by Tessa Hadley
—You would say that.
—There seems to be quite a mess in here.
—I was going to clear it up, but then I got ill.
—And there’s been smoking. I thought we were agreed that you’d confine it to your room.
—Mum! (Real indignation.) Get off my case! You’ve only been back two seconds and you’ve started nagging me.
—All right, I’m sorry. But you did promise. Remember, this was supposed to be a test of whether I could trust you to be left while I’m away. After last time.
—We’ve been really, really good. We’ve watered all your plants. And we made flapjacks, only they’re all gone, because everyone thought they were so brilliant.
Zoe wanted to ask, We? Who’s we? Who’s everyone? Who’s been here?
But she went instead into the kitchen to make a pot of tea and find the Tylenol and the thermometer. Pearl’s illness probably wasn’t anything alarming. You wouldn’t cry at Truly, Madly, Deeply if you were that bad. She stared around her. The house was in a foul mess. Dishes were piled high in the sink and all over the surfaces, including the bowls and baking tins from the flapjack making, not dealt with yet, even though it looked as though the only flapjack left uneaten was the one trodden into the Portuguese rag rug in the kitchen. There were clothes in here too, all over the back-room floor, including a pair of tights half balled up and inside out, one foot snagged on the end of the bookshelf and the leg stretched around the cane chair as if they were scrambling to get away. There was a heap of blankets tangled with a sleeping bag in one corner. Everywhere there were ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts and roaches and bits of torn-up fag papers. Actually, Zoe didn’t own any ashtrays; they had used jam jar lids and plastic bottle tops and her pretty little Moroccan bowls and the blue glass flower vase she had from Grandma Lil, and then in other places they had stubbed the cigarettes out directly on the end of the bookshelf and onto the tiled floor and into the arms of the cane chair. Someone had indeed watered her houseplants, but it looked as though they had done it with the big watering can from the garden, so that earth had splashed out of the pots and up the wall. The door to one of the kitchen units was pulled off its hinges.
—Oh, called Pearl from the front room, the reason for all the washing up is there’s something wrong with the dishwasher. We think a fork’s stuck in it or something.
Zoe went upstairs. Her bed had been slept in, no effort made even to straighten the duvet and cover their traces. Her scarves and jewelry were pulled out and strewn across the top of her chest of drawers, and there were beer cans and Bacardi Breezer bottles and fag ends in here too. In the bathroom a cold and scummy tub hadn’t been emptied, and it looked as though someone had been sick in the toilet; it had been flushed but was still filthy round the rim. She didn’t even venture into Pearl’s room. From the doorway it appeared a dark and roiling sea of bedding with a flotsam and jetsam of bottles, fag ends, discarded food, magazines, makeup, and miscellaneous items (the peacock feathers from the vase on the piano, for example). She went back downstairs and into the front room, where she planted herself in front of the television screen.
—How can you? she said. How can you sit there, knowing I was coming home, while the house is in this state?
Pearl tried to see the picture round her, turned up the sound with the remote.
—Like I told you, I was going to clear up, only then I was ill. Anyway, I thought I could put everything in the dishwasher, but there’s this fork or something. It’s making an awful noise.
—No. That won’t do. I’m afraid I don’t buy that. This isn’t just a matter of not having cleared up yet. Quite apart from the fact that there are hours, hours, of serious cleaning work to do to get this house back to the way it was when I left. I’m talking about what happened here in the first place. This is an abuse of my home and my trust. We said, No parties.
—Mum, like, get it in proportion? It’s not like anyone’s died or anything.
—And as for you being ill, I should think the only thing that’s wrong with you is a serious hangover, judging by the bottles left lying around the place.
—It’s nice to know my own mother is so sympathetic.
—It makes me sick the way you watch this film over and over. I mean when, in real life, have you ever shown any interest in anyone’s suffering outside the immediate orbit of your own tiny circle? What do you care about real disaster? You’d rather sit playing at soap-opera sorrow in an overheated room, calling your friends on your mobile and crying phony tears about it to them.
