Past (23 page)

It began to be evening, their mother was late. They had eaten their dinner at midday, so there was no serious meal to cook; Hettie and Roland were sent over to buy eggs from Mrs Brody for their supper, holding hands to cross the road as Granny told them, even though there were almost never any cars. If they'd become positively enthusiastic about eggs, despite the slime, it was partly because they were drawn to what was thrilling and dreadful in this quest to fetch them. The Brodys' farm was dark, not pretty like Roddings where Mrs Smith grew flowers and the windows and doors of the farmhouse were painted a bright jolly green. Even the Brodys' red-brown cows smelled worse than the Smiths' black-and-white ones and seemed more outsize and sinister, stretching their throats and bellowing with eyes rolled back, jostling and clambering onto one another in the muck, in the grim yard of furrowed concrete. Weeds grew through a heap of tyres, and the hens pecked around the wrecks of ancient cars; high in the barn wall above them the evening light shone through the ruined empty dove cote. When Mrs Brody came to the kitchen door she was always nursing a cup of tea against her apron, as if she were keeping it warm – her teeth were brown from all the tea she drank, and sometimes the children didn't understand her because she spoke with a broad accent. She put the money they paid her in a cracked old mug on the windowsill, painted pink and gold, that said
A Present From Ilfracombe.
Their granny always washed the eggs before she used them.

Roland's concentration was entirely taken up, on their way back across the road, by holding on to the precious paper bag, one hand supporting it from underneath. But something made Hettie look around consciously, as if Kington became real to her for the first time – not as a mere background to her thoughts and plans, but having its own authority. The evening was as wide open as a spacious room. There wasn't a cloud in the sky and everything was touched with a warm russet-pink light – the rutted lane, the green growth in the hedges, the clouds of midges so excitedly stirred up. She asked her brother, didn't he just love it here? Even the Brodys' dirty farm seemed part of her happiness. Some bird plummeted past, belly low to the road; then those birds seemed to be all around them, darting and twittering in their high-pitched restlessness which was also soothing. Roland shrugged her enthusiasm off as if it were frivolous, distracting him from his mission. He carried the paper bag scrupulously inside the house.

A car was approaching through the lanes, disrupting the quiet; when it came into sight Hettie recognised the red one from the estate agents. She knew that her mother had been looking around for places they could move into – they might come and live down here in the country, and she would have to start at a new school. Although this prospect was fearful, she felt sure now that it was what she wanted. The car stopped noisily just short of where Hettie waited at the garden gate, and then for a few minutes more her mother didn't get out even though she had seen Hettie and waved to her, but sat on in the passenger seat, talking with the man who was driving. After she had climbed out, she leaned in through the window again, thanking him, telling him she'd be in touch, and then the red car reversed into the Brodys' drive and drove off, its noise subsiding in the evening air. Her mother was standing with the light behind her, and it was shining through her hair which had come down somehow from its French knot while she was out. She was fixing it now, standing in the middle of the road with the hairpins in her mouth, hands up behind her head, twisting round the long tail of her hair and skewering it in place. Because of the brightness, Hettie couldn't see her face properly; she didn't like to rush up to her while she was preoccupied, but began her confession anyway.

— Alice had an accident. She has a bump. It was my fault, I shouldn't have put her up on the wall, only she kept on begging me.

— What kind of a bump?

— On her forehead. But Granny's cheering her up. And Roly's written a real word with his letters:
plain.
He wrote
plain,
all by himself.

— That's a funny word to start off with!

Jill was in her laughing mood, everything was all right. Hettie explained that he copied it from a cookery book. She expected her mother to be businesslike, hurrying indoors to see the others, but instead she lingered outside in the pinkish light, with its promise of summer. — Isn't it lovely here, Het? she said. — Look at the swallows going mad in the field. They're drinking insect soup.

— What's insect soup?

— The air is full of creatures we can hardly see. The birds are feasting on them.

