Past (5 page)

— Don't dare say anything to Kasim. Because he'd be furious.

He nodded obediently, trusting her.

As they squeezed out through their gap into the day again – and Ivy restored the padlock carefully to its locked-seeming position – Kasim lifted his head, blinking, from among the flowers where he really had fallen asleep. To Ivy and Arthur, their usual roles as adults and children seemed reversed for a disconcerting moment, because they had seen what he hadn't: he belonged outside to the innocent sunshine. It occurred to Kasim, too late, that perhaps he shouldn't have let them go inside without checking first that the cottage was safe. But here they were again, unscathed, so it didn't matter. He yawned and announced he was starving. Ivy unpacked their picnic, laying out biscuits, apples, crisps.

— We have to make Arthur eat an apple, she insisted firmly.

— So what's it like in the cottage?

She was nonchalant. — Empty.

Arthur watched everything his sister did; the liquid blue eyes seemed huge in his small, fine face and he looked as if he was courageously suffering. Ivy had to remind herself that he always looked like this, even when he was only thinking about his dinner, or money – he was surprisingly mercenary for his age. As usual, he took a biscuit from the packet when Ivy did, bit into it when she did, took a mouthful of water from their bottle after her, except that as usual he hadn't emptied his mouth properly first – she protested at the bits swimming in the water when he'd finished. Chattering with exaggerated gaiety, Ivy felt the burden of her responsibility for what they'd seen. Everything was changed by it, she thought. They couldn't ever not have seen it, now. It stayed like a blot in the corner of her vision and darkness leaked from it. She could forget it all right when she was looking forwards, but if she turned too quickly, or forgot to be cautious, then it jolted her all over again with its dirty news, its inadmissible truth.

While Roland and Pilar went to look around the village, Alice lay reading on the window seat upstairs. She'd picked up this book about a doll's house from the shelf in her room quite casually and fondly, remembering how she had liked it in her childhood, not at all expecting to be ambushed with overwhelming emotion. Every so often she looked up from the page and stared around her as if she hardly knew where she was – but she was at Kington, which was the beloved scene of her past anyway. So her glance through the panes of the old glass in the arched window, to the yellowing rough grass in the garden and the alders which grew along the stream, didn't restore any equilibrium. It wasn't only the recollection attached to the words she was reading – a memory of other readings – which moved her. The story itself, in its own words, tapped into deep reservoirs of feeling. The writer's touch was very sure and true, unsentimental – one of the doll's-house dolls died, burned up in a fire. The book seemed to open up for Alice a wholesome and simplifying way of seeing things which she had long ago lost or forgotten, and hadn't hoped to find again.

Vaguely she was aware of Molly playing something melancholy on her guitar in her room – the same little sad, tentative thing over and over, always breaking down at the same place. Eventually the music faltered altogether. Molly was standing beside Alice's window seat, staring down at her anxiously.

— Aunt Alice, are you all right?

Alice smiled up at her through her tears. — I'm reading something I used to read when I was a girl. This story makes me so happy. It's brought back so many things.

— Oh dear, Molly said helplessly. — I'm sorry.

— Don't be sorry, I don't mind.

Molly was embarrassed by her aunt's excess of emotion. Guiltily, she mentioned to Harriet later that Alice had been reading old books and getting upset. Harriet only said that Alice got upset very easily. How like Alice, Harriet scolded in her thoughts, to make a parade out of her private feelings for everyone's consumption, bewildering the children.

Ivy made a scene when they got home, saying she wouldn't eat the risotto Alice was making; when Fran said that if she didn't she'd go to bed without eating anything, she lay racked with sobbing for a while on the grass in the garden.

— She has to learn to eat what's put in front of her, Fran said.

But Alice couldn't bear it and said she could have cheese on toast instead. Then Ivy and Arthur played before supper in the stream which ran across the bottom of the garden, building the dam they always built, or tried to build. From the kitchen came the rattle of china and cutlery, pan lids chiming, Alice banging the wooden spoon on the side of the pan after stirring. The sun was low and the stream was mostly in shadow. Bare-legged and barefoot inside clammy wellingtons, they fell into a concerted rhythm, satisfied by the push of the water up against their boots as they splashed through it, Arthur following Ivy's orders. They were drawn on by a vision of a spreading, still lagoon, while the stream, hastening over its stony bottom, forced its way through all the gaps they left. Urgent, responsible, Ivy rapped out her instructions. Once, memorably, in a different summer and when the children were sitting on the bank, cows – gigantic at close quarters – had come swishing along this stream, making a tremendous racket in the water, stirring up the mud from the stream bed, playing truant from their ordinary lives in the fields.

