Tessa Hadley - The Past

Harriet this morning had drunk tea and eaten toast with appetite, then turned over abandonedly into her sleep again. When Alice came downstairs to get more tea, all the doors were open onto the resplendent day — which intruded inside the house, casting lightrhomboids and dancing light motes on the walls and floors, exposing dingy corners. Only a litter of twigs and leaves in the garden, and spatters of rose petals on the soaked earth, gave any clue to the night’s tantrums. Now that the day seemed so promising, Alice was more afraid. She walked to the front gate and looked up and down the road; puddles flashed in the sun, but she was undeceived. — We’ll give them another hour, she said sourly in the kitchen, thinking the worst, — and then we’ll call the police.

Arthur’s and Ivy’s startled glances — they hadn’t known that they were in that deep — snagged and then disengaged, in instinctual self-preservation. An hour seemed an impossibly elastic interval, none of them knew what to do with it; all of them looked up hopefully every time there was any change in the light or sound from outside, and then were sick of themselves hoping. In her armchair in Harriet’s room, Alice turned the face of the alarm clock away so that she didn’t have to watch the time pass. Fran, because she hadn’t slept, was bursting with a scratchy energy. She cast her look around the kitchen and lit upon Arthur’s long pale gold locks, falling forward around his face like tent flaps as he focused on spreading his toast, holding his knife clumsily too far down the handle, bent on getting a skim of Nutella to the toast’s edges. It struck his mother that her son wasn’t as innocent as once he had been. In the general mood of ominous expectation, she felt resigned to the truth that everything good had to be spoiled eventually, and announced that she was going to cut his hair.

— Get on the stool, she said. — I’ll do it in your pyjamas.

Arthur was startled. He knew that in some complicated way his long hair fastened him to his mother — he’d always trusted that his dad, when the necessary moment came, would be the one to insist it was cut off. But it was Ivy who began to make a fuss, jumping up from the table, managing to spill milk from her cereal bowl and knock over her chair at the same time. — You can’t cut his hair! What are you thinking of? You don’t know what it means to me. I’ll never feel the same about him if his hair’s different. This is the Arthur I’m used to!

Fran paused without turning round, in the middle of her gesture of reaching for the scissors in their place on the row of hooks on the wall. — Just don’t, Ivy. Don’t start. Don’t even dream of it.

And something in her voice made Ivy submit for once. Meekly and without another word she fetched the kitchen paper and used reams of it to mop up her spilled milk. Arthur perched on his high stool gave off the tragic aura of a martyred prince, but Fran was remorseless. She wasn’t superstitious, but it crossed her mind that she was sacrificing something precious, to propitiate whatever fates there were. Ivy, when she’d finished mopping, watched in fascination. As the long coils dropped one after another onto the green linoleum, around the legs of the kitchen stool, a new Arthur seemed to come into being: without his old baby sweetness, shrewder, more bony and less soft, more unequivocally male. Hidden behind his hair, he’d been able to develop into a new self without their noticing. The hair’s under-colour, left behind — dented with the marks of clipping like a shorn lamb — was pale mouse-brown, without a hint of gold. As Fran cut she didn’t say a word. By a strong effort of will she repressed her sorrow.

When she was more than halfway round his head, there were steps outside and they all looked up in expectation, hearts lifting at the idea of a reprieve. But it was only Janice Patten, blocking the light at the door. Fran was suspicious at once that Janice was nosing around because she’d heard something about Harriet; Alice had hoped that no one saw them on the road last night, but in the country somebody was always noticing something. Or they might have discovered Harriet’s clothes, thrown into the stream: Alice had been going to rescue those later, if she could find them. Janice was dressed nautically in a blue-striped tee-shirt dress, with a peaked pink cap jammed down on her grey-blonde frizz. She took in the momentousness of the scene.

— Oh no, his lovely hair!

Fran guessed from something complacent in Janice’s protest at the shearing that she approved of it. Perhaps people had talked — all those people they didn’t even know, down here, whom Janice knew — about how she made a pet of her little boy. Vengefully she tugged at another lock, sawed into it; Arthur only grimaced, swaying stoically on his stool. And Fran looked at the clock: the hour was almost up. She might as well expose all their disasters.

— Yes, I thought it was about time. He can’t stay a baby for ever. And we’re in such a mess today: sorry Janice, I can’t offer you coffee. We’ve got to go to the police: we’ve lost Molly. We’ve lost Kasim too, but he’s not our responsibility. They haven’t been back all night. They went off yesterday evening — we’ve no idea where. And Harriet’s poorly.

Janice looked around their faces, miming distress; this was almost too much news at once, Fran thought, for her to properly enjoy. — Oh, you poor creatures, what a worry! What’s wrong with Harriet? She’s never ill, is she? But Kas and Molly — those two have a bit of a thing going on, don’t they? Don’t panic, they’ll turn up!

Ivy was sepulchral. — Isn’t that what they said to you about Mitzi?

For a moment Fran couldn’t imagine who Mitzi was; with sorrowful dignity Janice reminded her, adding that it was not at all the same kind of case. — He’s probably taken Molly off to a hotel somewhere. What does Roland think?

Fran, hard at work with the scissors, shook her head with her mouth pressed shut. She couldn’t bring herself to confess that Roland didn’t know. — Oh, they left yesterday.

— I saw the car. I noticed Molly wasn’t with them.

Arthur was feeling his hair with his hand, to discover whether his mother was finished. Because he felt satisfied, patting at the absence where his pretty locks had been — he’d had to fight over them a few times already at school, just some minor kicks and punches in retaliation when anyone called him a girl — he was inspired to tidy things up all round. — We know where they are, he said, sounding clearer to himself because he wasn’t muffled by his hair. — And where Mitzi is too. Or where she was — because Kas took her out when he was cleaning up.

Fran felt she hardly knew this boy with his bleak, naked head and calm authority. — Don’t be silly, Arthur. They lost Mitzi months and months ago.

— And we found her, in the cottage in the woods.

— What cottage? Janice was bewildered. — Is Mitzi OK?

It was time to explain, Ivy decided. — Oh no, I’m sorry. Actually she’s dead.

— Really dead, Arthur said. — All rotted and horrible. But Kas shovelled her up and put her on the fire. He was cleaning everything out, so that he could take Molly there.

— Are they just showing off? Janice asked Fran. — Is any of this true?

Fran honestly couldn’t say.

— They really love each other, Ivy insisted. — It was a kind of wedding. Don’t worry, not a real wedding, only a pretend one. That’s why we dressed her up.

Alice had forgotten about the time, she was lost in her thoughts in the armchair when Fran opened the door of the bedroom a crack, beckoning her over to whisper through it. Apparently Kasim and Molly had spent the night in the ruined cottage, the one on the way to the waterfall. So that was why Kas had wanted candles! The children had known about it all along, they were in big trouble.