Past (29 page)

— Don't be too cross with them, Alice pleaded.

They were all setting out for the cottage, as soon as the children were dressed. — And I've cut Arthur's hair!

— You haven't! I'll bet he looks lovely.

Fran made an unhappy face. — Alice, I don't like it. He looks like a real boy. He isn't blond at all. And Janice is coming with us.

— Why on earth?

— Oh, it's her wretched dog. Everything's going wrong.

— Don't worry. As long as you find Kas and Molly.

Alice went back to sit in her armchair. She heard the children's voices, and Fran insisting that they put on suncream, and then the crunch of little stones under all their feet on the drive as they went off, Janice having fetched her Nordic walking poles from across the road. The faded silky curtains were pulled across the bedroom window, so that the bright sun wouldn't bother Harriet. In the mauve light the dark old utility furniture, made of varnished cheap wood, seemed to float indistinctly.

— This is peaceful, she said when she saw Harriet was awake.

— I've made a dreadful fool of myself, Harriet said. Her face was yellow against the pillowcases, and her white hair stuck up like bristles where she'd slept on it. Involuntarily Alice's hand went up to touch her own hair, and her sister saw it.

— No you haven't, Alice said. — You're never foolish, you're one of the most serious people I know.

— I hate my own seriousness.

— Think of the wonderful work you do. And Pilar doesn't think you're a fool.

— I don't want to talk about her.

— She's just feeling sorry, right now, that you had a good friendship and it turns out it meant something different to each of you.

Harriet turned her head on the pillow to stare at Alice.

— Doesn't it ever wear you out, gushing and being charming all the time? It must take such an effort. I suppose you read my diary? I don't care about you reading it. Actually, I don't even care about making a fool of myself. But I feel very bitterly, Alice. Other people's lives, and the lives I read about in books, seem richer, mine seems so threadbare.

Alice was only jolted in passing by her sister's assault on her, like travelling over a familiar bump on a road. She sat up straighter, determined to talk with her truthfully for once, in this exceptional moment. — Threadbare? Do you think that's because you didn't have children?

— You don't have children, do you? And your life doesn't seem threadbare.

Alice said that it did sometimes, but Harriet snapped at her. — Don't try to cheer me up. You don't always have to make everything all right.

Well, did she feel that she had wasted that time when she was young, and so dedicated to politics? But Harriet said she'd asked herself that question often, and come to believe she'd chosen to be dedicated because of the way she was, politics hadn't made her that way. And it was true that the work she did now was valuable, she wouldn't change it for the world. But it didn't help to solve her own problems.

— What everybody wants is life: all our clients, all the asylum seekers and everyone. You're doing your best, trying to help them to get a roof over their head, security, enough money coming in. And you've got all those things, so in one way you're lucky, almost unimaginably lucky. But still you haven't got life.

— It isn't true, Alice said. — You're just seeing things the wrong way round, because you're sad.

— But what if I'm seeing them the right way round?

— And what about Christopher? You've got Christopher.

— Yes, Harriet said after a moment. — He's a good friend.

They contemplated each other frankly.

Alice sighed. — What you mean is that you've missed out on love.

Harriet picked at some imaginary mark on the duvet cover. She was embarrassed by Alice using that word, which rolled so ripely and fluently off her tongue because she'd used it so many times before, ten thousand times.

— Yes, I suppose that what I mean comes somewhere under that heading, she said gruffly. — And now it's too late. Don't say that it isn't, will you, whatever you do. Because it's in me anyway, the thing that makes love not happen. Or rather, the thing that makes it happen isn't in me. Allure. Or sex appeal. Whatever you call it. It's not in my genetic code.

Alice protested, saying that couldn't be how it worked. There must be something you could do to give yourself allure, if you made up your mind to it.

— But maybe there isn't.

— All the great passion there's been in the world can't be based on anything so arbitrary as a genetic code.

Harriet shrugged. — Maybe it is, though. But don't worry about me. I'm not going to try again, anything so silly. That was my Victor Hugo moment. There won't be another one.

