Past (17 page)

— Hurrah, hurrah! Hettie shouted, picking up on her mother's mood. She had been tranquil all morning while Jill was away, filling in her colouring book at the kitchen table.

— Ailsa's always in The Bungalow, Sophy said. — No wonder she's jumpy, it's all that coffee she drinks.

— Innocent dear Mummy, Ailsa's drink problem isn't
coffee
.

Sophy frowned across the children's heads and shook her head just perceptibly; alertly Hettie caught it, looking from her grandmother to her mother and back again. — Who is Ailsa? she demanded. — And what
is
her drink problem?

Jill laughed and wouldn't tell her, then when Hettie loudly persisted she lost her temper, smacking Hettie smartly across the back of the legs. — No iced bun for you!

Hettie's screams awoke the baby early from her nap, and Sophy thought of that flat in Marylebone, where they were all on top of one another. None of this fraught chaos of childcare had seemed to arise when Jill was a child herself. No doubt it was easier with only one – and anyway Jill had been serene from the moment she was born: commanding and forceful, but never naughty. Sophy hadn't realised perhaps how peculiar their family was, with a child who was her parents' easy companion, entering all the concerns of their adult lives: parish war work, the Tennis Club, Latin and Greek and poetry. This childhood seemed even odder in the light of Jill's adult life – she had disavowed her parents' style so wholeheartedly.

Sophy's own experience, she thought, hardly counted as motherhood at all – she had missed out on something more boisterous and transforming. Probably as an adult she had been too childish. Jill was right, she was an innocent – and that was awful. Though she did know about Ailsa. No doubt there were things in Jill's and Tom's life together which made it harder to include children. When Tom played with his children they had great fun, he rolled round on the floor with them, roaring like a bear – but he was quickly bored, and away too often. Poor Jill had to make up the rules for their family life all by herself. And Sophy saw that the children were bruised sometimes by their mother's power, which could be inconsistent and capricious. She thought that Jill adored her son too openly, and was too hard on little Hettie.

Jill took the children into the woods to eat their buns: even Hettie, when she'd apologised, was allowed to have one. They spread a rug among the bluebells – which were over, darkened and shrivelled on their stems – and Jill poured out plastic beakers of orange squash. Dwarfed by the woods' tall spaciousness, the children were very calm: the smooth trunks of the birch trees soared up all around them and over their heads the branches broke out in young leaves, tender as scraps of soft cloth caught in the twigs. Out of sight of other adults, Jill let her prickly irony lapse as if it was exhausting. Her children knew this and they loved to be alone with her. Ali stuffed her mouth determinedly with leaf mould and they gave up trying to prevent her: it was only earth after all, as Roland reassured his mother. Colours were clean in the watery light, small birds scuffled in the undergrowth, a wood pigeon took off from time to time, its disruption startling as gunshot. Behind the stillness they felt the surge of spring, pressing everything forwards.

After their picnic Hettie and Roland ran on along the path through the trees, while Jill let the baby stagger at her own pace, in her leading reins, pausing to bend over unsteadily like a stout old gentleman, picking up litter so daintily between two fingertips: a lolly stick, sweet wrapper, cigarette end, all dropped long ago and weathered to the same brown as the woods. Jill had changed out of her heels into a pair of flip-flops she found in the scullery; every so often, to catch up with the others, she slipped out of these and ran barefoot, carrying the flip-flops hooked over a finger, the baby bouncing and hiccoughing with laughter on her hip. She thought she'd take the children to call on the old couple who lived in a lonely cottage perched on a bend in the path, with a well in the garden and a view down through the trees into a secluded valley. They'd called here before, and Mrs Good had given sweets to Hettie – she had given them to Jill too, when she was a child, and Jill had always thanked her politely, then carried them home to bury them guiltily in the vicarage dustbin. She couldn't remember now what she'd been afraid of. Poison perhaps, as if they were sweets in a fairy tale, because of the old lady's name and the equivocal position of the cottage, set apart from the village community.

