Tessa Hadley - The Past

Late one afternoon in May, Jill’s mother, dressed in her oldest slacks and gardening shirt, straightened up from weeding in the front garden of the old white house beside the church, in an empty pause. She was extremely thin — bony, she called it — graceful and washed out, with pale grey-blue eyes and iron-grey hair which grew oddly upwards, like a crest. Was she thinking in those moments of her budding roses, and the shepherd’s pie for supper, like a caricature of a vicar’s wife? Just then a noisy arrival broke in upon the sealed, blissful, tedious peace of the place, and her beloved only daughter and her grandchildren unfurled from an unfamiliar panting, juddering car on the road outside, like an apparition, utterly unexpected. The car was a Morris Traveller, with Tudor panelling.

Sophy wasn’t really thinking of shepherd’s pie. She had slipped, as she often did when she was alone, into the dark pool of herself, beneath conscious awareness: she might have been standing, dreaming of nothing, for five seconds or five minutes. So that when she saw her daughter she really thought in that first instant — uncharacteristically, because she was rational and sceptical, the faith that bound her slender sometimes as a thread — that she was subject to a vision. Of the Stanley Spencer kind: a domesticated miracle. The children were beautiful as angels but also sticky and filthy, Hettie was ghastly pale, Roland’s glasses were mended at the bridge with sticking plaster, baby Ali’s curls were flattened with sweat, as if she had been roused from sleep against her mother. Whining at being put down on the road, she stumbled after Jill, clinging to her coat so that Jill almost fell over her.

— Keep hold of her, Hettie, will you?

The Morris Traveller wasn’t Jill’s. She couldn’t drive and anyway couldn’t possibly have afforded a car. They’d come from London on the train, then the bus, and then finally as they set out to walk the two miles from where the bus put them down, through the winding lanes into Kington — looking like refugees from the dust bowl or something, Jill said — someone passing had taken pity on them and given them a lift. When she had heaved the folding pushchair and a suitcase from behind the back seat, Jill leaned in through the open front passenger window, smiling, and Sophy heard her daughter fulsome and charming as she’d been brought up to be. So very kind of you … saved our lives. The Morris reversed into the Brodys’ farm entrance opposite, and was off by the time Sophy had dropped her trowel and hurried down to the gate.

— My dear ones, my best boy and girls, she said. — What’s happened?

— We stink, Jill said flatly. — They’ll have to open all their windows to get rid of us. Harriet was sick on the bus, I had nothing to wipe it up with except her own cardigan. The whole journey’s been sheer hell. And they weren’t actually coming to Kington, they made a detour just for us. No idea who they were, only they seemed to know us. We’re badly in need of a bath.

— Oh, but who was it?

Sophy worried about an intricate network of obligations and favours. — How nice of them! I’d like to thank them.

— I pretended I knew. Cunningly I said, So, how are you all? But their lives were too bland for identification. A daughter called Penny, who rides? Anyway, they were nosy, they wanted to know why Dad hadn’t picked us up at the station. I said we’d just come on an impulse. Which we have.

— Darling, you could have phoned the Smiths. How can I feed you all? The loaves and fishes thing doesn’t work with shepherd’s pie, when it’s such a tiny one. And you know that the Smiths really don’t mind. It’s only your father’s obstinacy, that he won’t have a phone put in. Now the shop’s shut. I’ll have to go over to Brodys for some eggs.

— We don’t eat eggs.

Roland broke the news solemnly.

— Oh god, said Jill. — I really began to think we’d never get here, that we’d just have to sleep under a hedge or something. And you’re worrying about a little thing like eggs.

— You shouldn’t say god, said Hettie. — Grandfather doesn’t like it.

— He isn’t here. He’s visiting the sick.

— Thank god for the sick, said Jill. — We can swear until he gets back.

Sophy put the kettle on for tea. It was astonishing that Jill and her children were suddenly real, and in the house with her. Usually before their visits — or before her own visits to their chaotic, unsuitable flat over a shop in Marylebone High Street — she had time to prepare to be astonished. If only she’d had time at least to change out of these old clothes. She had become more familiar, she realised, with the wistful dream of her daughter than with this actual woman: decisive, her face keen with the extreme leanness of young motherhood, her colouring which made Sophy think of a thrush, the careless switch of her tawny hair swinging from where she pulled it into a ponytail high on her head. Her crumpled shirt dress was so short — she had taken up the hem herself, Sophy could see, sewing in childish big stitches. Pale lipstick had seeped into the cracks in her lips, and she had painted her eyes. When she lowered her gaze, the heavy, strongly convex mauve lids could have belonged to a saint in a vision, but the eyes when they looked up took in everything with too much appetite.

Jill had come wearing her winter coat, because it was easier than carrying it; the coat was too thick for the cloudy, mild spring day, and her cheeks were hectic with the heat. Now she shrugged it off and dropped it on a chair in the hall, strode through the house and out through the French windows, into the garden where she threw herself down, flat on her back on the lawn: the earth’s deep chill seeped up through her dress, refreshing her. For a moment it was as if she was still seventeen, and had never left. Then the baby toddled after her and settled crowing with triumph astride her, bouncing until Jill groaned and pushed her off, lifted the little top of her romper suit printed with strawberries and blew noises on her tummy.

Her mother asked Jill carefully, over their cup of tea, where Tom was.

— Oh, he’s in Paris. He’s revolting.

For once Sophy’s irony failed her. — Revolting?

— You know. Isn’t that what revolutionaries do: revolt?

— Well, goodness. I hope he isn’t getting into trouble.

— That’s the whole point of a revolution, Mum, Jill said. — Trouble is what you’re hoping for. Anyway, Tom’s hoping for it, so he can write about it for his paper.

Evasive, not commenting, Sophy stirred the tea in her cup, chinking the spoon against the porcelain. Her doubts about Tom, transparent to her daughter, mostly went unspoken. — I’ll be so interested to hear what he thinks. I don’t know what to make of it. Aren’t the students going too far? There was a lot of idealism in the beginning. And the French police are brutes, aren’t they?

— Not like the nice English policemen.

But Jill didn’t want to get into a row about politics with her mother. She was sick of her own tired old opinions and indignation; at this moment, in truth, she couldn’t care less about Paris. She could just imagine what was going on over there: everyone denouncing all the wrongs in the world as if no one had ever denounced them before, all those students who’d never done a day’s work in their lives, so delighted with their sacrifices on behalf of the ‘workers’. Of course when she imagined those things she was really imagining Tom.

She had thought that when she arrived home she would spill over with her sorrows to her mother right away. Through all the difficulties of the long journey with the children, she had had this sensation as if she were holding the burden of these sorrows up out of the way and guarding them with her life: like a messenger in a story carrying something of terrible import, a signal for war or an enemy’s severed head. As soon as she was actually in Kington, her urgency diffused. How could she have forgotten this muffling effect of her home, where plain speaking was always deferred until a moment which never came? Instead they worried about eggs — and she found herself joining in, over the eggs, and the sheets and the hot water, as if these would suffice as coded, generalised expressions of affection, and concern. She waited for her mother to ask why she had come so precipitously, without warning. Perhaps Sophy really hadn’t read anything between the lines of all the letters Jill had sent, hadn’t intuited the failure of her marriage. Jill felt gratified and lonely both at once; loftily so much more experienced than her mother.