—It isn’t soap opera. That just goes to show how much you know.
—You and your friends know nothing, you take no interest in the world outside.
—What do you understand about what I feel about anything? When do you ever ask me?
—It’s too pat. Zoe was stony. I’ve heard it all before. You’re young, and therefore it goes without saying that you’re hard done by and misunderstood. But wait a minute. What we’re talking about here is, You trashed my house! You do that and then you whine that I don’t respect you, that I don’t ask you about your feelings? Did you ask me about mine?
—You should listen to yourself one day, hear how you hate me. I’ve had enough of living in this prison house.
—Prison house? What would you know about prison? How can you be so innocent? Don’t you have any shame? Anyway, that’s fine by me, because I’ve had enough of you living here too.
—I’m going to go to Dad’s.
—To Dad’s? Zoe gave a hard hoot of laughter. Oh, yes, wonderful, go to Dad’s. I love it. Let’s see how you two get along.
—He said I could come and stay anytime.
—Then pack your bags. Put your clothes on and pack your bags. Do it now, right now. I’ll give you a lift to the station. I don’t see why he shouldn’t have to put up with you for a while.
—But I’m really ill.
—I don’t believe you.
Zoe stopped the video, threw open the window, and turned off the fire. Pearl stormed resentfully out of the room to run herself a fresh bath. From downstairs Zoe heard a sequence of indignant conversations on her mobile. Presumably one of them was to Simon. (Whatever had Pearl been telling him that had made him offer to have her to stay?) Zoe would be figuring in all these calls as an unfeeling villain. But until she dropped Pearl off at the station she was adamant, she didn’t falter. Then when she fixed her eyes on the retreating back as Pearl pushed through the doors to buy her ticket for Oxford—backpack slung jauntily on one shoulder, dressed up so bravely and deliberately to meet the world with her painted eyes and her costume of bright colors, ripped jeans, embroidered patchwork cap—Zoe had a vision of things from a different angle, and the mess in the house seemed only a temporary problem. But there were taxis queued to stop behind her and she couldn’t wait; she had to pull out and drive on; she couldn’t jump out of the car and run after Pearl and tell her that after all she loved her more than anything on earth.
* * *
—What if she was really ill? zoe asked joyce. (she had stopped by at her mother’s house on the way back from the station.) What if I’ve turned her out of her own home and there’s something seriously wrong with her?
Joyce was ironing Ray’s shirts.
—You can phone Simon and ask him how she is when she gets there.
—I’m horrible. I’m so horrible.
Zoe nursed her coffee cup in her hands as if she were cold; her face was haggard with bruise-colored swellings under her eyes. Joyce worried about her; she gave too much of herself to her work. Joyce was proud when she saw her daughter’s name in the national papers, but she saw how Zoe was eaten up with nervous energy when she had to do one of these big lectures.
—Of course you’re not horrible. Pearl’s impossible. I feel badly myself because I said I’d keep an eye on things. But when I popped in yesterday morning it didn’t look too awful, and she promised me she was going to tidy up. They must have had a p
arty there last night.
—You wouldn’t ever have turned me or Daniel out on the street.
—In Daniel’s case it would probably have been very good for him. How was he?
—Really fine. We had a nice time. You know they’ve got some new girl working for them? From Romania.
—Oh, dear. I wonder what happened to the last one. Those poor little boys.
—I suppose working for Flavia is better than being trafficked here as a sex slave.
—Marginally, perhaps.
—All the way home I was planning on a hot bath. That’s why I went so mad. A long and mindless soak.
—Darling, have a bath here. Eat with us. We’ll go round together this evening and tackle the mess when you’ve rested.
—I’ve got to face up to it. I won’t be able to rest until it’s sorted. I’ll be all right once I get going.
—I’d come with you now, but I’ve got Vera for tea.
—Only, really, Mum, if you could see it! I truly don’t understand her. How can she be so utterly absorbed in herself? It’s not just the mess. It’s her complacency. It’s her unshakable certainty that she’s at the center of everything.
