Tessa Hadley - The Past

Then she sat in the study, with daytime television on. She had bought postcards in town, not quite awful enough to be funny: she chose the one of Exmoor ponies grazing. Dear Jeff, she wrote. The children are missing you. They think I’m a tyrant and that you’re much nicer, which is probably true. Only I’m here and you’re not. With the biro she drew a speech bubble on the front of the card, coming out of the mouth of one of the ponies: I wish I was in a band.

When the family were at Kington, their habit was to stay bunkered down at home, only driving into town, or a mile or two to the beginning of a favourite walk, or on a well-worn pilgrimage to a favourite second-hand bookshop inland. They excused themselves, saying they never grew tired of the walks which began at their front door. This was more than just a recoil of laziness: the past of the place enfolded them as soon as they arrived, they fell back inside its patterns and repetitions, absorbed into what had been done there before. Afterwards, they couldn’t distinguish one holiday at Kington from another. All the walks and picnics and lazy, long sessions of eating and drinking around the dining table blurred together — sunny days and rainy and snowy ones. Which year was it when Molly brought two friends who hardly spoke, except to complain furiously, when they were alone with her, about the bathroom and the food? Or when Christopher rode all the way from the station on his bike, up over the steep range of hills that lay between? All the Christmases they had spent there looked the same in the photographs: only the hairstyles changed. Slowly they aged, wearing the same paper hats. The babies grew into children, Roland’s wives replaced one another — in a long procession, Alice said, exaggerating.

Harriet and Pilar were driving all the way to the other side of the moor, to find a beach to swim from farther down the coast, where the estuary became the open sea. The break with tradition felt momentous to Harriet, even though they were only going thirty miles — she wasn’t sure of the way, and had to have Pilar check it for her on the map. Something lifted in her mood as she drove, new perceptions seemed possible. Arthur’s scribbles didn’t mean anything. Her mistake over the dress was only funny, it didn’t matter. Usually the moor’s austerity was reproachful but today the scrubby, knobbled, tufted earth was mild in the sunshine and seemed an invitation to play: mauve and tan distances were airy and light hearted. She had looked all right in the blouse Alice gave her, Alice really was clever with these things. Harriet might put it on when they went over to the Pattens for dinner. Perhaps it was not ridiculous, to be distinguished.

Everything she thought of was slicked with ease and possibility, because Pilar was beside her in the passenger seat; each time Harriet had to change gear she stole looks at her. The trip had been Pilar’s idea in the first place — and it had been obvious she didn’t want Roland to come: swimmers only, she had said. We want to swim in the real sea. Now that girlish insistence was in abeyance and she was quiet, sometimes staring out at the landscape as if it didn’t detain her thought for long. Her hair was fastened back in a sober low ponytail. Harriet was too shy to ask herself what her sister-in-law might be thinking or intending: the other woman’s presence — a gift of luck whose shining surface dazzled her — was for submitting to, not interrogating. Harriet kept even her own meanings hidden away from herself, buried inside the changing sunlit scenery of each moment. Pilar’s perfume was blown against her in the rush of air through the car; they had to have the windows open in the heat, as needless to say her old Renault didn’t have air conditioning. When they stopped halfway across the moor to have lunch in a pub garden, she didn’t mind that Pilar hardly spoke. Usually she suffered, blaming other people’s silences on her own tongue-tied insufficiency. But her ease with Pilar today, without talking, seemed like evidence of intimacy.

It was exhilarating to feel much farther south and farther west than usual, more remote from everywhere, when they drove down eventually into the steep little seaside town. Instead of the equivocal distances across the estuary and its muddy tides, the light here opened up and the silver sea ran unqualified to the horizon. Human settlement clung nervously in rising tiers to the valley’s steep flanks; the little Victorian seaside villas were distinctive as if they were cut out from paper, the pretty fretwork fascia boards like fantasies of peasant art. The place was down at heel, locked in its time warp, over-supplied with cafés and fish and chip shops, and the crowd on the beach too seemed left over from another era. Harriet thought these were eternal children, filling their plastic buckets with sand and poking into rock pools the falling tide had left behind. They sculled face-down on inflatables, jumped and squealed in the ceaseless undertow of the waves swelling and breaking, spilling up the shingle in long curling afterthoughts of shallow foam, tugging and sucking at the grit. Where the cliffs along from the beach ran straight into the water, sea smashed itself against them in a dazzling spume.

They locked their valuables in the boot of the car so that they could leave just the huddle of their clothes and towels on the sand while they swam. Undressing eagerly, they entered the unstable shallows which dipped and retreated, then returned to flood around them; laughing and exclaiming at the cold, they made their way further out, bobbing upright, still hesitating before plunging, holding up their arms out of the way — until the surface, opaque like dark glass, knotty with its flotsam of skeins of weed, was rising and falling around their waists, touching them intimately like gloved chilly hands. Pilar coiled her hair away, to keep it dry under a pink rubber bathing cap, and her long face was austerely naked, the skin seeming softer and more putty-like, blueshadowed, in the glinting light. Harriet was first to go in, engulfed at once in the huge shock of the different perspective, the horizon settling down at eye level, thick salt water parting before her cleaving hands, the clamour of splashing alternating in her ears with a private underwater peace. The cold of the water began to be translated into her own warmth, buoying her up. — It’s gorgeous, she shouted, with the half-treachery of the first in. Pilar eyed her and hesitated, then with a funny gathering movement, as though she pulled on reins, pursing her mouth, threw herself forward towards the sea.

They powered far out of their depth, then back again, to roll inshore with the collapsing waves, then out once more to where they were far off from the small fry at play in the surf. Their pleasure in it was inhuman, almost; transposed out of the air into water, consciousness was silenced and intensified, they moved and submerged in place of speech. Gulls wheeled against the sun, wailing and slicing the air with wings like blades — or they rose and fell inconsequentially on the water surface like toy birds, wings folded, glassy gaze averted. Harriet let herself drop down, once, underneath the water. She opened her eyes to see, so that she could remember it later: through the brown-green murk of sand and spinning motes suspended, Pilar’s amphibiously kicking legs, bent beams of sunlight. This seemed a place she hadn’t visited since she was a child, she had forgotten it; when she burst again into the clamorous day she half-expected to come up into another life. Then she saw Pilar waving from further out. They swam until they knew they were too exhausted to be safe; getting out, streaming water, they could hardly lift their knees to walk, or stand upright.

Harriet’s whole body shook in long spasms; she had to clamp her teeth shut, close her eyes to steady herself, huddled on the hard sand under one of the worn striped towels from the cupboard at Kington. Pilar was anointing herself patiently with suntan oil, the smell of it nutty and spicy like something their mother had once used. No one in England seemed to buy that oil these days. Then Pilar offered to put it on Harriet too. — Come on, you ought to wear something, with your fair skin.