When they arrived at the cottage and knocked on the door, there seemed to be no one at home. All the windows were on the inaccessible back wall, overhanging the valley below, so they couldn't peer inside; Roland tried the door handle and was taken aback when the door swung open. Stepping halfway across the threshold into the tiny single room on the ground floor, Jill called out in case anyone was lying sick or in trouble upstairs. The silence and stillness inside the cottage was a shock after the perpetual movement outdoors; this air hadn't been stirred for long hours – or days perhaps. Even the light was stale. She felt she'd intruded on something forbidden. The dishes on the painted dresser and rug in front of the hearth communicated the home's emptiness, presided over by the religious pictures on the walls: Jesus was sorrowfully reproachful, or had a lantern and a lost lamb tucked under his arm. The Goods were a remnant of the Bible Christians, who once had a great following among the farm workers.

Jill called out again for Mrs Good, and then when no one responded was relieved to get out of the cottage, pulling the door shut quickly behind her, choosing not to explore upstairs. Roland asked her what she'd seen inside.

— Nothing at all. Just the ordinary inside of a house, when the people are out somewhere.

There was a message waiting for Jill when they arrived home, sent round from the Smiths who owned Roddings, the biggest and oldest farm in the village, and had a telephone. Tom had called her and left a number he could be contacted on, if she rang him at nine that evening. Mrs Smith had written it out in a fat schoolbook hand, in purple indelible pencil, on notepaper headed with an advertisement for a dairy – a cow kicking up her heels, jumping over a moon.

Jill frowned at it, suspicious. — So is this a Paris number?

The outrage of him: sending his instructions, dictating that she should arrange her life around his convenience. She wouldn't call, anyway. He could sit and wait, expecting the phone to ring, and it wouldn't. Let him have a taste of that.

Peering at the number, Sophy worried. — What do you think?

— It's rather important because of the time difference. I don't think it's Paris, it's not long enough. I think it's London. He wouldn't have thought to take the Smiths' number away with him, he must be back at the flat. I'm surprised he remembered where I wrote it down. By the way, what's happened to the Goods? We went to the cottage and their door was unlocked, but no one was home.

Sophy was vague, her mind was still on Tom. — It shouldn't be unlocked. We ought to see to that. There's a niece who might want things. Didn't I write to you? He died just before Christmas, she went into a Home, poor old thing. Daddy calls on her but she won't see him, she has some rather eccentric religious convictions. I don't know what will happen to the house. No one will live there, without running water.

Jill said that all religious convictions were eccentric, including Daddy's. Her mother was unperturbed. — Well, mine are the most eccentric of all. If you knew the half of the funny things that I have faith in. Just don't start any theological arguments with your father before he's finished supper. He forgets to eat, if he's enjoying himself.

— Oh, you're an old pagan, Jill said. — I know all about that. You're a disgrace to the Church.

She was burning up all the time, with consciousness of Tom's call: it roused her again to that exhilarated anger she'd felt in those last weeks in London, and to those heights of cheerful dissimulation. Whose number was it he had given her? It wasn't his office. Perhaps some other woman's place? He demeaned her and she repudiated out of her exceptional soul the cliché of the old wrong, would not allow sex-jealousy to be the explanation for her leaving. And how dare he presume that she wanted to speak to him?

Yet a few minutes before nine o'clock – the children were all asleep – Jill slipped out of the house in the dark as if under some compulsion, to go to the phone box in the village. Her father was working on his sermon, Sophy was sitting at her bureau, writing to old schoolfriends: Jill didn't want their awareness accompanying her. It was a relief to duck down the stone steps at the front, into the chilly damp under the privet hedge, hearing the voice from the wireless carry on indoors, blithely assured, without her. Moonlight seeped around the edges of a mass of cloud. Sophy had left shillings and sixpences piled up discreetly beside Jill's purse, and she didn't notice how tightly she was gripping them until her fingers ached. Her hate-tryst consumed her, she was bent upon it, aimed in her entirety at the lit-up phone box and its dank sealed-in air, the furtive importance of fumbling in her pocket for the number, the burr in the heavy receiver, the suspenseful moment of waiting, reading over the framed instructions and advertisements in the kiosk without seeing them. Two worlds – here, and elsewhere – were steered into collision.