Joyce folded a shirt carefully.
—You’ve always had to be so busy, she said. I suppose if you’d been able to be at home more, she might have felt more secure and not needed to behave badly to get your attention. Of course it’s wonderful the way you manage things. But I do feel sorry for anyone having to juggle family and career. I was grateful, when I was your age, that I didn’t have to work.
—Oh, don’t start that again, said Zoe. We’ve been over that argument so many times.
—And then, she hasn’t ever had a father at home. Which wasn’t your fault.
—She didn’t need one. We’ve managed fine without.
—You should listen to Woman’s Hour. Everyone thinks differently about that now.
* * *
At home alone, zoe burned up with energy. She ran buckets of hot water with disinfectant, she filled black bags with rubbish and fag ends and beer cans and bottles; she put on rubber gloves and wiped and scoured every surface, even the backs and seats of chairs, that they might have touched with their sticky hands. She grew to feel she was in intimate communion with “them,” down in their dirt and their discards: Pearl’s gang, who congregated at weekends around the standing stones on the heath in further pursuit of their ever more incestuously entangled intimacies, probably thinking it was an ancient sacred site although in fact it was a nineteenth-century folly. Their heterogeneous uniform of droopy tops and baggy ripped trousers and dangling scarves and strings and laces was a more mannered rerun of the fashions of Zoe’s own teenage years. Some of “them” she could picture, the inner circle of familiar friends: a few sweet ones she was fond of, a couple of losers and no-goods. Some of them she fantasized, louche and sinister strangers, men mostly, taking advantage of Zoe’s absence and her goodwill, peddling drugs perhaps, hunting after sex. She snooped through the ashtrays and the debris in search of evidence of anything worse than the dope and the pills she knew about (though she wasn’t clear what the evidence might be). She scrubbed the toilet and the bathtub and the sink and the bathroom floor; she put all the towels in the laundry basket. She washed down the wall behind the plants; she scraped the kitchen rug free of flapjack and put it into the washing machine together with the sodden bath mat. After she had tried the dishwasher and heard the horrible noise it made, she stood washing and drying up for what seemed like hours, soaking the pans that were too far gone.
She phoned Simon to tell him what time Pearl was arriving and warn him she might be ill.
—I’ve given her money for a taxi, she said. I don’t know how she’ll get on with Martha.
—Martha’s in the States.
—Oh, right.
There was no point in holding on for more information. Martha was successor to Eve, successor to Ros, successor to Melanie. Zoe only knew about any of them because Pearl had told her. They didn’t live in with Simon (at least, they kept their own places). They didn’t bear his children (he only had Pearl). In Zoe’s imagination they were a procession: stately, independent, striking.
—Does Pearl have a bedtime or anything? he asked. Or a time she has to be in at night?
—You have to be joking! Zoe laughed hollowly. Just give her a key and hope she doesn’t bring back all her friends at four in the morning.
—Oh, I think we’ll have to have some pretty clear rules laid down.
—At least at first she won’t have any friends.
—I don’t know yet if this is going to work out, or for how long. It’s a provisional arrangement. And we’ll have to think hard about her education.
—Her education! I don’t know if you remember me telling you, but she didn’t even show up for half her AS exams.
—Precisely. I’m interested as to why.
—Oh.
—Insofar as one’s allowed to be interested in anything else, in the midst of the end of the world.
—You mean what’s happening at the moment?
—We seem to be gathering ourselves ready for a just war. Isn’t that right? It’s very much your specialty, isn’t it? Against the forces of evil.
She heard in his voice a grim exulting pessimism. Simon never wanted to be caught out feeling shocked and appalled; he always wanted to have thought of the worst in advance. Then, whatever happened, he would be proved right; he would be ready with his irony.
—Actually, Simon, I don’t really want to talk about this with you. I don’t mean Pearl, I mean the rest of it. I’ve spent the whole weekend talking about nothing else. I need to shut it out for a few hours.
An instant retraction of intimacy was distinct as cold air in her ear.