— It was Mitzi, Arthur paused to say, a stone in each hand.

Ivy was contemptuous. — Are you still thinking about that old thing?

— But it was.

— I don't care. Who cares?

She shrugged her skinny shoulders, fending off some intimation through a great effort of will. The real evening was brimming and steady around her like a counter-argument to horror, its midges swarming and multiplying in the last nooks of yellow sunshine.

After supper, when Fran had put the children to bed and Molly and Harriet were finishing the washing up, Alice visited the bathroom upstairs and then slipped secretly into her brother's room. She carried the tooth mug full of water, pretending she wanted to top up their flowers. Roland and Pilar and Kasim were sitting outside on the terrace with their coffee and brandy; their voices floated from below through the open windows. Kasim was opening up to them at last – perhaps too much. It sounded as if he was boasting about how he found his university lecturers boring, how stupid most of them were.

Alice found her flowers put aside indifferently on a windowsill, out of the way of all the toiletries and bottles and kit crowded on their dressing table: not only Pilar's expensive make-up and scent but cologne and moisturiser for Roland too. Alice saved the surprise of these for Fran later – after a short and crabbed conversation with Jeff, on the phone in the hall so that everyone could hear her side of things, Fran was watching some detective thing on the grim little television in the study. Who would ever have thought their brother would use moisturiser, or Acqua Di Parma? Alice felt tugged between fond respect for him and a puff of laughter. At dinner there had been a little fuss when he dropped something on the white trousers; crouching beside him, Pilar had mopped at it so seriously and efficiently.

She peered around the bedroom in the dusk, helped by the light from the landing behind. Cases stood open and half-ransacked on the floor: Pilar's dresses and a blouse – in simplified bold shapes and colours, black and white and red – were ghostly presences on their hangers, hooked over the carved rim of their grandmother's huge old wardrobe. Fingering a red chiffon blouse, admiring it, Alice caught sight of herself in the foxed oval mirror in the wardrobe door and was taken aback by something dated and fusty in her own appearance. She had put on that vintage bolero again. Was she letting something slip, had she failed in her vigilance, keeping up her style? Or sometimes too much vigilance was disastrous, as you grew older. A floorboard creaked and Ivy called out subduedly. Alice hurried out through Harriet's room then into her own. — Go to sleep, she said from across the landing.

— I can't!

Alice put her head round the door of the children's bedroom. Ivy was mournful, eyes glittering in the half-dark. She lay flat on her back in bed like a little girl in a folktale, her sharp nose pointing up, her two plaits angled neatly on the pillow.

— Yes you can. Shut your eyes and think of nice things.

— What nice things?

Alice cast around for ideas. — Ice cream? Kittens? A pair of magic shoes to carry you away on an adventure?

She began to tell Ivy the story of the doll's-house dolls, but Ivy only sighed, rolling over, turning her back on Alice. Her eyes were still staring open and she was portentous with her despair, beyond the reach of childish consolations.

Harriet stepped into her room later, closed the door behind her, and stood in the dark in the relief of her own space at last, feeling the evening's sociability drain out of her. Almost at once she was aware that the door in the other wall, which led into her brother's room, had been left open – although she had been careful to close it earlier. The light wasn't on in there either, but she could hear Roland and Pilar moving around; they had come upstairs to finish their unpacking. Embarrassed because they hadn't noticed the door, Harriet slipped out of her shoes and went stealthily across the room to close it. The full moon had risen and was shining in at all the windows on the back of the house; blue light spilled through the open door into her room. Her brother and his wife must be bathed in moonlight.

She put out her hand to close the door – it was only open a few inches. Then through the gap her attention was caught by a movement she couldn't at first interpret – moonlight itself seemed to be coiling and uncoiling inside the looming shape of her grandmother's heavy wardrobe; Pilar's dresses, hanging like pale body-shapes, swayed in time to it. Whatever Harriet was watching, she realised, she was seeing reflected in the wardrobe's mirror: some knot of light and dark busied upon itself, intent as nothing ever was intent, urgent. It seemed more like work than play. She had watched for too long, too deeply drawn in, before acknowledging that she knew what she was seeing, or half-seeing: the newly-weds were making love. By then it was too late. Putting her forehead against the wood of the doorframe, she touched her own breast with her hand, outside her shirt, unable to leave off looking.

