Past (10 page)

Light, with a ripple in it like water, quavered through the clear glass in the windows, tinged green from the trees outside. She tried not to move, so that the church could be as it was when she wasn't in it. Its cold breath – eloquent of worm-eaten wood, hard iron, greasy velvet, hymnbooks sour with damp, damp stone – had waited for her all this time. It was damper now, if anything, because it was only used one week in four. She looked around her almost with curiosity, like a tourist, at the musicians' gallery in the west end, at the ancient stone font, its carvings worn almost to inexpressiveness, where Harriet had been christened, but not the rest of them
(we ran out of steam
, her mother had once half-explained, making Alice think for years that babies were christened in hot water). Her grandmother's altar cloth – cream and yellow and black, in the style of that era when she'd embroidered it, John Piperesque bold childlike forms – was spotted with mould in one corner.

She throbbed with the aftershocks of her argument with Pilar, or with everyone – it was a jagged pain. But almost at once, even as she sank into her corner in the pew, Alice gave up defending herself to herself. Conscience – like something weightless, cobwebby – settled on her out of the air; the old church must be thick with it, after all the centuries of soul-searching. It was always a relief, she found, to accuse yourself and lose all the arguments. With the same blundering as when she offended, she went straight to imagining herself forgiven, because she was so sincerely sorry. How could she have read Roland's words aloud like that – making a public parade of his feelings, when he was so private? Probably no one had read those letters before except their mother and grandmother. She wilted and sighed aloud, watching herself doing it in her mind's implacably accusing eye. What showing off! Pilar had been quite right to snatch the letters from her. With a pang, she felt all her new sister-in-law's decency and righteousness mustered in the scales against her, as impeccable as her clothes – which were never studied or too fussy. In a revulsion against her own taste, Alice decided there was something stale in it, that her choices were flaky and unsound; she was always trying too hard.

Ivy and Arthur's den was hollowed out inside a musty dense hedge on top of the front garden wall, beside the crumbling stone gatepost whose gate had rotted into nothingness long ago. It was easy climbing up from the garden side, but the drop to the stony lane, silted in caramel-brown dust, was much steeper, and so the den was forbidden: Ivy associated danger with the bitter smell of the privet. Arthur muddled up privet and private, thinking they meant the same thing. It was a good place for spying but there wasn't much to spy on, because nothing came that far along the lane; the tractor and its trailers, laden with hay bales or black plastic bags of silage or a few bleating lambs, turned off down the track to the farm before they got as far as Kington House.

Crouched on the mossy flat coping stone that topped the wall, Ivy set out a cramped game of clock patience: her petticoat was a liability in the den, snagging on privet twigs. Arthur watched absorbedly as she turned the cards over, sighing with relief every time it wasn't a king, irritating her with his optimism; the cards stuck together and she envied Molly's deft sliding movement. Would it count if she got the patience out now and no one saw? Nobody would believe them. Heavy with her failure to catch Molly's phone, she cheated once without Arthur noticing. Getting stuck a second time, she gathered the cards up despondently and shoved them into a pocket of the shorts she had on underneath the petticoat.

From their vantage point on the wall, they could see into the yard of the Pattens' barn conversion across the road. The Pattens weren't in residence: the yard had been blankly vacant in the sunshine ever since Ivy and Arthur arrived in Kington, roses blooming and going over with no one to pick them, days burgeoning and ebbing unseen – except that the children saw them – against the pink of the high brick barn wall with its slits at the top where the doves eased in and out. It had been ordinary once, if the Pattens were there, for Mitzi to be sloping around their yard, sniffing in corners and signalling results with her plumy tail, or flopped loosejointedly on the cobbles in the heat. Ivy wasn't even mad about dogs. She had felt fastidiously about Mitzi's coat – which looked so silky but was greasy to touch – and her bad breath and slobber. Yet now the idea of Mitzi was potent in Ivy's awareness, like something hidden but present in a landscape; the ruined cottage had simplified in her imagination into a perpetual knot of unease. Away from it, she lost her certainty about what was inside. Weren't they too young, to be the only ones who knew anything so important?

