by Tessa Hadley
Zoe wandered with her tea upstairs to the room she used as her study. The tide of the party had only just reached this far: she hadn’t had to do anything in here when she was cleaning except straighten the cover on the bare mattress of the spare bed and take away one half-empty beer can. (And now she spotted a bitten-into piece of flapjack on a pile of papers.) She had promised to write a piece for New Internationalist about the implications of the current crisis in relation to the arms industry. When she first sat down at the desk she hadn’t made any conscious decision to begin it; in fact, she hadn’t thought she would be able to write anything again until she had Pearl back. Out of habit, however, she turned her computer on and opened a new document. Even when she started to type she threw down her first thoughts in easy freedom because she didn’t seriously think she had begun (usually she wrote effortfully, anticipating dissent). But she had happened upon one of those precious air pockets of clear work. Her line of argument bloomed, it leaped forward; her words embodied her thought without contortion. She forgot herself; all the mess of her personal life was absorbed for the moment into a larger responsibility. She must be scrupulous to get this right.
She hadn’t switched on the lamps; the study, if she lifted her head to glance blindly around at it, was eerie in the blue light from the screen. Then the blue was swelled by daylight, which grew outside the window (so it was morning, not night). The rain persisted; the blowing mist became an earnest earthward downpour, soaking and steady. Zoe wrote concentratedly for three hours, only dragging her attention away from the screen when she needed figures and information from the journals and papers on her shelves. Once she went downstairs to put the heat on and make more tea. When she was finally and suddenly too tired to do anymore, she saved her work on a disk and crawled back to bed, still in her socks and sweater. Only instead of choosing her own bed she went on an impulse into Pearl’s room and plowed across the chaos of bedding heaped on the floor to climb under her daughter’s duvet and fall asleep, curled up with her back to the warm radiator, cocooned among all the crumpled dirty clothes, pressing her face into a consoling inside-out T-shirt ripe with Pearl’s young animal smell.
* * *
When pearl rang him said she was leaving home and cried and called him Daddy (mostly she called him Simon, and he had never given her the least sign of wanting anything else), he had thought this might be what he needed, to have a child in the house. He had said she could come for a week or two at least, to see how it went, but in his heart he had for a moment imagined foolish things: how their lives might slip around each other weightlessly in his flat (there would be none of the searing, if none of the excitement, that came with sexual cohabitation), how he might choose books for her and play her music, and how she might with her ingenuousness and chatter heal whatever was soured and thwarted in him. He had even pictured her sitting at his kitchen table, drawing as she used to do, and thought how he would put her pictures up on his fridge and on his kitchen walls, which were too austere. (He used to refuse to put them up, scornful of the smug sentimentality of estranged fathers parading their parenthood. He had kept them instead in a folder in his desk.)
Only Pearl wasn’t a child anymore. She was something else.
Of course, he remembered now, she had given up drawing years ago.
Usually she only came for a weekend, and usually Martha was around to take her off his hands and make sure she was fed and watered and talked to about whatever it was girls talked about (Martha was not a girl but had at least been one, and fairly recently too). Now Martha had gone home to the States for a month, and he and Pearl were painfully exposed to each other. The first morning, he was already convinced he should never have let her come. When he got up at eight he put croissants in the oven and made coffee and squeezed fresh orange juice (he had shopped at the supermarket in honor of her arrival). He called her several times before he realized that, in spite of bleary assurances from behind her bedroom door, she wasn’t going to join him. Then he sat absurdly amid the unaccustomed splendor of his breakfast (he usually only drank black coffee) and ate both croissants.
