Tessa Hadley - The Past

Harriet was horrified by the rage that overwhelmed her. Hadn’t she unlearned this years ago? It had been peace, when she had stopped hating Alice.

— You can’t do that. Whatever’s in there is private, you shouldn’t look at it.

— They’re dead, Harriet. Don’t be ridiculous. If we don’t read their stuff, who will? I want to read their letters because I’m remembering them. I love them. Would it be better to forget them?

— Granny would have hated you digging around in her private life. If you do find letters in there you ought to burn them.

Alice sat back on her heels, staring at her sister. — What’s got into you? You’re in a mood. And what I said at breakfast wasn’t just romantic either, by the way. I know you agree with me, that things are ugly and awful. Why are you making up to Pilar? She won’t approve of your work with asylum seekers, you needn’t think so. I should think she’s pretty unsentimental about them. Aren’t they all from ‘backward’ places?

— You’re so judgemental, Alice. We hardly know her. You don’t know what she thinks, or what her life has been.

Both of them were remorseful, as soon as they were apart, that they had succumbed to quarrelling — it demeaned them, each preferred to think of herself as brightly generous in the face of the other’s provocations. Alice was ashamed of judging her new sister-in-law — Harriet was right, there was something crabbed and narrow in how she resented the intrusion into their family. Pilar was admirable and wholesome, as well as intimidating: when she washed up the breakfast things this morning she had scoured the whole kitchen, left it bright and pleasant. And Harriet thought it was true that Alice had loved the grandpees, she had been good to them when they were old, and it surely didn’t matter about the letters, if there even were any. What could their grandparents have written that was not blameless?

Alice resumed poking into the keyhole of the little bureau with an unbent paper clip. She tried to remember Dani’s swift authoritative movement when he came to her rescue after she locked her passport in a drawer and lost the key; she imitated it now and something gave way inside the bureau, freeing the sloping lid. With a subdued cry of triumph — not wanting to bring Harriet back — she lowered it, letting out its stale, held breath: the past was for a moment intimately at hand. Ink had dried up in a bottle of Quink, pencils and an eraser and a plastic pencil sharpener and Basildon Bond paper were stowed away in their compartments, bills paid long ago were sorted inside the leather clips which had been someone’s Christmas present, chequebook stubs were stuffed into a pigeonhole, the lavender in one of the little voile bags her grandmother sewed had crumbled to a powder with no smell. The arrangements preserved the traces of the hands that had last closed the lid, twenty years ago.

There were a few letters; no doubt there would be more in the bureau’s side drawers — Alice thought she could open these too, now that she’d got the knack. The first letters weren’t interesting: mostly business correspondence from the last four or five years of the old lady’s life, when she was a widow and had managed in the house by herself. A carer had visited — first every few days and then daily, driving out from the town — and Alice had come down to be with her grandmother whenever she could, although that was also the time when she was in the thick of her disasters in the theatre. There were some photographs from the 1980s: Roland’s graduation and then his PhD graduation, Fran a skinny kid with spiky, punky hair, eyes painted black as pits. Probably Harriet had sent these. It was Harriet who had managed to keep Fran on the rails — attending school, turning up for exams — in the years after their mother died and their father left. Harriet had ironed Fran’s school uniform and made her packed lunch, she had helped with her homework.

Alice stared into the photographs of her younger self as if they were oracles — they came with a new shock because she had forgotten they were ever taken, forgotten even possessing the clothes she was wearing in them. What she remembered of that time was insecurity and self-doubt — and yet the young woman in the photographs looked so assured and knowing: blowing out smoke, laughing with her head thrown back and eyes half closed, or haughtily made-up for some party. All that time when she was drowning in the struggle and chaos of her emotions, it was as if her outward identity had led another wholly competent life in spite of her — a life which seemed enviable and even admirable at this distance. She glanced behind her now into the room whose wallpaper was silvery in the light from the garden. No one was there, the room’s stillness was all hers: yet the chaise longue and the upright piano and the glass-fronted bookcase with her grandmother’s novels in it — Elizabeth Goudge and Rebecca West and L.P. Hartley — seemed drawn up stiffly against the walls in expectation. Again Alice was subject to that intimation of something unknown in wait for her — not from the past, but in her future. Her imagination seemed strained open and consenting, something must come into it, to fulfil it. In her history it had always been a man who filled up that quickened expectation. She was ready for another man.

One bundle of letters and cards were tied together with ribbon: she realised these were condolences written when her grandfather died, along with obituaries cut out from the newspapers. The cards were decorously floral; on one a pair of black gates opened onto an autumnal avenue. Alice imagined her grandmother looking for the ribbon, fastening the letters ceremoniously together before she set them aside. My dear Sophy, our thoughts are with you … your sad news … if it’s any comfort … privilege to have published … praying for you … The melancholy and the stuffy smell of old newspaper began to make her sleepy.

Molly stopped outside the cottage. — Oh, I remember this old place.

Kasim glanced warningly at the children — they knew it meant they must not tell that they’d been inside it.

— Imagine living here, he said as if he was reproaching somebody. — No electricity. No running water. No hot showers. No internet or mobile phone signal.

Molly puzzled over this. — They must have had electricity, surely. Everyone has electricity.

Kasim waved his arms at the sky innocent of pylons, even telegraph wires. — Do you think that it just comes down out of the air?

She looked vague.

— Where my family comes from, he said, — there are hundreds of thousands of people who live like this. Millions, actually.

The others were impressed. — Where do your family come from?

— But there must be water, Arthur said. — Else, how could you drink?

Kasim made it sound as if he’d spent more time in Pakistan than he ever had. He told them about the deep wells, or fetching water from streams, or from standpipes miles away; he had only a quite vague idea of these things, because his own relatives in Pakistan were wealthy — except that he had drunk water from a well in a country courtyard once, in a house belonging to his great-uncle. It seemed to him now that it must have been exceptionally pure and cold.

— You might die, Arthur said.

Ivy knew he was muddling up the water thing with what had happened inside the cottage.

— Lots of children do, said Kasim. — They die from drinking bad water.

— But not in this country, Molly added quickly, squeezing Arthur’s hand.

— So that’s all right then, said Kasim, sardonic.

He turned his back on them, but Molly picked up a lump of moss from beside the path and threw it hard at him as he walked off, hitting him accurately between the shoulder blades, spoiling his poise; for a long instant he was astonished and offended, and then to their relief he yelled as if letting go some pent-up outrage, scooped up the moss again and threw it back just as hard at Molly. This was the signal for the resumption of the pelting game they had played earlier: Molly and Arthur went hurrying in search of things to throw. In the slanting, syrupy afternoon light, because they were dreamy with tiredness and heat, they seemed to be bending and shrieking and thudding along the path in pleasurable slow motion.