Past by Tessa Hadley

made-up for some party. All that time when she was drowning in the struggle and chaos of her emotions, it was as if her outward identity had led another wholly competent life in spite of her – a life which seemed enviable and even admirable at this distance. She glanced behind her now into the room whose wallpaper was silvery in the light from the garden. No one was there, the room’s stillness was all hers: yet the chaise longue and the upright piano and the glass-fronted bookcase with her grandmother’s novels in it – Elizabeth Goudge and Rebecca West and L.P. Hartley – seemed drawn up stiffly against the walls in expectation. Again Alice was subject to that intimation of something unknown in wait for her – not from the past, but in her future. Her imagination seemed strained open and consenting, something must come into it, to fulfil it. In her history it had always been a man who filled up that quickened expectation. She was ready for another man.
    One bundle of letters and cards were tied together with ribbon: she realised these were condolences written when her grandfather died, along with obituaries cut out from the newspapers. The cards were decorously floral; on one a pair of black gates opened onto an autumnal avenue. Alice imagined her grandmother looking for the ribbon, fastening the letters ceremoniously together before she set them aside.
My dear Sophy, our thoughts are with you … your sad news … if it’s any comfort … privilege to have published … praying for you …
The melancholy and the stuffy smell of old newspaper began to make her sleepy.
    Molly stopped outside the cottage. — Oh, I remember this old place.
    Kasim glanced warningly at the children – they knew it meant they must not tell that they’d been inside it.
    â€” Imagine living here, he said as if he was reproaching somebody. — No electricity. No running water. No hot showers. No internet or mobile phone signal.
    Molly puzzled over this. — They must have had electricity, surely. Everyone has electricity.
    Kasim waved his arms at the sky innocent of pylons, even telegraph wires. — Do you think that it just comes down out of the air?
    She looked vague.
    â€” Where my family comes from, he said, — there are hundreds of thousands of people who live like this. Millions, actually.
    The others were impressed. — Where do your family come from?
    â€” But there must be water, Arthur said. — Else, how could you drink?
    Kasim made it sound as if he’d spent more time in Pakistan than he ever had. He told them about the deep wells, or fetching water from streams, or from standpipes miles away; he had only a quite vague idea of these things, because his own relatives in Pakistan were wealthy – except that he had drunk water from a well in a country courtyard once, in a house belonging to his great-uncle. It seemed to him now that it must have been exceptionally pure and cold.
    â€” You might die, Arthur said.
    Ivy knew he was muddling up the water thing with what had happened inside the cottage.
    â€” Lots of children do, said Kasim. — They die from drinking bad water.
    â€” But not in this country, Molly added quickly, squeezing Arthur’s hand.
    â€” 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