Past (27 page)

And yet Molly had nonetheless stayed! Keeping Molly made the stayers-on triumphant. And as the Jaguar slid between the old gateposts always gaping their welcome promiscuously, those left behind – Fran and Alice and the children, Kas and Molly: Harriet hadn't yet returned from her walk – were suddenly jubilant, relieved, saved, shutting the front door behind the departed ones, putting on the kettle. After all, the present moment closed around them, and they needn't think of the future yet: they needn't think of leaving, or any endings. The four young ones went to play more Scrabble; Fran made tea, while Alice built a fire in the sitting room. Outside the French windows the afternoon changed and glowed with a mild light, the rain eased, a blackbird singing in a birch tree made it shiver and shed silver drops. Fran carried four tea mugs upstairs, all milked and sugared in different proportions, then brought Alice her pretty cup. — This is cosy, she said wholeheartedly, pulling her feet up under her in an armchair opposite Alice's armchair. — Now at last we can say what we think.

Kneeling at the hearth, Alice coaxed her fire with expertise, nudging a log into place with a stick of kindling, putting her hair behind her ears with the back of a smutty hand. — D'you mean, about Pilar?

— And everything.

— She isn't our type. But then perhaps our type is awful. Or at least, isn't good for Roland.

— We are awful.

— Relentless. Always pouncing on things, analysing them to bits.

— Do you remember how we tortured him when he was studying for his A levels? Leaving bits of our underwear in his sock drawers, writing him fake love letters. No wonder he's confused when it comes to women.

— Our type is no good to him. He needs someone who just thinks a remark is a remark, and a fact is a fact, a feeling is a feeling.

— But I mean, come on, Alice. She
stamped
on every step on her way upstairs!

— I was watching his face, and I think the only thing he minded was that I heard it. I don't think he cares much about scenes. It isn't scenes he hates: it's complications, and grey areas. He likes clear-cut situations.

— But whatever was going on between her and Harriet?

— I don't know, Alice said doubtfully.

Upstairs, the children were getting Molly ready (after she'd won at Scrabble as usual). They wouldn't let Kasim into her bedroom, they told him he wasn't allowed to see her yet, he could see her at supper time. After supper, Kasim was taking her to the cottage: what was she going to wear? She said she would just wear her shorts as usual, but Ivy picked up a dress from where it was thrown over the back of a chair – Harriet had given it to Molly, saying she'd bought it and never worn it, Molly could give it to a charity shop if she didn't like it. Molly hadn't even bothered to try it on, she never wore dresses. Now Ivy fingered the filmy flowered chiffon wistfully, exclaiming that it was beautiful and she must wear it for her wedding. — It's not my wedding, Molly said.

— It is, it is, the children insisted, drunk with all the excitement in the house. — It's a pretend wedding.

So Molly stripped off her shorts and tee shirt and pulled the dress over her head: it was baggy across her bust, sleeveless, with a scoop-neck and fitted waist; the chiffon skirt with its blue cotton underskirt was cut in a full circle and hung limply to just above her knees. She wore it with her trainers and no socks, and looked as poignant as an orphan dressed in an old lady's cast-offs. Then she sat on the edge of her bed while Ivy knelt beside her with an intent face, doing Molly's hair in tiny plaits all over her head, weaving in beads and bits of ribbon and lace. Molly only ever wore one silver bangle but had bags full of accessories she never used: diamante chokers and sequined brooches and hairgrips stuck with pink butterflies, all grubby from being jumbled in with tubes and pots of the make-up that she didn't use much either. They heaped her with jewellery – her own and then everything else they could find. — We're dressing Molly up, they said to Alice. — Can we borrow some of your necklaces?

Alice was enthusiastic and also lent them a lace scarf and clip-on white earrings, round and matte like mint imperials, which she told them had belonged to their great-grandmother, Sophy. — Oh,
that
dress, she said when she saw Molly. — I knew that Molly would look lovely in it.

