by Tessa Hadley
—Brecht’s not my beloved anything, said Simon. Although you’re being pigheadedly naive about the options available to him in 1953. But I don’t have beloved writers. Love doesn’t come into it. If you want the smearing of disgusting empathy across the text, it’s Josh who goes in for that kind of thing.
—Fuck you, said Josh. Fuck fuck fuck you, you cunt.
—You see? said Simon. For him it’s all feeling.
They didn’t argue with Zoe.
She was very tentative, anyway, in putting her opinions to them; these were all second-years, living out in their own place free from the childishness of life in college. She had no idea how you attained their kind of bold certainty, which was almost a physical attribute like deep voices or broad shoulders; she felt her own inward contemplation much less steady and more flickering than theirs. And so when she proffered something into the conversation, it tended to produce a blank effect, like a missed beat in a complex pattern of exchange and response; or Marty would kindly pick up something close to what she’d dropped as if he was covering for her. Simon in particular never responded directly to anything she said, unless they were alone.
They were talking, for example, about the kidnappings (there had been a spate of them: Schleyer in the autumn, Empain and Moro in the new year). The newspapers printed the photograph the Red Brigade had sent to Moro’s family; he was holding a copy of La Repubblica with the headline MORO ASSASSINATO? Lennard called it the symbolic enactment of profound class antagonisms; Marty feared the romance with terrorism was a dangerous distraction for left politics.
—They’re not fools, said Simon. Look at how cleverly the photograph exploits a classical aesthetic: the powerful man brought low; the end already known and named; the moral painted on the wall behind. It’s pure spectacle.
—I wonder what he thinks, said Zoe. I wonder what he was thinking while the picture was taken.
Simon got up abruptly and left the kitchen. He would do this in the middle of a conversation; afterward she would find him reading in another room.
Lennard hunted with fierce rustlings through the rest of the newspaper.
—Who knows the footie scores?
—Do you think he only hates them? Zoe persisted. Or do you think it’s possible he begins to see himself through their eyes?
—Did City win?
—It’s a sweet idea, Zoe, said Marty.
—But who cares? said Lennard. It isn’t personal. He isn’t a person, he’s the representative of a system.
When Moro’s body was found a few weeks later in the boot of a car, Zoe felt as if it was a response to her sentimentality: a brutal shutting up of hopefulness and personal interest.
She studied the things that Trina said, which everybody liked. This was because Trina was natural; she wasn’t trying to impress anyone, she didn’t think before she spoke. Zoe could perhaps have tried playing the role of this natural female, washing up their dishes and chiding them for their laziness and dirtiness, chattering about shopping and clothes. But then this wouldn’t in fact have been natural in her, only another complicating layer of falsity, in which Simon would surely have found her out.
* * *
Zoe was able to see the romance of the old university. she experienced an appropriate thud of aesthetic response whenever she walked up over the Backs, past the gardens and over the bridge and into the seventeenth-century college court. And yet she never felt it was really hers. She was only admiring those things as a passer-through. Also, she found herself fairly indifferent to the weight of tradition that squeezed some of the other students so painfully. She only once wore her gown and had formal dinner in Hall, with Latin grace. After that she used the cafeteria in the basement. The oldness of the university and its complex hierarchies and all the inhibiting burden of competition and thirst for acceptance that it imposed didn’t loom dreadfully and overwhelmingly for her; they didn’t interest her much. People anxiously questioned about where you had been to school. She told them proudly that she had come from a comprehensive (Amery-James was her secret.) In the political climate of the late 1970s they were obliged to respect you for that, whatever they privately thought.
She was probably able to step around the workings of the place so casually because she was a girl. The traditions of belonging weren’t designed around girls; it was easy not to be hooked in. Her mother had hinted that at Cambridge at last she would meet boys who’d appreciate her (no doubt doing some private calculations about the tiny numbers of women in relation to men). But in reality the effect of that outnumbering when she first got there, before she had Simon, was that it had made Zoe feel invisible, canceled out. Of course there were a few beauties among the girls, who attracted attention and were feted and pursued. But she was never going to be one of those. She had dressed so as to make sure no one even thought she was trying to be one of those, in trousers and sweaters and a duffel coat.
She had worked hard from the beginning, but that hadn’t been entirely satisfactory either. What she had expected when she came was passionate argument; instead, for the first few months she had the sensation of swallowing down mouthfuls of ideas she wasn’t able to share with anyone. You were supposed to pour out all your arguments in writing in your essay, and then your supervisor would make a few responses in the margin or explain some controversy of interpretation of the facts or recommend further reading. This wasn’t the exchange she had longed for. And she had got herself into a group of nice-enough friends who would only talk about their subject chaffingly, jokingly. They loved history, they often knew more than she did, they could confound her with their information, but the way they spoke about it kept it fenced in like an absorbing hobby. They teased Zoe for taking things too seriously.
Simon embodied the intellectual passion she had dreamed of. He made no separation between his life and his work. He reacted to books with a fierce partisanship, as if writing were a matter as serious as life and death. She knew he changed himself, in response to what he read. Perhaps Zoe still didn’t get the arguments she had expected. But she didn’t mind swallowing down her own ideas, as long as she could be sure she was submitting to the real, the superior, thing.
