Past (2 page)

— Watch out, she said. — It would be quite easy to set fire to this dry grass.

He opened one eye to look at her then closed it again.

— My mum doesn't like smoking. She says it gives you cancer.

— Wherever did she get that idea?

Kasim's offhandedness didn't put Ivy off – in fact he was beginning to impress her. She supposed he was her aunt Alice's new boyfriend, and might be the best so far. Most of the adult behaviour children saw, it occurred to her, was carefully infantilised for their benefit – like smoking, which she knew her daddy did, but never where they could see it. Idling, Kasim took out his phone to check his emails.

— You won't get a signal here, she said importantly. — There's only one place, and even then it depends what network you're on. You have to cross into that field with the cows in and then walk up to the gate at the top and sit on it. It's the only way.

Kasim swore – incredulously rather than because he really cared. Perhaps you weren't supposed to swear in front of children, but Ivy was unblinking as if she heard
fuck
every day of her life. He quite liked the idea of dropping off the edge of communication into nowhere, where his friends couldn't find him, nor his father or mother – who were divorced – nor the girl he was half-heartedly half-involved with. The buzzing, rustling summer afternoon, too hot for birdsong, swelled louder and more invitingly in his ears now that he knew it couldn't be cut across by any mediated connectedness. He was going to ground, he decided, and enjoyed feeling the hard flank of the ground, not at all accommodating, moulded underneath him where he lay. On the other hand, it was irritating that there were children here. Children didn't amuse him. It seemed only yesterday that he was a child himself, he could remember it only too well.

Alice went round the house to air it, singing and opening doors and windows. She was all right now she was inside. Leaning out of an upstairs bedroom she called and waved to Kasim coming through from the churchyard; he was trying to shake off Ivy who followed close behind. He waved back without unplugging his cigarette. Turning away from him into the room again, Alice was subject to a leap of promise that had no relation to Kasim or to anyone, certainly not to Dani: light moving on pink wallpaper, the dark bulk of a wardrobe in the corner of her vision, the children's voices from outside, the room's musty air and its secrets, a creak of floorboards – these aroused a memory so piercing and yet so indefinite that it might have only been a memory of a dream. There was summer in the dream, and a man, and some wordless, weightless signal of affinity passing between him and her, with everything to play for. This flare of intimation buoyed Alice up and agitated her, more like anticipation than recollection. Love seemed again luxuriant and possible – as if something lay in wait. She went along the landing breathless, and aware of her heart beating.

Upstairs the house was always full of light, changing dramatically according to the weather. Its design was very simple: a single flight of wide, shallow stairs rose to a long landing with a white-painted balustrade; at each end of the landing, at the centre of the front and back elevations of the house, there rose the tall arched windows that were its distinctive beauty from inside and out. In the front bedroom that was always hers, Alice knelt at the bookshelf – guiltily aware all the time of Fran at work downstairs. The house was full of children's books – not only from her own and her siblings' childhood, but from their dead mother's too. Bookplates, with Alice's name written in the shakily flowing cursive she'd been taught at school, were pasted inside the cover of all hers, with dates. As if in a form of divination she opened one at random – E. Nesbit's
The Wouldbegoods –
and read a page or two.
And then we saw a thing that was well worth coming all that way for; the stream suddenly disappeared under a dark stone archway, and however much you stood in the water and stuck your head down between your knees you could not see any light at the other end.
The very weight of the book in her hands, and the thick good paper of the pages as she turned them, and the illustrations with the boys in their knickerbockers and the girls in pinafores, seemed to bring back other times – the time when she had first read this, and behind that the time when such children might have existed.

Fran was peeling potatoes in the kitchen sink when Alice came in looking for scissors, wanting to cut flowers in the garden.

— When you decided to invite Kasim, Fran said, — where exactly were you planning for him to sleep?

Alice was blithe. — Don't worry, there's plenty of room. She banged through the drawers in vain, looked hopelessly around her. — Don't we have scissors?