They stood at the field gate, watching in close companionship, and when Jill lifted Hettie high onto the top bar of the gate, she held her tight so that she wouldn't fall.

When she'd put the children to bed, Jill hesitated in the dusk at the foot of the stairs. There was no lamp switched on yet in her father's study but the fire was lit, its reflection gleaming on the cut glass of the whisky decanter: she was thirsty suddenly for whisky. Perhaps what she'd done that afternoon had opened a door, and she would be buffeted from now on by violent appetites. Stepping inside the room she thought at first she was alone, then realised that her father was kneeling in the half darkness beside the bookcase, not looking round, peering in the firelight to read the gold lettering on the books' spines, as if he didn't want her to know that he knew she was there. Jill picked up the decanter she'd never touched in her life before, to help herself.

— You can pour one for me as well, her father said.

He was stiff, getting up from his knees. Even while he was strong and only middle aged, she'd dreaded any intimation that he might grow old and weak, and thought she wouldn't be able to bear it. — I hear you might be moving home, he said. — Your mother told me.

— It's probably not a good idea, is it?

— We miss you, Charlie. We'd love to have you here.

— Oh well, Daddy, she said, — I miss you. But life goes on. I've got three great big children now.

— You could pick up your work again, if you came down here. Your mother could mind the children, we could try out some translations together. You've got such a good intellect, you know. It hurts me to think that you've thrown it all away.

— I haven't thrown it away. I'm still the same person.

He made an impatient face of fine discrimination, shadows knotting around the deep socketed, disenchanted eyes. — We don't think Tom's such a good idea, you know. Not good enough for you.

— It's too late for that, Jill stubbornly said. — And anyway you don't know him. You don't know what I know. Nobody does.

Later that same evening, after it was dark, Jill knocked on the side door at Roddings and asked if she could use their phone. She had the money ready to leave for them, and was sure that they always left more than the actual cost of the call – but it was obvious Eve Smith didn't think much of her coming round so late. The Smiths might even have been on their way to bed, though it was only half past nine; there was no sound of any television going in the farmhouse. But Jill didn't care. She knew her apologies sounded insincere and falsely fulsome, in her educated voice, and she was aware for a moment of the person she had been at Oxford, filled up with her cleverness and ambitions for her intellectual life.

Yet this tempestuous life she had instead wasn't anything less. It was surely wrong to think that reading and intelligence had to float somewhere above the thickness of real experience. She was so glad to be in her solid woman's body – used, by men and by her children who'd come into the world through it. Eve switched on the light in the office and retreated to the scullery, not quite out of earshot – Jill heard her running water into a tin kettle. The farm office was chilly, bleak in the light from a weak bulb, all its workmanlike disorder inert while the farm slept. There was no one in the flat in Marylebone when she rang, so she dialled Bernie's number and some woman answered. — It's Jill Fellowes. I want to speak to Tom.

— He's not here.

— But I expect he is. See if you can find him.

The woman pretended to be bemused, but Jill insisted. Eventually Tom came on the phone, breezy and too ready with his innocence. — Did you hear about de Gaulle?

— I don't want to talk about de Gaulle.

She told him he had to come and pick them up in the morning, to take them home.

— You've changed your mind all of a sudden.

— You'll have to borrow a car from somewhere, she said. — If you want us back, you have to be here by midday. I mean it.

Tom reassured her that it was all he wanted. Nothing else mattered.

