Past by Tessa Hadley

Ivy rapped out her instructions. Once, memorably, in a different summer and when the children were sitting on the bank, cows – gigantic at close quarters – had come swishing along this stream, making a tremendous racket in the water, stirring up the mud from the stream bed, playing truant from their ordinary lives in the fields.
    â€” It was Mitzi, Arthur paused to say, a stone in each hand.
    Ivy was contemptuous. — Are you still thinking about that old thing?
    â€” But it was.
    â€” I don’t care. Who cares?
    She shrugged her skinny shoulders, fending off some intimation through a great effort of will. The real evening was brimming and steady around her like a counter-argument to horror, its midges swarming and multiplying in the last nooks of yellow sunshine.
    After supper, when Fran had put the children to bed and Molly and Harriet were finishing the washing up, Alice visited the bathroom upstairs and then slipped secretly into her brother’s room. She carried the tooth mug full of water, pretending she wanted to top up their flowers. Roland and Pilar and Kasim were sitting outside on the terrace with their coffee and brandy; their voices floated from below through the open windows. Kasim was opening up to them at last – perhaps too much. It sounded as if he was boasting about how he found his university lecturers boring, how stupid most of them were.
    Alice found her flowers put aside indifferently on a windowsill, out of the way of all the toiletries and bottles and kit crowded on their dressing table: not only Pilar’s expensive make-up and scent but cologne and moisturiser for Roland too. Alice saved the surprise of these for Fran later – after a short and crabbed conversation with Jeff, on the phone in the hall so that everyone could hear her side of things, Fran was watching some detective thing on the grim little television in the study. Who would ever have thought their brother would use moisturiser, or Acqua Di Parma? Alice felt tugged between fond respect for him and a puff of laughter. At dinner there had been a little fuss when he dropped something on the white trousers; crouching beside him, Pilar had mopped at it so seriously and efficiently.
    She peered around the bedroom in the dusk, helped by the light from the landing behind. Cases stood open and half-ransacked on the floor: Pilar’s dresses and a blouse – in simplified bold shapes and colours, black and white and red – were ghostly presences on their hangers, hooked over the carved rim of their grandmother’s huge old wardrobe. Fingering a red chiffon blouse, admiring it, Alice caught sight of herself in the foxed oval mirror in the wardrobe door and was taken aback by something dated and fusty in her own appearance. She had put on that vintage bolero again. Was she letting something slip, had she failed in her vigilance, keeping up her style? Or sometimes too much vigilance was disastrous, as you grew older. A floorboard creaked and Ivy called out subduedly. Alice hurried out through Harriet’s room then into her own. — Go to sleep, she said from across the landing.
    â€” I can’t!
    Alice put her head round the door of the children’s bedroom. Ivy was mournful, eyes glittering in the half-dark. She lay flat on her back in bed like a little girl in a folktale, her sharp nose pointing up, her two plaits angled neatly on the pillow.
    â€” Yes you can. Shut your eyes and think of nice things.
    â€” What nice things?
    Alice cast around for ideas. — Ice cream? Kittens? A pair of magic shoes to carry you away on an adventure?
    She began to tell Ivy the story of the doll’s-house dolls, but Ivy only sighed, rolling over, turning her back on Alice. Her eyes were still staring open and she was portentous with her despair, beyond the reach of childish consolations.
    Harriet stepped into her room later, closed the door behind her, and stood in the dark in the relief of her