Tessa Hadley: The Past

— Just to think, said Fran, — that this might be the last time we come here.

Alice said she hated thinking about it and Fran shouldn’t jump the gun, that was what they had to discuss when they were all assembled. The children, searching from face to face to gauge the collective mood, were poignantly good mannered under its influence: Ivy’s peaky face was lifted up towards nothing because she was suspended between this real room and another imaginary one. The telephone rang on its stand in the hall while they ate and when Harriet came back from answering it she looked disappointed.

— It was Roland. They’re not coming until tomorrow.

— I knew it as soon as the phone rang, Alice said.

— He always manages to do this, Fran exclaimed. — Every time!

— Oh, it’s his little power play. He doesn’t know he’s doing it.

For a moment they were flattened; expectation of the others’ coming had buoyed them all up. Their brother and his wife and daughter — Molly was his daughter by his first wife — had seemed all the more glamorous in their absence, and the evening had been climbing towards the high point of their arrival. — Pretty feeble excuse, Harriet said. — If he really has a meeting tomorrow, he surely could have let us know earlier?

— But actually I’m glad, said Alice, recovering, sitting forwards with her elbows on the table, holding up her wineglass to the others so that her bangles fell chinking down her arm. She had put on a vintage bolero with transparent sleeves over her summer dress. — Isn’t this special, just the six of us? I feel quite reprieved, that we don’t have to meet Roland’s new wife tonight. We’ll be fresh tomorrow, we’ll be ready for her. But just for tonight — we’re perfect without them, aren’t we?

— I don’t care if they never come, said Kasim cheerfully.

— Roland should think about us when he gets married so often, Fran said. — All over again, we have to learn to live with a new wife. We’d got used to Valerie.

— Sort of used to her.

— I wasn’t ever used to her, Ivy said. — Her voice was screechy and her head went like a chicken’s when she walked.

— Like this, said Arthur, imitating it.

Alice said wasn’t it such a relief, now that Valerie was a thing of the past, to be able to come out with the truth at last?

— Don’t encourage them, Fran said. — They’re bad enough.

After dinner Alice hunted in the sideboard for candles: electric light was too brutal, it would spoil the magic. And when the washing up was done and the beds were made up and the children were quiet upstairs, the adults sat around the table again, with the windows open because the night was so warm. Poetic moths, significant in a thin soup of lesser insects, blundered about the candle flames. Harriet had put on a cardigan and tied a silk scarf round her neck, a concession to sociability; scarves were Alice’s thing, but encouragingly she touched her sister’s and exclaimed at how pretty it was. Pulling off her apron, Fran dug out chocolates and a bottle of Armagnac from among the supermarket boxes. Alice stole one of Kasim’s cigarettes so she could blow smoke at the insects, then stole another one.

Kasim was quite drunk, warming himself expansively in the tender attention of the three women concentrated on him, each of them old enough to be his mother. They drew out his responsiveness as girls of his own age didn’t yet know how: girls thought he was cold and clever. He sprawled back in his chair and stretched his long legs under the table, aware of exerting and stretching his intelligence, and of the sisters’ alertness to him — unguarded, because they had outgrown any narrow self-possession. The girls he knew were always performing something, or if they let go of their guard then there seemed nothing behind it. His cleverness in relation to these older women operated like a sexual power in itself — even if the power reached out to no particular end. He tipped the Armagnac luxuriantly round in his glass and slopped it onto his shirt, dropping ash from his cigarette onto the carpet.

He addressed himself to Fran, who was a maths teacher in a comprehensive school, and might have liked him least if he hadn’t worked on her. She seemed more definite and perhaps more limited than her sisters. Kasim had once had a crush on his maths teacher, and Fran’s freckled plump hands roused a pleasurable memory of equations written out neatly on a whiteboard. Showing off, he talked about optimisation theory and the chain rule in calculus — the amount x of some good demanded depends on price p, which depends on the weather, measured by the parameter w, and so on. Actually maths was dull, moving in its inexorable circles. But he enjoyed frightening them with his solutions to the banking crisis: we ought to have let the banks fail, he explained severely, and let the insurance companies who bought the collateralised debt obligations fail, and let the people who borrowed too much to buy their homes, lose their homes. We need less regulation not more — global finance operates as a set of interlocking cartels and a free market is our only hope of breaking them up.

Alice was horrified, but also proudly vindicated by Kasim’s display of himself. Of course he knew what the sisters’ opinions were even before they voiced them — their dusty old hopeful leftism, their old-fashioned aspiration for the state to be the instrument of social justice.

— The trouble with capitalism, Alice said, — is that it’s always predicated on growth. But we can’t go on just making more and more things, and using up more of the earth’s resources. We have to cut carbon emissions, to begin with.

— Are you serious? Is there anybody who seriously still thinks there’s time for that? Do you imagine that Chinese heavy industry can run on sunshine?

— We have to live differently. We have to learn to do without things.

— Tell that to the Chinese.

Fran said she didn’t want to think about global warming, it was too depressing.

— D’you know, Kas, Alice said, — Harriet was a real revolutionary when she was younger! The real thing! You’d be amazed. She was arrested over and over. She went to prison for her beliefs.

— You make it sound as if she was planting bombs or something, Fran said.

— Were you planting bombs? he asked. — More fun than economics.

He was used to his father’s friends’ nostalgic bragging about their radical pasts.

— Of course I wasn’t planting bombs. Harriet looked down uneasily into her coffee, chiming her spoon against her cup. — I wasn’t really a revolutionary. Don’t take any notice of Alice, she doesn’t mean half of what she says. She just talks to be entertaining.

— You used to go on all the protests! You lay down in the road in front of cruise missiles! You filmed police tactics in the miners’ strike! You hated being middle class, from our sort of family. And do you know was she does now? She works advising asylum seekers. It’s such hopeless work. She’s so good. She listens all day to stories of rape and torture.

Tetchily Harriet interrupted her. — Don’t try to make a drama out of it, Alice. You turn it into something that it isn’t.

— I’m so selfish, Alice persisted. — I only live for myself.

Kasim said it was the only way, live for yourself and make plenty of money.

— At least I’ve never made any money. I’m not that bad.

— I wish I was that bad, said Fran. — I wish I had money.

Lying awake upstairs, Ivy could hear their voices and laughter: she identified in a frisson of loneliness with a solitary owl calling over the fields outside. Turning her invisible hands this way and that in front of her face in the dark, it was impossible to believe that she ended at the limits of her skin and couldn’t surpass it. At last, curling on her side with her knees up, she descended the ceremonial staircase of her sleep, shedding a heavy cloak on the steps behind her, unpinning the dark rivers of her hair, which fell in her dream all the way down her back to the floor.