Past by Tessa Hadley

— Is he coming down?
    The light seemed particularly insolent at that moment to Fran, flashing from Alice’s sunglasses – she saw that people turned their heads to look, wondering if they knew her striking sister from television somewhere. In London Alice didn’t show up against the general background of striking people.
    â€” I don’t even want him here, I told you, Fran said. — I’m finished with him. What does he ever give? It’s always me, giving everything.
    â€” But you love him, you do. He’s the one. Don’t fight him all the time.
    â€” I’m not going to take any lessons from you, Alice, on how to manage my love life. You don’t seem to have made such a brilliant job of yours. Harriet’s right, you’re such a romantic.
    â€” I’d rather be romantic than jaded. At least I’ve
had
a love life. Even if the romance does seem unreal sometimes, in retrospect. All that hard work of falling into love and falling out of it again. None of it leaves any trace, not visibly.
    â€” Well, you should have had children then, shouldn’t you? Children are real enough. They’re a trace.
    â€” Fran, how can you? It hasn’t been a
choice
, not to.
    â€” Hasn’t it? When did you have time for children, between all your adventures?
    Both sisters managed to be offended. They sulked for five minutes and couldn’t forgive each other, until they forgot about it and went back to their gossip, which circled eternally. All the siblings felt sometimes, as the days of their holiday passed, the sheer irritation and perplexity of family coexistence: how it fretted away at the love and attachment which were nonetheless intense and enduring when they were apart. They knew one another so well, all too well, and yet they were all continually surprised by the forgotten difficult twists and turns of one another’s personalities, so familiar as soon as they appeared.
    When Roland took Pilar for a drive across the moor, Harriet asked if she could come. He would rather have been alone with Pilar, which made him more punctilious in his kindness to his older sister. Just because he felt Harriet’s life was dreary, he mustn’t let her glimpse this. She wasn’t stupid and had read a lot: she turned out, for instance, to be up to date in recent developments in the Argentinian economy. And of course Roland admired what she did at work. But her life seemed so small to Roland, she had no outlet for her thinking in the wider world. She was supposed to have Christopher to talk to, but he was always off cycling. Roland was profoundly unsporting and couldn’t take bony, middle-aged Christopher seriously, flaunting himself in in his skintight Lycra.
    In the sunlight the moor’s distances were harmless, bland lovely tobacco-brown and mauve: they had to explain to Pilar how austere the place could look in winter or bad weather. They got out of the car to see the view, exploring along the bleached dry brush riddled with paths, where the sheep dropped shiny dark pills and left their wool caught in the coconut-scented gorse. Harriet picked a purple sprig of heather, telling Pilar to keep it because it was lucky. Then they drove on to an ancient river crossing, where flat-topped boulders made stepping stones across the water and cream teas were served in a garden. When he set down the laden tea tray on their table, Roland knew that Pilar was drawing glances from the other tourists in her tight trousers and dark glasses.
    Roland had wondered whether Harriet would disapprove of Pilar, because of her class and background: no doubt in the past Harriet had belonged to committees protesting the abuses of the Argentinian military. But Harriet seemed more animated and more tentative these days, less judgemental; she was wearing a scarf knotted around her neck too, and had something shiny on her eyelids. Because of her white hair and the way she held herself so