Tessa Hadley - The Past

— Don’t be too cross with them, Alice pleaded.

They were all setting out for the cottage, as soon as the children were dressed. — And I’ve cut Arthur’s hair!

— You haven’t! I’ll bet he looks lovely.

Fran made an unhappy face. — Alice, I don’t like it. He looks like a real boy. He isn’t blond at all. And Janice is coming with us.

— Why on earth?

— Oh, it’s her wretched dog. Everything’s going wrong.

— Don’t worry. As long as you find Kas and Molly.

Alice went back to sit in her armchair. She heard the children’s voices, and Fran insisting that they put on suncream, and then the crunch of little stones under all their feet on the drive as they went off, Janice having fetched her Nordic walking poles from across the road. The faded silky curtains were pulled across the bedroom window, so that the bright sun wouldn’t bother Harriet. In the mauve light the dark old utility furniture, made of varnished cheap wood, seemed to float indistinctly.

— This is peaceful, she said when she saw Harriet was awake.

— I’ve made a dreadful fool of myself, Harriet said. Her face was yellow against the pillowcases, and her white hair stuck up like bristles where she’d slept on it. Involuntarily Alice’s hand went up to touch her own hair, and her sister saw it.

— No you haven’t, Alice said. — You’re never foolish, you’re one of the most serious people I know.

— I hate my own seriousness.

— Think of the wonderful work you do. And Pilar doesn’t think you’re a fool.

— I don’t want to talk about her.

— She’s just feeling sorry, right now, that you had a good friendship and it turns out it meant something different to each of you.

Harriet turned her head on the pillow to stare at Alice.

— Doesn’t it ever wear you out, gushing and being charming all the time? It must take such an effort. I suppose you read my diary? I don’t care about you reading it. Actually, I don’t even care about making a fool of myself. But I feel very bitterly, Alice. Other people’s lives, and the lives I read about in books, seem richer, mine seems so threadbare.

Alice was only jolted in passing by her sister’s assault on her, like travelling over a familiar bump on a road. She sat up straighter, determined to talk with her truthfully for once, in this exceptional moment. — Threadbare? Do you think that’s because you didn’t have children?

— You don’t have children, do you? And your life doesn’t seem threadbare.

Alice said that it did sometimes, but Harriet snapped at her. — Don’t try to cheer me up. You don’t always have to make everything all right.

Well, did she feel that she had wasted that time when she was young, and so dedicated to politics? But Harriet said she’d asked herself that question often, and come to believe she’d chosen to be dedicated because of the way she was, politics hadn’t made her that way. And it was true that the work she did now was valuable, she wouldn’t change it for the world. But it didn’t help to solve her own problems.

— What everybody wants is life: all our clients, all the asylum seekers and everyone. You’re doing your best, trying to help them to get a roof over their head, security, enough money coming in. And you’ve got all those things, so in one way you’re lucky, almost unimaginably lucky. But still you haven’t got life.

— It isn’t true, Alice said. — You’re just seeing things the wrong way round, because you’re sad.

— But what if I’m seeing them the right way round?

— And what about Christopher? You’ve got Christopher.

— Yes, Harriet said after a moment. — He’s a good friend.

They contemplated each other frankly.

Alice sighed. — What you mean is that you’ve missed out on love.

Harriet picked at some imaginary mark on the duvet cover. She was embarrassed by Alice using that word, which rolled so ripely and fluently off her tongue because she’d used it so many times before, ten thousand times.

— Yes, I suppose that what I mean comes somewhere under that heading, she said gruffly. — And now it’s too late. Don’t say that it isn’t, will you, whatever you do. Because it’s in me anyway, the thing that makes love not happen. Or rather, the thing that makes it happen isn’t in me. Allure. Or sex appeal. Whatever you call it. It’s not in my genetic code.

Alice protested, saying that couldn’t be how it worked. There must be something you could do to give yourself allure, if you made up your mind to it.

— But maybe there isn’t.

— All the great passion there’s been in the world can’t be based on anything so arbitrary as a genetic code.

Harriet shrugged. — Maybe it is, though. But don’t worry about me. I’m not going to try again, anything so silly. That was my Victor Hugo moment. There won’t be another one.

The sisters stopped to listen then, hearing footsteps outside: someone was coming to the scullery door. Could the others be back already? When Alice parted the curtains, to her surprise she saw a man in the yard below. It was Jeff: rucksack slung across one shoulder, guitar on the other. He hadn’t told anyone he was coming. Banging on the glass she waved to him excitedly. He must have caught the eleven o’clock bus from the station and then walked — it was such a fine day. Now Fran would be happy. And when Jeff stepped back in the yard to look up at Alice, squinting into the sun and grinning at her, she remembered how nice he was: skinny as ever, with his jeans sliding down his narrow hips, tee shirt hanging out, muscular strong arms although he never did any exercise, tan-skinned although he spent his life in bars and clubs. He hadn’t taken care of his teeth, they were crooked and stained with nicotine, and the flesh which had been so tender was beginning to be leathery. But still he had his look of a keen youth: liquid black eyes and dead-straight nose, long face with those distinctive flattened cheekbones, which Arthur had too. Running alongside Alice’s exasperation with her teasing, satirical, lazy brother-in-law, there was always a frisson of harmless flirtation. They could do with a man in the house, she thought, for these last few days. Roland hadn’t counted because he was their brother, and Kasim was too young. Jeff’s arrival seemed to rebalance something.

Alice had meant to tell Harriet her news. And then Jeff had arrived — and anyway, before that, she had worried that if she brought it out in the middle of their conversation, she could seem to be trumping Harriet’s own crisis, or trying to put her somehow in the wrong. So she decided to put off telling anyone. Anyway, it wasn’t really news, not yet. It might turn out to be nothing: this small lump she had found in her breast in the middle of one night, a week or so ago, after the Pattens’ dinner party. The lump was new, she was sure of it; but it might only be benign. She had woken and put her hand straight to the place; it seemed to have called her out of her sleep, as distinctly as a tiny alarm going off. And she had phoned the next day for an appointment with her doctor, as soon as she got back to London. That margin of delay — she supposed she’d have gone right away, if she was sensible — was the only sign she gave herself that she was afraid.

No, of course she was afraid, that went without saying — especially when she woke alone in the night. And she was conscious of the lump at every moment, even sitting here in the garden with Jeff, drinking beer with him happily, waiting for the others to get back. But for the time being the fear stayed in its separate compartment from the rest of her life; and it was not as bad, not yet, as she might have expected. After all, there was every reason to be hopeful. Even if it was cancer, so many cancers were treatable these days. Their mother might not have died, they had sometimes said, if she’d had access to the latest developments in medicine. Alice surprised herself with her own resilience. No doubt when she was back in London the reality would lunge from its dark tunnel, mowing her down. But that hadn’t happened yet. The lump still belonged to her and had some meaning for her. She told herself it was connected to that intimation on her first day at Kington, when the light moving on the wallpaper in her grandparents’ bedroom, and the voices from outside, had pierced her with memories of such intensity. She had known then that something lay in wait for her, something was promised. Only she had mistaken what it was.