by Tessa Hadley
—Whatever Lennard says, Zoe said softly to Simon, while the others made their way out of the chapel and down the deep fall of worn steps, hands in pockets, actively resisting awe, whatever he says, I love it here.
He smiled and put her hair out of her face, which she knew was earnest and heated. Nervous that he might disapprove, she told him about her obsessive passion for the past when she was a child, and the longings she had had for there to be a way into it out of the present, which had seemed so ugly.
—Oh, me too, said Simon, to her surprise. There was a door at school that was always kept locked—it was probably just a laundry room or something—and I built this whole fantasy world, that if I could only press through the door I’d find myself in another time and space. I was convinced it was only a failure of my imagination that prevented me. Of course, if I got through I was always conveniently going to emerge as a member of the landed aristocracy.
—Oh, yes, me too!
—Late sixteenth century, I favored. Hawking and riding to hounds and probably getting caught up in Essex’s doomed rebellion against the old queen.
—I liked the nineteenth century.
—God, no. Who wants to come after the stinking Industrial Revolution? And all that lachrymose prudery?
—Well, I see that now.
Later, in the same spell of good weather, Simon took her punting; she brought a couple of her girlfriends who did history. He had spent the previous summer working for Scudamore’s, hiring punts out to visitors, so he was fast and flawlessly competent, as steady on his bare feet on the back of the punt as if he were on land. He stood braced with his jeans rolled up, dropping the pole through his hands until it hit the bottom, bending his knees to push against it when they were in deeper water, using it like a rudder to steer. Deftly he skimmed the dithering punts full of beginners, not even acknowledging in his expression their separate existence. The girls lay back and watched; the low-slung punt enforced the postures of idling privilege even in these studious girls, dressed in sober jeans and draggled Indian print cheesecloth skirts. They would have liked to be teasing and ironic with Simon—this was their comfortable mode—but his silence and good looks made them shy, and they slipped along the lapping green-smelling river with its flotsam of twigs and duck feathers and fag packets mostly without talking. Possibly it was not for all of them the occasion of unalloyed pleasure it must have looked to anyone watching. Yet even while Zoe was full of worried consideration for her friends (who clambered onto dry land at Grantchester as if they were made clumsier by Simon’s hand held out to help), she couldn’t help the sight of him dancing joyously on her eyelids, closed against the bright sunshine.
And one night he played her an old 78 of Kathleen Ferrier singing the “Abschied” from Das Lied von der Erde, in a recording made by a private collector at Carnegie Hall, so crackling and distorted that it was difficult to listen to.
—There was a period when I was quite seriously deluded, he said. I found this in a junk shop in the sixth form. I was convinced that I could hear Ricky speaking to me in the crackling. Pretty weird. But don’t you think, if the dead could come back and speak to us, it might sound like this?
—O Schönbeit, the voice sang, through a storm of interference, O ewigen Liebens, Lebens trunken Welt!
—What does it mean? Zoe asked. She didn’t know much about classical music; this slightly sickened her, its suspenseful nervous expectancy and its fullness of longing.
—It’s about how the dead are in love with the world they have to leave behind.
She knew Simon was thinking about death all the time, in a way she could not imagine for herself. This was understandable—sacrosanct and forbidden territory—because of his brother. She knew that she, with her shallower life, had no authority to try to speak to him of these dark things. She only hoped that when they were making love she could pass over some healing into him out of her own deep reservoir of hopefulness and belief.
* * *
There was a wedding in zoe’s family that summer. zoe’s uncle Peter (who wasn’t strictly her uncle but her mother’s cousin) came back from America to live and work in England. He was leaving behind the American wife he had been married to for seventeen years and bringing home a new bride (English, though she had been working with him in New York), closer in age to his oldest daughter than to himself. Everyone was scandalized over the youth of the new bride; on the other hand, they couldn’t help being delighted at the thought of having Peter back among them, with his New York cleverness and sophistication. The first wife, although she was very dynamic, had fought bitterly with Peter. She had wanted to pursue her own career with a theatrical agency on Broadway and had demanded he do his share of running their household. Joyce and Ann sighed over Peter’s “chauvinism.” But they couldn’t help approving of someone who would look after him more appreciatively.