The sisters stopped to listen then, hearing footsteps outside: someone was coming to the scullery door. Could the others be back already? When Alice parted the curtains, to her surprise she saw a man in the yard below. It was Jeff: rucksack slung across one shoulder, guitar on the other. He hadn't told anyone he was coming. Banging on the glass she waved to him excitedly. He must have caught the eleven o'clock bus from the station and then walked – it was such a fine day. Now Fran would be happy. And when Jeff stepped back in the yard to look up at Alice, squinting into the sun and grinning at her, she remembered how nice he was: skinny as ever, with his jeans sliding down his narrow hips, tee shirt hanging out, muscular strong arms although he never did any exercise, tan-skinned although he spent his life in bars and clubs. He hadn't taken care of his teeth, they were crooked and stained with nicotine, and the flesh which had been so tender was beginning to be leathery. But still he had his look of a keen youth: liquid black eyes and dead-straight nose, long face with those distinctive flattened cheekbones, which Arthur had too. Running alongside Alice's exasperation with her teasing, satirical, lazy brother-in-law, there was always a frisson of harmless flirtation. They could do with a man in the house, she thought, for these last few days. Roland hadn't counted because he was their brother, and Kasim was too young. Jeff's arrival seemed to rebalance something.

Alice had meant to tell Harriet her news. And then Jeff had arrived – and anyway, before that, she had worried that if she brought it out in the middle of their conversation, she could seem to be trumping Harriet's own crisis, or trying to put her somehow in the wrong. So she decided to put off telling anyone. Anyway, it wasn't really news, not yet. It might turn out to be nothing: this small lump she had found in her breast in the middle of one night, a week or so ago, after the Pattens' dinner party. The lump was new, she was sure of it; but it might only be benign. She had woken and put her hand straight to the place; it seemed to have called her out of her sleep, as distinctly as a tiny alarm going off. And she had phoned the next day for an appointment with her doctor, as soon as she got back to London. That margin of delay – she supposed she'd have gone right away, if she was sensible – was the only sign she gave herself that she was afraid.

No, of course she was afraid, that went without saying – especially when she woke alone in the night. And she was conscious of the lump at every moment, even sitting here in the garden with Jeff, drinking beer with him happily, waiting for the others to get back. But for the time being the fear stayed in its separate compartment from the rest of her life; and it was not as bad, not yet, as she might have expected. After all, there was every reason to be hopeful. Even if it was cancer, so many cancers were treatable these days. Their mother might not have died, they had sometimes said, if she'd had access to the latest developments in medicine. Alice surprised herself with her own resilience. No doubt when she was back in London the reality would lunge from its dark tunnel, mowing her down. But that hadn't happened yet. The lump still belonged to her and had some meaning for her. She told herself it was connected to that intimation on her first day at Kington, when the light moving on the wallpaper in her grandparents' bedroom, and the voices from outside, had pierced her with memories of such intensity. She had known then that something lay in wait for her, something was promised. Only she had mistaken what it was.

Their procession through the woods was sombre. Fran and Janice made stilted conversation about the National Park, on which subject Janice was darkly conspiratorial. Her Nordic walking poles, Fran felt, were the last straw. Christ, it was a signposted woodland walk, you could have done it in high heels! Ivy had a pinched expression because in her fantasy she was on her way to the altar, or alternately to the scaffold – although she was vague about what happened next in either place. Her outfit was inspired by Molly's yesterday: along with her nylon petticoat and pink sequined top she wore a veil made from a lace doily, borrowed from under the telephone in the hall and fixed with hairgrips. Arthur was experimenting with swivelling his new head, which felt weightless on his neck. Approaching nearer to the cottage, they noticed a faint mist hanging between the trees; none of them were interested in it, putting it down in their city ignorance to some peculiarity of the weather. The mist thickened, glittering in the sunbeams, as they reached the stretch of path leading up to the head of the valley and along the side of the cottage; Arthur began to cough behind his hand, and they all tasted dust. With the help of her poles, Janice was slightly ahead of the others, and saw it first.

