Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

Within a couple of weeks of beginning at Amery-James, Zoe felt differently. The rituals that were soothing to read about in books were irksome and depressing to live inside. Days were beset with pitfalls and anxieties: Had you remembered to hand in your maths homework on the right morning? Had your mother remembered to sew your name tape in your knickers in case there was a spot check? Had you returned your library books and brought in your science overall and your cakes for the cake sale for the Form Charity? Joyce found for Zoe a green mac that was not quite the green mac sanctioned by the uniform list. The teachers would pull her humiliatingly out of the crocodile of girls on their way to the sports field to lecture her on how it was unacceptable. She had to visit the secondhand cupboard again and buy a mac of the right kind.

Certain teachers, especially the older ones — Miss Webb, Miss Anstruther, Miss Langley — cultivated a game it was dangerous to become involved with, in which a brutal unsheathed cruelty (personal insults, contempt, a lashing loss of temper, shouting) would alternate with rewards, flashes of comradely inclusiveness, a calculated letting down of guards. The game’s brutality was sanctioned by the brutality of intellectual competition in the world outside, which was after all the raison d’être of the school. The physics teacher brought their marked homework into the classroom in three piles: good, acceptable, and unacceptable. The unacceptable pile wasn’t only of work done carelessly or incompletely; some of the girls had tried hard but simply not understood. The sheer burden of work seemed crushing. Under the school’s discipline Zoe learned French and Latin effectively (which no one seemed to do at Langham Road) and struggled with the most advanced Nuffield science teaching. Even though she liked English and her English teacher, the books she read there (George Eliot, Kipling, Robert Frost, Hopkins) were so contaminated for her by the place that she was not able to touch them again for years afterward. Every evening after school there were two or three hours of homework. In the lunch break, faced with an afternoon of maths and double Latin, Zoe’s heart would quail. It could not be endurable; surely something would give way. But of course it was endurable, it was only school and not real torture, and at last the clock would deliver up home time and the walk to the bus, which waited in a somnolent lull for twenty minutes on the suburban corner before it turned around for its return journey into town. Here at last was repose; in the gap before the driver started up the engine and the conductor came selling tickets, she sank into herself, dreaming, alone, hugging her briefcase on her knees, turning her head away if girls in green uniform got on.

In assembly and at commemoration services, the girls were addressed as if they were part of some ennobling crusade on behalf of enlightenment. Zoe was shocked to find herself bitterly and implacably opposed to the very principle of the place. She wasn’t much liked by the teachers or by many of the girls; she could see herself that there was something unattractive in how she cherished her apartness: unresponsive in class, refusing to be charmed when the teachers were funny and courted them, skeptical of the togetherness of the gangs of girls. One of the fiercest of the teachers, Miss Webb, with frozen pale blue eyes and white hair wound in a plait around her head, took passionately against her.

— I see Zoe Deare is wearing her usual charming scowl, she would say, enlisting the rest of the class on her side in a spatter of giggles and exchanged gleams of treacherous amusement. Do you have a pain, Zoe?

Zoe was absentminded, hopeless at remembering all those little details of preparation that could ensure an uneventful life at Amery-James. One day she had been supposed to bring a board and a plastic bag into Miss Webb’s geography class, where they were going to make clay models of a shadoof, an ancient Egyptian irrigation system. Miss Webb boiled over into a torrent of righteous chastisement when Zoe turned out to be the only one who had forgotten. She actually took her by the shoulders and backed her across the classroom, shaking her so that her hair bunches flew and berating her in panting breathy bursts. The class drank up the spectacle in hot-faced silence.

— Little sour-faced miss … lazy, sloppy, sulky attitude … your sort of girls don’t get anywhere in a school like this. Don’t think I don’t know your type!

— I don’t even want to! shouted Zoe in bewilderment. I don’t even like this school!

— And this school doesn’t like you very much, either!

After this episode, Ray and Joyce went to see the headmistress, and Zoe was taken out of Miss Webb’s class.

Later, much later, Zoe was able to appreciate that the lives of some of these teachers must have been pioneering in their dedication to women’s education. Some of them had no doubt sacrificed married life and family in order to keep their independence and pursue their careers; probably some of them, their names in gold up on the honors board in the hall, had been to university at a time when women were not even awarded degrees. Zoe’s own Great-aunt Vera, when she was at Amery-James, had been by all accounts (including her own) one of the fierce and arbitrary teachers, and yet Zoe liked her. She never quite found a way to explain to her great-aunt that she and Amery-James had found themselves incompatible. Vera had been so proud when she got her free place and had bought her the black leather briefcase she at first eagerly filled with books. With twinges of guilt, Zoe allowed her to think that she had become one of those girls who romped and cheered and belonged. It was a revelation anyway, when her aunt talked, to hear the teachers referred to by their first names: Jennie Anstruther, Ruth Marsh (the English teacher Zoe liked), Beth Webb. Behind their school shapes they sounded suddenly girlish and tentative and incomplete. She never told Aunt Vera about her quarrel with Miss Webb. At least she could safely report her marks, which were always rather surprisingly good, considering how her teachers despaired of her.

Zoe’s family moved again at the end of her first year, this time to a tall Hilltop terraced house that had been a girl students’ residence, so that it had gas rings in every room and a rope fire escape wound on a red-painted reel in a bathroom with five sinks. (Joyce dedicated herself energetically, indefatigably, to her vision of its transformation; she made it beautiful.) From the new house it was only a fifteen minute walk to Fiona’s; she and Zoe made lingering transitions between their homes, looking together in all the shop windows on Clore Hill at things they planned to save for: felt pens, autograph books, sewing sets (Zoe), those electric lights filled with slowly moving blobs of different-colored oils (Fiona). They bought licorice and Parma Violets in the sweet shop.

Fiona listened to Zoe’s tales of Miss Webb.

— I don’t know how she’d get on at our school, she said. The boys are terrible for mucking about.

— Are they? asked Zoe, with a voluptuous inner shudder. What do they do? What do they do exactly?

She longed for mucking about. She even thought tenderly of Paul Andrews and his banging desk lids.

— Nicking pencil cases and chucking them around, said Fiona. Or flicking stuff, chewed-up lumps of paper and things. The latest is trying to set fire to their haversacks. It’s pretty boring.

To Zoe, whose lessons mostly passed in a subdued silence, this sounded as exciting as a carnival.

* * *

Zoe, who had been such an easy child, became moody and distant at home. Joyce found in her bedroom lugubrious messages she had written to herself for the first day of the holiday. “Appreciate to the full this wonderful day of freedom. How lucky you are. Six whole weeks! Don’t waste this precious time.” From Ray’s vantage point in his new first floor studio, spacious and full of good light, he could see his green-clad daughter plod into view at half past four every afternoon, weighed down with her briefcase, snuffed under her horrible hat. He mourned the bossy bouncing child she had been, full of schemes and passions. Joyce and he agreed that she didn’t have to stay on at the ghastly place. He rather liked the idea of taking his daughter out of the school everyone else was trying to get their daughters into; after all, they were Labour voters and supposed to believe in a state education system.