Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

— They’re not fools, said Simon. Look at how cleverly the photograph exploits a classical aesthetic: the powerful man brought low; the end already known and named; the moral painted on the wall behind. It’s pure spectacle.

— I wonder what he thinks, said Zoe. I wonder what he was thinking while the picture was taken.

Simon got up abruptly and left the kitchen. He would do this in the middle of a conversation; afterward she would find him reading in another room.

Lennard hunted with fierce rustlings through the rest of the newspaper.

— Who knows the footie scores?

— Do you think he only hates them? Zoe persisted. Or do you think it’s possible he begins to see himself through their eyes?

— Did City win?

— It’s a sweet idea, Zoe, said Marty.

— But who cares? said Lennard. It isn’t personal. He isn’t a person, he’s the representative of a system.

When Moro’s body was found a few weeks later in the boot of a car, Zoe felt as if it was a response to her sentimentality: a brutal shutting up of hopefulness and personal interest.

She studied the things that Trina said, which everybody liked. This was because Trina was natural; she wasn’t trying to impress anyone, she didn’t think before she spoke. Zoe could perhaps have tried playing the role of this natural female, washing up their dishes and chiding them for their laziness and dirtiness, chattering about shopping and clothes. But then this wouldn’t in fact have been natural in her, only another complicating layer of falsity, in which Simon would surely have found her out.

* * *

Zoe was able to see the romance of the old university. she experienced an appropriate thud of aesthetic response whenever she walked up over the Backs, past the gardens and over the bridge and into the seventeenth-century college court. And yet she never felt it was really hers. She was only admiring those things as a passer-through. Also, she found herself fairly indifferent to the weight of tradition that squeezed some of the other students so painfully. She only once wore her gown and had formal dinner in Hall, with Latin grace. After that she used the cafeteria in the basement. The oldness of the university and its complex hierarchies and all the inhibiting burden of competition and thirst for acceptance that it imposed didn’t loom dreadfully and overwhelmingly for her; they didn’t interest her much. People anxiously questioned about where you had been to school. She told them proudly that she had come from a comprehensive (Amery-James was her secret.) In the political climate of the late 1970s they were obliged to respect you for that, whatever they privately thought.

She was probably able to step around the workings of the place so casually because she was a girl. The traditions of belonging weren’t designed around girls; it was easy not to be hooked in. Her mother had hinted that at Cambridge at last she would meet boys who’d appreciate her (no doubt doing some private calculations about the tiny numbers of women in relation to men). But in reality the effect of that outnumbering when she first got there, before she had Simon, was that it had made Zoe feel invisible, canceled out. Of course there were a few beauties among the girls, who attracted attention and were feted and pursued. But she was never going to be one of those. She had dressed so as to make sure no one even thought she was trying to be one of those, in trousers and sweaters and a duffel coat.

She had worked hard from the beginning, but that hadn’t been entirely satisfactory either. What she had expected when she came was passionate argument; instead, for the first few months she had the sensation of swallowing down mouthfuls of ideas she wasn’t able to share with anyone. You were supposed to pour out all your arguments in writing in your essay, and then your supervisor would make a few responses in the margin or explain some controversy of interpretation of the facts or recommend further reading. This wasn’t the exchange she had longed for. And she had got herself into a group of nice-enough friends who would only talk about their subject chaffingly, jokingly. They loved history, they often knew more than she did, they could confound her with their information, but the way they spoke about it kept it fenced in like an absorbing hobby. They teased Zoe for taking things too seriously.

Simon embodied the intellectual passion she had dreamed of. He made no separation between his life and his work. He reacted to books with a fierce partisanship, as if writing were a matter as serious as life and death. She knew he changed himself, in response to what he read. Perhaps Zoe still didn’t get the arguments she had expected. But she didn’t mind swallowing down her own ideas, as long as she could be sure she was submitting to the real, the superior, thing.

* * *

Simon told zoe things he never told anyone else. under the hot dark tent of the duvet — their bodies tangled together in his single bed so that she couldn’t see his face, his voice muffled in the pillow, vibrating in his chest where she pressed her head against him — he let slip fragments of information about himself. The broken pieces were often confusing and incomplete, as if he was giving them to her deliberately in a code she didn’t yet know how to read; she put all her effort into patiently learning to interpret the least stirrings of his thought, his most opaque remarks. She hardly knew where this confidence of his came from, that she could be trusted to guard what she knew about him with instincts of concealment and protectiveness as fierce as his own. But he was right to trust her; she didn’t tell anyone, not for years and years.

She told him plenty about her life, too, and readily, when he seemed to want to know; he would listen with affectionate interest. When they were alone he called her his “pony” because of her long mane of straight light-brown hair, and her fringe always falling over her eyes. He was surprised when she said she didn’t think she was pretty. (“You’re nice,” he said. “Clear eyes, these straight eyebrows like brushstrokes, this wide sensual mouth she keeps so carefully closed. A shy pony, nervous with strangers but will take food at my hand. Why would I have wanted her, if I hadn’t thought she was nice?”) She told him she had been an obstinate little girl and an awkward teenager, and he found for her a Goethe poem — one of the Roman Elegies — that said the vine blossoms were unpromising but the ripe grapes “yielded nectar for gods and men.” She felt blessed; she learned the poem by heart (in German, which she scarcely understood). But their confidences were not given in an arrangement of mutual exchange. Hers were daylight stories (at worst, maybe her mother was having an affair); she felt ashamed now that she had ever thought she suffered.

Simon had had an older brother who had killed himself at Oxford when Simon was thirteen. He hadn’t left any note; it was even just possible that he had overdosed accidentally (the inquest had been inconclusive). