Past (25 page)

But Kas put his shoulder to the door and heaved at it, lifting at the same time, until it yielded and opened wider than the children had ever opened it – they stumbled inside together, and he propped it open behind them with a stick. In the changed weather the tiny dim downstairs room was surprisingly dry but seemed somehow even less human, more like a burrow, hardly differentiated from the earth. Perhaps it smelled less of dead dog, but it smelled more of that same mouldy, mineral, rank underground they'd been uneasily aware of earlier, passing the torn-up tree root in the woods. Luxuriantly, obscenely, the cottage was rotting away. If only a clean wind could blow through it! The children looked anxious, as though this desolation were their responsibility.

— How long since anyone lived here? Kasim said shortly.

He poked with his foot at the packed leaves in the grate and then – as if he were looking for something – officiously pulled open and banged shut again the doors of the cupboards built in on either side of it, which the children had never touched. There was nothing inside, except one empty biscuit tin without a lid; the shelves were lined with thick paper, cut in scallops where it overhung the edges. Fatally, they knew he would try the door next which led to the bottom of the stairs – and he did, vanishing behind it. They heard his springy tread on the few steps, taking two at a time, and then crossing the first room. They didn't look at each other, but Arthur shrugged.

Upstairs, Kasim hardly noticed the little mess of scissors and cut out bits of paper on the floor – he knocked the scissors accidentally with his foot into a corner before he saw them, and only then caught sight of the lighter. It didn't occur to him that this was his: it was the cheap kind of disposable you could buy anywhere. He thought simply that someone else had left it, along with some loose change, which he pocketed: presumably whoever had been visiting to enjoy this ancient porn. Trying the lighter, he was surprised that it gave off a strong flame. In one disdainful glance, he spurned the dirty magazines: they mocked and affronted him, the ugly white flesh gloatingly exposed. He hadn't even seen Molly yet without her clothes more or less on, but his knowledge of her body hidden underneath them – intricately folded on itself, taut with secrets – possessed him. He knew that all the kissing and cuddling and hiddenness at some point would not be enough, and must come to feel like failure; desire in him was bitter sometimes, his own equivocation taunted him. Then all at once this lonely place in the woods struck him as an answer to his difficulty and a vision of his fulfilment. He could bring Molly here, undress her finally and make love to her.

Looking out of the window, he could see all the way down the valley. The trees were stirring under successive waves of a light rain, the twigs in their tops springing back as spry as tuning forks. He couldn't possibly have sex with her, proper sex, back at the house, with her father bursting in on them every minute, and the children taking an unhealthy interest, and Alice giving them knowing looks and smiles. Once they were alone in here, they needn't be afraid of anyone. Kasim had made love to several girls already, and none of it been been either a great disaster or a great success, nor had it flowered into any relationship. He wasn't even sure he wanted a relationship, he flinched from intimacy. But he knew that his father's sex life had been going on, pretty much non-stop, from when he was about fifteen, and it made Kas feel that his own was insufficient and paltry. In this place, though, something different might be possible. If he just cleared out the magazines and cleaned up a bit and brought some blankets, there'd be nothing to distract them. He would have Molly to himself, the whole thing could unfold at its own speed. She wasn't like those other girls, she was absorbent and dreamy and would let him be in charge.

Kasim opened the door into the second room and for a short moment was shocked, thinking that something was alive in there – in fact it was only strips of wet curtain, twitching in the squall at the window, which was not quite closed. This tiny dead-end room – it was more like a cupboard, nowhere near the size of his mother's walk-in wardrobe – had advanced much farther into dereliction than the rest of the house. The wall on the window side was stained with rain and black mould, the floor was deep in dead leaves, and there was a nasty mess which looked like a dead animal in one corner, shrivelled leather collapsed onto sinisterly yellow bones, traces of reddish fur. Kas thought it must be a fox, not wanting to examine it too closely, not knowing much about wildlife. He'd have to clear all this lot out before the cottage was ready for Molly. It occurred to him that Ivy and Arthur, who'd been begging almost every day to get into the cottage, must have been upstairs and seen what he'd seen, the magazines and the fox; perhaps they hadn't known what they were looking at. Or more likely it was their guilty little secret, he knew what kids were like. No wonder Ivy hadn't wanted him to come inside.

