Tessa Hadley: The Past

KASIM ATE BREAKFAST the next morning in a deckchair in the garden outside the French windows, scowling, retreating inside himself, without even a newspaper or his iPad to hide behind. He had shed the previous evening, choosing to remember nothing about it. The second gloriously fine day in a row already struck him as monotonous — what were you supposed to do with fine weather? Ivy and Arthur, who’d been up for hours, watched from a respectful distance where they sat cross-legged on the lawn; when he turned his back on them deliberately, they moved to a new vantage point. Alice and Fran — revealed to him, disturbing, softer, older, in their dressing gowns and without make-up — supplied him solicitously with coffee and orange juice and toast.

He contemplated escape, imagined himself on a train back to London, and asked if anyone was driving into town. But then he saw in Alice’s face how she would be crushed if he left; because of his father, Kasim felt exposed whenever Alice showed her vulnerability. Anyway, London wasn’t what he wanted, he was already on the run from there. On second thoughts, he said, he would rather stay put. He pretended he had work to do, though actually he hadn’t brought any books. Reprieved, with a rich smile, Alice put her cool hand on his forehead as if he was sick.

— You take it easy, she said. — Enjoy yourself.

He tried not to show how much he wanted her to take her hand away. After breakfast he made a little pilgrimage, up through the field with the cows in it to the gate at the top, to check his phone. Ivy and Arthur followed faithfully after him.

— Now, wait here, he said sternly, stopping some little way before the gate, gesturing out an invisible line along the ground. — No coming any closer. This is private, right?

Impressed, they kept back religiously behind his line, standing poised on the very brink of the forbidden, shuffling their feet to be as close as they could get, both making pantomime efforts not to topple forwards, Ivy tugging Arthur fiercely back into his place. Kasim climbed to the top of the gate as Ivy instructed. He didn’t know why he bothered. Among his messages there was one from his mother, which he didn’t read, and one from the girl; he decided before opening this that if she used any form of text-abbreviation, which he despised, then he wouldn’t respond.

— Where r u Kas? she wrote.

With a sigh he switched the phone off and discovered that from this elevation he could see the sea in the distance, looking more like a flat wash of silver light than like water; and beyond the silver wash, a blue line of hills. He had had no idea that they had arrived so close to this other edge of the country — how small it was! He said to himself sometimes that he was more at home in the Punjab, although he hadn’t been there since he was fifteen, when his grandfather died.

Roland and his seraglio — as Alice called them, though not to his face — arrived at Kington at lunchtime. He drove an old Jaguar XJ6 with all the original beige leather upholstery. His new wife Pilar, Argentinian and a lawyer, was beside him in the passenger seat; she had passed the journey reading through papers, replacing one file every so often in her briefcase and pulling out another. Sixteen-year-old Molly had been stretched along the back seat, either asleep or playing with her iPhone, and every so often she had asked how far it was now, just as she had done when she was six.

They pulled up on the cobbles beside the outhouses. All the noise and forward thrust of travel faded and receded, the engine clicked secretively as it cooled, and when he stood up out of the car Roland experienced the scene for a moment as archetypally English, as if he saw it through Pilar’s foreign eyes: the simple white house with its arched window, the surging pillar-like trunks of the great beech trees with their canopies of sombre bronze-green, the dancing silver birch, the old church sunk in its graveyard, the white doves in the stone dovecote belonging to a barn conversion opposite. But it might all seem poky and parochial to Pilar, who had spent her childhood summers on a ranch on the Argentinian pampas, where her uncle raised cattle and bred polo ponies. Her uncle, whom she loved much better than her own father, had been up to his neck in junta politics.

Molly and Pilar yawned and stretched, Pilar fished for her shoes. She had slipped out of her high heels in the car and tucked her feet underneath her on the seat while she was reading, as she always did; her feet were long-boned and slender like her hands. Roland began unpacking their luggage.

— It’s a nice example of a small English rectory, he explained to her. — Built about 1820.

She was smiling, willing to like whatever he liked. — It’s very pretty.

— I’m fond of it because our mother grew up here. Molly’s been coming here all through her childhood. But of course the upkeep’s expensive, it needs a lot of work.

— You can’t ever sell Kington, Dad, Molly said flatly. — You’re not allowed to. It always has to be here to come back to.

— We’ll have to see.

Roland had worried that Pilar and Molly wouldn’t get on. His own relationship with his only child was unproblematic and doting, but he had thought Pilar might be exasperated by Molly’s silences and awkwardness. They seemed to be all right, though; since they first met a few days ago — Molly lived mostly with her mother, his first wife — Pilar had taken her to have her hair cut and her eyebrows threaded, and had bought her new clothes. Molly had been gratefully absorbed in these initiations. Probably Molly’s mother wouldn’t approve — she was stern on the subject of the commodification of beauty. It was interesting to Roland that a woman’s appearance, so seemingly effortless, might in fact entail all this earnest expertise and hard work. Pilar’s elegance was accomplished out of sight, a daily miracle. She had never asked for his approval.

Alice and Fran and the children spilled out noisily from the side door of the house; they crowded around Pilar and kissed her and then kissed Molly. — At last! At last you’re all here. Welcome! Don’t unpack now, leave it, come and eat. We’ve put out lunch on a table on the terrace. Isn’t the weather wonderful? There are going to be three weeks like this, I know there are. Harriet’s out bird-watching of course. And Jeff isn’t coming! He’s done his usual thing, booking himself in to play, claiming he’d forgotten all about the holiday. Are you all right in those shoes, Pilar? Divine shoes! Take care on the cobbles though.

Alice linked her arm into her brother’s, walking round into the garden. — I can’t believe you in a white suit, Roly. Do you remember, when you were twenty you despised me and Fran because we cared about clothes?

— I’ve never despised anyone.

— You did, you did! You despised us. Now look at you! It’s such a good look. Like one of those academics on television, wandering around a ruined monastery or something. Crumpled and sexy and wise.

Roland was short and compact and calm with blinking brown eyes, the lids very curved; his grizzled, tightly curled hair was cut close to his well-shaped head and his mouth was unexpectedly soft, loose-lipped. His smiles when they came transformed him. He didn’t mind his sister teasing him but he didn’t respond in kind, he never had: he hadn’t been very playful even when he was a child and supposed to play. He had always preferred knowing and explaining things.

Pulling Pilar along, Ivy and Arthur pressed her to admire the lunch table, where they had decorated each place with leaves and sprigs of unripe blackberries. — It’s very nice, she said of everything, not quite satisfying them. A bowl on the table was piled high with fruit, another was full of baby tomatoes and sliced cucumber; butter and cheese were laid out on leaves and a loaf was put ready with its knife, yet they sensed that Pilar was not overwhelmed. They let go her hands. She said she didn’t want to sit down to lunch yet, she was cramped from sitting for so long in the car.