Fran lifted them from their place hanging on a row of wall-hooks, and handed them over. — I mean, I presume that he's not in with you.

— For god's sake! Kasim's something like my stepson, almost.

— Only asking. I never know with you.

— I'm an ancient old woman, as far as he's concerned. The children adore him, by the way. Everywhere he goes, they go in procession after him. Kasim has his hands in his pockets and now Arthur's copying him. He looks so sweet.

— Is there room then? Fran persisted, bent over her peeling. — Molly has to have a room of her own, obviously. She's not a child any longer.

Alice was forced to start counting up bedrooms and beds on her fingers. — Oh dear. I'd forgotten Molly.

— Roland and whatever her name is, the new wife. You, Kasim, Harriet. Molly. That's five bedrooms. There are only six. It means I have to sleep in with the children, in the bunk-bed room.

— Oh Fran, that's awful. You need a break more than any of us. You need your privacy. No. I'll sleep with them instead, it's all my fault. I don't mind, really.

— Don't be silly, Fran said flatly, punishingly. — You know that isn't ever going to happen.

Penitent, Alice got out their grandmother's vases from the scullery and filled them with water on the kitchen table. — Right in my way, Fran grumbled when she was out of earshot. Alice brought in roses and montbretia and purple linaria from the garden, where only the toughest plants survived their long absences. Then she put flowers out all round the house – a posy for every dressing table, white roses and ferns for the new wife. She arranged the supermarket fruit in bowls. Fran had brought new tea towels in bright colours. Rooms filled with the smells of cooking. In between their visits it was as if the empty house lapsed into a kind of torpor, and was frigid and reluctant at first when they had to rouse it back to life.

Harriet came through the churchyard and paused at the keyhole gap to brace herself for the end of her solitude. Her afternoon filled her to the brim: she had taken the route to the waterfall, which at this time of year wasn't much more than a swell of liquid in a sodden long fall of emerald moss. Goldcrests had shrilled in the tops of a plantation of firs, a slow-worm had basked across her path, grey tree trunks surged and the sunlight was filtered through fans of leaves that stirred in movements of air imperceptible on the ground. A cottage whose abandonment they had observed since they were children – with a dim memory of a last inhabitant, an old woman – had sunk further back into the earth at its vantage point at the path's turn, perched high above the steep end of a valley. Long ago she and her brother and sisters had broken a rusty padlock and explored inside the cottage, even climbing upstairs; it would be dangerous to do that now. The place was cut off from all services, there was no mains water, let alone electricity, no one could have lived there any longer. Though sometimes Harriet had thought that she could. She didn't need very much.

She saw that the others had arrived. The French windows were open onto the terrace and a young man was established there on one of the deckchairs, fetched from an outhouse. Ivy, emerging from the sitting room, was bringing him a glass of what looked like gin and tonic, held aloft carefully in two hands; Arthur, following, carried a bowl. Harriet was more shy than anyone knew, and quailed at the necessity of re-entering this peopled world. At first she thought the man must be a new boyfriend of Alice's, though she hadn't heard of there being one. Closer up, she recognised him.

— I know who you are, Harriet said, holding out her hand, startling Kasim because he was finishing reading, attentively contemptuous, the
Metro
he'd picked up on the tube in London. — You must be Dani's son. We met at Alice's birthday a few years ago. You were only a boy then. I'm Alice's sister.

— I've grown up.

— Stupid thing for me to say. Of course you have.

Kasim stood up, he tried to make Harriet take his seat, and then his gin and tonic, and the salted cashews, which were what Arthur had brought.

— This one's yours, said Ivy sternly. — She can have one of her own.

As soon as Kasim saw Harriet he did remember meeting her, because she looked like a more tragic Alice – though her cord trousers and old tee shirt showed that she didn't care about clothes as Alice did. Her face was more haggard than Alice's, though less expressive, like a mask of calm, and her short hair stuck up in a stiff crest and was pure white.

Harriet said she wasn't ready for gin yet, she had better change out of her walking boots first, and then unpack. Arthur asked if he could come.

