by Tessa Hadley
—I’ve got something to show you, said Fiona. She undid a button and felt around her neck inside her blouse, her olive skin smooth and clear apart from a couple of dark moles, the glimpsed shadowy swell of her breasts in their lace bra mysterious and adult. Zoe, who was tall and clumsy and flat-chested and had to wear an orthodontic brace, felt shamed beside her perfection. Fiona pulled out a ring on a fine gold chain.
—Look. I’m engaged. Only it’s a secret. You’re not to tell anyone.
—Engaged? But who to?
—No one you know. No one at this school. He’s much older. And he’s not from round here.
The ring was warm from lying against Fiona’s skin. Zoe examined it helplessly: gold, with a green stone, cheap-looking to her. Fiona leaned back against the slatted shed wall with her eyes closed, her arms hugged round her knees against the cold.
—He loves me, she said, slowly and voluptuously. He’s crazy about me. He can’t get enough of me. He wants me to leave school and have his babies and all this stuff.
—Oh, my God, Fiona. You mustn’t do that. Remember what you always said? You want to get a good job as a translator, remember, and a flat in London? And you’re only sixteen.
—Oh, yes. And I might still do all that. I haven’t decided anything. I haven’t said when we will marry or anything.
But her face was suffused with thoughts that made her eyes open wide and heated her skin. The way her mouth slipped secretively round the word “marry” made Zoe know she was lost. This wasn’t what Zoe had expected, and she felt cheated.
—You mustn’t give it all up for a boy, she said. There’s the rest of your life for that.
—He isn’t a boy, said Fiona, dropping the ring on its chain back down into her blouse, where it was hidden. He’s a man. That’s what’s different. You’ll see.
* * *
And so they parted. fiona did stay on for a few months in the sixth form to do A-levels with the hardworking girls and boys, but she was fatally bored; she yawned openly in class; all the liveliest of her friends had left. Zoe was happy there, but she saw it would not do for Fiona. At about the same time that Fiona stopped turning up for classes, Jean left her job at the corner café and moved from the flat opposite the heath, and so Zoe lost touch with them finally and totally. Perhaps it didn’t matter. Life filled up so quickly with other things, changing during those years at such a rate it seemed as though almost every six months or so you shed one self and stepped into a new one, leaving behind a phase of your personality and your role and your desires as mere discarded skin.
Once during the summer before she went up to read history at Cambridge (it had turned out to be that easy to do well at Langham Road), Zoe thought she might have seen Fiona again. It was an odd sour summer; things were happening at home. Daniel was playing in a band; he had moved into a sordid flat with filthy purple and orange wallpaper and was taking a lot of speed and dropping acid. He told Zoe in all seriousness that he saw eels swimming around in the toilet. Ray was mostly at work on a new series of pictures in his studio at college (having a studio in the house hadn’t worked out); these were the studies of Moira, a sixty-year-old schizophrenic who lived in hostels and on the streets, that many would rate afterward as his best work. When he was home he always seemed to be on the phone to friends. As Zoe lay on her bed, she could hear his voice climbing up and down, booming and hectoring, taking up much more than his half share of the conversation; without being able to hear his words, she could guess that the gist of it was how he was always right, how he knew so much better than everybody else, how everybody else was an idiot or a sellout, you couldn’t expect anyone to understand. She could tell from this that he was unhappy.
That summer they all seemed to be listening out for signs of life and clues as if they hardly knew one another. In the middle of one night, Zoe woke as instantly and completely as if a clear small bell had sounded through her dreams; her mother was speaking downstairs to someone in a voice of such quiet tenderness and sweetness that Zoe’s heart twisted. She couldn’t make out what they were saying, and she didn’t recognize the male voice (it certainly wasn’t Ray’s, and anyway Ray was probably sleeping at the studio). A deep vibrating bass responded to Joyce’s sweetness like counterpoint, like some essence of male and female interaction. They were speaking together so softly and discreetly, being so considerate of the sleeping house, it was only through some miracle of intuition that Zoe had woken up to hear it at all. After a while Joyce closed the front door very quietly; then Zoe knew from the intimate creakings of the old house that her mother was moving around downstairs, not bustling or tidying, just wandering between the rooms, barefoot on the thick carpets.
