Everything Will Be All Right

by Tessa Hadley

  The washing machine made life remarkably much easier. In fact, before she bought it, Zoe simply hadn’t been coping with the amount of housework to do. Simon would take a bag of their clothes down to the launderette every week or so, as he always had, but she never gave him anything of the baby’s, so that in the evenings (Pearl’s best time for sleeping) Zoe found herself at the kitchen sink looking out of the window into the dark yard—or at her own blurry reflection, hunched and desperate—rubbing through the little sleepsuits and Babygros and plastic pants and cardigans and muslin wiping cloths (also her own bloodied knickers for the first couple of weeks), while the nappies boiled in a pan on the gas stove, filling the house with a foul steam. Somehow nothing ever came quite clean with handwashing (she supposed it was her inexperience; she was beginning to take in the infinite amount of ordinary things she didn’t properly know how to do); the babysuits were permanently yellowed with spit-up at the neckline or stained on the legs from leaking nappies. She remembered from somewhere to soak her own knickers in salt for the stains before washing them, and that helped; but on the clothes horse in front of the gas fire everything looked dingy and dispiriting, particularly when the rest of the house was such a mess because she hadn’t had time to tidy. Sometimes in the evening the baby bath from the morning, its water cold and scummed with soap and bits of cotton wool, was still sitting on the table waiting for her to empty it.

  So she was fervently thankful for the automatic washing machine.

  When she had first gone to prenatal classes, they had all been given a little booklet printed on poor-quality paper with information about pregnancy and childbirth and baby care. It was illustrated with old-fashioned line drawings of mother and father and baby in which mother wore a frilly tight-waisted apron and father a tie, and both wore screwball-comedy expressions of mock joy and mock despair as they juggled with their cute cartoon infant. Zoe had despised this booklet at the beginning and almost thrown it away. She had looked at its descriptions of a day with baby and wondered whatever you were supposed to do in the long gaps between the four-hourly feed and change routines. On the list of things to take into hospital with you for the birth had been included eau-de-Cologne, and dutifully, although with no idea what she might need it for, Zoe had acquired a huge cheap bottle of this from Boots. (Years later she still had it, almost full, and the smell of it would bring back overwhelming memories of the maternity ward, the vast baths with thundering hot water where she had soaked her soreness and afterward splashed her neck and arms with the cologne she hadn’t found any other use for, the smell of it mingling with the new strange smell her sweat had in those days after the birth.)

  Now, although the booklet was stuffed in the drawer where she kept Pearl’s clothes and where Simon wouldn’t look, Zoe made constant and humbled reference to it, to try and find out what she should do to manage better this new life she found herself inside. Pearl wasn’t what they called a “good” baby. This was the first question all the new mothers asked when they met at the baby clinic, looking into one another’s prams: “Is yours good?” (Zoe never saw either the hairdresser or the wife of the man in haulage again.) She knew everything was wrong with this; she was repelled by the smug relish of the mothers of the “good” ones, and she could imagine just what Simon would understand about their use of that word “good,” its repressive moralization of any behavior that didn’t fit into a convenient pattern. And yet it was a relief to confess to someone else whose baby, like hers, didn’t sleep in the day and woke up every two hours at night, who was moving like her in a fog of fatigue, falling asleep on her feet doing the washing-up, falling asleep whenever she picked up a book to read. She longed sometimes when things weren’t going well to telephone Joyce and pour out her troubles. Instead, whenever they did speak, she was careful to present herself as coping competently. (“You were such an easy baby,” Joyce had told her. “I never knew what any of the fuss was about.”) They sometimes spoke of the possibility of a visit, but they never fixed a date.

  —Whenever you’re ready for us, Joyce said.

  —Whenever you can make time, said Zoe.