* * *
Simon told zoe things he never told anyone else. under the hot dark tent of the duvet—their bodies tangled together in his single bed so that she couldn’t see his face, his voice muffled in the pillow, vibrating in his chest where she pressed her head against him—he let slip fragments of information about himself. The broken pieces were often confusing and incomplete, as if he was giving them to her deliberately in a code she didn’t yet know how to read; she put all her effort into patiently learning to interpret the least stirrings of his thought, his most opaque remarks. She hardly knew where this confidence of his came from, that she could be trusted to guard what she knew about him with instincts of concealment and protectiveness as fierce as his own. But he was right to trust her; she didn’t tell anyone, not for years and years.
She told him plenty about her life, too, and readily, when he seemed to want to know; he would listen with affectionate interest. When they were alone he called her his “pony” because of her long mane of straight light-brown hair, and her fringe always falling over her eyes. He was surprised when she said she didn’t think she was pretty. (“You’re nice,” he said. “Clear eyes, these straight eyebrows like brushstrokes, this wide sensual mouth she keeps so carefully closed. A shy pony, nervous with strangers but will take food at my hand. Why would I have wanted her, if I hadn’t thought she was nice?”) She told him she had been an obstinate little girl and an awkward teenager, and he found for her a Goethe poem—one of the Roman Elegies—that said the vine blossoms were unpromising but the ripe grapes “yielded nectar for gods and men.” She felt blessed; she learned the poem by heart (in German, which she scarcely understood). But their confidences were not given in an arrangement of mutual exchange. Hers were daylight stories (at worst, maybe her mother was having an affair); she felt asham
ed now that she had ever thought she suffered.
Simon had had an older brother who had killed himself at Oxford when Simon was thirteen. He hadn’t left any note; it was even just possible that he had overdosed accidentally (the inquest had been inconclusive). Before he died he had broken up with his girlfriend (but she wasn’t important, Simon said); also, he had only got a 2.1 in his PPE finals, when he had been predicted for a First. Simon’s brother had told him what to read and what to laugh at and how to play cricket. He had written letters to Simon at boarding school every week, with funny drawings of himself falling asleep over his books, or dancing at a party, or waving placards in some political demonstration.
—I was bewildered. His death bewildered me. At that age.
—Of course, she whispered.
—Bewilder: “to lose in pathless places.”
—Yes.
—A couple of years after that, I wanted to fuck his girlfriend. I mean, before I even knew how. Ex-girlfriend. The one who, maybe. That grew to a fixation for a bit. I thought I knew how to find her. I had this idea, about if I did.
—Was she important after all, then?
—And since then I don’t sleep. Not nightmares, just awakeness. This power to hold up everything in my mind; it’s like a bright light switched on. Sometimes I think I can see everything. It’s like radar; when I look at a page I can see right through it, how it’s put together and why.
—Yes.
—I burnt Ricky’s letters. Couldn’t bear the thought of my mother getting her hands on them. Anyway, I got too old. Had to leave them behind.
—Why not your mother?
—Oh. You don’t know what they’re like. What they turned it all into.
He told her about the family house in St. Johns Wood, worth a quarter of a million; they also had a flat in Lewes and a house in Scotland. His father had been something big in ICI. There was a visitors’ book in the guest room (“they don’t have real friends, they wouldn’t know how”), and over the grand piano in the sitting room hung a portrait of his brother painted in his Winchester scholar’s gown.
—The piano isn’t there because they like music. Why did I have viola lessons every week for twelve years? It’s just “done.” How would you know you had children if you weren’t shelling out for the right school and all the appropriate cultural trimmings?
He told her how he’d fought with his father—physically, punching and kicking—when he was home from school one weekend age seventeen, and how his mother had called the police and had him arrested and he had spent the night in a police cell.
—It was because I was going around the streets at that time in bare feet. He tried to make me put shoes on. That’s why I kicked him first; he was trying to force these horrible brogues of his—you know, from some fucking Bond Street shoe shop—onto my feet. Without any socks or anything. But it was her fault. She started it. With some remark about her floors. I mean, as if my feet were any dirtier than shoes. But of course they were too naked. The real, forbidden kind of naked. Not the bikini, décolletage, socially sanctioned kind.
After Christmas his parents sent him a letter and a check (he was on the minimum grant, because of their income). Cross-legged on the stained and greasy carpet in the glow of the gas fire, his hair falling forward across his frown, Simon rolled himself a joint in fingers that actually shook: “to smoke them out of my mind.”
—It’s a kind enough letter, Zoe said lamely.
—That’s because you have no idea. Why couldn’t my father have given me the check when I was home? Then we could have looked each other in the eye for once. They’re angry with me because I won’t feel guilty taking their fucking money.
—There’s no sign that they’re angry with you. They seem very interested in what you’re doing.
—Anesthetized politeness alternating with bouts of inchoate violence. The bourgeois ethos precisely. The smothered horrors in its family life analogous precisely with its effects in the political world. How charming do you think Pinochet is at dinner parties? While at the very same moment—in the same synchronized moment in real time, say, that the Nuits-Saint Georges is being brought round by soundless-footed waiters—his special forces are dropping political prisoners out of helicopters over the sea. Under the same white moon.