When Arthur was upset the veins at his pale temples always showed more blue. — Why do you think they closed the door? he asked.

She pretended she didn't know what he was talking about. — What door?

— Someone might have just shut Mitzi in there for a moment and then gone away and forgotten that they'd done it and been looking for her everywhere.

Ivy was scathing. — Oh, that's really likely, isn't it? Unless they suddenly had total amnesia.

— Or otherwise, Arthur went on (he must have been puzzling all this out by himself) — she might have gone in there on her own. When she finished looking round she could have just pushed at the door with her nose, if she wanted to open it wider to come out.

He made a funny little shoving movement to demonstrate, with his own nose. — But she pushed it shut by mistake instead.

Ivy thought this was plausible, though she wouldn't say so. It was true that Mitzi used to roam for miles in the woods by herself. Pushing the door shut wouldn't even have seemed like much of a disaster at first: she would have sniffed round again in the room, then barked for a bit, then settled down waiting for someone to turn up. She might have found a comfortable place on a pile of leaves. For some reason this quietly meaningless mishap seemed worse than imagining anybody's cruelty or neglect. Stoically she refused to show Arthur, by any least gesture of sympathetic feeling, that what he'd guessed at might really have happened. Her face felt iron-stiff with her refusal.

Alice went in search of Pilar, to pour out her abasement. Fran in the kitchen was mashing potatoes for her fish pie. — They're still upstairs, she said darkly. — But at least it's gone quiet. I'm making a big pie, on the assumption their departure isn't imminent.

Alice almost forgot, in her eagerness, to knock at Roland's bedroom door – remembering, she pulled her hand back from the doorknob as if it burned her. Their voices were not raised now but lowered and tender – she couldn't tell whether they were speaking in English or Spanish. At any rate, the worst of the row was over. When she did knock, she heard from inside the room a certain muffled bustle and protest which she recognised, and her first instinct was to laugh – how funny to catch out her brother Roland when he'd been making love in the afternoon. Then she reminded herself that her brother wasn't her intimate any longer, his sex life was none of her business.

— It's only me, she said apologetically.

Doing penance, she waited a long time on the landing before, soberly, Roland opened the door. Then he stood blocking her way in, fully dressed but barefoot, and as tousled as was possible with his short haircut. She thought he looked her up and down to see what new difficulty she might be landing him in – like a policeman checking whether she had come armed. — I'm such an idiot, Roly, she pleaded. — Can you forgive me?

This didn't get round him – he frowned, wary of more complications. — I was so out of order with Pilar. Does she know that I'm just jealous? I'm like a great baby, wanting all the attention, making a mess of things. My therapist says I've never got over Fran coming along to displace me.

Roland said he hoped her therapist didn't charge too much, if that was as good as she got – but then stood back, relenting, from the door. Both windows in the room were open wide again, frail shadows from the alder trees stirred in the sunlight on the pink wallpaper, the children's voices floated from the garden. Pilar was sitting at the dressing table in her slip, pinning up the rich swathe of her chestnut hair. The flesh of her raised arms was brown and firm and Alice thought she was replete with sexual pleasure, and pleasure in being loved. She met Pilar's eyes in the mirror and stoutly, keeping faith with her new humility, refused to see any sly triumph in them. — Pilar, I'm so sorry for what I said. I was completely in the wrong, and you were right.

Pilar in her reflection held Alice's gaze but hardly unbent, made no gracious protestation that she was guilty too, or had overreacted. — It's water under the bridge, she only said, as if she was trying out a new phrase she'd learned, to see its effect.

— I'm so oblivious sometimes, Alice hurried on, — to other people's feelings.

— Don't overdo it, Roland said. — That will suffice. You're no more oblivious than the next man.

