Tessa Hadley - The Past

Harriet dropped the towel and kept her head down, neck bent. Business-like, Pilar began rubbing oil into her shoulders; Harriet closed her thoughts to the shoulders’ whiteness and thin angularity.

— I can talk to you, Harriet, Pilar said as she ran strong fingers over the shoulder blades, outlining them, then caressingly forwards around the neck, pressing and smoothing up under the hairline, behind the ears, around the top of the arms, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. — There are things I can’t talk to Roland about. I want everything to be nice for him, I don’t want to spoil things between us with this worry. Valerie was always nagging at him, wasn’t she? But there is a problem with my aunt. This is partly why I’m not keen on returning home for a visit. She wants me to undergo certain tests, I don’t want to.

Intelligent thought lagged behind Harriet’s awareness of Pilar’s competent massage. Her body was melted into her sensations; deliriously she allowed herself to imagine the oiled hands slipping underneath the clinging wet of her costume, foraging further and further, onto her longing breasts and past them, down to between where her thighs were clamped shuddering together, blue-white with cold. No one had touched her so easily as this, not for such a long time, perhaps not ever, not since she was an adult. Reluctantly she dragged her mind to what her sister-in-law was telling her. — What kind of tests?

Pilar rolled down Harriet’s shoulder straps matter-of-factly. DNA tests, she explained, because some people believed that her mother and father were not rightfully her parents. She hadn’t liked her parents very much, but that didn’t mean she wanted a whole new set of relatives; one family was quite enough, thank you. — You don’t know what these people are like. These campaigners, these leftists: obsessed, thinking of the same thing day and night. I can understand it of course. But I don’t want to belong to them. Do they think any test can bring back their sons and daughters?

Harriet was puzzling it out. — Do you mean you might have been adopted?

— Everyone knows I’m adopted, me and my brother. It was at the time of the disappearances, but it was from an orphanage, everything above board and official. We have all the paperwork. Anyway what can the tests prove? I don’t belong to these people, they’re in a different world. My uncle says, what’s gone is gone.

Digging with her fingers into the gritty sand of the beach, feeling for fragments of shell, Harriet was pierced with guilt and exquisite pleasure both at once: how could she be so selfishly happy, while Pilar was suffering? She knew something about these stories, that the children of the disappeared had been handed over for adoption, to privileged friends of the regime. But she pushed away out of her own sight the complicated justice of the situation, muffled and opaque: immune in her sheltered life, she had no right to enquire into that. What could she know? Pilar seemed magnificent to her, heroic and stoical, living inside the reality of politics, and with the terrible consequences of violence.

Kasim said it was all right for the children to go inside the ruined cottage. When Molly was anxious it might not be safe, he reassured her airily. — It’s been here for a hundred years, it’ll last for another hundred. Anyway, they’ve been inside before, we all went in, there’s nothing to be afraid of.

— I’d better go in with them, Molly said. — Even though it’s creepy. It smells bad.

She shivered fastidiously, like a cat sniffing at cold water.

Kasim and Ivy had to join forces to dissuade her; he winked at Ivy expressively. — It’s our secret, Ivy darkly said. — You can’t come in.

— Sit down here on this bank, Kasim said, steering Molly by the shoulders, coaxing her. — Don’t worry about the children, they’re just fine. I fell asleep here, one day before you came. It’s an enchanted place, it makes you sleep. Look, you can still see the outline of where I lay, there where the grass is crushed. Try it.

— I can’t see any outline.

He was pressing her down gently but insistently, seemingly intent on her and yet also hardly aware of her, as if he was fulfilling some programme of his own, laid down in advance. She sat cross-legged at first. — No, lie back, you have to lie back. Just try to keep awake, see if you can. Shut your eyes: I bet you’re asleep in half a minute. I should think you’re highly suggestible, aren’t you?

Obediently Molly lay among the grasses with her hair fallen back, eyes closed, her face exposed to the sun. She was pale, the sun had hardly tanned her but it hadn’t burned her either — apart from a cloud of indistinct freckles across her nose and a faint effect of rust-colour at her hairline, almost as if she hadn’t washed, although he was quite sure she washed exhaustively and often, he heard her running water for hours, day and night, in the bathroom. The purplish lids of her eyes were obscenely huge when they were shut, and her full lips were parted trustingly — they would be cracked and dry, he saw, if she wasn’t always putting on that salve from a tube she carried in her pocket, fussing with it, tending to her appearance because she could never quite forget herself. Her small breasts flattened when she was lying on her back, so that it was mostly the crumpled empty padding of her bra that rose and fell under her tee shirt; her belly button was a raised brown knot in the naked hollow, deep as a pool, between her hip-bones.

Kasim hung over Molly without touching her, studying her, talking to her soothingly, careful that his shadow didn’t fall across her and disturb her. He thought that if he could just see her clearly enough he would be able to understand her and see through her: what was this effect of her exterior, that blocked and prevented him? This beauty of hers was only a subjective effect of the moment, evanescent; he was preoccupied by his knowledge that she would grow old and change. He thought about Alice’s flirting and the way the flesh was beginning to soften and clot together under her jaw and on her upper arms; not that his mother’s arms, sinewy from the gym, were any better.

— My father hasn’t got a clue, he said, rambling just to keep her there, just so that Molly didn’t open her eyes and return his gaze. — He’s such an old leftie, you know? You’d think by now he might be wondering, well, maybe my generation didn’t work things out so well, maybe despite all our efforts we didn’t really get the socialist dream project off the ground, it all seems to have pretty much ended in the shit. But no: it’s never him, it’s never his fault, it’s always someone else’s. If only they’d listened to me and my mates, he thinks, we wouldn’t be in this mess now. It’s all just one big lost opportunity. That’s what I can’t stand, Molly, I really can’t stand it. He’s so energetic. Whoa! Dad! Time to slow down there. Don’t start another fucking co-operative whats-it for black youth, just please don’t.

Kasim felt an actual gust of irritation at the idea of his father then, as if Dani’s pre-emptive maleness cast its shadow over the afternoon. Molly smiled, with her eyes closed. — Stop going on about it, she said. — Never mind, it doesn’t matter. Anyway, I thought you said he lived in Pakistan?

— Wherever did you get that idea? He lives in Ladbroke Grove. That’s where I live with him, part of the time, when I’m not at the university or at my mum’s. I’ve got to get out, man.

Inside the cottage a kind of braggadocio came over Ivy. She needed to make free of the place and so she stamped around downstairs, hallooing and kicking at the mass of dead leaves packed in the grate, sending them skittering across the red cement floor. Among the leaves, against her jelly shoe, she felt something softer and more yielding too, which she ignored — though she didn’t kick it again. Dead bird? She might have felt the light snap of feathers, or bird bones: any dreamed-of horror was possible. She was showing off to Arthur, asserting her primacy in the cottage, boasting that she’d been here all alone once, without him.