Past (20 page)

— All right, I'm asking about them now.

Jill groaned in exasperation, and said it wasn't just the asking. — It's the way you are, how you can put them out of your mind for days at a time, or weeks even. Just as if you were free. And I can't.

— I said I'd look after them for a bit, if you wanted to go to Paris. Or go anywhere. I don't mind!

— You're not serious about anything. So now it's painting instead of journalism. What will it be next week?

— D'you mean like your old man is serious? The serious miserable fucking poet? And by the way, I don't think sex is coarse. You surely brought me to this weird and wonderful place – I know you – with sex in mind. That isn't coarse. And now you're breaking my balls. Look, I'm serious. Look at me. This is the thing in the world I am most serious about.

Jill looked at him almost tenderly. It wasn't any wonder that other women threw themselves in his way. The firelight played over his long brown face, which was like her idea of a warrior's or a cowboy's: the high, hard, knobbed cheekbones, jutting tense brow. In the grey eyes there was always a suggestion of sleepy satisfaction, something rapt and dreaming. — D'you know what? she said. — I'm going to go back now. I'm going to leave you here.

— You're insane, you can't do that.

— Don't follow me. I don't want you to follow me. I'm going to take the torch, you'd only get lost without it. You'll be all right in here until the morning. There are plenty of logs. In the morning I don't want to see you. I don't want you coming to the house.

Standing at her window in the dawn light, Hettie saw the strangest thing. The light often woke her up, here in the country: when her eyes flipped open out of her dreams, the new day waiting in the room was so distinctively, surprisingly present that it was impossible – it was almost impolite – to close her eyes again, as if she hadn't seen it. The children's bedroom overlooked the front garden, as their mother's did. And on this particular day, almost as soon as she took up her post between the silky lilac-coloured curtains – in her nightdress, with her bare feet in the ice-cold which pooled ankle-deep on the floorboards – she saw her daddy walking past in the lane outside. He was wearing his big duffel coat, with the hood down.

In fact she heard him before she saw him; in the stillness of the early morning she had heard the tramp of his boots, coming from the direction of the woods, displacing the little stones on the road, crunching them and sending them skittering. This made her know that he was real. And then when she did see him it was only the top third of him, because the rest was hidden by the garden wall. But she was so sure that it was him. No one else down here had that long hair and that untidy beard and that intent way of walking with his head down and his shoulders hunched up. Yet how could he be coming from the woods, when it was only just light? And strangest of all, he didn't stop at their house and come inside to see them. Of course she was expecting him to turn in at the garden gate and come up the path. She was all ready to fly downstairs and be the one to let him in, and the first one carried round in triumph on his shoulders, announcing to the sleeping house that he'd arrived.

But he went on walking past the gate, and down the lane out of sight, and he never even turned his head to look at the house, though he knew it as well as they did, and must surely have known where he was. He never looked up to see his daughter watching at the window. And then he was gone, though for a while Hettie could hear the noise of his boots in the distance. The whole thing was so improbable that afterwards, as it settled down into her memory, she thought she must have been dreaming, or that she'd confused reality with an illustration in a picture book. Their dad was in London, or somewhere else, Paris: she knew that really. She never mentioned what she'd seen to anyone, because it couldn't really have happened, and her mother got angry if Hettie invented things. When she came to a certain page in their book of nursery rhymes – Mr Foster going to Gloucester in a shower of rain, drawn in a purple pencil and wearing a top hat – Hettie turned over quickly, because it brought back a sharp pain of disappointment.

