Tessa Hadley - The Past

— Someone might have just shut Mitzi in there for a moment and then gone away and forgotten that they’d done it and been looking for her everywhere.

Ivy was scathing. — Oh, that’s really likely, isn’t it? Unless they suddenly had total amnesia.

— Or otherwise, Arthur went on (he must have been puzzling all this out by himself) — she might have gone in there on her own. When she finished looking round she could have just pushed at the door with her nose, if she wanted to open it wider to come out.

He made a funny little shoving movement to demonstrate, with his own nose. — But she pushed it shut by mistake instead.

Ivy thought this was plausible, though she wouldn’t say so. It was true that Mitzi used to roam for miles in the woods by herself. Pushing the door shut wouldn’t even have seemed like much of a disaster at first: she would have sniffed round again in the room, then barked for a bit, then settled down waiting for someone to turn up. She might have found a comfortable place on a pile of leaves. For some reason this quietly meaningless mishap seemed worse than imagining anybody’s cruelty or neglect. Stoically she refused to show Arthur, by any least gesture of sympathetic feeling, that what he’d guessed at might really have happened. Her face felt iron-stiff with her refusal.

Alice went in search of Pilar, to pour out her abasement. Fran in the kitchen was mashing potatoes for her fish pie. — They’re still upstairs, she said darkly. — But at least it’s gone quiet. I’m making a big pie, on the assumption their departure isn’t imminent.

Alice almost forgot, in her eagerness, to knock at Roland’s bedroom door — remembering, she pulled her hand back from the doorknob as if it burned her. Their voices were not raised now but lowered and tender — she couldn’t tell whether they were speaking in English or Spanish. At any rate, the worst of the row was over. When she did knock, she heard from inside the room a certain muffled bustle and protest which she recognised, and her first instinct was to laugh — how funny to catch out her brother Roland when he’d been making love in the afternoon. Then she reminded herself that her brother wasn’t her intimate any longer, his sex life was none of her business.

— It’s only me, she said apologetically.

Doing penance, she waited a long time on the landing before, soberly, Roland opened the door. Then he stood blocking her way in, fully dressed but barefoot, and as tousled as was possible with his short haircut. She thought he looked her up and down to see what new difficulty she might be landing him in — like a policeman checking whether she had come armed. — I’m such an idiot, Roly, she pleaded. — Can you forgive me?

This didn’t get round him — he frowned, wary of more complications. — I was so out of order with Pilar. Does she know that I’m just jealous? I’m like a great baby, wanting all the attention, making a mess of things. My therapist says I’ve never got over Fran coming along to displace me.

Roland said he hoped her therapist didn’t charge too much, if that was as good as she got — but then stood back, relenting, from the door. Both windows in the room were open wide again, frail shadows from the alder trees stirred in the sunlight on the pink wallpaper, the children’s voices floated from the garden. Pilar was sitting at the dressing table in her slip, pinning up the rich swathe of her chestnut hair. The flesh of her raised arms was brown and firm and Alice thought she was replete with sexual pleasure, and pleasure in being loved. She met Pilar’s eyes in the mirror and stoutly, keeping faith with her new humility, refused to see any sly triumph in them. — Pilar, I’m so sorry for what I said. I was completely in the wrong, and you were right.

Pilar in her reflection held Alice’s gaze but hardly unbent, made no gracious protestation that she was guilty too, or had overreacted. — It’s water under the bridge, she only said, as if she was trying out a new phrase she’d learned, to see its effect.

— I’m so oblivious sometimes, Alice hurried on, — to other people’s feelings.

— Don’t overdo it, Roland said. — That will suffice. You’re no more oblivious than the next man.

His sister threw her arms round him, embarrassing him; firmly, smiling, he extricated himself. Roland had been very close to Alice for a few years, in that painful early teenage time — they were both clever at school and had done their homework in a frenzy of competition. Later, although she was younger, she had seemed to leap ahead of him into adulthood, beginning to have boyfriends and sex and to be in love while he lagged shamefully behind, hopeless at everything except in the world of his books and his study. It was in this time lag, when he was so crippled by his social ineptitude, that he had gained his advantage educationally over his sister, and found his path through to his adult self.

Now she had embarked on this project of reading over their grandparents’ correspondence. She said she was going to write a book about their grandfather but he didn’t believe she would do it, she didn’t have the discipline. When they got home from their excursions she was sometimes asleep in bed in the middle of the afternoon, or she looked up at them from along the piles of old letters, face smudged with dust, as if she hardly knew them or was expecting someone else. Roland worried about how she drifted. Since she gave up trying to act she had had a long succession of jobs: waitressing and in bars, front of house for various theatres, some private tutoring. She managed on very little money. She had had a few poems published but she had never given herself over to writing with the ruthlessness that it required; her poems were too slight, he thought, they tried too hard to please. When he suggested they should talk about their plans for the house, Alice pleaded for more time; there was plenty of time, she said. Very soon, they must sit down and have their important discussion. But they didn’t need to decide anything just yet. They were enjoying themselves so much, it would be a such a shame to spoil things. Well, she had very nearly spoiled them.

In bed that night, the children invented a new game. The cave under Ivy’s duvet was some sort of underground hall or temple, and she and Arthur returned there between forays into a dangerous world. They often came back hurt and used magic pine cones for healing — Arthur was particularly moving with his groans and his fainting, eyelids fluttering half open. If the grown-ups heard them playing from downstairs then they took no notice. Ivy snapped out instructions to Arthur. She only mentioned the Dead Women in passing, in an undertone, as if he must know whom she meant: they ordered the children to tie their pyjama tops around their heads, or they made them bring sacred water in a tooth mug from the bathroom. The Dead Women weren’t their enemies exactly, and yet she spoke about them warily, in a guarded voice. The fields outside were staring with blue moonlight and the moon-shadows seemed more substantial than daytime ones. They heard the male owl calling and the female’s more subdued response, like a flurry of talk.

— What’s the owl doing? Arthur whispered.

— Killing things, said Ivy matter-of-factly.

Kasim was deeply asleep the next morning when Molly pushed open the door to his bedroom. The intrusion must have sounded an alarm in some deep chamber of himself, summoning him to the surface: he sat up quickly with a yell.

— What are you doing in here? What time is it?

It seemed to him it must be unreasonably early — dawn at least. Molly’s hair was wet and she was wearing a towelling bathrobe; her skin was flushed pink and damp from her bath.