Everything Will Be All Right

by Tessa Hadley

  Now Joyce found herself telling Fran’s stories to Zoe enthusiastically: how the women danced in toy police helmets in mockery in front of the lines of policemen; how they lay across the entrances to the base and had to be dragged away; how wire-cutting parties forayed inside the compound and sprayed the missile silos with red paint. She couldn’t stop talking and being busy, as if Zoe’s arrival had gone to her head; she emptied cupboards to find baby blankets, ripped up perfectly good sheets for the cot, poured big gin and tonics at a time of the evening when she and Ray didn’t usually drink.

  —You did the right thing, walking out of there. Starting off a completely new life. It wasn’t possible for the women of my generation; we didn’t know you could get away with it. I’m going to learn to drive. I don’t want to have to depend on your father for everything. Wouldn’t it be wonderful just to take off in the car whenever you felt like it and go anywhere you wanted? I so admire what Fran has done. Ray takes it for granted that I haven’t got it in me, but you never know.

  —But you’re not unhappy? I mean, Dad isn’t unkind?

  Joyce looked at her unfocusedly, as if across wastelands of complications.

  —It’s not that. It’s nothing he does particularly. It’s just the whole house, the whole thing, keeping everything looking nice, worrying about everybody else. It’s my own fault. I ought to have the courage to walk away from it all.

  Zoe was cautious.

  —I think the driving lessons are a good idea.

  * * *

  Zoe had forgotten her pajamas. she had to borrow one of Joyce’s nightdresses: skimpy coffee-colored satin and lace, nothing she would ever normally have worn. She seemed to fall into sleep through layer upon layer of delicious awareness: the silky gown, clean sheets, Pearl in the Chanders’ crib, which Ray had put together with some exasperated difficulty, the bright luxurious comfort of the house, the promise of days and days of respite to come when she needn’t be perpetually on duty and vigilant. Joyce was only busy two mornings a week (she taught dressmaking classes); they could spend long hours talking and shopping and looking after Pearl together. They could talk on and on about Zoe’s leaving Simon; Joyce would be bottomlessly sympathetic. Of course Zoe would have to decide what she was going to do with her life—but not yet. (She might perhaps pick up her PhD again, transfer it down here. Anything might happen.)

  And then as she fell down and down, radiant with relief and vindication, Zoe came all of a sudden to some deep sad place and knew she hadn’t quite told her parents the truth about Simon. What she had said looked like the truth, so that no one else but her would ever know the difference; but it wasn’t the whole truth. She would need to start out all over again if she wanted to describe what he was actually like, in justice. Only it was too late to start now, she was asleep, she was so nearly asleep that all she could muster to represent her nagging worry to herself was a picture of Simon filling his fountain pen from a bottle of black ink at his desk—absorbed and careful, wiping off the surplus with a tissue—which didn’t mean anything at all and was extinguished anyway the next moment in the oblivion that crashed upon her like an overwhelming sea.

  Eight

  Daniel had gone into business with Uncle Cliff; then he married an Italian girl and they set up their own company importing delicatessen foods. After the first few difficult years they had done very well. They had moved to London and bought a loft apartment in Butler’s Wharf. He and Zoe weren’t exactly close. He read some of his sister’s articles in academic journals; although he hadn’t been to university, he was good at quickly picking up an argument and testing it. He didn’t positively disagree with anything she wrote. The world of arms trading and nuclear buildup seemed very remote from his innocent trafficking in olive oils and salamis, but he suspected nonetheless that Zoe judged him as if he were contaminated by it (even when he and Flavia made the decision to source all their products with organic suppliers). Perhaps she thought that making money was in itself intrinsically compromising. In return, Daniel teased Zoe about the unworldliness of academics.

  They got on all right. Sometimes when Zoe had to be in London she stayed with them; whenever Daniel went home to see his parents he called in on Zoe (especially if Ray was working up for one of his artist moods, feeling unappreciated and misunderstood). Daniel was privately amused that in spite of Zoe’s expertise in conflict resolution she didn’t seem to be able to control her own daughter. Pearl was disobedient and difficult: a nonsleeper, a scene maker. She howled in her push chair and threw her toys. When she was older she called her mother a bitch, played her music loud, had her ears and then her nose pierced without permission, came home late and drunk from escapades in town. Even Joyce, who adored Pearl (more, Daniel suspected, than she adored his own two much more charming and better behaved little boys), had to concede that she could be hard work.

  After Zoe published her second book (on the history of the relationship between arms manufacturers and defense establishments in Western Europe during the Cold War), he saw her name around even more often. She sometimes wrote for the broadsheet newspapers now. She was invited to be one of the keynote speakers at a big conference on civilians in conflict, which was held (coincidentally) only a few weeks after the attack on the World Trade Center. She turned up at his place on the Saturday evening when the conference was over; Maryse, their Romanian girl, was putting the kids to bed; Flavia was out at the restaurant, which was their pet sideline. Zoe was still frantic with adrenaline; when she’d been to kiss the boys good night she started telling Daniel some involved story about Palestinian students on their way to the conference being interrogated at Heathrow by immigration officials. He mixed martinis, but he couldn’t make her sit down until she had drunk off the first one, standing watching out of the windows as the sun went down over the Thames, behind Tower Bridge.