THE CHILDREN GOT
used to the rectory as the days passed, and began to forget their life in London, as they had done in the holidays before. Hettie settled into not going to school, although from time to time she was aware of the routines of that other existence – which she had been beginning to master – proceeding without her, and had a panicking sense of her deficit. Then she put off this awareness with a quick grimace. They might never go back, perhaps there would never be any more school. The rooms of their Marylebone flat seemed a chaotic muddle in memory – crowded with their landlord's ugly furniture, and with all the apparatus of toys and baby-life, and their mother's distinctive efforts at homemaking: splashes of painted vivid colour, exotic textiles draped over sofas or pinned to the walls, art posters and political ones. Jill had found a stuffed heron in a glass case for next to nothing in a junk shop, and a gigantic mirror with dancing, garlanded cupids set into the gilt frame. The sink was always piled with dishes, there were always visitors talking non-stop and drinking tea from chunky ceramic mugs at the kitchen table: alien children were imposed upon them. By contrast, the kingdom of the rectory was theirs alone. There was more space for fantasy in its faded empty rooms – especially in the expectant spare bedrooms upstairs, used for nothing, scarcely furnished except with beds and chests of drawers and skimpy rugs, and smelling thinly of damp.

Who were those beds intended for? The rooms' vacancy, which intimidated Hettie at night, was stimulating by day. A statuesque dressmaker's dummy, like nobody's shape, loomed in one corner. Little crabbed watercolours, relegated to hang amid their expanses of bare wall, took on a momentousness in isolation: the children stared into the smudgy landscapes and feeble portraits as if they were oracles, speaking of the past and the dead. They invented a game of stampeding along the landing, between the arched windows, shouting, as if they were pursuing something or being pursued – Ali could even join in, if they fixed a chair across the top of the stairs to stop her falling down them. There was an additional delicious pleasure in this game if it was raining outside; the sound of the rain, and the sight of it blowing in wet gusts against the bare tall windows, drove them mad, and they dived onto the empty beds, rolling around in them, shrieking. Of course they could only play this if Grandfather were out. Granny didn't mind it: you could even tell, from a gleam in her pale eyes, that it stirred a buried desire in her which she could never act on, to join in and throw herself around. It was just possible to imagine Granny as a lanky, watchful girl-child; impossible somehow to imagine their own mother, ever, as anything but the full-grown finished woman, all curves and certainty. She often talked about her childhood, and there were photographs to prove that time existed – but her children didn't really believe in it.

For hours, when it wasn't raining, or not much, Hettie and Roland waded in wellington boots in the stream in the garden, carrying a bucket, looking for eels or sticklebacks. Or they prowled downstairs indoors, where the day's work proceeded in a way that was more ordered and less fraught than their parents' way. In the mornings Granny appeared to spring from her bed fully dressed, there was no sticky and fractious long interval of dressing gowns and breakfast mess and getting ready, before things could properly begin. In the dining room a cloth was spread on the breakfast table, there were flowers in a vase, and the children dipped bread-and-butter soldiers tranquilly in eggs fetched from Brodys across the road, as if they had been eating eggs all their lives. When she had finished her tea their grandmother held up her cup against the light and showed them a woman's face, hidden in the china. Twice a week a Mrs Cummins – she of the scratchy brooches, known to them from church – came to do the heavy chores, not constrained in the sculpted church-suit, but loose and businesslike inside her overall. She manhandled steaming sheets out of the boiler then rinsed them and put them through the mangle, she scrubbed floors on her knees with a contemptuous hissing noise which must have come from her brush, though it seemed to come out of herself.

If their Grandfather was at home, then everything revolved around the invisible work that went on behind the closed door of his study. But even the prohibitions that came with this, the whispering and secrecy – and occasionally, the door torn open, the blast of his cold complaint – had their reassurance and romance. Because he was getting on with what mattered, the women and children could fill their time without responsibility. There was always work to do, women's work – but that was not lofty or exacting like religion or poetry. And then when he did go out, some spring which had held them tightly was released, so that they felt free. Even Jill, at the ironing board or at the sink, could seem to be caught up in the air of mild, sly, jubilation – as if she were another kind of woman, a more ordinary one. When the cat's away, their granny said, the mice can play – though their grandfather couldn't really be called a cat, or any kind of tyrant. Granny would put the kettle on although it wasn't teatime. Peculiarly, this liberation couldn't happen so long as Mrs Cummins was there: she kept them up to the mark in the minister's absence.

