Tessa Hadley - The Past

— He was a very educated man, and a poet. A famous poet.

Kasim was studying economics, he didn’t care about poetry — though he didn’t care much about economics either. Loose-jointed, he ambled after Alice round the churchyard, hands in pockets, only half-interested, head cocked to listen to her. Alice always talked a lot. Kasim was very tall and much too thin, with brown skin and a big nose lean as a blade; his smudged-black eyes drooped eloquently at the corners, the lower lids purplish, fine-skinned; his blue-black hair was thick as a pelt. He was completely English and unmistakeably something else too — his paternal grandfather, a Punjabi judge, had been married briefly to an English novelist. Now Alice was worrying that he would find the country tedious; somehow this hadn’t occurred to her when she’d invited him in London. What she loved best in Kington was doing nothing — reading or sleeping. It was obvious now they’d arrived that this wouldn’t be enough for Kasim, and she sagged under her responsibility to entertain him. Because he was young and she was forty-six, she was afraid of failing to interest him; she would be crushed if he didn’t like it here. Alice was painfully stalled by beginning to lose her looks. She had always believed that it was her personality and intelligence which gave her what power she had. Her looks she had taken for granted.

Fran — Alice’s other sister, the youngest of the four siblings — arrived next with her children, Ivy and Arthur, nine and six. They’d had an awful journey, the traffic had been hell and Ivy had been carsick. She’d had to sit with a plastic bowl on her knees, and her face — thin, prim mouth and sharp points of nose and chin, high forehead — was drained theatrically white behind her freckles. Trailing into the back garden from the car, through the stone archway overgrown with an aged white rambler rose, the children looked like remnants from an old-fashioned play: Ivy was dressed in a long Victorian skirt of khaki silk with ruffles, and a pink-sequinned top. She was usually running some imaginary other world in her head. Her stories weren’t dramas with plots and happenings, they were all ambience — and she loved Kington because here her inner life seemed to touch the outer world at every point. She advanced across the grass into her dream: the old house dozed in the sunshine, and its French windows under their little canopy of dun lead, burdened with clematis montana, might have opened onto any scene of royalty or poetry or tragic forbearance.

Arthur was wearing everyday shorts and a tee shirt but he was frail and exquisite, with translucent skin and blue veins at his temples; he looked more like a part in one of Ivy’s stories than she ever did. Although Fran was resolutely not sentimental, she couldn’t bear to cut Arthur’s silky pale-gold hair, which had grown down below his shoulders. Fran herself was stocky and definite, freckled, tawny hair chopped off in a neat bob, her green top stretched tight across her breasts and stomach.

— Thank goodness you’ve come, cried Alice, arriving in the keyhole gap from the churchyard. — I’ve forgotten my keys!

— I was terribly sick, Ivy announced. — I had to have a bowl.

— You should have heard the fuss. You’d have thought it was terminal. Doesn’t Harriet have keys? Her car’s here.

— The car was here when we arrived. She must have gone off for a walk.

— Oh well, at least there’s you — I could do with a hand unpacking all this shopping. You’re looking nice. How slim you are! I’m jealous.

She admired Alice’s white dress patterned with blue flowers, her tan, painted toenails, clever sandals. — I wish I had the time to spare for all of that.

Alice said she felt terrible that Fran had had to do the shopping. But she couldn’t have brought it on the train, and they somehow couldn’t have asked Roland to shop, could they, as they hadn’t met his new wife yet? And Harriet would have been too abstemious. Fran reassured her that she hadn’t been abstemious at all; Harriet would be horrified when they divvied the costs up later. Kneeling on the tufty rough grass, Alice hugged the children: Ivy holding herself stiffly, convalescent, and Arthur leaning into the kiss, liking the perfumed soft warmth of women. The grass had been cut for their coming by the neighbour who kept up the garden for them, and the grass cuttings strewn all around them were turning to dead straw, smelling sweetly rotten. Fran remembered there were spare keys in one of the outhouses anyway.

— Oh well, it didn’t matter. We’ve been in the churchyard together, visiting graves.

— Who’s we?

She was so sure she’d mentioned bringing Kasim. — Dani’s son. You’ll really like him. I left him meditating on a tomb or something.

— But Alice! You’re the one who said only family.

— He’s almost family! You met him — don’t you remember? — when he was a beautiful little boy, just about yesterday. Now he’s a beautiful young man — isn’t it frightening?

— You didn’t mention it, Fran said.

— And where’s Jeff?

Standing over her sister on the lawn, laden with plastic carriers, Fran paused for a dramatic effect that was very like her daughter. She was forceful where Alice was diffuse; her eyes had distinctive shallow lids which made her look as if all her awareness was out on the surface, with nothing hidden. — Guess what. At the last minute, Jeff couldn’t make it.

— Fran, you’re kidding? I thought he’d really promised this time.

— He really did promise. But he’s crap.

Jeff pretended he’d forgotten all about the holiday, Fran said, though it had been arranged for months. He’d booked in gigs for the whole time they were supposed to be away, without telling her; he said might be able to clear some time to come down for a few days. She had told him not to bother. Alice exclaimed and commiserated, though warily, because sometimes when she’d criticised Jeff, Fran had taken offence and begun defending him. And Alice liked him anyway, she was sorry he hadn’t come. This really was the last straw, Fran insisted, keeping her voice low to spare the children. It was all over between her and Jeff, she’d had enough. Alice had heard that before as well.

Fran unlocked the front door and the sisters stood hesitating on the brink of the interior for a moment, preparing themselves, recognising what they had forgotten while they were away from it — the under-earth smell of imprisoned air, something plaintive in the thin light of the hall with its grey and white tiled floor and thin old rugs faded to red-mud colour. There was always a moment of adjustment as the shabby, needy actuality of the place settled over their too-hopeful idea of it. Fran began unpacking the shopping in the kitchen, which was the least nice room of the house, unchanged since the nineteen seventies when their grandmother in a fit of modernisation had put in wood veneer wall cabinets and a sink unit and linoleum and an electric stove — at least she had preserved the old dresser built along one wall. Pans and basins left in certain cupboards grew black mould and were sticky with cobwebs, and there were always mouse droppings. Because the kitchen was between the dining room at the front of the house, and the long sitting room which ran all the way across the south-facing back, it was dark, with a neon strip light, and its side window looked out onto a scullery and outhouses.

Their brother Roland’s previous wife, Valerie — she had been his second — had seemed to spend all her time in Kington describing her plans for improving it, although she was always reassuring them how much she loved the place. They should make a new kitchen which opened into the garden, she said; put in central heating and more bathrooms. Everyone agreed with her but nothing was changed. There was no money to change anything anyway.