Past (28 page)

And then she had opened the gate and gone through, was immersed in the darkness of the wood and couldn't bring herself to call out again. When she switched on the torch it was as though what surrounded her leaped back, but not reassuringly, gathering intensity rather at the edges of the narrow light-tunnel of her vision. If she swung the light beam around, then the crooked slender trunks, ghost-pale, seemed drawn up in ranks, spelling something significant. What violence was it she feared, though she wasn't ever afraid in a city street? When with a crashing rumpus some animal – a deer? – broke unseen out of the dark ahead, bounding away, Alice was wrenched with shock. She told herself that she'd go through this first stretch of woodland, and no further; when she reached the wedge-shaped field – beyond which there were more woods – if Harriet wasn't there, she would turn back.

Climbing out of the wood, across another stile, she was surprised that there was so much light left in the sky. Milky mist was pooled here at the field's bottom below her; above her she could still make out distinctly the tall rocky banks and mounds of bramble, stunted thorn trees. Weren't those cows, standing at the top of the field across the stream, looking down attentively towards her? Some white shape, anyway, against the gloom. It was a relief to be out in the open. The deep cleft of a stream, overgrown with more brambles, bisected this field in a meandering line; unseen, it babbled in its hollows like a muffled clapper in a bell. Again Alice called out, sing-song.
Het-tie! Har-riet!
She stared up at the distant white shape, which seemed to be lying now along the ground, then started towards it, stumbling on the tussocky rough grass, torch beam jerking inconsequentially.

— Hettie! Is it you? Are you there?

If it was a cow, it might scramble to its feet and charge at her, knock her down. Everything in the night was alive with threat. And Alice couldn't understand, if the shape was Harriet – too slender, and too tapered, after all, for a cow – why she didn't move, and why she showed up in that distinctive way, an inert pale smudge against the gathering darkness of the field. If it was Harriet, she seemed to be turned away, concentrating intently over something private. Alice's ears were filled with her own gasping for breath as she hurried up the slope, boots slipping in the wet. She fell and cracked her knee sickeningly against a rock, struggled up again. Water boiled somewhere nearby in a cold rage, the stream must be falling over a lip of stone. Peering ahead, poking the torch beam, Alice saw then in one scrambled recognition that her sister lay naked on the grass, fork-limbed, face down, bottom up. The violence of the night had been made real, the worst had happened – even though Alice in her horror refused its truth with all her force, protesting aloud against it. It couldn't be so, but it was. The protest, even as she made it, seemed directed at no one present who could hear it.
No! No, no, no!

Then Harriet lifted her head, twisting her neck to look up over one shoulder, squinting into the torch beam. — Oh Alice, why did you come? she said. — I wanted to die.

Alice was overwhelmed. She couldn't bear Harriet to know she'd believed she was dead, and directed the torch at her accusingly, dazzling her. — But what are you doing here? Where are your clothes?

— I threw them in the water, so that I couldn't change my mind.

— Change your mind about what?

— I don't know. I just wanted to die. I'd had enough.

— You're kidding. You're not serious. Whoever, in the whole history of idiocy, tried to kill themselves by catching cold in the middle of summer?

— I don't know. It turns out I don't even know how to die.

Shining the torch around, Alice found Harriet's woollen jumper, caught in a bramble bush and not quite fallen in the stream. One cuff was soaked where it had dangled down. — Put this on. At once.

— But I haven't got my underwear.

— Have you gone mad? Oh yes, I forgot, obviously you have gone mad. It doesn't matter about your underwear, you idiot. I'll give you my jumper too, to put on top. We have to stop you getting hypothermia – not that I seriously think you
could
get hypothermia at this time of year. I'll give you my skirt as well.

While they talked, Alice was dressing her sister as best she could, pulling the jumper over Harriet's lolling head, rolling up the wet cuff, then taking off her waterproof and her own jumper, putting these on Harriet too. Harriet was compliant but she didn't help, she let Alice put her clothes on for her as if she were a child; her arms were heavy, quite separate things from any will of hers, Alice had to lift them and force them into the sleeves. Harriet said that she was numb. The night was cold, but not unbearably; at first Harriet wasn't even shaking, and then when she began she couldn't stop.

— You see, we have to put everything on you, Alice said. — I'm all right, I'm warm, it really isn't that bad, you've just got yourself into a state. Although I hope we don't meet anyone when we get to the village, me in my knickers. What were you thinking of? What were you thinking?

— You've no idea what's happened to me, what an awful thing I've done.

— Yes I do, Alice said. — I do have some idea. You made some kind of pass at Pilar and she turned you down. Don't worry, she hasn't told anyone, she won't. No one knows. I just guessed. This stuff happens to everyone. It's happened to me a million times over. I mean, mostly with men, it's true, and not with women. But actually, it did happen with a woman once.