Zoe had got a job for the summer, working in a dry cleaners in St. Peters. They had the contract for the New Theatre; there had been flooding in the theater wardrobes. It was Zoe’s special assignment to go through the plastic bags of sodden costumes, ticketing them and sorting them for treatment, growing emotional from handling the sad largesse of soggy flounces, brocades, beads, veils, velvets. She worked in a big airless back room and didn’t often need to visit the front of the shop, but one afternoon she went in to ask the manageress something about her hours just as a customer was going out of the door: a young dark-haired woman, pregnant, struggling with a baby in a push chair and a small child on reins. It was only after Zoe had asked Mrs. Doyle her question that she was suddenly convinced this customer had been Fiona Martin. Explaining hurriedly, knowing how foolish she must seem, she scrambled under the counter and ran after her into the street. There was quite a crowd of shoppers and several women with push chairs.
She called Fiona’s name, and one of them turned round. She really looked very like Fiona, although her long hair was hennaed and tangled and she was dressed carelessly in an old T-shirt and slacks stretched over her pregnant stomach, as if she hadn’t even looked in a mirror that morning. Her face (if she was Fiona) was still fresh and her eyebrows had grown back into their pure clear line. She did smile and look hard at Zoe, but only for a moment or two, before turning away, as if after all she hadn’t recognized her, and forging on with the push chair, hitching the reins a half turn tighter round her hand to keep the walking child close by her side.
Zoe checked the ticket on the garment she had deposited and it wasn’t in any name she knew; but then, Fiona would probably have been married. She had hoped it might be something pretty for her imagination to work on, a party dress, something springlike; but it was only a man’s cheap suit, worn and with something spilled down the front of the jacket. Mrs. Doyle promised her that if anyone came in to pick it up while Zoe was there she’d let her know (Zoe did check from time to time, and one day the suit was gone without anyone having mentioned it). For some reason this nonencounter was a strong blow; Mrs. Doyle found Zoe half an hour later struggling in tears over a bronze-colored satin petticoat thick with stinking mud too wet to brush off. She made her a hot sweet cup of tea and put an arm around her shoulders, blaming the dry cleaning chemicals.
Zoe read all sorts of things into the young woman’s long look at her (it grew longer in memory): irony; condemnation; a knowledge of Zoe’s life, all her superficial success, her self-important cleverness; an intimation of unreality in Zoe’s very existence. Fiona hadn’t even been willing to exchange a few words with her, as though she suspected that Zoe’s very desire for her friendship was something fake, something to show off, some deal Zoe was trying to make to get absolution for her own privilege, for university, for “Cambridge,” for arty parents and a big house.
Probably, Zoe knew, she had made all this up. Probably the woman hadn’t been Fiona in the first place, just some projection onto a stranger of her idea of how Fiona’s life might have been: her body subdued to the discipline of that unimaginable mother’s life, her expression one of weary skepticism, as if she was awakened to something Zoe hadn’t even begun to be able to see.
Six
Usually, Zoe didn’t stay the night wi
th Simon. After they’d finished making love he would send her home, always much too soon for Zoe, who would be drifting into a sweet heaviness among the crumpled dragged sheets and the mounds of pillow and kicked-aside duvet. She would have given anything to sink down and down and find her sleep inside the heat of his nearness, inside the smell of him, peppery and astringent. But Simon would never lie stilled and satisfied for long. If she lay with her face pressed against his fine rib cage or his long honey-brown back she felt the change of his mood distinctly, like something chemical altering in his tissues: abandonment and languor transforming into alertness, then restlessness, and then, if she stayed too long, or resisted or protested, into impatience. So she would force herself awake, and find and pull on the clothes she had carelessly torn off, and fish around on the dark floor for her sandals. Her head would be swimming and her legs still trembling. Sometimes she even felt nauseated: this was shock at the sheer effort, she thought, of taking back into rational possession the flesh that had been so opened up and lost.
