Past (4 page)

She lingered in the pregnant quiet of the empty yard, until Arthur came wading out from the scullery in cobwebby walking boots, huge on him, that must have once belonged to her grandfather. He didn't seem surprised to find her skulking there.

— You should come round, he said. — They're all here now.

— I suppose I should.

Kindly, Arthur led her by the hand. They went together through the stone archway; the French windows in the drawing room were open onto the terrace and the lawn. A table was set out on the terrace for lunch. They never seemed to stop eating, Harriet thought – although Alice didn't really eat much, she just picked at it, watching her weight. Roland at the head of the table was talking, his fork laden with avocado and tomato and then forgotten: his delivery was always deliberate, full of measured pauses as if he considered every remark, holding it in inverted commas before letting it out in shapely sentences. His sisters half-worshipped his cleverness.
Who'd have thought it?
they said to one another. Being his sisters, they also found it slightly ridiculous, even Harriet did. They could remember him in short trousers, when his glasses were mended with sticking plaster.

Roland's academic position was as a philosopher, but he had also published a couple of popularising books, which didn't popularise too far, on philosophy and film, and now he wrote and reviewed for the national papers. The surprising white suit must be the new wife's influence, Harriet thought, and made him appear worldly and gilded. He was saying that British film had always been limited by its lack of pastoral. — Unlike Italian films, say, or Iranian, we can only do the pastoral as pastiche. We only know how to be nostalgic about landscape, we don't know how to imagine ourselves inside it.

Pilar said that the countryside didn't make her in the least nostalgic. — I love cities. I love London. All the people, all the conveniences.

Her accent was not heavy but pervasive, exotic, tawny.

— She grew up on a ranch, Roland told them. — Twelve thousand acres.

— I'm hopeless at numbers, Alice said. — Is that enormous or tiny?

Pilar was dressed in white too, the shape of her dress seemed stamped against the shadows under the overhanging clematis. Her slim long legs were crossed, a white shoe dangled from the toe of one long foot, her long brown hair was caught up smoothly behind in a clip. When Arthur led Harriet forwards to the table, they were startled as if they'd hardly registered that she was missing – there wasn't a place set for her. Roland over-compensated, kissing her although they didn't usually kiss, then escorting her almost ceremonially to meet Pilar. Harriet put out her hand at arm's length to forestall more embraces, Pilar unwound from her chair and stood up to shake it. She was very handsome, and taller than anyone in their family; in fact, she seemed to be made of a different material to them, less fussy and more polished, simplified to a few strong statements – the dark strokes of her eyebrows, straight long nose, heavy jaw. Harriet was suffused for a moment in the pungent perfume the other woman was wearing, and could smell it on her fingers for hours afterwards.

They were all affected by Pilar's new presence among them – it had the effect of making their talk at the table seem false, as if they were performing their family life for her scrutiny. Alice and Fran were noisy, showing off; Fran exaggerated the drama of Jeff's selfishness, his dereliction. Ivy spilled her drink, Arthur picked out all the cheese from his sandwich, then left the crusts; Kasim when he appeared wouldn't sit down for lunch – he said he wasn't hungry and then carved himself huge hunks of bread, ate them sitting on the grass at the bottom of the garden. Pilar didn't contribute much to the conversation, her remarks were rapid and forceful like her concentrated, liquid glances, as if she closed discussion instead of opening it up. But this might just be cultural difference, the sisters generously thought. Perhaps it was difficult to be tentative in Spanish. When they asked about the situation in Argentina, Pilar said she loathed politics. — Over there everything's political. That's why I couldn't wait to get away.

— She won't let me meet her family, Roland said.

— You will meet them, Pilar promised him. — You will. Just give me time.

— At fourteen she had to fight off her cousin with a riding whip.

— He was just a little over-excited.

The newly-weds were at that stage where every exchange between them had a private reference, tender but cloying to observers. Alice's quick glance found Fran's, across the table. — The trouble is you'll love them, Pilar said. — They'll love you. They'll butcher an animal for a barbecue for you, take you out riding, sleep under the stars, all that. But you don't know the place, you can't really know it. It's so crazy.