Then a cloud covered the moon and blotted out the light, and she stepped back from the door. She was too horrified to close it now – anyway, they might hear her, and know that she'd heard them. The purposeful low noises of their love-making racked Harriet; in the aftermath (settling sounds, the appreciative hum of fulfilment, a low laugh) she was hollowed out, humiliated. Standing drawn upright, alone in the quiet room, imagining herself like one of those emaciated worm-eaten medieval carvings, she was assaulted by outrageous longings. Where had these been locked away inside her? With Christopher and with others, she saw now, she had only ever had the husk of the real thing, the dry rehearsal. Creeping out through Alice's room, she shut herself in the bathroom; and then when she returned she came noisily into her bedroom, put on the light, crossed directly to the other door, and closed it firmly. She took out her diary from under the tee shirts in her drawer, and sat with it on the side of her bed as she usually did; she put down the date, then hesitated with her biro poised above the page. After a moment she began to write.

In the field above Bardon Huish I found what I'd never seen before: a waterfall hidden in a cleft in the ground, grown thickly over with brambles. The berries still very green and hard. The little fall of water jetting off its miniature cliff curved purely and perfectly as glass, yet not still but in perpetual motion. I interrupted it with my hand, feeling its force, indifferent to me. Touched myself with the water as if it was a blessing, although of course I knew it might be poisonous.

KASIM DAWDLED IN
the garden the next morning, waiting for Molly to come downstairs. He was setting fire with his lighter to bits of the dried cut grass which lay around, just to annoy Ivy, who hovered on guard nearby, tormented with the responsibility, rushing to stamp out all his little conflagrations, half-delighted and half-exasperated. He knew that Molly was up because he'd listened outside her door hours ago and heard her moving about in her room – they still hadn't spoken one word to each other. Planning to intercept her, he'd lounged for a while on the window seat on the landing with its padded striped cushion, pretending to read the book he'd picked up from the shelf in Alice's room, until the hot sun through the glass made him too stuffy. Arthur had come puffing up the stairs, frowningly intent on some baby purpose: not noticing Kasim, he had knocked on Molly's door and been admitted, swallowed up inside. Then had come a faint noise of the guitar being strummed, first by Molly, who was scarcely competent, and then by Arthur, who was not competent at all. Kasim gave up and took the book downstairs.

What was she doing up there, for fuck's sake?

— Getting ready, Ivy explained.

— Getting ready for what?

When Molly finally appeared, stepping out through the French windows carrying a bowl of muesli and with Arthur devotedly in train, she showed no signs of elaborate preparation. She could have pulled her jeans and cropped tee shirt on in two minutes, she wore no jewellery apart from a plain silver bangle, he could scarcely see that she wore make-up; her ears weren't even pierced. There was something naked in fact in her pretty, neat face – high forehead, slanting long eyes, wide mouth; no wonder she kept the glossy wing of her hair falling forward, to hide it. Her hair had glints of rusty red in it, so did her lashes, and she was dusted across the nose with a few rust-coloured freckles, not too many. She sat on the step, flat belly folding into a neat crease, eating her muesli self-consciously and slowly while Ivy interrogated her. Smiling with her mouth full, Molly only nodded or shook her head in response. Did she like her school? No. What was her favourite lesson? Shrug. Did she have a boyfriend? No: blushing. What did she want to do when she grew up? Shrug. Did she like butter? Yes – a buttercup held under her chin reflected yellow.

Kasim knew Molly knew that he was watching, that she was performing for his benefit and the children were a convenient sideshow as he and she took each other's measure. Molly's self-possession was mysterious as a still inland lake; he hadn't decided yet if she was very deep or very shallow. Now, when she took out her iPhone from her jeans pocket, it was his moment; he saw Ivy open her mouth to explain and sternly he forestalled her, frowning. — What network are you on? There's no signal.

— Oh! Ivy was furious. — I wanted to tell her!

— I'm used to it, Molly said. — I've been coming here for years. Just thought I'd try.

— But it's possible: I'll show you. We have to walk up to that top gate in the field. If you sit on it you might get something.

— I feel cut off without my phone, she confided. — You know?

He was lofty. — I'm not bothering to check mine. Who cares?

