Past (11 page)

Janice had an idea that her neighbours were arty and eccentric, and saved up stories about them: they were part of the local history along with their grandfather, even if they were letting that lovely old house decline into a dreadful state. Ivy had forgotten she was wearing the silky petticoat. It was stained and torn now and she had only put it on again this morning as a kind of penance. Giving up snaking, she plonked herself, pouting, in a chair.

— Someone's in a mood, Fran apologised.

— I wanted to do cooking, Ivy said. — Mum, you promised I could.

— Darling, I wish you'd been helping me, Alice said. — Why didn't you say? My cake's a disaster, it's flat as a pancake. Listen, Janice, if you'd rather have a biscuit …

Janice reassured her insincerely.

Alice contemplated her cake. — Actually, it
is
a biscuit.

Fran and Alice were so eagerly hospitable – fussing round Janice, bringing out the old story about the lady with the flowing hair in the teacups (Janice was expert in antiques) – that Ivy could tell they wished Janice hadn't come over. She was tall and bulky with a small head and pink skin and small quick blue eyes glancing everywhere; her surprising shock of yellow silky curls was beginning to grey and her silk shirt was tight over her bosom, its button straining under pressure. — Talking of moods, she said, — Claude's taken to his bed. He claims he's exhausted after the journey even though I drove all the way.

— It is exhausting, Alice sympathised. — I'm a back-seat driver and I know just how he feels. In fact I'm exhausted just thinking about driving. I could climb right in there
with
Claude. Well, not literally
with
Claude, obviously.

Janice said Alice was welcome to him, warning that he snored and kicked like a horse. Cross-legged on the floor, Arthur was painting his fingernails with Molly's clear varnish, dipping the little brush in the bottle with scrupulous concentration. — Doesn't anyone think they ought to stop him? Ivy said wearily. — Isn't he bound to get varnish everywhere? That clear stuff is a waste of time anyway. Nothing looks any different afterwards.

— It strengthens your nails, said Arthur.

— He's making a lovely job of it, Fran said. — Molly won't mind.

Arthur lifted his eyes from where he was dabbing the brush on his nails, reproaching his sister without words, soulfully: only she knew how innocent he wasn't. — Why didn't you bring Mitzi? he asked Janice.

— Yes, where is Mitzi? Alice joined in merrily, handing Ivy a slice of cake on a plate.

Janice had just taken a bite of cake, and had to put her hand in front of her mouth while she chewed, signalling distress in her expression, before she could tell them. Too much was at stake to be borne: Ivy dropped the plate – one of the same set as the teacups. There seemed to be a cartoonish moment of suspension, such was the tension, before it bounced and landed upside down on the rug and didn't break; then when she jumped up she pressed it onto its cake under her shoe, and heard it crack.

— Look what you've done now! Fran accused.

Alice said it didn't matter, there were plenty more plates and as far as the cake was concerned it was for the best. — There aren't more plates, cried Ivy. — These are the only ones!

Janice, swallowing, was distressed. — Didn't you know? she exclaimed. — We lost Mitzi! I thought you knew.

— We didn't know. We don't really talk to anyone. We talked to Simon Cummins. He didn't say anything.

Janice had to mop at her tears with a tissue pulled from her sleeve while she told them the story; Arthur all the while appeared absorbed in wafting his nails to dry them, the way he'd learned from watching Molly.

— It was while we were down here at Easter. She just disappeared one morning and at first I didn't think much of it, she was always off on her little escapades. But this time she didn't come back. We hunted for her everywhere for days. Claude thinks she ran out in front of a car, and it's true that she was awfully silly about cars. But I believe she was kidnapped. The pedigrees are worth an awful lot of money. I tell myself she's living the life of luxury with doting new owners somewhere, sleeping on velvet cushions and eating chicken breast and grilled tomato. Do you remember how she loved grilled tomato? Though I still think she'd be pining for us – and how would they find out, about the tomato? We stayed on for days longer than we meant to, because I was just haunted by the idea that she would turn up and we wouldn't be there. I used to think every night that I could hear her scratching at the door and whining, and in the end Claude refused to go down and look, he said I was going potty. It's only a dog, he said.