In his study even the smells were different to the rest of the house: the smoky brown notes – of pipe tobacco, books, cold cinders in the fireplace, whisky – were half offensive, with their suggestion of something meaty. Hettie and Roland had investigated the cut-glass decanter once, and discovered that the whisky, which looked and smelled promisingly like liquid caramel, tasted poisonous. Could anyone actually drink it for pleasure? It must be one of those forbidding adult initiations, commensurate with the impossible books on the shelves. However Hettie pored over the words in these, spelling them out one at a time, the sentences remained obdurately outside her comprehension. Grandfather told them he was writing poems about somebody in the fifth century who had translated St John's gospel into Greek verse, and also wrote hymns to a pagan god. Roland was maddening, with his calm presumption that he would understand all of this very soon. Hettie couldn't see why the grown-ups found this charming. She reminded him sternly that he couldn't even read yet.

— Grandfather said that doesn't matter, because I'm already thinking about things.

— What things?

— Sorting out what I need to learn, about history and science and stuff, and people speaking different languages.

After lunch their grandmother retired mysteriously to her room, and came down later in a different dress, unless she was gardening. In those late afternoons, their mother sometimes played the piano, and the sound came floating out past Alice, eating through the daisies in her playpen set on the lawn, to where Hettie and Roland were busy in the stream, building a dam across it, Hettie snapping out orders to Roland. The music while it lasted seemed to frame and characterise their life in a way which was poignant and satisfying, as if they could see it from a long way off. The children were always surprised that their mother could play at all; the piano seemed to speak quintessentially of acres of empty time, dedicated to dreamy introspection – which they did not associate with her. Then Jill would break off impatiently, when she made a mistake in the middle of some rippling passage, crashing both her hands down on the piano keys crossly, slamming the lid shut. They were half-aware that their mother was boiling up with trouble, the whole time they were adapting to life in Kington, settling down there. — I can't bear this, she said aloud once rather calmly, with her hands still raised in that impressive way, curving and passionate, poised above the notes.

— What can't you bear? Sophy said.

She was patting out a soft dough for scones, with floury hands, on the kitchen table. Jill had come in to cook the baby's supper and was crouching, banging through the saucepans in a corner cupboard, looking for a small one.

— Not being able to play through those pieces I used to know. It's so frustrating.

Her mother began pressing a glass into the dough, cutting rounds of scone and setting them out on a baking tray, while Jill sat back thoughtfully on her heels on the linoleum, with the saucepan in her hand. — And that's not all. There's quite a lot I can't bear, just at the moment. My husband, for instance, if you really want to know. That marriage is pretty much over, I should say. I made a mistake with Tom, and it hasn't worked out. So there we are.

She put on a sprightly, debunking voice, as if all this was a subject for a light, bright, clever irony; and Sophy went on pressing down the glass into the dough, close up each time against the last cut-out round, for minimum waste. — I knew something was wrong, she exclaimed, but without looking at her daughter.

— I've decided to come back and live down here, Jill said. — Mikey Waller's helping me look for a place to rent. Perhaps I could find a little job – I thought you wouldn't mind looking after the children, just a couple of mornings a week.

— What kind of little job?

— Anything. I don't care. I thought of asking in the library.

— You're a wicked girl, Sophy said. When she had stamped out as many rounds as she could, she gathered up the leftovers, pressing them together into a new ball, flattening this with deft fingers. — To tempt me so dreadfully. I can't think of anything I'd rather have in the whole world than all of you living down here. I'd be so happy, having you nearby all the time. Or here at the rectory for goodness sake: what are all those spare rooms for? Helping you look after the children. I'd like it more than anything.