Joyce asked Zoe whether she would like to bring her “boyfriend.” Zoe winced at that awful word and thought for a moment they wouldn’t go. She had new standards of seriousness and a new sensitivity to what was right and wrong. Her parents hadn’t met Simon yet; her mother’s curiosity over the telephone (“We’re dying to get to know him, darling”) sounded almost predatory.
—He’s not my “boyfriend,” she said. It’s not like that.
—What do you mean? asked Joyce. Don’t you sleep together?
Zoe put the phone down in disgust.
They did go to the wedding anyway. Simon said he didn’t care, and secretly Zoe longed for everyone in her family to see him. Peter called them the celestial twins because they came dressed alike in white collarless shirts over jeans, and they were both tall and lean with long hair tucked behind their ears (only Simon didn’t have a fringe). The joke went around the wedding and Zoe heard other people use it, asking “Where are the twins?” and “What are the twins doing?” She felt a thrill at the idea of a connection visible to everyone, setting them apart. When Simon, as if it was not even an issue, said he was not going to sit down for the reception dinner but would wait outside, Zoe followed him into the garden without a qualm, wearing the same steady and remote smile as his (even though she’d seen where Joyce had written their names on little ornamented cards set out on a table with Daniel and their American cousins). They sat cross-legged in the sunshine beside an ornamental pond full of water lilies, smoking and watching iridescent dragonflies hovering above the lily pads. The reception was in a big eighteenth-century house in the Hilltop area of the city, which could be hired out for functions. Inside the orangery, the playing of a string quartet was half smothered by the noisy boisterousness of the wedding guests. Simon described to her a Berliner Ensemble production of Mother Courage.
Joyce came looking for them, carrying two full glasses.
—Time for champagne and toasts! Come on, you two! Don’t go and be so superior that you miss all the fun.
She was wearing a dress she’d made, green Liberty cotton printed with tiny bunches of cherries; her hair was cut in a new layered way that exposed too recklessly, Zoe thought, how the light red was fading underneath into colorlessness and gray. She was always vigilant for glimpses of haggardness and wear under her mother’s petite prettiness. She dreaded that Joyce would try to engage Simon in conversation, imagining she was drawing him out about Cambridge or poetry or “left-wing politics,” as she called them.
—I suppose Simon will find us all awfully loud and boisterous, Joyce said, if he isn’t used to our sort of family occasion. We do tend to let our hair down. His family’s probably much more respectable.
Simon smiled his fending-off smile.
—We’re so respectable I don’t think we even do family occasions. So I won’t be able to tell whether you’re more loud and boisterous than the average.
—We’re very rude. But I don’t care. God knows what the bride’s relatives are making of it all. They seem a bit squaresville, and they’re probably shocked.
—Mum, all right, we’ll come insi
de.
They stood at the back of the orangery and Simon drank down his champagne before the toasts were made and squinted through his smoke at the guests on the top table who stood up to make speeches, smiling privately to himself but not laughing at the jokes. These jokes were mostly about sex and produced loud shouting laughter and heckling from Peter’s side of the family; the bride’s relatives and the more elderly guests were more subdued. Zoe decided not to even smile.
Peter had put on weight in the last few years. His head, which had been clumsily heavy when he was younger, seemed in proportion now; his thick shoulder-length black hair was speckled with gray and he wore big tinted glasses and a patterned tie. The bride in her youthfulness was insubstantial beside him: pretty enough, blond with blue eyes and an anxious pink rash on her throat and arms. In an accent tinged with Americanisms, Peter made a witty and emotional speech, saying how happy he was at coming home at last to live close to his “beloved mother” (there was a flashed exchange of glances between Joyce and Ann). Zoe had always liked Peter’s extravagant openness, his clowning confessions (she and her family had spent two happy summers at his place in Vermont). Now she prickled uneasily as if he exposed too much. When the speeches were over and everyone was mingling, he embarrassed her by reminiscing nostalgically to Simon about his days at Peterhouse.
