by Tessa Hadley
—I don’t know if I was thinking about weddings in particular, said Ray, giving the painting a careless wary glance. It’s just the usual kind of existential angst. I thought you might enjoy it.
—It’s fantastic! Absolutely fantastic. I love it. I’m going to love to live with this guy.
—Me too, said Rose.
Joyce felt hollowed out with hospitality. Peter insisted that she lie down. He put his arm round her to escort her to her bedroom and called her “sweet coz” and thanked her for organizing everything so wonderfully, whispering in her ear so that his hot breath tickled her. She couldn’t forgive him, though, for refusing to invite his father. She knew how much Dick had wanted to come. Peter was obstinate; there was something self-preening in how he cultivated and clung to his childhood hurt.
Joyce put her dress on a hanger and lay down on the bed in her silk dressing gown embroidered with poppies. It was early evening; the thin white cheesecloth curtains drawn across the open windows swelled and lifted in the breeze, making squares of reflected light swim on the wall. Dick often came to see Joyce; she had visited him and Ruth in their cottage. Whenever he came he brought presents: his homemade wine (which Joyce had to save for parties because Ray wouldn’t touch it), bundles of old silver teaspoons bought at a sale, newspaper parcels of runner beans or sweet peas from his garden. Joyce couldn’t help basking in his rusty old charm. If he took her out for lunch he pulled out her chair and helped her off with her coat, so that she felt taken care of. No doubt there was a great deal of delusion in it. No doubt the women who had lived most intimately with him had reason to resent the lightness and sweetness he could make when he chose. Joyce knew for herself how the thirst for lightness and sweetness could lead you into twisted snarled-up ways.
She almost slept; at least her thoughts floated some little way above the bed, although she couldn’t let go of the busy responsibility that had stretched her thin all day, the worry over all the ones who needed to be placated and appeased and looked out for. Fran, Ray’s sister, was a widow of six months and, although she was a hearty sensible creature, was bound to be stricken and sorry at a wedding. Martin and Ingrid still weren’t pregnant. Frisch had come with a new girl, and Joyce had had to judge delicately the degree of friendliness to show toward her, considering how very recently she had been friendly to the one displaced. A good friend of Joyce’s from the days of the craft cooperative (her brother had been at school with Peter) told her over lunch that her breast cancer had come back; hard to believe when she looked so radiantly well. And even as Joyce dozed she couldn’t help her high-strung nerves tuning in to any possibility of raised voices, in case it was Ray and Daniel picking another fight over nothing. It had been a mistake, Daniel’s coming back to live with them after his band split up and his flat fell through and Joyce had had to nurse him through a bad night when he’d mixed his drugs. Ray couldn’t bear it that Daniel didn’t know what he wanted to do next.
Joyce opened her eyes and came wide awake and thought with clarity while she followed the line of a crack across the ceiling how much she would have liked to talk about all this with Zoe. Wasn’t that what mothers and daughters were supposed to do? Wouldn’t she have loved more than anything to tell Lil? She had been so busy—today, yesterday, this month, last year—she had probably let slip precious opportunities for making contact with her now-grown-up child. Zoe and Simon had missed out earlier on their tea. If she took up to Zoe’s room a tray with three cups and slices of Ann’s cake (full of brandy), perhaps they would let her in and she could tell them funny stories from the day, confide in them about her difficulties. Simon’s silence might turn out to be only the insecurity of youth.
Joyce had made up the packaway bed for Simon yesterday, although she had known he wasn’t likely to sleep in it. It had seemed a strange thing even so, to prepare a bed for a man in the room full of Zoe’s childish possessions, her teddy and favorite doll still on her white cotton bedspread, her storybooks muddled in with her A-level texts on the shelves in the alcove, her china animals on her treasure shelf. When Zoe first moved into the room years ago, she and Joyce had decorated it in blue and white; Joyce made blue curtains and covered the bedside table in blue, with a white fringe glued around it. On the wall were pictures Zoe had made on holiday in Wales out of shells picked up on a beach and an appliqué snowman Joyce sewed for her when she was a baby, with snowflakes in cross-stitching.
