Past (15 page)

Disgusted, Kasim imagined them all laughing with their mouths full. But he was bent upon Molly and must go inside: Molly was silent amid the crowd as he was. The memory of their kiss washed over him and he was strained with sexual longing. Then an unexpected fat drop of warm rain struck his cheek, out of the night-blue sky which had seemed cloudless. At first he thought that his wet hair was dripping, then he felt another drop and heard the rain's secretive patter swelling all around, too quietly for them to hear inside, rustling in the Pattens' gravel, sending up little puffs of the parched dust.

JILL FELLOWES CAME
home to her parents at Kington in 1968, with her three children, in flight from her husband: she believed that she was finished with him for ever. She had never stopped calling herself Jill Fellowes – in her own mind and, mostly, when she met people – although it was useful being married for the benefit of Harriet's school, and at the doctor's. When her mother wrote to her the envelopes were always addressed to Mrs T. R. Crane. Her mother wrote every week, her letters filled with news of the nothing that happened at Kington, salted with her perpetual irony.
The big story around here is that the shop has thrown in the towel and refuses to sell anything apart from sliced bread, they say it's too much trouble, and you know your father won't eat it. I expect this Sunday's sermon will be punishing.
Every week, dutifully, Jill had written back, dry in return. In return telling her mother nothing, nothing.

Late one afternoon in May, Jill's mother, dressed in her oldest slacks and gardening shirt, straightened up from weeding in the front garden of the old white house beside the church, in an empty pause. She was extremely thin – bony, she called it – graceful and washed out, with pale grey-blue eyes and iron-grey hair which grew oddly upwards, like a crest. Was she thinking in those moments of her budding roses, and the shepherd's pie for supper, like a caricature of a vicar's wife? Just then a noisy arrival broke in upon the sealed, blissful, tedious peace of the place, and her beloved only daughter and her grandchildren unfurled from an unfamiliar panting, juddering car on the road outside, like an apparition, utterly unexpected. The car was a Morris Traveller, with Tudor panelling.

Sophy wasn't really thinking of shepherd's pie. She had slipped, as she often did when she was alone, into the dark pool of herself, beneath conscious awareness: she might have been standing, dreaming of nothing, for five seconds or five minutes. So that when she saw her daughter she really thought in that first instant – uncharacteristically, because she was rational and sceptical, the faith that bound her slender sometimes as a thread – that she was subject to a vision. Of the Stanley Spencer kind: a domesticated miracle. The children were beautiful as angels but also sticky and filthy, Hettie was ghastly pale, Roland's glasses were mended at the bridge with sticking plaster, baby Ali's curls were flattened with sweat, as if she had been roused from sleep against her mother. Whining at being put down on the road, she stumbled after Jill, clinging to her coat so that Jill almost fell over her.

— Keep hold of her, Hettie, will you?

The Morris Traveller wasn't Jill's. She couldn't drive and anyway couldn't possibly have afforded a car. They'd come from London on the train, then the bus, and then finally as they set out to walk the two miles from where the bus put them down, through the winding lanes into Kington – looking like refugees from the dust bowl or something, Jill said – someone passing had taken pity on them and given them a lift. When she had heaved the folding pushchair and a suitcase from behind the back seat, Jill leaned in through the open front passenger window, smiling, and Sophy heard her daughter fulsome and charming as she'd been brought up to be.
So very kind of you … saved our lives.
The Morris reversed into the Brodys' farm entrance opposite, and was off by the time Sophy had dropped her trowel and hurried down to the gate.

— My dear ones, my best boy and girls, she said. — What's happened?

— We stink, Jill said flatly. — They'll have to open all their windows to get rid of us. Harriet was sick on the bus, I had nothing to wipe it up with except her own cardigan. The whole journey's been sheer hell. And they weren't actually coming to Kington, they made a detour just for us. No idea who they were, only they seemed to know us. We're badly in need of a bath.

— Oh, but who
was
it?

Sophy worried about an intricate network of obligations and favours. — How nice of them! I'd like to thank them.

— I pretended I knew. Cunningly I said,
So, how are you all?
But their lives were too bland for identification. A daughter called Penny, who rides? Anyway, they were nosy, they wanted to know why Dad hadn't picked us up at the station. I said we'd just come on an impulse. Which we have.

— Darling, you could have phoned the Smiths. How can I feed you all? The loaves and fishes thing doesn't
work
with shepherd's pie, when it's such a tiny one. And you know that the Smiths really don't mind. It's only your father's obstinacy, that he won't have a phone put in. Now the shop's shut. I'll have to go over to Brodys for some eggs.

