Tessa Hadley - The Past

Kasim dropped his head melodramatically in his hands; she saw how his hair sprouted from the crown so vigorously glossy and densely black. — Have I said something awful, bringing up your mother’s name like that? Are you grief-stricken now? Was she a saint?

— Don’t be silly, of course she wasn’t a saint, Alice said. — But she was a shining sort of person. Spirited and clever. Imagine her growing up here, in this wonderful place. It was perfect, that just as I closed my eyes to think about her you came in here with her book. Nothing happens by accident.

— Things do happen by accident.

She shook her head wisely, maddeningly. — I don’t believe in coincidence.

Light filtered through the stirring straw of the grass stems, bent under the weight of their heavy seed heads, flickering against Alice’s heart-shaped face and sooty, smudged eyes, and her soft skin and hair. There was a memorial plaque, she said, inside the church; very beautiful, her grandfather had chosen the words. Of course the death of their daughter, their only child, had broken her grandparents’ hearts completely. It had not broken her grandfather’s faith only because it was that kind of faith already, hardened in expectation of the cruellest thing possible. When Kasim asked whether Alice’s father was still alive, she said he was, somewhere in the Dordogne, probably. She hadn’t seen him for a couple of years and didn’t much care. After their mother died of breast cancer, their father had gone to pieces — which was forgivable — and run off to France with another woman, leaving his orphaned children behind — which wasn’t. It was all ancient history now. Her father had thought he was escaping ahead of old age, but it had caught up with him eventually. She had talked the whole thing over with her therapist for so many years that they’d wrung the subject dry.

— He’s supposed to be an artist, she said. — That was his excuse.

— What kind of artist?

— A painter. Not a very good one. Women in landscapes that are sort of dreamscapes: part Van Gogh, part album cover. He’s never sold much. His new wife — not the same one he ran off with — earns all the money. She’s an estate agent, selling the old farms to British incomers as the French country people go off to live in the cities. Isn’t that funny?

— Is it funny?

— I don’t mean about the farms and the depopulation. I mean, if you knew some of the fine things my father says about an artist’s life.

Alice went inside to brush her hair before supper. She remembered, as she always did, that her mother had sat at this same dressing table: first as a girl, and then again later, when the children spent their summers here with her and their father went off painting. Slanting late sunlight glinted on Alice’s bottles of scent and make-up and nail varnish, the lustre jug with its posy, gold threads in a scarf, the heap of her jewellery — none of it valuable but each piece striking and interesting, rich with sentimental associations. Wherever Alice settled, she had this gift of applying little touches to make the place distinctive and attractive, as if she were composing a scene for a play. She had moved from one room or flat to another very often in London, transforming each one in turn into a nest full of curiosities and nice things. Looking in the mirror now, she held her brush suspended in the air, staring over her reflection’s shoulder to the reflected room behind. Quietly she breathed aloud, my dear , although she didn’t know who she was speaking to. Her fine hair crackled with static, floating up towards the brush.

Breaking her mood, Harriet was suddenly present, blocking the reflected space in the mirror, intruding on her reverie. Of course it wasn’t Harriet’s fault that she had to come through Alice’s room — but she crept about so quietly! Because Alice was startled she couldn’t help being annoyed. Harriet made her feel caught out in vanity. She dropped her hairbrush and twisted round from the mirror.

— Goodness, are you spying?

— I thought I ought to tell you, Harriet said gruffly, — that I’ve arranged with work to take more holiday. So I will be able to stay here longer after all.

Guilty, Alice was aware of overacting her delight. She jumped up from the dressing-table stool to kiss her sister, feeling how Harriet stood stiffly in her embrace, not knowing how to yield to it.

— Oh Hettie! I’m so pleased! Thank you! she exclaimed. — And I know I don’t deserve you doing anything nice for me — I’m a grumpy old stick. I’m sorry.

— I didn’t do it for you, Harriet said. — It’s good for me to have a break. I’m enjoying myself.

She didn’t much look like it, Alice thought. She looked strained and there were purple stains on the fine skin under her eyes, as if she hadn’t slept — Alice hoped this wasn’t because she’d been put in that awkward, poky bedroom. She had some clever concealer which would work wonders with those under-eyes, but she was wary of offering it, thinking Harriet would only despise her.

Harriet prodded around among the bottles on the dressing table.

— I’ve never gone in for any of this clobber, she said. — What is it all?

Alice was watching her closely.

— Look, she said. — Sit down on the stool. Let me try something on you, just the least little thing. It’s only the teeniest smudge of cream. No one will notice, you’ll just look prettier.

Harriet’s expression as she hesitated brimmed uncharacteristically full with mixed reluctance and yearning. She gave way and sat submissively with her back to the mirror. Alice rummaged in her make-up bag and then very carefully, tenderly, stroked on the concealer, and after that a very light foundation, eye pencil, eyeshadow, mascara. Their two faces for once drew uninhibitedly close without any antagonism, Harriet’s vulnerably proffered, Alice absorbed in what she knew supremely well.

— Oh no, Harriet said with horror when finally she looked at her reflection. — It isn’t me. It isn’t right. Take it off, Alice.

FRAN AND ALICE drove into town with the children — Fran wanted fish from the farmers’ market, to make a pie. When they’d finished shopping, at the market and in the Co-op, they bought ice cream from the lemon-yellow-painted Esplanade Café, which had endured from the sisters’ childhood even though it looked as provisional as a summer house, in its little park of flower beds and crazy golf. In their childhood the ice cream would have been Wall’s, between two wafers — now it was made locally, from sheep’s milk. Fran and the children had two scoops and Alice had one, then Ivy dropped hers and wept, and needed a replacement. — She always does, Fran said. Leaning on the sea wall to eat theirs, the sisters looked out across the estuary while Ivy and Arthur played on the beach below, turning out buckets of sand decorously and warily because they were latecomers among the family encampments. The air was filmy with heat, blue with stale frying-fat and candy sweetness. The shouts of children ricocheted against the packed sand and the sea wall and the long rock groynes built down onto the beach against erosion.

This seaside town wasn’t quite the true seaside, for all the old-fashioned holiday jollity on display in the shops down at that tail end of the high street: buckets and spades and windbreaks and polythene windmills on sticks. The sand was imported from further down the coast; if the tide was out then anyone wanting to swim had to wade, ankleor calf-deep, for what seemed like miles into rich estuary silt and a disorienting glinting light, laid in long, flat planes across the eye — so that the shore, on turning round to look back, seemed more than left behind, seemed lost. After a rough night the water, opaque with silt, could be as brown as milk chocolate; oystercatchers and curlews and rarer birds fed on the many species of worm left in the mud when the tide slid off it. You saw easily across to Wales — blue hills and the white ghost of a power station at Aberthaw — so that the watery expanse could only ever feel domestic, a known quantity, though notoriously treacherous.