His sister threw her arms round him, embarrassing him; firmly, smiling, he extricated himself. Roland had been very close to Alice for a few years, in that painful early teenage time – they were both clever at school and had done their homework in a frenzy of competition. Later, although she was younger, she had seemed to leap ahead of him into adulthood, beginning to have boyfriends and sex and to be in love while he lagged shamefully behind, hopeless at everything except in the world of his books and his study. It was in this time lag, when he was so crippled by his social ineptitude, that he had gained his advantage educationally over his sister, and found his path through to his adult self.

Now she had embarked on this project of reading over their grandparents' correspondence. She said she was going to write a book about their grandfather but he didn't believe she would do it, she didn't have the discipline. When they got home from their excursions she was sometimes asleep in bed in the middle of the afternoon, or she looked up at them from along the piles of old letters, face smudged with dust, as if she hardly knew them or was expecting someone else. Roland worried about how she drifted. Since she gave up trying to act she had had a long succession of jobs: waitressing and in bars, front of house for various theatres, some private tutoring. She managed on very little money. She had had a few poems published but she had never given herself over to writing with the ruthlessness that it required; her poems were too slight, he thought, they tried too hard to please. When he suggested they should talk about their plans for the house, Alice pleaded for more time; there was plenty of time, she said. Very soon, they must sit down and have their important discussion. But they didn't need to decide anything just yet. They were enjoying themselves so much, it would be a such a shame to spoil things. Well, she had very nearly spoiled them.

In bed that night, the children invented a new game. The cave under Ivy's duvet was some sort of underground hall or temple, and she and Arthur returned there between forays into a dangerous world. They often came back hurt and used magic pine cones for healing – Arthur was particularly moving with his groans and his fainting, eyelids fluttering half open. If the grown-ups heard them playing from downstairs then they took no notice. Ivy snapped out instructions to Arthur. She only mentioned the Dead Women in passing, in an undertone, as if he must know whom she meant:
they
ordered the children to tie their pyjama tops around their heads, or
they
made them bring sacred water in a tooth mug from the bathroom. The Dead Women weren't their enemies exactly, and yet she spoke about them warily, in a guarded voice. The fields outside were staring with blue moonlight and the moon-shadows seemed more substantial than daytime ones. They heard the male owl calling and the female's more subdued response, like a flurry of talk.

— What's the owl doing? Arthur whispered.

— Killing things, said Ivy matter-of-factly.

Kasim was deeply asleep the next morning when Molly pushed open the door to his bedroom. The intrusion must have sounded an alarm in some deep chamber of himself, summoning him to the surface: he sat up quickly with a yell.

— What are you doing in here? What time is it?

It seemed to him it must be unreasonably early – dawn at least. Molly's hair was wet and she was wearing a towelling bathrobe; her skin was flushed pink and damp from her bath.

— Nine o'clock. Everyone's getting up. I've got good news. Guess what?

Confusedly aroused and sweaty from his dreams, Kasim felt at a disadvantage: probably his breath stank too. When Molly sat down on the side of his bed he imagined he could feel her wetness leeching into his blankets. Was she naked underneath that robe? She announced with glee that her iPhone had started working again. — The hair dryer must have done the trick, she said. — I never though it would. Isn't that great? I'm so relieved.

He was aghast at her prattling on about her phone – as if he cared. And when she'd gone out again he felt exposed because she'd seen inside his room that was too tidy and too empty: austere as a cell, with only a thin rug on bare floorboards, the walls painted a horrible icy pale blue. This décor seemed to stand for a certain kind of middle-class Englishness he loathed, chilly and superior and withholding, despising material comfort. His clothes were piled too neatly on the chair, his trainers tucked too obediently underneath it, side by side. He had created a kind of mystique for the others when he retreated inside this room to be alone, pretending he was working. But now Molly had seen inside it for herself, she knew he had no books with him, and that the room was only bleak and bare.