— We don't eat eggs.

Roland broke the news solemnly.

— Oh
god,
said Jill. — I really began to think we'd never get here, that we'd just have to sleep under a hedge or something. And you're worrying about a little thing like eggs.

— You shouldn't say god, said Hettie. — Grandfather doesn't like it.

— He isn't here. He's visiting the sick.

— Thank god for the sick, said Jill. — We can swear until he gets back.

Sophy put the kettle on for tea. It was astonishing that Jill and her children were suddenly real, and in the house with her. Usually before their visits – or before her own visits to their chaotic, unsuitable flat over a shop in Marylebone High Street – she had time to prepare to be astonished. If only she'd had time at least to change out of these old clothes. She had become more familiar, she realised, with the wistful dream of her daughter than with this actual woman: decisive, her face keen with the extreme leanness of young motherhood, her colouring which made Sophy think of a thrush, the careless switch of her tawny hair swinging from where she pulled it into a ponytail high on her head. Her crumpled shirt dress was so short – she had taken up the hem herself, Sophy could see, sewing in childish big stitches. Pale lipstick had seeped into the cracks in her lips, and she had painted her eyes. When she lowered her gaze, the heavy, strongly convex mauve lids could have belonged to a saint in a vision, but the eyes when they looked up took in everything with too much appetite.

Jill had come wearing her winter coat, because it was easier than carrying it; the coat was too thick for the cloudy, mild spring day, and her cheeks were hectic with the heat. Now she shrugged it off and dropped it on a chair in the hall, strode through the house and out through the French windows, into the garden where she threw herself down, flat on her back on the lawn: the earth's deep chill seeped up through her dress, refreshing her. For a moment it was as if she was still seventeen, and had never left. Then the baby toddled after her and settled crowing with triumph astride her, bouncing until Jill groaned and pushed her off, lifted the little top of her romper suit printed with strawberries and blew noises on her tummy.

Her mother asked Jill carefully, over their cup of tea, where Tom was.

— Oh, he's in Paris. He's revolting.

For once Sophy's irony failed her. — Revolting?

— You know. Isn't that what revolutionaries do: revolt?

— Well, goodness. I hope he isn't getting into trouble.

— That's the whole point of a revolution, Mum, Jill said. — Trouble is what you're hoping for. Anyway, Tom's hoping for it, so he can write about it for his paper.

Evasive, not commenting, Sophy stirred the tea in her cup, chinking the spoon against the porcelain. Her doubts about Tom, transparent to her daughter, mostly went unspoken. — I'll be so interested to hear what he thinks. I don't know what to make of it. Aren't the students going too far? There was a lot of idealism in the beginning. And the French police are brutes, aren't they?

— Not like the nice English policemen.

But Jill didn't want to get into a row about politics with her mother. She was sick of her own tired old opinions and indignation; at this moment, in truth, she couldn't care less about Paris. She could just imagine what was going on over there: everyone denouncing all the wrongs in the world as if no one had ever denounced them before, all those students who'd never done a day's work in their lives, so delighted with their sacrifices on behalf of the ‘workers'. Of course when she imagined those things she was really imagining Tom.

She had thought that when she arrived home she would spill over with her sorrows to her mother right away. Through all the difficulties of the long journey with the children, she had had this sensation as if she were holding the burden of these sorrows up out of the way and guarding them with her life: like a messenger in a story carrying something of terrible import, a signal for war or an enemy's severed head. As soon as she was actually in Kington, her urgency diffused. How could she have forgotten this muffling effect of her home, where plain speaking was always deferred until a moment which never came? Instead they worried about eggs – and she found herself joining in, over the eggs, and the sheets and the hot water, as if these would suffice as coded, generalised expressions of affection, and concern. She waited for her mother to ask why she had come so precipitously, without warning. Perhaps Sophy really hadn't read anything between the lines of all the letters Jill had sent, hadn't intuited the failure of her marriage. Jill felt gratified and lonely both at once; loftily so much more experienced than her mother.

