Past (7 page)

Molly stopped outside the cottage. — Oh, I remember this old place.

Kasim glanced warningly at the children – they knew it meant they must not tell that they'd been inside it.

— Imagine living here, he said as if he was reproaching somebody. — No electricity. No running water. No hot showers. No internet or mobile phone signal.

Molly puzzled over this. — They must have had electricity, surely. Everyone has electricity.

Kasim waved his arms at the sky innocent of pylons, even telegraph wires. — Do you think that it just comes down out of the air?

She looked vague.

— Where my family comes from, he said, — there are hundreds of thousands of people who live like this. Millions, actually.

The others were impressed. — Where do your family come from?

— But there must be water, Arthur said. — Else, how could you drink?

Kasim made it sound as if he'd spent more time in Pakistan than he ever had. He told them about the deep wells, or fetching water from streams, or from standpipes miles away; he had only a quite vague idea of these things, because his own relatives in Pakistan were wealthy – except that he had drunk water from a well in a country courtyard once, in a house belonging to his great-uncle. It seemed to him now that it must have been exceptionally pure and cold.

— You might die, Arthur said.

Ivy knew he was muddling up the water thing with what had happened inside the cottage.

— Lots of children do, said Kasim. — They die from drinking bad water.

— But not in this country, Molly added quickly, squeezing Arthur's hand.

— So that's all right then, said Kasim, sardonic.

He turned his back on them, but Molly picked up a lump of moss from beside the path and threw it hard at him as he walked off, hitting him accurately between the shoulder blades, spoiling his poise; for a long instant he was astonished and offended, and then to their relief he yelled as if letting go some pent-up outrage, scooped up the moss again and threw it back just as hard at Molly. This was the signal for the resumption of the pelting game they had played earlier: Molly and Arthur went hurrying in search of things to throw. In the slanting, syrupy afternoon light, because they were dreamy with tiredness and heat, they seemed to be bending and shrieking and thudding along the path in pleasurable slow motion.

Ivy hung back in the clearing; soon the shouts of the others sounded remote among the trees below and she had the sensation again that she'd had at the pool, of seeing herself from treetop height, remote and doll-like. Crossing the clearing and tugging at the cottage door, she imagined she was someone else, another more audacious girl in a children's story. Ivy wasn't brave, she was a coward when it came to sports or party games, the kind where you ran in a team and had to burst a balloon by sitting on it. But she also had a greedy curiosity which was like a hunger; she wanted to get clear, all by herself and without the shame of other people knowing she was doing it, the truth of what could happen. Still, squeezing inside the cottage door, she longed to find it scoured and empty, a clean breeze blowing through its harmless shell.

The brown dull light in the downstairs room, and the frozen urgency of the tipped chair, were just the same; her footsteps broke into the silence she and Arthur had left behind them yesterday. Halfway up the stairs she spun round and almost fell with fright when the door swung shut behind her, but this simplified things, because going back now was as dreadful as going on. The magazines and the dead dog had become one composite idea in her mind, the magazines a necessary preliminary to the rest, and she turned the damp-clumped unglossy pages boldly because Arthur wasn't watching, taking possession this time of what she saw, the bleached-paper flesh in all its configurations, on and on, endlessly different and the same. Who were these women? Because she knew the pictures were for grown-ups, she couldn't get over their gratuitous childishness and rudeness. Yet she couldn't discount them completely; they stirred some tingling possibility in her, as well as fierce distaste.

Then she opened the door which she and Arthur had pulled shut behind them, and crossed the threshold into the second room, pinching her nose tight shut with her fingers, breathing through her mouth – still the smell of rot was in her throat, intimate and filthy. The room wasn't as dark as before, light came and went because a breeze was blowing in the scraps of curtain. She had not noticed yesterday that the window was not quite closed. The fat sluggishness of the flies and their inconsequential spurts of buzzing disgusted her; she thought she couldn't bear it if one buzzed against her. Yet once she was actually inside the room she forgot to be frightened. Everything was quiet apart from the flies, even peaceful. There was no one here except herself, she could do what she liked, she could see uninhibitedly.