Downstairs the children waited, hearing him open the second door, close it again; then his tread was noisy once more on the stairs.

— Look what I found, Kas said.

They looked obediently, in dread – but he was only holding up the red lighter. — We could make a fire after all. But I suppose there'll be all kinds of shit stuck in the chimney.

He poked up experimentally with a stick, and a thick tumble of sooty, leafy, feathery mulch fell out gratifyingly at his feet: Arthur put his head in the grate and said he could see the sky. But when they tried, they couldn't really get a fire started, all the wood they picked up outside was too wet.

— We'll bring firelighters next time we come, Kas said enthusiastically. — I'm going to clean this place up. We'll bring a shovel and a broom. We could disinfect it, fetch water from the stream. It could be cosy, don't you think? Burn some incense, get a little fire going.

They'd never seen this boyish Kasim before, excited by his project. Catching on, Ivy suggested that after they'd made it all nice, they could bring Molly to the cottage and surprise her. Kasim was unforthcoming. His plans to bring Molly here, needless to say, did not include the children.

The four siblings and Pilar went out one evening, to eat at a pub in the next village. The Pattens – who had friends staying, down from London – had asked them over to dinner again, and they needed some excuse not to accept. Alice feared that Janice wanted to exhibit them as local colour. Anyway, Roland reminded them, it was time they had their meeting, to decide what to do about the house. Wasn't that what they were down here for? Before they'd even set out, Alice said desolately that they had better let the old place go. — I suppose it's all over, isn't it?

— Wait, Alice, Fran said with real annoyance. — We have to have a discussion first, don't leap to conclusions. We have to think about it logically, what would be best for all of us.

— But it's obvious what you all want.

It should have been a melancholy occasion, but they couldn't quite remember to be sad amongst all the complications of getting in around the table in its little nook, ordering food and drinks – strong drinks, Fran and Alice insisted, to brace them for decision-making. Harriet, squeezed in beside Pilar, surprised them all by asking for a glass of port, and then another one; under its influence they felt her vigilance relax, she told them funny stories about her colleagues at work. Looking from Alice to Harriet, Pilar announced that they were very much alike. — Aren't we? Alice cheerfully agreed for once. — We're like our awful father, I'm afraid.

Harriet said that Alice was the pretty one, Alice said it wasn't true, she was just the fake, with her dyed hair – and in fact Harriet was glowing that evening, dressed again in the nice things Alice had given her. The hollows of her eye sockets and cheeks, which could look haggard, only seemed sculptural and striking; her face was broad and calm like a nun's, her expression open. In the warm artificial light all of them looked ten years younger. It made a pleasant change to be snug in the crooked low-beamed pub, with its wood-burning stove, after the cold and damp of Kington: hungrily they attacked battered scampi and breaded plaice. Roland was troubled from time to time by the idea of Kasim and Molly alone in the house together – but they weren't really alone, the children were allowed to stay up until the grown-ups came back, Kasim couldn't get up to much while those two had him under scrutiny.

It was only Pilar in the end, funnily enough, who sided with Alice in her reluctance to let the house go. Pilar pronounced decisively – almost superstitiously – that there were too many family memories enshrined in the place for them ever to part with it; they were relieved she'd saved them from having to pronounce it for themselves. Then Harriet said simply that she didn't need two homes. The place was going to start falling down round their ears, they all agreed, and they none of them could easily find the money to spend on repairing its fabric. But hadn't they had so many happy holidays down here, for free – or almost free? Roland said its charms had rather palled on him, Fran said she'd rather go abroad for a change. Mightn't one of them want to move down here to live, some day? They looked warily at one another, no one owned up. What emerged to dominate, as the argument went backwards and forwards, was the clinching, immediate problem of the roof. It all came back to the roof, which had needed attention even in their grandparents' day. No one knew what it would cost to put on a new one: ten thousand pounds, fifteen, twenty? More? And who could find time to be on the spot, supervising repair work on that scale? They couldn't ask Simon. Alice couldn't bear the idea, anyway, of replacing those ancient mossy slates with modern ones, even if they were letting water in. — I'd rather even leave the house behind, I think, than change those slates.

