Tessa Hadley - The Past

When they arrived at the cottage and knocked on the door, there seemed to be no one at home. All the windows were on the inaccessible back wall, overhanging the valley below, so they couldn’t peer inside; Roland tried the door handle and was taken aback when the door swung open. Stepping halfway across the threshold into the tiny single room on the ground floor, Jill called out in case anyone was lying sick or in trouble upstairs. The silence and stillness inside the cottage was a shock after the perpetual movement outdoors; this air hadn’t been stirred for long hours — or days perhaps. Even the light was stale. She felt she’d intruded on something forbidden. The dishes on the painted dresser and rug in front of the hearth communicated the home’s emptiness, presided over by the religious pictures on the walls: Jesus was sorrowfully reproachful, or had a lantern and a lost lamb tucked under his arm. The Goods were a remnant of the Bible Christians, who once had a great following among the farm workers.

Jill called out again for Mrs Good, and then when no one responded was relieved to get out of the cottage, pulling the door shut quickly behind her, choosing not to explore upstairs. Roland asked her what she’d seen inside.

— Nothing at all. Just the ordinary inside of a house, when the people are out somewhere.

There was a message waiting for Jill when they arrived home, sent round from the Smiths who owned Roddings, the biggest and oldest farm in the village, and had a telephone. Tom had called her and left a number he could be contacted on, if she rang him at nine that evening. Mrs Smith had written it out in a fat schoolbook hand, in purple indelible pencil, on notepaper headed with an advertisement for a dairy — a cow kicking up her heels, jumping over a moon.

Jill frowned at it, suspicious. — So is this a Paris number?

The outrage of him: sending his instructions, dictating that she should arrange her life around his convenience. She wouldn’t call, anyway. He could sit and wait, expecting the phone to ring, and it wouldn’t. Let him have a taste of that.

Peering at the number, Sophy worried. — What do you think?

— It’s rather important because of the time difference. I don’t think it’s Paris, it’s not long enough. I think it’s London. He wouldn’t have thought to take the Smiths’ number away with him, he must be back at the flat. I’m surprised he remembered where I wrote it down. By the way, what’s happened to the Goods? We went to the cottage and their door was unlocked, but no one was home.

Sophy was vague, her mind was still on Tom. — It shouldn’t be unlocked. We ought to see to that. There’s a niece who might want things. Didn’t I write to you? He died just before Christmas, she went into a Home, poor old thing. Daddy calls on her but she won’t see him, she has some rather eccentric religious convictions. I don’t know what will happen to the house. No one will live there, without running water.

Jill said that all religious convictions were eccentric, including Daddy’s. Her mother was unperturbed. — Well, mine are the most eccentric of all. If you knew the half of the funny things that I have faith in. Just don’t start any theological arguments with your father before he’s finished supper. He forgets to eat, if he’s enjoying himself.

— Oh, you’re an old pagan, Jill said. — I know all about that. You’re a disgrace to the Church.

She was burning up all the time, with consciousness of Tom’s call: it roused her again to that exhilarated anger she’d felt in those last weeks in London, and to those heights of cheerful dissimulation. Whose number was it he had given her? It wasn’t his office. Perhaps some other woman’s place? He demeaned her and she repudiated out of her exceptional soul the cliché of the old wrong, would not allow sex-jealousy to be the explanation for her leaving. And how dare he presume that she wanted to speak to him?

Yet a few minutes before nine o’clock — the children were all asleep — Jill slipped out of the house in the dark as if under some compulsion, to go to the phone box in the village. Her father was working on his sermon, Sophy was sitting at her bureau, writing to old schoolfriends: Jill didn’t want their awareness accompanying her. It was a relief to duck down the stone steps at the front, into the chilly damp under the privet hedge, hearing the voice from the wireless carry on indoors, blithely assured, without her. Moonlight seeped around the edges of a mass of cloud. Sophy had left shillings and sixpences piled up discreetly beside Jill’s purse, and she didn’t notice how tightly she was gripping them until her fingers ached. Her hate-tryst consumed her, she was bent upon it, aimed in her entirety at the lit-up phone box and its dank sealed-in air, the furtive importance of fumbling in her pocket for the number, the burr in the heavy receiver, the suspenseful moment of waiting, reading over the framed instructions and advertisements in the kiosk without seeing them. Two worlds — here, and elsewhere — were steered into collision.

Tom made a mistake when he answered the phone. She knew him! He would have planned to snatch it up as soon as she rang, and greet her gravely, intimately. But for a moment he’d lost concentration, and forgotten: probably he was reading something he’d picked up while he waited, or scribbling an idea. So he answered the phone in a breezy light voice, without thinking, as he did at the office. — Tom Crane?

She almost laughed.

He changed his voice then hastily, to growly and low, troubled. — Jill, is it you?

— Where are you? she said. — Whose number is this? I don’t care: only I need to know.

— Bernie’s. I’m staying here. Can’t stand being in that flat without you.

— You’ll get used to it.

Did she believe him, that he was at Bernie’s? His silence tried to be reproachful, but he wasn’t very good at silence. — Everything’s changed, Jilly. You’d feel differently if you’d seen what I’ve seen. There’s no way things are going to go back to how they were, not after this. Listen, I’ll stay with the children at home for a few days and you can go over there, be part of it. I don’t mind at all.

— Go over where? she asked coldly. — Oh, you mean Paris. I’d forgotten about Paris. No, I’ve no desire to go there.

— It’s crazy, I’m telling you. The courage of those kids! The police have clubs and gas bombs: they’ve brought in reservists from Brittany — country boys, reactionary nationalists. Someone said that they’re getting rid of bodies in the Seine. And people in the apartments throw down chocolate and saucisson for the students, bring them out coffee. The bourgeois drive into the quartier from the suburbs on quiet nights, sightseeing, taking photos of themselves on the barricades. Three million joined the march protesting at the police repression. I stood up on a traffic island and I saw a river of them, running all the way down the Boul’ Saint-Mich and out of sight. Do you know what they chanted? Nous sommes tous des juifs allemands — because of Cohn-Bendit, the authorities threatening to deport him. Isn’t that beautiful?

— Three million sounds unlikely. The whole population of Paris is only eight and a half.

Jill knew how he hated her when she was flattening. She was like her father then, with his superior knowledge like a trap snapping shut. — I heard they’re cutting down the trees, she said. — The lovely old plane trees of Paris. They won’t grow again in a hurry.

Sententiously Tom said that this wasn’t a time to be worrying about trees.

— It’ll be too late to worry about them afterwards. Anyway, what did you want? You left a message asking me to call.