Mitzi was both something and nothing at the same time: a mass in one corner was darkened and flattened, with a stain spread round it on the floorboards as if fluids had seeped out of it, then dried. Only the patches of russet red curls clinging onto the mass in places made it Mitzi. An eye socket was a pit in the skull, showing white through its leathery covering. When Ivy crouched to examine the remains more closely, not too close, she saw – at first incredulous, then with dawning certainty – that white living maggots fine as threads were wriggling in the dog's body, in the places where the flesh was still clinging to its bones. Reaching this farthest shore of her discovery, Ivy let out a noise that was only for herself: wounded, like a low groan of protest. She was fascinated, though. She didn't move from watching them until she heard the others shouting her name from the woods.

Before supper, Fran stood frowning in the shadowy hall, rucking the mat deliberately with her sandal against the chequered tiles then smoothing it out again, winding the coiling telephone wire around her hand, hunching her shoulder to hold the receiver against her ear. The louche old brown telephone, a relic from the seventies, was isolated on its wooden stand as if it were ornamental like an aspidistra or a vase: when Molly used it they had to show her how to dial a number. There was no chair put out beside it: the grandpees hadn't wanted to invite the cosy, long conversations which were so expensive. Fran was dialling Jeff's number over and over and not getting through – resentful, she imagined him drinking beer and playing snooker and smoking with the rest of the band, his phone ringing pointlessly in his pocket. Roland and Pilar in the kitchen were roasting two chickens with grapes and apples: a Spanish recipe. They were collaborating efficiently: Pilar had everything exactly timed and Roland, tied into an apron, was following orders, peeling apples and liquidising grapes. This was a very different regime to the one with Valerie, who had run around looking after him as if he were helplessly unworldly. Now, he addressed the cooking processes with earnest technical interest.

Kasim was bored, because Molly was teaching clock patience to the children. He went to walk by himself in the churchyard, and from his tall vantage point didn't see Alice until he almost fell over her; sitting in the long grass, she was leaning back against the grey stone of a grave. Startled, he was cross for a moment, as if she'd lain in wait deliberately under his feet. When he was a boy he'd been humiliatingly aware of Alice's female presence in his home – her underwear dropped in the washing basket, her perfume on his father's bed sheets. Now her low exclamation and smiling upwards glance seemed too softly placatory, they clung to him.

— Kas, spare a ciggy?

She should buy her own, he thought, instead of pretending that she didn't smoke. But he found them both cigarettes and dropped to sit cross-legged in the grass with her, his back to a grave opposite hers. Down among the grasses was a different universe, hotter and pleasantly sour with the smells of fermenting sap; out of sight of the encircling landscape, relationship to the huge sky was everything. He twisted to read the words over his shoulder, half indecipherable where the stone was flaking away:
Fell asleep in Jesus, 1882.

— Fell asleep, and they buried him? Thank goodness I'm a Muslim.

Alice longed to be strong enough not to ask if he was enjoying himself. She shouldn't let him see her need for his approval. — Do you like Molly? she asked instead.

He considered the lit end of his cigarette. Flatly, obediently, giving nothing away, he said he did like Molly. — But who is Molly? What is she?

Alice sang his words, to the tune of
Who is Sylvia?

— Are you sure she really is your brother's actual daughter? She's not much like him, is she? He's straightforward, she's an enigma.

— You're teasing. But just because Molly's not the brightest, doesn't mean she isn't something special.

— I'm deadly serious. I think she's profound, perhaps presides over the secret to the universe. And while we're on the subject of unknowns, who is Jill Fellowes?

— Oh. Why?

Kasim pulled out from his back pocket the book he'd been carrying round with him all day, not noticing how she flinched at the bent end boards. — Look. The name's written inside it. It's a book of poetry. Is she your grandmother?