  —I’m mad about your view, she said. I’d like to stay looking at it all night. I could even be tempted to be rich, in return for this.

  He was impressed with his sister in her public clothes: a narrow dark-green wool skirt and jacket with bone buttons, a little cream blouse with a square-cut collar, dangling chunky silver and green earrings. (At home she looked as if she didn’t bother to notice what she was putting on in the mornings.) She used no makeup, her hair was cropped short, she didn’t have any figure, and she wore flat shoes and strode about like a man, but he could see all this might appeal to a certain type. He put out bread and cheeses and cold meats on the glass-topped dining table and left the lights off so they seemed to float in the pink and orange sunset. She tucked in hungrily.

  —Look at you, stuffing your face. But you’re such a beanpole. How come you never put on weight? I wish I could get away with it.

  —Eat with me, she said with her mouth full, pushing bread and cheese across to him. Danny, it’s all delicious. What’s this one called?

  —I’m not supposed to, I’ve already eaten. It’s raviggiolo: sheep’s milk cheese, from a new little place we’ve found in Umbria. You should eat it with the pear. Perhaps I’ll just cut myself a corner.

  —It’s fantastic. The food was probably all right at the conference, but I’m always so busy talking I forget to have any. And today I was too nervous about my paper.

  —Go well?

  —Mmm.

  She took a swallow of drink to clear her mouth so she could elaborate.

  —Do you know how many deaths from small arms are estimated annually? Four million. Knocks road accidents at thirty thousand into a cocked hat. Ninety percent civilians. Eighty percent women and children. Most of them aren’t even war casualties. Revenge killings, murders, tribal conflict.

  She sounded almost gloating. It was an occupational hazard, he supposed, that you would end up exulting over the excesses that proved your case. Her readiness to name horrors in ordinary conversation always embarrassed him, as if it was an error of taste.

  —Flavia and I are starting to think it might not be a bad idea to move out of L
ondon. Wondering if this is really how we want to bring up our children and all that. I’d like them to know something about green fields. And, being realistic, if anything happens we’re right in the middle of it. I stood at these windows a few weeks ago expecting God knows what to fall out of the sky.

  —You mustn’t think like that, said Zoe earnestly, wiping a smear of grease off her cheek with the napkin he gave her. If you start to think like that, they’ve really won.

  —Well. Easily said.

  —No, truly; if once we start to abdicate from these city spaces, we hand imagination of them over to the rhetoricians of apocalypse on both sides. And that brings their horrible endgame one step nearer. We have to go on asserting by sheer persistence that it’s possible to live here, live our ordinary hopeful life.

  She was emphatic; he could imagine her waxing passionate like this in front of her audience, gesturing at them with those hands that seemed so big in proportion to her narrow thinness. (Perhaps she had used the very words she used to him, at the conference today.) She was drunk on power, probably, as well as the martini. He could guess how it could go to your head, all those faces turned your way, all that deferential assent and stimulating contest.

  —Any male talent at your conference, Zo? Aren’t you academics supposed to get up to all sorts of wickedness when the papers are over and the bar is open?

  He wondered if he’d got it right from the way she laughed, tearing off more bread, the usual tension in her posture unlocked and slack.

  —Dear little brother. Concerned as ever for my happiness.

  —I just worry that you pick them so deep. I wish you’d find one with a sense of humor.

  —You sound just like our mother.

  * * *

  Zoe had a window seat in the train home on sunday morning. She had some work from one of her graduate students to mark, but she let it lie on the table in front of her; she couldn’t read more than a sentence before her mind was possessed again by images and snatches of remembered exchanges from the weekend. The aftermath of these high points for her was always a kind of excruciated awakening, as if she had been drunk or dreaming and must now sort over the rash things she had done in cold judgment. Even the talks she gave seemed to her afterward full of risk; she worried that she had stressed the wrong thing, or that in her fixation on certain interpretations of the facts she had allowed herself to be oblivious to others.

  Now she had added to that usual exposure the foolishness of a flirtation. She wondered scaldingly how conspicuous it had been. Had she shown in her face how she glowed in response to his persistence, when he made everyone move up so he could sit beside her in the bar and introduce himself? It was that moment of his choosing her that snatched away her peace now, rather than the shy and fumbled kiss they had exchanged before they retired to their respective single rooms. He had been young. Not impossibly young, but quite a bit younger, in a skinny sweater with a little string of amber beads round his throat. (Perhaps he had only been trying to further his academic career.) She had danced; she never usually danced. It had not seemed stupid to her at the time. She had lain awake after they kissed good night, burning with the idea of him, fantasizing over and over that she got out of bed and went padding along the corridors in her pajamas to find his room (they were both in the same conference accommodation wing), or that he came knocking softly at her door. But now in the train she wrapped her arms tightly around herself and thought it was stupid. It was humiliating. It was particularly humiliating that they hadn’t even had sex together. What was she doing at her age, burning up at the idea of a look and half a kiss? Thank God at least that probably nobody would believe it had only been that. No one need know she was susceptible as a virgin girl.