— Philosophers love crazy places, Alice said. — More work for them. Roland's got this Latin American thing anyway, it all appeals to him because he's so buttoned-up in his own life, he's such a puritan. That's why he writes about it.

But clearly Pilar didn't want to talk about Roland's character with his sisters. She was only really forthcoming when she was outlining how, since she'd been made a partner in her law firm, she had led a very effective reorganisation, including getting rid of a couple of staff. — I don't mind working hard, she said, — but I can't bear inefficiency. When Harriet asked what area of law she worked in and Pilar said commercial contracts, there was an awkward silence which was not disapproval – what did they know about it, to disapprove of? – they simply could not think of anything to say, could not bring themselves to say,
that must be interesting
. Roland went on cutting cheese steadfastly and cheerfully, as if he refused to help them out. Commercial contracts, he seemed to imply, were as good a topic for discussion as any other.

Kasim said he was going for a walk. Cobwebby from too much sleep, he wasn't ready yet to take on Alice's brother, and he didn't want this girl to think he was hanging around because of her. He and Molly had not yet spoken. Ivy sprang into supplicant position at her mother's elbow, holding up her hands together in prayer. — Can we go with him? Please, please, Mummy? We can show him the way to the waterfall. He can look after us.

Fran pretended to make a fuss – they were forbidden to climb trees, Arthur mustn't go near the edge of any steep slopes – but of course, Kasim thought, she must be relieved to be rid of them for a couple of hours. Then he had to be laden with the whole apparatus the children might need: bottles of water, wet wipes, biscuits, apples, Elastoplasts, Savlon. They had to pee, they had to change their shoes. Eventually they set out along the road in the opposite direction to the way the taxi had brought him and Alice the day before; he strode with a scowl, hoping the children wouldn't be able to keep up. They were indefatigable though, running up and down like puppies, yapping and chattering. Ivy in a spangled waistcoat, with a scarf knotted under her chin, was disconcerting, a miniature old crone.

The road became more or less impassable for cars not far beyond the little cluster of houses; grass growing through its tarmacked surface was breaking it up and branches had fallen, blocking it, from ancient oaks growing out of the banks on either side. Ivy led the way across a stile then up a steep field to a tree at the top; they followed the left-hand hedge through several more fields before descending through another gate into woods. Yellow waymarkers were painted on posts and trees. They couldn't get lost, everything in this countryside was tamed and known, nothing was dangerous.

They had it all to themselves – only a farmer on a tractor, toiling up and down, his noise no louder than a persistent buzzing insect, did something in a field far off on the opposite hill-flank. Ploughed? But didn't they plough in the spring? In the woods, as if he'd arrived far enough away from the world in which he was on his dignity, Kasim unbent and began to play with the children: he picked up pine cones where the path ran through a plantation of conifers, pelting Ivy with them. She was dumbfounded at first but soon they were pelting him back and having screaming fun – feet thudding as they ran, breath stopping in their chests with delicious fear, some ancient pent-up violence released in the rage of throwing. Ivy called Arthur a spoilsport when he cried because Kasim hit him too hard. Then for a while Kasim carried Arthur on his shoulders.

They arrived at the ruined cottage at the head of a valley, where the path turned tightly round above a steep drop through trees to the stream below, the cottage hanging precipitously on to the edge. After the wood-shadows this clearing seemed a bright simplification; water gurgled in a rocky cleft below them and the treetops stirred. The windows of the cottage were all on its other side, for the view; a wooden porch on their side was collapsing away from the front door. The roof was made of the same slabs as Kington House, thickly mossed, and from one end of the cottage bulged a semicircular bread oven, built of grey stones slotted mysteriously into their curve. A grassy bank opposite the front door was improbably pretty with wild flowers.

— Is this the waterfall? Kasim said, setting Arthur down.

— Oh, not for
miles.

