— 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.
Guilty, Alice was aware of overacting her delight. She jumped up from the dressing-table stool to kiss her sister, feeling how Harriet stood stiffly in her embrace, not knowing how to yield to it.
— Oh Hettie! I’m so pleased! Thank you! she exclaimed. — And I know I don’t deserve you doing anything nice for me – I’m a grumpy old stick. I’m sorry.
— I didn’t do it for you, Harriet said. — It’s good for me to have a break. I’m enjoying myself.
She didn’t much look like it, Alice thought. She looked strained and there were purple stains on the fine skin under her eyes, as if she hadn’t slept – Alice hoped this wasn’t because she’d been put in that awkward, poky bedroom. She had some clever concealer which would work wonders with those under-eyes, but she was wary of offering it, thinking Harriet would only despise her.
Harriet prodded around among the bottles on the dressing table.
— I’ve never gone in for any of this clobber, she said. — What is it all?
Alice was watching her closely.
— Look, she said. — Sit down on the stool. Let me try something on you, just the least little thing. It’s only the teeniest smudge of cream. No one will notice, you’ll just look prettier.
Harriet’s expression as she hesitated brimmed uncharacteristically full with mixed reluctance and yearning. She gave way and sat submissively with her back to the mirror. Alice rummaged in her make-up bag and then very carefully, tenderly, stroked on the concealer, and after that a very light foundation, eye pencil, eyeshadow, mascara. Their two faces for once drew uninhibitedly close without any antagonism, Harriet’s vulnerably proffered, Alice absorbed in what she knew supremely well.
— Oh no, Harriet said with horror when finally she looked at her reflection. — It isn’t me. It isn’t right. Take it off, Alice.
Four
FRAN AND ALICE drove into town with the children – Fran wanted fish from the farmers’ market, to make a pie. When they’d finished shopping, at the market and in the Co-op, they bought ice cream from the lemon-yellow-painted Esplanade Café, which had endured from the sisters’ childhood even though it looked as provisional as a summer house, in its little park of flower beds and crazy golf. In their childhood the ice cream would have been Wall’s, between two wafers – now it was made locally, from sheep’s milk. Fran and the children had two scoops and Alice had one, then Ivy dropped hers and wept, and needed a replacement. — She always does, Fran said. Leaning on the sea wall to eat theirs, the sisters looked out across the estuary while Ivy and Arthur played on the beach below, turning out buckets of sand decorously and warily because they were latecomers among the family encampments. The air was filmy with heat, blue with stale frying-fat and candy sweetness. The shouts of children ricocheted against the packed sand and the sea wall and the long rock groynes built down onto the beach against erosion.
This seaside town wasn’t quite the true seaside, for all the old-fashioned holiday jollity on display in the shops down at that tail end of the high street: buckets and spades and windbreaks and polythene windmills on sticks. The sand was imported from further down the coast; if the tide was out then anyone wanting to swim had to wade, ankleor calf-deep, for what seemed like miles into rich estuary silt and a disorienting glinting light, laid in long, flat planes across the eye – so that the shore, on turning round to look back, seemed more than left behind, seemed lost. After a rough night the water, opaque with silt, could be as brown as milk chocolate; oystercatchers and curlews and rarer birds fed on the many species of worm left in the mud when the tide slid off it. You
saw easily across to Wales – blue hills and the white ghost of a power station at Aberthaw – so that the watery expanse could only ever feel domestic, a known quantity, though notoriously treacherous.
Fran and Alice’s gossip rambled luxuriantly around the family – when it was Molly’s turn, Fran remarked that she seemed very young for her age.
— She’s a bit blank, isn’t she? Alice agreed.
— She seems to get on all right with Pilar.
— But have you noticed that although Roland’s supposed to adore Molly so much, he never actually talks to her – I mean, about ideas or books? But then, she’s very sweet natured.
— She’s sweet with the children, bless her. But can she cook an egg?
— And terribly pretty. Kas is smitten. Roly can’t bear anyone looking at her in that sexual way, can he? He smoulders whenever Kas comes near. Though I don’t suppose Kas has laid a hand on her. He’s quite an innocent, though he thinks he’s so wicked and sophisticated.
— I should think he hasn’t laid a hand on her, Fran said primly. — She’s still a child.
— She’s sixteen. What were you up to at sixteen?
— Well exactly.
Fran always maintained that she wouldn’t allow any child of hers to get away with what she once did: Alice protested that this was eating your cake and stopping anyone else eating theirs. — Anyway, when it’s Ivy’s turn, you’ll have no idea what she’s getting up to. She won’t actually tell you.
Fran groaned at the idea of Ivy’s turn.
— I’m reading through Mum’s old letters, Alice said, — written to the grandpees in her first year at Oxford. All she tells them is about lectures and funny things happening – but who knows what she was actually in the thick of?
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