— Well there we are then, Fran said. — We're all agreed, it's time to go, we can't bear the idea of the new slates, or actually changing anything. I'm sure Jeff and I can do with the money. There can't be any harm in just getting a valuation, at least. We'll contact Wallers, they're the best people. How much d'you think we'd get for it, Roland?

He hadn't a clue, no one knew. Three hundred thousand? Or more, or less, because of the condition it was in? — We could hold out, suggested Harriet, — and say we'll only sell to local families.

— We could, Roland considered doubtfully.

Fran hated that idea. — And then sell to some local builder who sells it on as a second home for twice the price! Of course we'd do better ourselves if we borrowed the money to do it up, then sold it.

Nobody wanted to be bothered with that.

— I know you're right, Alice said. — It's time to sell. I do agree with you all, really. I never know what's good for me. It may release me into a new phase of life, not clinging to the past. I'll become a new person, even. You won't recognise me! Happy at last!

— Alice, don't be silly, Fran said. — You're happy now, you know you are. Anyway, we can always come back here to visit. There are plenty of places to stay, some lovely B&Bs in the area.

Alice looked horrified. — I never would. I can't ever come back, not anywhere near here, once we've sold the house. That will be the end of it, for me.

THE CHILDREN LOATHED
housework if their mother ever asked them to do any, but they threw themselves with enthusiasm into Kasim's new project of cleaning out the cottage. They escaped from home in any intervals when it wasn't raining, or wasn't raining much, smuggling out a plastic bucket and a dustpan and a brush and cloths and bottles of cleaning stuff, returning them later without anyone noticing. If the grown-ups asked where they were off to, so preoccupied and important, they said evasively that they were playing a new game in the woods. Ivy wore her long silk skirt because it conferred extra dignity upon their mission, though it dragged in the mud. Fran wondered where the bucket was, but it didn't occur to her that the children had it; when she found filthy wet cloths dropped in a corner in the scullery, she thought crossly that Alice must have been cleaning her room in one of her fits of energy. Alice had mostly stayed in bed since they'd made their decision to sell. Fran had felt sorry for her, and taken her cups of tea – then she made that little face of disappointment, if you didn't bring it in the pretty cup she liked.

Molly was half in on the cottage secret, but Kas made her promise not to tell. He liked having something to hold back from her. — It's a surprise for you! he said. — Wait until tomorrow. I'll take you to see it tomorrow evening, I promise.

— But why can't I come now?

He was smiling down into her face, holding her shoulders, his face close to hers, so that she couldn't help reflecting back his smile. Between their two faces, each feasting on the looks of the other, even when they weren't kissing there was a tingling awareness of the sensations of kissing. — It's not ready for you yet, he assured her. — We've got to get rid of all the spiders.

He knew he mustn't mention the dead fox, or he'd never get her inside.

She shuddered. — Spiders! I hate spiders.

This gallantly tender Kasim was very different to the grim-faced businesslike one, with a dirty smudge on his cheek, who made a fire in the clearing outside the cottage, helping it along with firelighters and a dash of lighter fuel, while the watching children stood serious and impressed. The three of them hardly spoke all the time they were working – sweeping and scrubbing and carrying out armfuls of dead leaves – except in curt practicalities. Arthur hunted around in vain for his pound coins. The fire spat and crackled, threatened to go out, and then regained force: sparks whirled up into the wet grey day, making the children step back smartly. Kasim propped open the cottage door and ran up and down the poky staircase again and again until his tee shirt was wet with sweat, bringing out the piles of magazines on a shovel he'd found in one of the outhouses at Kington, as if he didn't deign to touch them with his hands. No comment in relation to this mystery of the Women ever passed between the three, while they fed the fire with their naked images and watched them burn, blackening sulkily to nothing, the paper turning to a heavy ash that kept its shape as pages. Only Ivy told Arthur in bed that night that the Women's power was broken now: they'd taken his money, and were satisfied. At some point she threw away the little trove of sacred things and signs they'd collected, as if they were all suddenly just trash.

When the magazines were disposed of, Kasim went upstairs again with the shovel. The children looked at each other.

— Does he know that it's Mitzi? Arthur asked.

Ivy was scornful. — He doesn't even know Mitzi ever existed.

— Tell him, then.

— You tell him.

— No, you.