PILAR COMPLAINED THAT
she felt out of condition because she was missing her regular swimming sessions; Harriet said there was a pool in a hotel nearby that they could use, and so the two women drove off together in Harriet's car after breakfast one morning. Harriet had used this place before. It was a gloomy Victorian hotel built of red stone at the top of an inlet on the coast, surrounded by a caravan park; the pool was in a basement excavated underneath the building, lit by artificial light. The girl on reception opened it up for them reluctantly, and had to telephone the manager to find out how much to charge them, as non-residents. Harriet wanted to apologise to her sister-in-law – how dismally claustrophobic this pool must seem to anyone used to swimming outdoors. Then she remembered how Pilar had reproached her for always harking back to Argentina. Perhaps she accepted the silly pool as part of an England she was determined to belong to.

Yellow lamps like half shells were set against its walls all round, casting their light oddly upwards so that the water seemed oily, breaking up into shifting flat forms when they disturbed it. Pilar and Harriet changed into similar plain black swimming costumes. They were both strong swimmers, preferring crawl; really the pool was too short for them, but at least they had it to themselves. Swallowed in the muffling, booming underground acoustic, Harriet felt a kind of equality with the other woman for the first time – in the water her body, sleek and streamlined, didn't let her down. Perhaps after all they could be friends; Harriet glowed still, because Pilar had chosen to confide in her, or half-confide. For a while they swam up and down ignoring one another, absorbed in the release of physical exercise. Then Pilar challenged Harriet to a race – four lengths of the pool. Harriet knew that she was faster: she was never normally competitive but now she went all out to win, and felt a surge of power – she could have easily gone on for twenty lengths, or forty. Heaving herself half out against the side of the pool, chlorinated water streaming in her nose and eyes, she was breathless and laughing with triumph. They raced again as soon as they got their breath back. All Harriet's shyness and awkwardness were suspended while she was slicing through the water, buoyed up by her unexpected happiness.

After their swim they stripped out of their sodden costumes and towelled themselves in separate little cubicles, getting dressed side by side, not speaking, hearing each other moving around and bumping against the flimsy dividers. They went outside to drink hot chocolate in the hotel garden, which was built on terraces above a steep wooded coombe, descending to the estuary; the sun on the water below turned its calm surface to a gleaming zinc sheet, too bright to look at. Pilar combed out her wet hair with her fingers. She seemed preoccupied and serious, and began asking questions – brusquely, staring across Harriet's shoulder – about Harriet's old life, when she was involved in politics and an activist for various causes. Did she ever regret what she'd done in those days?

— Why do you ask? That's a difficult question.

— You don't look like a revolutionary, Pilar said bluntly.

Harriet wouldn't have consented to talk about this painful subject with anybody else, but she saw what an effort it took to ask her; mostly Pilar's conversation was practical and impersonal. Roland had told them how the shadow of Pilar's uncle's politics hung over their family – very likely any secrets had to do with him. Harriet said that she hadn't really been much of a revolutionary, she'd never done anything daring or sensational. — I suppose I did think I was helping the revolution along, which seems ridiculous now. All that campaigning and leafleting, and the meetings and demonstrations. I earned money by temping, in offices mostly – but it was as if the me that worked all day hardly existed. I used to believe I was sacrificing myself for something. I was sacrificing myself – but it was for the wrong thing. It was worse than nothing. It was beside the real political point. Other people were doing the real, political work, trying to change things for the better. We despised them because they were reformists, they weren't revolutionary enough.

Her story seemed far-fetched, told in the sunshine in the country garden. There was no one else out there with them, it was still early; the blanching, scouring light made the white china cups blaze on the table between them. The plastic cloth was weighed down with stones at the corners against any breezes blowing inland, but at that moment the stillness and heat seemed absolute. Nothing stirred, except the bees and other insects, in the flowerbeds planted with tall spiky yucca and acanthus and ornamental grasses. Pilar was reading Harriet's face intently. — I'm interested in people who change their minds, she said. — Switch from one thing to the other. Did you change your mind all at once? In one day?

