Tessa Hadley - The Past

That afternoon, Kasim and Molly quarrelled. He had been feeling particularly fond of her, making her laugh, cherishing his secret of the cottage’s transformation. Ivy and Arthur were sworn not to say anything. It seemed to him that he’d made extraordinary concessions, in all his preparations, to everything in Molly that was susceptible and sweet and female. Fran put out lunch for the children on the kitchen table and Kasim and Molly joined in, then when she smelled coffee Alice came down too, in her dressing gown. Kasim read out depressing headlines from the Guardian which Fran had brought from town. Alice pleaded with him to stop and he found worse and worse ones until she put her hand over her ears. Gaddafi loyalists held over bomb blasts. UK self-sufficiency in food falling. Violence during Eid celebrations in Syria.

— It’s not funny, Molly said suddenly, frowning down furiously at the bread she was buttering, as if some pent-up condemnation burst out of its bounds. — You can’t just use people’s sufferings to make a joke.

Kasim was taken aback. — It’s better than pretending they’re not happening.

— Is it really better?

Molly insisted with a bitterness that hadn’t been any part of Kasim’s plan; he was wounded and offended. — She doesn’t even read the newspaper, he said, appealing around the table. — She doesn’t even know where Libya is.

— I’m such a coward, Alice said, conciliatory, smiling from one to the other. — I definitely want to pretend.

— I know where Libya is, Ivy cautiously contributed, although she didn’t.

— I don’t want to know where it is, Molly cried. — I don’t have to.

She was looking intently down at her plate and the nakedness of her dropped purple eyelids was reproachful, chastening; cutting slices of cheese, she layered them on her bread, then added sliced tomatoes, coleslaw. When she looked up, her eyes flared with indignation. — Just knowing things without doing anything doesn’t help anybody. What’s the point of having an opinion about everything? I think it’s better not to know. It’s more kind , just to feel sorry for people.

Kasim thought that was hilarious. — You mean just feel sorry for people generally, without even knowing whether they’re actually suffering from anything?

— I know what Molly’s trying to get at, Alice put in.

— At least I believe in people, Molly said, — which is more than he does.

— I believe in people all right. I mean, I think they’re real, they actually exist.

— But you’ve got such a gloomy outlook. Everything’s always going to turn out for the worst. In real life there are lots of good people: nurses and social workers and postmen and councillors and everything. There are people who change things and make them better. Don’t you have any hope?

— Hope! That’s a fucking message on a birthday card.

— Do you mind? Fran protested. — There are babies here.

Ivy and Arthur said indignantly that they weren’t babies, Molly ran up to her room leaving her sandwich, and Kasim sat on in high dudgeon at the table, eating through his own sandwich and then hers too, to show his indifference. Fran remarked that he seemed to have eaten his way through a fair amount of food over the holiday, though she hadn’t noticed he’d contributed anything — but he hardly seemed to hear her. Then the children had to run between Kas and Molly with important faces all afternoon, peacemaking, carrying messages back and forwards between where Molly sat in tears amid the rich chaos of her room, and Kasim, with an intransigent bleak face, in the empty tidiness of his. Estranged from her, he felt exposed, as though some shelter had been ripped away where he’d been leaning into it.

Postmen? he wondered, with a savage irony only for his own benefit. Did she seriously include postmen in her kindly fucking team of do-gooders? Straight out of her first reader in infants — or Postman Pat, more likely. Morally and intellectually, she’s still an infant.

Harriet and Pilar had the pool all to themselves again: its strange space seemed to have awaited them, sealed underground, without windows, soundless and motionless, intact through all the days since they last left it, unchanging whatever changed in the weather outside. The effect of the yellow lights, upward cast, was to make them feel as if they slid into some other element than water, something molten or oily, turning choppy as they broke it up. Because any sound in the pool was amplified and distorted, and then swallowed, they felt a prohibition against speaking, as distinctly as if someone had turned to them with a finger across sealed lips. Swimming up and down, again and again, in a smooth continuous motion, they turned almost without a splash, and didn’t race: instead of trying to beat Pilar, Harriet adjusted her pace to stay with her exactly, as if she swam in the other woman’s wake. She let herself be absorbed in their communion, she told herself it was sufficient happiness, in the time that was left to them, that they moved like this in concert without touching, cleaving through the chlorinated water, up and down the thwarting short length of the pool.

Pilar was the first to have had enough. Streaming water as she climbed the steps, giving out a little grunt of exhaustion or gratification, she pulled off her rubber cap, letting down the dark mass of her hair.

That’s it, then, Harriet thought resignedly. It’s over.

Then standing at the poolside with her back to Harriet, Pilar casually pulled off her wet swimming costume too, tugging it by the shoulder straps down past her waist, stepping out of it, stooping swiftly to pick up the diminished sodden scrap — though any stranger, a guest at the hotel, might have come through the door at any moment. This peeling away of the last minimal layer of Pilar’s covering, and the revelation of her nakedness, the sight of her swinging breasts when she half-turned, was overwhelming for Harriet in the confined space. Pilar’s waist was strikingly narrow, the curve into her buttocks was as exaggerated as if she was corseted; the sight of her naked full bottom was frankly intimate, friendly, teasing. Wringing out her costume as she went, she disappeared, flat-footed, round the corner to the showers and changing cubicles. Left behind and treading water, Harriet was sure that this gesture could not mean nothing. It was too flaunting, not to have some message in it for her — one of those messages she had no doubt failed to heed, in the waste of her youth. Now this time, before it was too late, she mustn’t fail. Mustn’t even think; not thinking was the key.

Pilar was facing her, when she followed, under the shower without having pulled the curtain across, working the shampoo into a lather in her hair, her head bent forward under the onslaught of water and steam. Probably she couldn’t see Harriet. Her nakedness was more terrifying from the front: even half-veiled by the water which was slanting off her breasts, streaming in the pubic hair shaved to a black line. She was like a goddess under a waterfall, thought Harriet — the sight made her more afraid. But she mustn’t miss life, just because she was afraid. So she stepped into the shower and put her arms round Pilar, whose flesh was yielding, slippery, hot from the hot water. There was a little scuffle, a scream, Pilar exclaimed loudly in Spanish. The whole scene was over in a matter of a few seconds.

Then Harriet was outside the shower again, stumbling, dripping with wet. She might have seen the impression of white finger marks on her upper arms where Pilar had seized her and shoved her, or might have imagined them. The pink plastic curtain had been snapped across and behind it the hot shower still streamed, soapy water swirling around Pilar’s long feet — visible below the curtain, toenails painted cherry-red — and into the drain. She was rinsing the shampoo out of her hair.