Simon would get up and put on his jeans and help her find her things. He would come with her to the back door and check that her bike lamp worked. He didn’t like her to kiss him goodbye; he said he “preferred to keep things separate.” She cycled off, doing her best not to wobble for as long as he could see her, making her way confusedly until she woke up properly to the empty night streets: a narrow way between sleeping terraced cottages, then Mitchams Corner roundabout, where in the day the lanes of traffic thundered but now the traffic lights often changed color only for her, although she still obediently waited, one foot on the road, when they were on red. Sometimes, although she never remembered this when she was with Simon, she was afraid as she pedaled home: that someone would leap from the bushes and drag her down as she crossed Jesus Green or that when she had to get into college through the underground bike shed because the gates were locked, someone would be lurking there to rape her and smother her.
It was a cold winter. By the time she climbed the staircase to her room, her jaw would be in spasms of shuddering and her hands even inside her gloves would be frozen into the shape of her grip on the handlebars. Because her room was one of the modern conversions in the attic, it didn’t have a gas fire, only an inadequate electric heater, so when she undressed for the second time she kept her socks and pants and T-shirt on under her nightdress, piled her coat and dressing gown on top of her duvet, and lay shivering in her bed, hugging her knees. She didn’t mind all this. She imagined that somehow she was testing herself, hardening herself, making herself more like Simon. In her half sleep she dreamed that she was hugging cold steel to her breast and that even the pain it caused did her honor.
* * *
Simon told her he had been insomniac since he was a child; night had become the time when he read and wrote. A big old office desk, stained with ink and scarred with ancient jagged scratches as if someone had once raged against it, was pulled under the window of his room in the house he shared with student friends. The walls of the room were papered in a glowering green splodged with brown motifs that sometimes looked like grinning demon faces; he didn’t care, he didn’t notice it. When Zoe was gone, he worked. When she returned, the desk would be heaped with new piles of books bent open to some important page, new sheets of scribbled notes in his neat black writing, difficult to decipher because he formed so many of the letters with the same steep uphill curves. His reading often had nothing to do with the papers he was supposed to be preparing for, but his supervisors didn’t seem to mind. One week it was American poets: Ashbery and Ed Dorn. (He didn’t like Ginsberg.) The next week it was Arthur Golding’s translations of Ovid, and then Brecht’s Little Organum for the Theatre and then Villon, and then critical books and books of philosophy (new names to her: Saussure and Barthes). He would crawl into bed before dawn and sleep all through the morning; he never went to any lectures.
It was true that this wouldn’t have fit in with Zoe’s rhythms at all. She was up before eight and always had a good breakfast of muesli and whole wheat toast, to set her up for lectures and work in the university library. Simon woke in the afternoon, and drank black coffee, and hardly remembered to eat unless she brought him something. He wouldn’t sit down to a meal but cut himself pieces of cheese or bread and ate them while walking about or looking out of the window. Sometimes one of the others in the house cooked a pan of chili or spaghetti Bolognese, and they would all eat standing up in the kitchen, which nobody ever cleaned, with its sink full of dishes and its burned pans and the patina of oily grime on all its surfaces. Zoe admired the kitchen as evidence of their minds on higher things.
She had known from the first time she saw him that Simon was brilliant. When she came to the college for her interview, she had been put in the charge of a first-year historian with straw-dry fair hair and blotched-pink plump arms and circles of sweat on her shirt who was supposed to take her on a tour and talk about her experiences of university life. Her name was Amanda. (They had studiously avoided recognizing each other ever since Zoe turned up the following October in her own right.) Zoe suspected that Amanda’s experiences of university life thus far had not been altogether sweet and she was understandably reluctant to share them; also, she was having trouble that day with the leather thong that fastened one of her sandals. At Amanda’s very worst moment—when her sandal had slipped right in the middle of crossing a busy road with fast cars and she had had to save herself in a sort of undignified running stumble, hanging on to her heel—a boy had passed them going the other way, pausing to look up and down at the traffic just long enough for Zoe to take him in, not even seeming to see the two girls caught out in their weakness at his feet.
