by Tessa Hadley
The thought came to her unbidden, that the plait would keep its color through all the years while her own hair turned gray.
Five
In Zoe’s memory, Fiona first came to their school the day they did air pressure. At junior school they only did science in an occasional desultory way, when their excitable Welsh teacher was in the mood for it. Drawing autumn leaves or testing milk and vinegar with litmus paper was a glamorous respite from the routines of English comprehension and maths.
On this particular day (they were Junior Three, so Zoe was ten years old), he crowded the whole class into the staff room, which was enough of an adventure in itself; this was normally a forbidden sanctum whose threshold they were not allowed to cross. The children were usually allowed in here only if they had fainted or been sick and were waiting, perhaps wrapped in the old blue cellular blanket, to be collected by a parent. It was always consoling to be reminded that this snug refuge was only a step away from the rough struggle of the echoing lofty classrooms, with their gothic windows too high to look out from. The staff room was homey, with a gas fire and armchairs and crocheted cushion covers smelling of mothballs; there was a tray with a teapot and knitted cosy, jars of coffee and sugar, and a biscuit barrel with a wicker handle. The teachers’ coats were hung up on hooks in one corner, proving that they really did sometimes go home and have real lives elsewhere. Zoe was prone to a little rush of worship at the thought of her teachers’ private lives. She was really very happy at that school.
Beside the fire was a gas ring where the teachers boiled their kettle. Mr. Lloyd had brought in from home an empty metal paraffin can with a screw lid. He impressed upon them, first, that they were not to touch anything—anything—in the staff room; second, that this experiment was much too dangerous for them ever to try for themselves; and, third, that it would have been even more dangerous if he hadn’t scrupulously washed out every trace of paraffin before he started. Then he put the empty can with its lid unscrewed onto the gas ring and began to heat it.
It was of course the aura of danger that the children loved with this teacher. This was true even when they weren’t doing science, even when they were writing out, say, five sentences with speech marks at the beginning, five sentences with speech marks at the end, and five with speech marks in the middle; or multiplying nineteen pounds, seventeen shillings, and eightpence ha’penny by 7, 9, and 11. He was a short, springy, vital man with a lock of shining black hair that flopped forward and had to be tossed back out of his eyes, a passionate Baptist who explained to them as if it were a truth that brooked no argument the flawed logic of the Roman Catholic celebration of Christ’s suffering. He cultivated a volatile and histrionic relationship with his classes, irresistible to certain of the girls and the cleverer boys. It did not occur to Zoe at the time to wonder how those other boys felt about him, the ones whose failures were the necessary grist to his teaching performances, those whose ears he twisted or whose legs he slapped across the back of the knee.
—What’s inside this can? he asked them, while it was heating.
Surely that was easy.
There was a whole ritual performance attached in Mr. Lloyd’s class to the answering of questions. If you knew the answer—or, riskily, if you didn’t but thought he wouldn’t pick on you—you thrust your arm up and called out “Sir! sir!,” urgently, eagerly. Mr. Lloyd meanwhile would fasten on one of the children, usually one of the boys who didn’t know the answer, and persist in trying to elicit it from him. Those who knew, or were pretending they knew and had probably by now forgotten that they didn’t, would carry on calling out, pumping their arms in the air, and—not in the staff room obviously, but if they were in their normal classroom—actually climbing onto their chairs and jumping up and down on them, in a crescendo of desperate appeal. This wasn’t an occasional performance but repeated every day, usually over times tables or spellings. Mr. Lloyd would eventually turn in disgust from the ignoramus he was persecuting and ask one of the panting, desperately certain ones; sometimes it would turn out that he or she had no idea of the answer either. Then the others who had subsided momentarily into a post-climactic lassitude would revive and start the chanting and pumping of fists in the air again.
—Sir! Sir!
But today no one, not even Zoe or Barbara Mole or Pamela Warren or Neil Ashley or David Tew, or any of the others who were usually to be counted on, could give the right answer.
—What’s inside this can? he said again, smiling at them, enjoying their perplexity.