Tom made a mistake when he answered the phone. She knew him! He would have planned to snatch it up as soon as she rang, and greet her gravely, intimately. But for a moment he'd lost concentration, and forgotten: probably he was reading something he'd picked up while he waited, or scribbling an idea. So he answered the phone in a breezy light voice, without thinking, as he did at the office. — Tom Crane?

She almost laughed.

He changed his voice then hastily, to growly and low, troubled. — Jill, is it you?

— Where are you? she said. — Whose number is this? I don't care: only I need to know.

— Bernie's. I'm staying here. Can't stand being in that flat without you.

— You'll get used to it.

Did she believe him, that he was at Bernie's? His silence tried to be reproachful, but he wasn't very good at silence. — Everything's changed, Jilly. You'd feel differently if you'd seen what I've seen. There's no way things are going to go back to how they were, not after this. Listen, I'll stay with the children at home for a few days and you can go over there, be part of it. I don't mind at all.

— Go over where? she asked coldly. — Oh, you mean Paris. I'd forgotten about Paris. No, I've no desire to go there.

— It's crazy, I'm telling you. The courage of those kids! The police have clubs and gas bombs: they've brought in reservists from Brittany – country boys, reactionary nationalists. Someone said that they're getting rid of bodies in the Seine. And people in the apartments throw down chocolate and
saucisson
for the students, bring them out coffee. The bourgeois drive into the
quartier
from the suburbs on quiet nights, sightseeing, taking photos of themselves on the barricades. Three million joined the march protesting at the police repression. I stood up on a traffic island and I saw a river of them, running all the way down the Boul' Saint-Mich and out of sight. Do you know what they chanted?
Nous sommes tous des juifs allemands –
because of Cohn-Bendit, the authorities threatening to deport him. Isn't that beautiful?

— Three million sounds unlikely. The whole population of Paris is only eight and a half.

Jill knew how he hated her when she was flattening. She was like her father then, with his superior knowledge like a trap snapping shut. — I heard they're cutting down the trees, she said. — The lovely old plane trees of Paris. They won't grow again in a hurry.

Sententiously Tom said that this wasn't a time to be worrying about trees.

— It'll be too late to worry about them afterwards. Anyway, what did you want? You left a message asking me to call.

He changed to the low-toned, coaxing voice he used when he wanted to make love to her. — Just to talk to you, Jilly. I wanted to hear you speak. Listen, I need you. I can't live without you and the children. When are you coming back? You're making a big fuss about a little thing. It was nothing, what happened with Vanda. She drives me nuts, she's stupid, I don't even like her. You're the one, Jilly. You're the only one who understands all this. I miss you so much. I need you.

Jill didn't say anything. She coiled and uncoiled the flex of the phone restlessly around her left hand and held the receiver with her chin against her shoulder, stretching her neck as if her shoulders ached, pressing her back against the heavy door of the phone box until it opened under her weight, letting in the night air. She hardly knew that she watched the barn owl pass, weightless-seeming as a drift of chiffon against the gloom. Luxuriantly she listened to her husband. She didn't want him back. But still, she wanted to hear this, she couldn't help herself. When he fell quiet eventually, listening to her, trying to gauge what meaning there was for him in her silence, she put the receiver back in its metal cradle, cutting him off.

