Tessa Hadley - The Past

This wounded her — and yet this morning she had been seized by remorse and affection for her family, after her bad behaviour the other day. She had baked the cake as a warming, heartening surprise, to bring the whole family together — then the cake hadn’t risen and no one had wanted it. Also, Janice Patten had turned up. Alice was sorry about their dog, but Janice’s sharp eyes went probing everywhere, and you could see she was storing up things to make stories out of; she seemed to be friends with everyone in the village, though she didn’t spend any more time in it than they did. She was always telling them news about people whose names they didn’t recognise. On the whole Alice preferred Claude to Janice, even though he was pampered and self-indulgent, with a paunch and a bald head like a tonsure, fringed with greasy grey hair straggling down past his shoulders. Claude was an architect — that was why their barn conversion was so nice, although also a bit fake and sterile in its good taste.

All Alice’s irritations fell away as she walked. My beloved, she thought, tramping along through the first stretch of the woods, where the undergrowth was sparse in a plantation of conifers. She didn’t mean Claude Patten — she laughed out loud at the idea. Sunlight pierced the dense pine canopy high above and fell in shafts through the dusty brown space that made her think of an empty theatre. My beloved, my dear love, my heart’s own. It wasn’t Claude! Since she’d been in Kington, her solitary reverie seemed to fall into these cadences like a love letter — a love letter such as, in fact, she’d never written. In her actual love letters she’d always been rather light and dry and funny — either that or anguished and savage. Anyway, nobody wrote love letters any more, nobody wrote letters. Lovers just checked in with each other every hour of the day on their phones, exchanging banalities. But this yearning inward voice of hers was like a tic, a new habit of her heart, which seemed to stumble with excitement in her breast. Yet there was no one. She was living in this keyed-up expectancy, but with no particular man in mind. Was this the form neurosis was going to take, in her middle age? She would have to discuss it with her therapist. Alice called Eva a therapist but she couldn’t afford a real one, Eva was more of a counsellor and often overstepped the mark, advising her rather strongly: their talks were more like intimate chats between friends. Once Eva had even told Alice to pull her socks up . On the other hand, she didn’t charge her if she was short of money.

When she was through the woods, Alice struck into a steep lane that wound up the hillside — she met no one, and no cars passed her. Nothing came this way. The lane was strewn with branches fallen in the last high wind; huge oaks growing out of the banks were contorted and bulging with age, their grey hides deeply fissured and crusty. In the high hedgerows the delicate flowering plants of early summer had yielded to coarsely thriving nettles and bramble and dock, rank in the heat. She crossed a stile, then climbed a stubble field up to where cylindrical bales of straw were stored in a Dutch barn. At the top of the hill the wide landscape was proffered bleached and basking, purged of its darkness: there were views across the shining estuary all the way to the blue hills of Wales and, behind her, inland to the moors. But Alice didn’t seek out that sensation of overview, where a place seemed to be explained and put in context as if it was a map laid out: at any given point on a walk, Roland could always tell you which way was north. She would rather burrow into the place she was and lose herself, unsure of how the intricate folds of the hills all fitted together.

On her way down she lay for a long time on her back on the earth in the hidden corner of a meadow of tall grass, in the half shade under a stand of sweet chestnuts. She was thinking about a science programme she’d seen on television, and felt as if she could see deep into the meaning of the creative and destructive pulses which made up the dynamic of creation. At this late point, now, if it were still possible, would she like to have a child? Was that missing from her life? Mixed in among her grandmother’s letters she’d found a number of slips of tissue paper, wrapped round locks of blonde baby hair pale and light as breath, or tiny teeth. These might have been her mother’s — or her siblings’, or her own; she hadn’t shown them to anyone, and they caused her some convoluted pain of exclusion and loss. But the truth was that whenever in the past she’d come close to the reality of having a child, she hadn’t felt any joyful anticipation — only a muddled panic, like darkness closing in. All those little eggs which were inside her when she was born: Alice imagined them like clusters of tiny pearly teeth, and the idea of them washing away one by one was a relief as well as a regret.

Then she thought she saw a skylark soar up out of the field, streaming with song, balancing on its invisible jet of air — but as soon as she sat up on her elbows she doubted her identification. The bird was just a dot in the sky, too far off to be certain. Surely the skylarks had gone long ago from this part of the country? Everything was in decline. What a compromised generation theirs was, she thought. Materially they had so much, and yet they were haunted by this sensation of existing in an aftermath, after the best had passed.

Ivy unravelled at bedtime into one of her tantrums. The house seemed swollen for a while with her loud weeping and accusations. — I can’t sleep in this dirty old bed. All the springs are sticking up through the mattress: look at these scratches on my legs. It’s like a torture chamber! I want a bedroom of my own. You never think about me, do you? You only love Arthur. I want to go home to Daddy! Other children get taken on real holidays, in aeroplanes. I hate it here! I wish I was dead. I’m so bored! There’s nothing to do.

— Yeah, it’s boring, said Arthur, backing her up reliably.

— It’s so boring without any computer.

Alice tried to explain why it was good for them to be away from computers, using their own imaginations. Fran was cajoling and calm until she suddenly lost patience and slapped Ivy hard on the legs and shouted at her, making everything worse, telling her she’d had it up to here, and that Ivy was driving her round the bend with her selfishness and behaviour like a spoiled brat. Alice gave Fran one maddening look with her eyes full of feeling, at once disappointed in her and sympathetic. — The children are both overtired, Fran said defiantly when she arrived downstairs, hot-faced with her own outrage and ashamed. — It’s probably a bit of heatstroke too. I forgot to make them put on their hats.

The other adults looked incredulous, aghast at the loud grief turning the stone walls of the house to paper. They didn’t say anything, but of course each was thinking that they’d never allow any child of theirs to carry on that way. Fran asked herself furiously what any of them knew about bringing up children? Roland had hardly been tested with Molly, who was a docile pudding of a baby, whereas Ivy was a traitor knotted in her mother’s chest, devouring her. Fran blamed Jeff; in fact she wanted to phone Jeff this minute and tell him about it, while her injury was still fresh. She shouldn’t have lost her temper, though. While she sat on the scullery step with her shoulders rigid and her back to the house, the others crept around in the kitchen behind her, bringing in dishes from the dining table and washing them, exchanging practicalities in low voices, starting up mild jokes which were soon flattened by new blasts of lamenting. Kasim and Molly were play-acting in a kind of dumbshow; she giggled when he threatened her with a skewer from the cutlery drawer. The present was hollowed out as if a birth or a death were taking place upstairs.