Tessa Hadley - The Past

He changed to the low-toned, coaxing voice he used when he wanted to make love to her. — Just to talk to you, Jilly. I wanted to hear you speak. Listen, I need you. I can’t live without you and the children. When are you coming back? You’re making a big fuss about a little thing. It was nothing, what happened with Vanda. She drives me nuts, she’s stupid, I don’t even like her. You’re the one, Jilly. You’re the only one who understands all this. I miss you so much. I need you.

Jill didn’t say anything. She coiled and uncoiled the flex of the phone restlessly around her left hand and held the receiver with her chin against her shoulder, stretching her neck as if her shoulders ached, pressing her back against the heavy door of the phone box until it opened under her weight, letting in the night air. She hardly knew that she watched the barn owl pass, weightless-seeming as a drift of chiffon against the gloom. Luxuriantly she listened to her husband. She didn’t want him back. But still, she wanted to hear this, she couldn’t help herself. When he fell quiet eventually, listening to her, trying to gauge what meaning there was for him in her silence, she put the receiver back in its metal cradle, cutting him off.

ON SUNDAY MORNING the baby woke up early. Jill was hauled out of her own deep sleep by the creak of the wooden cot as Ali climbed over its side, for the first time. After a pause — for sheer surprise, perhaps, at this brand new freedom, so easily attained — purposeful little steps came padding out onto the landing, then, after a hesitation, along towards Jill’s room. Jill was aware of calculating irresponsibly — in exchange for a few seconds more of warmth in bed — that if Ali could climb out of her cot, then she could navigate safely past the top of the stairs. The door of the bedroom was pushed tentatively open and Ali stopped on the threshold, in her sagging night-nappy and the blue pyjamas patterned with yachts that had belonged to Roland. She was staring solemnly, as if she wasn’t sure what she might find, in a world no one had prepared for her. Jill couldn’t help laughing at the round eyes and fat flushed cheeks: Ali’s fair hair was so fine that it hardly counted, she looked bald as an egg. She laughed back at her mother in pure pleasure.

— What do you think you’re doing, naughty? Why aren’t you in your cot?

Jill slipped out of bed then, to snatch the baby up and kiss her, scolding her in whispers, then listen at the door and quietly close it. As long as Ali hadn’t woken up the others, if Jill changed her nappy now and she had her morning bottle of milk — kept ready overnight on the dressing table — there was even a chance of her falling asleep again. Ali was the doziest and easiest of her three babies. With Hettie she had tried too hard to establish a routine, as the books instructed; Roland had frightened her with infantile convulsions.

— It’s still night-time, little chicken. You can have your bottle in bed with Mummy if you’ll go back to sleep. Shut your eyes now.

Jill held her in the crook of her arm, nestled under the blankets and eiderdown. At first Ali kept her eyes resolutely open as she sucked: brilliant with the joke of the whole occasion, fixed on her mother. When her grin spread irresistibly her mouth slid off the rubber teat of the bottle, milk trickling at its corner. Eventually the heavy eyes fell shut, flicked open, drooped again. Jill put the bottle on the bedside table and tried to go back to sleep herself. The sleeping baby was pressed close along the contours of her own body, burning with her heat, wispy hair blowing in her breath, the stuffy milky smell in her own nose — but in the hollow of her thoughts she was agitated and noisy, full of her argument with Tom as she hadn’t been when she went to bed. She saw things with finality in the grey light which developed inexorably around the heavy furniture in the room. From henceforward, she thought, he and she were fated to be enemies, set opposite each other at their different poles of experience. Once, they had been equal in their separate freedoms. They had set out to have children as lightly as if they were playing house, and now her necessarily domestic life bored him, and she was bound to it in her body and imagination. This imbalance was fated, built into their biology.

Jill was afraid for her free self, as if she saw a young woman receding on a road in the far distance. What use was her grown-up knowledge — acquired through such initiations, at such risk — in this world of infants, who had to be kept safe? Tom had said once that anyone could do motherhood: in fact, he added, the less complicated you were, the better mother you would make. This was probably true, but not consoling. The whole silly, flirting, furtive episode with Vanda was enraging just because it was so lightweight and shouldn’t have mattered — Tom went ducking and wincing with infuriating flexibility through his obligations, while Jill’s humiliation weighed her down. She thought about the Goods’ cottage in the woods. Perhaps she could find another kind of freedom, if she lived there. Looking out of those windows day after day, seeing nothing human, only the shifting screens of leaves between her and the sky — what a simplification! Drifting into sleep, she imagined a life alone in those tiny rooms, alone with the children.

Sophy looked after the baby while Jill went to church with the older children. Hettie and Roland felt as if they followed another mother when Jill led the way, in her coat and a hat — a pretty, neat, blue hat, borrowed from Granny, with a feather tucked into its blue ribbon — holding up a big umbrella over all of them against the drizzle. They processed through the keyhole gap between their garden and the churchyard which was their privilege, when all the rest of the congregation had to come in by the church gate. This other mother was more like the ones in books, stricter and yet more poised and equable than her everyday self, more remote. Inside the church Jill always knew confidently what to do, carrying off the mysterious act in such bold style, standing up and sitting down and kneeling even before anyone else did, singing hymns in a strong voice, hardly glancing at the words in the hymn book. They children felt their own disgrace as pagan city-dwellers, fumbling and mumbling their lame way after her. Roland after a while gave up pretending, preferring to stare into the church calmly in silence as if he’d got its measure. He attended to his grandfather’s sermon, about Hope, with detached interest. When his mother’s fingertips — seeming moved by an awareness quite separate to her own steadied attention to her father — strayed across his warm scalp, among his curls, he shifted away just perceptibly, not wanting the church to catch them out in any absence.

At least Hettie did know the Lord’s Prayer. She had learned it at school, and Granny had given them a Ladybird book which was an illustrated version. A dense passage in the middle wound around the trespasses whose very sound — as we forgive those who trespass against us — was vexed and bristling, and which were disconcerting morally because you might, Hettie had puzzled out, both inflict them and have them inflicted upon you. She was drawn to those pictures in shamed fascination: a boy put his hand in wet paint where his father was decorating, but it was his sister who had broken the boy’s toys, an aeroplane and a crane. Faces were stark with outrage and guilt and hurt. This moral ambiguity was associated, in Hettie’s vision, with the building of the church itself, whose stone shape, pierced with glass, soared upwards and yet remained where you could always smell damp earth beneath you. The great Gurney stove, with its iron fins spread like the fanned pages of a book, only ever gave out the faintest indication of heat: her grandparents despaired of it and the parish couldn’t afford to buy a new one, so no wonder the hymn books grew mouldy. In the coldest weather they plugged in an electric fire. The altar cloth their grandmother had sewn was the only sumptuous thing in the grave, undecorated place: yellow-haired angels blasted something against cream satin on long trumpets, turning their faces away from the stubby huge nails which they held out as if to prove something. You see? These nails looked like the fat wax crayons at school.