Tessa Hadley - The Past

When the magazines were disposed of, Kasim went upstairs again with the shovel. The children looked at each other.

— Does he know that it’s Mitzi? Arthur asked.

Ivy was scornful. — He doesn’t even know Mitzi ever existed.

— Tell him, then.

— You tell him.

— No, you.

They were both silent when, more cautiously, and with his head twisted fastidiously away, Kasim came out with what must be the dog’s remains held out at arms’ length on his shovel. These were scrambled now out of their meaningful shape, to a mere nasty heap of contaminating mess. This didn’t burn well, until — ordering the children sternly to stand behind him — Kasim threw on more lighter fuel, and more of the dry kindling he’d lugged in his rucksack from the house; then a great flame shot up and everything blazed, and afterwards settled to smouldering and fuming with a greasy black smoke which hung around for hours afterwards, making Ivy feel sick although she didn’t say so. It took three trips upstairs before Kasim had scraped the whole thing up. He set to work next on the floor in that last room, with a stiff broom and buckets of water taken from the stream, tearing down the rags of curtain and burning those too, along with all the dead leaves shored up under the window, scrubbing with bleach at the walls blackened with damp and the persisting dark stains on the floor. The children couldn’t look at what was left, when the fire burned down — bones, which Kasim kicked away into the undergrowth.

Fran couldn’t believe how filthy the children were when they got home; they left a scummy grey watermark on the sides of the bath. When she drove into town the next morning to talk to the estate agents, Kasim and the children asked to go with her, and then mysteriously shopped. — It’s for our game, Ivy explained. Kas chose a bottle of wine — rosé, which he thought Molly would like. In a place called The Four-Leaved Clover, ducking under a whole orchestra of wind chimes pinned to the low ceiling, he purchased cones and sticks of incense and scented candles — fairly incredulous at the prices — and an aromatic oil called ylang-ylang which the girl recommended. Telling the children to wait outside, he also went into the chemist’s for condoms. Then they went back to the cottage together for the last time, arranging the candles on the shelves and windowsills, sprinkling the whole bottle of oil around. When the candles and the incense were lit, their perfumes mingled exotically with the rooms’ pungent damp and smell of bleach. Kasim had stuffed his rucksack with blankets taken from the airing cupboard at Kington, and now he folded these into a corner; he’d also borrowed two glasses and a corkscrew, and put these with the wine and a couple of packets of crisps.

As an experiment, he lit a fire in the grate downstairs. This changed the house completely, as if they awoke something alive in it; he and Arthur crouched side by side on the hearth to watch protectively over the tentative flame with its noisy crackle, Arthur’s fists clenched on his dirty bare knees, his long hair pushed behind his ears, the fire’s light on his face. Excitedly Ivy entered into the spirit of the transformation, arranging pink flowers in a cup without a handle which she’d found in the tall grass outside the door. She wound trailers of wet greenery along the mantelpiece and above the door to the stairs, around the old nails which were stuck randomly here and there in the walls.

— Are you going to bring Molly here? she asked. — Isn’t the wine for her?

— I am going to bring her, Kasim said, looking round from the fire with earnest importance. — And you two aren’t going to come with us. Molly and I have something serious to sort out, which we can’t discuss in the house. We need to be alone. D’you understand that? If you try to follow us, I’ll kill you.

They nodded solemnly.

— Are you going to marry her? Ivy said.

— Don’t be ridiculous.

The hotel with the swimming pool was smothered in a sea mist; Harriet and Pilar couldn’t even see the sea. It was impossible to believe they had basked so recently in the hot sun in this garden — those plants still dimly visible through the mist were bowed and dripping, upturned chair legs protested on the tables. While they waited in the hotel car park for the engine to die, Pilar showed Harriet two photographs, taken from a manila envelope in her handbag. She explained that these were the two married students who had disappeared in the nineteen seventies, along with their baby son and unborn child. Now, Pilar said, the parents of these students were hounding her and her brother, fixated on the belief that they were the children of these lost children. It wasn’t good news about the injunction; her brother might go ahead with the testing, though he seemed to be hesitating at the last moment. He wouldn’t speak to Pilar on the phone, she had only spoken with his wife.

The photos were in black and white, printed on computer paper; they weren’t very clear, areas of the black ink had fused together. The young man was wearing glasses, rather expressionless and affronted, as if his picture had been taken for passport ID. The young woman’s was more informal: she was smiling up at the photographer, confident of her attraction — she might have been caught in the middle of lively conversation. Her long hair, parted in the middle, fell around her shoulders, solid in the printout like a dark cape. All Harriet could think, staring into their faces, was how thoroughly dead they were. The secret of their deaths had become the central fact about them, blotting out everything else, devouring all the decades which were stolen from them, when they couldn’t change out of themselves. Their present had faded gradually out of fashion.

— What do you feel? she warily asked, putting her hand on her friend’s.

— Nothing, Pilar said impatiently, shaking her off, busy with something in her bag, her lipstick. — What am I supposed to feel? I’m sorry for them, as anyone would be sorry. But they don’t mean anything to me. Do you hate me for that?

She redid her lipstick with scrupulous care — even though they were about to swim — using the mirror on the visor over the passenger seat, pressing her lips together on a tissue, opening her eyes rather wide at the sight of herself. Harriet didn’t take the trouble to say she could never hate her. — Do you think they are your parents? She does looks like you.

— You can’t tell, Harriet. And anyway it doesn’t mean anything. A sperm and an egg. My parents — god forgive them! — are the two fine clowns who brought me up, made a rare mess of it.

Harriet tried to focus on the moral dimensions of Pilar’s story. But it was as if some charged low storm cloud — like the darkened, blinded day beyond the steamy windows of the car — blocked her clear perception whichever way she looked. She couldn’t straighten up to see past this blockage clearly, through the next minutes and hours into any future. Now that they’d decided to sell the house, she was surprised how much this change seemed like the end of a world, and a crisis in which anything might happen. The end of their holiday was drawing near, the weeks of this summer were ringed already, in retrospect, in a lurid glare of nostalgia for something unrepeatable. Harriet might not see her brother’s wife again for months, she didn’t know if she could bear that. And because the time left in proximity to Pilar was so short, it was gathering density: as if the hours remaining were backing up against a closed, an untried door. Harriet did not let herself think of what might lie behind the door. She wanted something more from her new friend, that was all — something that sometimes Pilar seemed to be holding out to entice her, like one of the bright jewels in her rings: promising and tantalising. Yet Harriet couldn’t be oblivious to a hard limit of calculation in Pilar’s look. Hope and doubt pulsed back and forth in her, in their alternating current.