— It wasn't only a dog, cried Alice. — It was Mitzi!

— If she'd been knocked down, Fran said, picking up the pieces of the plate, — surely someone would have found her body by now?

— That's what I think. But Claude says people who kill dogs don't want to face the music, they drive off with the body and get rid of it at the other end of the country.

— Claude's got a vivid imagination, hasn't he?

— You do hear the most amazing stories though, Alice said, — about dogs coming back to their owners after years and years.

— Oh I know, Janice said. — It's what I'm counting on.

Ivy was aware then of Arthur gazing at her expectantly, and knew she ought to stop them hoping for what wasn't possible: she opened her mouth to speak. But at that moment Fran started sweeping the cake mess crossly from around Ivy with the dustpan and brush, prodding her feet out of the way with the brush-end as though she didn't care about the dog at all. Looking down at her mother on her knees, bent over the sweeping, Ivy was suddenly protective of her secret: in all its ugliness it belonged to her, and she didn't want the grown-ups taking it over, sorting it out and cleaning it up, not yet – although the words unspoken felt stifling in her mouth. Arthur wouldn't say anything, she was sure, if she didn't. She knew that, by refraining, she shut herself out from decency and safety. While they were all still being sorry about Mitzi she announced outrageously that she needed more cake. — No one round here seems to appreciate I'm actually starving to death.

Janice reproached her: she shouldn't use the word starving when there were children in African countries who really were. Then Alice said Janice made her feel guilty, because she for one was always using it. When Ivy had eaten her dry cake, which almost choked her, she went upstairs again, stomping on every step, burdened, feeling herself impossible. She tried on lipstick at Alice's dressing table, pressing too hard and breaking off the little tube of red paste. Then she wandered next door and rummaged in Harriet's chest of drawers, found the diary hidden under her clothes. Harriet's writing was very small, covering page after page. There didn't seem to be anything secret in it, just stuff about walks and birds and people.
Sat next to P. tonight at supper. Am I happy? I think I'm happy, but it's close to madness.

Ivy scribbled over the pages with the broken lipstick. She wrote
fuk
upside down, spelling it deliberately wrongly, and then added Arthur's name in sprawling uncertain baby letters which were nothing like Arthur's actual rather careful writing. Harriet's white pillowcase and sheet were smeared with the vermilion lipstick.

That afternoon Alice went out for a walk by herself. She wanted to be alone: she had chafed at their conversation with Janice in the drawing room, so limited and stale. When the others came back from swimming it wasn't any better; Pilar and Fran were actually discussing house prices. In company Alice was so often disappointed; she dreamed of an ideal sociability, when her most pressing and important thoughts would flow out easily into words and be understood, and she would be equally attuned to the real thoughts of others. Once, she and Roly used to talk on and on for hours about everything – religion and art and death – understanding each other completely. But these days he was so guarded, and put up all his cleverness and his knowledge like a barrier against her, to keep her out. Since he'd arrived at Kington with Pilar, Alice had never had him to herself for a moment.

This wounded her – and yet this morning she had been seized by remorse and affection for her family, after her bad behaviour the other day. She had baked the cake as a warming, heartening surprise, to bring the whole family together – then the cake hadn't risen and no one had wanted it. Also, Janice Patten had turned up. Alice was sorry about their dog, but Janice's sharp eyes went probing everywhere, and you could see she was storing up things to make stories out of; she seemed to be friends with everyone in the village, though she didn't spend any more time in it than they did. She was always telling them news about people whose names they didn't recognise. On the whole Alice preferred Claude to Janice, even though he was pampered and self-indulgent, with a paunch and a bald head like a tonsure, fringed with greasy grey hair straggling down past his shoulders. Claude was an architect – that was why their barn conversion was so nice, although also a bit fake and sterile in its good taste.

