Past (6 page)

Kasim picked another stem of grass and dusted its drooping, plumy head, heavy with seeds, against Molly's cheeks and her closed, protuberant, mauve eyelids. With her hair fallen back from her face, he thought, and from his odd angle, she looked quite different – a sleek water animal basking on a rock.

— What are you doing? she said. — Don't! It tickles.

He had forgotten Molly herself, he was so intent upon his explorations – of her ear now, which stood out childishly from her head, its cartilage golden-pink and transparent. Trailing his grass around the whorls of it, he speculated aloud that the grass stem might be sharp enough to pierce its long lobe, then prodded at it.

Molly squealed in protest and sat up: both of them were shocked, looking one another in the eye again after such intimate contact.

— Why don't you pierce your ears? Kasim asked severely. — Or your nose, or at least something.

She explained that she would love to wear earrings but had a horror of the pain of piercing. In fact she couldn't bear the idea of any pain: she told him this solemnly, with innocent self-importance, as if she were telling him she disliked Marmite or classical music. — I've never even had to have a filling at the dentists, thank goodness.

— Ever been stung by a bee or a wasp?

She shuddered at the idea. — Never. I hate them.

— Broken your arm?

— Nope. I sprained my ankle once, that was bad enough.

— Got a staple in your finger from a staple gun?

— Oh god! She buried her face in her hands. — No! Did you ever do that?

She believes she's charmed, Kasim thought incredulously. She thinks she gets a choice. She thinks it's something special about her, and that she's discriminating against pain out of an especially refined sensitivity – as if other people are made differently and don't mind it.

— Ever had a Chinese burn? he said slyly.

— What's that?

— We used to do them in the playground at junior school. Give me your arm.

— I don't want one.

— Give it to me.

He held her arm above the wrist in his two fists, then twisted them opposite ways, pulling the skin lightly but hard enough to hurt her and make her pull away, only half laughing. She rubbed at the place where he'd left a red mark, easy tears welling like lenses, magnifying her tawny irises.

— What about childbirth? he said. — Don't you want children?

— You can have an anaesthetic, Molly said, — from the waist down. My mother did and she said it was fine.

Fran and Alice lay side by side on a rug on the prickly grass in the garden, with their skirts pulled up to tan their thighs, though Fran's only ever turned pink. — It's not fair, she grumbled. — Why haven't I got your golden kind of skin? Harriet's got it and she doesn't even need it, she doesn't care. So what do you think of the new Mrs Roland?

— My god, she's a Gorgon! Alice exclaimed with pent-up feeling. — Poor Roly. What's he done? He must know what we'd think. No wonder he married her without telling us.

— But he doesn't seem to mind it. He's basking in it.

— He isn't even a womaniser, though. He doesn't lift a finger: it's the women who do it. They see him looking so clever and so lost, so very much married to the wrong person. They come to his rescue; I'll swear he isn't at all active in the whole thing. I mean, everyone knew he needed rescuing from Valerie, but I'm not sure
he
did, until Pilar explained to him. And now he's totally smitten. Sexually smitten.

— I do appreciate Pilar's very attractive. I'd die to have her figure.

— Isn't she a bit heavy in the jaw? Don't you think? Carnivorous. And she so disapproves of us! She thinks we're the worst kind of time-wasters.

— She thinks we aren't worthy of Roland.

— She thinks we ought to be grovelling at his feet. No wonder he's in love. Fran, I feel we'll never have Roly to ourselves again! None of his other wives have taken him away from us like this. We could accommodate ourselves to the others – or they accommodated to us.

— Don't be silly, Fran said. — It won't last.

— D'you mean the marriage won't last?

— I mean this phase of the marriage: you know, the lovey-dovey phase, when everything the other person does seems especially entrancing and original. Before the next phase, when all the same things seem especially irritating.

— Did you go through a lovey-dovey phase with Jeff?

— I suppose I must have, though the memory's so humiliating I've repressed it. I feel as if I've been seeing through Jeff for ever and ever.

