Tessa Hadley - The Past

— What kind of a bump?

— On her forehead. But Granny’s cheering her up. And Roly’s written a real word with his letters: plain. He wrote plain, all by himself.

— That’s a funny word to start off with!

Jill was in her laughing mood, everything was all right. Hettie explained that he copied it from a cookery book. She expected her mother to be businesslike, hurrying indoors to see the others, but instead she lingered outside in the pinkish light, with its promise of summer. — Isn’t it lovely here, Het? she said. — Look at the swallows going mad in the field. They’re drinking insect soup.

— What’s insect soup?

— The air is full of creatures we can hardly see. The birds are feasting on them.

They stood at the field gate, watching in close companionship, and when Jill lifted Hettie high onto the top bar of the gate, she held her tight so that she wouldn’t fall.

When she’d put the children to bed, Jill hesitated in the dusk at the foot of the stairs. There was no lamp switched on yet in her father’s study but the fire was lit, its reflection gleaming on the cut glass of the whisky decanter: she was thirsty suddenly for whisky. Perhaps what she’d done that afternoon had opened a door, and she would be buffeted from now on by violent appetites. Stepping inside the room she thought at first she was alone, then realised that her father was kneeling in the half darkness beside the bookcase, not looking round, peering in the firelight to read the gold lettering on the books’ spines, as if he didn’t want her to know that he knew she was there. Jill picked up the decanter she’d never touched in her life before, to help herself.

— You can pour one for me as well, her father said.

He was stiff, getting up from his knees. Even while he was strong and only middle aged, she’d dreaded any intimation that he might grow old and weak, and thought she wouldn’t be able to bear it. — I hear you might be moving home, he said. — Your mother told me.

— It’s probably not a good idea, is it?

— We miss you, Charlie. We’d love to have you here.

— Oh well, Daddy, she said, — I miss you. But life goes on. I’ve got three great big children now.

— You could pick up your work again, if you came down here. Your mother could mind the children, we could try out some translations together. You’ve got such a good intellect, you know. It hurts me to think that you’ve thrown it all away.

— I haven’t thrown it away. I’m still the same person.

He made an impatient face of fine discrimination, shadows knotting around the deep socketed, disenchanted eyes. — We don’t think Tom’s such a good idea, you know. Not good enough for you.

— It’s too late for that, Jill stubbornly said. — And anyway you don’t know him. You don’t know what I know. Nobody does.

Later that same evening, after it was dark, Jill knocked on the side door at Roddings and asked if she could use their phone. She had the money ready to leave for them, and was sure that they always left more than the actual cost of the call — but it was obvious Eve Smith didn’t think much of her coming round so late. The Smiths might even have been on their way to bed, though it was only half past nine; there was no sound of any television going in the farmhouse. But Jill didn’t care. She knew her apologies sounded insincere and falsely fulsome, in her educated voice, and she was aware for a moment of the person she had been at Oxford, filled up with her cleverness and ambitions for her intellectual life.

Yet this tempestuous life she had instead wasn’t anything less. It was surely wrong to think that reading and intelligence had to float somewhere above the thickness of real experience. She was so glad to be in her solid woman’s body — used, by men and by her children who’d come into the world through it. Eve switched on the light in the office and retreated to the scullery, not quite out of earshot — Jill heard her running water into a tin kettle. The farm office was chilly, bleak in the light from a weak bulb, all its workmanlike disorder inert while the farm slept. There was no one in the flat in Marylebone when she rang, so she dialled Bernie’s number and some woman answered. — It’s Jill Fellowes. I want to speak to Tom.

— He’s not here.

— But I expect he is. See if you can find him.

The woman pretended to be bemused, but Jill insisted. Eventually Tom came on the phone, breezy and too ready with his innocence. — Did you hear about de Gaulle?

— I don’t want to talk about de Gaulle.

She told him he had to come and pick them up in the morning, to take them home.

— You’ve changed your mind all of a sudden.

— You’ll have to borrow a car from somewhere, she said. — If you want us back, you have to be here by midday. I mean it.

Tom reassured her that it was all he wanted. Nothing else mattered.

AFTER THE PATTENS’ dinner, the rain settled in. Morning after morning they woke in their damp beds to hear it insisting against the windows — not stormily, only steadily, pattering down through the leaves in the big beeches, secretive and pressing. The light and the acoustics in the house were so changed that it seemed a different place, shrunken as if it crouched underneath an assault; landscape diminished to the near-at-hand, airy distances condensed into prosaic grey and crowded close around the windows. The temperature dropped, the clematis dripped on the terrace. A mossy, silvery pattern of wet sunshine bloomed sometimes for a few minutes on a wall on the landing, before it was extinguished again — like a weak message from another existence. It might brighten up tomorrow , everyone said. Sometimes the rain was a relief, Alice thought: less was expected of you than in fine weather, you could turn over and go back to sleep. But Harriet and Roland seemed to be up at dawn, Harriet in her sensible checked pyjamas and Roland in his silk ones, putting buckets and plastic bowls underneath the places where there were leaks, their voices reproachful with practicality. Then water pinged, torturously, into the buckets, and Simon Cummins came round to talk to them about repairs. Alice thought that she could give up this house after all, the claims that it made on them.

She was reading gradually through all the children’s books on her shelves, losing herself inside them one after another. If Ivy and Arthur joined her in her bed she read to them, and they finished a whole volume of Doctor Dolittle together — not one of the good ones. Kasim drifted into the room and while they watched from the bed he searched through the things on Alice’s dressing table and in her handbag without asking or even looking at her, for the cigarettes she didn’t have. — No, it’s a good thing, he said, when she suggested Fran could drive him into town to buy some. He explained that he’d given up, and was only tempted to start again because he was bored. But when she said they could take him to the station if he wanted, he looked surprised and said that he was all right, he wasn’t in any hurry to get home. It might brighten up tomorrow. He liked it here. He didn’t mind being bored.

And then he sidled into Molly’s room, the children following him, still in their pyjamas, and behind that closed door they seemed to play interminable games of Monopoly — really interminable, one starting up again as the last one finished, Kasim winning every time (Well, I am supposed to be studying economics ), Molly tranquilly indifferent to losing. Ivy stormed out in a temper, slamming the door behind her because Arthur wouldn’t play properly, he wouldn’t buy any property, he only wanted to hang on to the money he was given at the beginning. — Don’t you understand the idea of it? she shouted. — The idea of it’s that you use that money to make more money! Arthur looked from under the blond fringe that hung into his eyes, apologetically but shrewdly, as if he knew better than to trust anything so far-fetched. Between Monopoly games, when Molly was sometimes busy — ‘getting ready’ — Alice found Kasim slouching on the window seat on the landing, blankly engaged in nothing. She tried to lend him a novel to pass the time, but he said gloomily that he didn’t see the point of fiction. — I don’t see what it’s for. Why would you put out any intellectual effort, understanding something that wasn’t actually true?