Tessa Hadley - The Past

Their procession through the woods was sombre. Fran and Janice made stilted conversation about the National Park, on which subject Janice was darkly conspiratorial. Her Nordic walking poles, Fran felt, were the last straw. Christ, it was a signposted woodland walk, you could have done it in high heels! Ivy had a pinched expression because in her fantasy she was on her way to the altar, or alternately to the scaffold — although she was vague about what happened next in either place. Her outfit was inspired by Molly’s yesterday: along with her nylon petticoat and pink sequined top she wore a veil made from a lace doily, borrowed from under the telephone in the hall and fixed with hairgrips. Arthur was experimenting with swivelling his new head, which felt weightless on his neck. Approaching nearer to the cottage, they noticed a faint mist hanging between the trees; none of them were interested in it, putting it down in their city ignorance to some peculiarity of the weather. The mist thickened, glittering in the sunbeams, as they reached the stretch of path leading up to the head of the valley and along the side of the cottage; Arthur began to cough behind his hand, and they all tasted dust. With the help of her poles, Janice was slightly ahead of the others, and saw it first.

— Oh, goodness gracious, she exclaimed, stopping short on the path.

The whole of the back of the cottage had sheared off — along with a great slide of rocks and red mud — and fallen into the wooded gully fifty feet below, where a rubble of bricks and mortar smoked tranquilly in silence among the splintered and smashed trees. The silence — or rather, the ordinary restored quiet rustling and burbling and birdsong — was somehow the strangest thing of all, as if the actual moment of disaster itself might have been soundless, abstract, a technicality. The front facade, with about a third of the depth of the cottage still attached to it, was left hanging out over the sheer slope: exposed from behind, each room seemed like a miniature room from a doll’s house, with its own wallpaper, and painted dado, and paler outlines on the walls where pictures had once hung. The cream-tiled fireplace, sticking out into nothing, still had cinders in it, and a wine bottle was rolled on its side on the floor. Ivy shrieked once theatrically, then shut up just as abruptly. Very subduedly, Fran began murmuring to herself: oh my god, my god, my god . They seemed to stare at what they saw for whole minutes, reactions suspended, as if waiting for some explanation that might be forthcoming from it.

— Can we climb down there? Fran said.

Janice thought there was a long way round by the path, which took you down. — But one of us should go back for the emergency services. They’ll send a helicopter. Should I go? I’m not that fit, but I’ll do my best to jog. Or should we send one of the children? Can they be trusted?

— Janice, stay with me another moment. I’m not thinking straight.

Fran crouched down on the path in front of her daughter. — Ivy, I have to know. How certain are you, on your honour, that Molly and Kasim were in there?

Dumbly Ivy nodded, lace doily quivering.

But Arthur had run ahead, and now he was waving to them from where the path swung round. — They’re here! They’re here! he shouted.

As they hurried out into the clearing, Kas and Molly, fully dressed, holding hands, were approaching from the path on the other side. They seemed every bit as astonished as the others were by the cataclysm that had occurred in the cottage. Its front facade, facing onto the clearing, was in fact oddly intact, like a pretence kept up — for decades now — that domesticity was going on behind it as usual. But the front door swung open onto the blue air beyond.

— Oh my god, you stupid pair, what have you done? Fran shouted at the two young ones, and then turned on her own children. — And just don’t tell me that you two have been climbing in and out of that awful place over the past couple of weeks? Don’t tell me these irresponsible idiots allowed you to do that, when I put them in charge?

Then she burst into furious loud tears and couldn’t be comforted, because although Arthur put his arms round her, all she could see every time she looked at him was his sad, shorn, unfamiliar little poll.

Molly told them that she had woken in the dawn light.

— It had been so windy in the night, and then I looked out of the front door and the wind had stopped, it was all still, everything was shadowy and perfect. And I thought that I’d never actually seen the dawn before. Well, I’d seen it, on car journeys and things, but I’d never actually been in it. So I woke up Kas, and we got dressed and decided to walk to the waterfall. You should see the waterfall, Ivy, it’s like a raging torrent compared to when we went there before. And we saw a deer. I didn’t know they still had wild deer in the country.

— But dawn was hours and hours ago, Janice said. — It’s almost midday.

Studiously, Kas and Molly didn’t exchange looks. They’d fallen asleep again, she explained, on the grass beside the waterfall, once the sun came up and it was so lovely and warm.

Because of the drama of what had happened, and their close escape, no one made any effort to pretend that these two hadn’t been making love — probably half the night and all morning. Even the children must have guessed something. The little plaits sticking up all over Molly’s head were fuzzy from their embraces, and as she spoke, full of her story, words tumbling out in her excitement, her face shone with a dreamy languor. What a lucky escape! Just imagine it! What would have happened if she hadn’t woken, and insisted they go out? Kas had grumbled, he hadn’t wanted to go anywhere. If he’d had his way, they’d both be in that pile of rubble now.

But you could see she didn’t really for one moment seriously believe that this death was possible. The life in her had such force, it felt inviolable.

— We probably wouldn’t, Kas said. — I expect there was some kind of warning noise. Anyway, not all of it has gone down. I’ll bet we could have managed to scramble out somehow.

— You must have heard something , Janice insisted. — Even from the waterfall. It must have made quite a racket when it came down.

Molly frowned vaguely. — Well, I may have, perhaps. A sort of smash. Or a roar, like bottles being tipped out. I just thought it was industrial. A factory or something.

— You didn’t mention it, Kas said. — Of course there are a lot of factories round here.

— I didn’t want to wake you. You look so sweet when you’re asleep.

Janice asked Kasim, at some point on their way back through the woods, whether it was true that they’d found Mitzi in the cottage. Kasim said he had cleaned out the remains of a fox from one of the upstairs rooms: Janice was relieved and Arthur and Ivy looked at each other, deciding wordlessly not to interfere. They felt upon them again the prohibition of the Women. Even in his newly toughened boy-self, Arthur seemed to half believe in them. Probably the cottage had fallen down by accident. But he remembered those dirty rags flickering at a window, and the dead dog in a corner which might have been a fox, and that mystery of the magazines, which had grown upon him while he cut them out: one naked body after another in numbing repetition, as if they must add up to something. Why weren’t there men’s bodies?

They took the shortcut up through the churchyard; Alice was talking and laughing with someone in the garden. Fran was thinking about school, trying to be the person she was when she was there: smart and flexible and competent, parrying her pupils’ remarks with her quick sarcasm, flattening them. But everything got so confused in her own family, and she made such drastic mistakes. It dismayed her that Janice Patten had seen her in tears, and that her children seemed so unhealthily fascinated by Molly’s sex life, and that she’d allowed them to stray into such danger in that place. She closed a door in her mind on that vision of smoking rubble, squeezing it tightly shut — but even the squeezing made her feel blank and sick. If only Jeff were here, she thought. Full of self-doubt, she let go the eternal litany of her complaints, and longed for him — the familiar, loved, wiry puzzle of his body and his familiar exasperating self, his character — as if he was the particular and only solution to the problem of her.