Past by Tessa Hadley Read Free Book Online Page B

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.
    â€” 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.
    â€” Oh dear, Molly said helplessly. — I’m sorry.
    â€” 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.
    â€” 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,