Tessa Hadley: Everything Will Be All Right

This isn’t because she’s unaware, entirely, of her actual surroundings. The blue walls, which everyone told her would be too dark, do collect a pool of shadows at the center of the room, but Zoe doesn’t mind. She has the lamp switched on even though it’s still light outside, and the gas fire is puttering away. The room is tidy and the supper things washed up. The big clock on the mantelpiece that Aunt Vera (really Great-aunt Vera) passed along when she moved into the retirement home, a real clock with works that need winding with a key and that has required a succession of expensive repairs, ticks out the minutes with calm meditative steadiness, although it tells entirely the wrong time as usual. It’s the end of a gray day in a spell of unusually cold temperatures for late April (a reflex, now, to wonder whether that’s part of natural climatic fluctuation or a result of global warming).

Zoe is aware of Pearl upstairs, too; she suppresses from time to time a twinge of irritation at the music that seeps distractingly into her concentration and keeps a suspicious ear alert to Pearl’s moving around. It’s not just clothes she takes but money, jewelry, Tampax, grass (if Zoe ever buys it), expensive bath oils, shoes. (Zoe’s taller and thinner than her daughter — in fact, she’s very much the shape Pearl would like to be — but unfortunately they have the same shoe size.) A precious bracelet that had belonged to Zoe’s dead grandmother was borrowed without asking, then heedlessly lost in a club somewhere; Pearl denied ever having set eyes on it. Zoe has thought of having a lock put on her bedroom door but decided against it on an issue of principle: you don’t learn respect for other people’s values through being forcibly shut out from them. She sometimes has the sensation of taking part in a painful and potentially disillusioning experiment in conflict resolution.

Zoe doesn’t know yet about the clarinet lesson or the vermouth, and won’t notice the green trousers until it’s too late and Pearl is exiting to a waiting taxi, insolently making a joke out of trying to conceal herself and the trousers among her friends. They will descend the stairs and surge along the narrow hall like a flock of bright-plumaged screeching birds. Unlike Pearl, the friends are always polite with Zoe, but they will collaborate to deceive her nonetheless, crowding in front of Pearl and making charming considerate remarks to distract Zoe’s attention from the trousers. Zoe will not be distracted, probably isn’t even meant to be; it’s only funny for them to pretend to care what she thinks. The trousers will be rolled up round Pearl’s waist because they are too long; even so they will trail down over her shoes, Zoe will see that they are going to be dragged in the dirt and ruined. She will handle it badly, hear her voice fall into the familiar ugly wail of the worn-down and hard-done-by, instead of giving her blessing with graceful superiority to the fait accompli. Pearl, who quite apart from the trousers isn’t even adequately dressed to keep out the cold — bare midriff, plunging neckline, transparent blouse, no coat — will hustle the others through the hall, hissing at them to keep going and trampling their heels and falling over them in her mock haste. (Is she drunk? Already? On what?) And then as the taxi drives off Zoe will only think, with a subsidence of resentment like a plunge of thrashing wings to stillness, how lovely Pearl looked in the trousers anyway.

Then she will go back to her book.

Zoe is used to this sensation of consciousness stretched between two opposed poles, the intensity of immediate personal life on the one hand and the intensity of impersonal intellectual thought on the other. The tension between them seems to her to be the very material of awareness. The only time she lost her gift for balancing the two possibilities was in the first months of motherhood, when she foundered under the sheer weight of material necessities: feeding, washing, cleaning, shopping, walking up and down at night with a baby when she might have been reading a book.

She used to think that women were better at managing the reconciliation between these kinds of awareness because of cultural conditioning: they’d simply never been allowed the privilege of the untrammeled pursuit of thought behind closed study doors. Now she thinks it probably has something to do with evolutionary biology too; it’s probably hardwired. And anyway she doesn’t envy the solitudes of the study anymore. She’s got too used to the unsettling stimulating astringency of the interactions of life and thought. When she sits back down to read about American foreign policy after her fight with Pearl, her heart will be pounding and her pulse racing with her sense of the precariousness of things and her own imperfect capacity in the face of them.

* * *

Zoe’s mother, Joyce, has spent the day with her Aunt Vera. Now they are sitting together, drinking tea in Vera’s room in the retirement home, watching Who Wants to Be a Millionaire on the television. Vera was a teacher at a girls’ school for most of her working life and watches the program regularly, but in a kind of torment. She disapproves of everything about it: the ignorance of most of the contestants, the fact that it’s on ITV, the fact that the contestants compete for money, the tackily dramatic music, the questions about soap operas and film stars. Really, Joyce supposes, Vera would like the format to be more like a school examination, severe and unsmiling and impersonal, conducted in a kind of religious hush, without commentary. This was the context in which Vera shone, all her life. Among all the pale scribbling girls in an examination room, she would be the one who knew with subdued nervous excitement that she was earning an A. So now she can’t resist being tested. Which South American country has both a Pacific and an Atlantic coast? Tomas Masaryk was president of which Central European country before the Second World War: Hungary, Poland, Romania, or Czechoslovakia? She very often knows the answers to these kinds of questions, even though she is ninety-four and has trouble remembering the names of the girls who look after her every day in the home or the news Joyce has told her about the children and grandchildren.

Vera is tall and craggy with age-spotted hanging jowls and iron-gray hair that in its heaviness escapes in wild-looking strands from where she sticks it up with hairpins behind a sort of velvet Alice band. In honor of their day out, a defiant silver and diamond brooch is pinned onto her bosom, which has so lost shape over the years that now it is simply a fat cushion held in place by her belt. The trip was probably a mistake, Joyce thinks ruefully. They haven’t enjoyed themselves. They went to look for the house they had lived in together more than fifty years ago when Joyce was a child: Vera with her two children and Joyce’s mother, Lil, with her three. The old gray square house was only a few miles outside the city, on the flatlands of the estuary near the bridge (fifty years ago there was no bridge, only a pair of ferries that chugged backward and forward across the water, or a long detour by road, for those who were traveling on westward). At Vera’s ninety-fourth birthday party, after a couple of glasses of fizzy wine, pressing her aunt’s hand with its old cold skin loosened from the bones and improbable arthritis-knobbled knuckles, Joyce had decided it would be wonderful to take her out and go see whether the old house was still standing.

She would never learn.

Her husband refused to take part in the quixotic expedition.

— Didn’t we try and find it once before, years ago, he said, and there was just some big sprawling kind of industrial plant?

— I don’t think so, Joyce said. I don’t think we were ever sure we’d found the right place. The roads had all changed.