Miserably Harriet turned her face away, closing her eyes.

— I know that just because it happens to everyone, that doesn't make it any better. But didn't you
think
about the rest of us, Hettie, and how we love you? Look at me, open your eyes! Isn't it amazing that I found you? I
knew
you'd be here, in this field at the end of the first wood, I knew. I came out because it was unbearable, waiting at home and worrying. And Fran said it was such a bad idea, because we hadn't a clue which way you'd gone, and she was perfectly sensible of course, I was the daft one as usual. But I just had this instinct! Something guided me, although it was all so dark and so awful. You know I've always believed in all that stuff. And now I've found you, thank goodness! And I've saved you! Isn't that amazing!

— But I didn't want to be saved.

— Yes you did. You did really. You just don't know it yet.

Kasim made Molly wait outside the cottage for a few minutes while he hurried about inside, lighting the candles and the fire which he'd laid ready, spreading out the blankets on the floor in front of the fire. It didn't smell too bad. Molly was afraid of the dark, she pressed up against the far side of the door, moaning through the crack in her distress. — Can't I come in yet?
Please
, Kas! Let me in. It's horrible out here.

Then he was suddenly nervous when he did let her in, in case she made fun of what he'd done in the cottage, which he was so proud of. He watched her face uneasily; he couldn't get used to how different she looked with her hair sticking out all over her head in those weird plaits – exposed and mocking at the same time, like a clown. She was a stranger whom he hardly knew. When she smiled around her, liking everything, he remembered that women bestowed those bright smiles to encourage men's efforts and be kind to them, whatever they really thought. So he didn't trust her, and felt slightly vengeful.

— Oh, it's lovely, Kas. You've made it lovely. I'm so glad I stayed.

He got busy with opening the wine – it turned out to have a screw top, no need for the corkscrew – and emptying a packet of crisps into a bowl. They sat down on the blankets in front of the fire, which was burning well – he'd been drying the wood in preparation for a few days. Everything at least was going as he had planned. Still, Molly's idea of what happened next might not be quite the same as his. She might just think that they were going to spend the evening kissing and touching each other and getting worked up as usual, and then blow out the candles and go home. Strategically, according to his plan, Kas ought to be topping up her wine every time she tasted it. But when he tried, Molly put her hand across the top of the glass, saying she didn't want to get too drunk. Then she kissed him and her mouth was full of wine, which flooded into his mouth, shocking him. Had she done that deliberately?

So he kneeled up to kiss her back, more forcefully, bearing down on her from above, pushing his fingers up between the knotty plaits on the back of her head, lifting her face towards his, so that she was craning upwards. After a minute or so she twisted away, complaining she'd get a crick in her neck. — So, she asked him, beaming as if she had some secret. — Are you getting used to seeing me in a dress?

Kas couldn't believe that she was still worrying about what to wear. — It's a ridiculous dress, he said. — It looks awful.

Molly leaned forward to whisper, her breath tickling his ear. — All right then.

— All right what?

— If you don't like it, I'd better take it off.

Before he'd even understood, she stripped the dress in one easy movement over her head. Underneath it, she had nothing on. Her body was known to his hands, or half-known, but he was seeing it for the first time, as if she was newborn in the firelight licking over her: the little tipped-up breasts with blunt pink nipples, the long hollow of her stomach with slightly protruberant navel, the shadowy fluff at the crux of her, where she knelt with her thighs pressed together. She smiled at him shyly; she still had her mint imperial earrings on. — So, what do you think? Do you like me?

Kasim hardly knew where to begin.

— Don't be too anxious about this, he said. — I'll be very gentle. I've had quite a bit of experience.

— I've had some too, Molly said. — So I'm not anxious.

FRAN AND ALICE
took turns all night to sit up with Harriet. Alice had told Fran everything. First they made Harriet drink hot tea with sugar and brandy in it, then they put her in her own bed to sleep, dressed in her pyjamas with a tee shirt underneath. They filled hot water bottles in relays – wrapping them in towels, careful not to put them too near her skin – and piled two duvets on her. Her flesh had felt so cold and unresponsive when they helped her take off her outdoor clothes – she'd lolled against them, not speaking, with her eyes half rolled up into her head. Fran phoned Jeff, to ask him to check on the internet whether they were doing the right things, or whether they ought to call a doctor. The brandy, it turned out, might have been a mistake. But she did seem warmer now, when they slipped a hand to check between the layers of her bedding. She had turned on her side to sleep, with her knees pulled up, and sometimes she snored. They didn't know how long she'd been exposed out in the field. Probably she'd only taken off her clothes when it began to get dark.

