Arthur lifted his eyes from where he was dabbing the brush on his nails, reproaching his sister without words, soulfully: only she knew how innocent he wasn’t. — Why didn’t you bring Mitzi? he asked Janice.
— Yes, where is Mitzi? Alice joined in merrily, handing Ivy a slice of cake on a plate.
Janice had just taken a bite of cake, and had to put her hand in front of her mouth while she chewed, signalling distress in her expression, before she could tell them. Too much was at stake to be borne: Ivy dropped the plate – one of the same set as the teacups. There seemed to be a cartoonish moment of suspension, such was the tension, before it bounced and landed upside down on the rug and didn’t break; then when she jumped up she pressed it onto its cake under her shoe, and heard it crack.
— Look what you’ve done now! Fran accused.
Alice said it didn’t matter, there were plenty more plates and as far as the cake was concerned it was for the best. — There aren’t more plates, cried Ivy. — These are the only ones!
Janice, swallowing, was distressed. — Didn’t you know? she exclaimed. — We lost Mitzi! I thought you knew.
— We didn’t know. We don’t really talk to anyone. We talked to Simon Cummins. He didn’t say anything.
Janice had to mop at her tears with a tissue pulled from her sleeve while she told them the story; Arthur all the while appeared absorbed in wafting his nails to dry them, the way he’d learned from watching Molly.
— It was while we were down here at Easter. She just disappeared one morning and at first I didn’t think much of it, she was always off on her little escapades. But this time she didn’t come back. We hunted for her everywhere for days. Claude thinks she ran out in front of a car, and it’s true that she was awfully silly about cars. But I believe she was kidnapped. The pedigrees are worth an awful lot of money. I tell myself she’s living the life of luxury with doting new owners somewhere, sleeping on velvet cushions and eating chicken breast and grilled tomato. Do you remember how she loved grilled tomato? Though I still think she’d be pining for us – and how would they find out, about the tomato? We stayed on for days longer than we meant to, because I was just haunted by the idea that she would turn up and we wouldn’t be there. I used to think every night that I could hear her scratching at the door and whining, and in the end Claude refused to go down and look, he said I was going potty. It’s only a dog, he said.
— It wasn’t only a dog, cried Alice. — It was Mitzi!
— If she’d been knocked down, Fran said, picking up the pieces of the plate, — surely someone would have found her body by now?
— That’s what I think. But Claude says people who kill dogs don’t want to face the music, they drive off with the body and get rid of it at the other end of the country.
— Claude’s got a vivid imagination, hasn’t he?
— You do hear the most amazing stories though, Alice said, — about dogs coming back to their owners after years and years.
— Oh I know, Janice said. — It’s what I’m counting on.
Ivy was aware then of Arthur gazing at her expectantly, and knew she ought to stop them hoping for what wasn’t possible: she opened her mouth to speak. But at that moment Fran started sweeping the cake mess crossly from around Ivy with the dustpan and brush, prodding her feet out of the way with the brush-end as though she didn’t care about the dog at all. Looking down at her mother on her knees, bent over the sweeping, Ivy was suddenly protective of her secret: in all its ugliness it belonged to her, and she didn’t want the grown-ups taking it over, sorting it out and cleaning it up, not yet – although the words unspoken felt stifling in her mouth. Arthur wouldn’t say anything, she was sure, if she didn’t. She knew that, by refraining, she shut herself out from decency and safety. While they were all still being sorry about Mitzi she announced outrageously that she needed more cake. — No one round here seems to appreciate I’m actually starving to death.
Janice reproached her: she shouldn’t use the word starving when there were children in African countries who really were. Then Alice said Janice made her feel guilty, because she for one was always using it. When Ivy had eaten her dry cake, which almost choked her, she went upstairs again, stomping on every step, burdened, feeling herself impossible. She tried on lipstick at Alice’s dressing table, pressing too hard and breaking off the little tube of red paste. Then she wandered next door and rummaged in Harriet’s chest of drawers, found the diary hidden under her clothes. Harriet’s writing was very small, covering page after page. There didn’t seem to be anything secret in it, just stuff about walks and birds and people. Sat next to P. tonight at supper. Am I happy? I think I’m happy, but it’s close to madness.
Ivy scribbled over the pages with the broken lipstick. She wrote fuk upside down, spelling it deliberately wrongly, and then added Arthur’s name in sprawling uncertain baby letters which were nothing like Arthur’s actual rather careful writing. Harriet’s white pillowcase and sheet were smeared with the vermilion lipstick.
That afternoon Alice went out for a walk by herself. She wanted to be alone: she had chafed at their conversation with Janice in the drawing room, so limited and stale. When the others came back from swimming it wasn’t any better; Pilar and Fran were actually discussing house prices. In company Alice was so often disappointed; she dreamed of an ideal sociability, when her most pressing and important thoughts would flow out easily into words and be understood, and she would be equally attuned to the real thoughts of others. Once, she and Roly used to talk on and on for hours about everything – religion and art and death – understanding each other completely. But these days he was so guarded, and put up all his cleverness and his knowledge like a barrier against her, to keep her out. Since he’d arrived at Kington with Pilar, Alice had never had him to herself for a moment.
This wounded her – and yet this morning she had been seized by remorse and affection for her family, after her bad behaviour the other day. She had baked the cake as a warming, heartening surprise, to bring the whole family together – then the cake hadn’t risen and no one had wanted it. Also, Janice Patten had turned up. Alice was sorry about their dog, but Janice’s sharp eyes went probing everywhere, and you could see she was storing up things to make stories out of; she seemed to be friends with everyone in the village, though she didn’t spend any more time in it than they did. She was always telling them news about people whose names they didn’t recognise. On the whole Alice preferred Claude to Janice, even though he was pampered and self-indulgent, with a paunch and a bald head like a tonsure, fringed with greasy grey hair straggling down past his shoulders. Claude was an architect – that was why their barn conversion was so nice, although also a bit fake and sterile in its good taste.
All Alice’s irritations fell away as she walked. My beloved, she thought, tramping along through the first stretch of the woods, where the undergrowth was sparse in a plantation of conifers. She didn’t mean Claude Patten – she laughed out loud at the idea. Sunlight pierced the dense pine canopy high above and fell in shafts through the dusty brown space that made her think of an empty theatre. My beloved, my dear love, my heart’s own. It wasn’t Claude! Since she’d been in Kington, her solitary reverie seemed to fall into these cadences like a love letter – a love letter such as, in fact, she’d never written. In her actual love letters she’d always been rather light and dry and funny – either that or anguished and savage. Anyway, nobody wrote love letters any more, nobody wrote letters. Lovers just checked in with each other every hour of the day on their phones, exchanging banalities. But this yearning inward voice of hers was like a tic, a new habit of her heart, which seemed to stumble with excitement in her breast. Yet there was no one. She was living in this keyed-up expectancy, but with no particular man in mind. Was this the form neurosis was going to take, in her middle age? She would have to discuss it with her therapist. Alice called Eva a therapist but she couldn’t afford a real one, Eva was more of a counsellor and often overstepped th
e mark, advising her rather strongly: their talks were more like intimate chats between friends. Once Eva had even told Alice to pull her socks up. On the other hand, she didn’t charge her if she was short of money.
When she was through the woods, Alice struck into a steep lane that wound up the hillside – she met no one, and no cars passed her. Nothing came this way. The lane was strewn with branches fallen in the last high wind; huge oaks growing out of the banks were contorted and bulging with age, their grey hides deeply fissured and crusty. In the high hedgerows the delicate flowering plants of early summer had yielded to coarsely thriving nettles and bramble and dock, rank in the heat. She crossed a stile, then climbed a stubble field up to where cylindrical bales of straw were stored in a Dutch barn. At the top of the hill the wide landscape was proffered bleached and basking, purged of its darkness: there were views across the shining estuary all the way to the blue hills of Wales and, behind her, inland to the moors. But Alice didn’t seek out that sensation of overview, where a place seemed to be explained and put in context as if it was a map laid out: at any given point on a walk, Roland could always tell you which way was north. She would rather burrow into the place she was and lose herself, unsure of how the intricate folds of the hills all fitted together.
