Tessa Hadley - The Past

He tried to persuade Pilar that it was time for them to go, but she was determined that they see out the whole three weeks. — It’s such a long time since I had a rest, she said. — I feel very comfortable, here at home with your family.

— But the weather’s awful.

— I don’t mind the weather.

They drove for a day to look round a great Victorian baronial pile an hour’s drive away, on the other side of the motorway, but at the last minute Harriet asked if she could come with them. She said she hadn’t seen the place for years, and he didn’t know how to refuse her; then he felt his kindness, which was his fixed habit with Harriet, strained through a long afternoon. He had wanted to be alone with his wife, to give her his whole attention, and to have hers — nothing smothering or soppy, quite the contrary. Before Pilar met his family, he remembered, their communion had been simplified and minimal. When he’d told her things, she had lifted a shapely eyebrow, or curved her lips in a responsive smile: she only spoke if she had something to say. This had answered to his deepest need, and he’d never intended for Pilar to be initiated — and so willingly, even eagerly! — into the scruffy, unsound, makeshift excesses of his own family, which were just what he wanted to escape from.

Harriet seemed happy enough anyway, all that day: when she was happy she was surprisingly girlish, chaffing and jokey, bringing up stories from his owlish boyhood until he was annoyed. He didn’t disown the prig he once was, who had worshipped Sir Mortimer Wheeler and pretended to write plays in Latin, but he felt tenderly enough about him to keep him more or less private. He was afraid of seeing the perception dawn in Pilar that he could be thought ridiculous. Harriet’s cheeks as she teased, he noticed, were surprisingly pink — surely she wasn’t wearing something on her skin? And who’d have imagined that his revolutionary sister would one day take her pleasures visiting these shrines to the surplus consumption of the aristocracy, exclaiming with Pilar over a vast billiard table or a cabinet full of lockets with their painted miniature doll-faces and twists of ancient hair? He was astonished when they began working out the relationships between the dolls. Lady Geraldine, she must have been married to the second Earl.

— But don’t you want to send them all to the guillotine?

— Don’t be such a spoilsport, Harriet said. — I’m having fun.

Roland wasn’t in the least revolutionary, but thought nonetheless that the National Trust was opium for the middle classes, and found he couldn’t take much pleasure in it. There were too many holidaymakers — because it was raining outside, and cold, and there was nowhere else to pass the time — tramping damply round the rooms, wondering obediently at the great dining table set out with damask and silver and Wedgwood, glazed plaster fruit and dusty plaster fowl and dusty bread rolls, for the delectation of twenty guests long dead, who’d have despised them. The view from the back of the house, which should have been down a succession of terraces and parterres to the great gothic threadworks where the money came from, and beyond that to a dream of hills, was muffled in grey cloud.

In the cold, wet weather the children’s cult intensified: driven back on themselves indoors, the Dead Women made themselves felt in every shadowy corner blooming with black mould, and were ever more exacting. Ivy interpreted the signs they left with confident authority: a pattern of cracks in a broken mirror, a wet dead mouse left on the terrace, and — unanswerable triumph — a crude charcoal face found drawn on a wall, once, when she tore a secret strip of wallpaper away, above the skirting board beside her bed. She kept Arthur perpetually guessing: was she making all this stuff up, or should he trust her? There was cool calculation in his expression, even while he hurried around after her instructions, digging out Kasim’s old dog-ends from the lawn, stealing salt from the crock in the kitchen, peeing into a cup so she could stir up one of her sacrificial potions. He drew the line at touching the mouse, and in the end Alice buried it; their mother had outraged them, telling them to just throw it into the shrubbery. Ivy couldn’t, Arthur puzzled, have put the drawing ready under the stuck wallpaper; in fact she had looked for a moment as surprised as he was, finding it there. Everything might be a mere succession of accidents, which his sister wove into her story: he dithered between his belief, and the doubt which was both refreshing and disenchanting.

At least the rain meant they weren’t going to the cottage so often, where he had to pay money to appease the Women’s powers. They had got nearly all his savings out of him already. According to Ivy, they were building up to some climax of revelation.

— About Mitzi? Arthur asked.

She was fairly contemptuous. — That’s old news. It’s bigger than that. Something’s going to happen.

This expectation became entangled with the time they spent spying on Kasim’s and Molly’s love affair. The endless kissing and caressing appalled the children but was also enthralling, so that they couldn’t bear to miss any developments. Kasim and Molly sat together in the mess of Molly’s bed for Monopoly and sometimes forgot — in the long pauses between goes, while Arthur made up his mind — that anyone was watching. They would slip further and further down among the pillows, lost to everything but their own convoluted, mostly mute windings around each other, which seemed so oddly bent upon some purpose, although they had no obvious end in sight. Kasim determinedly clambered half across Molly, Molly responded in adjustments and little noises which were half-protest and half-consent. Ivy would nudge Arthur — lost in contemplation of his troubling property portfolio, which she managed for him — with her foot, and signal with a jerk of her head to see what she saw; then the children stared at each other bemusedly. Their laughter coiled inside them, sensuous in itself, until they had to hide their faces.

Arthur burst out once with his hilarity, hot-cheeked. — Are you two going to get married or something? Is he your boyfriend?

— Shut up, small boy, Kasim said, muffled. — Nobody asked you.

Kindly Molly explained that you didn’t have to get married just because you kissed someone. Arthur grinned at Ivy. — But you do if you do sex.

Molly sat up abruptly, blushing, pushing Kas away. — You’re not supposed to know anything about that!

Ivy was furious with Arthur for drawing the lovers’ attention, which meant that they were chucked out from the bedroom for a while — but not for long. It was almost as if the children were part of what was unfolding between the young people: or at least they lent them the necessary cover, so that the grown-ups didn’t bother them. Their craze moved on from Monopoly to Scrabble. Alice was sometimes enlisted for advising Arthur and Ivy, although Ivy would agonise between getting a better word and managing by herself; she couldn’t believe that she could only see words of three letters, when she could read much harder ones in her books. — Don’t tell me, don’t tell me! she cried, putting her hands over her ears, scrutinising her tiles fiercely, as if she could glare them into a more sophisticated order. She had finally to turn to her aunt, who was tactful in the extreme. — Look, try this, Alice suggested. — I wonder if this would fit in anywhere?

It turned out that Molly had a gift for Scrabble.

— I’ve always been good at spelling, she said complacently, putting down vortex on the treble word score.

Kasim couldn’t bear it. — But you don’t even know what half of these words mean! What’s a vortex?