Tessa Hadley - The Past

Later, when Sophy climbed upstairs with her arms full of the clean sheets she had been airing in front of the Rayburn, she saw through the open door of the bathroom that Jill was naked in the bath with all the children. Startled, she turned her eyes away from all that flesh, from the clambering, slithering, chubby limbs flushed pink in the hot water, and from her daughter’s bare breasts, still plump and shapely even though she’d fed three babies. All piled in together, they were splashing water everywhere on the lino. Some people round here would disapprove, Sophy knew, of the promiscuous bathing. She didn’t disapprove, but the sight made her afraid for Jill, as if it was a signal from the kind of life Jill had now, which Sophy couldn’t imagine: initiated into goodness knows what, in London with Tom. Sophy thought that she had not looked directly for a long time at any adult’s nakedness, not her husband’s, rarely even her own. Snapping out a sheet, ironed into its perfect squares, over the bed in Jill’s room, she was startled by catching sight of an old woman — clothed, thankfully — in the dressing-table mirror: tall, and so thin she seemed made like old bentwood furniture, with all the colour leached out of her, even out of her eyes. The giveaway slippery liver-dark mouth was ugly with doubt, Sophy thought, and the surprising upstanding crest of her hair made her look like an affronted bird: she forgot sometimes to put in the hairgrips to tame it.

When the baby and Roland had been put to bed, and Hettie was reading in the drawing room with her grandmother, Jill paced around the bedrooms in the dusk, in her stocking feet, drying the rope of her hair in a towel. The fresh smell of the fields at evening came in at the windows, tugging at her. It was unexpected to find that leaving a man was not chaste or nun-like; on the contrary, it seemed to have a smouldering sexual content. She looked out from her parents’ room at the alders stirring beside the river, heard the water hurrying on with that low-key urgent restlessness which sounded like rain when you woke to it in the night; her reflection surprised her in the mirror of the monumental wardrobe, she looked impatiently away. This reprieve was what she had longed for when she felt trapped and half-crazy, alone with the children in the flat in London, eking out the days with trips to the park, or with visiting friends — the friends had been no solace because she hadn’t told them what was happening with Tom, hadn’t wanted their opinions or their advice. All her rage and unhappiness and heightened excitement, over the past weeks, had focused in her longing to get home, as if that was a solution. But now she was actually in Kington, she seemed still to be waiting for something else, the next thing.

By the time her father returned the children were all in bed, and Jill had changed into a clean blouse and skirt. — You’ll never guess who’s here, she heard her mother say in the hall, helping him off with his coat. He strode into the drawing room with an exasperated low hum, resenting the intrusion of visitors, preparing his patience, tightening the belt on the flapping black gown which Tom derided as vanity and pantomime. Grantham Fellowes was small, austerely thin, his skin tanned and burned as dark as old leather. His cheeks and his eye sockets were sculptured pits; above a high naked forehead his thick hair was pure white, and light as down. Tom said Grantham cultivated this look, of a medieval Saint Jerome — or a fake, Pre-Raphaelite, copy of one. Jill was aware of making her own striking picture, sitting with her clean hair loose in the lamplight and a book open on her knee — though in truth she hadn’t been reading it, she couldn’t concentrate. There was deception in her composure but that was a good thing, she preferred to present him with an impermeable surface, her performance of an accomplished, fulfilled self. She could imagine spilling over in confidences to her mother, but couldn’t bear the idea of her father’s knowing yet about her failure, and judging it.

— Isn’t this lovely? Sophy said.

The surprise put him for a moment at a disadvantage. — Charlie! To what do we owe this unexpected honour?

— Just a whim, Jill said. — Hello, Daddy.

Charlie was his name for her in the days when they went around everywhere together and she had wanted to be a boy; he had started her off on Latin and ancient history while she was still in junior school, taught her elementary botany on their long walks — she had never complained when her legs were tired. She had gone with him into estate cottages without running water or electricity, where old men or women lay sick or dying; once it was a young man whose chest had been crushed by falling straw bales, and whose mother wanted him to pray, though he wouldn’t look at the minister. He had turned his head away, gargling and blowing bright terrible bubbles of blood which stained the dirty pillowcase; someone had hurried Jill out before she saw too much, although she already had. Her father had worn himself out campaigning to improve the living conditions of the rural workers, though he never identified with them, and wasn’t much loved — his manner was too distant, he didn’t know how to put uneducated people at ease. In his poems he wrote about them sometimes as if they were insentient features of the landscape, like old stones or trees. He had a vision of a simple Christian community, toughened by hardship and contact with harsh natural law; he couldn’t sympathise when the country people wanted televisions and refrigerators. Now, with the mechanisation of the farms, so many were leaving the countryside to look for work in the cities; his congregation was mostly old women and a few incomers, retirees. Jill knew that he embraced this new turn of his fate as a comic irony, scourge of his pride.

It was absolutely dark in the bedroom the three children shared, yet in Hettie, lying in bed with her eyes strained open onto nothing, every sense was anxiously alert to the difference from home. Even the dark was different: in Marylebone a street lamp diffused its orange glow into their room so that she could always make out the hump of Roly in his bed — he slept bottom up, with his face in his pillow — and the bars of the baby’s cot casting a weak shadow on the wall. There, the headlights of cars passing crossed the ceiling in a deliciously, mysteriously purposeful slow arc; the night was always full of voices from the London street below.

Darkness in Kington was as dense as a hand clapped over her face, and her grandmother’s cool sheets smelled disconcertingly of lavender. At home Jill hardly had time to wash their sheets, let alone iron them, and Hettie had grown used to burrowing each night into the crumpled cloth smelling of herself, her dribble and biscuit crumbs and salty hair. Something barked in the woods: a fox, or a wolf? There was so much empty silence in the country that each sound seemed significant in ways Hettie couldn’t learn to understand; her dad didn’t understand them either. Jill knew the names of all the flowers and could recognise the birds by their songs; when Tom said he didn’t care, Hettie was reprieved, and hid away the I-Spy books of the countryside which were the record of her shame, hardly ticked at all. She preferred the wild animals in London zoo, safe behind bars and identified straightforwardly by the labels on their cages, which she was beginning to be able to read.

For a while she lay tormented and sorry for herself, needing to pee, disappointed in her body as she had been on the bus when she knew she would be sick. Eventually, swinging her legs from under the blankets, she slid down the side of the bed until her feet touched the bare boards of the floor, feeling with her toes for the rug: it occurred to her in a clutch of terror that in this darkness reality could be making and unmaking itself dizzily, unforeseen precipices opening ahead of her which were not there when she got into bed. Cautiously, she felt her way around by the wall — Ali stirred in the cot when she knocked against it, and made lip-smacking noises. At least Hettie could discern, once she was out from the bedroom — in a dim light escaping from wherever the grown-ups were talking downstairs — the looming perspectival shapes of so many doors, open and closed, to so many rooms fearfully unused, full with their emptiness. A blue-black sky showed in the uncurtained arched windows at either end of the landing. In the bathroom she peed and rubbed the hard toilet paper between her hands as her mother had showed her, till it was soft enough to use, then pulled the momentous long chain. On the windowsill ends of old soap were dissolving in a jam jar of gloopy water; her grandfather used these to wash his hair, it was one of the funny stories Daddy told about his meanness. Coming out onto the landing again, Hettie was quite blind, after the light in the bathroom.