Tessa Hadley - The Past

— There’s no hurry, said Alice. — Stretch your legs. Breathe the air.

Ivy groaned, she was starving, she couldn’t wait or she would die of hunger. Ignoring her, Fran opened a bottle of something fizzy to toast the new arrivals.

— You should see this place in the spring, Pilar, said Alice regretfully, — when the flowers are so perfect.

— Everything here is left just as our grandparents had it, Roland said, gesturing into the shadowy drawing room. — Our grandpees, as we called them. He was afraid Pilar was seeing the faded beige brocade on the sofa and chairs and the damp stains on the wallpaper, which had peeled away from the wall in one corner. There weren’t even many real antiques in the house, most of the furniture was wartime utility, which had come with the house when their grandparents moved in.

She was sympathetic. — These old houses are so expensive to maintain.

— We don’t maintain it, Alice cheerfully said. She sat on the terrace steps with her bright face uplifted, hands clasped around her knee, keen to charm her new sister-in-law. — We love it just how it is. Do you know, Roly, that I forgot my keys? When we arrived I could only peer into it from the outside, through the windows. Then it seemed an enchanted place: as if we’d only seen it in a mirror and wouldn’t ever be able to get inside it. Now I keep feeling as if I passed through the mirror and I’m living in there, on the other side.

— Our grandfather was minister here for forty years, Roland said. — And he was a poet too: a good one I think. Alice will tell you whether he’s any good. Alice is the poet in the family now.

— I’m not a real poet, Alice apologised. — Not like Grandfather. Do you like poetry?

Pilar said she didn’t have time to read any and Alice sympathised. — There’s never any time, is there? What happens to it?

Molly already had her guitar out of its case. She bent over it, hair falling to hide her face as she bent down to the strings — she might have been showing off except that her playing was so hesitant, made with such minimal movements of her fingers that it barely stirred the air: a little repeated pattern of notes close together, in a minor key. Her fingers hardly seemed to press the frets. Arthur stood watching, compelled by the tiny music.

— I can’t believe we’re drinking again, said Alice. — We only seemed to stop five minutes ago. I ought to be more hungover than I am. Kasim’s in a bad way this morning. He was here at breakfast but he retreated to his room again and hasn’t been seen since. He said he was working but we think he’s just gone back to bed.

Then she had to explain all over again who Kasim was. Roland tensed visibly, warily. Brought up in a household of women, he found them easier, more stimulating, and resented the idea of an unknown adult male on his territory, let alone Dani’s son, who was still in bed in the afternoon. Dani had been a disaster for Alice, Roland thought.

Coming out of his bedroom, still sleepy, rubbing his eyes bad-temperedly, Kasim met Molly just as she arrived at the top of the stairs with her rucksack. Alice and Fran had mentioned Molly, but he’d presumed she would just be another little girl, a nuisance. Both of them visibly quaked at catching this unexpected sight of each other; not with attraction immediately but with shock at this encounter with one of their own kind — young — in this place where they had both been resigned to being singular, and even relieved by it. The encounter added interest to the whole situation, most definitely, but also pressure. They passed in silence, Kasim on his way to the bathroom and Molly to her bedroom. He carried away her image — delicate little cat’s impertinent muzzle, little springy high breasts — imprinted on his mind’s eye and digested it afterwards while taking a piss, not too noisily, in case she was listening. Running the cold tap, splashing water on his face, he stared into the mirror above the sink and saw himself differently because she’d seen him; he knew that now, alone in her room, she was digesting his image too.

On her way home from birdwatching Harriet crossed a tussocky field, a narrow wedge shape between two stretches of woodland, rising steeply to where it was closed in by more woods at the top. After the woods with their equivocal shade, the strong sunlight was startling when the path opened onto this gap; a red kite ambled in the sky above, small birds scuffled in the undergrowth, too hot to sing, and a pigeon broke out from the trees with a wooden clatter of wing beats. A stream ran down the field, bisecting it, conversing urgently with itself, its cleft bitten disproportionately deep into the stony ground and marked against the field’s rough grass by the tangle of brambles that grew luxuriantly all along it, profuse as fur, still showing a few late white flowers limp like damp tissue, and heavy with berries too sour and green to pick yet, humming with flies.

Harriet followed the sound of the stream’s boiling and deep chuckle up the field to a place where it tumbled over a stone and fell to foam in a dark pool below, all out of the sunlight, hidden under its thick fringe of growth. Crouching, she reached out her hand to break the water’s fall; it bore away from the stone lip in a perfect glassy curve, vividly cold. She wanted to taste it but thought that wasn’t sensible — who knew what pesticides they used on these fields? On her solitary walks she was ambushed occasionally by this fear of accidents: what if she fell, and no one knew where she was? So she touched her wet hand to her forehead instead, and the water dried against her skin as she walked towards home, through the woods down to the road and past the restored mill which sold handmade paper to London artists, then onto the disused road which climbed again, along the side of the hill to Kington at the top.

Roland’s Jaguar, when she got there, was pulled up between her car and Fran’s, and luggage was left on the cobbles — so much good-looking luggage, expensive suitcases and briefcases and laptops, and a lovely straw basket, lined with cotton print, a billowing scarf tied round the leather handles. Harriet stood hesitating — she could hear excited voices, mostly Alice’s, coming from the back garden. Entering into that high-pitched sociability would be like breaking through a skin, all eyes would turn on her and see how she was hot and dishevelled from her walk. Harriet dreaded the effort that would have to be made, getting to know Roland’s new wife: a stranger was a fearful and impregnable unknown country. Even this luggage intimidated her, with its aura of life lived according to a high, intolerant code that she would never master.

She lingered in the pregnant quiet of the empty yard, until Arthur came wading out from the scullery in cobwebby walking boots, huge on him, that must have once belonged to her grandfather. He didn’t seem surprised to find her skulking there.

— You should come round, he said. — They’re all here now.

— I suppose I should.

Kindly, Arthur led her by the hand. They went together through the stone archway; the French windows in the drawing room were open onto the terrace and the lawn. A table was set out on the terrace for lunch. They never seemed to stop eating, Harriet thought — although Alice didn’t really eat much, she just picked at it, watching her weight. Roland at the head of the table was talking, his fork laden with avocado and tomato and then forgotten: his delivery was always deliberate, full of measured pauses as if he considered every remark, holding it in inverted commas before letting it out in shapely sentences. His sisters half-worshipped his cleverness. Who’d have thought it? they said to one another. Being his sisters, they also found it slightly ridiculous, even Harriet did. They could remember him in short trousers, when his glasses were mended with sticking plaster.