by Tessa Hadley
The one ambition he didn’t allow himself (not yet, not yet, not for a long time yet), was to write “creatively” (the very word was absurd, evoking so precisely the dismal queue of hopefuls clutching yellowed carbon-copy typescripts). It was true, there were a few poems (Beckett-like, if anything); but no one had ever seen them, and they didn’t exist, God forbid, anywhere on paper; he only kept them in his mind. He had too vivid an imagination of disaster: a car smash or a fall from a high place, the poems discovered by Zoe or his mother going through his things, misguidedly shown round, the dissimulated smugness of those who had admired him at finding out their imperfections.
He was working, around the time that the baby was born, on his chapter on Tyranny. The idea of his work, and what was good in it, was his strongest happiness; when he wasn’t actually engaged in reading or writing for the thesis he was nonetheless constantly aware of the shape of it, hidden and precious like a smooth stone fitted to his hand inside a pocket or a secret matrix glowing in his chest. The paper he had given at Manchester was on Byron’s “Sonnet on Chillon” and the aristocratic ideal of individual freedom; his basic argument was that there had been an absolute shift in literature between the end of the eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth century, from representations of punishment as an issue between individuals, the tyrant and the oppressed one, to modern representations of it as the one-sided outcome of an implacable impersonal system, grinding individuality small in the name of normalization and regulation. The logic of these modern representations ended in Kafka, as he would suggest in his conclusion. His title—which had, in the context, an irony he enjoyed—was “The Chainless Mind,” from Byron.
He was succeeding in keeping all this work on schedule, despite the extra day at the market he had taken on and the broken nights that came with the baby. He had never slept well. Now, if Zoe couldn’t stop the baby crying, Simon got up and went out and walked the streets as he had done years before in the time of his worst insomnia, a solitary prowling in a world turned inside out in the dark. He had not wanted this baby. He had always had a horror of a certain kind of semi-academic domesticity: PhD students turned whey-faced and sour-tempered over their grubby-mouthed and badly behaved offspring; rented flats filled up with a detritus of toys; typewriter and books pushed resentfully aside to make room for plates of baby pap. It seemed to him self-evident that intelligent women with minds of their own would not make the best mothers; how could they bear, if they liked room to think and breathe and read, to be constrained as the mothers of small children must be to the sticky and endlessly repetitive routines of domestic life? He was sympathetic to the conundrum for feminism posed by this tension between motherhood and intelligent life (Kristeva’s fundamentalism was one kind of answer, though it didn’t convince him as the right one). He had reasoned with himself that he had no right to oppose Zoe if she was convinced that a baby was what she wanted (no doubt there were imperatives of female biology he was not equipped to understand); after that first week of hostilities, he had never brought up his reservations again.
He had a distinct impression, however, that Zoe was not managing the baby very well. It cried surely more than they were supposed to, and the mess and smell and chaos in the house were worse than he had feared. Zoe herself was so changed. Her pregnancy had disconcerted him; the distended belly grotesque in its sheer improbability, forcing on whoever saw it naked the unpalatable truth that the oneness of the body is not indivisible. That transformation, however, hadn’t been unexciting. But he was sad that since the birth Zoe was so physically diminished from the proud girl careless of female fuss that she had been. She had always been scornful of women who made a bother about their menstrual cycle; now she was so jangled with hormones that she wept at the news on the radio (over what was happening in Beirut, for example), even if she thought he didn’t see it. Her skin was lusterless; she didn’t seem to find time to wash her hair and wore it pulled back in an elastic band; her stomach was still slack, and her breasts were heavy. She moved him not to desire but at best to a kind of sympathetic pity, which he could perfectly well perceive was the last thing she needed from him or could make any use of. He guessed that she smoldered with resentment against him, and this was exactly the kind of deterioration of their life together—which had been spacious and generous and free—that he had feared would follow the arrival of a child.