—Who was that? Zoe asked.
Amanda could hardly be expected to recognize every student they saw. However, something in her hot face and angry concentration bent over her sandal gave away how his passing caused a definitive sharpening of her pain. She didn’t even bother to pretend to turn around to see who Zoe meant.
—Simon Macy, she spat out. English scholarship. First year. Very brilliant, apparently. Destined for great things and all that. I’ve never spoken to him, so I’ve got no idea.
Neither of them chose to mention his narrow hips, the long wolfish lean lope, the skinny T-shirt under an Oxfam-shop suit jacket, the straight jeans, and the Chinese canvas sandals. Or the stormy marks on the fine clear face, purple shadows under his eyes and beside his nose, a tension where his jaw was hinged, the shadow of a mustache on his upper lip. Or the thick long brown-black hair pushed carelessly behind his ears, or the cigarette held dangling in his fingers. These were imprinted, though, on Zoe’s imagination, even before she heard that he was also destined for greatness.
When she decided at Langham Road to take the Cambridge entrance examination, she hadn’t had any idea which college to apply to. No one in her family had been to Cambridge, and only one of her teachers. She browsed through the brochure and chose the place that looked nicest in the photograph. Only a few of the colleges were mixed. She wouldn’t contemplate an all-girls’ college; she thought it would be like Amery-James all over again. What luck, she thought, when she saw Simon! What luck to have chosen his college. She only thought that if she got in she would see him from time to time. She never dreamed she would ever speak to him.
* * *
The others who lived in simon’s house were fairly brilliant too, although they weren’t so beautiful. Marty, with untidy shoulder-length curls and dark-rimmed glasses, was a gifted linguist doing Arch and Anth (Modern Languages too boring, just translation and the lower forms of criticism). Joshua, freckled and lisping, was supposed to be doing English, although he smoked too much and never finished any work and Peterhouse had threatened to kick him out: his dad was an Oxford economist and a friend of Michael Foot. Lennard had a strong Manchester accent and a proletarian rage, although his parents were teachers at a grammar school; he was tiny and vivid and spotted and did history, favouring the annales approach of
Braudel and Bloch. Zoe was the only girlfriend. Lennard was intermittently in pursuit of a half-Polish nurse with a wide heart-shaped face, slanting eyes, and shapely breasts; whenever Trina came round they all commented afterward on how good it was to spend time with someone from the “real world” and how refreshing her intuitive sound judgment. She made them almost meek. She told them their kitchen was disgusting and refused to eat anything they cooked in it.
These friends were vociferous in their arguments. They did not argue about personal things, they treated one another’s private lives with elaborate tactful avoidance, almost squeamishness. Simon, for instance, did not know until Zoe told him that Marty had two younger sisters or that Joshua had been desperately ill when he was fifteen with hepatitis. But they reserved for one another’s opinions a bluntness and cavalier contempt that made Zoe quake. Marty was a member of the Cambridge Amnesty International group and sat for hours in a cage outside Kings to raise awareness; Lennard hung around and shouted through the bars at him that human rights were a bourgeois conception and Amnesty a tool of American imperial ideology. Simon argued that the future of literary analysis probably lay in computer-assisted readings of stylistics; Joshua groaned and said that was just more clever boys solving chess problems. Simon thought English was a subject for dilettante belle-lettrists anyway, and history dreary empiricism; he would have done sciences, only his maths wasn’t good enough. Marty argued that Simon’s beloved Brecht had betrayed the proletariat in the 1953 uprising in the GDR and that his layman’s enthusiasm for Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology ignored the problems there were in reconciling his closed systems with the results of fieldwork.
