Tessa Hadley - The Past

— But you’ve never been to Zambia.

— I read a book about it.

Roland stretched out in the sun, closing his eyes. — Am I afraid? At this moment I seem to feel an animal assurance of well-being, against all the promptings of my intellect. Anyway, how did we get so fast to the apocalypse? You bring everything around to the apocalypse, Alice.

— No, be serious. Own up to being afraid.

But Roland wouldn’t own up, he smiled with his eyes still shut as if fear were just a phenomenon he was considering among others, interested in working out its implications.

— I really do think Pilar is gorgeous, Alice said. — You know I didn’t mean what I said the other day, don’t you? I’m sure she can fit in. Though I do find her a little bit intimidating. She’s so organised and dynamic, she must think I’m good for nothing. It’s nice how well she gets on with Harriet.

Roland clammed up then. He didn’t want to talk with her about Pilar.

They were all invited across to the Pattens for dinner, including the children. There was something ceremonious in how they crossed the road in the early evening light, bearing bottles; Ivy concentrated, in charge of a glass dish of Fran’s home-made chocolate truffles covered in cling film. Pilar brought white roses, cut from the garden wall. They felt clannish: bound together and identifiable, for once, as a family. Roland had Arthur hoisted on his shoulders as if, male, they ought to combine to overtop the female hordes; Arthur rode his uncle tranquilly, a small smile playing in his expression for no one in particular, steering lightly with his hands in Roland’s hair, the boy-prince easy with acclaim.

Wordless, they all seemed to collect themselves in preparation for the hours of chatter to come, scuffing up a cloud of dust around their feet in the road, the women’s different perfumes mingling in the disturbed, heavy air. Even Harriet was wearing perfume; even Roland had sprayed on cologne. Harriet carried herself with a self-conscious stiffness which warned off comment; she was wearing the skirt and blouse Alice had given her, and her own little silk scarf knotted at her neck — which Alice would not actually have advised. But Harriet’s pretty earrings, bought apparently in some museum she’d once visited, caught the light, and her face was animated, tanned and pink from her trip to the seaside. And Molly moved, after her kiss, with a new languid fullness which only the children understood; her father, observing her daydreaming, suffered in fact a pang of worry, thinking how childlike and inexperienced she was. Kasim would be late to the supper party because he had chosen this moment to take a bath, though he’d been skulking in his room for hours. Molly hardly missed him: her idea of him was so vivid in his absence, completing her, that she half-dreaded his actual presence, complicating things.

Light from the low sun slanted through the windows of the church behind them, filling the stone interior and making it appear weightless, floating spirit-like among its graves. From inside the church that morning, while some of them were still slothful in bed, they’d heard the quavering of hymns; because it was used in rotation with the vicar’s other three churches, they never quite remembered to expect it. None of them ever attended, to kneel on their grandmother’s hassocks which were each embroidered with a different local wildflower. If a service was taking place, they only moved around more decorously and guiltily in the old rectory, and everyone was made aware of some pattern of significant time passing, marked out behind the succession of their own days, which were not distinguished one from another. The church kept count, while they were distracted.

Now, as they stepped into the Pattens’ yard, white doves descended in a kerfuffle of fanned-out feathers, the spread wings backing up before landing with the noise a length of cloth makes when snapped in the air to straighten it. Claude Patten, whatever kind of architect he was (mostly old people’s homes and shopping malls) had known better than to encroach upon the barn’s ancient dovecote. Janice had researched on the internet which doves to choose, and how to keep them. She was waiting now, pink-skinned from her shower, curls damp, dressed up in a caftan of kingfisher-blue shot silk, full of proud-hostess smiles beside the tall glass doors which stood open to the yard. These let out the rich smells of her cooking: meat slow baked with tomatoes and wine and herbs, home-made bread. Behind her, opaque white globes — suspended on chains from the barn’s rafters high above — shone with weak light over the long refectory-style table, laid with blue glass and yellow linen napkins. Alice thought it looked like a showy restaurant. The lamps were still outdone by the big low lemony sun outside — but this was about to sink behind the field of head-high exotic and shabby elephant grass, grown for biofuel, which rose behind the barn to the horizon. Janice hated the elephant grass — it spoils my view but it isn’t that, it’s the ecological issue — and had fallen out with the farmer over it.

She greeted her guests and kissed them and took grateful possession of the roses and the truffles, telling Roland she was afraid of him because he was so clever. Apologetic, Roland lifted Arthur from his shoulders and deposited him carefully. Claude, Janice insisted, summoning him ringingly from wherever he was lurking, must be put in charge of the bottles. Her guests felt that their long moment of silence, crossing the road, was suddenly a tangibly sweet thing between them, as they noisily broke it.

Coming late across the road — probably too late, he gloomily and indifferently thought, perhaps he shouldn’t bother — Kas was almost in the dark. The huge evening sky wheeling overhead was a livid, electric blue, pocked with sparks of stars; it stalled him, so that he stood still in the middle of it, in the middle of the road, as if there was something he’d forgotten. His hair was still wet from his bath, picking up the evening’s chill and soaking the collar of his last clean shirt; he had been too proud, or too lazy, to ask where he could do his washing, vaguely he’d been waiting to happen upon a washing machine somewhere. He had seen things drying today, hadn’t he, on a line in the garden?

The tall windows in the barn were lit up and wide open and a clamour of voices floated from inside, along with the businesslike chink of cutlery and chiming of glasses. Kasim shuddered, entering the yard, not wanting to belong to that conviviality. He felt he didn’t want to be initiated, ever, into any noisy crowd of friends and family, its claim a chummy arm dropped on his shoulders. Now he was alive, now. Apprehension could only be kept keen by being kept apart. Alice was protesting over something in that drawling voice which was always on the verge of either tears or teasing. — I’m afraid of everything, she was saying. — But Roland won’t own up to fear, he just won’t admit to it.

Disgusted, Kasim imagined them all laughing with their mouths full. But he was bent upon Molly and must go inside: Molly was silent amid the crowd as he was. The memory of their kiss washed over him and he was strained with sexual longing. Then an unexpected fat drop of warm rain struck his cheek, out of the night-blue sky which had seemed cloudless. At first he thought that his wet hair was dripping, then he felt another drop and heard the rain’s secretive patter swelling all around, too quietly for them to hear inside, rustling in the Pattens’ gravel, sending up little puffs of the parched dust.

JILL FELLOWES CAME home to her parents at Kington in 1968, with her three children, in flight from her husband: she believed that she was finished with him for ever. She had never stopped calling herself Jill Fellowes — in her own mind and, mostly, when she met people — although it was useful being married for the benefit of Harriet’s school, and at the doctor’s. When her mother wrote to her the envelopes were always addressed to Mrs T. R. Crane. Her mother wrote every week, her letters filled with news of the nothing that happened at Kington, salted with her perpetual irony. The big story around here is that the shop has thrown in the towel and refuses to sell anything apart from sliced bread, they say it’s too much trouble, and you know your father won’t eat it. I expect this Sunday’s sermon will be punishing. Every week, dutifully, Jill had written back, dry in return. In return telling her mother nothing, nothing.