Pearl didn’t get out of bed until well after midday. This should have given Simon a perfect opportunity to get on with his work. However, her mere presence in the flat was somehow catastrophically disruptive. He kept imagining he heard her stirring or calling for him. Somehow the idea of her with her pink hair and her nose stud and her backpack full of female apparatus spilling out into his space prevented him from concentrating (she had explained one surgical-looking item in all seriousness to him as an “eyelash curler”). He gave up trying to push ahead with the chapter of his book and turned instead to reading through a PhD thesis for which he was the external examiner. That was much easier. Pearl could have been one of his students. It was easier to think about her in relation to them. He liked it when the students had pink hair and piercings; he admired their irreverence for what was natural. He didn’t know why he found it disconcerting in his own daughter.
When Pearl did eventually get up, to Simon’s dismay she turned the television on. He had a digital set—widescreen, with the sound wired up to come through his B and W speakers—but he didn’t watch it often and certainly never, ever, in the daytime. (Martha watched things on it that astonished him; he found her unapologetic assertion of a taste for Ally McBeal and Sex in the City provocative and intriguing, but it also made him glad she had kept her own place.) Pearl didn’t have the television on particularly loud, but she didn’t shut the door, and the sound inserted itself like a trip wire between him and the furtive argument of this thesis, which was escaping from him through a dense underbrush of language. (It wasn’t very good: on Dickens and carnival, a stale theme. These enthusiasts for charivari were the same people, no doubt, who complained about joyriders and lager louts.) He found himself trying to determine from the patterns of speech and laughter what it was that Pearl was watching. It must be a chat show. You could recognize the rhythms of inanity without even hearing the words.
He went to ask her to turn the sound down and keep the door shut. She was still in her baggy stretch nightshirt, eating toast smothered in chocolate spread on his white-covered sofa. For a ghostly moment he heard his mother’s words in the room. “Don’t make any marks, will you?” At least he didn’t actually speak them.
—Grotesque, isn’t it? he said instead, after stopping to watch for a moment. “Forgive us for running our item on propagating bonsai in the home, which we know is overshadowed by September’s tragic events, but after all life must go on.” I’ll bet “overshadowed” is doing overtime, isn’t it? And “spirit”? And “inextinguishable”?
Pearl looked at him, pausing with her toast held ready for a bite.
—But what happened was terrible. How else could they talk about it?
—It doesn’t occur to you that if they meant it, if they really meant it, they could just cut the item? Cut the whole show. Turn their backs on the cameras and cover their faces with their hands. We could just contemplate darkness for a few months. It might do us good.
She looked bemused, and then she shrugged.
—But I suppose people expect there to be television. I mean, they might panic, if they turned it on and it wasn’t there.
He contemplated continuing the argument with her but decided that the abysses of her blankness might be too deep. He was not ready quite yet to navigate them with her; he was too afraid of what he might not find.
—No doubt, he said. No doubt there would be panic.
And he went back to the thesis and worked on it for another twenty minutes, until he began to wonder guiltily whether she might need hot drinks or instructions in how to work the shower. Or perhaps she had come to him because she wanted to confess to him, to consult him. Of course if that were the case she should really have got up to have breakfast with him; they might have talked then. She could not expect him to interrupt his work. On the other hand, he was only marking a student thesis. He had put aside his book,
his “real” work. He had made his preparations for the week’s teaching. It could not matter if he broke with his routine for just one day. (Martha accused him of living like a monk, with his rigid routines. “In some respects,” she said. “Although a very licentious monk.”)
He got up to suggest that they go out to tea. Wasn’t that what fathers did? He would buy Pearl tea. He would take her somewhere done up to look old-fashioned, she would think Oxford was a charming place, he would ply her with cake, she would consume it with youth’s insatiable appetite for sweet things, and she would artlessly open up to him her life, her reasons for disenchantment with her education, her complaints against her mother. However, when he opened the door to his study he heard that she was talking: not to herself—as he imagined for one disorienting moment (“she’s mad, she’s actually talking to the television”)—but on her mobile phone. Although she was loud with that particular autistic loudness of the mobile phone user, he could not catch exactly what she was saying. The rhythms of her talk were stagey and exaggerated; she sounded like the television she had been watching. He took a few steps along the passage, treading softly on the thick carpet. He had a need to know how his daughter’s mind worked when she was unguarded and apart from him. He could hear her when he stood close up to the closed door.