Ivy almost protested – he had checked! – then closed up her small mouth upon his fib. The four of them set out up the field in a procession. Kasim reminded the children that they had to stay this side of his line and surprisingly they obeyed, planting their feet as if his new law was a fact of life. Then he leaned on the gate and pretended to be gazing out at the view basking in sunlight, blue-dusky woods and motionless ranks of golden crops, distant birds suspended in the air's pale blue, scrutinising the earth beneath. Molly meanwhile, her bare brown midriff on a level with his eyes, was all absorbed in her phone, giving squeals of satisfaction when she got her signal, growling with real irritation if she lost it again. He stole glances up at her expression, which as she read and texted was the most animated he'd seen it; when she'd finished with her texts she checked Facebook, fingers adept at scrolling, smiling and reacting secretively in collusion with an invisible company of like minds elsewhere.

— Let's take a walk, he said decisively. — Molly, would you like to come for a walk?

The children would accompany them, he calculated: at least on this first excursion. They were his pretext and his cover. Thrilled, Ivy suggested they could go to the Buddhist retreat. — There are people wandering around meditating, and they won't speak to you even if you ask them things.

— No, let's go to the waterfall again. This time I want to actually see the waterfall.

Ivy turned on him, if he'd noticed it, a face that was clouded with complications and reluctance. She accepted stoically, however, that because she was only a child she couldn't determine where they went, could only adapt to what the others chose. Anyway, she half-desired to return to the scene in the cottage, even as she half-dreaded it.

— Will we go in that cottage again? Arthur asked her privately on their way down the field.

— What for? We've seen inside. It's only boring.

In the dining room Fran replenished everyone's cups with fresh coffee. They were using the good china from the sideboard, the cups weightless and fine, transparent. If you held them up to the light when they were empty you could see set in the base a picture of a woman's head, strands of her loose hair blowing behind her – their grandmother had shown them this miracle when they were children. Alice, still in her dressing gown, was talking too much, leaning animatedly forward across the table among the ends of crust and pots of jam stuck with spoons, showing her cleavage, holding forth in one of her diatribes against modern life. She said everyone was losing the sense that everyday things could be substantial and beautiful. In the old days a peasant carved a bowl and a spoon out of a piece of wood, then used them to eat the food he'd grown in his own garden. — Now everything is banal, objects have no meaning, they're interchangeable.

— I wonder if that's what the peasant thinks, her brother said.

— He's better off carving bowls than working in a factory.

— Well, you'd better ask him.

Roland felt impatient with how Alice simplified – she wanted shortcuts, but the truth about these things could only be understood through a lifetime's intellectual endeavour. It wasn't possible for him to lay out in casual conversation all the complex hinterland to his conviction, his own formulations interwoven with the thoughts of others. — I'm wary of your evaluative judgements, he said. — This is
good
and that's
bad.
The peasant might be better off in the factory and have more leisure time and disposable income. You have to factor that in.

— But is it always stupid, to see the value in other ways of life, and realise what's wrong with our own?

— You have to ask how you know what you think you know, about value.

— It's a bit late for peasants carving bowls, Alice, Fran said. — I don't think you're going to get that particular genie back into its bottle.

— Not just peasants. It's the way that people lived more slowly, and kept the same things all their lives, and took care of them. Our whole relationship to the things we owned was different. I hate how we throw everything away now.

Alice was more of an actress in her private life, Roland thought, than she ever was in the years when she had tried to be one on the stage. She had so
wanted
to be an actress, always – yet in any role apart from her own, to everyone's surprise, her performances had been tentative and lacking in conviction. Roland knew his sister so well. When her words tumbled over one another in this self-dramatising way, he knew she wasn't faking or pretending, it was her real effort to communicate the truth. Pilar asked whether, if she didn't like modernity, she didn't want anaesthetics when she had an operation.

— Of course I'm glad we have those modern things – medicines and sewage and hot showers and low infant mortality. Of course I am. With the treatments they have these days for cancer, our mother could still be alive, probably. But isn't some of it false improvement, false betterment? We're making the world too ugly. We've forgotten how to live.

— You'd be surprised, said Roland, — how long people have been saying that.

— You are an incurable romantic, Alice. Harriet sounded so bitter that everyone looked at her.

— Perhaps I am. Isn't the world ugly, though? And getting uglier.

— You don't know the peasantry, Pilar said briskly. — It's easy to idealise them, but their way of life is very backward. If you saw them, you might change your mind.