On her way down she lay for a long time on her back on the earth in the hidden corner of a meadow of tall grass, in the half shade under a stand of sweet chestnuts. She was thinking about a science programme she’d seen on television, and felt as if she could see deep into the meaning of the creative and destructive pulses which made up the dynamic of creation. At this late point, now, if it were still possible, would she like to have a child? Was that missing from her life? Mixed in among her grandmother’s letters she’d found a number of slips of tissue paper, wrapped round locks of blonde baby hair pale and light as breath, or tiny teeth. These might have been her mother’s – or her siblings’, or her own; she hadn’t shown them to anyone, and they caused her some convoluted pain of exclusion and loss. But the truth was that whenever in the past she’d come close to the reality of having a child, she hadn’t felt any joyful anticipation – only a muddled panic, like darkness closing in. All those little eggs which were inside her when she was born: Alice imagined them like clusters of tiny pearly teeth, and the idea of them washing away one by one was a relief as well as a regret.
Then she thought she saw a skylark soar up out of the field, streaming with song, balancing on its invisible jet of air – but as soon as she sat up on her elbows she doubted her identification. The bird was just a dot in the sky, too far off to be certain. Surely the skylarks had gone long ago from this part of the country? Everything was in decline. What a compromised generation theirs was, she thought. Materially they had so much, and yet they were haunted by this sensation of existing in an aftermath, after the best had passed.
Ivy unravelled at bedtime into one of her tantrums. The house seemed swollen for a while with her loud weeping and accusations. — I can’t sleep in this dirty old bed. All the springs are sticking up through the mattress: look at these scratches on my legs. It’s like a torture chamber! I want a bedroom of my own. You never think about me, do you? You only love Arthur. I want to go home to Daddy! Other children get taken on real holidays, in aeroplanes. I hate it here! I wish I was dead. I’m so bored! There’s nothing to do.
— Yeah, it’s boring, said Arthur, backing her up reliably.
— It’s so boring without any computer.
Alice tried to explain why it was good for them to be away from computers, using their own imaginations. Fran was cajoling and calm until she suddenly lost patience and slapped Ivy hard on the legs and shouted at her, making everything worse, telling her she’d had it up to here, and that Ivy was driving her round the bend with her selfishness and behaviour like a spoiled brat. Alice gave Fran one maddening look with her eyes full of feeling, at once disappointed in her and sympathetic. — The children are both overtired, Fran said defiantly when she arrived downstairs, hot-faced with her own outrage and ashamed. — It’s probably a bit of heatstroke too. I forgot to make them put on their hats.
The other adults looked incredulous, aghast at the loud grief turning the stone walls of the house to paper. They didn’t say anything, but of course each was thinking that they’d never allow any child of theirs to carry on that way. Fran asked herself furiously what any of them knew about bringing up children? Roland had hardly been tested with Molly, who was a docile pudding of a baby, whereas Ivy was a traitor knotted in her mother’s chest, devouring her. Fran blamed Jeff; in fact she wanted to phone Jeff this minute and tell him about it, while her injury was still fresh. She shouldn’t have lost her temper, though. While she sat on the scullery step with her shoulders rigid and her back to the house, the others crept around in the kitchen behind her, bringing in dishes from the dining table and washing them, exchanging practicalities in low voices, starting up mild jokes which were soon flattened by new blasts of lamenting. Kasim and Molly were play-acting in a kind of dumbshow; she giggled when he threatened her with a skewer from the cutlery drawer. The present was hollowed out as if a birth or a death were taking place upstairs.
Every so often Ivy would emerge again from her bedroom to stand sobbing full-throatedly at the top of the stairs, or begin making a halting, broken-hearted descent until Fran ordered her back. Once Ivy had begun a fight she couldn’t let it go, and was drawn again and again to the scene of her disaster, prodding at it and prolonging it, wanting more. — You see, you hate me, don’t you? Everybody thinks I’m horrible, I know they do! Everything’s ruined now, it’s too late.
