Past (30 page)

But you could see she didn't really for one moment seriously believe that this death was possible. The life in her had such force, it felt inviolable.

— We probably wouldn't, Kas said. — I expect there was some kind of warning noise. Anyway, not all of it has gone down. I'll bet we could have managed to scramble out somehow.

— You must have heard
something
, Janice insisted. — Even from the waterfall. It must have made quite a racket when it came down.

Molly frowned vaguely. — Well, I may have, perhaps. A sort of smash. Or a roar, like bottles being tipped out. I just thought it was industrial. A factory or something.

— You didn't mention it, Kas said. — Of course there are a lot of factories round here.

— I didn't want to wake you. You look so sweet when you're asleep.

Janice asked Kasim, at some point on their way back through the woods, whether it was true that they'd found Mitzi in the cottage. Kasim said he had cleaned out the remains of a fox from one of the upstairs rooms: Janice was relieved and Arthur and Ivy looked at each other, deciding wordlessly not to interfere. They felt upon them again the prohibition of the Women. Even in his newly toughened boy-self, Arthur seemed to half believe in them. Probably the cottage had fallen down by accident. But he remembered those dirty rags flickering at a window, and the dead dog in a corner which might have been a fox, and that mystery of the magazines, which had grown upon him while he cut them out: one naked body after another in numbing repetition, as if they must add up to something. Why weren't there men's bodies?

They took the shortcut up through the churchyard; Alice was talking and laughing with someone in the garden. Fran was thinking about school, trying to be the person she was when she was there: smart and flexible and competent, parrying her pupils' remarks with her quick sarcasm, flattening them. But everything got so confused in her own family, and she made such drastic mistakes. It dismayed her that Janice Patten had seen her in tears, and that her children seemed so unhealthily fascinated by Molly's sex life, and that she'd allowed them to stray into such danger in that place. She closed a door in her mind on that vision of smoking rubble, squeezing it tightly shut – but even the squeezing made her feel blank and sick. If only Jeff were here, she thought. Full of self-doubt, she let go the eternal litany of her complaints, and longed for him – the familiar, loved, wiry puzzle of his body and his familiar exasperating self, his character – as if he was the particular and only solution to the problem of her.

Harriet was much better; she was very quiet. A card had arrived for her one morning, inside an envelope addressed in a foreign handwriting: she picked it up from the hall floor under the letter box before anyone else saw it, and took it into her bedroom to read, shutting both doors quietly. What was she hoping for? Some word that could unfasten what she'd done? The card was a picture of Malmesbury Abbey, with its ruined windows in the clerestory: perhaps Pilar and Roland had visited there on their way home. On the back Pilar had only written:
The tests were negative.
Harriet was amazed. How could Pilar imagine that she still cared one way or another about those tests? Why would she care, if she couldn't have Pilar? Harriet wouldn't ever have believed, in her life before, that she was capable of such selfish love, cold greed. But there it was.

The estate agent came one afternoon to go over the house and give them a valuation. They had spent all morning cleaning and making everything look nice, and Alice had put out flowers again in all the rooms. She noticed that someone was sitting out in the man's car on the drive; he explained that this was his father, who wasn't much involved with the business any longer, but liked to come with him for the ride sometimes. He'd been forced to give up driving himself, because of problems with his peripheral vision; frustrating for him, his son said, because he was very fit and active otherwise. Alice said his father was welcome to come inside, she'd make him a cup of tea. But apparently he preferred waiting in the car.

Mikey Waller sat there for a while, and then when the sun came out and the rain stopped spitting he got out to stretch his legs, walking down the road to take a quick look inside the church, because his hobby was church architecture. His thatch of sandy-white hair was neatly trimmed and his colour was ruddy as if he might have high blood pressure; he was one of those tall, shambling men who look too raw when they're young and then, without trying for it, accumulate gravity and style later in life. He didn't take long inside the church, not wanting to keep his son waiting. When he turned into the rectory drive again, he saw that a young woman – anyway, she looked young enough to him – had come out of the house with a bowl of washing, children's clothes, which she was pegging on the line. He watched her, though he had to be careful not to seem to stare, because of the problems with his field of vision. He supposed she must be one of Jill Crane's daughters. How many children were there: three? Or four? This one was petite and plump and decisive; she didn't look much like her mother, as far as he could see – the same red-gold hair perhaps. So the family were going to sell the house, after all these years. Mikey regretted this. He felt a special attachment to the old place, and had always liked to think of the Cranes using it. This was because he'd loved their mother once, for a long time. She'd gone away, though, and he'd had to make his life without her.

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Copyright © Tessa Hadley 2015

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First published by Jonathan Cape in 2015

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