She pictured herself taking up the tea and cake and hearing from behind the closed door a quality of silence—paused and creaking, taut with held breath—which would make it impossible to knock. Or she would knock and say there was tea and Zoe would say muffledly, OK, she’d fetch it in a minute, and Joyce would have to carry the third cup downstairs with her again, so that they wouldn’t even know she’d tactlessly tried.
* * *
Zoe had had sex twice before she went up to cambridge, but those hadn’t been very happy experiences, both at parties, both drunk, one of them outside up against a wall, the boy seeming exasperated with her for her incompetence at managing what had surely been a near-impossible physical contortion, into which pleasure couldn’t imaginably have entered. She had decided that she was not going to be very good at this kind of thing. Therefore she had gone to her first few university social occasions expecting to be a shy observer, unnoticed and wondering and perhaps, if she could rise to it, somewhat ironic.
It was probably because she had thought herself more or less invisible that she had allowed herself to stare at Simon Macy. Josh, who was kind, had invited a first-year friend of Zoe’s to a party at his house, and she had begged Zoe to go with her so that she would have someone to walk back to college with afterward. Zoe hadn’t even realized when she agreed that Simon lived there, although she certainly hadn’t forgotten who he was; from time to time in those first weeks she had caught sight of him, each glimpse like a jolt of longing—unappeasable longing, she was quite clear about that—grounding itself through her. There was something in the particular combination of his nervous fine-boned features with his dark hair, and his absorbed obliviousness with his confidence, that answered exactly to her idea of a desirable male and set him apart in romance from all the other students. The romance thickened when the weather sharpened in November and she saw him in an old Oxfam-shop fur coat, the collar turned up around a lean face pinched and bruise-colored with cold. She knew perfectly—crushingly—well that she wasn’t alone in any of this. Loads of girls liked Simon Macy.
At the party she sat inconspicuously on the edge of a group of people she didn’t know, drinking mouthfuls of warm rioja from a plastic cup. She hadn’t dressed up, even that would have been presumptuous; as if anyone was likely to look at her. She was wearing her comfortable cords and her desert boots and an old navy V-neck sweater she used to wear to school, and her hair was tied back. She had, in honor of the party, fastened it with a blue ribbon. There were a couple of really beautiful girls there—one of them, she learned later, was Trina—with their eyes elaborately painted, wearing old 1930s dresses that showed off their silky curves. They were dancing and performing at the center of things; literally, they seemed to be acting out scenes from some play they had been in together at school. Watching them and swallowing down the rioja, Zoe felt sad, as if this was the youth that books and poetry celebrated and she was shut out from it by something helplessly prosaic in her constitution. At the same time, she couldn’t have wanted to be them; finally, there seemed to her something foolish and exposing in how they presumed upon admiring male attention.
Zoe had known Simon was there as soon as she arrived. He wasn’t in the room constantly, he came in and out (this was his habit at parties, she learned afterward). Once he came back eating an apple, once with his finger in a book, as if he had been distracted from reading in another room. The party, it was clear, was not quite enough for him. His only whole-hearted participation was when he sat cross-legged to roll another joint, tearing papers and strewing tobacco on the bac
k of an LP cover (Velvet Underground).
At some point he was gone again and she didn’t see him come back in, and then with a scalding stir of adjustment she was aware that he was standing right beside where she sat. She was intimately close to his long bony feet with the big toes turned crookedly outward; she could have touched them with her hand. Then he dropped to squat beside her, offering her the joint. She would have accepted it, just so as not to seem like a stodgy little first-year, only she was afraid she’d choke and make a worse fool of herself.
—No, I don’t take it, she said idiotically, shaking her head.
—Oh, don’t you? He laughed. What do you take?
—Nothing, really, apart from this horrible wine.