Upstairs Harriet was standing in her brother's bedroom. The sash windows were thrown open high and she could hear her sisters' voices from the garden though she couldn't hear their words; she didn't want to. Dust motes swarmed in the sunlight, and the thick hot silence inside the room seemed strongly printed with its absent inhabitants, who had marked it with their scent of cosmetics and perfume and aftershave. They had made up the bed with a duvet cover and pillowcases patterned in swirls of red and orange; the old-fashioned faded furniture seemed to hold stiffly back from an invasion. Harriet, too, was holding herself back – she was rusty, the joints of her spirit creaked and groaned with disuse. And yet she had crept in here. Possessed by what she had seen last night, she could not free herself from its violence, its excitement. She had not reckoned with this power of sex. In all seriousness she had believed that it didn't count for her, that sex was a thing among other things, that you could put aside.

Putting her face up against the scarlet chiffon blouse whose hanger was slung over the wardrobe's upper rim, not touching it at first with her hands, she stood breathing through its veil. The frail fabric rose and fell against her lips and cheeks, lifted by her breath; she tasted its sun-warmed, laundry smell. How grotesque she must look, with this draped over her face, if anyone ever saw. Outside a male voice chimed in with Fran's and Alice's: Simon Cummins, who kept the garden for them. She heard how they flirted with him and how he teased them, and she heard the drowsing, inward-absorbed cooing of the doves, hidden in the full summer skirts of the beech trees. Lifting down the blouse on its hanger, she carried it off into her own room, where she laid it on the bed. When she had closed both the doors, she pulled off her tee shirt, then unhooked her bra and dropped it on the floor. With hasty, clumsy fingers she pulled Pilar's blouse over her head – it floated against her naked chest, the silk was raw against her breasts.

I am inside what she will wear, Harriet thought.

What would it feel like to be Pilar; to be so beautiful inside your clothes, to wear them with such assurance, and fit with that easy grace inside your own skin? It was as if the other woman belonged to a different, superior species. Then she stared at herself, as punishment, in the little round mirror on its stand on top of the chest of drawers. How lucky that her room was on the shady side of the house and the chest of drawers was in the shadows too, on the wall opposite the window. What she saw was something that ought to be kept hidden. The blouse made her grotesque; it insulted her as vividly as a slap or a derisory remark. Its brilliant red sucked away colour from her skin, and its low neck sagged against her jutting, freckled collarbones. She saw that her old woman's haircut – chopped off short at her ears, sticking up on top – wasn't modest or sensible, as she'd hoped, but a humiliating mistake. Reaching up inside the transparent material she touched her breast again, watching herself in disgust. Its flesh was cold, nosing against her hand like an old dog.

Changed back into her own tee shirt, Harriet sat on the side of her bed to write in her diary.
I saw a hawk lift up out of a field
, she wrote.
Such heavy effort of the shoulders, wing tips dipping; the whole noble drama of its movement. I am nothing
.

When Harriet went downstairs and stepped into the drawing room, thinking she would have it to herself, she found Alice there, kneeling on the floor beside their grandmother's bureau, poking into its lock with something.

— Whatever are you doing?

Alice was startled, but not abashed. — I'm trying to pick the lock, she said. — Do you know how? Dani can do it, but I haven't got his knack. I just have this feeling there are letters in here which might be interesting. Don't you think? Otherwise why keep it locked? I don't know why I haven't wanted to before.

Harriet was horrified by the rage that overwhelmed her. Hadn't she unlearned this years ago? It had been peace, when she had stopped hating Alice.

— You can't do that. Whatever's in there is private, you shouldn't look at it.

— They're dead, Harriet. Don't be ridiculous. If we don't read their stuff, who will? I want to read their letters because I'm remembering them. I love them. Would it be better to forget them?

— Granny would have hated you digging around in her private life. If you do find letters in there you ought to burn them.

Alice sat back on her heels, staring at her sister. — What's got into you? You're in a mood. And what I said at breakfast wasn't just romantic either, by the way. I know you agree with me, that things are ugly and awful. Why are you making up to Pilar? She won't approve of your work with asylum seekers, you needn't think so. I should think she's pretty unsentimental about them. Aren't they all from ‘backward' places?

