Tessa Hadley - The Past

— That sounds like a good solution.

Sophy opened the oven door in the Rayburn with a tea towel, slid the tray of scones inside, rummaged in the vegetable crock for potatoes. — You’d be surprised, she said, — how you can think you’ve made up your mind about things and got to the bottom of them, and then there’s a sort of swerve in the road or you turn a corner, and everything looks different all over again. As if you’re driving through a new landscape.

— Really? Does that really happen?

Sophy considered carefully. — To a certain extent.

Jill slumped in her corner, as if a certain extent wasn’t enough.

— Incidentally, her mother said, — I don’t care as much as you might imagine, about being good. But I really don’t think you ought to come home. However much I would love it. I think you ought to stay out there in the world, where things are happening. If I were you, then that’s what I would want. I wouldn’t want to come back here. There’s nothing for you here.

Undressing that night in her bedroom, Sophy arranged her dress carefully on its hanger, then hooked this over the carved rim of the wardrobe for airing, and to let the day’s creases fall out of the wool crepe. She slipped the straps of her petticoat off her shoulders, then pulled her nightgown over her head, with her arms inside so that she could take off the rest of her clothes underneath it, as she did every night. She preferred, too, not to sit brushing her hair in front of the dressing-table mirror, where she would have to contemplate her own worn face which looked so finished and sad: as if something were completed in her, which was not what she felt. Instead she stood brushing at the window, contemplating the night sky: when she drew the curtains she always left herself this little gap for looking out. She could see her own face here again, reflected in the pane; but she didn’t mind her eyes afloat — staring and undomesticated — against the navy-blue dark outside, or the shock of her stiff hair seeming lightened with moonlight, or the pale round of her face like another moon. Their bedroom at the back of the house looked out over the bowl of the valley, so that from her window she had the sensation of swooping down into it, like the owl she often saw passing, hanging from his outstretched wings.

The bed in here was the same one she and her husband had slept in since they first came to this parish and this house during the war, when Jill was a child, four years old. The people here would never accept that Sophy belonged to them, but the landscape and the house had swallowed her tolerantly. Grantham was in the bed already, sitting propped stiff as an effigy against the pillows, holding up his book: they both read in bed at night, often for hours. This wasn’t the anodyne reading their middle-class neighbours spoke of, helping you slip over a threshold into sleep, equivalent to swallowing pills, the marker progressing through the book in modest increments. Sophy and Grantham devoured their books: reading was a freedom torn out of the day’s regulated fabric. Without ever having spoken of it, each knew that the other approved their habit of having the face of their alarm clock, set for seven, turned away from them, so that they couldn’t know how much time passed while they sat up awake and turning pages, couldn’t know how rash they were or how much they would pay for it next day. Of course their reading matter was quite different: her novels from the library, his serious books. As was fitting, it was usually Sophy who slipped away first, putting her novel opened face down on the floor — breaking its spine, he complained — and relinquishing her involvement in its otherness with a sigh that was close to sensuous.

Tonight, standing at the window with her back to her husband in bed and her arms up, brushing, she told him that Jill said she was going to leave her husband. — I don’t know how far she means it. It may just be a temporary falling out.

She didn’t turn round to look at Grantham straight away, knowing how he would dislike her having this advantage over him: getting the news first, and having the power to disconcert him by announcing it. He would be longing to know more, but unable to ask her.

— That’s not exactly a surprise, he said. — I knew something was wrong.

Sophy would have to bend first, as she always did, because she didn’t care about the little dance of primacy. Yet she felt a perverse impulse to protect Tom against Grantham’s condemnation: certainly she would never, ever repeat Jill’s story about finding the red knickers in her bed, knowing how that detail would stick to her husband’s imagination, burning into it, firing him up with distaste and male challenge. — She says she wants to come back here to live. She’s got Mikey Waller looking for somewhere she can rent.

Grantham wanted to know what Sophy’s reaction had been, so that he could argue the opposite case. She said she didn’t know what there was for Jill, back here. — And then are the children to think about, their schooling, all the advantages of London.

— They don’t need to rent anywhere, he said. — They can come to live with us, there’s no question. She would be better off with us. She could pick up her studies where she left them off.

— You know people wouldn’t like it.

— I don’t care what people like. What is this all about anyway, what’s the idiot gone and done now?

— Jill says she sees through him.

— Is that all? It’s too easy to see through him.

— He’s more persuasive than you will allow.

— He’s never persuaded me. I suppose there’s another woman? Of course there’s another woman. I can’t believe he’s got away with it for so long. He stinks of women.

Sophy knew he used these violent words to shock her — and actually to jolt himself, because he was upset. He couldn’t bear anything to hurt Jill. And she was shocked, although she hoped he didn’t notice it; then she wondered about this idea that women — a certain kind of woman — left their scent on men, so that other men could smell it. All kinds of shame seemed to be wrapped up in it: the shame of leaving your civet trace, or the shame of odourlessness, not leaving one. Sitting down on the side of the bed with her back to him, she contemplated the bony mauve of her long bare toes against the carpet. — I think she ought to stick it out, she said. — I expect that this will pass. I dread to think of her bringing up three children alone, without a husband. The children would suffer. People can be very cruel.

— Stick it out? he complained. — You sound like a Girl Guide. Why should she stick it out, if he’s no good, not good enough for her? Why shouldn’t she be rid of him, if that’s what she wants? Isn’t that what women do these days?

— Perhaps they do. Off with the old, on with the new.

In bed, while she was finding her place in her book, Sophy felt the familiarity of her husband’s lean flank against hers, through the cloth of their nightclothes: they lay close together because the bed hadn’t warmed up yet — she had put on her bedsocks as a precaution. The lovemaking part of their marriage wasn’t over, but most often these days their contact was merely friendly. After sleeping together for so many years, they hardly had to go through the rigmarole of a rapprochement or a truce before they touched, even if they’d been at odds while they were talking. Their bodies, more prosaic than their souls, were intimate at a level deeper than their argument.

Mikey Waller picked up Jill one afternoon in his car, to take her to see a couple of possible rentals. She was taken aback by the car — for some reason she’d imagined him driving something reliably old-fashioned, but he turned up in a bright red sporty Hillman, pleased with it as if he expected to impress her. Sophy came out of the house with the baby on her hip, to say hello to Mikey, shading her eyes with her hand in the watery sunshine. It had been raining all morning but now light was glinting off the puddles on the garden path. Roland and Hettie were collecting snails in a jam jar; Hettie explained that they weren’t going to kill them, they were keeping them as pets. She had forgotten her cross self-consciousness for once, looked almost pretty.