Tessa Hadley - The Past

But he went on walking past the gate, and down the lane out of sight, and he never even turned his head to look at the house, though he knew it as well as they did, and must surely have known where he was. He never looked up to see his daughter watching at the window. And then he was gone, though for a while Hettie could hear the noise of his boots in the distance. The whole thing was so improbable that afterwards, as it settled down into her memory, she thought she must have been dreaming, or that she’d confused reality with an illustration in a picture book. Their dad was in London, or somewhere else, Paris: she knew that really. She never mentioned what she’d seen to anyone, because it couldn’t really have happened, and her mother got angry if Hettie invented things. When she came to a certain page in their book of nursery rhymes — Mr Foster going to Gloucester in a shower of rain, drawn in a purple pencil and wearing a top hat — Hettie turned over quickly, because it brought back a sharp pain of disappointment.

THE CHILDREN GOT used to the rectory as the days passed, and began to forget their life in London, as they had done in the holidays before. Hettie settled into not going to school, although from time to time she was aware of the routines of that other existence — which she had been beginning to master — proceeding without her, and had a panicking sense of her deficit. Then she put off this awareness with a quick grimace. They might never go back, perhaps there would never be any more school. The rooms of their Marylebone flat seemed a chaotic muddle in memory — crowded with their landlord’s ugly furniture, and with all the apparatus of toys and baby-life, and their mother’s distinctive efforts at homemaking: splashes of painted vivid colour, exotic textiles draped over sofas or pinned to the walls, art posters and political ones. Jill had found a stuffed heron in a glass case for next to nothing in a junk shop, and a gigantic mirror with dancing, garlanded cupids set into the gilt frame. The sink was always piled with dishes, there were always visitors talking non-stop and drinking tea from chunky ceramic mugs at the kitchen table: alien children were imposed upon them. By contrast, the kingdom of the rectory was theirs alone. There was more space for fantasy in its faded empty rooms — especially in the expectant spare bedrooms upstairs, used for nothing, scarcely furnished except with beds and chests of drawers and skimpy rugs, and smelling thinly of damp.

Who were those beds intended for? The rooms’ vacancy, which intimidated Hettie at night, was stimulating by day. A statuesque dressmaker’s dummy, like nobody’s shape, loomed in one corner. Little crabbed watercolours, relegated to hang amid their expanses of bare wall, took on a momentousness in isolation: the children stared into the smudgy landscapes and feeble portraits as if they were oracles, speaking of the past and the dead. They invented a game of stampeding along the landing, between the arched windows, shouting, as if they were pursuing something or being pursued — Ali could even join in, if they fixed a chair across the top of the stairs to stop her falling down them. There was an additional delicious pleasure in this game if it was raining outside; the sound of the rain, and the sight of it blowing in wet gusts against the bare tall windows, drove them mad, and they dived onto the empty beds, rolling around in them, shrieking. Of course they could only play this if Grandfather were out. Granny didn’t mind it: you could even tell, from a gleam in her pale eyes, that it stirred a buried desire in her which she could never act on, to join in and throw herself around. It was just possible to imagine Granny as a lanky, watchful girl-child; impossible somehow to imagine their own mother, ever, as anything but the full-grown finished woman, all curves and certainty. She often talked about her childhood, and there were photographs to prove that time existed — but her children didn’t really believe in it.

For hours, when it wasn’t raining, or not much, Hettie and Roland waded in wellington boots in the stream in the garden, carrying a bucket, looking for eels or sticklebacks. Or they prowled downstairs indoors, where the day’s work proceeded in a way that was more ordered and less fraught than their parents’ way. In the mornings Granny appeared to spring from her bed fully dressed, there was no sticky and fractious long interval of dressing gowns and breakfast mess and getting ready, before things could properly begin. In the dining room a cloth was spread on the breakfast table, there were flowers in a vase, and the children dipped bread-and-butter soldiers tranquilly in eggs fetched from Brodys across the road, as if they had been eating eggs all their lives. When she had finished her tea their grandmother held up her cup against the light and showed them a woman’s face, hidden in the china. Twice a week a Mrs Cummins — she of the scratchy brooches, known to them from church — came to do the heavy chores, not constrained in the sculpted church-suit, but loose and businesslike inside her overall. She manhandled steaming sheets out of the boiler then rinsed them and put them through the mangle, she scrubbed floors on her knees with a contemptuous hissing noise which must have come from her brush, though it seemed to come out of herself.

If their Grandfather was at home, then everything revolved around the invisible work that went on behind the closed door of his study. But even the prohibitions that came with this, the whispering and secrecy — and occasionally, the door torn open, the blast of his cold complaint — had their reassurance and romance. Because he was getting on with what mattered, the women and children could fill their time without responsibility. There was always work to do, women’s work — but that was not lofty or exacting like religion or poetry. And then when he did go out, some spring which had held them tightly was released, so that they felt free. Even Jill, at the ironing board or at the sink, could seem to be caught up in the air of mild, sly, jubilation — as if she were another kind of woman, a more ordinary one. When the cat’s away, their granny said, the mice can play — though their grandfather couldn’t really be called a cat, or any kind of tyrant. Granny would put the kettle on although it wasn’t teatime. Peculiarly, this liberation couldn’t happen so long as Mrs Cummins was there: she kept them up to the mark in the minister’s absence.

In his study even the smells were different to the rest of the house: the smoky brown notes — of pipe tobacco, books, cold cinders in the fireplace, whisky — were half offensive, with their suggestion of something meaty. Hettie and Roland had investigated the cut-glass decanter once, and discovered that the whisky, which looked and smelled promisingly like liquid caramel, tasted poisonous. Could anyone actually drink it for pleasure? It must be one of those forbidding adult initiations, commensurate with the impossible books on the shelves. However Hettie pored over the words in these, spelling them out one at a time, the sentences remained obdurately outside her comprehension. Grandfather told them he was writing poems about somebody in the fifth century who had translated St John’s gospel into Greek verse, and also wrote hymns to a pagan god. Roland was maddening, with his calm presumption that he would understand all of this very soon. Hettie couldn’t see why the grown-ups found this charming. She reminded him sternly that he couldn’t even read yet.

— Grandfather said that doesn’t matter, because I’m already thinking about things.

— What things?

— Sorting out what I need to learn, about history and science and stuff, and people speaking different languages.