Past (14 page)

— When?

— The other day, while you were busy playing.

Already that solitary visit seemed enshrined in myth: she could hardly believe in the audacity of that other Ivy, venturing bravely by herself to her tryst with the things upstairs. Arthur was visibly sceptical, jingling coins in his shorts pocket.

— I did come here, I really did! Anyway, why have you brought your money, stupid? There isn't anything to spend it in on in the countryside.

He said he'd thought that they might pass a shop; Ivy was scornful, but it gave her an idea. — It's a good job that you brought it actually. It will do as part of the sacrifice we need to make.

— What sacrifice?

She lowered her voice piously. — I told you. Because of the Dead Women.

Arthur took some persuading before she could get him to part with his pound coin – she had to peel back pale fingers finally, one by one, from where he clenched his treasure in his palm. Once he'd let go of it, however, he submitted gracefully to the ritual Ivy invented: upstairs, in the first room, they tore little washed-out pink pieces of body out of the pages of the magazines, and crumpled some of these, arranging them in a heap around the pound coin on the floor. Other samples, as Ivy called them, she thrust in her pocket. Bustling round, preparing the sacrifice, she sometimes almost forgot to be afraid of where she was, opening the door once into the last room almost casually, as if she was simply checking Mitzi was still there. Mitzi was, of course. She wasn't going anywhere – her remains in fact appeared diminished and contracted into a smaller, blander shape, into something leathery. She was beginning to seem part of the same substance as the room, and her smell was changing: still nasty, but more stale and ancient. Ivy's offhandedness, glancing at her, was proprietorial, like the habituated priestess of a cult. Arthur spent longer taking Mitzi in than Ivy did – she was the old hand.

Using Kasim's lighter – which Ivy had picked up from the desk in the study, because Kas didn't need it any longer – they set fire to the twists of paper; these curled and turned brown at the edges as the flame licked round them, and one of the women looked for a moment as if she was stretching, uncoiling luxuriantly to her full length, before she was consumed in a brief flare of heat and light. When they'd scuffed out the last spark responsibly Arthur wanted to have his coin again, but Ivy told him that would be unlucky, it belonged to the Women now; reluctant, gazing behind him over his shoulder when he left, he let it stay there. Their going downstairs wasn't at all like the first time, when nightmare jostled at their heels. Ivy eased the front door open where she had closed it behind them, lifting it on its hinges, Arthur pushing past her into the gap. Both of them saw at the same moment Kasim and Molly on the grassy bank some little way off: framed at eye level in the opening, dazzling and confusing in the suddenly blazing light, oblivious to the children watching.

And at that very moment Molly half-shuffled up on her elbows and reached up her mouth to Kas, who, cupping the curved back of her head in his palm, skewing his shoulders round to come at her from the right angle, reached down his open mouth to kiss her. Their heads moved in deliberate slow rhythm together, like licking at ice cream. This kiss hadn't occurred to the children as a possibility and they were shaken by what was indecently needy and exposed in it, exchanging glances ripe with derision and dismay. As soon as the lovers heard the children coming they sprang apart as if nothing had happened, and the children pretended they hadn't seen anything.

Roland and Alice drank flat glasses of leftover fizzy wine, stretched out on the grassy stubble in the garden in the afternoon sun, sharing a bowl of salted nuts instead of lunch. They had the place to themselves, everyone else was out. Roland was voluble from writing all morning in his room on his laptop, working on a review. Alice said that when she was an actress the reviews had almost killed her. The idea of that kind of implacable judgement was awful to her, pinned down in words on a page which couldn't be softened or unwritten. For once, instead of countering Alice – did he notice he was doing it, dissenting with a kind of patient forbearance from everything she put forward? – Roland seemed to attend sympathetically to what she was saying. Where had her self-doubt come from? When they were fifteen or sixteen, you'd have thought that Alice was the confident one, she had been so blithe and poised. No one could have imagined that Roland would come to speak with such assurance, such weight of authority behind him.

— In another era, Roly, you'd have made a wonderful vicar. I mean a really noble one. Founding a monastic order or taking the word to the heathen or something. I can just imagine it. While all of us sat at home knitting warm vests for you, dreadful spinsters, making a cult out of their precious brother and hating him secretly.