Sometimes she gave the baby to him to hold, no doubt in hope that the physical proximity would bring on the tenderness he was supposed to feel. It wasn’t very pretty, although he was amused by its fierce frowning look. He asked himself what bond he felt with this creature made from his own body, and in truth he felt nothing that he might not have felt for anybody else’s baby (some resentment, perhaps, at how its peremptory needs impinged upon him). If it moved him, it was to a blur of dismay at its feeble vulnerability contrasted with the more-than-hopefulness with which it attached itself to its life source, sucking and screaming and shitting, wanting everything. It made him fearful to think how much it didn’t know.
* * *
Simon announced to zoe one day when pearl was about twelve weeks that he was going to take them to visit an old friend of his.
—What old friend? Do I know him?
—Her. She’s got children, that’s why I thought you’d get on. I’ve borrowed a car.
It was absolutely characteristic of Simon that Zoe had had no idea that he had learned to drive or passed his test; he frowned now when she interrogated him.
—It seemed a kind of idiocy not to know. But it’s a process of no intrinsic interest. First you can’t do it, and then you practice, and then you can.
Actually, she thought he was more anxious about the driving than he would ever confess, so she was anxious too, and the journey passed in a tense silence, with Zoe clutching the sleeping Pearl tightly and watching the road as if their lives depended on her concentration. She had thought they would be driving somewhere in Cambridge, but he headed south out of the city, into Suffolk. After forty minutes or so, just outside Haverhill, and as if he had been here before and knew exactly where he was going, Simon pulled off the road into a stony puddled driveway and stopped in front of what looked as if it had once been a farmhouse, patched and extended with a straggle of outbuildings, screened by trees from the road with open fields behind. The house was neither neglected nor done up but in a middle position between the two, with heaps of builder’s sand and bricks and a cement mixer in the yard, all pooled with rainwater. The sun as they stopped was just struggling out from between lowering dark clouds; a blond woman in high-heeled boots and jeans and a white polo neck came round the side of the house as if she’d been listening out for them.
—The front door doesn’t open; we have to go in at the back; nothing works here; my heating was off all last week. Never marry a man who promises he’s going to do everything himself. Hugh has been doing up this place for four years. But he’s also running his own business, selling these trough things for planting made out of old tires, so of course meantime we live on a building site.
She explained all this ruefully to Zoe while she took them round the back—more mud, more heaps of sand and cinder blocks, also a brave showing of daffodils—and into a big warm downstairs room with a low-beamed ceiling, Laura Ashley wallpaper, an old stripped pine dresser, and a huge sagging sofa piled with patchwork cushions. Insulating material was visible around the edges of the windows, and the wiring hung in loops along the beams. Big logs smoldered in an open stone fireplace heaped with several days’ worth of ash; a little fair-haired girl was drawing at a table.
—Everything’s dirty.
The woman wiped her finger along the dresser and showed the dust disgustedly to Zoe. She was pretty and brisk, with a long straight nose, eyes slightly too close together, and natural pink in her cheeks (although the blond was dyed).
—I’ve surrendered in the battle with dirt here. If you knew how I longed sometimes to live in a little new semi with cent
ral heating and constant hot water.… I’m Dina, by the way. It’s nice to meet you. Simon’s told me all about you. And this is Simon’s baby. I can’t quite believe it. I must say, I didn’t think old Simon would get caught so soon. But it doesn’t look anything like you, Si. Oh, aren’t they just delicious at this age? Couldn’t you just eat them? Can I have a cuddle with her? No, wait, I’ll put some coffee on first, I don’t know about you two but I’m gasping. And I’m not allowed my first ciggy til I have a coffee. Which sometimes means I have it very early.
Simon was crouched, poking at the fire.
—Do you make decent coffee? I can’t remember.
—So, how do you two know each other? Zoe asked. She couldn’t imagine how this woman came to be a friend of Simon’s; she belonged to one of those types of person whose existence he usually managed to seem entirely unaware of: countryish and probably Tory-voting and definitely not bothered about things intellectual. There were some shelves of books, but they looked like nature books and stately-home books and perhaps even Jilly Cooper.