Nothing, they were sure. He had turned it upside down; he had passed it around; they were sure it was empty.
—There’s something inside this can, he said. What is it?
The answer dawned slowly. You could see one or two hug the possibility to themselves, then look round cautiously to see if others were thinking the same thing, putting their hands tentatively halfway up.
Zoe saw where the new girl was sitting. She had been introduced to them that morning, and Zoe had felt the customary mixture of pity and initiated smugness at the thought of the tangled web of school codes and hierarchies that was bound to trip her up and expose her before she learned to fit in. Her name was Fiona Martin. That might be a point of vulnerability to begin with; the boys might call her Martin, with its humiliating implications of uncertain gender and a taint of maleness. She was also wearing a woolly homemade-looking top and skirt, very neat, in brown. Zoe had once worn a woolly skirt her Grandma Lil had knitted her, and Gary Lyons in words seared onto Zoe’s memory had asked if it didn’t “itch her fat arse.” She had refused ever to wear that skirt to school again.
What was striking however about Fiona Martin, while they were thinking about air in the staff room, was that she was not looking round to see what the others thought, nor was she frowning in the required perplexity, nor did she look anxious or defiant like one of the naughty or dull ones. She was composed and sat straight-backed with her legs crossed, watching Mr. Lloyd steadily, as if expectation of his explanation of the mystery was a quiet pleasure but nothing to make a fuss about. She was very pretty; Zoe had not taken that in adequately, earlier. That would make a difference to how she was treated. She had smooth olive-colored skin, features of a satisfying neatness that insults could not hang on, and fine straight black hair cut off in an unusual bob just above her shoulder (the fashionable way for girls to wear their hair that year was in two low-slung bunches). It ought to have been terrible, to be new, and yet Fiona Martin looked as if she wasn’t afraid.
—If I took all the furniture out, would this room be empty? Mr. Lloyd asked. He held out his cupped hands. Are my hands empty? What’s in my hands now?
They began to understand. There was air, air was everywhere; they waved their hands about in it with sudden consciousness. Paul Andrews, the clown, pretended to get a handful of it and drop it down someone’s back.
—Air, sir. It’s air.
—Lyons, what is it?
—It’s air, sir.
—And air is made up of molecules, like everything else, bouncing against one another and against other molecules. That’s called air pressure: the molecules of the air pressing on everything around them. We don’t feel it because we take it for granted. But we would certainly notice it if it wasn’t there. Watch this.
He explained to them about the molecules of air inside the can becoming farther and farther apart and moving faster and faster as they heated up. Then when the can was very hot he screwed on the lid, using the potholder the staff used for their kettle, and turned the gas off.
—As air cools, it contracts. The air pressure on the inside of the can weakens; it’s pressing less hard than ordinary air. The air outside the can is pressing with normal air pressure. The air outside is pressing in harder than the air inside is pressing out. Watch.
It worked very satisfactorily. Under pressure from something quite invisible and intangible, the solid-seeming metal container buckled and crumpled, giving out twanging, booming noises
like protests. Zoe felt it as if it were happening in herself, that invasion and hollowness, that caving in, helpless and extravagant and pleasurable. Fiona Martin watched with a slight unperturbed curve of the lips, as if the exhibition only confirmed something she had long intuited. And the idea of the buckling container became a kind of shorthand sign for Zoe for years afterward, signifying that momentous first encounter with someone who is going to be important and be loved.
* * *
A large proportion of zoe’s efforts at that junior school were devoted to making herself as acceptably inconspicuous as possible. This wasn’t easy; she couldn’t help being determinedly opinionated, anymore than she could help her square pink face and thick light-brown bunches of hair and her sturdy arms and legs (she wasn’t really fat, she knew; Gary Lyons would call anyone fat who wasn’t lean as a knife, as he was). She looked like the Dutch girl in clogs and cap who stood with the Eskimo, the barefoot colored boy, and the little Indian squaw in the picture that hung over the entrance to their classroom, gazing adoringly up at a blond Jesus bringing together the children of the world.