— That doesn't sound much fun for anyone.

— Probably more fun for the spinsters. You'd have got yellow fever and been nursed in your last days by a devoted native bearer, but your faith would have sustained you. Do you think our grandfather's faith sustained him? I mean, seriously, when Mum died. Or d'you think he lost it?

On the day of their mother's funeral, Roland remembered, their father had driven off somewhere with Alice in the old Bedford van; they'd arrived back very late when everything was over, and then Alice had thrown up all night from eating too much chocolate. Yet Roland had heard her on two separate occasions, as an adult, talk as if she was present at the funeral – and she seemed to think it had been here in Kington, not in a church in Marylebone. Their dad had claimed he couldn't stand the religious hypocrisy, and Alice had pretended she felt the same, though she had been too young to know what hypocrisy was. Roland had seen through the pair of them, father and daughter: he knew they were only afraid. Alice had been wearing some kind of punky, slippery, inappropriate silver party dress, which showed up her puppy fat and the small beginnings of her breasts; everything that day had been crazy and disordered, even their grandmother couldn't put it right. Roland was pierced with a strong pity for his sister sometimes – although this was out of character, and he wasn't convinced that pity helped anyone. Alice would have been dismayed if she'd known he felt it.

He pushed his fingers through his wiry curls. — I expect our grandfather believed God's providence was inscrutable. That's what the serious Christians think. Which seems reasonable enough. That's just about what I think, only without God.

His skin was faintly freckled with brown and he reminded Alice, with his brown eyes, of a speckled thrush; you could see the current of awareness moving in his face like a current in water. Their closeness for a moment was like the old days, she thought. She scrabbled in the bowl for nuts, got mostly salt. — It is inscrutable, isn't it? I find life pretty terrifying, don't you? And I'm such a coward. I certainly don't know what anything means. I mean, even the ordinary things frighten me, just the sadness of change and growing old and missed opportunities. And then there's the ugly way things are going – with the environment for instance. I know you get annoyed when you think I'm nostalgic for the old days, as if things were always better in the past. Perhaps they really weren't. But aren't you afraid of oceans full of plastic, melting ice caps, factory farms with lakes of pigswill? All the forests of Zambia cut down, and the animals becoming extinct in our lifetimes, and grubbing up the earth for filthy minerals, and everyone forgetting how to make beautiful things. Isn't that all so disgusting and threatening?

— But you've never been to Zambia.

— I read a book about it.

Roland stretched out in the sun, closing his eyes. — Am I afraid? At this moment I seem to feel an animal assurance of well-being, against all the promptings of my intellect. Anyway, how did we get so fast to the apocalypse? You bring everything around to the apocalypse, Alice.

— No, be serious. Own up to being afraid.

But Roland wouldn't own up, he smiled with his eyes still shut as if fear were just a phenomenon he was considering among others, interested in working out its implications.

— I really do think Pilar is gorgeous, Alice said. — You know I didn't mean what I said the other day, don't you? I'm sure she can fit in. Though I do find her a little bit intimidating. She's so organised and dynamic, she must think I'm good for nothing. It's nice how well she gets on with Harriet.

Roland clammed up then. He didn't want to talk with her about Pilar.

They were all invited across to the Pattens for dinner, including the children. There was something ceremonious in how they crossed the road in the early evening light, bearing bottles; Ivy concentrated, in charge of a glass dish of Fran's home-made chocolate truffles covered in cling film. Pilar brought white roses, cut from the garden wall. They felt clannish: bound together and identifiable, for once, as a family. Roland had Arthur hoisted on his shoulders as if, male, they ought to combine to overtop the female hordes; Arthur rode his uncle tranquilly, a small smile playing in his expression for no one in particular, steering lightly with his hands in Roland's hair, the boy-prince easy with acclaim.

