Tessa Hadley - The Past

As Alice returned inside the house, submerging in the half-dark of the scullery and blind from the brightness outside, Harriet waylaid her, asking her to look at something, saying she needed her advice. Harriet led the way upstairs, then closed the door of her room furtively behind them and pulled out a plastic carrier from underneath the bed.

— You know about this sort of stuff, she said. — I bought this. But probably it’s a disaster. I need you to tell me the truth, Alice. Don’t do that thing you do when you’re just flattering people.

— You bought yourself a dress! How extraordinary! I haven’t seen you in a dress in a thousand years. But wherever did you find to buy anything, round here?

Harriet said anxiously that she’d got it from a shop in the High Street, was that a mistake? She was driving to the sea today with Pilar and wondered whether she should wear it. Alice tried not to show in her face that she would not have even looked in the windows of any of those shops. The clothes displayed in them were a kind of doom, she thought — fusty and elderly, unthinkable. Putting them on you would be surrendering all hope of joy. Harriet had bought something flowery and fussy in pink and blue, chiffon lined with cotton, with a full skirt: like a party dress for a little girl. It could at a stretch have looked sexy as a retro parody on a sixteen-year-old, on Molly.

— It’s pretty, Alice said, hesitating. — No, no: it is, it’s pretty.

— You don’t like it.

— You have to put it on, or I can’t see whether it works or not. I wish you had let me come with you.

With a bitter face, resigned, Harriet stripped off her tee shirt and trousers and then was smothered momentarily inside the dress, emerging with an odd effect as if a weathered old wooden doll had been stuffed into a Barbie outfit, crucified inside it. Her brown arms and brown muscled calves seemed androgynous against the pale chiffon. — Your expression is a picture, Alice! Is it that bad?

Alice was so sorry. — I’m such a fusspot. It isn’t right. It’s too — you know — frou-frou. The cut’s all wrong for you, and it’s baggy over the bust for starters. Can you take it back?

Harriet began clowning as if they were still children, marching up and down the room in a funny stiff walk, swinging her legs from the hips and simpering, to make Alice laugh. — I’m the mad old woman you avoid sitting next to on the bus, aren’t I?

— Stop it, really. You just don’t have any experience buying clothes. It takes years: you have to know what you’re doing, what you want. You have to spend hours of your life actually planning it, concentrating on nothing else. And of course you have to keep up with what the idiotic fashion is. It makes me ashamed of myself, just telling you these things. You haven’t been vain enough, Hettie. Look, I’ll lend you something if you want to dress up.

— No, I’m going to wear it! Harriet insisted, teasing, escaping into a corner of the room. — I’m going to let everybody see!

Alice made her take off the dress and brought her better things to try. — You need to dress to flatter this wonderful figure, she said. — You’re so lucky to be so lean, without even having to worry. This shape looks marvellous under clothes.

In a spirit of genuine selflessness — she liked these things herself, and never had enough money to buy what she wanted — Alice gave Harriet a grey cord straight skirt and a cream silk shirt with a pretty scooped collar. She stood behind Harriet when she was wearing these new clothes and did something to her hair, pushing her fingers into it tenderly like a hairdresser, fluffing it up, scrutinising in the mirror. — There, she said. — Grow it a little bit until it’s softer round your face. We’re getting older, we can’t afford to be so hard on ourselves. And you need beads or something: just a single strand, nothing fussy. I’ll have a look at what I’ve got. You see, you should go for this understated thing, that the French women do. It suits you, you look distinguished.

— Distinguished, Alice? What’s that a euphemism for?

— Not for anything. It’s what you are.

Alice rested her cupped hands a moment longer on her sister’s head, feeling the warmth in her skull, the stillness of her unexpected submission. She wanted to tell Harriet about last night’s dream of sex and how it had coloured her morning, making her mysteriously happy: but of course she couldn’t. You couldn’t describe those things aloud in your waking life: that move and then this, the affectionate faceless nameless lover, those suffusing pleasurable sensations. There were no words to fit their innocence. Translated into words they would turn into something cheap, Harriet would be disgusted with her.

Ivy and Arthur were supposed to tidy their own beds. They only had to put their pyjamas under their pillows and straighten their duvets yet they groaned and protested, dragging their feet as if the work exhausted them. Then while they cleaned their teeth in the bathroom their mother stood over them, plaiting Ivy’s long hair, twisting the stretch bands around the ends of the plaits to fasten them in a habituated deft movement.

— Dad never makes us clean them, Ivy complained. — Not in the mornings as well as at night.

— That’s just his irresponsibility. Do you want to have bad teeth like your father’s, full of fillings?

— His are quite brown, Arthur said thoughtfully.

— This is really unfair. They’re waiting for us, they’ll go without us!

— Of course they won’t. And you have to be sensible while you’re out, Ivy. You’re in charge of making sure Arthur doesn’t go too near the edge of the path, if it’s steep. Do everything Molly says.

Spitting into the sink, Ivy cast her mother a look heavy with world-weariness. Fran kissed both children while she was drying their mouths on the towel; they twisted their faces away impatiently, though not in hostility, and when they had set off along the road with Kasim and Molly she was at a loss what to do without them. Alice was reading her old letters, Roland was writing something in his room, Harriet and Pilar had gone off to swim. At the end of each term, when the school holidays were approaching, Fran would be longing to escape from her job and get back to her private life, stale from the long enforced confinement with her pupils, chafing at school’s repetitions. After a few weeks of holiday her interest began to point the other way, back to the ordered routines of her classroom. Fran was a popular teacher, although she was strict and unsparing, with a biting wit sometimes at the students’ expense; she pushed them hard and got them their results. It was a point of honour with her, that she expected as much from the difficult students as from the docile ones. But every day in Kington was so shapeless; she was daunted, having to invent the ways to fill so many empty hours.

Plugging in the radio in the scullery, she began the slow work of washing and rinsing dirty clothes by hand in the big enamel sink. There was always at least this bottom-line grim satisfaction of grinding one’s way through the list of things needing to be done. Their grandmother’s monstrous ancient electric spin dryer had to be manhandled from its place against the wall; juddering with stunning violence on the stone floor, it spat gouts of its own rust into the rinse water, which Fran collected in a plastic bowl under the perished hose. Every year they expected the dryer to die, or at least electrocute somebody: improbably it persisted, built with the solidity of a tank. Eventually there was pegging out wet clothes in sunshine on the washing line, which for its moment was bucolic. At home Fran had an automatic washer and a tumble dryer. She had half forgotten the fulfilment of pegging out.