Tessa Hadley - The Past

— Nine o’clock. Everyone’s getting up. I’ve got good news. Guess what?

Confusedly aroused and sweaty from his dreams, Kasim felt at a disadvantage: probably his breath stank too. When Molly sat down on the side of his bed he imagined he could feel her wetness leeching into his blankets. Was she naked underneath that robe? She announced with glee that her iPhone had started working again. — The hair dryer must have done the trick, she said. — I never though it would. Isn’t that great? I’m so relieved.

He was aghast at her prattling on about her phone — as if he cared. And when she’d gone out again he felt exposed because she’d seen inside his room that was too tidy and too empty: austere as a cell, with only a thin rug on bare floorboards, the walls painted a horrible icy pale blue. This décor seemed to stand for a certain kind of middle-class Englishness he loathed, chilly and superior and withholding, despising material comfort. His clothes were piled too neatly on the chair, his trainers tucked too obediently underneath it, side by side. He had created a kind of mystique for the others when he retreated inside this room to be alone, pretending he was working. But now Molly had seen inside it for herself, she knew he had no books with him, and that the room was only bleak and bare.

PILAR COMPLAINED THAT she felt out of condition because she was missing her regular swimming sessions; Harriet said there was a pool in a hotel nearby that they could use, and so the two women drove off together in Harriet’s car after breakfast one morning. Harriet had used this place before. It was a gloomy Victorian hotel built of red stone at the top of an inlet on the coast, surrounded by a caravan park; the pool was in a basement excavated underneath the building, lit by artificial light. The girl on reception opened it up for them reluctantly, and had to telephone the manager to find out how much to charge them, as non-residents. Harriet wanted to apologise to her sister-in-law — how dismally claustrophobic this pool must seem to anyone used to swimming outdoors. Then she remembered how Pilar had reproached her for always harking back to Argentina. Perhaps she accepted the silly pool as part of an England she was determined to belong to.

Yellow lamps like half shells were set against its walls all round, casting their light oddly upwards so that the water seemed oily, breaking up into shifting flat forms when they disturbed it. Pilar and Harriet changed into similar plain black swimming costumes. They were both strong swimmers, preferring crawl; really the pool was too short for them, but at least they had it to themselves. Swallowed in the muffling, booming underground acoustic, Harriet felt a kind of equality with the other woman for the first time — in the water her body, sleek and streamlined, didn’t let her down. Perhaps after all they could be friends; Harriet glowed still, because Pilar had chosen to confide in her, or half-confide. For a while they swam up and down ignoring one another, absorbed in the release of physical exercise. Then Pilar challenged Harriet to a race — four lengths of the pool. Harriet knew that she was faster: she was never normally competitive but now she went all out to win, and felt a surge of power — she could have easily gone on for twenty lengths, or forty. Heaving herself half out against the side of the pool, chlorinated water streaming in her nose and eyes, she was breathless and laughing with triumph. They raced again as soon as they got their breath back. All Harriet’s shyness and awkwardness were suspended while she was slicing through the water, buoyed up by her unexpected happiness.

After their swim they stripped out of their sodden costumes and towelled themselves in separate little cubicles, getting dressed side by side, not speaking, hearing each other moving around and bumping against the flimsy dividers. They went outside to drink hot chocolate in the hotel garden, which was built on terraces above a steep wooded coombe, descending to the estuary; the sun on the water below turned its calm surface to a gleaming zinc sheet, too bright to look at. Pilar combed out her wet hair with her fingers. She seemed preoccupied and serious, and began asking questions — brusquely, staring across Harriet’s shoulder — about Harriet’s old life, when she was involved in politics and an activist for various causes. Did she ever regret what she’d done in those days?

— Why do you ask? That’s a difficult question.

— You don’t look like a revolutionary, Pilar said bluntly.

Harriet wouldn’t have consented to talk about this painful subject with anybody else, but she saw what an effort it took to ask her; mostly Pilar’s conversation was practical and impersonal. Roland had told them how the shadow of Pilar’s uncle’s politics hung over their family — very likely any secrets had to do with him. Harriet said that she hadn’t really been much of a revolutionary, she’d never done anything daring or sensational. — I suppose I did think I was helping the revolution along, which seems ridiculous now. All that campaigning and leafleting, and the meetings and demonstrations. I earned money by temping, in offices mostly — but it was as if the me that worked all day hardly existed. I used to believe I was sacrificing myself for something. I was sacrificing myself — but it was for the wrong thing. It was worse than nothing. It was beside the real political point. Other people were doing the real, political work, trying to change things for the better. We despised them because they were reformists, they weren’t revolutionary enough.

Her story seemed far-fetched, told in the sunshine in the country garden. There was no one else out there with them, it was still early; the blanching, scouring light made the white china cups blaze on the table between them. The plastic cloth was weighed down with stones at the corners against any breezes blowing inland, but at that moment the stillness and heat seemed absolute. Nothing stirred, except the bees and other insects, in the flowerbeds planted with tall spiky yucca and acanthus and ornamental grasses. Pilar was reading Harriet’s face intently. — I’m interested in people who change their minds, she said. — Switch from one thing to the other. Did you change your mind all at once? In one day?

— Of course it wasn’t in one day, Harriet said. And she hadn’t switched from one thing to another: she hadn’t turned into a fascist or a conservative or anything. She hadn’t stopped hating injustice and cruelty and suffering, or believing that it was important to act against them. But she had withdrawn from all the shapes of her old life, leaving it behind her like a shell. And then she had felt that she didn’t have any shape of her own, without it. She hadn’t any energy left over for a new involvement in the world. She had been ill for a while, really quite ill. Christopher had helped her through that bad time — he was an apostate too.

— Revolution here is like a tea party for children, Pilar said. — In England you take so much for granted. You have no idea.

— We have no idea. I know that.

— Where I come from, revolutionaries are terrible people. And the other ones are just as terrible. It’s all death and endless conflict, making trouble for people who just want to live their lives.

— What kind of trouble? For your family in particular. You mentioned something the other day.

Pilar made an angry dismissing gesture, pushing her cup away. — I can’t begin, she said. — I’m not ready to talk about it. I didn’t mean to bring these stupid complications into Roland’s life.

Insanely, Harriet found herself wanting to confess everything. She wanted to explain to Pilar how once she would have judged against her just because of her background and her type — but she didn’t know how Pilar would respond, she didn’t want her to recoil. She hated to think now about her old mistaken confidence, when she had divided up the world into the ones who were nobly wronged, and those who wronged them. Needless to say she had imagined her own family — her bourgeois family — on the culpable side. They hadn’t ever been rich exactly, but they had always had education and an assumption of superiority, they were the inheritors and not the disinherited. She had thought that her whole life ought to be a kind of expiation of this privilege. This all seemed histrionic to her in retrospect.