Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

Zoe had got a job for the summer, working in a dry cleaners in St. Peters. They had the contract for the New Theatre; there had been flooding in the theater wardrobes. It was Zoe’s special assignment to go through the plastic bags of sodden costumes, ticketing them and sorting them for treatment, growing emotional from handling the sad largesse of soggy flounces, brocades, beads, veils, velvets. She worked in a big airless back room and didn’t often need to visit the front of the shop, but one afternoon she went in to ask the manageress something about her hours just as a customer was going out of the door: a young dark-haired woman, pregnant, struggling with a baby in a push chair and a small child on reins. It was only after Zoe had asked Mrs. Doyle her question that she was suddenly convinced this customer had been Fiona Martin. Explaining hurriedly, knowing how foolish she must seem, she scrambled under the counter and ran after her into the street. There was quite a crowd of shoppers and several women with push chairs.

She called Fiona’s name, and one of them turned round. She really looked very like Fiona, although her long hair was hennaed and tangled and she was dressed carelessly in an old T-shirt and slacks stretched over her pregnant stomach, as if she hadn’t even looked in a mirror that morning. Her face (if she was Fiona) was still fresh and her eyebrows had grown back into their pure clear line. She did smile and look hard at Zoe, but only for a moment or two, before turning away, as if after all she hadn’t recognized her, and forging on with the push chair, hitching the reins a half turn tighter round her hand to keep the walking child close by her side.

Zoe checked the ticket on the garment she had deposited and it wasn’t in any name she knew; but then, Fiona would probably have been married. She had hoped it might be something pretty for her imagination to work on, a party dress, something springlike; but it was only a man’s cheap suit, worn and with something spilled down the front of the jacket. Mrs. Doyle promised her that if anyone came in to pick it up while Zoe was there she’d let her know (Zoe did check from time to time, and one day the suit was gone without anyone having mentioned it). For some reason this nonencounter was a strong blow; Mrs. Doyle found Zoe half an hour later struggling in tears over a bronze-colored satin petticoat thick with stinking mud too wet to brush off. She made her a hot sweet cup of tea and put an arm around her shoulders, blaming the dry cleaning chemicals.

Zoe read all sorts of things into the young woman’s long look at her (it grew longer in memory): irony; condemnation; a knowledge of Zoe’s life, all her superficial success, her self-important cleverness; an intimation of unreality in Zoe’s very existence. Fiona hadn’t even been willing to exchange a few words with her, as though she suspected that Zoe’s very desire for her friendship was something fake, something to show off, some deal Zoe was trying to make to get absolution for her own privilege, for university, for “Cambridge,” for arty parents and a big house.

Probably, Zoe knew, she had made all this up. Probably the woman hadn’t been Fiona in the first place, just some projection onto a stranger of her idea of how Fiona’s life might have been: her body subdued to the discipline of that unimaginable mother’s life, her expression one of weary skepticism, as if she was awakened to something Zoe hadn’t even begun to be able to see.

Usually, Zoe didn’t stay the night with Simon. After they’d finished making love he would send her home, always much too soon for Zoe, who would be drifting into a sweet heaviness among the crumpled dragged sheets and the mounds of pillow and kicked-aside duvet. She would have given anything to sink down and down and find her sleep inside the heat of his nearness, inside the smell of him, peppery and astringent. But Simon would never lie stilled and satisfied for long. If she lay with her face pressed against his fine rib cage or his long honey-brown back she felt the change of his mood distinctly, like something chemical altering in his tissues: abandonment and languor transforming into alertness, then restlessness, and then, if she stayed too long, or resisted or protested, into impatience. So she would force herself awake, and find and pull on the clothes she had carelessly torn off, and fish around on the dark floor for her sandals. Her head would be swimming and her legs still trembling. Sometimes she even felt nauseated: this was shock at the sheer effort, she thought, of taking back into rational possession the flesh that had been so opened up and lost.

Simon would get up and put on his jeans and help her find her things. He would come with her to the back door and check that her bike lamp worked. He didn’t like her to kiss him goodbye; he said he “preferred to keep things separate.” She cycled off, doing her best not to wobble for as long as he could see her, making her way confusedly until she woke up properly to the empty night streets: a narrow way between sleeping terraced cottages, then Mitchams Corner roundabout, where in the day the lanes of traffic thundered but now the traffic lights often changed color only for her, although she still obediently waited, one foot on the road, when they were on red. Sometimes, although she never remembered this when she was with Simon, she was afraid as she pedaled home: that someone would leap from the bushes and drag her down as she crossed Jesus Green or that when she had to get into college through the underground bike shed because the gates were locked, someone would be lurking there to rape her and smother her.

It was a cold winter. By the time she climbed the staircase to her room, her jaw would be in spasms of shuddering and her hands even inside her gloves would be frozen into the shape of her grip on the handlebars. Because her room was one of the modern conversions in the attic, it didn’t have a gas fire, only an inadequate electric heater, so when she undressed for the second time she kept her socks and pants and T-shirt on under her nightdress, piled her coat and dressing gown on top of her duvet, and lay shivering in her bed, hugging her knees. She didn’t mind all this. She imagined that somehow she was testing herself, hardening herself, making herself more like Simon. In her half sleep she dreamed that she was hugging cold steel to her breast and that even the pain it caused did her honor.

* * *

Simon told her he had been insomniac since he was a child; night had become the time when he read and wrote. A big old office desk, stained with ink and scarred with ancient jagged scratches as if someone had once raged against it, was pulled under the window of his room in the house he shared with student friends. The walls of the room were papered in a glowering green splodged with brown motifs that sometimes looked like grinning demon faces; he didn’t care, he didn’t notice it. When Zoe was gone, he worked. When she returned, the desk would be heaped with new piles of books bent open to some important page, new sheets of scribbled notes in his neat black writing, difficult to decipher because he formed so many of the letters with the same steep uphill curves. His reading often had nothing to do with the papers he was supposed to be preparing for, but his supervisors didn’t seem to mind. One week it was American poets: Ashbery and Ed Dorn. (He didn’t like Ginsberg.) The next week it was Arthur Golding’s translations of Ovid, and then Brecht’s Little Organum for the Theatre and then Villon, and then critical books and books of philosophy (new names to her: Saussure and Barthes). He would crawl into bed before dawn and sleep all through the morning; he never went to any lectures.