AFTER THE PATTENS'
dinner, the rain settled in. Morning after morning they woke in their damp beds to hear it insisting against the windows – not stormily, only steadily, pattering down through the leaves in the big beeches, secretive and pressing. The light and the acoustics in the house were so changed that it seemed a different place, shrunken as if it crouched underneath an assault; landscape diminished to the near-at-hand, airy distances condensed into prosaic grey and crowded close around the windows. The temperature dropped, the clematis dripped on the terrace. A mossy, silvery pattern of wet sunshine bloomed sometimes for a few minutes on a wall on the landing, before it was extinguished again – like a weak message from another existence.
It might brighten up tomorrow
, everyone said. Sometimes the rain was a relief, Alice thought: less was expected of you than in fine weather, you could turn over and go back to sleep. But Harriet and Roland seemed to be up at dawn, Harriet in her sensible checked pyjamas and Roland in his silk ones, putting buckets and plastic bowls underneath the places where there were leaks, their voices reproachful with practicality. Then water pinged, torturously, into the buckets, and Simon Cummins came round to talk to them about repairs. Alice thought that she could give up this house after all, the claims that it made on them.

She was reading gradually through all the children's books on her shelves, losing herself inside them one after another. If Ivy and Arthur joined her in her bed she read to them, and they finished a whole volume of Doctor Dolittle together – not one of the good ones. Kasim drifted into the room and while they watched from the bed he searched through the things on Alice's dressing table and in her handbag without asking or even looking at her, for the cigarettes she didn't have. — No, it's a good thing, he said, when she suggested Fran could drive him into town to buy some. He explained that he'd given up, and was only tempted to start again because he was bored. But when she said they could take him to the station if he wanted, he looked surprised and said that he was all right, he wasn't in any hurry to get home. It might brighten up tomorrow. He liked it here. He didn't mind being bored.

And then he sidled into Molly's room, the children following him, still in their pyjamas, and behind that closed door they seemed to play interminable games of Monopoly – really interminable, one starting up again as the last one finished, Kasim winning every time
(Well, I am supposed to be studying economics
), Molly tranquilly indifferent to losing. Ivy stormed out in a temper, slamming the door behind her because Arthur wouldn't play properly, he wouldn't buy any property, he only wanted to hang on to the money he was given at the beginning. — Don't you understand the idea of it? she shouted. — The idea of it's that you use that money to make more money! Arthur looked from under the blond fringe that hung into his eyes, apologetically but shrewdly, as if he knew better than to trust anything so far-fetched. Between Monopoly games, when Molly was sometimes busy – ‘getting ready' – Alice found Kasim slouching on the window seat on the landing, blankly engaged in nothing. She tried to lend him a novel to pass the time, but he said gloomily that he didn't see the point of fiction. — I don't see what it's for. Why would you put out any intellectual effort, understanding something that wasn't actually true?

By the time Alice got up to get dressed, it was often midday, or one o'clock; then in the afternoon she carried more letters upstairs from her grandmother's bureau, or from the drawers of her grandfather's desk in the study, and lay on top of the eiderdown to read through them. She kicked off her shoes and after a while she would slip for warmth into that consoling space between the eiderdown and the top blanket.
Dear Mr Fellowes, I can't tell you how much I was moved and excited by your new collection. It speaks to our moment with a directness and urgency like nothing else I've read this year.

Roland made a fire in the sitting room in the afternoons, though the chimney didn't draw very well. Pilar sat hunched over it with her shoes slipped off and her long feet tucked under her, reading through the newspapers, or through the legal papers she had brought with her, making notes. She was determinedly cheerful. Fran and Alice agreed in lowered voices in the kitchen that she made everything worse, made them feel the dreariness of the place which they wouldn't have minded if they'd had it to themselves. — We're used to it being crap, Fran said. — Now I feel like I have to keep apologising for it.

— Why don't they just go? If they're so obviously bored to death?

— But it's only Roland who's bored to death: Pilar actually claims to like it. She must be mad.

— She's needy, Alice said. — She needs something from us. I don't know what.

Harriet went for long walks despite the weather, and came back humming to herself, then went upstairs to change her clothes and confide in her diary. She had to hang out her wet things to dry – they steamed in front of the fire, depressing Alice. The postman delivered packages of DVDs for Roland, and he and Pilar cuddled together under a duvet in the study to watch them – Roland had bought a new DVD player in town. He bought an oil-filled electric radiator too, which he plugged in wherever they were sitting. — He thinks he can purchase his way out of boredom, Fran said. — Well, of course you can purchase your way out of it. But not down here.