—But your father isn’t Pinochet.
He looked on her darkly.
—You want to know what involvements ICI have in most of the places that figure pretty largely in Marty’s Amnesty handbook? How much time do you have?
—No, no, I do sort of know. But it’s not quite the same. I mean, there is a difference of scale. Your father hasn’t ordered anyone to be killed.
—That’s exactly the mistake that sentimental revisionism makes: imagining you can draw the line somewhere, not understanding the totalizing bourgeois worldview, how it contaminates everything it comes in contact with. It hollows out the truth and replaces it with shams that only look on the surface like real things. If you want to save yourself, you have to repudiate the whole lot, get it out from under your skin. It’s respectable housewives shopping for Yves Saint-Laurent in Selfridges who cause blood to be shed in Angola and Eritrea.
—So what should we do? asked Zoe, chastened. To live differently.
—Not torchlit Broad Left marches or picketing at Grunwick or sending telegrams of solidarity to the Chilean people, that’s for certain. Or the Nursery Action Group.
—What, then? she said, after a pause.
He shook back his hair impatiently.
—You have to change your mind. Actually change your mind.
Zoe bent over his mother’s letter again. There was news of relatives Zoe hadn’t heard of, of a dog who wasn’t well. Simon wasn’t to work too hard or forget to enjoy himself. This was written hastily, and then underlined, with “Please” and a question mark.
—It sounds as if she’s worried about you.
—And you can just imagine it. Is he taking drugs? Has he kept up the insurance on his viola? I hope if he’s sleeping with this girl he’s taking all the proper precautions. Is the mess produced by his grotty friends compromising the market value of the house we’ve invested in on his behalf?
—Perhaps she just wants you to be happy.
—Oh, well, he said, happy. Well then. Jesus Christ.
He stood abruptly and rummaged on top of his wardrobe among empty hi-fi boxes and cricket kit, squinting his eyes in the smoke from the roll-up drooping at the corner of his mouth. From underneath the mess he pulled out a brown viola case.
—Fuck the viola. Fuck that.
He put it on the floor between them. The instrument inside, when he pulled away a silk paisley scarf, was dark toffee-colored, gleaming, richly complex. Zoe for a moment thought with joy that he was going to play it. Jumbled in the case were rosin and tuning pipes and a homemade stuffed cloth chin rest with an elastic loop.
—Here’s what you have to do, he said. Here’s how to put an end to it.
And he raised his foot in its clumsy winter boot and brought it down on the viola, with a crunch and a tortured stifled jangling of the strings.
—Oh, no! cried Zoe. No! No!
* * *
In the spring she caught a virus and was ill with a high temperature for a few days. Simon made a surprisingly tender nurse. He called her a “sick little pony” and put her in his bed and brought her aspirins and made her drink glasses of lemon barley water; he wiped her face with a flannel wrung out in cold water and brushed her hair out of her way; he rang to cancel the supervision she was supposed to be having on her essay on the taxation policies of Edward III. Then he sat at his desk and worked, and through the vertiginous swoopings and retreats of her delirium she was aware of something deeply consoling in the steadily turned pages and the patterings of his Biro. He read her a poem by Beckett, and in her dreams, obedient to its instructions, she wandered back and forward in a shadowy bare corridor between doors that slid shut at her approach; after a while, thoug
h, she added some kind of brightly colored darting bird that had never been in the original, and then the corridor was lined in red velvet and ran twisting underground and became her sore throat, and the poem drifted away altogether.
She almost didn’t want to get better. There was something delicious in this enforced passivity, handing responsibility over to him, with no need to think or act for herself; although she also knew that she ought to be ashamed of such weakness and that he would think less of her if he ever found her faking. And then she was deeply touched by his gentleness. This must mean—mustn’t it?—that he cared for her. She was not allowed to ask if he loved her; she’d learned that very early on.
—It’s not a word I use, he’d said. It’s a kind of sentimental bondage, like the bourgeois exchange of rings. Once I’ve said it to you, you’ll expect me to repeat it, and then sooner or later it will turn into a lie just by wearing out. The love words are dead words; they kill. You should hear it when my parents are arguing. “Don’t be ridiculous, dear.” “How dare you say that, darling?”
When she was recovered from her virus they all went off for the day to Ely, in a car Marty borrowed from a friend who kept it illicitly (undergraduates weren’t supposed to have them). It was an effervescent spring day. The wide sky over the flatland looked washed clean as a pale sea, with a few lemon-glazed strips of cloud on the horizon and bright watery sunshine; birds put back their wings and made heart-shaped dives into the low-growing scrub. It was Zoe’s first visit; they went to the cathedral and then to the Old Fire Engine House for tea. In the Lady Chapel she was overcome by the lofty cool stone vaulting and wavering greenish light like a pool of air.
—Not that it would have been like this, said Lennard sternly. It would have all been painted in bright colors. Our sense of what’s beautiful in it belongs to a purely contemporary aesthetic.