— You're so judgemental, Alice. We hardly know her. You don't know what she thinks, or what her life has been.

Both of them were remorseful, as soon as they were apart, that they had succumbed to quarrelling – it demeaned them, each preferred to think of herself as brightly generous in the face of the other's provocations. Alice was ashamed of judging her new sister-in-law – Harriet was right, there was something crabbed and narrow in how she resented the intrusion into their family. Pilar was admirable and wholesome, as well as intimidating: when she washed up the breakfast things this morning she had scoured the whole kitchen, left it bright and pleasant. And Harriet thought it was true that Alice had loved the grandpees, she had been good to them when they were old, and it surely didn't matter about the letters, if there even were any. What could their grandparents have written that was not blameless?

Alice resumed poking into the keyhole of the little bureau with an unbent paper clip. She tried to remember Dani's swift authoritative movement when he came to her rescue after she locked her passport in a drawer and lost the key; she imitated it now and something gave way inside the bureau, freeing the sloping lid. With a subdued cry of triumph – not wanting to bring Harriet back – she lowered it, letting out its stale, held breath: the past was for a moment intimately at hand. Ink had dried up in a bottle of Quink, pencils and an eraser and a plastic pencil sharpener and Basildon Bond paper were stowed away in their compartments, bills paid long ago were sorted inside the leather clips which had been someone's Christmas present, chequebook stubs were stuffed into a pigeonhole, the lavender in one of the little voile bags her grandmother sewed had crumbled to a powder with no smell. The arrangements preserved the traces of the hands that had last closed the lid, twenty years ago.

There were a few letters; no doubt there would be more in the bureau's side drawers – Alice thought she could open these too, now that she'd got the knack. The first letters weren't interesting: mostly business correspondence from the last four or five years of the old lady's life, when she was a widow and had managed in the house by herself. A carer had visited – first every few days and then daily, driving out from the town – and Alice had come down to be with her grandmother whenever she could, although that was also the time when she was in the thick of her disasters in the theatre. There were some photographs from the 1980s: Roland's graduation and then his PhD graduation, Fran a skinny kid with spiky, punky hair, eyes painted black as pits. Probably Harriet had sent these. It was Harriet who had managed to keep Fran on the rails – attending school, turning up for exams – in the years after their mother died and their father left. Harriet had ironed Fran's school uniform and made her packed lunch, she had helped with her homework.

Alice stared into the photographs of her younger self as if they were oracles – they came with a new shock because she had forgotten they were ever taken, forgotten even possessing the clothes she was wearing in them. What she remembered of that time was insecurity and self-doubt – and yet the young woman in the photographs looked so assured and knowing: blowing out smoke, laughing with her head thrown back and eyes half closed, or haughtily made-up for some party. All that time when she was drowning in the struggle and chaos of her emotions, it was as if her outward identity had led another wholly competent life in spite of her – a life which seemed enviable and even admirable at this distance. She glanced behind her now into the room whose wallpaper was silvery in the light from the garden. No one was there, the room's stillness was all hers: yet the chaise longue and the upright piano and the glass-fronted bookcase with her grandmother's novels in it – Elizabeth Goudge and Rebecca West and L.P. Hartley – seemed drawn up stiffly against the walls in expectation. Again Alice was subject to that intimation of something unknown in wait for her – not from the past, but in her future. Her imagination seemed strained open and consenting, something must come into it, to fulfil it. In her history it had always been a man who filled up that quickened expectation. She was ready for another man.

One bundle of letters and cards were tied together with ribbon: she realised these were condolences written when her grandfather died, along with obituaries cut out from the newspapers. The cards were decorously floral; on one a pair of black gates opened onto an autumnal avenue. Alice imagined her grandmother looking for the ribbon, fastening the letters ceremoniously together before she set them aside.
My dear Sophy, our thoughts are with you … your sad news … if it's any comfort … privilege to have published … praying for you …
The melancholy and the stuffy smell of old newspaper began to make her sleepy.