—Who wants to talk about it? Isn’t there already too much talk?
There was a note from Pearl on Zoe’s dressing table. “No wonder you can’t get a boyfriend, only sad Dyl. No wonder Dad didn’t want to live with you.” Zoe had thought of phoning Dylan (who wasn’t exactly a boyfriend, or just a friend, but something awkward in between); after she found the note she decided not to. What did Pearl mean by “no wonder”? No wonder because Zoe was so shrill, so puritanical, so vindictive? Or because she was growing older and plainer and had neglected herself? Perhaps this was why Pearl had left the note on the dressing table, where Zoe was supposed to work to make herself attractive: a warning from one female to another.
She studied her face with concentration in the mirror. She was forty-three. There must have been changes over the past couple of years, only she hadn’t had time to take them in until today: a leaching of color from her skin and hair, perhaps; a loss of resilience, so that the little lines didn’t spring back when she stopped grimacing. She worried now, when it was presumably too late, that she had never used anti-wrinkle cream or taken vitamins. Joyce spent at least half an hour in front of her mirror every day, “getting ready.” Zoe truly didn’t know what you were supposed to do in all that time; in the mornings she washed her face and pulled a comb through her hair. She had thought she was too intelligent to worry over the usual women’s trivia.
When she stripped her bed she found a used condom, shriveled and stuck to the sheet (certainly not hers; she and Dylan only slept together at his place, and not recently, and in any case she would never ever have forgotten such a thing and left it there). She picked it up in a tissue and buried it deep in the black bag on the landing with a shudder of distaste, thinking that at forty-three it was certain now she would never have another child, although she had always supposed that she probably would.
* * *
Zoe wasn’t teaching again until wednesday. When she woke she didn’t know what time it was, but it didn’t matter. There was no Pearl to hurry off to classes at the city sixth-form college (where her attendance in spite of Zoe’s efforts was insultingly perfunctory). Her watch had stopped; the battery must have died. She hadn’t been able to find her al
arm clock; presumably it was drowned somewhere under the mess in Pearl’s room, the one place Zoe hadn’t tackled in her cleaning mania (she had shut the door on it instead, containing an inland sea). Downstairs, Aunt Vera’s clock said half past three, but this clock notoriously kept a time all of its own, and anyway it didn’t feel like either kind of half past three, not the middle of the night or the middle of the afternoon. A fine gray rain swelled and ebbed against the windowpanes; it could have been the beginning or the ending of a day. She didn’t know whether she had been asleep for six hours or twenty or (surely not) thirty-six. If she put the radio or the television on she could have discovered which, but she didn’t want the intrusion of the world and its urgent claims upon her attention into this eerie nowhere space she had happened upon.
She would wait to see whether the light came or went.
Her sleep had been very deep and transforming, although she did not know where she had been and had no memory of her dreams. In her pajamas and a pair of thick socks and a sweater she boiled the kettle, made herself a cup of tea, and carried it steaming around the rooms of the house, turning the lights on and then off again, moving through the underwater texture of the deep quiet, sipping at the tea, lacing her fingers around it for warmth. Her rooms were restored to a chastened sobriety. She had thrown all the clothes she picked up through the door onto Pearl’s bed. There were a few burns, a couple of breakages; the smell of cigarettes was still mingled perceptibly with the disinfectant. She would have to get Dyl to look at the dishwasher and fix the cupboard door. That was all. It was nothing.
And for this she had let her beloved daughter go off alone into the crowd where anything could happen, without Pearl’s even turning her head to exchange last glances. Zoe was afraid for herself, that she could not keep anything safe. How absurd that she had quarreled with Pearl over a bit of mess; didn’t she profess not to care for material things? As soon as she knew what time it was, and if it was a time when Pearl was likely to be awake, Zoe would phone and ask her to come home (if you phoned when she was asleep, she snarled and cursed). Or perhaps she would go up to Oxford to see her, take her out to lunch, listen to her. How had she even for a moment wanted to catch her uniquely unknowable child in the net of her judgment?