  The thought of other wakeful mothers was consoling when Zoe was walking up and down in Pearl’s room trying to get her to sleep after a night feed (on bad nights she stayed in there on the studio couch because it was pointless to disturb Simon, getting in and out of bed every time Pearl cried). She would be holding her upright against her shoulder the way she liked best, jogging her slightly and rhythmically until her right arm ached, letting her suck on the first knuckle of her left hand. After a while she would feel the alert little body dropping into softness against her, yielding up its conscious awareness, the wet mouth falling away from where it sucked. Without stopping the jogging, Zoe would lower her with slow smooth movements onto the cot, face down, rocking her against the sheet with both hands, gradually lessening and slowing the rocking and taking away the hands, one at a time, hovering ready to pounce back and rock her into sleep again if she roused. Then—silence!—Zoe would creep off to her couch and lie down. The temptation was to lie strained, awake, listening to Pearl breathe, but Zoe knew she could not afford to waste these blessed spaces of peace; she trained herself to fall almost instantly into sleep by running over and over the dates and details of the Education Acts or the clauses of the Treaty of Vienna, not testing herself, only moving her mind round and round inside the loop of known things until it fell through and was swallowed up. On bad nights it might be only five or ten or twenty minutes later that she was shocked awake again by Pearl’s hard little cry, vindictive-seeming, full of outrage.

  In the old days before Pearl, Zoe had hardly been aware of housework. She and Simon had developed a pattern of minimal engagement with the material substratum of their lives. The vacuum cleaner stood in a corner of the living room and occasionally one of them would plug it in and run it over the floor. In the mornings, whoever was last to leave rinsed through the few dishes in the sink. They cleaned out the ashes of the front-room coal fire when they made a new one. They bought little bits of shopping on their way home from work or the library; they never made a list. They lived on bread and cheese and olives and fruit and biscuits, and sometimes one of them, if in the mood, would cook soup or risotto. Mainly they lived on black coffee, which Simon always bought at one particular delicatessen; he oversaw the details of its making with fastidious care. They were both very thin (the nurses at prenatal had been worried about Zoe); they certainly never avowed thinness as anything they were aiming for (that was for idiots, demeaning), but they had had a disdain for the greedy corporeality which betrayed itself in sweet puddings, second helpings, thickened flesh. The only chore that presented itself as any kind of a burden or obligation was cleaning the toilet, and it was true that they had sometimes neglected this, but Zoe had cleaned it scrupulously before her parents came to stay (that was somehow why she had forgotten to provide them with sheets). Simon and Zoe had never talked together about any of these arrangements or choices; that would have been banal.

  Now that she had Pearl, this order of life—in which the material arrangements floated lightly on the periphery and knowledge and books and music were the real dense substance at the center—was completely overturned. Zoe looked back upon the ruins of the old life with astonishment at her innocence then. Had she really believed you could exempt yourself so easily from the grown-up burdens, as if you were children playing house? To begin with, she knew now that she needed to eat. Not only was she hungry, starving hungry, all the time, she knew she must eat to make milk. One weekend when she had neglected to feed herself, her milk had started to fail. Pearl had screamed without stopping all one night, Simon walked out, and the Health Visitor made her go to bed for a couple of days. She had phoned Carol, who came over and cooked her fish pie and rice pudding and sausages and mash and sponge cake.

  After that, Zoe knew she had to shop and prepare food properly (although she didn’t really have much idea of how to cook). And of course
she could not pop out and do her shopping casually anytime, it was a whole expedition: she had to feed and change and bathe and dress Pearl first, and somehow wash and dress herself (she looked up in the booklet to try and find out what you were supposed to do with the baby at those moments when you needed both your hands). Usually the rocking of the pram in motion put Pearl to sleep while they were out, and this would be the best sleep she had all day. Sometimes when they got back after shopping Zoe would be able to leave her asleep in the pram in the yard while she flew inside to tidy up from the morning’s routine, rinse nappies and put them to soak, start a wash, make the bed, rinse the dishes. Then the hard little cry would come again.