— Of course it wasn't in one day, Harriet said. And she hadn't switched from one thing to another: she hadn't turned into a fascist or a conservative or anything. She hadn't stopped hating injustice and cruelty and suffering, or believing that it was important to act against them. But she had withdrawn from all the shapes of her old life, leaving it behind her like a shell. And then she had felt that she didn't have any shape of her own, without it. She hadn't any energy left over for a new involvement in the world. She had been ill for a while, really quite ill. Christopher had helped her through that bad time – he was an apostate too.

— Revolution here is like a tea party for children, Pilar said. — In England you take so much for granted. You have no idea.

— We have no idea. I know that.

— Where I come from, revolutionaries are terrible people. And the other ones are just as terrible. It's all death and endless conflict, making trouble for people who just want to live their lives.

— What kind of trouble? For your family in particular. You mentioned something the other day.

Pilar made an angry dismissing gesture, pushing her cup away. — I can't begin, she said. — I'm not ready to talk about it. I didn't mean to bring these stupid complications into Roland's life.

Insanely, Harriet found herself wanting to confess everything. She wanted to explain to Pilar how once she would have judged against her just because of her background and her type – but she didn't know how Pilar would respond, she didn't want her to recoil. She hated to think now about her old mistaken confidence, when she had divided up the world into the ones who were nobly wronged, and those who wronged them. Needless to say she had imagined her own family – her bourgeois family – on the culpable side. They hadn't ever been rich exactly, but they had always had education and an assumption of superiority, they were the inheritors and not the disinherited. She had thought that her whole life ought to be a kind of expiation of this privilege. This all seemed histrionic to her in retrospect.

Ivy was alone in the den on the front wall, setting out clock patience again, when – breaking into the peace which had seemed impermeable – the Pattens' car was suddenly all noisy presence in their lane. Its shiny red roof slid sinisterly close below her, then the car turned into the courtyard of the barn conversion opposite, crackling over the small stones and spitting them behind it. Hopeful, Ivy watched Janice Patten climb out from the driver's seat: it seemed wholly possible that, through some fluke or break in Ivy's flawed child understanding, Mitzi might come bounding out of the red car when Janice opened the rear door, and pay her necessary visit to a succession of sniffing places around the yard. Then everything would be all right again. But Claude Patten got out of the car instead, and stood stretching and groaning on the gravel. Janice only took some bags off the back seat. But if their dog was dead, how could they be so ordinary?

The last king – diamonds – appeared too soon; Ivy collected her cards together and climbed down from the wall, then wandered inside the house. Alice was playing something melancholy on the piano in the drawing room, and the music filled her with superstitious dread. She retreated upstairs, not announcing to anyone that the Pattens had arrived. Alone in her bedroom, she climbed under her duvet and began reading a book she had borrowed from the shelves in Alice's room, and had read at Kington before. All the time she was aware of voices coming and going downstairs, and felt herself passed over. When at some point she smelled baking she realised, martyred, that she hadn't had lunch. Finishing the book she put it back and took another one. Reading was consoling, when you knew in advance everything that had to happen.

Roland drove into town while Pilar was out with Harriet, to get the newspapers and check his emails – although Alice said they didn't want newspapers, not at Kington. — Can't we not know the news, just for a while? The world will get along fine without us being aware of what's happening in it.

— No one says you have to read them.

— But if I don't they sit expectantly, the news leaks out of them.

Molly asked to come: she wanted to show Kasim the amusement arcades she had loved when she was a child. On the way into town the young ones sat together in the back seat of the Jaguar; Roland imagined Kasim's hand on Molly's leg, bare under her shorts, against the leather upholstery – although he'd never actually seen them touching and there was no sign of anything more between her and Kasim than a frisson of attraction. Roland had always been delighted by his daughter – her easy compliance, her grace; he loved her easily, with a strong current of feeling. Because it was obvious she wasn't intellectual, he had never put any pressure on her to do well at school; that dreary parental fixation on achievement seemed to him a distraction from the real values of art and thought. Now he was taken aback by how much the idea of her sexual life troubled him. He didn't like Kasim; it was a strain keeping ahead of him in conversation, negotiating with his ignorance, his quick cleverness, his high opinion of himself. He flattered Roland almost negligently, as though he were bound to be pleased by it, and cheerfully pronounced his bleak verdicts on politics, on the economy, on the future of the planet. Roland was glad when, after he parked behind the Co-op, they agreed to go their separate ways.

