Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

What was striking however about Fiona Martin, while they were thinking about air in the staff room, was that she was not looking round to see what the others thought, nor was she frowning in the required perplexity, nor did she look anxious or defiant like one of the naughty or dull ones. She was composed and sat straight-backed with her legs crossed, watching Mr. Lloyd steadily, as if expectation of his explanation of the mystery was a quiet pleasure but nothing to make a fuss about. She was very pretty; Zoe had not taken that in adequately, earlier. That would make a difference to how she was treated. She had smooth olive-colored skin, features of a satisfying neatness that insults could not hang on, and fine straight black hair cut off in an unusual bob just above her shoulder (the fashionable way for girls to wear their hair that year was in two low-slung bunches). It ought to have been terrible, to be new, and yet Fiona Martin looked as if she wasn’t afraid.

— If I took all the furniture out, would this room be empty? Mr. Lloyd asked. He held out his cupped hands. Are my hands empty? What’s in my hands now?

They began to understand. There was air, air was everywhere; they waved their hands about in it with sudden consciousness. Paul Andrews, the clown, pretended to get a handful of it and drop it down someone’s back.

— Air, sir. It’s air.

— Lyons, what is it?

— It’s air, sir.

— And air is made up of molecules, like everything else, bouncing against one another and against other molecules. That’s called air pressure: the molecules of the air pressing on everything around them. We don’t feel it because we take it for granted. But we would certainly notice it if it wasn’t there. Watch this.

He explained to them about the molecules of air inside the can becoming farther and farther apart and moving faster and faster as they heated up. Then when the can was very hot he screwed on the lid, using the potholder the staff used for their kettle, and turned the gas off.

— As air cools, it contracts. The air pressure on the inside of the can weakens; it’s pressing less hard than ordinary air. The air outside the can is pressing with normal air pressure. The air outside is pressing in harder than the air inside is pressing out. Watch.

It worked very satisfactorily. Under pressure from something quite invisible and intangible, the solid-seeming metal container buckled and crumpled, giving out twanging, booming noises like protests. Zoe felt it as if it were happening in herself, that invasion and hollowness, that caving in, helpless and extravagant and pleasurable. Fiona Martin watched with a slight unperturbed curve of the lips, as if the exhibition only confirmed something she had long intuited. And the idea of the buckling container became a kind of shorthand sign for Zoe for years afterward, signifying that momentous first encounter with someone who is going to be important and be loved.

* * *

A large proportion of zoe’s efforts at that junior school were devoted to making herself as acceptably inconspicuous as possible. This wasn’t easy; she couldn’t help being determinedly opinionated, anymore than she could help her square pink face and thick light-brown bunches of hair and her sturdy arms and legs (she wasn’t really fat, she knew; Gary Lyons would call anyone fat who wasn’t lean as a knife, as he was). She looked like the Dutch girl in clogs and cap who stood with the Eskimo, the barefoot colored boy, and the little Indian squaw in the picture that hung over the entrance to their classroom, gazing adoringly up at a blond Jesus bringing together the children of the world.

One of the things that Zoe had to keep out of sight at school was her disdain for the present. Once she had come, through books mostly, to believe that there had really been other times in the past when things were done differently, she felt sure that the past must have been a better place. This was first and foremost an aesthetic judgment. She flinched from the raw ugliness of modern things: bleak concrete shopping centers built up where the old streets of the city had been bombed, plastic teenager dolls, and Crimplene clothes. She bothered her mother for stories about the time when she lived with Grandma and Aunt Vera and her cousins in an old gray house on the estuary with no gas or electricity, where there was an orchard and a little stone room for storing the apples, sweet-tasting queer-shaped apples of a kind you couldn’t buy anywhere anymore. When they drove out once to look for the house, all they could find was a filthy carbon factory.

When she went on holiday to the Gower Peninsula with her parents and wound up the car windows going through Port Talbot, she stared straight ahead in shame: the naked innards of the steelworks stank and sprawled across the coastal plain. It was a horror to her, guiltily pushed away just out of reach of conscious thought, that anyone should have to live under those blighted hillsides where the trees were stunted and blackened; it made a shadow in the corner of all her pleasure in the sea and the beach and the cottage they rented, where she played out her games of past times, trailing about in long skirts, baking, washing herself in cold water, stitching elaborate layers of underclothes for her rag dolls (she wouldn’t use nylon lace or plastic buttons).

She couldn’t quite believe that if you pushed hard enough you wouldn’t be able to make the passage through to the past from the present. She read books where children managed this— A Traveller in Time and Tom’s Midnight Garden —and they fueled and sharpened her desire. Real people, astonishingly but unarguably, had once worn these clothes, handled these things; everything that was now saturated with mystery had once been casually used. If you touched them yourself, possessed them, put them on, might you not take on something of the superior substance and depth that the past had, in contrast to the shallow present? This active nostalgia and an elegiac sense that the best things were gone were Zoe’s first strong abstract emotions.

Her cult of the past translated itself into a quite passionate materialism. During this time, her last years at junior school and first years at secondary, there was a craze everywhere for Victoriana, for the old things that only a decade before everybody had been ripping out of their houses in disgust: old dressers, old brass fittings, old fireplaces. Now when Zoe’s parents bought their first house, a teetering, skinny, four-floor, eighteenth-century terrace house that they had to convert from grimy bedsits, her mother papered the lounge in imitation William Morris wallpaper and knocked out a 1930s tiled mantelpiece to expose the original deep recess behind. “Original” became a word of powerful magic. Junk shops were treasure troves, and Zoe and her mother drew together in their deep interest in buying things. Zoe started a collection: a little leather-covered inkwell that clicked open to reveal a glass bottle; a wooden trunk with cast-iron fittings, which Joyce found thrown out on a skip and which they stripped down together; a dove-gray Edwardian silk parasol with drawn-thread work around its rim, given to her for Christmas by her Aunt Ann. Zoe tried to do drawn-thread work herself; she made patchwork and tatted lace on a tiny old ivory shuttle.

She had a couple of friends at school who read the same books and were happy enough to dress up whenever they saw each other at weekends, to play Victorian governesses or ladies and maids. At first she dreamed, against all probability, that Fiona Martin might share her passion for the past. She looked for a sign, an exchange of glances when an extract from The Young Brontës was read out in class, an unnatural informedness with regard to dance programs or gophering irons. But as she grew accustomed to Fiona’s being at school and the sign didn’t come, she realized that she was even glad of it. Fiona wasn’t meant to yearn, as she did. It didn’t matter that Fiona didn’t dream about how things could be otherwise, because Zoe was the imaginer and Fiona was the thing itself: the still point, the Princess.