Tessa Hadley - The Past

— I don’t know! It’s a thing you get pulled into, like a zone or something.

— And what’s a zone?

— Do I have to know? As long as it’s a word.

— But I don’t understand how you can know it, if you can’t use it.

She shrugged. — The word’s just sort of there , I’ve heard of it.

Kasim was a bad loser, and even upset the board and stormed out once, when she and Alice wouldn’t let him have Elvis. — It’s a proper name! You know it is! Alice said, laughing at his indignation.

Harriet was sitting on the edge of her bed, writing in her diary, when Pilar knocked subduedly on the door between their rooms. — Do you mind if I come in?

Hastily, guiltily, she closed the book.

— Of course not.

It was the first time Pilar had been inside this room: Harriet saw her look around and take in with a little involuntary shudder how dismally empty it was. Harriet had never known how to do what Alice did, crowding out any space she occupied with her personality, setting out her possessions as if they composed a little tableau, making everything inviting. Even in this wet weather when Alice hardly got dressed, she’d have both lamps switched on in the middle of the day — one beside the bed and one on the dressing table — so that everything was bathed in the glow from under their pink, pleated shades. Harriet hadn’t thought to turn anything on, she’d been writing in the dull light from the window and the room was chilly.

— Oh Harriet, I need you, Pilar said, and sat beside her on the bed, seizing her hand, enveloping her in perfume; Harriet stared down at Pilar’s wrist, slender in the cuff of her silk blouse, dangling a gold chain. Her English was perfect, and yet there was some nuance in the way that she pronounced Harriet , which made it breathily exotic. — I’m so glad we’re friends. I have to have someone I can talk to. I don’t want to bore Roland.

Trouble showed dramatically in her face: all the strong lines were dragged downwards and there were purple smears of shadow under her eyes and beside her sharpened nostrils. Catching sight of her reflection in the swing mirror, she looked away. — I’m an old witch, she said.

— You? You’re not the one who’s an old witch. Harriet squeezed her hand, bird-light bones and flesh, impervious stiff bristle of the rings. — You’re always beautiful.

— You’re so nice to me.

Pilar told her that there was bad news from Argentina: she’d found out when she checked her emails in town that morning. Her brother in Buenos Aires had agreed to have the DNA tests, to help resolve the question over their biological parents. — I don’t know, maybe they got to him, put pressure on him, made him feel bad. He’s been talking to my aunt. And now I can’t tell Roland, it’s too late.

— Well of course it’s not too late, Harriet stoutly said, though she dreaded the idea of Roland being in on their secret.

— He’ll ask why I didn’t tell him before, bringing all this trouble. He likes to think I’m so calm and in control.

If Pilar’s brother took the tests, it was effectively the same as if she was tested. She said she’d spoken to a lawyer friend in Argentina, who was looking to see whether there was any kind of injunction she could take out to prevent him. — You probably think I’m very selfish, Pilar said, — not to give this satisfaction to people who’ve lost their children. I must seem like a monster to you.

Harriet tried to imagine this point of view. In another life, she might have thought that Pilar was a monster. Her idea of the women of that guilty class, heir to privileges bought in blood, might have corresponded very much to how Pilar looked at this moment — groomed and impervious and expensive, something hardened in her expression. It was extraordinary that this creature in all her physical perfection sat here beside her on her own poor bed: she looked as displaced as a queen out of a tragedy, or a god in an old painting, descended from another world to ravish mortals. In the presence of the god, the protests of righteousness were puny. Anyway, Harriet’s old confidence had collapsed long ago, that the world could be sorted out into the damned and the righteous. In flawed reality, who could blame Pliar for her resistance to being enlisted in some horrible old story? It wasn’t her fault, if friends of her friends had once dropped the bodies of dissidents from helicopters into the sea. Who could want to belong to people they didn’t know and be claimed by them, even if their wrongs stretched out beyond counting?

— You’re not a monster, she said, lifting Pilar’s hand to her lips and kissing it. Pilar allowed her to do this, she didn’t pull her hand away. There was knowledge in her face, Harriet thought, daring to look into it: a rich gleam of contempt, mingled with amused acceptance of the homage. — If there’s anything I can do to help. Really, I would do anything for you.

Pilar wasn’t the sort of person Harriet usually got on with: her friends at home were mostly conscientious, wary of judgement, self-deprecating. If Pilar was a queen, it was a drama queen. And Harriet had overheard her say something shocking to Roland once, about Kasim: that she didn’t like Asians, didn’t trust them — s he ought to know, she had to work with them . Roland had only mildly demurred, as if her prejudice were amusing, like ignorance in a child. In another life, Harriet might have kept a sceptical distance from Pilar, her lack of irony, partisanship, lack of culture. Had anyone, Alice insufferably said, ever yet seen her with a book? Pilar wanted to belong inside Roland’s family because of Roland: she wasn’t interested, really, in his sisters’ separate selves, and it was obvious that she’d taken against Alice. She had fastened upon Harriet because she needed a confidante, and Harriet was eagerly compliant. Pilar didn’t want to bore Roland .

When Harriet was twelve or thirteen, she’d had a friend at school whom she’d loved and who had used her, sending her on pointless little errands, finding out where she was vulnerable and prodding there, resorting to her company when there was no one more interesting, dropping occasional kindnesses like crumbs. Harriet had tidied this memory away, believing it belonged safely with childish things; now she remembered her mother’s impatience with this friend’s exploitation, and her own inability to explain what she knew about it — that the abjection was not a downside, but the essential fabric of her love.

— We two should go swimming again, Pilar said.

— If it brightens up, I’d love that.

Pilar made a face towards the window, shrouded in its grey. — Will it brighten up? We could go to the little pool in the hotel.

— That awful place. Could you bear to go back there?

— Of course! I liked it!

In an interval of one day which wasn’t sunny, but when at least for an hour or two it stopped actually raining, Kasim took the children off into the woods. Molly was doing something to her hair, in her room, and he didn’t invite her: he thought she needed reminding that he could enjoy himself without her. Fran made the children put on their wellington boots, so that they could splash through the new lakes of red-brown water blocking the path, and around the troughs of sucking mud, knee-deep where cows had wallowed. Kasim had to negotiate these more cautiously — he’d only brought one pair of trainers, and had spurned Fran’s suggestion that he pick a pair of wellingtons to fit him, out of the promiscuous, cobwebby muddle of boots in the scullery. The idea of putting his own foot inside anyone else’s dank old cast-offs upset him. — Suit yourself, Fran said.

In the woods the light was brooding and subdued. Of course Kas got his feet wet more than once, and muddy, and he cursed, and his pullover was soon soaked and he was freezing, because every bush and drooping bramble shed its load of raindrops if he brushed against it. Streams which had trickled were swollen now and dirty. New undergrowth sprouted livid green, the tan mulch under the pines in a plantation had darkened to ox blood, unripe blackberries were fuzzy with grey mould. Beside a path a bank had sheared away in a smear of red mud; skirting around it they saw into the raw root-gape, like flung arms, of a tree upended, its deep hole whiskery with torn roots. Their senses prickled in the alert quiet; drops merely sifting down through the trees as they passed made them think it was starting to rain again; squirrels startled them, dashing about the tree canopy in crazy fits, sending down showers. Kasim’s silence prohibited frivolity; plodding after him, the children knew better than to propose any chasing game. Arthur only stamped his boot once in a puddle to spatter Ivy with liquid mud — Kas quelled her outrage with one look, before it was even uttered. They were regretting coming out, this wasn’t much fun. Kasim, with a chill, felt the force of the landscape for the first time, now that it glowered at him.