One of the things that Zoe had to keep out of sight at school was her disdain for the present. Once she had come, through books mostly, to believe that there had really been other times in the past when things were done differently, she felt sure that the past must have been a better place. This was first and foremost an aesthetic judgment. She flinched from the raw ugliness of modern things: bleak concrete shopping centers built up where the old streets of the city had been bombed, plastic teenager dolls, and Crimplene clothes. She bothered her mother for stories about the time when she lived with Grandma and Aunt Vera and her cousins in an old gray house on the estuary with no gas or electricity, where there was an orchard and a little stone room for storing the apples, sweet-tasting queer-shaped apples of a kind you couldn’t buy anywhere anymore. When they drove out once to look for the house, all they could find was a filthy carbon factory.
When she went on holiday to the Gower Peninsula with her parents and wound up the car windows going through Port Talbot, she stared straight ahead in shame: the naked innards of the steelworks stank and sprawled across the coastal plain. It was a horror to her, guiltily pushed away just out of reach of conscious thought, that anyone should have to live under those blighted hillsides where the trees were stunted and blackened; it made a shadow in the corner of all her pleasure in the sea and the beach and the cottage they rented, where she played out her games of past times, trailing about in long skirts, baking, washing herself in cold water, stitching elaborate layers of underclothes for her rag dolls (she wouldn’t use nylon lace or plastic buttons).
She couldn’t quite believe that if you pushed hard enough you wouldn’t be able to make the passage through to the past from the present. She read books where children managed this—A Traveller in Time and Tom’s Midnight Garden—and they fueled and sharpened her desire. Real people, astonishingly but unarguably, had once worn these clothes, handled these things; everything that was now saturated with mystery had once been casually used. If you touched them yourself, possessed them, put them on, might you not take on something of the superior substance and depth that the past had, in contrast to the shallow present? This active nostalgia and an elegiac sense that the best things were gone were Zoe’s first strong abstract emotions.
Her cult of the past translated itself into a quite passionate materialism. During this time, her last years at junior school and first years at secondary, there was a craze everywhere for Victoriana, for the old things that only a decade before everybody had been ripping out of their houses in disgust: old dressers, old brass fittings, old fireplaces. Now when Zoe’s parents bought their first house, a teetering, skinny, four-floor, eighteenth-century terrace house that they had to convert from grimy bedsits, her mother papered the lounge in imitation William Morris wallpaper and knocked out a 1930s tiled mantelpiece to expose the original deep recess behind. “Original” became a word of powerful magic. Junk shops were treasure troves, and Zoe and her mother drew together in their deep interest in buying things. Zoe started a collection: a little leather-covered inkwell that clicked open to reveal a glass bottle; a wooden trunk with cast-iron fittings, which Joyce found thrown out on a skip and which they stripped down together; a dove-gray Edwardian silk parasol with drawn-thread work around its rim, given to her for Christmas by her Aunt Ann. Zoe tried to do drawn-thread work herself; she made patchwork and tatted lace on a tiny old ivory shuttle.
She had a couple of friends at school who read the same books and were happy enough to dress up whenever they saw each other at weekends, to play Victorian governesses or ladies and maids. At first she dreamed, against all probability, that Fiona Martin might share her passion for the past. She looked for a sign, an exchange of glances when an extract from The Young Brontës was read out in class, an unnatural informedness with regard to dance programs or gophering irons. But as she grew accustomed to Fiona’s being at school and the sign didn’t come, she realized that she was even glad of it. Fiona wasn’t meant to yearn, as she did. It didn’t matter that Fiona didn’t dream about how things could be otherwise, because Zoe was the imaginer and Fiona was the thing itself: the still point, the Princess.
* * *
Zoe soon understood that one reason fiona hadn’t seemed afraid of coming to a new school was because she had had so many more terrible things to practice being brave on. Her cousin, Jackie Potter, was already in their same class, so the word quickly got around—bred out of the little closed circles of murmuring girls with their arms hung around one another’s necks in the playground, faces long with portent or indignation—that Fiona’s parents were divorced. “Divorced” in those days stood for something lurid, only half comprehended, shaming. Zoe wished she hadn’t heard and refused to tell anyone else, although she was supposed to; she had been in trouble for this before, when messages came down the line with the tag, “Pass it on.” She feared and hated those closed circles of girls and all the high dramas they generated out of their intimate heat: once-favored ones excluded and weeping, once-excluded ones reinstated and brilliant with relief, lashing out in turn to prove themselves.