Alice also had to have hot tea, and sit with a blanket round her, and the electric heater turned on in the room; she wanted the brandy even if Jeff said it would make her worse. The horrors of her adventure – dressed only in her knickers and the wellingtons and a shirt, fortunately a long shirt, getting Harriet back through the wood and across the field – were already hardening into legend as she narrated them. Harriet had managed to walk, leaning heavily on her, stumbling and slithering. At least she hadn't thrown her boots into the stream along with her clothes – apparently she'd thought at the last moment that they might be useful to somebody. Fran said that Alice was a hero. They told the children, who weren't in bed yet when Alice and Harriet arrived home, that Harriet had had a fall, and couldn't move till Alice found her – which was what they'd told Jeff, and agreed to tell everyone.

— It's just such amazing luck that you persisted, Fran said again. — I feel so guilty! What if you'd listened to me?

— It wasn't luck. I knew. Something was guiding me, or someone. Don't you think it was our mother?

— Oh no, Alice, no. Don't say that, that's awful. What nonsense. You don't really believe it.

Fran was strictly rational, she put it all down to Alice's psychological insight. Harriet opened her eyes out of her sleep every so often, as if making sure they were still sitting there. — Say something, Harriet, Fran urged her. — We need to know you're compos mentis.

— I am compos mentis, she mumbled, closing her eyes again.

The bedside lamp shed a rosy light; Alice had thrown a red silk scarf over its shade. Outside a wind began to blow, unexpected after the afternoon's stillness, buffeting the house and rattling the windows. When Alice woke from dozing, in the armchair they'd carried in from Roland's room, again her sister's eyes were open, staring at her – but as soon as Alice spoke she closed them and pretended to be asleep. There was something almost voluptuous, Alice thought, in how Harriet was submitting to their attentions, allowing them to dress and undress her, spoon tea into her mouth, talk about her over her head. Ordinarily, in her austere life, there was no one to indulge her or make a fuss of her – certainly Christopher didn't. She held herself stiffly apart from anyone's pity. But now she claimed their care as unselfconsciously as a child, not even trying to thank them or to apologise for making trouble. It stirred Alice but also made her fearful, to see how far her sister was straying from her old self, undoing the vexed knots which had held her tight. She knew from her own experience what a great labour it was, binding up again all the mess of self, which in your extremity you had unbound.

When Fran had put the children to bed, she came back into Harriet's room and didn't sit down, kept going to look out into the darkness, through the window – which didn't look out onto anything much, only the scullery and the outhouses and back door. A light outside this door illuminated the wind tearing into the beech trees, raking through the leaves and stripping them, twisting them so that they flashed pale-side out. Fran didn't want to worry Alice, but there was no sign of Molly or Kasim: she had turned on the outside light in the hope of guiding them home if they were lost. Where on earth had they disappeared to? — What's the matter with everyone today? she protested.

So that second anxiety kept them up all night, began to consume them as the hours passed, and they took it in turns to catch half an hour's sleep. It seemed better somehow to keep a vigil through the young ones' absence than sleep through it. Should they phone Roland? But what was the point of worrying him, when there was nothing they could do until the morning? Should they phone the police? Alice said she was sure Kas and Molly were all right somewhere, she had a feeling. — And even if they were out all night, they could keep each other warm. Like the babes in the wood.

Fran groaned. — Are you allowed to be fanciful for ever now, just because you've found one missing person? It's horrible out there.

— Probably they got lost and then they walked until they found a pub somewhere, had a few drinks and booked a room to stay over.

— Though you'd think they could have called us in that case.

— I'll bet they haven't got the number.

— And if it turns out, Fran added, — that they have spent the night together in a room in a pub, let's not tell Roland.

In the morning Fran went in early to the children's room, to interrogate them in case they knew anything. Because the day was brilliant, scoured clean by the night's storm, as she was about to pull the curtains open she noticed the light shining – like sequins or a burnished silver thread – through a number of tiny crosswise slits in the cloth, as if it had been deliberately nicked. Rousing the children, she demanded to know what had happened, but they met her with bemused blank faces. Confused and hot from their sleep, still in thrall to their dreams, it genuinely hardly seemed to Ivy or Arthur as if they were the same selves who knew all about the curtain-slits. But this first refusal set them fatefully on the primrose path of denial. Glumly they shook their heads when Fran asked them next if they knew anything about where Kas and Molly had gone. At the kitchen table, tousled and stuffy in their pyjamas, they bent their heads far down in silence over their bowls of rice krispies and golden nuggets, scooping in milk like model children who only wanted to be left in peace to play.

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.