Taking the book from him, Alice pressed it tenderly back into shape. — Have you been reading these poems?

— I only pretended to read them, just to intrigue Molly. I'm an economist, I don't know what poetry's function is.

— It's my mother's name. Her maiden name. Lots of those books on the shelf where you found it are books from her childhood. It's so uncanny that you spoke her name, because I'd come in here to think about her. She died, you know, when I was only thirteen.

He was discomfited. — But these aren't poems for children, he said argumentatively.

— They used to be. Now, what we give children to read is mostly anodyne.

Kasim dropped his head melodramatically in his hands; she saw how his hair sprouted from the crown so vigorously glossy and densely black. — Have I said something awful, bringing up your mother's name like that? Are you grief-stricken now? Was she a saint?

— Don't be silly, of course she wasn't a saint, Alice said. — But she was a shining sort of person. Spirited and clever. Imagine her growing up here, in this wonderful place. It was perfect, that just as I closed my eyes to think about her you came in here with her book. Nothing happens by accident.

— Things do happen by accident.

She shook her head wisely, maddeningly. — I don't believe in coincidence.

Light filtered through the stirring straw of the grass stems, bent under the weight of their heavy seed heads, flickering against Alice's heart-shaped face and sooty, smudged eyes, and her soft skin and hair. There was a memorial plaque, she said, inside the church; very beautiful, her grandfather had chosen the words. Of course the death of their daughter, their only child, had broken her grandparents' hearts completely. It had not broken her grandfather's faith only because it was that kind of faith already, hardened in expectation of the cruellest thing possible. When Kasim asked whether Alice's father was still alive, she said he was, somewhere in the Dordogne, probably. She hadn't seen him for a couple of years and didn't much care. After their mother died of breast cancer, their father had gone to pieces – which was forgivable – and run off to France with another woman, leaving his orphaned children behind – which wasn't. It was all ancient history now. Her father had thought he was escaping ahead of old age, but it had caught up with him eventually. She had talked the whole thing over with her therapist for so many years that they'd wrung the subject dry.

— He's supposed to be an artist, she said. — That was his excuse.

— What kind of artist?

— A painter. Not a very good one. Women in landscapes that are sort of dreamscapes: part Van Gogh, part album cover. He's never sold much. His new wife – not the same one he ran off with – earns all the money. She's an estate agent, selling the old farms to British incomers as the French country people go off to live in the cities. Isn't that funny?

— Is it funny?

— I don't mean about the farms and the depopulation. I mean, if you knew some of the fine things my father says about an artist's life.

Alice went inside to brush her hair before supper. She remembered, as she always did, that her mother had sat at this same dressing table: first as a girl, and then again later, when the children spent their summers here with her and their father went off painting. Slanting late sunlight glinted on Alice's bottles of scent and make-up and nail varnish, the lustre jug with its posy, gold threads in a scarf, the heap of her jewellery – none of it valuable but each piece striking and interesting, rich with sentimental associations. Wherever Alice settled, she had this gift of applying little touches to make the place distinctive and attractive, as if she were composing a scene for a play. She had moved from one room or flat to another very often in London, transforming each one in turn into a nest full of curiosities and nice things. Looking in the mirror now, she held her brush suspended in the air, staring over her reflection's shoulder to the reflected room behind. Quietly she breathed aloud,
my dear
, although she didn't know who she was speaking to. Her fine hair crackled with static, floating up towards the brush.

Breaking her mood, Harriet was suddenly present, blocking the reflected space in the mirror, intruding on her reverie. Of course it wasn't Harriet's fault that she had to come through Alice's room – but she crept about so quietly! Because Alice was startled she couldn't help being annoyed. Harriet made her feel caught out in vanity. She dropped her hairbrush and twisted round from the mirror.

— Goodness, are you spying?

— I thought I ought to tell you, Harriet said gruffly, — that I've arranged with work to take more holiday. So I will be able to stay here longer after all.