All Alice's irritations fell away as she walked.
My beloved,
she thought, tramping along through the first stretch of the woods, where the undergrowth was sparse in a plantation of conifers. She didn't mean Claude Patten – she laughed out loud at the idea. Sunlight pierced the dense pine canopy high above and fell in shafts through the dusty brown space that made her think of an empty theatre.
My beloved, my dear love, my heart's own.
It wasn't Claude! Since she'd been in Kington, her solitary reverie seemed to fall into these cadences like a love letter – a love letter such as, in fact, she'd never written. In her actual love letters she'd always been rather light and dry and funny – either that or anguished and savage. Anyway, nobody wrote love letters any more, nobody wrote letters. Lovers just checked in with each other every hour of the day on their phones, exchanging banalities. But this yearning inward voice of hers was like a tic, a new habit of her heart, which seemed to stumble with excitement in her breast. Yet there was no one. She was living in this keyed-up expectancy, but with no particular man in mind. Was this the form neurosis was going to take, in her middle age? She would have to discuss it with her therapist. Alice called Eva a therapist but she couldn't afford a real one, Eva was more of a counsellor and often overstepped the mark, advising her rather strongly: their talks were more like intimate chats between friends. Once Eva had even told Alice to
pull her socks up
. On the other hand, she didn't charge her if she was short of money.

When she was through the woods, Alice struck into a steep lane that wound up the hillside – she met no one, and no cars passed her. Nothing came this way. The lane was strewn with branches fallen in the last high wind; huge oaks growing out of the banks were contorted and bulging with age, their grey hides deeply fissured and crusty. In the high hedgerows the delicate flowering plants of early summer had yielded to coarsely thriving nettles and bramble and dock, rank in the heat. She crossed a stile, then climbed a stubble field up to where cylindrical bales of straw were stored in a Dutch barn. At the top of the hill the wide landscape was proffered bleached and basking, purged of its darkness: there were views across the shining estuary all the way to the blue hills of Wales and, behind her, inland to the moors. But Alice didn't seek out that sensation of overview, where a place seemed to be explained and put in context as if it was a map laid out: at any given point on a walk, Roland could always tell you which way was north. She would rather burrow into the place she was and lose herself, unsure of how the intricate folds of the hills all fitted together.

On her way down she lay for a long time on her back on the earth in the hidden corner of a meadow of tall grass, in the half shade under a stand of sweet chestnuts. She was thinking about a science programme she'd seen on television, and felt as if she could see deep into the meaning of the creative and destructive pulses which made up the dynamic of creation. At this late point, now, if it were still possible, would she like to have a child? Was that missing from her life? Mixed in among her grandmother's letters she'd found a number of slips of tissue paper, wrapped round locks of blonde baby hair pale and light as breath, or tiny teeth. These might have been her mother's – or her siblings', or her own; she hadn't shown them to anyone, and they caused her some convoluted pain of exclusion and loss. But the truth was that whenever in the past she'd come close to the reality of having a child, she hadn't felt any joyful anticipation – only a muddled panic, like darkness closing in. All those little eggs which were inside her when she was born: Alice imagined them like clusters of tiny pearly teeth, and the idea of them washing away one by one was a relief as well as a regret.

Then she thought she saw a skylark soar up out of the field, streaming with song, balancing on its invisible jet of air – but as soon as she sat up on her elbows she doubted her identification. The bird was just a dot in the sky, too far off to be certain. Surely the skylarks had gone long ago from this part of the country? Everything was in decline. What a compromised generation theirs was, she thought. Materially they had so much, and yet they were haunted by this sensation of existing in an aftermath, after the best had passed.

Ivy unravelled at bedtime into one of her tantrums. The house seemed swollen for a while with her loud weeping and accusations. — I can't sleep in this dirty old bed. All the springs are sticking up through the mattress: look at these scratches on my legs. It's like a torture chamber! I want a bedroom of my own. You never think about me, do you? You only love Arthur. I want to go home to Daddy! Other children get taken on real holidays, in aeroplanes. I hate it here! I wish I was dead. I'm so bored! There's nothing to do.