Kasim dropped down onto the bank and then lay back among the flowers, closing his eyes. — Who cares about the waterfall anyway? This'll do.

Ivy was crestfallen. When she had been leading them so well! And the promise of the waterfall – with its clear pool at the bottom, where she had once dramatically cut her foot – had been her trump card. Kasim's sleep, or feigned sleep, withdrew his presence as abruptly as if a cloud had crossed the sun – though none did, the sky was cloudless.

— May we explore in the cottage, then? she asked.

Kasim grunted agreement without even looking at it.

The rusty padlock held, but pointlessly, because the hasp was entirely loose from the door frame; the door stood slightly ajar, and when they tugged at it opened wide enough to let them squeeze through. Inside, the children were aware at once that the cottage smelled awful – not innocently of leaf-rot and minerals like outside, but of something held furtively close, ripening in secret. There was only one room downstairs, which must have been the kitchen and living room combined; once-cream-painted cupboards were built-in on either side of the chimney breast, and a tiled 1930s hearth, its grate stuffed high with dead leaves and feathers fallen down the chimney, still showed traces of red polish. The room was empty except that, theatrically, a cheap wooden kitchen chair lay on its side on the floorboards, as if to make them think that someone had just left in a hurry – although it was obvious that the house had been abandoned for a long time. All its surfaces had lost their shine and were sinking back into the same dun earth-colour, beginning not to look man-made.

Ivy accepted at first that the house had no staircase: its inhabitants must have gone to bed miraculously, through the upper windows. Then Arthur found stairs behind a little door; he felt for her hand as she led the way up. The smell was worse in the two tiny bedrooms. The wallpaper in the first room might have been pink, once; baskets of fruit were looped along diagonal festoons of roses. This room too was empty, apart from a decomposing heap of magazines in one corner away from the window. Their paper had lost its shine and some of them were left open as if a reader had been interrupted, leafing through them. In angry haste, Ivy scanned and repudiated page after page of bloated flaunting bosoms and fat nipples, upside-down perspectives from peeled, parted, meaty thighs. The drooping texture of the pages was disgusting; some of them were glued together with damp, returning to pulp.

— Come on, said Arthur, not interested, tugging at her hand.

The door to the last room was closed and it was half-dark in there because rags of left-behind curtain were drawn across the window. A few fat flies knocked around sluggishly, buzzing against the glass. As the children's eyes adjusted they made out some large dark mess on the floor, something shrivelled and staining which was the centre of the bad smell. Arthur recognised it first.

— It's Mitzi, he said.

Mitzi was Kington's loping, lolloping red setter, belonging to the Pattens who owned the barn conversion opposite the church. The children hadn't missed her because she wasn't always in the village when they were; like theirs, the barn was a holiday home. Ivy saw that Arthur was right: crisp curls of Mitzi's russet hair were stuck to the blackened leathery thing in places, and it had approximately Mitzi's outline. Spikes of white bone stood up in a row out of the collapsed flat bag of the rest.

— Don't be stupid, she said derisively. — How can it be Mitzi? Do you think anyone would just leave her here?

— But it is Mitzi, look!

You could definitely make out one of those velvety, floppy ears, more intact than the rest of her. Arthur went closer and half-crouched with his hands on his knees, examining forensically, wrinkling up his nose for the smell. — Why is she like this?

Ivy began loudly singing nonsense words and laughing. — La, la. I don't know what you're talking about, she sang. — It isn't Mitzi. Arthur is a silly twat. La, la, la.

Arthur's being there with her made her hot, in the presence of that thing: if she'd been alone she could have stared more greedily, without any need for concealment. Partly she was distracting him as an older sister should, saving him from certainty. Mitzi and the rude pictures swam together in her embarrassment: not knowing she was doing it, she began to think that those women were dead.

— Let's go out, she said. — It's only an old stinky mess.

— Yes, it's stinky.

Arthur had been calm in the presence of the horror, but once or twice he looked back sharply nonetheless as they came down the poky stairs; they hurried, and burst out in a muddle through the door at the bottom.