Alice was silenced for a moment, unpicking conscientiously her shocked reaction to that word
backward
. After all, what did she know about the Argentinian peasantry, or peasantry anywhere? Roland's sisters looked cautiously at him – he might be scorched, feeling how thoroughly his new wife didn't fit inside their well-worn family forms. Also, they wondered how well this idea of backwardness would go down at his university. Stolidly Roland resisted their interest, keeping his own counsel as he always had, even when it hadn't interested them so much. He knew Pilar didn't enjoy these kind of discussions where there was no practical outcome, no decision to make. She believed social occasions ought to be lubricated with an agreed civility, limited and shallow.

Pilar began clearing the breakfast things onto a tray, refusing help when Harriet offered it. She was wearing a white shirt, and jeans that fitted her curved slim haunches precisely. When they began living together, Roland had been surprised that she put on clean clothes every day – and they were always spotless, never crumpled. At the end of each week, he discovered, she sent everything she'd worn to the dry cleaners or the laundry. This had seemed profligate to him at first, but lately he'd begun to do the same. And Pilar haggled rather brutally if there was the least grease spot or crease when their clothes were delivered back. The people at the cleaners seemed to admire her for it.

— We're going to drive into town, he said to Alice now, — to pick up the papers and find somewhere to check emails. If we do decide to keep the house on, you know, we ought to get broadband. It just makes life easier.

— But that's just what's precious here, Alice protested. — That we're not in connection with everything outside. It's a sanctuary.

Kasim had acquired a map from the study. He led them to the waterfall a different way, through a tunnel where a railway line had once passed overhead, then across a stretch of high scrubland with wooden fire towers set at vantage points. They wouldn't pass the ruined cottage until they were on their way home. In the woods they threw pine cones again: Molly screeched unselfconsciously when she was hit, racing flat-footed along the path, throwing cones back hard at Kasim – she and Arthur seemed to be in league together against the other two. Collaborating with Kasim, Ivy was happy. Her movements seemed perfectly attuned to his, running among the trees, collecting ammunition and then waiting in ambush.

The waterfall when they eventually arrived was a disappointment. In Ivy's anticipation it had tumbled in a crystal stream, foaming into the pool below; in reality it was a swelling silver rope in a long curtain of vividly green moss. There was no authoritative thunder of falling water, only a subdued trickling. Because she'd talked it up as the climax of their walk, she felt humiliated. Kasim and Molly hardly looked at it. Molly flopped down in the grass and closed her eyes as if she was sunbathing, Kasim sat nearby and began reading a book which he took out of the back pocket of his shorts. In truth they were both – briefly – disappointed too: they had longed, without knowing it, for the éclat of something spectacular and greater than themselves, to overwhelm them. The abrupt cutting off of their attention was a surprise to the children, who were used to being bathed in adult awareness, at least for as long as adults were present. If her mother had been there, Ivy might have made a scene – this exposure, when something fell flat which she had longed for and promoted, was famously one of her tipping points. But she couldn't risk disaster's crescendo with no one to anchor it against. She brought out the story of cutting her foot on a piece of glass in the pool under the waterfall; reduced to words it seemed truncated and paltry and no one listened.

Molly and Kasim appeared to have forgotten each other entirely; then Ivy noticed that while Kasim frowned seriously into the pages of his book he was at the same time tickling Molly's bare midriff with a long piece of grass. He did it so casually that at first Molly didn't know it was him and brushed the grass seed head away carelessly without opening her eyes. When the tickling persisted – as if the grass had a will of its own, nothing to do with Kasim – a smile of knowing came on Molly's face and, still without opening her eyes, she snatched at the seed head and held onto it, crushing it. Kasim's face showed nothing.

Excluded, Ivy was suddenly shy and wanted to do something childish: she went to paddle in the pool with Arthur. Water babbled in there secretively. A freckled yellow light, refracted in the tea-coloured depths, gilded a scatter of pebbles on the sandy bottom; insects sculled the surface, dodging into the darkness under the ferns. The water was vivid against Ivy's legs as socks of cold. They were wearing their jelly shoes – it didn't matter if you got them wet, and you were safe from glass. Arthur was sternly preoccupied in some game with the thermos cup, pouring water out of the pool into a cleft in the rock. Ivy pressed her palms against the soaking moss of the waterfall – until she thought there might be slugs, and pulled her hand away smartly. Then she was seized by the sensation of seeing herself from a far distance, from the skinny tops of the fir trees stirring high above the clearing: miniature, alone inside herself, cut off at the knees by water.