—I meant, what subject do you take? If you are a student? Are you?
—I’m at your college, she said. I do history.
—That’s just what I would have guessed. You look calm and factual.
—Oh, dear. That’s probably exactly what I am. I was actually—just then—thinking about the medieval Italian banking system.
—The medieval Italian banking system! He seemed pleased with that, settling back to sit with his arms around his knees. You’ll have to tell me all about it sometime. I’m fascinated.
She was dizzy at the idea that he imagined they might have further conversation in the future.
—But you haven’t been thinking about medieval banking systems all evening. You were watching me.
—Oh, no! Zoe flushed guiltily. I’ve been watching everybody. I don’t really know anyone here.
—Don’t be embarrassed. I really thought you were. Every time I glanced up, you were looking at me.
Dumbly she shook her head.
—Not really.
—I thought you’d like it if I came over to talk.
—Well, I do like it. If you don’t mind.
—How did you know, anyway, which college I’m at?
—I’ve seen you around.
—You see? You have been watching!
This time she shook her head, not meeting his eyes, but smiling.
—Everybody knows you.
—No, they don’t. Not as well as you do.
—I don’t know you at all, she said sensibly.
—Well, would you like to?
She simply nodded.
And that was when he touched her for the first time: transferring the nearly smoked end of the joint to his left hand very deliberately, slipping his right hand under her thin wool sweater, and running it lightly around her waist until he found the top of her hipbone, pressing in against the bone under the waistband of her trousers. It was the deliberateness that undid and dissolved her when she replayed this moment of his choosing her afterward, over and over: the idea of his consciously coolly initiating their crossing over from talk into sex, not waiting to fumble into it later in the dark or through drink. His fingers were cool, though not cold; she could feel his long tapering fingertips and longish nails, and she was seized, just from this touch, by an excitement she certainly hadn’t felt those times with the other boys, although she knew something like it from occasions alone and dreaming. Disoriented because her dreaming desires had impossibly erupted into actual life, she sat amid the noise and chaos of the party in stillness and a kind of hallucinatory ease, as if like Alice in Wonderland she had grown larger than the room, looking around with eyes that saw everything and nothing.
She learned afterward that Simon’s touching her was always his preliminary to sex. In between times, he didn’t like any physical contact: he didn’t want her to kiss him or put her arms around him, he never held hands with her when they were walking together. Also, they were never to talk at other times about what they did in bed. Once Zoe had adjusted to all this, she didn’t mind it; she too came to feel that all that pawing and clinging to each other that other couples went in for was cloying and infantile; their sentimentalities and spilled-over confidences were a kind of rubbish that might contaminate what was real, which must be kept clear and utterly private.
When Simon took her to his bed that first time, while the party was still going on downstairs (her friend after all had to walk back to college on her own), she was so afraid that she shook while he undressed her and hoped he didn’t notice it. All longing had died down in her, and she only hoped the thing would be quickly over with and she would acquit herself without disgrace. Judging from her previous experiences, she supposed her role in the business would be primarily to be accommodating and instrumental, so she was taken aback and dismayed when, kneeling beside her in the near dark (he had spread out his duvet on the floor in the light of the gas fire), he turned his attentions to touching her with no sign of the urgency or male peremptory haste that she remembered. She had thought of these touchings as solitary secrets, or perhaps as teenage substitutions for the “real thing”: in the first moments she was so shy she tried to stop him, kept her legs together and twisted away from him onto her side, hugging her knees childishly. Then naturally as he persisted she forgot herself, and uncurled, and opened her legs, and lost herself, and even forgot, sooner or later, that this was him; and then she wasn’t afraid—although she was astonished and wincing at it afterward—of showing herself to him, greedy and inventive and exposed.
