Tessa Hadley - The Past

Ivy hung back in the clearing; soon the shouts of the others sounded remote among the trees below and she had the sensation again that she’d had at the pool, of seeing herself from treetop height, remote and doll-like. Crossing the clearing and tugging at the cottage door, she imagined she was someone else, another more audacious girl in a children’s story. Ivy wasn’t brave, she was a coward when it came to sports or party games, the kind where you ran in a team and had to burst a balloon by sitting on it. But she also had a greedy curiosity which was like a hunger; she wanted to get clear, all by herself and without the shame of other people knowing she was doing it, the truth of what could happen. Still, squeezing inside the cottage door, she longed to find it scoured and empty, a clean breeze blowing through its harmless shell.

The brown dull light in the downstairs room, and the frozen urgency of the tipped chair, were just the same; her footsteps broke into the silence she and Arthur had left behind them yesterday. Halfway up the stairs she spun round and almost fell with fright when the door swung shut behind her, but this simplified things, because going back now was as dreadful as going on. The magazines and the dead dog had become one composite idea in her mind, the magazines a necessary preliminary to the rest, and she turned the damp-clumped unglossy pages boldly because Arthur wasn’t watching, taking possession this time of what she saw, the bleached-paper flesh in all its configurations, on and on, endlessly different and the same. Who were these women? Because she knew the pictures were for grown-ups, she couldn’t get over their gratuitous childishness and rudeness. Yet she couldn’t discount them completely; they stirred some tingling possibility in her, as well as fierce distaste.

Then she opened the door which she and Arthur had pulled shut behind them, and crossed the threshold into the second room, pinching her nose tight shut with her fingers, breathing through her mouth — still the smell of rot was in her throat, intimate and filthy. The room wasn’t as dark as before, light came and went because a breeze was blowing in the scraps of curtain. She had not noticed yesterday that the window was not quite closed. The fat sluggishness of the flies and their inconsequential spurts of buzzing disgusted her; she thought she couldn’t bear it if one buzzed against her. Yet once she was actually inside the room she forgot to be frightened. Everything was quiet apart from the flies, even peaceful. There was no one here except herself, she could do what she liked, she could see uninhibitedly.

Mitzi was both something and nothing at the same time: a mass in one corner was darkened and flattened, with a stain spread round it on the floorboards as if fluids had seeped out of it, then dried. Only the patches of russet red curls clinging onto the mass in places made it Mitzi. An eye socket was a pit in the skull, showing white through its leathery covering. When Ivy crouched to examine the remains more closely, not too close, she saw — at first incredulous, then with dawning certainty — that white living maggots fine as threads were wriggling in the dog’s body, in the places where the flesh was still clinging to its bones. Reaching this farthest shore of her discovery, Ivy let out a noise that was only for herself: wounded, like a low groan of protest. She was fascinated, though. She didn’t move from watching them until she heard the others shouting her name from the woods.

Before supper, Fran stood frowning in the shadowy hall, rucking the mat deliberately with her sandal against the chequered tiles then smoothing it out again, winding the coiling telephone wire around her hand, hunching her shoulder to hold the receiver against her ear. The louche old brown telephone, a relic from the seventies, was isolated on its wooden stand as if it were ornamental like an aspidistra or a vase: when Molly used it they had to show her how to dial a number. There was no chair put out beside it: the grandpees hadn’t wanted to invite the cosy, long conversations which were so expensive. Fran was dialling Jeff’s number over and over and not getting through — resentful, she imagined him drinking beer and playing snooker and smoking with the rest of the band, his phone ringing pointlessly in his pocket. Roland and Pilar in the kitchen were roasting two chickens with grapes and apples: a Spanish recipe. They were collaborating efficiently: Pilar had everything exactly timed and Roland, tied into an apron, was following orders, peeling apples and liquidising grapes. This was a very different regime to the one with Valerie, who had run around looking after him as if he were helplessly unworldly. Now, he addressed the cooking processes with earnest technical interest.

Kasim was bored, because Molly was teaching clock patience to the children. He went to walk by himself in the churchyard, and from his tall vantage point didn’t see Alice until he almost fell over her; sitting in the long grass, she was leaning back against the grey stone of a grave. Startled, he was cross for a moment, as if she’d lain in wait deliberately under his feet. When he was a boy he’d been humiliatingly aware of Alice’s female presence in his home — her underwear dropped in the washing basket, her perfume on his father’s bed sheets. Now her low exclamation and smiling upwards glance seemed too softly placatory, they clung to him.

— Kas, spare a ciggy?

She should buy her own, he thought, instead of pretending that she didn’t smoke. But he found them both cigarettes and dropped to sit cross-legged in the grass with her, his back to a grave opposite hers. Down among the grasses was a different universe, hotter and pleasantly sour with the smells of fermenting sap; out of sight of the encircling landscape, relationship to the huge sky was everything. He twisted to read the words over his shoulder, half indecipherable where the stone was flaking away: Fell asleep in Jesus, 1882.

— Fell asleep, and they buried him? Thank goodness I’m a Muslim.

Alice longed to be strong enough not to ask if he was enjoying himself. She shouldn’t let him see her need for his approval. — Do you like Molly? she asked instead.

He considered the lit end of his cigarette. Flatly, obediently, giving nothing away, he said he did like Molly. — But who is Molly? What is she?

Alice sang his words, to the tune of Who is Sylvia?

— Are you sure she really is your brother’s actual daughter? She’s not much like him, is she? He’s straightforward, she’s an enigma.

— You’re teasing. But just because Molly’s not the brightest, doesn’t mean she isn’t something special.

— I’m deadly serious. I think she’s profound, perhaps presides over the secret to the universe. And while we’re on the subject of unknowns, who is Jill Fellowes?

— Oh. Why?

Kasim pulled out from his back pocket the book he’d been carrying round with him all day, not noticing how she flinched at the bent end boards. — Look. The name’s written inside it. It’s a book of poetry. Is she your grandmother?

Taking the book from him, Alice pressed it tenderly back into shape. — Have you been reading these poems?

— I only pretended to read them, just to intrigue Molly. I’m an economist, I don’t know what poetry’s function is.

— It’s my mother’s name. Her maiden name. Lots of those books on the shelf where you found it are books from her childhood. It’s so uncanny that you spoke her name, because I’d come in here to think about her. She died, you know, when I was only thirteen.

He was discomfited. — But these aren’t poems for children, he said argumentatively.

— They used to be. Now, what we give children to read is mostly anodyne.