Tessa Hadley - The Past

— Oh Alice, said Fran. — For goodness sake!

— How could you? said Harriet.

Alice was wounded. — I don’t know why everyone’s so angry with me. Wasn’t it a lovely letter?

— It’s your lack of tact. It was Roland’s letter.

She seemed genuinely bewildered. — Was I tactless?

Both windows were wide open in Roland and Pilar’s bedroom. The sisters couldn’t help overhearing what went on up there: they hardly needed to understand what Pilar was actually saying, in her torrent of outraged exclamation in Spanish. They couldn’t spare much surprise, in the heat of the moment, at Roland’s turning out to be perfectly fluent in Spanish, responding to her — how come he hadn’t showed this off to them before? What galling restraint for the couple to have always spoken in English in front of his family, how annoyingly considerate of them. And comically, his Spanish was so English: so placatory and reasonable. Harriet grabbed her book and the blanket, Fran her colander of gooseberries: they wanted to retreat away from the consequences of what Alice had done. Then Roland — it was his only vehemence — pulled down the sash windows, making them shudder in their frames, muffling the voices abruptly. But still they could hear the drawers rattled in the dressing table, the wardrobe door banged open on its hinges.

— Is she packing? Harriet was horrified. — You’ll have to apologise, Alice. Go up and speak to her. Go now.

— But I can’t, because I’m not sorry.

Fran bore her gooseberries off into the kitchen to make crumble; Harriet lingered, pained, eavesdropping but uncomprehending, in the garden. Alice fled through the keyhole gap into the churchyard and then even went into the church to hide, where she wouldn’t usually go — she was afraid of it, superstitiously, because of the succession of funerals there had been inside it: her mother’s, then her grandfather’s seven years later, and then her grandmother’s. Behind her she closed first the mesh gate, to stop birds flying in, and then the ancient heavy door; the dimness and coolness inside swallowed her. Sounds resounded around its quiet, like stones dropped in a well: she refastened the loud latch, then stepped into her own echo, crossing the nave to huddle against the whitewashed, clammy, powdery, green-stained wall at the end of a pew, where she’d be invisible, she convinced herself, if anyone came after her. She wouldn’t — couldn’t, ever — look at the brass plaque with her mother’s name on it, and the dates of her birth and death, and the line from her grandfather’s poem. Her grandmother hadn’t been able to forgive him that vanity, choosing the words from his own poem.

Light, with a ripple in it like water, quavered through the clear glass in the windows, tinged green from the trees outside. She tried not to move, so that the church could be as it was when she wasn’t in it. Its cold breath — eloquent of worm-eaten wood, hard iron, greasy velvet, hymnbooks sour with damp, damp stone — had waited for her all this time. It was damper now, if anything, because it was only used one week in four. She looked around her almost with curiosity, like a tourist, at the musicians’ gallery in the west end, at the ancient stone font, its carvings worn almost to inexpressiveness, where Harriet had been christened, but not the rest of them (we ran out of steam , her mother had once half-explained, making Alice think for years that babies were christened in hot water). Her grandmother’s altar cloth — cream and yellow and black, in the style of that era when she’d embroidered it, John Piperesque bold childlike forms — was spotted with mould in one corner.

She throbbed with the aftershocks of her argument with Pilar, or with everyone — it was a jagged pain. But almost at once, even as she sank into her corner in the pew, Alice gave up defending herself to herself. Conscience — like something weightless, cobwebby — settled on her out of the air; the old church must be thick with it, after all the centuries of soul-searching. It was always a relief, she found, to accuse yourself and lose all the arguments. With the same blundering as when she offended, she went straight to imagining herself forgiven, because she was so sincerely sorry. How could she have read Roland’s words aloud like that — making a public parade of his feelings, when he was so private? Probably no one had read those letters before except their mother and grandmother. She wilted and sighed aloud, watching herself doing it in her mind’s implacably accusing eye. What showing off! Pilar had been quite right to snatch the letters from her. With a pang, she felt all her new sister-in-law’s decency and righteousness mustered in the scales against her, as impeccable as her clothes — which were never studied or too fussy. In a revulsion against her own taste, Alice decided there was something stale in it, that her choices were flaky and unsound; she was always trying too hard.

Ivy and Arthur’s den was hollowed out inside a musty dense hedge on top of the front garden wall, beside the crumbling stone gatepost whose gate had rotted into nothingness long ago. It was easy climbing up from the garden side, but the drop to the stony lane, silted in caramel-brown dust, was much steeper, and so the den was forbidden: Ivy associated danger with the bitter smell of the privet. Arthur muddled up privet and private, thinking they meant the same thing. It was a good place for spying but there wasn’t much to spy on, because nothing came that far along the lane; the tractor and its trailers, laden with hay bales or black plastic bags of silage or a few bleating lambs, turned off down the track to the farm before they got as far as Kington House.

Crouched on the mossy flat coping stone that topped the wall, Ivy set out a cramped game of clock patience: her petticoat was a liability in the den, snagging on privet twigs. Arthur watched absorbedly as she turned the cards over, sighing with relief every time it wasn’t a king, irritating her with his optimism; the cards stuck together and she envied Molly’s deft sliding movement. Would it count if she got the patience out now and no one saw? Nobody would believe them. Heavy with her failure to catch Molly’s phone, she cheated once without Arthur noticing. Getting stuck a second time, she gathered the cards up despondently and shoved them into a pocket of the shorts she had on underneath the petticoat.

From their vantage point on the wall, they could see into the yard of the Pattens’ barn conversion across the road. The Pattens weren’t in residence: the yard had been blankly vacant in the sunshine ever since Ivy and Arthur arrived in Kington, roses blooming and going over with no one to pick them, days burgeoning and ebbing unseen — except that the children saw them — against the pink of the high brick barn wall with its slits at the top where the doves eased in and out. It had been ordinary once, if the Pattens were there, for Mitzi to be sloping around their yard, sniffing in corners and signalling results with her plumy tail, or flopped loosejointedly on the cobbles in the heat. Ivy wasn’t even mad about dogs. She had felt fastidiously about Mitzi’s coat — which looked so silky but was greasy to touch — and her bad breath and slobber. Yet now the idea of Mitzi was potent in Ivy’s awareness, like something hidden but present in a landscape; the ruined cottage had simplified in her imagination into a perpetual knot of unease. Away from it, she lost her certainty about what was inside. Weren’t they too young, to be the only ones who knew anything so important?

When Arthur was upset the veins at his pale temples always showed more blue. — Why do you think they closed the door? he asked.

She pretended she didn’t know what he was talking about. — What door?