They were both silent when, more cautiously, and with his head twisted fastidiously away, Kasim came out with what must be the dog's remains held out at arms' length on his shovel. These were scrambled now out of their meaningful shape, to a mere nasty heap of contaminating mess. This didn't burn well, until – ordering the children sternly to stand behind him – Kasim threw on more lighter fuel, and more of the dry kindling he'd lugged in his rucksack from the house; then a great flame shot up and everything blazed, and afterwards settled to smouldering and fuming with a greasy black smoke which hung around for hours afterwards, making Ivy feel sick although she didn't say so. It took three trips upstairs before Kasim had scraped the whole thing up. He set to work next on the floor in that last room, with a stiff broom and buckets of water taken from the stream, tearing down the rags of curtain and burning those too, along with all the dead leaves shored up under the window, scrubbing with bleach at the walls blackened with damp and the persisting dark stains on the floor. The children couldn't look at what was left, when the fire burned down – bones, which Kasim kicked away into the undergrowth.

Fran couldn't believe how filthy the children were when they got home; they left a scummy grey watermark on the sides of the bath. When she drove into town the next morning to talk to the estate agents, Kasim and the children asked to go with her, and then mysteriously shopped. — It's for our game, Ivy explained. Kas chose a bottle of wine – rosé, which he thought Molly would like. In a place called The Four-Leaved Clover, ducking under a whole orchestra of wind chimes pinned to the low ceiling, he purchased cones and sticks of incense and scented candles – fairly incredulous at the prices – and an aromatic oil called ylang-ylang which the girl recommended. Telling the children to wait outside, he also went into the chemist's for condoms. Then they went back to the cottage together for the last time, arranging the candles on the shelves and windowsills, sprinkling the whole bottle of oil around. When the candles and the incense were lit, their perfumes mingled exotically with the rooms' pungent damp and smell of bleach. Kasim had stuffed his rucksack with blankets taken from the airing cupboard at Kington, and now he folded these into a corner; he'd also borrowed two glasses and a corkscrew, and put these with the wine and a couple of packets of crisps.

As an experiment, he lit a fire in the grate downstairs. This changed the house completely, as if they awoke something alive in it; he and Arthur crouched side by side on the hearth to watch protectively over the tentative flame with its noisy crackle, Arthur's fists clenched on his dirty bare knees, his long hair pushed behind his ears, the fire's light on his face. Excitedly Ivy entered into the spirit of the transformation, arranging pink flowers in a cup without a handle which she'd found in the tall grass outside the door. She wound trailers of wet greenery along the mantelpiece and above the door to the stairs, around the old nails which were stuck randomly here and there in the walls.

— Are you going to bring Molly here? she asked. — Isn't the wine for her?

— I am going to bring her, Kasim said, looking round from the fire with earnest importance. — And you two aren't going to come with us. Molly and I have something serious to sort out, which we can't discuss in the house. We need to be alone. D'you understand that? If you try to follow us, I'll kill you.

They nodded solemnly.

— Are you going to marry her? Ivy said.

— Don't be ridiculous.

The hotel with the swimming pool was smothered in a sea mist; Harriet and Pilar couldn't even see the sea. It was impossible to believe they had basked so recently in the hot sun in this garden – those plants still dimly visible through the mist were bowed and dripping, upturned chair legs protested on the tables. While they waited in the hotel car park for the engine to die, Pilar showed Harriet two photographs, taken from a manila envelope in her handbag. She explained that these were the two married students who had disappeared in the nineteen seventies, along with their baby son and unborn child. Now, Pilar said, the parents of these students were hounding her and her brother, fixated on the belief that they were the children of these lost children. It wasn't good news about the injunction; her brother might go ahead with the testing, though he seemed to be hesitating at the last moment. He wouldn't speak to Pilar on the phone, she had only spoken with his wife.

The photos were in black and white, printed on computer paper; they weren't very clear, areas of the black ink had fused together. The young man was wearing glasses, rather expressionless and affronted, as if his picture had been taken for passport ID. The young woman's was more informal: she was smiling up at the photographer, confident of her attraction – she might have been caught in the middle of lively conversation. Her long hair, parted in the middle, fell around her shoulders, solid in the printout like a dark cape. All Harriet could think, staring into their faces, was how thoroughly dead they were. The secret of their deaths had become the central fact about them, blotting out everything else, devouring all the decades which were stolen from them, when they couldn't change out of themselves. Their present had faded gradually out of fashion.