— Oh, goodness gracious, she exclaimed, stopping short on the path.

The whole of the back of the cottage had sheared off – along with a great slide of rocks and red mud – and fallen into the wooded gully fifty feet below, where a rubble of bricks and mortar smoked tranquilly in silence among the splintered and smashed trees. The silence – or rather, the ordinary restored quiet rustling and burbling and birdsong – was somehow the strangest thing of all, as if the actual moment of disaster itself might have been soundless, abstract, a technicality. The front facade, with about a third of the depth of the cottage still attached to it, was left hanging out over the sheer slope: exposed from behind, each room seemed like a miniature room from a doll's house, with its own wallpaper, and painted dado, and paler outlines on the walls where pictures had once hung. The cream-tiled fireplace, sticking out into nothing, still had cinders in it, and a wine bottle was rolled on its side on the floor. Ivy shrieked once theatrically, then shut up just as abruptly. Very subduedly, Fran began murmuring to herself:
oh my god, my god, my god
. They seemed to stare at what they saw for whole minutes, reactions suspended, as if waiting for some explanation that might be forthcoming from it.

— Can we climb down there? Fran said.

Janice thought there was a long way round by the path, which took you down. — But one of us should go back for the emergency services. They'll send a helicopter. Should I go? I'm not that fit, but I'll do my best to jog. Or should we send one of the children? Can they be trusted?

— Janice, stay with me another moment. I'm not thinking straight.

Fran crouched down on the path in front of her daughter. — Ivy, I have to know. How certain are you, on your honour, that Molly and Kasim were in there?

Dumbly Ivy nodded, lace doily quivering.

But Arthur had run ahead, and now he was waving to them from where the path swung round. — They're here! They're here! he shouted.

As they hurried out into the clearing, Kas and Molly, fully dressed, holding hands, were approaching from the path on the other side. They seemed every bit as astonished as the others were by the cataclysm that had occurred in the cottage. Its front facade, facing onto the clearing, was in fact oddly intact, like a pretence kept up – for decades now – that domesticity was going on behind it as usual. But the front door swung open onto the blue air beyond.

— Oh my god, you stupid pair, what have you
done?
Fran shouted at the two young ones, and then turned on her own children. — And just don't tell me that you two have been climbing in and out of that awful place over the past couple of weeks? Don't tell me these irresponsible idiots allowed you to do that, when I put them in charge?

Then she burst into furious loud tears and couldn't be comforted, because although Arthur put his arms round her, all she could see every time she looked at him was his sad, shorn, unfamiliar little poll.

Molly told them that she had woken in the dawn light.

— It had been so windy in the night, and then I looked out of the front door and the wind had stopped, it was all still, everything was shadowy and perfect. And I thought that I'd never actually seen the dawn before. Well, I'd seen it, on car journeys and things, but I'd never actually been in it. So I woke up Kas, and we got dressed and decided to walk to the waterfall. You should see the waterfall, Ivy, it's like a raging torrent compared to when we went there before. And we saw a deer. I didn't know they still had wild deer in the country.

— But dawn was hours and hours ago, Janice said. — It's almost midday.

Studiously, Kas and Molly didn't exchange looks. They'd fallen asleep again, she explained, on the grass beside the waterfall, once the sun came up and it was so lovely and warm.

Because of the drama of what had happened, and their close escape, no one made any effort to pretend that these two hadn't been making love – probably half the night and all morning. Even the children must have guessed something. The little plaits sticking up all over Molly's head were fuzzy from their embraces, and as she spoke, full of her story, words tumbling out in her excitement, her face shone with a dreamy languor. What a lucky escape! Just imagine it! What would have happened if she hadn't woken, and insisted they go out? Kas had grumbled, he hadn't wanted to go anywhere. If he'd had his way, they'd both be in that pile of rubble now.