— But, Jill said. — You're going to say:
but,
it's not possible. But, I have to be good, or something. We can't all just have what we want in life. You're going to remind me of my duty, that I ought to stay with him. For the sake of the children or whatever. Those things don't mean anything any more, Mum. They don't count for anything. Women have seen through them. Anyway, you haven't even asked what's wrong.

— So what's wrong?

Jill sighed and put up the cool metal of the saucepan against her face. — He sleeps with other women for a start. That's the easy bit.

Sophy began stamping out new scone-rounds, dipping the glass into the flour bag, grinding it down thoughtfully into the dough. — How many other women?

— Mum, you're funny. What does it matter how many? I don't know. One at least, quite definite, that he's owned up to, recently. I found her underwear, if you want to know the sordid detail, in my bed, when I stripped it to wash the sheets. All crumpled up, sort of fossilised because I don't wash them that often, down over the edge at the end, caught between the layers. He brought her home when I took the children off to Candice Markham's for the weekend. They must have hunted everywhere. She had to go home without her knickers, poor Vanda. She must have thought he'd stolen them, to keep in his pocket or something. Frilly red nylon ones, that couldn't possibly ever have been mine: in the underwear department I'm still very much the vicar's daughter, in my white cotton. Poor Vanda. He doesn't even like her very much.

Jill said she was sure there'd been other women too. — Two at least, that I have suspicions over. He's probably with someone right now. Some dirty little Parisian Maoist he's got off with on the
manif
, the
manifestation
. Or perhaps there's a woman at Bernie's – you may have spoken to her, when you telephoned.

— I think that one's with Bernie.

— Well, who knows? She may sleep around. The point is, Tom doesn't seem to have qualms, as long as he can get away with it. But the unfaithfulness really isn't the major problem. Maybe he's right that we don't need to own each other. Maybe I could get lovers of my own, we could balance things out.

It was lucky, Jill thought, that she was sitting here on the floor. From her unusual perspective, everything in this kitchen – that was familiar as life itself – looked unexpected: so that these extraordinary words, which didn't belong in here, could flow freely out of her mouth, liberated by the room's new strangeness. She could see from where she was sitting the grubby stained underside of the kitchen table, the side which was not bleached each week by Mrs Cummins, and metal struts that had been screwed in at some point, fastening the top more securely against the legs.

— The real problem is that I don't admire Tom any more. I don't just mean him being unfaithful: though of course that makes me sick and jealous, it's bound to. But I mean intellectually, as a thinker and a writer. I used to believe he was so brilliant. I chose him as my guide to everything, he showed me how to find my way in the world. But now I can see the lazy patterns in his thinking, all the short cuts. He doesn't really know half as much as he pretends he does. He's full of enthusiasms, but doesn't think things through deeply. I can follow a complex argument better than he can, I can see through falsity more quickly, I'm better at connecting things up together. I'm a better writer. What am I supposed to do with that discovery? I don't know how to be with him if I can't look up to him. I'm programmed to believe that the man I choose must be my master. I know that's an absurd expectation, but I can't seem to unpick it from where it's stitched into my psyche.

Jill had never said any of these things aloud before; she hardly even knew if they were true. And her mother didn't care anyway, about cleverness. She wouldn't be on Jill's side over that, she believed that women should keep their scepticism and criticism hidden, not risk exposing themselves – as the men exposed themselves – by pronouncing with any certainty. She would disapprove of the language of intellectual competition which Jill had used, she would have her secret irony at that. But at the same time, she must be at least half-triumphant, hearing all these things about Tom. In recent years Jill's relationship with her mother had often seemed to be a silent tussle, Sophy's unspoken judgement against Tom pushing up against her daughter's defence of him. Now Sophy was painting the tops of the scones with egg and milk beaten together, and she asked what Jill was going to cook for the baby's dinner. Would Alice eat the cauliflower cheese left over from yesterday? Jill stared hopelessly inside her empty pan. — She didn't like it very much, did she? I was imagining some boiled potatoes, with peas and grated cheese on top.