, thank goodness.

— Ever been stung by a bee or a wasp?

She shuddered at the idea. — Never. I hate them.

— Broken your arm?

— Nope. I sprained my ankle once, that was bad enough.

— Got a staple in your finger from a staple gun?

— Oh god! She buried her face in her hands. — No! Did you ever do that?

She believes she’s charmed, Kasim thought incredulously. She thinks she gets a choice. She thinks it’s something special about her, and that she’s discriminating against pain out of an especially refined sensitivity — as if other people are made differently and don’t mind it.

— Ever had a Chinese burn? he said slyly.

— What’s that?

— We used to do them in the playground at junior school. Give me your arm.

— I don’t want one.

— Give it to me.

He held her arm above the wrist in his two fists, then twisted them opposite ways, pulling the skin lightly but hard enough to hurt her and make her pull away, only half laughing. She rubbed at the place where he’d left a red mark, easy tears welling like lenses, magnifying her tawny irises.

— What about childbirth? he said. — Don’t you want children?

— You can have an anaesthetic, Molly said, — from the waist down. My mother did and she said it was fine.

Fran and Alice lay side by side on a rug on the prickly grass in the garden, with their skirts pulled up to tan their thighs, though Fran’s only ever turned pink. — It’s not fair, she grumbled. — Why haven’t I got your golden kind of skin? Harriet’s got it and she doesn’t even need it, she doesn’t care. So what do you think of the new Mrs Roland?

— My god, she’s a Gorgon! Alice exclaimed with pent-up feeling. — Poor Roly. What’s he done? He must know what we’d think. No wonder he married her without telling us.

— But he doesn’t seem to mind it. He’s basking in it.

— He isn’t even a womaniser, though. He doesn’t lift a finger: it’s the women who do it. They see him looking so clever and so lost, so very much married to the wrong person. They come to his rescue; I’ll swear he isn’t at all active in the whole thing. I mean, everyone knew he needed rescuing from Valerie, but I’m not sure he did, until Pilar explained to him. And now he’s totally smitten. Sexually smitten.

— I do appreciate Pilar’s very attractive. I’d die to have her figure.

— Isn’t she a bit heavy in the jaw? Don’t you think? Carnivorous. And she so disapproves of us! She thinks we’re the worst kind of time-wasters.

— She thinks we aren’t worthy of Roland.

— She thinks we ought to be grovelling at his feet. No wonder he’s in love. Fran, I feel we’ll never have Roly to ourselves again! None of his other wives have taken him away from us like this. We could accommodate ourselves to the others — or they accommodated to us.

— Don’t be silly, Fran said. — It won’t last.

— D’you mean the marriage won’t last?

— I mean this phase of the marriage: you know, the lovey-dovey phase, when everything the other person does seems especially entrancing and original. Before the next phase, when all the same things seem especially irritating.

— Did you go through a lovey-dovey phase with Jeff?

— I suppose I must have, though the memory’s so humiliating I’ve repressed it. I feel as if I’ve been seeing through Jeff for ever and ever.

Upstairs Harriet was standing in her brother’s bedroom. The sash windows were thrown open high and she could hear her sisters’ voices from the garden though she couldn’t hear their words; she didn’t want to. Dust motes swarmed in the sunlight, and the thick hot silence inside the room seemed strongly printed with its absent inhabitants, who had marked it with their scent of cosmetics and perfume and aftershave. They had made up the bed with a duvet cover and pillowcases patterned in swirls of red and orange; the old-fashioned faded furniture seemed to hold stiffly back from an invasion. Harriet, too, was holding herself back — she was rusty, the joints of her spirit creaked and groaned with disuse. And yet she had crept in here. Possessed by what she had seen last night, she could not free herself from its violence, its excitement. She had not reckoned with this power of sex. In all seriousness she had believed that it didn’t count for her, that sex was a thing among other things, that you could put aside.

Putting her face up against the scarlet chiffon blouse whose hanger was slung over the wardrobe’s upper rim, not touching it at first with her hands, she stood breathing through its veil. The frail fabric rose and fell against her lips and cheeks, lifted by her breath; she tasted its sun-warmed, laundry smell. How grotesque she must look, with this draped over her face, if anyone ever saw. Outside a male voice chimed in with Fran’s and Alice’s: Simon Cummins, who kept the garden for them. She heard how they flirted with him and how he teased them, and she heard the drowsing, inward-absorbed cooing of the doves, hidden in the full summer skirts of the beech trees. Lifting down the blouse on its hanger, she carried it off into her own room, where she laid it on the bed. When she had closed both the doors, she pulled off her tee shirt, then unhooked her bra and dropped it on the floor. With hasty, clumsy fingers she pulled Pilar’s blouse over her head — it floated against her naked chest, the silk was raw against her breasts.

I am inside what she will wear, Harriet thought.

What would it feel like to be Pilar; to be so beautiful inside your clothes, to wear them with such assurance, and fit with that easy grace inside your own skin? It was as if the other woman belonged to a different, superior species. Then she stared at herself, as punishment, in the little round mirror on its stand on top of the chest of drawers. How lucky that her room was on the shady side of the house and the chest of drawers was in the shadows too, on the wall opposite the window. What she saw was something that ought to be kept hidden. The blouse made her grotesque; it insulted her as vividly as a slap or a derisory remark. Its brilliant red sucked away colour from her skin, and its low neck sagged against her jutting, freckled collarbones. She saw that her old woman’s haircut — chopped off short at her ears, sticking up on top — wasn’t modest or sensible, as she’d hoped, but a humiliating mistake. Reaching up inside the transparent material she touched her breast again, watching herself in disgust. Its flesh was cold, nosing against her hand like an old dog.

Changed back into her own tee shirt, Harriet sat on the side of her bed to write in her diary. I saw a hawk lift up out of a field , she wrote. Such heavy effort of the shoulders, wing tips dipping; the whole noble drama of its movement. I am nothing .

When Harriet went downstairs and stepped into the drawing room, thinking she would have it to herself, she found Alice there, kneeling on the floor beside their grandmother’s bureau, poking into its lock with something.

— Whatever are you doing?

Alice was startled, but not abashed. — I’m trying to pick the lock, she said. — Do you know how? Dani can do it, but I haven’t got his knack. I just have this feeling there are letters in here which might be interesting. Don’t you think? Otherwise why keep it locked? I don’t know why I haven’t wanted to before.