Tessa Hadley - The Past

They struck off from the lane into the path through the woods; Jill had brought a torch in her coat pocket. What if it was true? she thought. What if this absolute, creative transformation into a new life really were possible, and it was her fault that she couldn’t see it, and was stuck inside the old one?

— Journalism’s beginning to disgust me, Tom said. — It’s just being part of the machine. I’m thinking about taking up my painting again. I’ve got some ideas. Doing something real for once. Something that’s really different, part of how everything’s changing.

She took him to the Goods’ cottage, and they went inside. It was darker and colder in there than outside in the woods. — We could stop here for a bit, Jill said. — If you really want to talk.

— What is this place? Who lives here? Won’t they mind? It smells creepy.

— He died and she went off her head. It belongs to no one.

Their voices were flattened in the stale, tiny room; Tom shone the torch around, picking out torn-out coupons stuffed in front of the plates in a dresser, a crocheted antimacassar, Jesus gazing yearningly at them, a wilted magazine — The People’s Friend — in a wire rack, a dirty crust of sliced bread in a torn plastic bag on the floor. Invisible in the dark aftermath of the torch beam, the room’s sparse furniture was more insistently present. Jill had brought matches and she tried to make a fire in the grate — there was kindling in a bucket, she brought in a couple of logs from the pile outside. But the chimney didn’t draw well and it smoked. Tom went exploring upstairs and came down with an armful of eiderdowns and blankets. — It’s grim up there, he said. — I had a feeling he’d died in that very bed, whoever he was.

The musty damp eiderdowns and the wood smoke made him wheeze, he had to use the pink rubber ephedrine pump he always carried with him. They spread the eiderdowns on the floor and wrapped themselves in the blankets, then ate the last of the mini rolls; it turned out that Tom had the remains of a quarter bottle of brandy with him too, although he’d said he had no money. Generously, he let Jill have most of what was left in it. Shuffling out of the blankets on her hands and knees, she adjusted the logs in the fire, adding another one — she had a gift for fires and this one had settled in, it wasn’t smoking too badly. While she crouched there on all fours, taking her weight on her arms with her face to the flames, Tom tugged out the elastic band from her ponytail so that her hair fell down loose over her shoulders. Then he slid his hand against her neck underneath it, making a low noise all the time as if he were growling in delight, bending his head down to kiss the back of her ears. At the same time he was sliding his other hand up between her legs from behind, slithering against the hard nylon of her tights, pushing up her skirt out of the way, probing around the waistband of her knickers. Closing her eyes, Jill shifted her weight so that she was pressing back against his hand. She thought then that this was really what she had been wanting all along, it was what she had come for. The wheezing in Tom’s chest was as purposeful as a ship’s engine.

— I missed you, Tom said. — I missed you so badly, Jilly.

Jill wouldn’t have been able to stop herself going along with the lovemaking, if Tom hadn’t spoken. The spell of this strange place in the middle of the woods, where neither of them were themselves, was very powerful — she was half abandoned to it already. But then she heard such familiar confident satisfaction in Tom’s voice. He was so sure that this would make everything all right. In one bound she sprang away from him, pulling down her skirt: she was still on all fours, but now she was facing him. They were head to head, like two fighting dogs. — How can you? How can you just settle back into this, as if nothing had happened?

— I’m not settling back into anything.

— Yes you are! When you say you want to talk, this is what you mean.

— Don’t be a prude, he said. — Don’t tell me you don’t want it too.

— You’ve got such a coarse mind. I don’t just mean sex. I don’t mean sex all the time.

— I know you don’t, he coaxed her. — Neither do I. But this is still all about Vanda, isn’t it? I never thought you’d be so hung up on that old possessiveness. I thought we agreed we didn’t own each other.

— You haven’t even asked about the children.

— All right, I’m asking about them now.

Jill groaned in exasperation, and said it wasn’t just the asking. — It’s the way you are, how you can put them out of your mind for days at a time, or weeks even. Just as if you were free. And I can’t.

— I said I’d look after them for a bit, if you wanted to go to Paris. Or go anywhere. I don’t mind!

— You’re not serious about anything. So now it’s painting instead of journalism. What will it be next week?

— D’you mean like your old man is serious? The serious miserable fucking poet? And by the way, I don’t think sex is coarse. You surely brought me to this weird and wonderful place — I know you — with sex in mind. That isn’t coarse. And now you’re breaking my balls. Look, I’m serious. Look at me. This is the thing in the world I am most serious about.

Jill looked at him almost tenderly. It wasn’t any wonder that other women threw themselves in his way. The firelight played over his long brown face, which was like her idea of a warrior’s or a cowboy’s: the high, hard, knobbed cheekbones, jutting tense brow. In the grey eyes there was always a suggestion of sleepy satisfaction, something rapt and dreaming. — D’you know what? she said. — I’m going to go back now. I’m going to leave you here.

— You’re insane, you can’t do that.

— Don’t follow me. I don’t want you to follow me. I’m going to take the torch, you’d only get lost without it. You’ll be all right in here until the morning. There are plenty of logs. In the morning I don’t want to see you. I don’t want you coming to the house.

Standing at her window in the dawn light, Hettie saw the strangest thing. The light often woke her up, here in the country: when her eyes flipped open out of her dreams, the new day waiting in the room was so distinctively, surprisingly present that it was impossible — it was almost impolite — to close her eyes again, as if she hadn’t seen it. The children’s bedroom overlooked the front garden, as their mother’s did. And on this particular day, almost as soon as she took up her post between the silky lilac-coloured curtains — in her nightdress, with her bare feet in the ice-cold which pooled ankle-deep on the floorboards — she saw her daddy walking past in the lane outside. He was wearing his big duffel coat, with the hood down.

In fact she heard him before she saw him; in the stillness of the early morning she had heard the tramp of his boots, coming from the direction of the woods, displacing the little stones on the road, crunching them and sending them skittering. This made her know that he was real. And then when she did see him it was only the top third of him, because the rest was hidden by the garden wall. But she was so sure that it was him. No one else down here had that long hair and that untidy beard and that intent way of walking with his head down and his shoulders hunched up. Yet how could he be coming from the woods, when it was only just light? And strangest of all, he didn’t stop at their house and come inside to see them. Of course she was expecting him to turn in at the garden gate and come up the path. She was all ready to fly downstairs and be the one to let him in, and the first one carried round in triumph on his shoulders, announcing to the sleeping house that he’d arrived.