Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

It was true that this wouldn’t have fit in with Zoe’s rhythms at all. She was up before eight and always had a good breakfast of muesli and whole wheat toast, to set her up for lectures and work in the university library. Simon woke in the afternoon, and drank black coffee, and hardly remembered to eat unless she brought him something. He wouldn’t sit down to a meal but cut himself pieces of cheese or bread and ate them while walking about or looking out of the window. Sometimes one of the others in the house cooked a pan of chili or spaghetti Bolognese, and they would all eat standing up in the kitchen, which nobody ever cleaned, with its sink full of dishes and its burned pans and the patina of oily grime on all its surfaces. Zoe admired the kitchen as evidence of their minds on higher things.

She had known from the first time she saw him that Simon was brilliant. When she came to the college for her interview, she had been put in the charge of a first-year historian with straw-dry fair hair and blotched-pink plump arms and circles of sweat on her shirt who was supposed to take her on a tour and talk about her experiences of university life. Her name was Amanda. (They had studiously avoided recognizing each other ever since Zoe turned up the following October in her own right.) Zoe suspected that Amanda’s experiences of university life thus far had not been altogether sweet and she was understandably reluctant to share them; also, she was having trouble that day with the leather thong that fastened one of her sandals. At Amanda’s very worst moment — when her sandal had slipped right in the middle of crossing a busy road with fast cars and she had had to save herself in a sort of undignified running stumble, hanging on to her heel — a boy had passed them going the other way, pausing to look up and down at the traffic just long enough for Zoe to take him in, not even seeming to see the two girls caught out in their weakness at his feet.

— Who was that? Zoe asked.

Amanda could hardly be expected to recognize every student they saw. However, something in her hot face and angry concentration bent over her sandal gave away how his passing caused a definitive sharpening of her pain. She didn’t even bother to pretend to turn around to see who Zoe meant.

— Simon Macy, she spat out. English scholarship. First year. Very brilliant, apparently. Destined for great things and all that. I’ve never spoken to him, so I’ve got no idea.

Neither of them chose to mention his narrow hips, the long wolfish lean lope, the skinny T-shirt under an Oxfam-shop suit jacket, the straight jeans, and the Chinese canvas sandals. Or the stormy marks on the fine clear face, purple shadows under his eyes and beside his nose, a tension where his jaw was hinged, the shadow of a mustache on his upper lip. Or the thick long brown-black hair pushed carelessly behind his ears, or the cigarette held dangling in his fingers. These were imprinted, though, on Zoe’s imagination, even before she heard that he was also destined for greatness.

When she decided at Langham Road to take the Cambridge entrance examination, she hadn’t had any idea which college to apply to. No one in her family had been to Cambridge, and only one of her teachers. She browsed through the brochure and chose the place that looked nicest in the photograph. Only a few of the colleges were mixed. She wouldn’t contemplate an all-girls’ college; she thought it would be like Amery-James all over again. What luck, she thought, when she saw Simon! What luck to have chosen his college. She only thought that if she got in she would see him from time to time. She never dreamed she would ever speak to him.

* * *

The others who lived in simon’s house were fairly brilliant too, although they weren’t so beautiful. Marty, with untidy shoulder-length curls and dark-rimmed glasses, was a gifted linguist doing Arch and Anth (Modern Languages too boring, just translation and the lower forms of criticism). Joshua, freckled and lisping, was supposed to be doing English, although he smoked too much and never finished any work and Peterhouse had threatened to kick him out: his dad was an Oxford economist and a friend of Michael Foot. Lennard had a strong Manchester accent and a proletarian rage, although his parents were teachers at a grammar school; he was tiny and vivid and spotted and did history, favouring the annales approach of Braudel and Bloch. Zoe was the only girlfriend. Lennard was intermittently in pursuit of a half-Polish nurse with a wide heart-shaped face, slanting eyes, and shapely breasts; whenever Trina came round they all commented afterward on how good it was to spend time with someone from the “real world” and how refreshing her intuitive sound judgment. She made them almost meek. She told them their kitchen was disgusting and refused to eat anything they cooked in it.

These friends were vociferous in their arguments. They did not argue about personal things, they treated one another’s private lives with elaborate tactful avoidance, almost squeamishness. Simon, for instance, did not know until Zoe told him that Marty had two younger sisters or that Joshua had been desperately ill when he was fifteen with hepatitis. But they reserved for one another’s opinions a bluntness and cavalier contempt that made Zoe quake. Marty was a member of the Cambridge Amnesty International group and sat for hours in a cage outside Kings to raise awareness; Lennard hung around and shouted through the bars at him that human rights were a bourgeois conception and Amnesty a tool of American imperial ideology. Simon argued that the future of literary analysis probably lay in computer-assisted readings of stylistics; Joshua groaned and said that was just more clever boys solving chess problems. Simon thought English was a subject for dilettante belle-lettrists anyway, and history dreary empiricism; he would have done sciences, only his maths wasn’t good enough. Marty argued that Simon’s beloved Brecht had betrayed the proletariat in the 1953 uprising in the GDR and that his layman’s enthusiasm for Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology ignored the problems there were in reconciling his closed systems with the results of fieldwork.

— Brecht’s not my beloved anything, said Simon. Although you’re being pigheadedly naive about the options available to him in 1953. But I don’t have beloved writers. Love doesn’t come into it. If you want the smearing of disgusting empathy across the text, it’s Josh who goes in for that kind of thing.

— Fuck you, said Josh. Fuck fuck fuck you, you cunt.

— You see? said Simon. For him it’s all feeling.

They didn’t argue with Zoe.

She was very tentative, anyway, in putting her opinions to them; these were all second-years, living out in their own place free from the childishness of life in college. She had no idea how you attained their kind of bold certainty, which was almost a physical attribute like deep voices or broad shoulders; she felt her own inward contemplation much less steady and more flickering than theirs. And so when she proffered something into the conversation, it tended to produce a blank effect, like a missed beat in a complex pattern of exchange and response; or Marty would kindly pick up something close to what she’d dropped as if he was covering for her. Simon in particular never responded directly to anything she said, unless they were alone.

They were talking, for example, about the kidnappings (there had been a spate of them: Schleyer in the autumn, Empain and Moro in the new year). The newspapers printed the photograph the Red Brigade had sent to Moro’s family; he was holding a copy of La Repubblica with the headline MORO ASSASSINATO? Lennard called it the symbolic enactment of profound class antagonisms; Marty feared the romance with terrorism was a dangerous distraction for left politics.