Later, when Sophy climbed upstairs with her arms full of the clean sheets she had been airing in front of the Rayburn, she saw through the open door of the bathroom that Jill was naked in the bath with all the children. Startled, she turned her eyes away from all that flesh, from the clambering, slithering, chubby limbs flushed pink in the hot water, and from her daughter's bare breasts, still plump and shapely even though she'd fed three babies. All piled in together, they were splashing water everywhere on the lino. Some people round here would disapprove, Sophy knew, of the promiscuous bathing. She didn't disapprove, but the sight made her afraid for Jill, as if it was a signal from the kind of life Jill had now, which Sophy couldn't imagine: initiated into goodness knows what, in London with Tom. Sophy thought that she had not looked directly for a long time at any adult's nakedness, not her husband's, rarely even her own. Snapping out a sheet, ironed into its perfect squares, over the bed in Jill's room, she was startled by catching sight of an old woman – clothed, thankfully – in the dressing-table mirror: tall, and so thin she seemed made like old bentwood furniture, with all the colour leached out of her, even out of her eyes. The giveaway slippery liver-dark mouth was ugly with doubt, Sophy thought, and the surprising upstanding crest of her hair made her look like an affronted bird: she forgot sometimes to put in the hairgrips to tame it.

When the baby and Roland had been put to bed, and Hettie was reading in the drawing room with her grandmother, Jill paced around the bedrooms in the dusk, in her stocking feet, drying the rope of her hair in a towel. The fresh smell of the fields at evening came in at the windows, tugging at her. It was unexpected to find that leaving a man was not chaste or nun-like; on the contrary, it seemed to have a smouldering sexual content. She looked out from her parents' room at the alders stirring beside the river, heard the water hurrying on with that low-key urgent restlessness which sounded like rain when you woke to it in the night; her reflection surprised her in the mirror of the monumental wardrobe, she looked impatiently away. This reprieve was what she had longed for when she felt trapped and half-crazy, alone with the children in the flat in London, eking out the days with trips to the park, or with visiting friends – the friends had been no solace because she hadn't told them what was happening with Tom, hadn't wanted their opinions or their advice. All her rage and unhappiness and heightened excitement, over the past weeks, had focused in her longing to get home, as if that was a solution. But now she was actually in Kington, she seemed still to be waiting for something else, the next thing.

By the time her father returned the children were all in bed, and Jill had changed into a clean blouse and skirt. — You'll never guess who's here, she heard her mother say in the hall, helping him off with his coat. He strode into the drawing room with an exasperated low hum, resenting the intrusion of visitors, preparing his patience, tightening the belt on the flapping black gown which Tom derided as vanity and pantomime. Grantham Fellowes was small, austerely thin, his skin tanned and burned as dark as old leather. His cheeks and his eye sockets were sculptured pits; above a high naked forehead his thick hair was pure white, and light as down. Tom said Grantham cultivated this look, of a medieval Saint Jerome – or a fake, Pre-Raphaelite, copy of one. Jill was aware of making her own striking picture, sitting with her clean hair loose in the lamplight and a book open on her knee – though in truth she hadn't been reading it, she couldn't concentrate. There was deception in her composure but that was a good thing, she preferred to present him with an impermeable surface, her performance of an accomplished, fulfilled self. She could imagine spilling over in confidences to her mother, but couldn't bear the idea of her father's knowing yet about her failure, and judging it.

— Isn't this lovely? Sophy said.

The surprise put him for a moment at a disadvantage. — Charlie! To what do we owe this unexpected honour?

— Just a whim, Jill said. — Hello, Daddy.

Charlie was his name for her in the days when they went around everywhere together and she had wanted to be a boy; he had started her off on Latin and ancient history while she was still in junior school, taught her elementary botany on their long walks – she had never complained when her legs were tired. She had gone with him into estate cottages without running water or electricity, where old men or women lay sick or dying; once it was a young man whose chest had been crushed by falling straw bales, and whose mother wanted him to pray, though he wouldn't look at the minister. He had turned his head away, gargling and blowing bright terrible bubbles of blood which stained the dirty pillowcase; someone had hurried Jill out before she saw too much, although she already had. Her father had worn himself out campaigning to improve the living conditions of the rural workers, though he never identified with them, and wasn't much loved – his manner was too distant, he didn't know how to put uneducated people at ease. In his poems he wrote about them sometimes as if they were insentient features of the landscape, like old stones or trees. He had a vision of a simple Christian community, toughened by hardship and contact with harsh natural law; he couldn't sympathise when the country people wanted televisions and refrigerators. Now, with the mechanisation of the farms, so many were leaving the countryside to look for work in the cities; his congregation was mostly old women and a few incomers, retirees. Jill knew that he embraced this new turn of his fate as a comic irony, scourge of his pride.