—Oh! (Dina looked quickly at Simon, as if he might want to answer first.) We grew up together. We lived practically next door. Our parents were friends. Of course, I’m more Ricky’s age than Simon’s; horribly ancient, as I’m sure you can tell. Simon, why don’t you leave that fire alone before you kill it?
—Zoe doesn’t know enough people with children, Simon said. That’s why I brought her.
—Well, children we do have here, if not much else. This is Bryony. (The little girl had climbed down from her drawing and was tugging at her mother to ask if she could hold Pearl.) Megan’s upstairs having her nap, thank God. A moment’s peace. You wait till you meet Megan. Hell on tottering legs, isn’t she, Bryony? And Charlie is at our local school, which is a sweet place. I’ll have to go in the car and pick him up at three-fifteen. My husband is away, of course, as usual.
—I’ll be back before then, Simon said.
—Be back? Zoe was astonished; she had had no idea he was going to leave her here.
—Won’t it be nice? said Dina. The girls will love to play with the baby. I’ve made some soup for lunch. And we could go for a walk if it brightens up. You can borrow wellies. We’ve got every size.
Zoe could hardly protest. And in fact she found herself not wanting to; it was better to be here with company than passing another long day in the mess of home. She might have been shy, but Dina seemed surprisingly eager to entertain her. Without Simon there, Zoe could study Dina uninhibitedly, trying to find out how one became a convincing mother of children. A certain flat manner seemed to work, without excesses of adoration or temper, wry in the face of catastrophe. Megan spilled orange squash at lunch, then scraped her knee jumping off the end of the sofa (“Mummy’ll put magic cream on”). The trick was to manage tortoise pace and businesslike both at once. They all professed to adore Pearl, who didn’t cry but watched the little girls with absorbed interest and then peacefully fed, only twisting her head away to check on her audience from time to time. Dina said she was so envious of breast-feeding—“that lovely time before the mucky eating starts.”
After lunch Dina found wellington boots for Zoe and put Pearl in a sort of backpack; Zoe had not known about these. (“Keep it. Megan’s much too big for it. It’s just clutter. See how she loves to look around her? You can get Si to carry her about in it. She’s obviously not the dopey sort of baby. Dopey’s much easier, of course. I’ll swear Charlie just slept for the first six months. I had to wake him up to feed him.”) They walked up the side of a steep plowed field in fresh wet air under a ragged sky, and then into some woods full of bluebells; the little girls in their bright waterproofs and boots went stumping in the puddles. When they got back, Dina made drop scones on a griddle and Zoe fed Pearl again at the kitchen table.
—I’ll tell you the strictest rule of motherhood, said Dina. Don’t eat what they leave. Look at this tummy of mine. That’s all fish fingers and bread-and-butter soldiers, truly.
—So what was Ricky like? Zoe asked.
A shock interrupted for an instant as rapid as a camera shutter the batter flowing from the spoon onto the smoking griddle. Dina turned an open and smiling face round to Zoe from the stove.
—Ricky? Oh, he was just a nice boy. A really happy, nice boy. Everyone loved Ricky.
—Simon worshiped him.
—It made a bloody mess of that family, the whole thing.
—Who’s Ricky? asked Bryony.
—Just someone Mummy used to know, who sadly died.
—What from? She put on a grown-up commiserating voice.
—He just got poorly.
—That’s sad. Was this long, long ago?
—It was, yes. In olden days.
Zoe didn’t know where Simon went, while she was with Dina all day. He came late to collect her. (“Oh, that’s so typical,” Dina said. “He never remembers.”) Zoe had stayed with the little girls when Dina drove to school, and then they drank tea, waiting for him, running out of conversation, while the children watched television and it began to rain outside.
On the way home, Zoe shook out a thought she hadn’t known she’d had.
