Past (21 page)

— That sounds like a good solution.

Sophy opened the oven door in the Rayburn with a tea towel, slid the tray of scones inside, rummaged in the vegetable crock for potatoes. — You'd be surprised, she said, — how you can think you've made up your mind about things and got to the bottom of them, and then there's a sort of swerve in the road or you turn a corner, and everything looks different all over again. As if you're driving through a new landscape.

— Really? Does that really happen?

Sophy considered carefully. — To a certain extent.

Jill slumped in her corner, as if a certain extent wasn't enough.

— Incidentally, her mother said, — I don't care as much as you might imagine, about being good. But I really don't think you ought to come home. However much I would love it. I think you ought to stay out there in the world, where things are happening. If I were you, then that's what I would want. I wouldn't want to come back here. There's nothing for you here.

Undressing that night in her bedroom, Sophy arranged her dress carefully on its hanger, then hooked this over the carved rim of the wardrobe for airing, and to let the day's creases fall out of the wool crepe. She slipped the straps of her petticoat off her shoulders, then pulled her nightgown over her head, with her arms inside so that she could take off the rest of her clothes underneath it, as she did every night. She preferred, too, not to sit brushing her hair in front of the dressing-table mirror, where she would have to contemplate her own worn face which looked so finished and sad: as if something were completed in her, which was not what she felt. Instead she stood brushing at the window, contemplating the night sky: when she drew the curtains she always left herself this little gap for looking out. She could see her own face here again, reflected in the pane; but she didn't mind her eyes afloat – staring and undomesticated – against the navy-blue dark outside, or the shock of her stiff hair seeming lightened with moonlight, or the pale round of her face like another moon. Their bedroom at the back of the house looked out over the bowl of the valley, so that from her window she had the sensation of swooping down into it, like the owl she often saw passing, hanging from his outstretched wings.

The bed in here was the same one she and her husband had slept in since they first came to this parish and this house during the war, when Jill was a child, four years old. The people here would never accept that Sophy belonged to them, but the landscape and the house had swallowed her tolerantly. Grantham was in the bed already, sitting propped stiff as an effigy against the pillows, holding up his book: they both read in bed at night, often for hours. This wasn't the anodyne reading their middle-class neighbours spoke of, helping you slip over a threshold into sleep, equivalent to swallowing pills, the marker progressing through the book in modest increments. Sophy and Grantham devoured their books: reading was a freedom torn out of the day's regulated fabric. Without ever having spoken of it, each knew that the other approved their habit of having the face of their alarm clock, set for seven, turned away from them, so that they couldn't know how much time passed while they sat up awake and turning pages, couldn't know how rash they were or how much they would pay for it next day. Of course their reading matter was quite different: her novels from the library, his serious books. As was fitting, it was usually Sophy who slipped away first, putting her novel opened face down on the floor – breaking its spine, he complained – and relinquishing her involvement in its otherness with a sigh that was close to sensuous.

Tonight, standing at the window with her back to her husband in bed and her arms up, brushing, she told him that Jill said she was going to leave her husband. — I don't know how far she means it. It may just be a temporary falling out.

She didn't turn round to look at Grantham straight away, knowing how he would dislike her having this advantage over him: getting the news first, and having the power to disconcert him by announcing it. He would be longing to know more, but unable to ask her.

— That's not exactly a surprise, he said. — I knew something was wrong.

Sophy would have to bend first, as she always did, because she didn't care about the little dance of primacy. Yet she felt a perverse impulse to protect Tom against Grantham's condemnation: certainly she would never, ever repeat Jill's story about finding the red knickers in her bed, knowing how that detail would stick to her husband's imagination, burning into it, firing him up with distaste and male challenge. — She says she wants to come back here to live. She's got Mikey Waller looking for somewhere she can rent.

Grantham wanted to know what Sophy's reaction had been, so that he could argue the opposite case. She said she didn't know what there was for Jill, back here. — And then are the children to think about, their schooling, all the advantages of London.

— They don't need to rent anywhere, he said. — They can come to live with us, there's no question. She would be better off with us. She could pick up her studies where she left them off.

— You know people wouldn't like it.

— I don't care what people like. What is this all about anyway, what's the idiot gone and done now?

— Jill says she sees through him.

— Is that all? It's too easy to see through him.

— He's more persuasive than you will allow.

— He's never persuaded me. I suppose there's another woman? Of course there's another woman. I can't believe he's got away with it for so long. He stinks of women.

Sophy knew he used these violent words to shock her – and actually to jolt himself, because he was upset. He couldn't bear anything to hurt Jill. And she was shocked, although she hoped he didn't notice it; then she wondered about this idea that women – a certain kind of woman – left their scent on men, so that other men could smell it. All kinds of shame seemed to be wrapped up in it: the shame of leaving your civet trace, or the shame of odourlessness, not leaving one. Sitting down on the side of the bed with her back to him, she contemplated the bony mauve of her long bare toes against the carpet. — I think she ought to stick it out, she said. — I expect that this will pass. I dread to think of her bringing up three children alone, without a husband. The children would suffer. People can be very cruel.

— Stick it out? he complained. — You sound like a Girl Guide. Why should she stick it out, if he's no good, not good enough for her? Why shouldn't she be rid of him, if that's what she wants? Isn't that what women do these days?

— Perhaps they do. Off with the old, on with the new.

In bed, while she was finding her place in her book, Sophy felt the familiarity of her husband's lean flank against hers, through the cloth of their nightclothes: they lay close together because the bed hadn't warmed up yet – she had put on her bedsocks as a precaution. The lovemaking part of their marriage wasn't over, but most often these days their contact was merely friendly. After sleeping together for so many years, they hardly had to go through the rigmarole of a rapprochement or a truce before they touched, even if they'd been at odds while they were talking. Their bodies, more prosaic than their souls, were intimate at a level deeper than their argument.

