Tessa Hadley - The Past

Harriet and Pilar were sitting together on the terrace. At the dinner table Harriet had studied, fascinated, how easily the red chiffon blouse fell against Pilar’s brown arms and neck. In the half-light, her shawl slipping down her arms, the red of the blouse retreated and became transparent, so that Harriet could make out what Pilar was wearing underneath it — not a bra, but a glimmering silken slip which slipped and rode over her breasts as she moved. Her silver earrings glinted, catching the light from inside the room. Darkness thickened around them and Harriet gave way to her longing, watching Pilar’s mouth move as she talked: the full supple lips, greasy with crimson, pressing together and opening decisively, her ripe accent taking on sensuous form. Native English, by contrast, seemed a limp, attenuated thing. Pilar was complaining that Molly’s mother was obstructive and difficult; apparently Roland thought Molly should move to a private school for her sixth form. As Roland had always been keen on state education, it was more likely this idea came from Pilar: Harriet wasn’t in sympathy with it, and she liked Molly’s mother. Yet none of this shuffling of opinion and judgement meant a thing. She had drunk a couple of glasses of wine. The kiss in her imagination was brilliant and liquid, scalding; she was falling down inside it like a tunnel.

Harriet had noticed the lipstick mess on her sheets in the afternoon but hadn’t said anything, not wanting to get the children into trouble. Then, when she went up to bed at the end of the evening, she found her carefully folded tee shirts all jumbled together in the drawer, and her diary defaced with one page torn. It didn’t occur to her to doubt that it was Arthur who had written Arthur in it, and those other things. She stood staring at his scribbling. Her brother and Pilar were moving around in the next room, preparing for bed, and all the time her awareness of their movements and low-voiced intimacy was raw. How much could Arthur have understood of what he read? He was only a baby, on the first readers in primary school — and she had believed her meanings were more or less hidden in innocent descriptions, available only to herself. Yet the scrawled words made her feel nonetheless as if she’d been found out — he had dragged up out of her diary entries what was most humiliating and raw. U are stupid. Fuck. Fuk. Fuk you. Leeve me alone. She summoned her sane understanding: children were capable of random silly malevolence, she should not take this seriously. But Arthur had seemed to like her. She felt his betrayal, and the truth of the violence of passion — fuk you, fucking, fuck: ugly and awful as a twisting knife.

ALICE SAT ON the top gate, one shoulder shrugged up, holding her phone against her ear, talking to friends, one after another. Half absorbed in her talk, she also twisted slowly on the gate, taking in the scene around her which her friends couldn’t see. The morning was resplendent, weightless: light lay on the fields like gauze. Below her the slate roof of Kington House flashed, solar panels on other roofs in the village drank up power. A family of buzzards held their distances from one another as they floated on thermals above the scooped out valley — and she felt as if she floated too in the blue air: the woods on the valley’s other flank were more densely blue, gathering darkness under their canopy. The landscape’s pattern seemed as simplified as a child’s jigsaw puzzle, locking together in bold pieces. Two old horses ambled to a fence to watch her, cocking their ears at her voice which must seem a silly shiny thread drawn across the mute surface of their day. A fire in the corner of a field far off was weakly orange in all the brilliance, its rising smoke filmy against the light, distorting it like old glass. She imagined she could hear its crackle, amplified by the distance.

— Hello, guess who? It’s me. I know you don’t know where I am. I’m in a retreat — no, not literally a retreat, I haven’t actually taken the veil or anything. Mind you, I really might one day, you never know. I love being cut off from everything, just going deep, deep inside myself. Though I don’t think I could bear the early mornings — I mean, if I was a nun. Anyway, how are you? What are you up to? I was thinking about you. I haven’t been phoning anyone but I wanted to talk to you.

Quite often she was cut off mid-sentence — the signal wasn’t reliable — and didn’t bother to call back but went on to the next friend. She could have used the landline in the house, but there was something about the old brown phone in the hall which rebuked frivolity; it was better to be perched up here, with the world unfolded around her, a vision of easy possibility. At least half of the friends she called were men. Alice was good at catching and keeping friends of both sexes, she was loyal and involved and generous with her time, and other people hardly knew about the opposite impulse in her, to crawl away from them and bury herself, inert: she told them about it readily enough, but with such joking confidence that they weren’t bound to take her seriously.

Waking this morning, she had felt so strong and young. She had woken from a rather amazing dream of innocent, pleasurable, uncomplicated sex — with someone indistinct, no one she knew. The dream had taken her by surprise; she believed that it must have a message for her, so she had dug out her phone from where she’d pushed it away out of sight in a drawer under her clothes, and plugged it in to charge. Now she was contacting everyone recklessly, promiscuously. One of them must be the one. She was living in such expectation of something happening: there were several possibilities. She felt herself overflowing with sympathetic imagination, ready to fall again, to submit to a new continent of discovery. You were adored, Alice, adored, she heard in the air, teasing her. It could be any one of a number of favourite men of hers: a poet, a real one, who taught at Goldsmiths; or a colleague who worked in front of house with her at the theatre, a few years younger than she was but he might not know that; or the gentle, subtle man who had built her some bookshelves in an alcove recently — she didn’t actually phone him, she had no excuse unless she wanted him to do more carpentry work, which she couldn’t afford.

— It’s marvellous here, she said to an old friend, a youth worker who’d recently split up with his wife. — I’m with my brother and sisters and their families. Eating and drinking, sleeping, walking in the fields. Yesterday I lay down by myself under some trees and I felt as if I could really feel the world turning, you know? I thought about the gods and how they came disguised in natural forms to seduce mortal women. I felt like one of those women. Not like Daphne turning into a tree. Is there one who turns into a sod of earth? That’s what I felt like, a constituent part of the earth. This is the most beautiful place in England but don’t tell anybody, we don’t want everyone to find out about it.

Everyone was friendly and pleased to hear from her; there was flirting. She flirted, she heard herself teasing and lingering, she fell into the familiar motions with a lurching sensation as if some well-oiled, habituated machinery were starting into action. And yet nothing ignited her imagination or penetrated her mood: she liked them all but she only liked them, and saw them in a disenchanted clear light, unmuddied by desire or need. When she climbed down from the gate she was as thoroughly alone as she had been at the beginning of all the conversations. She was perfectly all right — in fact she was safer, intact in her own possession. But it was as if some part of the spectrum of her responsiveness, which she had counted on, had shut down as completely as if it had never been. Was this what was in store for her, in her middle age? There was plenty of warm friendship but there was not the other thing — the deepest immersion, the secret underlying all the rest. But where, then, had her dream come from?