by Tessa Hadley
As long as Simon didn’t criticize and was compliant, Pearl played at being sweet with him. She made weak dripping mugs of tea and brought them in to where he was working (he didn’t really drink tea; Zoe’s house would be a tea-drinking house, it went with the vegetarianism and the good causes). Because he couldn’t write what he ought to be writing, he was busying himself instead with reading and making notes he knew he didn’t need; to Pearl it must look as if all was as usual with the scholar in his study.
—You ought to get out more, Simon, she said. Apart from work and driving to the supermarket, you’ve been locked up in here with your books all week.
—I’ve been swimming, he replied defensively. (He went every day and did twenty lengths.) She was right, the air among his heaps of papers was stale.
—Just because Martha isn’t around, it doesn’t mean you have to shut yourself away.
—She says I’m a monk. Do you think I’m a monk?
She caught her bottom lip in her teeth, considering.
—You are going just a teeny bit bald, on top here.
—No. No, I’m not. He anxiously felt.
Then he had to go and inspect in the bathroom mirror; she held his shaving mirror up behind for him.
—It’s only a very, very small patch, she assured him.
—Good God, you’d need a magnifying glass.
He didn’t like it, though, even the small patch. He wondered what Pearl saw when she looked at him. Perhaps he seemed ancient to her. He hadn’t seriously thought much about what it meant to be growing older. Without children to hand, he had not had any markers against which to test how he appeared and whether he was showing the beginnings of absurdity.
He took her out to dinner at Le Petit Blanc. She spent hours dressing up for it in some of the new clothes she’d bought for herself with his money. She looked vivid and extravagant in a green top sewn with sequins cut low across her pushed-up breasts and some sort of short jacket with a fur trim. There were green combs in her pink hair. Her face was wide and slightly pasty (he could see a spot she had tried to cover with makeup); her pouting mouth with its swollen lower lip was glossy with dark paint; her eyes, drawn all around with kohl, were the real beauty of her face, commanding and deep-lidded. Girls her age did themselves up like this to attract attention and then froze rigid in the glare of it. He wondered what her contemporaries thought of her, whether the boys found her attractive or too overpowering. He knew there had been boyfriends, none of them “serious.” He thought she might be the kind of girl who has to wait until she’s older to generate passion in men.
If he was spotted by anyone he knew, would they guess Pearl was his daughter? They might decide disapprovingly that he was taking out one of his students. She grew talkative after several glasses of wine, although he still detected something guarded in her, a certain bright falsity of manner like a defense, clichés of expression behind which she eluded him. She never for one moment lost awareness of the crowd of others in the restaurant. When she smoked a cigarette she did it with studied nonchalance, as if she’d been practicing. She told him she was thinking of finding a job and taking a year off before starting her A-levels again.
—I need a break, she said.
He didn’t ask, A break from what exactly? What have you actually ever done?
—I’d like to travel.
—Travel’s OK, he said, but education’s better. If I were you, I wouldn’t want to be foolish. Knowledge is power, you know. I would want to find out what was going on. I would want to learn to understand it.
She looked down into her dessert, poking it with her spoon, blushing.
—I’m not so bad as you think. I did know where the Black Sea was, really, I just forgot. And I read a lot, honestly. I just said To Kill a Mockingbird because I thought it was something you’d approve of.
On their way home she slipped her arm into his and clung to him (perhaps it was the drink, perhaps he was walking too fast for her heels). She asked him to lend her one of his books.
—With all of those you’ve got, she said, there must be something I would like.
He thought about it, and when they were home he pulled down for her his copy of Turgenev’s First Love.
* * *
After a couple of weeks, pearl got a job working at virgin Records. She was taught to work the tills and the machine for the debit cards; then she stood behind a counter and took money for goods, over and over, all day long. She said it was boring but OK. A boy began to ring her at home, sometimes on the land line, which Simon answered, hearing his own voice frigid with hostility.
—I’ll just call her. Who did you say it was?
—Tell her it’s Lozzy.
The voice was educated, slurred, and complacent. In Oxford it was perfectly possible for people with those voices to work on the tills in chain stores. Simon couldn’t bring himself to repeat this absurd name to Pearl; he only informed her that she was wanted on the phone. He was swelling in fact with a violent and no doubt irrational mistrust of anyone who came after his daughter. He couldn’t believe that they could want her for herself, that she wasn’t being duped.
Pearl went out in the evenings, perhaps to meet Lozzy or perhaps other friends she had made at work. Simon told her to take care; he said he would be happy to come in the car to pick her up later, if she gave him a ring; he asked her what time she would be back. She threw him a fierce look as abrupt as a snap at his hand.
—Simon! Get off my back!
No one had spoken to him, ever, with such contempt.
