Tessa Hadley - The Past

The congregation were few and mostly female, not young; distinctive — even if you also knew them as their weekday informal selves — in their padded, sculpted, decisive Sunday clothes, pinned-on hats or tied headscarves. If you were ever seized, to be embraced against a lapel pinned with a scratching brooch, these clothes gave off an odour of something chemical and hostile. Church was a place set apart, Hettie saw, for what in the everyday world had to be muffled and passed over. Death, for instance, was not dissimulated in the memorials on the walls or the floor of the church, any more than on the graves outside: she had been shocked when she first learned to make out what these matter-of-fact dates meant, attached to each name. It was no surprise that their father never came inside here. Hettie thought that he was against death, and all the burden of importance surrounding it. When the congregation gave themselves up to silent prayer, their mother sank her head impressively on her arms on the pew in front, and Roland sat open-eyed, looking around him. Hettie could hear rain buffeting against the church outside, beating on the roof, running down the window-glass, enclosing the still interior in its successive, insistent washes of soft sound.

At Sunday lunch traditionally, after he’d delivered his sermon, the minster drank a decent wine. He poured for his wife and daughter while Sophy dished up steaming bowls of watery vegetables in the kitchen, passing them through the serving hatch after the roast chicken which was their treat because they had visitors. Jill had begun cutting chicken breast up into morsels for the baby, who was tied into her bib in Jill’s old high chair, pounding her spoon cheerfully in her fist.

— Charlie wore the shortest skirt that’s been seen in my church, her father said, teasing. — It won’t have gone unnoticed.

Jill shrugged. — It’s all I brought to wear.

— He doesn’t mind, Sophy explained, calling through the hatch. — He likes it. He wishes the church was full of young women in short skirts.

— But don’t tell the Bishop, Grantham said.

The atmosphere in the vicarage was exuberant, because the sermon was done for a week and because their daughter was home. Sophy laughed in the kitchen, as if she’d drunk her wine already.

Because Grantham Fellowes had been beautiful when he was young — and despised that, even as he took for granted the power it conferred — he had never lost the habit of commanding a room. A great deal of his spiritual agony had come out of his circular pursuit of his own vanity, which he thought was only intellectual arrogance, not noticing how women yielded to his physical presence, basking in it — and some men too — and how he responded with unthinking entitlement. Only Sophy didn’t flutter, among the little group of middle-class women huddled around him in the parish, whom he mostly treated fairly badly, de haut en bas . A few of the men hated him. His face now was brown as wood, chiselled with deep trenches, assertively and shamelessly old — he was seventy, and perhaps looked older. Yet still there was something jaunty and haughty in the slanting bones and far-off blue of the small eyes, eloquent with all the punishment he’d inflicted on himself. Jill was susceptible to changes in her father’s expression, as if his moods were fastened into her awareness, tugging at her, although she had set her back to him years ago, and sailed in a contrary direction.

When he had carved, they passed around the gravy boat and discussed the sermon. — I knew what it meant, Roland said. — When you hope for something you might get something else instead, which is more useful.

His grandfather was gratified. — From the pulpit I was aware of those sceptical specs, trained on me in critical scrutiny. The boy really was listening! Well done, Childe Roland.

— And I was listening, said Hettie.

— You were a little fidget, her mother said, — twisting your head around to stare at everything.

— I heard it, Hettie said, looking around the table defiantly, trying to be funny, eyes glassy in her flushed, hasty little face. — Grandfather’s sermon about a nasty old mouldy-warp.

— An old mouldy-warp, darling? Sophy was bemused and pleased. — I’m sorry I missed that one!

— Take no notice, Jill said. — She’s only showing off, talking nonsense. Can’t bear anyone else to have the limelight.

— Forgiver us from evil. For thine is the daily bread.

— There you are, you see, said Sophy. — She was listening.

— Not very carefully.

The minister had finished the small portion on his plate. Overlooking Hettie’s performance, he spooned chopped carrots into the baby’s mouth. Even Ali felt his condescension, working the orange mass around in her jaw obediently, dumbstruck. — And what’s your opinion, Roland? he asked. — Do we just have to make the best of this useful thing we never hoped for in the first place? Or is that pusillanimous?

Roland was shovelling vegetables with his knife and fork: his mother had warned him that he had to eat them. — Pusillanimity, she added quickly, — is not doing something because you’re afraid of it.

Roland considered, twitching his glasses into position. — It would depend on what you got, he said. — The thing you got instead of what you wanted. Whether it really was any use.

His grandfather gave a bark of laughter, approving; his grandmother relieved Roland of his cabbage when no one was looking. Jill knew that her father wanted her praise for his sermon now — and in fact when she had been sitting listening to him, contained inside his voice, in the stark little church washed with wet light that was the core of her childhood and her past, his words had unbound an overwhelming emotion inside her. Putting her head on her arms to pray, she had been afraid for a few moments of falling out of her own control, collapsing to the stone floor or heaving with unseemly sobs — terribly un-Anglican. Grantham had based the sermon on a short Herbert poem, ‘Hope’. The limpid, measured words of this poem, and her father’s judicious explication of it, had seemed in their moment sufficient to her experience: everything outside them was obliterated. It was peculiar, as she had been so moved, how reluctant she was now for her father to know it.

— What the poet wants, she said to Roland, — is a ring. But God won’t send it.

— Why a ring? Hettie asked, too loudly, but genuinely bemused. She would like to own a ring herself, but couldn’t imagine a man wanting one.

Jill made strong efforts, overcoming her own contrary will. — You were good, Daddy. It was a beautiful sermon.

She’d have been the only one in the church, Grantham pointed out with sour irony, to recognise the Herbert. He always shook praise off like this, as if it was below the mark he aimed at; yet his wife and daughter knew from experience how he hungered for it, and was capable of sulking if it wasn’t forthcoming. Tom thought he was all vanity, and wouldn’t listen to Jill when she said vanity didn’t matter, it existed in a separate part of the self to writing. Anyway, weren’t all writers vain?

— Didn’t you choose the poem, Sophy suggested enthusiastically, — just because Jill was staying with us?

Grantham disdained this with a little moue of irritation. — I base any number of my sermons on poetry, with no expectation of anybody noticing.

Carefully, Sophy ate a cold mouthful of cabbage. She loved poems but easily forgot them, and she only half-listened to her husband’s sermons anyway. This wasn’t exactly because she wasn’t interested. But part of the oddity of marriage, she thought, was in how unwise it was to attend too intently to the other person. This was the opposite to what she had naively imagined, as a girl. To the unmarried, it seemed that a couple must be intimately, perpetually exposed to each other — but actually, that wasn’t bearable. In order for love to survive, you had to close yourself off to a certain extent.