—I suppose, she said, she was the girlfriend you once told me about. I mean your brother’s girlfriend, who you were angry with when he died.
—You invented angry. Simon concentrated past the pounding windscreen wipers.
—But she was that girl?
—She was a friend. They wrote to each other when they were both away at school.
The baby slept. Simon leaned forward to peer through the wind-screen because the rain was heavy, flickering in a confusing low light coming through a row of tall poplars beside the road.
—And I suppose you’ve had some sort of a thing going on with her at some point?
He was silent for long minutes, which she knew didn’t mean denial or assent, only a disavowal of her right to know, a disdain for the slack words she’d chosen.
—Are we going to start talking as if we own each other? he asked her.
* * *
Zoe got better at managing her new life. her stomach shrank back to flatness, she could get into her jeans, she washed her hair in the kitchen sink and then had it cut off as short as a boy’s. She grew less afraid of Pearl and manhandled her more boldly, kissing her with gobbling noises all over her head, blowing raspberries on her stomach while she was changing her until she laughed her throaty laugh. Pearl slept better at night and in the day, and then when Zoe heard her waking in her cot she hurried up the stairs to her with happy anticipation, eager to set eyes on her and hold her close again, as if even an hour’s separation awoke a yearning lack in her. Zoe discovered there could be a strenuous kind of pleasure in managing her house and her days. She set herself a routine and moved determinedly around inside it; at the end of the evening the dishes were washed and the kitchen floor was swept and the haricot beans were put on to soak. Then she sat up in bed, giving Pearl her midnight feed and running over in her head a list of tasks to be accomplished for the next day. This wasn’t the highest form of intelligent life, but it had its satisfactions.
This isn’t to say that there weren’t still bad days, of mess and mistakes and tedium. Four months after the birth she still hadn’t finished a book or been out in the evening. When she tried to have a coffee with Carol in Rose Crescent, Pearl cried and wouldn’t feed discreetly, and she had to take her outside and leave Carol to finish. She longed for adult company, and then when occasionally friends came round she feared she wouldn’t have enough to talk about: she couldn’t expect them to be interested for more than a few moments that she was trying Pearl on solid foods or that she had taken her to the Botanical Gardens to show her the ducks. She was impatient for Simon to come home, yet when he came he didn’t talk to her but sat in the cold front room to read.
She was thinking about Simon all the time, but not in the old way. There was a disorienting disproportion between their minimal actual contact and her
passionate interior indictment of him that ran its dull marathon day after day inside her head. In the flesh they exchanged a few transactional words, friendly enough; they made their mutually considerate movements around the shared functional spaces of the little cottage—the bath, the kettle, the toilet in the yard—and in bed at night sometimes their feet touched accidentally or she woke to find that in her sleep she had bundled herself against his warm back and was breathing in his smell. And yet her argument with him was clamorous when he wasn’t there; in her imagination she appealed as if in some public forum and to witnesses, presenting all the evidence of his unnatural behavior. If they could see my life, she thought, burning with its injustice. He’s wrong, he’s wrong! He believes he’s so unassailably right, but he’s wrong. At the same time she was calculating how she could disguise this very madness of their private life from her parents when they came to stay.
Simon had taken over her job on the market, and she had had to give up any idea of going back to the bag shop; Carol had gallantly offered to have Pearl for a couple of afternoons (perhaps picturing a sleeping mouselike creature in its shawls as Zoe once had), but Pearl screamed and wouldn’t take milk from a bottle, Carol was helpless, and they gave it up after the second time. Then the landlord telephoned from the Portland Arms to ask if Zoe could do a couple of evenings, and because they needed the money they tried it. Simon stayed at home to baby-sit; it was usually in the evenings that Pearl slept best and longest, so he ought to be able to work without being interrupted. Zoe didn’t admit to him that she quite enjoyed the synthetic companionableness of the pub; she adopted his own air of uncomplaining stoicism.