—My dad’s bought all this amazing stuff at the supermarket because he knew I was coming? she was saying, in an excited, swollen voice that rose up as if into a question at the end of almost every sentence. Like orange squash and chocolate spread and Dairylea cheese? They’re all the things I used to like when I was eight, it’s really funny! He’s so weird.
He hardly recognized himself, transformed into that funny “dad.”
—I haven’t got any clothes, she wouldn’t give me any time to pack, I’ve only got a really weird selection of things and none of them go together, so I won’t be able to go out of the door at all. She was really rabid; she just kind of stood over me while I packed up. I was scared, I was just thinking, Oh, my God, put anything in, I just wanna get out of here. So I’ve brought, like, no socks and two bottles of black nail polish?
Was she flirting? Was she talking to a girlfriend or a boy? She seemed to be making such efforts to please, to go through the hyperactive motions of this elaborated code, its language evacuated of apparent meaning. He could make no connection between this material of her life and what he remembered of himself when he was her age. Where had she learned to be so false? Disapproval overwhelmed him, like something rising in his throat; he withdrew soundlessly and went back to try and concentrate on the thesis in his study. She had left chocolate marks on his white sofa. He found himself scrubbing at them later with 1001 upholstery cleaner (the same stuff his mother used to use), when Pearl went out. He didn’t know where she had gone. She hadn’t called out any message before she banged the front door of the flat shut behind her.
* * *
When simon thought back now to his first book (the one on prisons and fictions that had been adapted from his PhD thesis) and to those obsessive writings and rewritings of it that had detained him for far too long, he saw now, in proportion to their results, he understood that he had been trying to disguise himself progressively further and further inside a language working as a self-enclosed system, purged of the treachery of personality. He knew now that such a language wasn’t possible. Literary criticism wasn’t physics. (He also thought that the book was too dependent on Foucauldian modelings of culture and power, of which he had since become more skeptical.) His new book on the representations of music in prose fiction, which he had been working on already for three years, was going to be much riper and warmer, was going to make the books that preceded it (the prisons book, the one on Dickens’s irony, the little one on the history of Madame Bovary in English) look like cautious apprenticeship pieces. He thought of it as a reclamation in a renewed language of some of the humanists’ old ground: a demonstration of a recovered trust, finally, in the best of the culture he was heir to. He had felt able, as he experimented with first drafts of sections on Tolstoy’s Kreuzer Sonata and Joyce’s The Dead, to use the words of value judgment he had once trained himself scrupulously to resist; he wrote about “greatness,” and “mastery,” and even used (carefully, and with explication) the term “classic.”
It wasn’t perfectly clear to him, given his deep confidence in it, why the writing of the book had stalled, just recently, in the few weeks since he and Martha came back from their visit with friends in Uppsala. It didn’t even seem to be an intellectual problem but more of a physical one. When he sat for the prescribed hours at his desk, it wasn’t that the complexity of his argument defeated him or that he was trying to do too much (as Martha somewhat bruisingly suggested); what he felt was a lassitude, a paralyzing indifference to adding one word more to what was already on his screen. He felt as if the book was written already somehow: the effort was expended, he was on the other side of it, and he didn’t have it in him to toil back up to the top of the mountain of his argument. He found himself playing for ages with a couple of sentences or scrolling up and down through what he’d finished, fiddling with the syntax, pouncing on awkward repetitions. In order to forge forward, he knew that something in the mind must tense itself: reject peripheral stimuli, lunge into new words, persist in pursuit of the idea and not let go. And suddenly he felt bored with that virtuous conquest which was his life’s story.