Mikey Waller picked up Jill one afternoon in his car, to take her to see a couple of possible rentals. She was taken aback by the car – for some reason she'd imagined him driving something reliably old-fashioned, but he turned up in a bright red sporty Hillman, pleased with it as if he expected to impress her. Sophy came out of the house with the baby on her hip, to say hello to Mikey, shading her eyes with her hand in the watery sunshine. It had been raining all morning but now light was glinting off the puddles on the garden path. Roland and Hettie were collecting snails in a jam jar; Hettie explained that they weren't going to kill them, they were keeping them as pets. She had forgotten her cross self-consciousness for once, looked almost pretty.

Mikey was emollient and affable, joking with the children, shaking hands and chatting with Sophy. Perhaps there was more of the estate agent in him than Jill had allowed for, when she had thought he might be shy. Flustered, she wanted to show off her children and at the same time regretted that he had to meet them, because when she was talking to him in his office she had felt weightless and carefree, as if she could go back to a bright, hard, selfish time when she had only herself to think about. And she worried uneasily that she might have put on the wrong clothes for looking around properties: she had made up her face and done her hair and sprayed on perfume as if Mikey had invited her for a date. Because the weather was warmer, she had left off her winter coat and was wearing a light anorak; when she climbed into the car passenger seat she pulled at her short skirt and smoothed it down as if she could make it longer. Every time Mikey changed gear – very competently and smoothly, not jabbing the gearstick in the way Tom did – she was aware of her thighs exposed so close beside his hand, as if she had meant to entice him: which perhaps she had, though now this didn't seem such a good idea.

— I expect I seem an ancient old woman to you, she said. — Now that you've seen my great grown children, one of them in school already.

— They look like nice kids, Mikey said. — I never really know what to say when people want me to admire their children. It's a whole world I don't know about.

Jill said he was under no obligation to admire them; she didn't point out that her question hadn't really been about the children. They were driving in one of the winding lanes that led down into the valley, and then up out of it again on the other side; the lane was so narrow that the wet growth in the tall hedgerows brushed against the sides of the car and sappy sharp smells of spring blew in through the open windows. Late primroses were half-hidden at the foot of the mossy banks, purple foxgloves with their pale speckled throats soared up like flares, the hedges were fretted with herb robert and red campion. Dunnocks and yellowhammers broke out on the road ahead of them in little spurts of flight. If they met any vehicle coming the other way, then one driver or the other had to reverse until they reached a passing place: this kind of driving couldn't sink away into a background awareness, Jill and Mikey were involved in it together, Jill craning back over her shoulder to advise him. They talked about her taking driving lessons, if she did move down here.

— I might be leaving my husband, so I need to learn to fend for myself, Jill said, while Mikey was involved in one particularly tricky manoeuvre, getting past a Roddings farm cart. Jill waved at one of the Smith boys driving the tractor, she wasn't sure which. She thought that Mikey was startled by her announcement, crashing the gear change uncharacteristically, then annoyed with himself for bungling.

— I'm sorry to hear that, he said with formal politeness.

— Why should you be sorry? I'm not. I mean I am, of course, for the children and everything. But I'm not sorry to be leaving Tom. He's not really cut out for family life, he's made me quite unhappy.

— Then, why shouldn't you have another chance?

— At happiness? Yes.

She had told him much more than she ought to; just because they had been children together, she mustn't presume that Mikey was interested in her present life. He didn't seem keen to talk about it, anyway, but got on fairly eagerly to the subject of the rentals they were going to visit, explaining things in his practised professional voice, pleasantly reassuring but not selling anything too hard. The first place they looked at was a cottage tucked into a curve in the lane, just before it met the road above: it was ghastly, poky and dark and done up with painted beams and fake bottle-glass window-panes and an inglenook fireplace – and in any case it was far too expensive. The existing tenant showed them round and Jill praised things in her most Oxford voice, eager to get away.

Then Mikey drove fast on to the next one – on the two-lane road which ran along the top of the valley and then left it behind. They hardly met any other cars. Last year's withered leaves hung on in the sombre beech hedges either side of the road, where the the new leaves coming through were a rich bronze-green. In places the hedges had been newly laid: above the woody old masses at the tree roots, thick stems had been gashed across and bent down at right angles, trained to grow parallel to the road. The light flickered behind this tracery, punctuated at intervals by the sturdy grey trunks that had been left to grow straight up. The upland scenery had a sober grandeur, different to the intricacy and intimacy of the valley behind.

The second house they saw was empty and Jill liked it much better: an austere stone box set back from the road, two-up two-down, unfurnished. The empty square rooms, where light shifted on the limewashed walls, seemed hardly differentiated from outdoors – in fact there was ivy growing through one corner under the roof, which Jill didn't mind. She had an excited idea that a life lived up here would be purged of everything unnecessary and distracting: in the evenings when the children were asleep she would be able to write something at last, go back to her Greek translations. She and Mikey stood together at an opened window upstairs, looking out past the woods and Forestry Commission plantations of pine, towards the bare tops of the moor, where the sunlight was falling mildly and sweetly, bringing out the colour of the heather. Jill said she thought she'd be happy in this house. There seemed some question about exactly what the rent was, but she might be able to afford it.

— It's a long way from anywhere, Mikey warned her. — The weather's not always as nice as this. You could get snowed up in the winter. What would you do to get around until you'd passed your driving test?

— I'm sure there must be a bus, Jill said gaily. — We could get bikes. I could put the baby on the back of mine.