Wordless, they all seemed to collect themselves in preparation for the hours of chatter to come, scuffing up a cloud of dust around their feet in the road, the women's different perfumes mingling in the disturbed, heavy air. Even Harriet was wearing perfume; even Roland had sprayed on cologne. Harriet carried herself with a self-conscious stiffness which warned off comment; she was wearing the skirt and blouse Alice had given her, and her own little silk scarf knotted at her neck – which Alice would not actually have advised. But Harriet's pretty earrings, bought apparently in some museum she'd once visited, caught the light, and her face was animated, tanned and pink from her trip to the seaside. And Molly moved, after her kiss, with a new languid fullness which only the children understood; her father, observing her daydreaming, suffered in fact a pang of worry, thinking how childlike and inexperienced she was. Kasim would be late to the supper party because he had chosen this moment to take a bath, though he'd been skulking in his room for hours. Molly hardly missed him: her idea of him was so vivid in his absence, completing her, that she half-dreaded his actual presence, complicating things.

Light from the low sun slanted through the windows of the church behind them, filling the stone interior and making it appear weightless, floating spirit-like among its graves. From inside the church that morning, while some of them were still slothful in bed, they'd heard the quavering of hymns; because it was used in rotation with the vicar's other three churches, they never quite remembered to expect it. None of them ever attended, to kneel on their grandmother's hassocks which were each embroidered with a different local wildflower. If a service was taking place, they only moved around more decorously and guiltily in the old rectory, and everyone was made aware of some pattern of significant time passing, marked out behind the succession of their own days, which were not distinguished one from another. The church kept count, while they were distracted.

Now, as they stepped into the Pattens' yard, white doves descended in a kerfuffle of fanned-out feathers, the spread wings backing up before landing with the noise a length of cloth makes when snapped in the air to straighten it. Claude Patten, whatever kind of architect he was (mostly old people's homes and shopping malls) had known better than to encroach upon the barn's ancient dovecote. Janice had researched on the internet which doves to choose, and how to keep them. She was waiting now, pink-skinned from her shower, curls damp, dressed up in a caftan of kingfisher-blue shot silk, full of proud-hostess smiles beside the tall glass doors which stood open to the yard. These let out the rich smells of her cooking: meat slow baked with tomatoes and wine and herbs, home-made bread. Behind her, opaque white globes – suspended on chains from the barn's rafters high above – shone with weak light over the long refectory-style table, laid with blue glass and yellow linen napkins. Alice thought it looked like a showy restaurant. The lamps were still outdone by the big low lemony sun outside – but this was about to sink behind the field of head-high exotic and shabby elephant grass, grown for biofuel, which rose behind the barn to the horizon. Janice hated the elephant grass
– it spoils my view but it isn't that, it's the ecological issue –
and had fallen out with the farmer over it.

She greeted her guests and kissed them and took grateful possession of the roses and the truffles, telling Roland she was afraid of him because he was so clever. Apologetic, Roland lifted Arthur from his shoulders and deposited him carefully. Claude, Janice insisted, summoning him ringingly from wherever he was lurking, must be put in charge of the bottles. Her guests felt that their long moment of silence, crossing the road, was suddenly a tangibly sweet thing between them, as they noisily broke it.

Coming late across the road – probably too late, he gloomily and indifferently thought, perhaps he shouldn't bother – Kas was almost in the dark. The huge evening sky wheeling overhead was a livid, electric blue, pocked with sparks of stars; it stalled him, so that he stood still in the middle of it, in the middle of the road, as if there was something he'd forgotten. His hair was still wet from his bath, picking up the evening's chill and soaking the collar of his last clean shirt; he had been too proud, or too lazy, to ask where he could do his washing, vaguely he'd been waiting to happen upon a washing machine somewhere. He had seen things drying today, hadn't he, on a line in the garden?

The tall windows in the barn were lit up and wide open and a clamour of voices floated from inside, along with the businesslike chink of cutlery and chiming of glasses. Kasim shuddered, entering the yard, not wanting to belong to that conviviality. He felt he didn't want to be initiated, ever, into any noisy crowd of friends and family, its claim a chummy arm dropped on his shoulders. Now he was alive, now. Apprehension could only be kept keen by being kept apart. Alice was protesting over something in that drawling voice which was always on the verge of either tears or teasing. — I'm afraid of everything, she was saying. — But Roland won't own up to fear, he just won't admit to it.