Then Roland had to sit on the gate at the top of the field in the rain, trying and failing to send off reviews from his phone: on the way down the hill he even slipped on the grass, getting red mud on his trousers. Preoccupied when he returned inside the house, he hurried up to Molly's room and went in without knocking, to ask for her help – perhaps she could get a better signal on her phone. She and Kasim were sitting on her bed – upright, it's true, and fully clothed, but disarrayed, hot-eyed, pulled hastily apart, who knew which layers untucked or buttons undone? Scalded, banging the door shut again without saying a word, Roland couldn't forgive either Kasim, or himself for his own idiocy. How had it not occurred to him to knock? His sisters would have put two and two together, they would have been deliberately noisy, coming upstairs, they would have knocked, or not even dreamed of going into her room in the first place. Why was he missing those instincts? For the first time in his life he wished he was more ordinary.

— You know what's going on? he said to Alice.

— Well of course I know: isn't it sweet?

— I don't find it sweet. I think I should step in, before things get any worse. What possessed you to bring that boy along in the first place?

— Don't be silly, Roly. What do you mean, worse? Young love: it's a glorious thing. You're just jealous.

— Is it glorious? But I'm so anxious for her.

Alice qualified, more truthfully. — Well, it wasn't exactly glorious for me. But that's only because I was so tortured. Molly's straightforward. I think she knows how to be happy.

Disconcerted, Roland sat down to a long session with Chopin at the old out-of-tune piano whose damper was warped. It didn't soothe him when Pilar marvelled at his performance, because he had no illusions about his playing – in fact it struck him that if she had a cloth ear for music it could be a problem between them. Then when he went upstairs to his own room, he found Ivy and Arthur huddled up against the door to Molly's bedroom, each with a glass tumbler pressed to the door and an ear pressed against the tumbler, listening to whatever was going on inside. Roland roared at them and they fled: even he thought this was amusing as well as alarming. Shortly afterwards, when he was on his way downstairs again, Kasim came out from Molly's room, hands in his pockets, whistling and kicking at the skirting board with exaggerated innocence. Roland thought that the house was intolerably too small and they were all going to go mad if it didn't brighten up soon, piled incestuously like this on top of one another.

— There's something funny going on with those kids, Fran said when he told her about the eavesdropping. — I'll show you what I found in their pockets.

She fetched the little folded scraps of ancient paper from where she'd buried them, perturbed, under her clothes in a drawer upstairs: she was even blushing as she handed them over. After a moment's squinting, Roland and Alice could make out women's body parts, faded to an unhealthy grey-pink. Alice laughed.

— Where on earth could they have got these from? Fran said. — And there's another thing. I'll swear there's money going missing from Arthur's savings. But what's he spending it on? Not just pennies: several pounds I think. They're never out of my sight when we're in town. You don't think that they've been buying porn?

— I know this is the country, Roland said, — but even down here no newsagent in his right mind would hand over dirty magazines to two infants clutching their pocket money.

— Anyway, these magazines are ancient, they smell of old damp.

— Oh, don't
sniff
them Alice, how can you! Maybe they're buying them from some other kid or something.

— Or from Kasim? Roland suggested. — They don't know any other kids down here.

— Roland, that's just an evil thing to say, Alice protested. — You can't mean it seriously, about Kasim.

— All right, I'm not altogether serious. I suppose the children have stumbled on someone's ancient stash, from years ago. No one looks at porn in magazines nowadays. Simon Cummins? He's got a leering look, hasn't he? Or Christopher?

— Christopher? Don't be ridiculous. Whatever made you think of Christopher, of all people? He's only even been here once or twice. And surely he's a feminist or something. He wouldn't look at porn.

— Only an idea. Those Lycra cycling outfits are a kind of sex perversion in themselves. And the feminists are probably the worst.