ON SUNDAY MORNING
the baby woke up early. Jill was hauled out of her own deep sleep by the creak of the wooden cot as Ali climbed over its side, for the first time. After a pause – for sheer surprise, perhaps, at this brand new freedom, so easily attained – purposeful little steps came padding out onto the landing, then, after a hesitation, along towards Jill's room. Jill was aware of calculating irresponsibly – in exchange for a few seconds more of warmth in bed – that if Ali could climb out of her cot, then she could navigate safely past the top of the stairs. The door of the bedroom was pushed tentatively open and Ali stopped on the threshold, in her sagging night-nappy and the blue pyjamas patterned with yachts that had belonged to Roland. She was staring solemnly, as if she wasn't sure what she might find, in a world no one had prepared for her. Jill couldn't help laughing at the round eyes and fat flushed cheeks: Ali's fair hair was so fine that it hardly counted, she looked bald as an egg. She laughed back at her mother in pure pleasure.

— What do you think you're doing, naughty? Why aren't you in your cot?

Jill slipped out of bed then, to snatch the baby up and kiss her, scolding her in whispers, then listen at the door and quietly close it. As long as Ali hadn't woken up the others, if Jill changed her nappy now and she had her morning bottle of milk – kept ready overnight on the dressing table – there was even a chance of her falling asleep again. Ali was the doziest and easiest of her three babies. With Hettie she had tried too hard to establish a routine, as the books instructed; Roland had frightened her with infantile convulsions.

— It's still night-time, little chicken. You can have your bottle in bed with Mummy if you'll go back to sleep. Shut your eyes now.

Jill held her in the crook of her arm, nestled under the blankets and eiderdown. At first Ali kept her eyes resolutely open as she sucked: brilliant with the joke of the whole occasion, fixed on her mother. When her grin spread irresistibly her mouth slid off the rubber teat of the bottle, milk trickling at its corner. Eventually the heavy eyes fell shut, flicked open, drooped again. Jill put the bottle on the bedside table and tried to go back to sleep herself. The sleeping baby was pressed close along the contours of her own body, burning with her heat, wispy hair blowing in her breath, the stuffy milky smell in her own nose – but in the hollow of her thoughts she was agitated and noisy, full of her argument with Tom as she hadn't been when she went to bed. She saw things with finality in the grey light which developed inexorably around the heavy furniture in the room. From henceforward, she thought, he and she were fated to be enemies, set opposite each other at their different poles of experience. Once, they had been equal in their separate freedoms. They had set out to have children as lightly as if they were playing house, and now her necessarily domestic life bored him, and she was bound to it in her body and imagination. This imbalance was fated, built into their biology.

Jill was afraid for her free self, as if she saw a young woman receding on a road in the far distance. What use was her grown-up knowledge – acquired through such initiations, at such risk – in this world of infants, who had to be kept safe? Tom had said once that anyone could do motherhood: in fact, he added, the less complicated you were, the better mother you would make. This was probably true, but not consoling. The whole silly, flirting, furtive episode with Vanda was enraging just because it was so lightweight and shouldn't have mattered – Tom went ducking and wincing with infuriating flexibility through his obligations, while Jill's humiliation weighed her down. She thought about the Goods' cottage in the woods. Perhaps she could find another kind of freedom, if she lived there. Looking out of those windows day after day, seeing nothing human, only the shifting screens of leaves between her and the sky – what a simplification! Drifting into sleep, she imagined a life alone in those tiny rooms, alone with the children.

Sophy looked after the baby while Jill went to church with the older children. Hettie and Roland felt as if they followed another mother when Jill led the way, in her coat and a hat – a pretty, neat, blue hat, borrowed from Granny, with a feather tucked into its blue ribbon – holding up a big umbrella over all of them against the drizzle. They processed through the keyhole gap between their garden and the churchyard which was their privilege, when all the rest of the congregation had to come in by the church gate. This other mother was more like the ones in books, stricter and yet more poised and equable than her everyday self, more remote. Inside the church Jill always knew confidently what to do, carrying off the mysterious act in such bold style, standing up and sitting down and kneeling even before anyone else did, singing hymns in a strong voice, hardly glancing at the words in the hymn book. They children felt their own disgrace as pagan city-dwellers, fumbling and mumbling their lame way after her. Roland after a while gave up pretending, preferring to stare into the church calmly in silence as if he'd got its measure. He attended to his grandfather's sermon, about Hope, with detached interest. When his mother's fingertips – seeming moved by an awareness quite separate to her own steadied attention to her father – strayed across his warm scalp, among his curls, he shifted away just perceptibly, not wanting the church to catch them out in any absence.