Ivy pinned the lace scarf in Molly's hair like a veil, then they painted her face; Arthur was allowed to put green on her eyelids with a brush, concentrating furiously, the tip of his tongue protruding between his lips. Ivy pencilled her eyebrows strongly in black, then put blusher on her cheeks and did her lipstick. — Go like this, she said, bringing her a square of toilet paper from the bathroom, pressing her own lips together to show Molly how to blot them.

Molly laughed when she saw herself in the mirror.

— Goodness, Fran said. — What have you done to the poor girl?

— She
likes
it, Ivy insisted.

Arthur started to tell his mother that it was for Molly's wedding, but Ivy kicked him and frowned at him, shaking her head. Kasim said she looked like a nightmare and would have to take it all off, but Molly who thought it was funny was suddenly stubborn and said she wouldn't. Remembering their argument at lunchtime, he decided after all that it didn't matter, though he regretted the white bird she had been. So she ate supper with them in all her finery, her painted face unreal as a mask, not saying much or eating much. The others chattered around her almost as if the real Molly was absent; but they were also disconcerted and touched by the presence of this eerie, hieratic figure amongst them. She was like a doll or a gaudy image of a saint, brought down out of her niche for her feast day, conferring her importance on their meal.

Still Harriet hadn't returned. After supper Alice stood with a tea towel in her hand at the front door, looking out for her, then walked up with the tea towel through the churchyard, expecting to meet her taking the short cut home. Fran was washing up and Alice ought to be helping; Harriet would only be cross with her for worrying. If they did meet, she would give Alice her shrivelling look: why did she have to make such a fuss out of everything? But Alice was susceptible to this panic of waiting for nothing in particular; expectation beat against the evening's serenity. The sky overhead was glassy now, as if it had been washed clean; in the west a mass of cloud on the horizon, navy blue and edged in rosy light, was like a whole city in the distance whose existence they'd somehow overlooked, or forgotten. Nothing in this bland external world resounded with Alice's anxiety; while she stood watching at the church front gate, Kas and Molly passed, walking hand in hand on the road. Molly had pulled a jumper over her dress because the temperature was dropping; her hair was still in plaits, though she seemed to have scrubbed her face clean and looked more like herself. They said they were going for a stroll; distractedly, Alice told them not to stay out too long, it would be getting dark soon.

Fran didn't know why Alice was worried: Harriet was well known for walking off her moods. — You know her: she'll have a torch with her and a packet of Kendal Mint Cake and a compass. Anyway, how could she get lost anywhere round here?

— But she didn't take the torch, Alice said, — it's on its hook in the scullery. And what if she's fallen somewhere, and can't move?

She wandered upstairs and, when she'd used the bathroom, went into her brother's room, which was not restored to self-sufficiency by the absence of its visitors, but seemed changed by their passage, as if they had stripped away a surface and left it bereft. Empty coat hangers, hooked over the rim of the wardrobe, jangled to her footsteps; the duvet and pillows denuded of their covers were a white mound on the mattress, tinged pink by the low sun; a forgotten sock lay in her sightline just under the edge of the bed. In the wastepaper basket were cotton wool balls dirty with make-up, an empty water bottle, yesterday's newspaper; she looked for those letters Roland had written to their mother, but he must have taken them with him. The flowers she had put out more than a fortnight ago were mummified on the windowsill, in a remaining half-inch of evil-smelling thick green water. Alice was about to pick up the vase to take it downstairs when instead, on an impulse, she opened the door in the corner which led out of this room into Harriet's.

Her fear returned as soon as she crossed this threshold: something in her sister's room – or just nothing, precisely the minimal trace that Harriet left – seemed at last to speak to her own dread. The room was too thoroughly empty, as if Harriet might never return to it. With an effort, scolding herself for her melodrama, Alice repressed a picture that rose before her mind's eye, of a body laid out under a sheet on the narrow bed, their family gathered in grief around it. This was nonsense, of course – at the worst, Harriet might have broken an ankle, or perhaps a leg. Then, with a sister's unerring instinct for finding what she was not supposed to see, Alice went straight to the drawer where Harriet's diary was kept, felt for it confidently under the clean underwear. She told herself she mustn't look inside it, but then immediately afterwards that she must. And the book fell open naturally onto the pages where Arthur had scrawled lipstick obscenities, and his name.

