Past by Tessa Hadley Read Free Book Online

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.
    â€” Is this the waterfall? Kasim said, setting Arthur down.
    â€” 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.
    â€” 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