The next afternoon, even though she told herself brutally that he probably often did what he’d done to girls at parties and that it did not mean he would want any further connection with her, she cycled over from college, rang the doorbell until Marty let her in, picked her way through a deep disorder of bottles and beer cans and stale overflowing ashtrays—in that house the mess from parties was never really cleared up, it was just allowed to wear away with time—and presented herself with a thudding heart in Simon’s room. He was working. He made her wait while he finished; she sat on his bed in absolute silence for two hours while he typed, scribbled, opened up books and read absorbedly, sighed, wrapped his hand tightly in his hair in the intensity of his concentration, scribbled, typed again. She wondered sometimes afterward whether this had been a test, which she had passed. Even when he wound the last sheet of paper out of the typewriter, she was afraid he might send her away. But he didn’t. In a restless afternoon dusk—cars plowing home on the wet road outside, lights sliding across the ceiling, the door locked, the others rousing out of their beds and shouting round the house and, once, knocking—they began again (only it was always each time different) what they had left off the night before.
It was this devoted attentiveness of his to sex that she thought of as her great good luck. Each time when they came to touching she felt a little beat of fear that he might frown and make his face of fastidious dismissal and deplore the importance that she placed upon it. But he never let her down. Each time it was a blessed dispensation, that with a serious face and rapt attention he applied himself to making love to her with all his intelligence and grace.
Seven
Zoe could imagine having a child but not a baby. The child when she imagined it was a tiny elflike thing, her spirit companion, playful, laughing, looking at her with dark eyes full of knowingness. But she realized there was an intermediate phase before knowingness was possible, and that was a kind of blank to her. She couldn’t think what you would do with a baby all day.
That autumn when she was pregnant she was working three afternoons a week in a shop across the road from the entrance to the maternity hospital. She wasn’t very busy. It was a shop that sold handbags and luggage, and the customers were occasional and took a long time choosing. So she was often looking out of the windows across at the hospital when one of the new mothers came out and got into her husband’s car to be driven home for the first time. The mother would be followed by a nurse, ceremonially carrying the baby wrapped in a bundle of white shawls; the nurse would hand it to the mother when she was safely in the passenger seat. If Zoe tried to convince herself that she would one day soon have a bundle of white shawls of her own, what she pictured wrapped up inside it was somet
hing like a mouse or a kitten, something soft and mewling and tender, but remote.
Simon and Zoe didn’t have a car. She supposed she would take a taxi home with her baby. This would be just another way in which she was unlike the other women she met at the prenatal classes, unlikenesses that made her feel lacking and yet at the same time aloof, privately cherishing the original way she and Simon had of doing things. She supposed she would get in the taxi on her own, with her baby. When she arrived back at the little house they rented in the Kite, she didn’t know whether Simon would be waiting there for them. He might choose to go on one of his long walks that day or to be working on his thesis in the university library. He hadn’t wanted a baby. She had pretended that her pregnancy was an accident (the truth was, it was something between an accident and deliberate; she had left off her cap when she couldn’t quickly find it on one occasion, not knowing whether she hoped she would get away with it or hoped she wouldn’t). Even so, he hadn’t wanted it; he had said they should find a doctor to get rid of it. But she had left it too late for that before she told him.
The arrival of the baby still seemed far off. She swelled up and was in love with the extraordinary shape of herself in the bath, and then with the baby leaping and jumping inside her, but the days ticked by very dawdlingly toward the date they had given her at the hospital. They had fine weather that autumn: skies like old watercolors, powder blue with tall ragged white clouds; the massive city trees bronzing and crisping at the edges; the spires and turrets of the colleges sharp gray pencil lines against the air. She cycled between her jobs (as well as at the handbag shop, she worked one day a week on a greengrocer’s stall in the market and two evenings and Sunday mornings as a barmaid at the Portland Arms), standing up on her left pedal when she took off from the curb, glancing behind her and scooting off with her right foot like a real Cambridge lady-habituée, proud that she was strong and capable and that her pregnancy made no difference to her. (She cycled into the hospital the very day before she had the baby.) She pitied and was privately skeptical of the ones who moaned about backache and tiredness.