— He loves women changing their clothes, Ivy explained.

— I'm only changing my boots, Harriet apologised.

Fran, washing salad in the kitchen sink, saw Harriet and Arthur bringing Harriet's luggage – not much of it – to the side door opening into the scullery, which opened in turn into the kitchen. Arthur was solemn with the importance of being slung across with his aunt's binoculars. He couldn't help, with that hair, having a page-boy look: Fran had seen this when she gave him the cashew nuts, and she felt with a pang that she must cut it, but not yet. At least her oldest sister talked to the children as if they were sensible adults – Alice did exaggerate sometimes.

— So you've been for a walk already? she said, kissing Harriet.

— I didn't want to be the first inside, Harriet confessed. — For some superstitious reason.

— I wish I had your energy. No wonder you're so thin.

Harriet sat in the scullery to unlace her boots, while Fran explained about Jeff not coming, and how unfair it was. — We don't know what time Roland's lot are getting here, but I'm making supper anyway and we've started on the gin. We thought we'd better be fortified against the new wife.

— I met Kasim in the garden.

— Dani's son. He's supposed to be very brilliant. But then all Alice's friends are supposed to be brilliant, aren't they?

— He seemed very nice.

Fran dropped her voice. — Alice never thinks about the practicalities. Because she's brought him, I'll have to be in the bunk-bed room with the children.

Harriet bent her hot face over her bootlaces, skewered with guilt because she knew she ought to offer to sleep with the children instead, to give Fran a break, and yet she couldn't do it. Her aloneness last thing at night was precious to her: at home she lived mostly apart from her partner, Christopher, because they both preferred it. Then Alice came into the kitchen, hands bundled full with knives and forks – she was laying the table in the dining room. — Hettie, you're here! Did you have a good walk? So wise, to get straight out into the lovely day. You haven't brought much luggage, to last three weeks. Aren't you austere! It's so like you, to be sensible about clothes. After all, no one's going to see us, are they? Except each other, and we don't care, we're family. And Kasim and Pilar.

— That's her name, Fran said. — I knew it was something architectural.

— I'm only here for a week, Harriet said. — I couldn't take more time off.

Fran whirred the salad spinner, to cover up the blow of Alice's disappointment. Alice's whole demeanour altered exaggeratedly. She dropped the cutlery noisily on the kitchen table. Harriet had promised, she cried. Hadn't they all agreed, to save up their holidays and have three full weeks together, because this might be the last time?

— I didn't promise, Harriet said. — I warned you. I said that it would be difficult, to take time off work for so long.

— I wanted you to be here. It's supposed to be a special occasion. I wanted us all to be here together like the old days.

— She's here now, Fran said. — Let's not quarrel on the very first night.

Upstairs, Harriet found the little posy on her chest of drawers; it seemed to communicate Alice's reproach as she unpacked. Her bedroom was above the kitchen and she could hear her sister's voice rising in continuing indignation downstairs, though she couldn't hear her actual words; when she stomped deliberately heavily on the floorboards, Alice shut up. A chiming of glasses and scraping of chairs came pointedly from the dining room. It wasn't fair of Alice to blame her for spoiling things. No one had protested that she shouldn't have turned up with Kasim, if she wanted this to be a family occasion.

Arthur sat on the bed swinging his legs, watching absorbedly as Harriet put her clothes away. — Are those your best pyjamas? he asked with earnest interest, and she had to admit she only had two pairs and they were both the same – one green check and one red. She regretted not having anything more thrilling to show him than the neat pile of clean tee shirts and the spare underwear and spare pair of trousers, a jumper in case it got cold. Putting away her hay-fever pills and her hairbrush, she slipped her diary under the tee shirts in the drawer. Tonight, when she was alone, she would write in the diary about the quarrel with Alice, and would try to put down both points of view with scrupulous fairness. Then Alice climbed the stairs with a peacemaking gin, and Harriet accepted it, although she didn't like gin much.