At least Hettie did know the Lord's Prayer. She had learned it at school, and Granny had given them a Ladybird book which was an illustrated version. A dense passage in the middle wound around the trespasses whose very sound –
as we forgive those who trespass against us –
was vexed and bristling, and which were disconcerting morally because you might, Hettie had puzzled out, both inflict them and have them inflicted upon you. She was drawn to those pictures in shamed fascination: a boy put his hand in wet paint where his father was decorating, but it was his sister who had broken the boy's toys, an aeroplane and a crane. Faces were stark with outrage and guilt and hurt. This moral ambiguity was associated, in Hettie's vision, with the building of the church itself, whose stone shape, pierced with glass, soared upwards and yet remained where you could always smell damp earth beneath you. The great Gurney stove, with its iron fins spread like the fanned pages of a book, only ever gave out the faintest indication of heat: her grandparents despaired of it and the parish couldn't afford to buy a new one, so no wonder the hymn books grew mouldy. In the coldest weather they plugged in an electric fire. The altar cloth their grandmother had sewn was the only sumptuous thing in the grave, undecorated place: yellow-haired angels blasted something against cream satin on long trumpets, turning their faces away from the stubby huge nails which they held out as if to prove something.
You see?
These nails looked like the fat wax crayons at school.

The congregation were few and mostly female, not young; distinctive – even if you also knew them as their weekday informal selves – in their padded, sculpted, decisive Sunday clothes, pinned-on hats or tied headscarves. If you were ever seized, to be embraced against a lapel pinned with a scratching brooch, these clothes gave off an odour of something chemical and hostile. Church was a place set apart, Hettie saw, for what in the everyday world had to be muffled and passed over. Death, for instance, was not dissimulated in the memorials on the walls or the floor of the church, any more than on the graves outside: she had been shocked when she first learned to make out what these matter-of-fact dates meant, attached to each name. It was no surprise that their father never came inside here. Hettie thought that he was against death, and all the burden of importance surrounding it. When the congregation gave themselves up to silent prayer, their mother sank her head impressively on her arms on the pew in front, and Roland sat open-eyed, looking around him. Hettie could hear rain buffeting against the church outside, beating on the roof, running down the window-glass, enclosing the still interior in its successive, insistent washes of soft sound.

At Sunday lunch traditionally, after he'd delivered his sermon, the minster drank a decent wine. He poured for his wife and daughter while Sophy dished up steaming bowls of watery vegetables in the kitchen, passing them through the serving hatch after the roast chicken which was their treat because they had visitors. Jill had begun cutting chicken breast up into morsels for the baby, who was tied into her bib in Jill's old high chair, pounding her spoon cheerfully in her fist.

— Charlie wore the shortest skirt that's been seen in my church, her father said, teasing. — It won't have gone unnoticed.

Jill shrugged. — It's all I brought to wear.

— He doesn't mind, Sophy explained, calling through the hatch. — He likes it. He wishes the church was full of young women in short skirts.

— But don't tell the Bishop, Grantham said.

The atmosphere in the vicarage was exuberant, because the sermon was done for a week and because their daughter was home. Sophy laughed in the kitchen, as if she'd drunk her wine already.

