Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

Then the tiredness hit her, like a cosh, at about eleven, when she put Daniel down for his nap and took the chocolate pudding out from the fridge and helped herself to a big bowlful (her diet seemed trivial, compared to what was happening in her marriage). When she had eaten it, she felt sick and thought she might lie down on the sofa to snatch some sleep for half an hour before she began to prepare the Sunday dinner. Zoe would be all right, Nana Deare had taught her to knit, and she was practicing. It was true that she couldn’t turn round at the end of a row, so that every ten minutes she had to come to Joyce to put the needles back into her hands facing the other way; but Joyce was sure she would be able to do that in her sleep.

As soon as she closed her eyes she remembered the plait of hair, which had lain forgotten in its tissue paper in the bottom of her handbag ever since she came home from the hairdresser’s. It seemed somehow disrespectful to leave it there unregarded any longer; even risky, although she didn’t know exactly what was at risk, except that the hair left for too long washing around in the depths of the bag might pick up bits of lint and dirt from the loose coins. So she stood up again, crossed the hall, opened the bedroom door, signing to Zoe to keep quiet, then tiptoed cautiously into the half-dark. The curtains were closed, the room smelled fustily of sleep, the hump of her husband snored from under the blankets pulled up over his head. Her handbag was still where she had put it down when she came in from her failed attempt at adultery early that morning. With an odd sense of enacting something like a ceremony, she pulled open her underwear drawer, lifted the plait from her bag, sinuous and suggestive in its crinkling paper, and buried it at the back of the drawer under all the layers of her things.

The thought came to her unbidden, that the plait would keep its color through all the years while her own hair turned gray.

In Zoe’s memory, Fiona first came to their school the day they did air pressure. At junior school they only did science in an occasional desultory way, when their excitable Welsh teacher was in the mood for it. Drawing autumn leaves or testing milk and vinegar with litmus paper was a glamorous respite from the routines of English comprehension and maths.

On this particular day (they were Junior Three, so Zoe was ten years old), he crowded the whole class into the staff room, which was enough of an adventure in itself; this was normally a forbidden sanctum whose threshold they were not allowed to cross. The children were usually allowed in here only if they had fainted or been sick and were waiting, perhaps wrapped in the old blue cellular blanket, to be collected by a parent. It was always consoling to be reminded that this snug refuge was only a step away from the rough struggle of the echoing lofty classrooms, with their gothic windows too high to look out from. The staff room was homey, with a gas fire and armchairs and crocheted cushion covers smelling of mothballs; there was a tray with a teapot and knitted cosy, jars of coffee and sugar, and a biscuit barrel with a wicker handle. The teachers’ coats were hung up on hooks in one corner, proving that they really did sometimes go home and have real lives elsewhere. Zoe was prone to a little rush of worship at the thought of her teachers’ private lives. She was really very happy at that school.

Beside the fire was a gas ring where the teachers boiled their kettle. Mr. Lloyd had brought in from home an empty metal paraffin can with a screw lid. He impressed upon them, first, that they were not to touch anything — anything — in the staff room; second, that this experiment was much too dangerous for them ever to try for themselves; and, third, that it would have been even more dangerous if he hadn’t scrupulously washed out every trace of paraffin before he started. Then he put the empty can with its lid unscrewed onto the gas ring and began to heat it.

It was of course the aura of danger that the children loved with this teacher. This was true even when they weren’t doing science, even when they were writing out, say, five sentences with speech marks at the beginning, five sentences with speech marks at the end, and five with speech marks in the middle; or multiplying nineteen pounds, seventeen shillings, and eightpence ha’penny by 7, 9, and 11. He was a short, springy, vital man with a lock of shining black hair that flopped forward and had to be tossed back out of his eyes, a passionate Baptist who explained to them as if it were a truth that brooked no argument the flawed logic of the Roman Catholic celebration of Christ’s suffering. He cultivated a volatile and histrionic relationship with his classes, irresistible to certain of the girls and the cleverer boys. It did not occur to Zoe at the time to wonder how those other boys felt about him, the ones whose failures were the necessary grist to his teaching performances, those whose ears he twisted or whose legs he slapped across the back of the knee.

— What’s inside this can? he asked them, while it was heating.

Surely that was easy.

There was a whole ritual performance attached in Mr. Lloyd’s class to the answering of questions. If you knew the answer — or, riskily, if you didn’t but thought he wouldn’t pick on you — you thrust your arm up and called out “Sir! sir!” urgently, eagerly. Mr. Lloyd meanwhile would fasten on one of the children, usually one of the boys who didn’t know the answer, and persist in trying to elicit it from him. Those who knew, or were pretending they knew and had probably by now forgotten that they didn’t, would carry on calling out, pumping their arms in the air, and — not in the staff room obviously, but if they were in their normal classroom — actually climbing onto their chairs and jumping up and down on them, in a crescendo of desperate appeal. This wasn’t an occasional performance but repeated every day, usually over times tables or spellings. Mr. Lloyd would eventually turn in disgust from the ignoramus he was persecuting and ask one of the panting, desperately certain ones; sometimes it would turn out that he or she had no idea of the answer either. Then the others who had subsided momentarily into a post-climactic lassitude would revive and start the chanting and pumping of fists in the air again.

— Sir! Sir!

But today no one, not even Zoe or Barbara Mole or Pamela Warren or Neil Ashley or David Tew, or any of the others who were usually to be counted on, could give the right answer.

— What’s inside this can? he said again, smiling at them, enjoying their perplexity.

Nothing, they were sure. He had turned it upside down; he had passed it around; they were sure it was empty.

— There’s something inside this can, he said. What is it?

The answer dawned slowly. You could see one or two hug the possibility to themselves, then look round cautiously to see if others were thinking the same thing, putting their hands tentatively halfway up.

Zoe saw where the new girl was sitting. She had been introduced to them that morning, and Zoe had felt the customary mixture of pity and initiated smugness at the thought of the tangled web of school codes and hierarchies that was bound to trip her up and expose her before she learned to fit in. Her name was Fiona Martin. That might be a point of vulnerability to begin with; the boys might call her Martin, with its humiliating implications of uncertain gender and a taint of maleness. She was also wearing a woolly homemade-looking top and skirt, very neat, in brown. Zoe had once worn a woolly skirt her Grandma Lil had knitted her, and Gary Lyons in words seared onto Zoe’s memory had asked if it didn’t “itch her fat arse.” She had refused ever to wear that skirt to school again.