Past Read Free Page A

Don’t worry, there’s plenty of room. She banged through the drawers in vain, looked hopelessly around her. — Don’t we have scissors?
    Fran lifted them from their place hanging on a row of wall-hooks, and handed them over. — I mean, I presume that he’s not in with you.
    â€” For god’s sake! Kasim’s something like my stepson, almost.
    â€” Only asking. I never know with you.
    â€” I’m an ancient old woman, as far as he’s concerned. The children adore him, by the way. Everywhere he goes, they go in procession after him. Kasim has his hands in his pockets and now Arthur’s copying him. He looks so sweet.
    â€” Is there room then? Fran persisted, bent over her peeling. — Molly has to have a room of her own, obviously. She’s not a child any longer.
    Alice was forced to start counting up bedrooms and beds on her fingers. — Oh dear. I’d forgotten Molly.
    â€” Roland and whatever her name is, the new wife. You, Kasim, Harriet. Molly. That’s five bedrooms. There are only six. It means I have to sleep in with the children, in the bunk-bed room.
    â€” Oh Fran, that’s awful. You need a break more than any of us. You need your privacy. No. I’ll sleep with them instead, it’s all my fault. I don’t mind, really.
    â€” Don’t be silly, Fran said flatly, punishingly. — You know that isn’t ever going to happen.
    Penitent, Alice got out their grandmother’s vases from the scullery and filled them with water on the kitchen table. — Right in my way, Fran grumbled when she was out of earshot. Alice brought in roses and montbretia and purple linaria from the garden, where only the toughest plants survived their long absences. Then she put flowers out all round the house – a posy for every dressing table, white roses and ferns for the new wife. She arranged the supermarket fruit in bowls. Fran had brought new tea towels in bright colours. Rooms filled with the smells of cooking. In between their visits it was as if the empty house lapsed into a kind of torpor, and was frigid and reluctant at first when they had to rouse it back to life.
    Harriet came through the churchyard and paused at the keyhole gap to brace herself for the end of her solitude. Her afternoon filled her to the brim: she had taken the route to the waterfall, which at this time of year wasn’t much more than a swell of liquid in a sodden long fall of emerald moss. Goldcrests had shrilled in the tops of a plantation of firs, a slow-worm had basked across her path, grey tree trunks surged and the sunlight was filtered through fans of leaves that stirred in movements of air imperceptible on the ground. A cottage whose abandonment they had observed since they were children – with a dim memory of a last inhabitant, an old woman – had sunk further back into the earth at its vantage point at the path’s turn, perched high above the steep end of a valley. Long ago she and her brother and sisters had broken a rusty padlock and explored inside the cottage, even climbing upstairs; it would be dangerous to do that now. The place was cut off from all services, there was no mains water, let alone electricity, no one could have lived there any longer. Though sometimes Harriet had thought that she could. She didn’t need very much.
    She saw that the others had arrived. The French windows were open onto the terrace and a young man was established there on one of the deckchairs, fetched from an outhouse. Ivy, emerging from the sitting room, was bringing him a glass of what looked like gin and tonic, held aloft carefully in two hands; Arthur, following, carried a bowl. Harriet was more shy than anyone knew, and quailed at the necessity of re-entering this peopled world. At first she thought the man must be a new boyfriend of Alice’s, though she hadn’t heard of there being one. Closer up, she recognised him.
    â€” I know who you are,