Tucked virtuously into his bed, Arthur watched his sister’s desperate coming and going with a connoisseur’s calm appreciation. Eventually, when she had subsided under her duvet into a kind of hysterical coughing, he judged the moment right for climbing out of his own bed and into hers, to console her and put his arm around her, with just a hint of piety. Quivering, racked, her back turned to him, hugging her knees to her chest, she radiated intensity: the knobs of her vertebrae prodded him through her thin pyjamas, and her plait where he lay on it felt as hard as rope. — I was only putting it on, she whispered fiercely. Placatory, Arthur said he’d known she was, and asked her if she wanted to play the game.
— I’m worried, she said, breath ragged with the remnants of her sobs. — I think the Women are angry. There’s only one thing we can do.
— What is it?
They needed to make little cuts, she said, with scissors in the bedroom curtains, for a sacrifice. Arthur went obediently to find the nail scissors in the bathroom. Ivy instructed him in a musing, teacherly, expert voice – though Arthur, struggling with the tough material of the curtains, which slid between the scissor blades and wouldn’t cut, knew she was making things up as she went along.
— We have to go back to the cottage too, tomorrow, she said. — We have to get samples from those magazines.
— Why didn’t you tell the grown-ups? About you-know-what.
Ivy shrugged and said she hated them, she didn’t care what they knew.
Pilar was wearing her chiffon blouse that evening, and began to feel chilly; while Alice made coffee, in the calm that finally succeeded Ivy’s tempests, she went up to her bedroom to find something to put round her shoulders. Roland came after her, wanting to change his shoes. They were aware of the children scuffling out of sight, not asleep, conferring in muffled voices – probably vengefully. Roland had thrown the sash windows open to their fullest extent in the morning, because these rooms under the roof soaked up heat during the day; now he hurried to close them against the night insects. In the garden the trees were fretty silhouettes against the last of the sky, filled with liquid light; bats flickered between them and an invisible blackbird richly sang; the air inside the room was velvety-ripe. In a vase on the windowsill dead plumes of purple flowers had drooped and were pasted against the glass, a white rosebud had browned and withered unopened in the cloudy water. P
ilar asked him about his emails: anything interesting? She was on her knees, searching for her shawl in the drawers of the dressing table. Roland told her about the keynote talk, and the publisher wanting a foreword for a new series.
He was touched by her tender solicitousness for his eminence; she wasn’t actually interested in his ideas. Pilar had no idea what philosophy might be for – he wasn’t sure she even knew what films were for. Her own professional life didn’t have any core of passion in it, apart from the belief she lent to the entire institutional structure of the law, which was wholehearted. An individual’s work, as Pilar saw it, was a means of leverage – you ought to make the most of yourself. She interpreted his academic and public career as merely adversarial, a succession of thwartings and triumphant overcomings. And all the time she was questioning him eagerly – so were these useful connections? Did the projects have status? – she was struggling with the ill-fitting drawers in the cheap wartime dressing table. These always got stuck and then flew out, then had to be jiggled and banged into their place again; Roland’s grandmother used to rub them with candlewax. He admired his wife’s patience, putting up with everything that was hopeless and dysfunctional in the cranky old house; even the bed springs which, as Ivy complained, stuck out through the mattresses.
His sisters clung on to these flaws, as if in themselves they were their link with the past; but Pilar was used to all the latest conveniences working with streamlined ease. He thought that they were a sentimental family; it might be good for them all if they gave the house up. Wouldn’t they be relieved, really? Every room in it was printed ineradicably, for Roland, with the quality of the first summer they had spent here without their mother. He had not known until then – he was fifteen – how much material things could be altered by the light, or the absence of light, in which you looked at them. Their mother’s death and what it meant, the new vision of things it brought, had seemed to be soaked into the blankets on the beds and the keys on the piano and the stones in the walls.
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