— What do you feel? she warily asked, putting her hand on her friend's.

— Nothing, Pilar said impatiently, shaking her off, busy with something in her bag, her lipstick. — What am I supposed to feel? I'm sorry for them, as anyone would be sorry. But they don't mean anything to me. Do you hate me for that?

She redid her lipstick with scrupulous care – even though they were about to swim – using the mirror on the visor over the passenger seat, pressing her lips together on a tissue, opening her eyes rather wide at the sight of herself. Harriet didn't take the trouble to say she could never hate her. — Do you think they are your parents? She does looks like you.

— You can't tell, Harriet. And anyway it doesn't mean anything. A sperm and an egg. My parents – god forgive them! – are the two fine clowns who brought me up, made a rare mess of it.

Harriet tried to focus on the moral dimensions of Pilar's story. But it was as if some charged low storm cloud – like the darkened, blinded day beyond the steamy windows of the car – blocked her clear perception whichever way she looked. She couldn't straighten up to see past this blockage clearly, through the next minutes and hours into any future. Now that they'd decided to sell the house, she was surprised how much this change seemed like the end of a world, and a crisis in which anything might happen. The end of their holiday was drawing near, the weeks of this summer were ringed already, in retrospect, in a lurid glare of nostalgia for something unrepeatable. Harriet might not see her brother's wife again for months, she didn't know if she could bear that. And because the time left in proximity to Pilar was so short, it was gathering density: as if the hours remaining were backing up against a closed, an untried door. Harriet did not let herself think of what might lie behind the door. She wanted something more from her new friend, that was all – something that sometimes Pilar seemed to be holding out to entice her, like one of the bright jewels in her rings: promising and tantalising. Yet Harriet couldn't be oblivious to a hard limit of calculation in Pilar's look. Hope and doubt pulsed back and forth in her, in their alternating current.

That afternoon, Kasim and Molly quarrelled. He had been feeling particularly fond of her, making her laugh, cherishing his secret of the cottage's transformation. Ivy and Arthur were sworn not to say anything. It seemed to him that he'd made extraordinary concessions, in all his preparations, to everything in Molly that was susceptible and sweet and female. Fran put out lunch for the children on the kitchen table and Kasim and Molly joined in, then when she smelled coffee Alice came down too, in her dressing gown. Kasim read out depressing headlines from the
Guardian
which Fran had brought from town. Alice pleaded with him to stop and he found worse and worse ones until she put her hand over her ears.
Gaddafi loyalists held over bomb blasts. UK self-sufficiency in food falling. Violence during Eid celebrations in Syria.

— It's not funny, Molly said suddenly, frowning down furiously at the bread she was buttering, as if some pent-up condemnation burst out of its bounds. — You can't just use people's sufferings to make a joke.

Kasim was taken aback. — It's better than pretending they're not happening.

— Is it really better?

Molly insisted with a bitterness that hadn't been any part of Kasim's plan; he was wounded and offended. — She doesn't even read the newspaper, he said, appealing around the table. — She doesn't even know where Libya is.

— I'm such a coward, Alice said, conciliatory, smiling from one to the other. — I definitely want to pretend.

—
I
know where Libya is, Ivy cautiously contributed, although she didn't.

— I don't want to know where it is, Molly cried. — I don't have to.

She was looking intently down at her plate and the nakedness of her dropped purple eyelids was reproachful, chastening; cutting slices of cheese, she layered them on her bread, then added sliced tomatoes, coleslaw. When she looked up, her eyes flared with indignation. — Just knowing things without doing anything doesn't help anybody. What's the point of having an opinion about everything? I think it's better not to know. It's more
kind
, just to feel sorry for people.

Kasim thought that was hilarious. — You mean just feel sorry for people generally, without even knowing whether they're actually suffering from anything?

— I know what Molly's trying to get at, Alice put in.

— At least I believe in people, Molly said, — which is more than he does.

— I
believe
in people all right. I mean, I think they're real, they actually exist.

— But you've got such a gloomy outlook. Everything's always going to turn out for the worst. In real life there are lots of good people: nurses and social workers and postmen and councillors and everything. There are people who change things and make them better. Don't you have any hope?

— Hope! That's a fucking message on a birthday card.