The American children of Peter’s first marriage sat gloomily apart: one leggy sixteen-year-old girl and two younger plump pasty sons in bow ties (“They look,” said Joyce disapprovingly, “as if they haven’t been brought up on home-cooked food”). Vera tried to fuss over them, magisterial in a white blouse with a tie neck and a dark skirt whose waistband rode up on her round high stomach, but they looked at her as if she were an eccentric stranger. Although she had talked endlessly about her grandchildren across the Atlantic—how clever they were, what opportunities they had, what a lovely home—in truth she hardly knew them. She gave herself up instead to basking in the attentions of her son. She forgave any number of missed birthdays, scrawled postcards from exotic holidays, and expensive gifts sent as substitutes for visits, when he walked with her around his guests, his arm around her shoulder, almost as if she were his bride. (Meanwhile the actual bride took her uncomfortable turn with her recalcitrant stepchildren.) There had been some talk of inviting Dick to the wedding. His second wife had died of breast cancer and now he was married again to a nurse he had met at the hospital; they were both retired and lived in the country. Peter and his mother were adamant, though, that he was not to be forgiven, even though Joyce and Ann pointed out that the thing he was not to be forgiven for was more or less what Peter was doing to his first wife now.
Ann said she wanted to talk to Simon about John Donne.
—I knew his poems by heart once. I used to recite them in the street.
—Really?
—Sweetest love, I do not go, for weariness of thee.… The lying toad. He is, of course, almost certainly weary of her. But then you’re young so you don’t know about that.
Her cream crèpe-de-chine dress was made up to look like something Edwardian, with leg-of-mutton sleeves and rows of tiny buttons up to the elbow and up the side of the high neck. Although she had a round belly and a waddle when she walked, her dainty hands and feet and small sharp face were still pretty as a quick-eyed little creature, a marmoset. Her dark hair was permed into a mass of curls.
—Haven’t you two got anything stronger than tobacco? My kids are driving me berserk. Sophie wanted to be a bridesmaid, can you believe, and is still sulking. I was hoping we could escape to the grotto for a secret smoke. Did you know there was a grotto? It’s supposed to be divine. Now I’m forty, the only chance I get to carry on with beautiful young men is likely to be by stealing them from my niece.
Simon smiled warily.
—A grotto sounds interesting, he said.
Zoe, going in search of more drink, bumped into Ray, looking huntedly around him.
—Is your mother anywhere in sight? D’you think I can get away with a quick cigar? Just one of these little ones?
—She’s with the caterers. You’re probably OK. Why don’t you come and talk to me and Simon?
—Oh, he’s much too stringently intellectual for me.
—Dad, I wish the two of you would get on. He hates this kind of phony occasion just like you do.
—Who says I hate it? I’m having a wonderful time. Our transatlantic cousin is one of my favorite people. Not only that but I’m hoping he’s going to be one of my customers, now he’s moving home. He buys contemporary art, you know. Of course this is hardly the New York market, but at least we’re cheaper. He’ll buy Frisch; he’ll certainly buy Frisch, he’ll love it. Anyway, what’s your friend got to complain about? Free booze, free grub, good music? Why the hell isn’t he enjoying himself?
—Don’t call him that: “my friend.” His name’s Simon.
—It would be. How sure I was that he couldn’t be a Wayne or a Terry. You’ve let me down, Zo. I was counting on you to bring home someone vulgar and unsuitable, just to see the look on your mother’s face. We’ll have to see what Daniel can do. I’m quite hopeful, actually, in that respect. I think the purple hair is a promising sign.
By the time Zoe found a half-full bottle she had lost Simon, and then she spotted him making his way down between two tall hedges in search of the grotto. She had been drinking champagne on an empty stomach and felt dizzy and desperate.
—Do you hate them all? she asked, when she caught up with him.