  She stared out of the windows at autumnal England. All the debate of the conference—retaliation, escalation, war—was a receding tide in her ears. Nothing happened here. Her irritation at it steadied her, the deep secretive fertility of this countryside, its dense thickets, the fur of its woods snuggled around the hills; it was all shelter for the sentimentalities of those who thought this was the “real” England, whatever else went on (even foot-and-mouth, even the burning pyres of stiff-limbed dead cattle). In the dells nestled mock-Tudor mansions and real Georgian ones, weathering attractively together; the pleasure boats cosied up on the river; the former farm-laborers’ cottages had been made over expensively for the nostalgic consumption of a different class. The creamy-mauve long grasses soughed and flattened themselves seductively in the fields.

  But nowhere is safe, she thought.

  Amid all the professional glooms and denunciations, it was easy to forget to be afraid. An irrational panic flapped a disorienting black wing across her thoughts. She was anxious to see Pearl. She had not been vigilant, she had not phoned; anything could have happened to her daughter while she was distracted. Pearl had been left alone in the house for all this time. (She was seventeen; she had reacted to the idea of a baby-sitter with outrage.) Zoe had called home from Paddington but she hadn’t answered. Probably she was still in bed. Often she didn’t get back from clubbing in town until three or four in the morning, and then she would sleep until late afternoon the next day. (A twinge of painful adjustment as usual on returning home: How was it possible that in the same world there existed students like the serious hard-working ones she met at these international conferences, burdened with gratitude for the opportunity of an education, and seventeen-year-olds dedicated as unswervingly as Pearl to her own pleasures?)

  * * *

  Zoe rang the bell while she paid off the taxi; then she had to hunt in her bag for her key. The front door opened directly off the terraced street, whose length was only punctuated by streetlamps (the tree that had been put in on the corner had died). Of course there was no reason to expect Pearl to be at home. She might be at a friend’s; she might be at her grandmother’s (Joyce was supposed to be keeping an eye on her). The front-room curtains were drawn across. They must have been drawn across all day; perhaps for the whole four days that Zoe had been away.

  —Pearl? Sweetheart? I’m back! Zoe called, into the darkness of the narrow hall. The light didn’t seem to work; the bulb must have gone.

  She hardly thought about her house while she was away. It was her shell, her refuge to crawl into and be private; she loved it but took no interest in it beyond keeping it clean and tidy. Joyce itched for her to move the kitchen out of its little scullery space into the back room or build a second bathroom upstairs. (“What for?” asked Zoe.)

  —In here, came a muffled voice from the front room.

  Pearl must be watching television with the curtains drawn, something Grandfather Deare used to do on weekend afternoons. In the dark, Zoe was taking in some surprises: a mess underfoot she couldn’t quite see, as if she was treading on gritty cloths, and a pall of soured (forbidden) cigarette smoke. She pushed the front room door open with some momentary difficulty (more cloth); the gas fire was on full and the room was stiff with heat. Pearl with bright pink cheeks was on the sofa in her pajamas, wrapped up in Nana Deare’s old green silk eiderdown, which was filthy and leaked feathers and ought to be thrown out. Zoe looked around and saw that the cloth she was trampling underfoot was, in fact, a tangle of clothes, mostly Pearl’s clothes and unidentifiable others, but some of them Zoe’s own (that cream cardigan with the roses; that denim jacket).

  —Why didn’t you answer the bell?

  —I’m really ill, Pearl said.

  —What kind of ill?

  —My head hurts, I feel sick, and all kind of weird and shivery.

  Zoe was filled with apprehension; her heart contracted to stone in her chest.

  —Does the light hurt your head? Is that why you’ve got the curtains closed?

  Pearl glanced at them in surprise.

  —Not really. I think they were just like that.

  Zoe put a hand on her forehead; it was hot, but then the room was very hot. Pearl’s cheeks were wet.

  —My love
. My precious girl, are you crying? Is it that bad? Tell me exactly where it hurts. She sat down beside her on the sofa, holding her tightly in her arms, drinking in her smell (unwashed, with notes of last night’s perfume and the stale gray of fags, but behind them the incorruptible sweetness of her youth). She kissed her hair (that horrible dyed color, instead of her own rare strawberry!), her cheeks, her forehead. She became aware of Pearl ducking the kisses and rearranging herself inside the embrace so as not to miss a moment of what passed on the television screen. She was watching her video of Truly, Madly, Deeply.

  —Mum, get it in perspective. I’m not crying because I’m ill. I’m just crying at the film.

  —I don’t know how you can. Haven’t you seen it a hundred times already?

  —You’ve got no imagination.

  —It strikes me that there are some rather more serious things worth crying about just at the moment.