The Past by Tessa Hadley

Author:Tessa Hadley [Hadley, Tessa]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: Family Life, Romance, Fiction, Women's Fiction, Relationships, Chick-Lit, British, Contemporary
ISBN: 9780224101691
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2015-09-02T23:00:00+00:00

Two

ON SUNDAY MORNING the baby woke up early. Jill was hauled out of her own deep sleep by the creak of the wooden cot as Ali climbed over its side, for the first time. After a pause – for sheer surprise, perhaps, at this brand new freedom, so easily attained – purposeful little steps came padding out onto the landing, then, after a hesitation, along towards Jill’s room. Jill was aware of calculating irresponsibly – in exchange for a few seconds more of warmth in bed – that if Ali could climb out of her cot, then she could navigate safely past the top of the stairs. The door of the bedroom was pushed tentatively open and Ali stopped on the threshold, in her sagging night-nappy and the blue pyjamas patterned with yachts that had belonged to Roland. She was staring solemnly, as if she wasn’t sure what she might find, in a world no one had prepared for her. Jill couldn’t help laughing at the round eyes and fat flushed cheeks: Ali’s fair hair was so fine that it hardly counted, she looked bald as an egg. She laughed back at her mother in pure pleasure.

— What do you think you’re doing, naughty? Why aren’t you in your cot?

Jill slipped out of bed then, to snatch the baby up and kiss her, scolding her in whispers, then listen at the door and quietly close it. As long as Ali hadn’t woken up the others, if Jill changed her nappy now and she had her morning bottle of milk – kept ready overnight on the dressing table – there was even a chance of her falling asleep again. Ali was the doziest and easiest of her three babies. With Hettie she had tried too hard to establish a routine, as the books instructed; Roland had frightened her with infantile convulsions.

— It’s still night-time, little chicken. You can have your bottle in bed with Mummy if you’ll go back to sleep. Shut your eyes now.

Jill held her in the crook of her arm, nestled under the blankets and eiderdown. At first Ali kept her eyes resolutely open as she sucked: brilliant with the joke of the whole occasion, fixed on her mother. When her grin spread irresistibly her mouth slid off the rubber teat of the bottle, milk trickling at its corner. Eventually the heavy eyes fell shut, flicked open, drooped again. Jill put the bottle on the bedside table and tried to go back to sleep herself. The sleeping baby was pressed close along the contours of her own body, burning with her heat, wispy hair blowing in her breath, the stuffy milky smell in her own nose – but in the hollow of her thoughts she was agitated and noisy, full of her argument with Tom as she hadn’t been when she went to bed. She saw things with finality in the grey light which developed inexorably around the heavy furniture in the room. From henceforward, she thought, he and she were fated to be enemies, set opposite each other at their different poles of experience.

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