When Alice suggested she ask the children directly, Fran confessed that, to her own surprise, she'd found she couldn't. — I don't want them to know that I know they've looked at anything like this. But I've no idea what I'm supposed to do. And now they're voyeurs as well! It can't be natural.

— I'm sure it's absolutely natural, Alice said. — Do you want me to ask them?

— Perhaps it's best to just ignore it. Really, though, don't you think Jeff ought to be here?

The sorry little scraps of obscenity on their softened, felty paper contaminated something, Roland thought. Those women with their bloated breasts and shaved pudenda weren't even protected by the sheen of an unreal mannequin beauty; they looked like any housewife he might have met shopping in the streets of the little seaside town, and unsettled him more than he could acknowledge, even to himself. Something overheated and uneasy seemed to have taken possession of their whole household, under siege from the everlasting rain. His own lovemaking with Pilar was more inhibited, as if he was aware of everyone listening in, as if those children might have their glasses pressed against his door. Once or twice he even jumped up out of bed, flinging open the door onto the landing, only to find no one on the other side. Wrung out of him against his will, however, his pleasures seemed particularly acute. In the mornings at breakfast he was ashamed to think who might have been listening.

He tried to persuade Pilar that it was time for them to go, but she was determined that they see out the whole three weeks. — It's such a long time since I had a rest, she said. — I feel very comfortable, here at home with your family.

— But the weather's awful.

— I don't mind the weather.

They drove for a day to look round a great Victorian baronial pile an hour's drive away, on the other side of the motorway, but at the last minute Harriet asked if she could come with them. She said she hadn't seen the place for years, and he didn't know how to refuse her; then he felt his kindness, which was his fixed habit with Harriet, strained through a long afternoon. He had wanted to be alone with his wife, to give her his whole attention, and to have hers – nothing smothering or soppy, quite the contrary. Before Pilar met his family, he remembered, their communion had been simplified and minimal. When he'd told her things, she had lifted a shapely eyebrow, or curved her lips in a responsive smile: she only spoke if she had something to say. This had answered to his deepest need, and he'd never intended for Pilar to be initiated – and so willingly, even eagerly! – into the scruffy, unsound, makeshift excesses of his own family, which were just what he wanted to escape from.

Harriet seemed happy enough anyway, all that day: when she was happy she was surprisingly girlish, chaffing and jokey, bringing up stories from his owlish boyhood until he was annoyed. He didn't disown the prig he once was, who had worshipped Sir Mortimer Wheeler and pretended to write plays in Latin, but he felt tenderly enough about him to keep him more or less private. He was afraid of seeing the perception dawn in Pilar that he could be thought ridiculous. Harriet's cheeks as she teased, he noticed, were surprisingly pink – surely she wasn't wearing something on her skin? And who'd have imagined that his revolutionary sister would one day take her pleasures visiting these shrines to the surplus consumption of the aristocracy, exclaiming with Pilar over a vast billiard table or a cabinet full of lockets with their painted miniature doll-faces and twists of ancient hair? He was astonished when they began working out the relationships between the dolls.
Lady Geraldine, she must have been married to the second Earl.

— But don't you want to send them all to the guillotine?

— Don't be such a spoilsport, Harriet said. — I'm having fun.

Roland wasn't in the least revolutionary, but thought nonetheless that the National Trust was opium for the middle classes, and found he couldn't take much pleasure in it. There were too many holidaymakers – because it was raining outside, and cold, and there was nowhere else to pass the time – tramping damply round the rooms, wondering obediently at the great dining table set out with damask and silver and Wedgwood, glazed plaster fruit and dusty plaster fowl and dusty bread rolls, for the delectation of twenty guests long dead, who'd have despised them. The view from the back of the house, which should have been down a succession of terraces and parterres to the great gothic threadworks where the money came from, and beyond that to a dream of hills, was muffled in grey cloud.