Tessa Hadley - The Past

Every so often Ivy would emerge again from her bedroom to stand sobbing full-throatedly at the top of the stairs, or begin making a halting, broken-hearted descent until Fran ordered her back. Once Ivy had begun a fight she couldn’t let it go, and was drawn again and again to the scene of her disaster, prodding at it and prolonging it, wanting more. — You see, you hate me, don’t you? Everybody thinks I’m horrible, I know they do! Everything’s ruined now, it’s too late.

Tucked virtuously into his bed, Arthur watched his sister’s desperate coming and going with a connoisseur’s calm appreciation. Eventually, when she had subsided under her duvet into a kind of hysterical coughing, he judged the moment right for climbing out of his own bed and into hers, to console her and put his arm around her, with just a hint of piety. Quivering, racked, her back turned to him, hugging her knees to her chest, she radiated intensity: the knobs of her vertebrae prodded him through her thin pyjamas, and her plait where he lay on it felt as hard as rope. — I was only putting it on, she whispered fiercely. Placatory, Arthur said he’d known she was, and asked her if she wanted to play the game.

— I’m worried, she said, breath ragged with the remnants of her sobs. — I think the Women are angry. There’s only one thing we can do.

— What is it?

They needed to make little cuts, she said, with scissors in the bedroom curtains, for a sacrifice. Arthur went obediently to find the nail scissors in the bathroom. Ivy instructed him in a musing, teacherly, expert voice — though Arthur, struggling with the tough material of the curtains, which slid between the scissor blades and wouldn’t cut, knew she was making things up as she went along.

— We have to go back to the cottage too, tomorrow, she said. — We have to get samples from those magazines.

— Why didn’t you tell the grown-ups? About you-know-what.

Ivy shrugged and said she hated them, she didn’t care what they knew.

Pilar was wearing her chiffon blouse that evening, and began to feel chilly; while Alice made coffee, in the calm that finally succeeded Ivy’s tempests, she went up to her bedroom to find something to put round her shoulders. Roland came after her, wanting to change his shoes. They were aware of the children scuffling out of sight, not asleep, conferring in muffled voices — probably vengefully. Roland had thrown the sash windows open to their fullest extent in the morning, because these rooms under the roof soaked up heat during the day; now he hurried to close them against the night insects. In the garden the trees were fretty silhouettes against the last of the sky, filled with liquid light; bats flickered between them and an invisible blackbird richly sang; the air inside the room was velvety-ripe. In a vase on the windowsill dead plumes of purple flowers had drooped and were pasted against the glass, a white rosebud had browned and withered unopened in the cloudy water. Pilar asked him about his emails: anything interesting? She was on her knees, searching for her shawl in the drawers of the dressing table. Roland told her about the keynote talk, and the publisher wanting a foreword for a new series.

He was touched by her tender solicitousness for his eminence; she wasn’t actually interested in his ideas. Pilar had no idea what philosophy might be for — he wasn’t sure she even knew what films were for. Her own professional life didn’t have any core of passion in it, apart from the belief she lent to the entire institutional structure of the law, which was wholehearted. An individual’s work, as Pilar saw it, was a means of leverage — you ought to make the most of yourself. She interpreted his academic and public career as merely adversarial, a succession of thwartings and triumphant overcomings. And all the time she was questioning him eagerly — so were these useful connections? Did the projects have status? — she was struggling with the ill-fitting drawers in the cheap wartime dressing table. These always got stuck and then flew out, then had to be jiggled and banged into their place again; Roland’s grandmother used to rub them with candlewax. He admired his wife’s patience, putting up with everything that was hopeless and dysfunctional in the cranky old house; even the bed springs which, as Ivy complained, stuck out through the mattresses.

His sisters clung on to these flaws, as if in themselves they were their link with the past; but Pilar was used to all the latest conveniences working with streamlined ease. He thought that they were a sentimental family; it might be good for them all if they gave the house up. Wouldn’t they be relieved, really? Every room in it was printed ineradicably, for Roland, with the quality of the first summer they had spent here without their mother. He had not known until then — he was fifteen — how much material things could be altered by the light, or the absence of light, in which you looked at them. Their mother’s death and what it meant, the new vision of things it brought, had seemed to be soaked into the blankets on the beds and the keys on the piano and the stones in the walls.

Expert from long practice, he manoeuvred the drawer into position and pushed it home. Then he stood behind Pilar while she brushed her hair in front of the oval mirror in the wardrobe, looking not at himself but at her. Her emphatic beauty — it was harsh, even — filled him with a yearning whose point was that it couldn’t be satisfied. The enchanting surface, drawing him again and again, was all its own meaning, not signifying anything — her beauty couldn’t be subject to his understanding. He slipped his hands against her skin under the loose red blouse. — We can go whenever you want, he said. — We’ve shown our faces now, and you’ve met everyone. We could leave Molly here and go off on our own for a few days. I know my sisters can be hard work, Alice was awful the other day. We could go to the Veneto, I could show you the villas.

Pilar seemed taken aback by his suggestion. She leaned sinuously into his touch. — Oh no, let’s stay. I like it here. It’s the real England, isn’t it? I’m growing fond of it.

Ceremonially, over coffee in the dining room, Kasim presented Alice with the china boot. — I bought this for you, he said, mumbling and looking away as if he was full of feeling. — I thought you’d like it, and I wanted to thank you, for inviting me down here. It means a lot to me. So I wanted to get you something special.

Alice, unwrapping the boot, only faltered for the least fraction of a second. Her bright face and performance of charmed surprise were always ready to be touched into life. — Oh, it’s a marvellous boot, darling Kas. Look how cleverly it’s done, with all the leathery little folds! I shall fill it full of flowers. I love it. Thank you.

She was gracious as if she were an actress practised at receiving tributes. Molly suffered physically from seeing anyone deceived, she couldn’t bear pitying their foolish hope. — He knows it’s not marvellous, Aunt Alice, she said. — He’s just kidding you. We won it in the arcades.

— Now Molly’s ruined it, Kas said crossly. — Why did you ruin it?

Fran laughed and said she could remember winning one of those boots herself, when she was a kid. Alice’s expression was still open and smiling, only faintly bruised, looking from face to face, willing to be amused at her own gullibility. — And I was so touched, thinking you’d chosen it specially for me, Kas. I suppose I should have been insulted.

It was characteristic that, exposed, she didn’t recoil into herself but waded in deeper. She told the others then about her walk and the beauty of the landscape and her happiness, lying in that field in the afternoon. She said it had been transcendent, she’d seemed to feel the pulse of the universe through her own body, and had understood at last all those old myths where the gods took on natural forms to make love to mortal women. Roland was embarrassed for his sister; she ought to keep her ecstasies to herself. Why did she always have to bring everything round to sex? She couldn’t help herself falling into this mode of charged flirtation, even when there was no one to flirt with. Didn’t it occur to her that as far as Kasim was concerned she was halfway to being an old woman, past her best? It was bad enough that her affair with Kasim’s father had dragged on painfully for years. Roland resented having to see his sister through the boy’s eyes.