Past Read Free

on it. It’s the only way.
    Kasim swore – incredulously rather than because he really cared. Perhaps you weren’t supposed to swear in front of children, but Ivy was unblinking as if she heard
fuck
every day of her life. He quite liked the idea of dropping off the edge of communication into nowhere, where his friends couldn’t find him, nor his father or mother – who were divorced – nor the girl he was half-heartedly half-involved with. The buzzing, rustling summer afternoon, too hot for birdsong, swelled louder and more invitingly in his ears now that he knew it couldn’t be cut across by any mediated connectedness. He was going to ground, he decided, and enjoyed feeling the hard flank of the ground, not at all accommodating, moulded underneath him where he lay. On the other hand, it was irritating that there were children here. Children didn’t amuse him. It seemed only yesterday that he was a child himself, he could remember it only too well.
    Alice went round the house to air it, singing and opening doors and windows. She was all right now she was inside. Leaning out of an upstairs bedroom she called and waved to Kasim coming through from the churchyard; he was trying to shake off Ivy who followed close behind. He waved back without unplugging his cigarette. Turning away from him into the room again, Alice was subject to a leap of promise that had no relation to Kasim or to anyone, certainly not to Dani: light moving on pink wallpaper, the dark bulk of a wardrobe in the corner of her vision, the children’s voices from outside, the room’s musty air and its secrets, a creak of floorboards – these aroused a memory so piercing and yet so indefinite that it might have only been a memory of a dream. There was summer in the dream, and a man, and some wordless, weightless signal of affinity passing between him and her, with everything to play for. This flare of intimation buoyed Alice up and agitated her, more like anticipation than recollection. Love seemed again luxuriant and possible – as if something lay in wait. She went along the landing breathless, and aware of her heart beating.
    Upstairs the house was always full of light, changing dramatically according to the weather. Its design was very simple: a single flight of wide, shallow stairs rose to a long landing with a white-painted balustrade; at each end of the landing, at the centre of the front and back elevations of the house, there rose the tall arched windows that were its distinctive beauty from inside and out. In the front bedroom that was always hers, Alice knelt at the bookshelf – guiltily aware all the time of Fran at work downstairs. The house was full of children’s books – not only from her own and her siblings’ childhood, but from their dead mother’s too. Bookplates, with Alice’s name written in the shakily flowing cursive she’d been taught at school, were pasted inside the cover of all hers, with dates. As if in a form of divination she opened one at random – E. Nesbit’s
The Wouldbegoods –
and read a page or two.
And then we saw a thing that was well worth coming all that way for; the stream suddenly disappeared under a dark stone archway, and however much you stood in the water and stuck your head down between your knees you could not see any light at the other end.
The very weight of the book in her hands, and the thick good paper of the pages as she turned them, and the illustrations with the boys in their knickerbockers and the girls in pinafores, seemed to bring back other times – the time when she had first read this, and behind that the time when such children might have existed.
    Fran was peeling potatoes in the kitchen sink when Alice came in looking for scissors, wanting to cut flowers in the garden.
    â€” When you decided to invite Kasim, Fran said, — where exactly were you planning for him to sleep?
    Alice was blithe. —