Tessa Hadley - The Past

The vicar was away for the day at a diocesan meeting and Sophy found Roland in his study, staring into a leather-bound book open across his scabby knees: Herodotus in the original, as it turned out. She stored this up as a funny story to report to Jill; then, in a second impulse of protective tact, decided to keep it to herself. Jill these days seemed to make a joke out of everything, including her children — she believed it was better to jolly them along and not indulge them. Sophy quailed occasionally at her daughter’s brittle, brave performance; Jill had mentioned already, as if it was funny, that Roland was slow at learning his letters. — He’s a sweetheart, but he isn’t Einstein, she had cheerfully said. He was holding Herodotus the right way up, anyhow, and turned the pages with great care, seeming really to be peering closely at the words. His small, intent face was brown and neat as a nut, wrenching his grandmother, and the silky hair curled tight on his skull like a black lamb’s. He told her he was reading Grandfather’s book.

— How interesting, darling. What is it about?

— All sorts of things, Granny. They can’t be said, because I can only read it with my mind.

— Of course, that’s very natural, I’m the same way.

— But what is thinking?

Sophy pushed away the idea of those absences of hers, when she sank into deep water: did they count as thought? — I suppose it is a kind of work, she said. — You can feel it in going on in your brain, when you’re understanding things. For instance when you’re reading words in a book, trying to find out what they mean. This book is in Greek, of course, so Granny can’t read it: but your mummy can, and your grandfather.

— And I can.

Roland twitched his nose when he looked up, to keep his glasses in place, with a backwards jerk of his head like a little old man. Sophy blamed this new habit, which distressed her, on the glasses mended lumpily with sticking plaster, which must be a blot in the corner of his vision. At the first opportunity she would take him into Corrigan’s, for a real repair. She mentioned it as soon as Jill arrived home off the bus, her basket piled high with shopping — and of course Jill took it as a criticism, although she was in buoyant spirits and forgave her mother easily. — Don’t you think I’ve had them repaired ten times already? He’ll only break them again right away. And old Corrigan’s creepy, he used to put his hand on my knee. But if you want to, I don’t care.

Jill’s beauty was startling that afternoon, with her hair pinned up and something scalded and raw in her young face: Sophy had to turn her eyes away from it. She didn’t have the refinement of either of her parents, with her straight long nose, lean animal jaw, big lazy mouth, her golden colouring suffused across the cheeks with a rough pink. — I can’t believe how everything in town is just the same. I knew everyone. I bumped into Mikey Waller — he’s working as an estate agent, did you know? And Ailsa was in The Bungalow. Thank you for the ten shillings. I felt like a schoolgirl on a treat, and ate two teacakes and bought iced buns for everyone.

— Hurrah, hurrah! Hettie shouted, picking up on her mother’s mood. She had been tranquil all morning while Jill was away, filling in her colouring book at the kitchen table.

— Ailsa’s always in The Bungalow, Sophy said. — No wonder she’s jumpy, it’s all that coffee she drinks.

— Innocent dear Mummy, Ailsa’s drink problem isn’t coffee .

Sophy frowned across the children’s heads and shook her head just perceptibly; alertly Hettie caught it, looking from her grandmother to her mother and back again. — Who is Ailsa? she demanded. — And what is her drink problem?

Jill laughed and wouldn’t tell her, then when Hettie loudly persisted she lost her temper, smacking Hettie smartly across the back of the legs. — No iced bun for you!

Hettie’s screams awoke the baby early from her nap, and Sophy thought of that flat in Marylebone, where they were all on top of one another. None of this fraught chaos of childcare had seemed to arise when Jill was a child herself. No doubt it was easier with only one — and anyway Jill had been serene from the moment she was born: commanding and forceful, but never naughty. Sophy hadn’t realised perhaps how peculiar their family was, with a child who was her parents’ easy companion, entering all the concerns of their adult lives: parish war work, the Tennis Club, Latin and Greek and poetry. This childhood seemed even odder in the light of Jill’s adult life — she had disavowed her parents’ style so wholeheartedly.

Sophy’s own experience, she thought, hardly counted as motherhood at all — she had missed out on something more boisterous and transforming. Probably as an adult she had been too childish. Jill was right, she was an innocent — and that was awful. Though she did know about Ailsa. No doubt there were things in Jill’s and Tom’s life together which made it harder to include children. When Tom played with his children they had great fun, he rolled round on the floor with them, roaring like a bear — but he was quickly bored, and away too often. Poor Jill had to make up the rules for their family life all by herself. And Sophy saw that the children were bruised sometimes by their mother’s power, which could be inconsistent and capricious. She thought that Jill adored her son too openly, and was too hard on little Hettie.

Jill took the children into the woods to eat their buns: even Hettie, when she’d apologised, was allowed to have one. They spread a rug among the bluebells — which were over, darkened and shrivelled on their stems — and Jill poured out plastic beakers of orange squash. Dwarfed by the woods’ tall spaciousness, the children were very calm: the smooth trunks of the birch trees soared up all around them and over their heads the branches broke out in young leaves, tender as scraps of soft cloth caught in the twigs. Out of sight of other adults, Jill let her prickly irony lapse as if it was exhausting. Her children knew this and they loved to be alone with her. Ali stuffed her mouth determinedly with leaf mould and they gave up trying to prevent her: it was only earth after all, as Roland reassured his mother. Colours were clean in the watery light, small birds scuffled in the undergrowth, a wood pigeon took off from time to time, its disruption startling as gunshot. Behind the stillness they felt the surge of spring, pressing everything forwards.

After their picnic Hettie and Roland ran on along the path through the trees, while Jill let the baby stagger at her own pace, in her leading reins, pausing to bend over unsteadily like a stout old gentleman, picking up litter so daintily between two fingertips: a lolly stick, sweet wrapper, cigarette end, all dropped long ago and weathered to the same brown as the woods. Jill had changed out of her heels into a pair of flip-flops she found in the scullery; every so often, to catch up with the others, she slipped out of these and ran barefoot, carrying the flip-flops hooked over a finger, the baby bouncing and hiccoughing with laughter on her hip. She thought she’d take the children to call on the old couple who lived in a lonely cottage perched on a bend in the path, with a well in the garden and a view down through the trees into a secluded valley. They’d called here before, and Mrs Good had given sweets to Hettie — she had given them to Jill too, when she was a child, and Jill had always thanked her politely, then carried them home to bury them guiltily in the vicarage dustbin. She couldn’t remember now what she’d been afraid of. Poison perhaps, as if they were sweets in a fairy tale, because of the old lady’s name and the equivocal position of the cottage, set apart from the village community.