Because she was pretty and well liked, Fiona with her divorced parents could have queened it, ostentatiously afflicted, her protectors scowling about them to forestall any intrusion or insensitivity. Instead, when once the divorce was awkwardly produced in conversation, her smile was quite steady, and her perfectly light and polite tone deflected any further inquiry.
—Yes, they are, she said. But it’s all right. It was all for the best.
The girls’ toilets were in a sort of shed at the end of the playground; it was customary for five or six girls to share one dank cramped cubicle, shuffling round to wee and wipe themselves on the hard paper in turn. Fiona sometimes stood in with Zoe and Barbara and Pam and sometimes in Jackie Potter’s cubicle across the way; only she could have moved effortlessly across the gulf dividing these two extremes of playground society without causing offense. Jackie had a memorable woman’s face, black-rimmed big eyes, and mobile mouth. She claimed a knowledge of the body and its forbidden and savory effects that the nice girls in the other cubicles couldn’t but respond to with fascination as well as disgust. Once, for example, she had a “suppurating sore” on her belly, which girls queued up to see (Zoe, Pam, and Barbara did not want to, nor were they invited, although the idea of the suppurating probably preoccupied them all the more for remaining nonspecific).
Jackie was supposed to be having sexual intercourse with her boyfriend, who was fifteen (she was ten). In private with her friends, Zoe poured fierce scorn on this, claiming it was physically impossible, although her sense of the mechanics of sex was vague. There was something in Jackie’s stories she angrily resisted even while they worked powerfully on her imagination, conjuring an underworld of scuffles and shriekings and groping exchanges of intimacies, out on the streets as the light faded, slipped from the leash of parental scrut
iny. The boyfriend’s pronouncements on male need, passed relishingly on by Jackie, seemed even savage: apparently he liked girls “with a bit of meat on them.” Zoe was horrified to think what for: she pictured him sinking his teeth into a leg or a neck as part of some sexual process.
And somehow, mysteriously, Fiona was part of all this, although she gave none of it away; her name was mixed up with boys’ names in Jackie’s account of the arcane negotiations that always sounded more like a kind of war than “love.” “Martin loves Diana.” “Lester says he loves Fiona more than he loves Sandra.” Fiona didn’t even blush. “So he says”—she laughed lightly—or, “I don’t think so.” And yet she must have been there, she must have come out on the street with the others in order to be “loved.” You could tell from the way Jackie pressed her, too, that she was not marginal to these transactions, that Jackie gained status and negotiating power through being Fiona’s cousin. Yet it was impossible for Zoe to imagine Fiona of her own volition choosing to go down on the street and be snatched at and fought over. She had a way of moving through arrangements as if they were always other people’s, so that they seemed to leave no trace on her.
Already, other girls in Jackie’s crowd looked marked and set apart from the good children. Their skin was sallow and bruised easily, their hair was lank; some had gold hoops in their ears, and their clothes were skimpy hand-me-downs, stained and unironed. It wasn’t entirely unattractive, this marked and used look; it was certainly to be preferred to looking like the children from the Homes, who were at the bottom of the playground hierarchy, neat always, but with giveaway chopped-off haircuts, clothes all tainted with the same sad charitable grayness, and smelling sometimes of wee (Jackie Potter only smelled of strong perfume). Fiona’s appearance, however, gave nothing away. She could have been one of the girls who went riding and had ballet lessons, for all you could tell. She didn’t speak with a broad local accent, but Gary Lyons couldn’t tease her for sounding “posh,” either. What stood out was something quietly adult in her demeanor and in how she was dressed: clean white sweaters and tartan skirts, white lace tights and black patent shoes with straps across.