Pearl’s arrival was the last straw; or she was his convenient pretext. The mess she left around the flat stunned him. He was incredulous at how much time she spent in empty chatter with her friends at home on her mobile phone. He found himself actually counting on his watch the hours she spent watching television. An outraged awareness of the dissipation, the indiscipline, the pointlessness of her life would float like a fog between his eyes and the screen he was supposed to be focused upon. She spent money like water—his money—then asked him for more in a tone that presupposed her right and the bottomlessness of his responsibility to provide. Although he asked her not to smoke in the flat, he knew she sometimes did; he smelled it and found the fag ends carelessly half buried in the waste bin. She went out “shopping” every day (she claimed she was looking for a job too); even Martha, who was quite capable of using that horrible verb “to shop” without irony, didn’t indulge in it very often. If he didn’t quarrel with Pearl, not yet, not in their first week, it was because he saw any domestic bickering as the ultimate extension of the banality he couldn’t bear.
He did once mildly reproach her for cutting food on the kitchen surfaces without a board, leaving knife marks.
—Oh, God! You’re just like Mum, always getting at me! she’d snapped, with such flagrant injustice (it really was the very first complaint he’d made) that he’d been deflected from persisting by her sheer illogic.
He was curious as to how Zoe had managed things at home; he wondered what Pearl’s perceptions of her mother were. Zoe’s restless conscientiousness made her perpetually strained; he could imagine how that was hard on a child. And when Pearl was small Zoe had surely been too passionately and unremittingly attached to her, too anxiously guilty about managing employment and motherhood together. Pearl hadn’t responded well to that anxiety. He wondered if his daughter wasn’t temperamentally more like himself. In truth, he had probably felt flattered, even vindicated, when Pearl called him and asked to take refuge with him. It was difficult to resist attributing some of what he deplored in Pearl’s attitude to flaws in her mother’s system of child-raising.
Zoe phoned Pearl at Simon’s almost every day; Pearl was blithely offhand in response.
—No, I’m all right, she said. No, don’t come up, there’s no need.… No, it’s OK, I’m chilling out, it’s cool.
When he talked to Zoe himself she was very brisk.
—I’m busy, she told him. I’ve got a couple of articles to write, I’m teaching two new courses, and there’s a lecture in the States to prepare for, as well as the book. As you can im
agine, this all feels rather urgent at the moment, in the context of what’s happening. So long as she’s OK with you. I’m amazed how much I can get done, with the house to myself. She’s missing her classes at college, but to be perfectly honest, with the levels of attendance she was managing last year, I don’t know why she was bothering with it at all.
Above all, Simon wanted to resist falling into Zoe’s pattern of conflict with Pearl, a cycle of repudiation and reconciliation she couldn’t break. He never wanted to hear his own voice rising in Zoe’s futility of indignant allegation: “She did this; she said that; I told her, once and for all; I really thought we were getting somewhere this time, but then last night she.…” He tried to focus his mind instead on the phenomenon of Pearl’s generation, so technologically well equipped, so well fed, so beset with innumerable trivial stimuli: the music that poured in at their ears, the flashing dancing pictures in front of their eyes, their swollen pay packets, the incitements to purchase and consume on every side, the exposed flesh promiscuously, blandly available everywhere (he couldn’t bear to look at the expanse of tender pale belly that Pearl bared bravely, even going to town, even in the middle of the afternoon).
He speculated as to what drugs she took when she was with her friends. He probed to see what in the world she knew about. She didn’t know the dates of the World Wars. She didn’t have any second language. She didn’t know who Stravinsky was, or Metternich, or Frantz Fanon, although she had vague ideas about Lenin and Germaine Greer (“Isn’t she some kind of feminist?”). She thought the Black Sea was “somewhere in Africa,” and she had never heard of the World Bank. Except when she was engaged in dialogue with her friends she spoke moderately clear English, although it was tainted with the cultish slang of the American teens. She didn’t seem to have read anything; astonishingly, when he asked her for her favorite book, she said it was To Kill a Mockingbird; how had that dinosaur of stuffy hopeful decency somehow endured into the age of techno and Ecstasy? Presumably it was something she had had to read at school.