He lay awake, listening for her to come home. Sometimes he didn’t hear her key in the door until two or three in the morning. One night he heard her and Lozzy come in together (presumably it was Lozzy? was it worse if it was someone else?), although they must have been tiptoeing scrupulously, taking much more elaborate care than she usually took to be quiet and not wake him. What made him know they were there was not even really distinct sound at all, it was more like the liquid overflow of something warm and sweet; at one point a low bubble of laughter erupted in Pearl’s voice, as if they were stumbling into each other in the dark in the passage, clinging to each other, stifling their mirth in each other’s clothes. Thank God the spare room was at the other end of the flat, the carpets were thick, and the old doors were heavy; there was no chance that he would hear them once they were in there. He strained his ears to make sure he was not hearing them, nonetheless.
That was it.
That was enough. She would have to go, if he was reduced to the grotesquerie of listening out for creaking bedsprings, like some greasy landlady in a northern realist novel. In the morning he lurked in his room, monitoring the progress of their furtive bathroom visits and breakfasting, then bursting out at a moment calculated to confront Lozzy face-to-face before they left for their day behind the counter. They both started guiltily where they were drinking tea in the kitchen, looking wan and used up (too much bed and not enough sleep; hadn’t that been the idiotic joke when he was a teenager?). He could see the beginnings of a sore beside Pearl’s lip. Lozzy was worse even than Simon had imagined: he had one of those white cocky faces, with a turned-up nose, thin lips rather full with blood, and rings in his eyebrows. His hair was cropped to a tight fuzz over his skull, dyed yellow.
—Hi there. Lozzy got in first before Simon said anything.
—Lozzy missed his last bus home, lied Pearl lamely. I said you wouldn’t mind if he slept on my floor.
He did mind. But as there were no words in which he could imagine conveying this without indignity, he silently tested the kettle (empty), filled it splashily at the tap, felt an awareness in his shoulder blades that behind his back they were exchanging conspiratorially amused looks.
Simon’s own sleep patterns started to disintegrate. He had thought he left his childhood insomnia behind him (gentle-handed Ros, whom he had been involved with for a while a few years ago, had been a hypnotherapist and had done wonders with him, for all his skepticis
m). Now it returned to sap his days and nights of goodness and reason. Because of the agonized absurdity of his lying awake at night waiting for Pearl, he once or twice even went out walking round the streets in the small hours as he had done when he was young. Then during the day, because he wasn’t young anymore, he found his mind was clogged with tiredness; he even laid his head down sometimes on his arms and slept in front of the humming screen of his computer. He was astonished at how far, far down the soul could drop out of such a makeshift and snatched repose; hauling it up to consciousness again, when guilt roused him after fifteen or twenty minutes, felt like pulling his resisting heart out of a deep well. His dreams in the instant he tore free seemed voluminous, significant, absorbing; he ached to drop back into them.
How was he supposed to act with Pearl? The first time they crossed paths after his encounter with Lozzy, she looked at him as if she expected him to say something, but he didn’t know how to. Had he presided ingloriously over his daughter’s deflowering? Surely not; he had a distinct memory of Zoe’s telling him, although he hadn’t in the least wanted to hear it, that she and Pearl had talked about which contraception Pearl was using. No doubt Zoe had also told him which this was, although he had chosen not to remember that (and certainly wasn’t going to ask her about it now). When he put a wash in the machine, he found blood-stained knickers in the laundry basket, but then there were more straightforward explanations for that than the loss of anyone’s virginity (and he wasn’t going to ask Pearl about her periods either, although he did notice that over a few days the contents of the box of Tampax Martha kept in his bathroom was depleted). He prowled around in the spare room when Pearl was out and he was meant to be working. He picked up a book with a flowery cloth cover that might have been a diary; he weighed it in his hands and held it for some long minutes but didn’t open it, afraid of what he might read in there about himself, or about a whole kind of living he did not recognize and could not understand. He went away into the kitchen and made himself coffee and took up his collection of Adorno’s essays on music, forcing himself to concentrate on these and not to wonder what Pearl might have written. He was grateful for the teaching and for the ordinary administrative busyness that got him out of the flat and into his office in college. He looked forward to Martha’s return; this surely would fill up his days and steady him. There was something unseemly in his allowing his private angst to take up so much space in his thoughts at a time when the whole world was upside down.
—What did you make of the Turgenev? he asked Pearl tentatively.
—Yeah, I really liked it, it was so sad, she said. I guessed what was going to happen though, right from the first time his father saw the princess in the garden.
—Interesting that of all the Russians it is the Westernizing believer in enlightenment and progress who writes the saddest stories.
—Are they Russian? I thought that they were French. Didn’t they keep saying things in French?
He explained to her about the function of French-speaking in nineteenth-century aristocratic Russia. He also pointed out that the story was set in the country outside Moscow. Did she think that Moscow was in France?
—Oh, I never read the place names. My eye just sort of glances over them.
—I recommend you train yourself to glance back.
—The only bit I didn’t like was the end. I didn’t understand why she let herself be beaten. She kissed her arm where he hit her with his whip. That’s gross.
Simon considered.
