Tessa Hadley - The Past

So he kneeled up to kiss her back, more forcefully, bearing down on her from above, pushing his fingers up between the knotty plaits on the back of her head, lifting her face towards his, so that she was craning upwards. After a minute or so she twisted away, complaining she’d get a crick in her neck. — So, she asked him, beaming as if she had some secret. — Are you getting used to seeing me in a dress?

Kas couldn’t believe that she was still worrying about what to wear. — It’s a ridiculous dress, he said. — It looks awful.

Molly leaned forward to whisper, her breath tickling his ear. — All right then.

— All right what?

— If you don’t like it, I’d better take it off.

Before he’d even understood, she stripped the dress in one easy movement over her head. Underneath it, she had nothing on. Her body was known to his hands, or half-known, but he was seeing it for the first time, as if she was newborn in the firelight licking over her: the little tipped-up breasts with blunt pink nipples, the long hollow of her stomach with slightly protruberant navel, the shadowy fluff at the crux of her, where she knelt with her thighs pressed together. She smiled at him shyly; she still had her mint imperial earrings on. — So, what do you think? Do you like me?

Kasim hardly knew where to begin.

— Don’t be too anxious about this, he said. — I’ll be very gentle. I’ve had quite a bit of experience.

— I’ve had some too, Molly said. — So I’m not anxious.

FRAN AND ALICE took turns all night to sit up with Harriet. Alice had told Fran everything. First they made Harriet drink hot tea with sugar and brandy in it, then they put her in her own bed to sleep, dressed in her pyjamas with a tee shirt underneath. They filled hot water bottles in relays — wrapping them in towels, careful not to put them too near her skin — and piled two duvets on her. Her flesh had felt so cold and unresponsive when they helped her take off her outdoor clothes — she’d lolled against them, not speaking, with her eyes half rolled up into her head. Fran phoned Jeff, to ask him to check on the internet whether they were doing the right things, or whether they ought to call a doctor. The brandy, it turned out, might have been a mistake. But she did seem warmer now, when they slipped a hand to check between the layers of her bedding. She had turned on her side to sleep, with her knees pulled up, and sometimes she snored. They didn’t know how long she’d been exposed out in the field. Probably she’d only taken off her clothes when it began to get dark.

Alice also had to have hot tea, and sit with a blanket round her, and the electric heater turned on in the room; she wanted the brandy even if Jeff said it would make her worse. The horrors of her adventure — dressed only in her knickers and the wellingtons and a shirt, fortunately a long shirt, getting Harriet back through the wood and across the field — were already hardening into legend as she narrated them. Harriet had managed to walk, leaning heavily on her, stumbling and slithering. At least she hadn’t thrown her boots into the stream along with her clothes — apparently she’d thought at the last moment that they might be useful to somebody. Fran said that Alice was a hero. They told the children, who weren’t in bed yet when Alice and Harriet arrived home, that Harriet had had a fall, and couldn’t move till Alice found her — which was what they’d told Jeff, and agreed to tell everyone.

— It’s just such amazing luck that you persisted, Fran said again. — I feel so guilty! What if you’d listened to me?

— It wasn’t luck. I knew. Something was guiding me, or someone. Don’t you think it was our mother?

— Oh no, Alice, no. Don’t say that, that’s awful. What nonsense. You don’t really believe it.

Fran was strictly rational, she put it all down to Alice’s psychological insight. Harriet opened her eyes out of her sleep every so often, as if making sure they were still sitting there. — Say something, Harriet, Fran urged her. — We need to know you’re compos mentis.

— I am compos mentis, she mumbled, closing her eyes again.

The bedside lamp shed a rosy light; Alice had thrown a red silk scarf over its shade. Outside a wind began to blow, unexpected after the afternoon’s stillness, buffeting the house and rattling the windows. When Alice woke from dozing, in the armchair they’d carried in from Roland’s room, again her sister’s eyes were open, staring at her — but as soon as Alice spoke she closed them and pretended to be asleep. There was something almost voluptuous, Alice thought, in how Harriet was submitting to their attentions, allowing them to dress and undress her, spoon tea into her mouth, talk about her over her head. Ordinarily, in her austere life, there was no one to indulge her or make a fuss of her — certainly Christopher didn’t. She held herself stiffly apart from anyone’s pity. But now she claimed their care as unselfconsciously as a child, not even trying to thank them or to apologise for making trouble. It stirred Alice but also made her fearful, to see how far her sister was straying from her old self, undoing the vexed knots which had held her tight. She knew from her own experience what a great labour it was, binding up again all the mess of self, which in your extremity you had unbound.

When Fran had put the children to bed, she came back into Harriet’s room and didn’t sit down, kept going to look out into the darkness, through the window — which didn’t look out onto anything much, only the scullery and the outhouses and back door. A light outside this door illuminated the wind tearing into the beech trees, raking through the leaves and stripping them, twisting them so that they flashed pale-side out. Fran didn’t want to worry Alice, but there was no sign of Molly or Kasim: she had turned on the outside light in the hope of guiding them home if they were lost. Where on earth had they disappeared to? — What’s the matter with everyone today? she protested.

So that second anxiety kept them up all night, began to consume them as the hours passed, and they took it in turns to catch half an hour’s sleep. It seemed better somehow to keep a vigil through the young ones’ absence than sleep through it. Should they phone Roland? But what was the point of worrying him, when there was nothing they could do until the morning? Should they phone the police? Alice said she was sure Kas and Molly were all right somewhere, she had a feeling. — And even if they were out all night, they could keep each other warm. Like the babes in the wood.

Fran groaned. — Are you allowed to be fanciful for ever now, just because you’ve found one missing person? It’s horrible out there.

— Probably they got lost and then they walked until they found a pub somewhere, had a few drinks and booked a room to stay over.

— Though you’d think they could have called us in that case.

— I’ll bet they haven’t got the number.

— And if it turns out, Fran added, — that they have spent the night together in a room in a pub, let’s not tell Roland.

In the morning Fran went in early to the children’s room, to interrogate them in case they knew anything. Because the day was brilliant, scoured clean by the night’s storm, as she was about to pull the curtains open she noticed the light shining — like sequins or a burnished silver thread — through a number of tiny crosswise slits in the cloth, as if it had been deliberately nicked. Rousing the children, she demanded to know what had happened, but they met her with bemused blank faces. Confused and hot from their sleep, still in thrall to their dreams, it genuinely hardly seemed to Ivy or Arthur as if they were the same selves who knew all about the curtain-slits. But this first refusal set them fatefully on the primrose path of denial. Glumly they shook their heads when Fran asked them next if they knew anything about where Kas and Molly had gone. At the kitchen table, tousled and stuffy in their pyjamas, they bent their heads far down in silence over their bowls of rice krispies and golden nuggets, scooping in milk like model children who only wanted to be left in peace to play.