  Very early on, lying on her front, Pearl could half raise herself up on her arms when she woke, lifting her head with its gingery crest of hair to peer around for Zoe. If she was in the pram, Zoe could watch for a few moments that veering seeking head that couldn’t support its own weight for long, before Pearl discovered where she was or began to cry. These were moments of eerie quiet, both of them awake but separate, Zoe allowed to see Pearl as she was when she was alone: an instant’s premonition of her daughter’s capacity for life without her, liberating and lacerating at once. Sometimes Zoe hurried to pick her up and restore their tight-wound connection. Then if it was time for a feed (following the booklet, Zoe worked hard to establish these four-hourly), they settled down together in the chair with no arms that was best for nursing, and into a day that was mostly an inchoate mess there would bloom a session of healing calm while the baby sucked.

  Zoe wore an old copper bracelet that she changed from wrist to wrist to remind herself which side they had started with last time. After her first urgent hunger was satisfied, Pearl’s hand would begin to wander exploringly across the surface of the breast and her eye would meet Zoe’s gazing down at her. Pearl’s look would heat up warmly, and grinning up at Zoe she would sometimes fall off the nipple, the bluish milk trickling out of her open mouth down Zoe’s front.

  * * *

  Simon didn’t watch the feeding, even when he was in the house. Mostly, he was out: at the market (he had taken over Zoe’s old job on the greengrocer’s stall) or at the library, with friends, or supervising students (he did some at home and some in a room in college). It was as if after the birth the house split into separate domains, his space in the front room, where he often didn’t bother to make a fire but sat in the cold, reading or typing or playing records; her space in the mess of the kitchen and living room with the gas fire on and the clothes horse laden with wet clothes or nappies steaming. If she had cooked he ate at the table with her and they exchanged polite information about their respective days, but he didn’t finish what she put on his plate: she tried putting less and less, but he never finished it. If he had a bath in the kitchen he pulled the curtain across.

  In the middle of the night when Pearl was about a month old, Simon had reached out for Zoe in the dark. She had just climbed back into their bed after feeding Pearl and putting her down to sleep again. She lay huddled away from him; he put a hand on her shoulder and rubbed up and down her back. It was the first time he’d touched her deliberately since she’d come back from the hospital. He had taken Pearl from her a few times when she asked him to, always when she was sleeping or peaceful; he had carried her into his part of the house and sat studying her tiny face framed among the shawls with an intent concentration which for those minutes would make Zoe hope that he was coming to care for her. But as soon as she stirred or grizzled he handed her back to Zoe as if she were no further business of his.

  Because he had only ever touched Zoe when he wanted to make love to her, it didn’t occur to her that he meant anything different by it now. Her body ached with ugliness; even in her tired fog she was conscious of unwashed hair, sweaty heat, a baggy stomach, swollen breasts. Her sexual self seemed buried several miles deep (probably buried, it had seemed to her then, forever). Also, she had just come from dropping tears onto the baby where she had been suckling her in the spare bed, dwelling angrily on Simon’s derelictions. How could he be so cold toward his own daughter? How could he keep up his punishment of Zoe, even if she had done wrong in tricking him into fathering the child? Could it be fair that the whole impossible labor of managing this baby fell upon her, even if that labor was precisely the reason he hadn’t wanted a baby in the first place? (He had said, “It will spoil everything. I’ve seen it happen. People drown in all that mucky stuff. Clever people get stupid, they forget what they used to be, they only think about rusks and sleep and potty training; they actually start to think that these are interesting.”) Zoe had wanted a baby; didn’t that count for anything? Much of her waking thought circled in the treadmill of this unspoken argument with Simon.

  —How can you? she said that night when he touched her. How can you even think I would want to? I’m exhausted. You haven’t given me a kind look all day. And the doctor said anyway to wait six weeks.

  As soon as the words had been said aloud and were floating in the chilly air above the bed, she was sure that sex wasn’t actually what Simon had meant at all. Really, he’d only been proffering friendliness and consolation. Perhaps he had even been intimating a willingness to hold her poor racked body in his arms while she went off to sleep; at the very thought of that possibility all accusation melted in her (for the moment). He had been offering her his hand across the rift between them; it might have been the beginning of everything changing. Instead, she felt him withdraw his kindness as immediately as if an electric current had cut off, and they lay jangled and motionless, apart. She knew she ought to speak—she could imagine the words of her apologetic explanation forming between them—but no sound came. She lay longing for him to touch her again. She wanted it so intensely that she was sure he must know; she couldn’t believe that such a power of desire aimed at someone close by wasn’t tangible. Oh, please, please, she willed.

