Tessa Hadley - The Past

Fran didn’t know why Alice was worried: Harriet was well known for walking off her moods. — You know her: she’ll have a torch with her and a packet of Kendal Mint Cake and a compass. Anyway, how could she get lost anywhere round here?

— But she didn’t take the torch, Alice said, — it’s on its hook in the scullery. And what if she’s fallen somewhere, and can’t move?

She wandered upstairs and, when she’d used the bathroom, went into her brother’s room, which was not restored to self-sufficiency by the absence of its visitors, but seemed changed by their passage, as if they had stripped away a surface and left it bereft. Empty coat hangers, hooked over the rim of the wardrobe, jangled to her footsteps; the duvet and pillows denuded of their covers were a white mound on the mattress, tinged pink by the low sun; a forgotten sock lay in her sightline just under the edge of the bed. In the wastepaper basket were cotton wool balls dirty with make-up, an empty water bottle, yesterday’s newspaper; she looked for those letters Roland had written to their mother, but he must have taken them with him. The flowers she had put out more than a fortnight ago were mummified on the windowsill, in a remaining half-inch of evil-smelling thick green water. Alice was about to pick up the vase to take it downstairs when instead, on an impulse, she opened the door in the corner which led out of this room into Harriet’s.

Her fear returned as soon as she crossed this threshold: something in her sister’s room — or just nothing, precisely the minimal trace that Harriet left — seemed at last to speak to her own dread. The room was too thoroughly empty, as if Harriet might never return to it. With an effort, scolding herself for her melodrama, Alice repressed a picture that rose before her mind’s eye, of a body laid out under a sheet on the narrow bed, their family gathered in grief around it. This was nonsense, of course — at the worst, Harriet might have broken an ankle, or perhaps a leg. Then, with a sister’s unerring instinct for finding what she was not supposed to see, Alice went straight to the drawer where Harriet’s diary was kept, felt for it confidently under the clean underwear. She told herself she mustn’t look inside it, but then immediately afterwards that she must. And the book fell open naturally onto the pages where Arthur had scrawled lipstick obscenities, and his name.

But it wasn’t Arthur, Alice understood at once. It must have been Ivy, in one of her tempers, who wrote these things, putting on the fake misspellings too inconsistently: Leeve me alone, Fuk you, U are an ugly sow. This was only childish naughtiness. Alice even laughed out loud at it in sheer surprise, imagining Ivy’s sour little face as she wrote, twisted with vicious invention. Yet Harriet surely ought to have said something, she ought to have protested; Alice seemed to feel how her sister had taken these stabbing insults inside herself, to let them work in her. Sinking down to sit on the side of the bed, turning on the bedside light to see better, she began reading the words written behind them, in biro, in Harriet’s distinctive small hand with its Greek e : the letters were all made separately, never joined in a cursive flow. Is this happiness? My feelings seem crazy, a sickness, when I think of how P. has suffered in the real world. But tonight after she’d used the bath, rescued her long hairs where they blocked the plughole, kept them and touched them.

Alice guessed, she turned the pages in haste, leaping quickly ahead, following the story through. Hope and doubt, I don’t know what to think. P. touched my hand, haven’t washed it all day. I’m like an idiotic child because I don’t know how these things are done. I hate Roland, because he has her in there. Ivy’s dirty words, defacing the page, must have felt like Harriet’s own judgement on herself. And in fact when Alice turned to find the last written entry, she saw that the neatly printed lettering broke off in violent strokes of Harriet’s own pen down the page, digging into the paper, tearing at it. Stupid, stupid, you stupid … How could I? What have I done? It’s all over.

The sky seemed more full of light, as it drained from the earth. On her way down the disused road, Alice could still just about see, if she looked up, though not her own feet, not in the tunnel of darkness under the trees, knotty thick-leaved branches black against jewel blue, like a wild wood in a children’s book. A white house floated on the road below her; this was the mill where they made paper for artists. Emerging from the tunnel, she saw bats like clots of darkness breaking away from the gathered darkness in the trees and under the eaves of the house; these felt like the forms of her own anxiety clotting in her, breaking up inside her thoughts. She had only come out — grabbing a pullover and someone’s clammy waterproof in the scullery, stripping off her strappy sandals and plunging her bare feet into damp anonymous wellingtons — because it was intolerable waiting at home. — But you don’t even know which way she went! Fran said.

Beyond the paper mill the road climbed up again, and at the top Alice crossed a stile, onto a path over a field. This was the way they most often came to walk when they were children. She was wading now in a cold, white evening mist, risen out of the damp field, that swirled around her knees as dense as milk; she had brought the torch but she didn’t want to put it on, not yet — who knew how much life the batteries had in them? Anyway, she could still see, it was not quite dark, a few swallows were swooping and twittering in the broad space of the field in the last light, dipping into the mist and darting out of it.

Alice began to call her sister’s name. Har-riet! Het-tie! The sound of her voice singing out was comforting and strange, as if it wasn’t her own but came from somewhere outside, echoing against the curve of the field sloping sharply up. But ahead was the dark entrance to the wood, like a hole burrowed in the barrier of the wood’s darkness. When she had to pass through that, she thought, she wouldn’t be able to do it, she’d never have the courage. Her search was pointless anyway, and her bare feet were rubbing painfully in the wellingtons. Harriet could have gone anywhere in the hills and valleys round about, she might be miles away: Alice would never find her. Her imagination failed, she felt a disenchanted flatness. There was only fear, and her own insufficiency in the empty dark: she was almost certainly only heading into nothing. In the daytime, in all weathers, she had always liked this gate into the wood with its promise of what lay beyond — she had thought of the birch wood’s shadowed interior, and the grace of its trees in summer and winter, like a lovely room. When she arrived at the gate now, and leaned on it, she called again into nothingness, and her voice seemed an intrusion into the wood’s withdrawn self. The invisible trees loomed vividly present to her other senses, unfriendly and portentous. At its edge the birch wood had been planted with a few pines, felled recently and now stacked beside the path, their resin pungent in the wet air, the fresh sawdust showing up in pale patches.

And then she had opened the gate and gone through, was immersed in the darkness of the wood and couldn’t bring herself to call out again. When she switched on the torch it was as though what surrounded her leaped back, but not reassuringly, gathering intensity rather at the edges of the narrow light-tunnel of her vision. If she swung the light beam around, then the crooked slender trunks, ghost-pale, seemed drawn up in ranks, spelling something significant. What violence was it she feared, though she wasn’t ever afraid in a city street? When with a crashing rumpus some animal — a deer? — broke unseen out of the dark ahead, bounding away, Alice was wrenched with shock. She told herself that she’d go through this first stretch of woodland, and no further; when she reached the wedge-shaped field — beyond which there were more woods — if Harriet wasn’t there, she would turn back.