—Don’t be silly, he said. Don’t exaggerate.
—I know what you think. They all put on such an act. They make such a display of enjoying themselves. It’s all so false and so materialistic.
—You don’t, actually, have any idea what I think.
—My dad’s different. He’s serious about what he does. You do like his paintings? (She had shown him that morning around the ones hung on the walls at home; he hadn’t commented.)
He shrugged.
—No, not much.
This was a hard blow; she had counted on his admiring them, taking them to stand for what was deep and true as everybody else always had. She struggled to smile and keep her composure, but her face was stinging and her eyes were watering as if he’d actually struck her. She was caught out in her own unexamined enthusiasm, exposed and curling up.
—Oh, don’t you? she said, trying to sound blithe and mildly surprised. I’m very fond of them. Perhaps you need to get to know them better.
—I doubt it. I can see exactly what they are. I just think figurative painting’s bankrupt. A dead language. There’s nothing left for it to say. The visual arts—whatever mess they’re in—have left behind that kind of simplistic confidence in representing the real.
For one electrifying split second, Zoe could imagine how it might be to hate Simon. It was like a white fizz, a surge of light from the back of her mind in which everything looked different: his absorbed frown, deciding at a fork in the path which way to take; his slouching step in his sloppy espadrilles; his rudeness to her family; his immovable calm certainty that she was wrong. She pierced through, just for that second, into a deep dark reservoir of protest, agitated and incoherent. Then she pulled herself back from the brink of it, remembering how she needed him for her happiness. She trotted penitently after him down the path, reminding herself of how much she wanted to be part of the purity and consistency in his way of looking at things. The changes that hurt her most were the ones that made her strong. If need be she would unlearn her taste for her father’s paintings too; she knew she could do that, do it easily.
But the moment’s shock left a little tender place, a chill of hurt.
* * *
Peter and rose were staying, and all the close family came back to the house for tea or more drinks except Vera, who had been dropped off at her flat to rest, and the stepchildren, who had escaped, to everyone’s relief, to “check the place out for a bit.” Zoe and Simon disappeared upstairs to her roo
m, which was also a relief. Joyce felt tense under the reproach of Simon’s coolly scrutinizing look; as if there weren’t enough things for her to be worrying over! (She hadn’t even had time yet to think, How dare he disapprove? What does he know about us?)
—He’s very gorgeous, Zoe’s chap, Ann said. Very sexy. And terrifyingly intelligent. But not much sense of humor.
While Joyce organized tea, Peter brought the wedding presents in from the car and heaped them on the big pine kitchen table.
—Open, open, open up, chanted Ann. We want to see what you got.
—Isn’t this supposed to be a decorous occasion, when Rose makes a list of who we need to thank for what?
—Spoilsport!
—OK then, I capitulate! Get ripping!
Rose did in fact make a list.
—Jesus God, what are we supposed to do with these? They look like instruments to procure an abortion.
—Oh, look, multicolored tumblers in little wicker baskets! Aren’t they just frightful?
—Frightful as fuck. Who were they from?
—Pasta maker, pasta maker. You’ve got two pasta makers.
—His and hers! So we can each make our own spaghetti.
—I’ll bet on a minimum thirty-six crystal goblets. People always give crystal goblets. There were definitely some crystal goblet givers there today.
—But we hate crystal goblets.
—Well, you’re going to have to find some way to learn to live with them. Lots and lots of them.
—I told you you should have had a wedding list.
—Oh, but Joycey, wedding lists are so infra dig.
—Open ours, open ours, clamored Ann. If you don’t appreciate it I’m going to have it back.
Ray and Joyce gave them a painting. Peter and Rose got genuinely very excited about this. It was a smallish dark painting of a man slumped in a chair with his back turned, leaning his head on his hand, his elbow propped on his knee.
—I did suggest, said Joyce, that it wasn’t exactly a weddingy subject.
—But it’s just how Ray feels about weddings, isn’t it! Say the word “wedding” to Ray, and that’s precisely the posture of his inner man.