Because Grantham Fellowes had been beautiful when he was young – and despised that, even as he took for granted the power it conferred – he had never lost the habit of commanding a room. A great deal of his spiritual agony had come out of his circular pursuit of his own vanity, which he thought was only intellectual arrogance, not noticing how women yielded to his physical presence, basking in it – and some men too – and how he responded with unthinking entitlement. Only Sophy didn't flutter, among the little group of middle-class women huddled around him in the parish, whom he mostly treated fairly badly,
de haut en bas
. A few of the men hated him. His face now was brown as wood, chiselled with deep trenches, assertively and shamelessly old – he was seventy, and perhaps looked older. Yet still there was something jaunty and haughty in the slanting bones and far-off blue of the small eyes, eloquent with all the punishment he'd inflicted on himself. Jill was susceptible to changes in her father's expression, as if his moods were fastened into her awareness, tugging at her, although she had set her back to him years ago, and sailed in a contrary direction.

When he had carved, they passed around the gravy boat and discussed the sermon. — I knew what it meant, Roland said. — When you hope for something you might get something else instead, which is more useful.

His grandfather was gratified. — From the pulpit I was aware of those sceptical specs, trained on me in critical scrutiny. The boy really was listening! Well done, Childe Roland.

— And I was listening, said Hettie.

— You were a little fidget, her mother said, — twisting your head around to stare at everything.

— I heard it, Hettie said, looking around the table defiantly, trying to be funny, eyes glassy in her flushed, hasty little face. — Grandfather's sermon about a nasty old mouldy-warp.

— An old mouldy-warp, darling? Sophy was bemused and pleased. — I'm sorry I missed that one!

— Take no notice, Jill said. — She's only showing off, talking nonsense. Can't bear anyone else to have the limelight.

—
Forgiver us from evil. For thine is the daily bread.

— There you are, you see, said Sophy. — She was listening.

— Not very carefully.

The minister had finished the small portion on his plate. Overlooking Hettie's performance, he spooned chopped carrots into the baby's mouth. Even Ali felt his condescension, working the orange mass around in her jaw obediently, dumbstruck. — And what's your opinion, Roland? he asked. — Do we just have to make the best of this useful thing we never hoped for in the first place? Or is that pusillanimous?

Roland was shovelling vegetables with his knife and fork: his mother had warned him that he had to eat them. — Pusillanimity, she added quickly, — is not doing something because you're afraid of it.

Roland considered, twitching his glasses into position. — It would depend on what you got, he said. — The thing you got instead of what you wanted. Whether it really was any use.

His grandfather gave a bark of laughter, approving; his grandmother relieved Roland of his cabbage when no one was looking. Jill knew that her father wanted her praise for his sermon now – and in fact when she had been sitting listening to him, contained inside his voice, in the stark little church washed with wet light that was the core of her childhood and her past, his words had unbound an overwhelming emotion inside her. Putting her head on her arms to pray, she had been afraid for a few moments of falling out of her own control, collapsing to the stone floor or heaving with unseemly sobs – terribly un-Anglican. Grantham had based the sermon on a short Herbert poem, ‘Hope'. The limpid, measured words of this poem, and her father's judicious explication of it, had seemed in their moment sufficient to her experience: everything outside them was obliterated. It was peculiar, as she had been so moved, how reluctant she was now for her father to know it.

— What the poet wants, she said to Roland, — is a ring. But God won't send it.

— Why a
ring?
Hettie asked, too loudly, but genuinely bemused. She would like to own a ring herself, but couldn't imagine a man wanting one.

Jill made strong efforts, overcoming her own contrary will. — You were good, Daddy. It was a beautiful sermon.

She'd have been the only one in the church, Grantham pointed out with sour irony, to recognise the Herbert. He always shook praise off like this, as if it was below the mark he aimed at; yet his wife and daughter knew from experience how he hungered for it, and was capable of sulking if it wasn't forthcoming. Tom thought he was all vanity, and wouldn't listen to Jill when she said vanity didn't matter, it existed in a separate part of the self to writing. Anyway, weren't all writers vain?

— Didn't you choose the poem, Sophy suggested enthusiastically, — just because Jill was staying with us?