Free Past by Tessa Hadley Page B

back on her heels, staring at her sister. — What’s got into you? You’re in a mood. And what I said at breakfast wasn’t just romantic either, by the way. I know you agree with me, that things are ugly and awful. Why are you making up to Pilar? She won’t approve of your work with asylum seekers, you needn’t think so. I should think she’s pretty unsentimental about them. Aren’t they all from ‘backward’ places?
    â€” You’re so judgemental, Alice. We hardly know her. You don’t know what she thinks, or what her life has been.
    Both of them were remorseful, as soon as they were apart, that they had succumbed to quarrelling – it demeaned them, each preferred to think of herself as brightly generous in the face of the other’s provocations. Alice was ashamed of judging her new sister-in-law – Harriet was right, there was something crabbed and narrow in how she resented the intrusion into their family. Pilar was admirable and wholesome, as well as intimidating: when she washed up the breakfast things this morning she had scoured the whole kitchen, left it bright and pleasant. And Harriet thought it was true that Alice had loved the grandpees, she had been good to them when they were old, and it surely didn’t matter about the letters, if there even were any. What could their grandparents have written that was not blameless?
    Alice resumed poking into the keyhole of the little bureau with an unbent paper clip. She tried to remember Dani’s swift authoritative movement when he came to her rescue after she locked her passport in a drawer and lost the key; she imitated it now and something gave way inside the bureau, freeing the sloping lid. With a subdued cry of triumph – not wanting to bring Harriet back – she lowered it, letting out its stale, held breath: the past was for a moment intimately at hand. Ink had dried up in a bottle of Quink, pencils and an eraser and a plastic pencil sharpener and Basildon Bond paper were stowed away in their compartments, bills paid long ago were sorted inside the leather clips which had been someone’s Christmas present, chequebook stubs were stuffed into a pigeonhole, the lavender in one of the little voile bags her grandmother sewed had crumbled to a powder with no smell. The arrangements preserved the traces of the hands that had last closed the lid, twenty years ago.
    There were a few letters; no doubt there would be more in the bureau’s side drawers – Alice thought she could open these too, now that she’d got the knack. The first letters weren’t interesting: mostly business correspondence from the last four or five years of the old lady’s life, when she was a widow and had managed in the house by herself. A carer had visited – first every few days and then daily, driving out from the town – and Alice had come down to be with her grandmother whenever she could, although that was also the time when she was in the thick of her disasters in the theatre. There were some photographs from the 1980s: Roland’s graduation and then his PhD graduation, Fran a skinny kid with spiky, punky hair, eyes painted black as pits. Probably Harriet had sent these. It was Harriet who had managed to keep Fran on the rails – attending school, turning up for exams – in the years after their mother died and their father left. Harriet had ironed Fran’s school uniform and made her packed lunch, she had helped with her homework.
    Alice stared into the photographs of her younger self as if they were oracles – they came with a new shock because she had forgotten they were ever taken, forgotten even possessing the clothes she was wearing in them. What she remembered of that time was insecurity and self-doubt – and yet the young woman in the photographs looked so assured and knowing: blowing out smoke, laughing with her head thrown back and eyes half closed, or haughtily