—Perhaps your generation of women really won’t ever know about the kind of power that Zinaida has at the beginning; on license, for just as long as she’s young and beautiful and hasn’t given herself to anyone. The trouble is, it only makes fools out of the men; she can’t wait to exchange it for submission to a man worthy of mastering her. I suppose that arrangement sounds fairly horrible to you?
—It doesn’t make her very happy.
—It doesn’t make him very happy either. I’m not sure that happiness is quite the point.
—Why can’t they just be equals?
—Nowadays it would be possible to hope they could, of course. And you are quite right to wish for it. Everyone would be happier. Who would dare to put a name to what might be lost, now that we are inventing new patterns for men’s and women’s behavior? Only one wonders sometimes whether women will really want these bland new men that they have engineered.
—I shouldn’t worry about it, Pearl said. There’s probably a way to go yet, anyway, before we get to bland.
Another day when he was in her room he found English and history essays she must have done for her teachers at the sixth-form college, stuffed crumpled in the bottom of her backpack. (Left there out of profound indifference to such a form of work as if it were mere waste paper, or brought in case she dared to show them to him?) These he read greedily on the spot, frowning at the spelling, reliving the arguments he had had with Zoe when he had offered to pay for Pearl to go to private school. (“How can you?” Zoe had said. “When I think of what you used to profess to believe, once.” He wondered sometimes how he had ever tolerated Zoe’s righteousness, unambiguous as a ringing bell, even for the few years they had lived together.) If Pearl had gone to private school, she would have done better than this raw and unpolished work. There were gleams here and there, however, of something audacious and intelligent, unspoiled. Perhaps if she had gone to private school she would have been more knowing and less true. He was surprised by her penetration of some godawful sentimental-feminist poem she’d been given to analyze; shaken, even, as if he’d stumbled on something she’d concealed from him.
* * *
Martha came back. her summer of research work in the archives had gone well (this was for her book on women and politics in eighteenth-century America). She was surprised to find Pearl still around. Simon had told her on the phone that she was staying, but not for how long. Martha was less warm with her than she had been when Pearl had visited once or twice before for the weekend. She moved some clothes and bits and pieces out of his flat back into her own. When they made love it was at her place, and then Simon didn’t want to sleep the night there; he said he didn’t like to leave Pearl on her own.
Martha sat up in bed with the sheet over her breasts and smoothed her hair back behind her ears. Her hair was thick and very dark, as near as brown can come to black, with rich red lights in it. She wore it long, curling loose halfway down her back. She gave him a glance deep with accumulated questions; her eyes were brown too, almond-shaped and slanting (she had a Portuguese grandmother).
—It strikes me, she said, that Pearl is perfectly capable of looking after herself.
Simon sat up too, so as not to be at a disadvantage.
—I think I ought to be there.
She waited as if for more explanation, but none came.
—What on earth does she do all day? What ever is she up to?
—She’s working almost full-time, Simon protested.
—Yes, but what kind of work? I mean, what are her plans? Aren’t you worried for her future?
He too had felt at first that Pearl’s life, without books, music, study, goals, had nothing in it, and this vacancy had produced in him an anxious desire to fill it up. Now, when Martha complained, he found himself thinking differently. He had come to look on Pearl’s idleness almost with envy. It would be possible to see his own zeal for improvement as a part of a whole history of cultural bullying, rooted in puritan self-punishing; to see Pearl’s resistance to it (her hours of telly watching, her days of sleep, the indifference with which she sold herself to the chain store for those long pointless sessions) as an irrecoverable freedom.
—I don’t think she has plans, he said.
Martha gave an impatient shrug of her naked shoulders. Her long tapering back with its hanging luxuriance of hair was poised and upright; she went to dance class twice a week. She was certainly not going to plead with him to stay.
* * *
He didn’t know whether Pearl had come in while he slept or not; he got up and wrapped himself in his bathrobe to check. Her bedroom door was closed, but he couldn’t remember whether it had been ajar before. He stood hesitating, not liking to open the door just in case she was in there with Lozzy. He heard a subdued moaning. He thought for a moment this could be sex and gathered himself for retreat; then he was sure that Pearl was crying. He knocked and opened the door. In the light from the hallway he saw she was alone, and awake, pushed up on her elbows to see him; she reached over to switch on the bedside lamp. The room flooded in pink light (she had put a red bulb in). She was wearing her usual grubby nightshirt (surely it was time that went into the wash?). Her face was blotched and wet with tears; there was makeup smeared on her pillow.
She was not beautiful. Martha was beautiful: five foot ten, slender and muscular, her cheekbones and jawbone sharp as if carved from flint. Pearl was too indefinite; her face seemed to change shape and character according to her mood and efforts, and her figure when she was older would grow soft and shapeless like Zoe’s mother’s. Her looks touched him, though, as if they were part of himself.
—What is it? he whispered awkwardly.
He had not had to comfort her since she was a small child; he did not know how to do it.