In the library he was scrupulously polite, charming the librarian, then checked his emails among the spider plants and oversized romances and the tiny chairs in the children's section. A publisher wanted a foreword for a new series of film scripts; someone wanted a keynote for a conference on film iconography; his agent had forwarded him some nice remarks on a piece he'd written for the
Guardian –
it all reconnected Roland with his public self. He couldn't imagine a life without work at its heart; it was a frame redeeming everything flawed and incomplete. What he dreaded was coming to the end of his interest, finding himself bored; in his thirties he had panicked, feeling trapped inside his university department, then made strategic efforts to develop a career reaching beyond it. He tried to imagine how it must be for Alice, having pinned all her aspirations on her personal fulfilment and her relationships. Perhaps everything would be different if she had succeeded as an actress.

When he had finished in the library he bought himself coffee and a sandwich, and sat with his newspaper at a café table on the pavement; catching sight of Molly and Kasim wandering past, he pretended not to notice them. Kasim was biting into a burger wrapped in a greasy napkin, Molly was licking ice cream. Strolling along with the crowd of desultory holidaymakers, they didn't look quite like everyone else. No matter how scruffily and carelessly they were dressed they were marked out by their class and education, and by Kasim's brown skin – these old-fashioned resorts were still remarkably white, it was striking when you were used to the crowds in the big cities. Roland couldn't help himself chafing at the narrowness and dullness of the little town. Sitting out like this on the street in any small town in France or Tunisia or Brazil, he'd have felt alive and stimulated, observing everything excitedly, drinking it in. He couldn't enjoy this place, it was too familiar, it was home.

Molly and Kasim had played ice hockey in the arcades, skimming flat discs on a table, then fished for furry toys with a mechanical arm. They had exchanged the reams of tickets they won for a white china vase in the shape of a crumpled boot, which Kasim said he was going to give as a present to Alice, just to watch how it put her on the spot, having to appear grateful when it was the ugliest thing she'd ever seen. They had passed a tattoo parlour on their way up the street, and now he was trying to coax Molly into having a tattoo.

— Just a teeny, teeny little one. Just a tiny butterfly, say. On your ankle.

— You're joking! You must be joking. I'd rather die.

— I don't know what you're worried about. Come on, I gave up smoking, don't you think I'm suffering? It's only a little needle pricking away at the surface of your skin, just the very surface. It doesn't take that long. A couple of hours, say. Little needles full of ink. That's all. They keep them very clean. Your ankle's a long way from your brain.

— You're doing it deliberately, she exclaimed, only half enjoying it. — You're teasing me! I know you are.

Ivy's mother, looking in suspiciously from the bedroom door, asked what she was up to. — Why aren't you playing outside in this lovely sunshine?

— Why should I? I hate everyone.

— Don't be silly. The Pattens have arrived, and Janice has come over. Alice has made a cake. Needless to say she's left a fine mess in the kitchen.

— I wanted to make a cake, Ivy said. — It's not fair.

Her mother shut the door and went away.

When Ivy heard Janice Patten's voice downstairs in the drawing room – deep as a man's, but chattier – she left her book open on her pillow and dawdled reluctantly down the staircase, first hanging over the banister to listen, then trying to enter the room invisibly: she would have liked to snake along the floor on her belly then conceal herself under a chair. But Janice was on the lookout. — I spy with my little eye, she said in a sprightly, fake-surprised voice, — I do believe it's Princess Ivy.