  She was sure he did know; but he wouldn’t touch her again because he couldn’t forgive her capacity to so grossly misunderstand him. After a while, without a word, he got up out of the bed and took his bathrobe from the door and went downstairs. He must have worked down there or slept in the armchair. In the morning, when Pearl woke at half past six and Zoe came down and lit the gas fire and put on the kettle to boil, she heard him go up and shut the bedroom door behind him, and the accusatory voice inside her thoughts struck up groggily again.

  * * *

  Simon could see the end of his thesis coming closer. Sometimes if he’d been reading late he found he was actually visualizing the coming end as a figure approaching from far off in flapping robes across a wasteland; one day it occurred to him that the image was from the scene in Pasolini’s The Gospel of St. Matthew where the devil comes to tempt Christ. He felt abashed that he had associated even in his subliminal awareness two such absurdly disproportionate testings—he didn’t really confuse his own petty intellectual agonies with those real ones—and he tried to suppress the picture.

  Simon’s supervisor, Kevin Fry, had said already that Simon would be able to publish the thesis when it was finished. Kevin had joined the faculty while Simon was an undergraduate (amid some controversy because of open hostility in the establishment then toward critics influenced by the ideas coming out of France). Simon had been one of a select few students who met in Kevin’s rooms and drank with him; they adopted styles in imitation of his (French cigarettes, old suit waistcoats from the secondhand stall in the market worn over collarless shirts), and submitted to certain implacable judgments as to what one could and could not talk about (eighteenth century was good, Lawrence was beyond bad, T. S. Eliot was boring). When Simon had read more, he understood that some of what he had taken to be Kevin’s original thought derived in fact from the Yale Deconstructionists and Foucault, and he was puzzled that Kevin’s written work seemed dogged, never as fresh or dangerous as his speech.

  At a certain point in the course of the PhD supervisions, while Simon was working on Stendhal (the th
esis hinged on a comparison of the representations of incarceration in La Chartreuse de Parme and Little Dorrit), he had felt Kevin relinquish his role at the prow of their relationship: he listened to Simon with a new relaxed assent, he marked the work more cursorily, and there was a distinct cooling of their friendship. His French wasn’t as good as Simon’s, but that wasn’t all; Kevin couldn’t keep up with him any longer. Simon had overtaken his mentor; he was better. It had been an almost weightless transaction, that exchange of authority. He had shut the doors to Kevin’s college room behind him one day (double doors made with a six-inch gap between, to insulate the concentrating one from all the noise of the world), and walked out to find spring sunshine after rain in the quad. Everything was altered, as if there had taken place a silent shift under the earth, and he had felt an elated triumphant lightness and a diminishment both at once (where would he put his marker now, to aspire toward?). He even began to have one or two undergraduate followers of his own, who listened to him to find out what to think. He knew you could live a lifetime dedicated to contesting such near-imperceptible shifts of intellectual power, and he was confident of his capacity to come out well in those contests. He did, however, ask himself whether this was the most serious use to which he could put his intelligence.

  He was pursuing his thesis in all seriousness. It seemed to him that the only possible justification for academic work was to do something that was bigger than the mere turning over of familiar compost that the system required. One had to be able to work the system, of course; the ideal was to do that—persuasively, authoritatively—with one’s left hand and reach outside it with one’s right, away from the small world of university into the big worlds of history and art (here, of course, was where one put one’s marker for aspiration). One should always have a little bit of contempt in one’s manner for academic work. He thought seriously about other careers when the thesis was finished, the diplomatic service or news reporting from some war zone; he thought about getting a teaching certificate and going to work in the worst kind of schools in the state system. He thought he would be strong enough for any of these. On the other hand, he feared the constraints that would leave him without the space to be free to think largely.