But it wasn't Arthur, Alice understood at once. It must have been Ivy, in one of her tempers, who wrote these things, putting on the fake misspellings too inconsistently:
Leeve me alone, Fuk you, U are an ugly sow.
This was only childish naughtiness. Alice even laughed out loud at it in sheer surprise, imagining Ivy's sour little face as she wrote, twisted with vicious invention. Yet Harriet surely ought to have said something, she ought to have protested; Alice seemed to feel how her sister had taken these stabbing insults inside herself, to let them work in her. Sinking down to sit on the side of the bed, turning on the bedside light to see better, she began reading the words written behind them, in biro, in Harriet's distinctive small hand with its Greek
e
: the letters were all made separately, never joined in a cursive flow.
Is this happiness? My feelings seem crazy, a sickness, when I think of how P. has suffered in the real world. But tonight after she'd used the bath, rescued her long hairs where they blocked the plughole, kept them and touched them.

Alice guessed, she turned the pages in haste, leaping quickly ahead, following the story through.
Hope and doubt, I don't know what to think. P. touched my hand, haven't washed it all day. I'm like an idiotic child because I don't know how these things are done. I hate Roland, because he has her in there.
Ivy's dirty words, defacing the page, must have felt like Harriet's own judgement on herself. And in fact when Alice turned to find the last written entry, she saw that the neatly printed lettering broke off in violent strokes of Harriet's own pen down the page, digging into the paper, tearing at it.
Stupid, stupid, you stupid … How could I? What have I done? It's all over.

The sky seemed more full of light, as it drained from the earth. On her way down the disused road, Alice could still just about see, if she looked up, though not her own feet, not in the tunnel of darkness under the trees, knotty thick-leaved branches black against jewel blue, like a wild wood in a children's book. A white house floated on the road below her; this was the mill where they made paper for artists. Emerging from the tunnel, she saw bats like clots of darkness breaking away from the gathered darkness in the trees and under the eaves of the house; these felt like the forms of her own anxiety clotting in her, breaking up inside her thoughts. She had only come out – grabbing a pullover and someone's clammy waterproof in the scullery, stripping off her strappy sandals and plunging her bare feet into damp anonymous wellingtons – because it was intolerable waiting at home. — But you don't even know which way she went! Fran said.

Beyond the paper mill the road climbed up again, and at the top Alice crossed a stile, onto a path over a field. This was the way they most often came to walk when they were children. She was wading now in a cold, white evening mist, risen out of the damp field, that swirled around her knees as dense as milk; she had brought the torch but she didn't want to put it on, not yet – who knew how much life the batteries had in them? Anyway, she could still see, it was not quite dark, a few swallows were swooping and twittering in the broad space of the field in the last light, dipping into the mist and darting out of it.

Alice began to call her sister's name.
Har-riet! Het-tie!
The sound of her voice singing out was comforting and strange, as if it wasn't her own but came from somewhere outside, echoing against the curve of the field sloping sharply up. But ahead was the dark entrance to the wood, like a hole burrowed in the barrier of the wood's darkness. When she had to pass through that, she thought, she wouldn't be able to do it, she'd never have the courage. Her search was pointless anyway, and her bare feet were rubbing painfully in the wellingtons. Harriet could have gone anywhere in the hills and valleys round about, she might be miles away: Alice would never find her. Her imagination failed, she felt a disenchanted flatness. There was only fear, and her own insufficiency in the empty dark: she was almost certainly only heading into nothing. In the daytime, in all weathers, she had always liked this gate into the wood with its promise of what lay beyond – she had thought of the birch wood's shadowed interior, and the grace of its trees in summer and winter, like a lovely room. When she arrived at the gate now, and leaned on it, she called again into nothingness, and her voice seemed an intrusion into the wood's withdrawn self. The invisible trees loomed vividly present to her other senses, unfriendly and portentous. At its edge the birch wood had been planted with a few pines, felled recently and now stacked beside the path, their resin pungent in the wet air, the fresh sawdust showing up in pale patches.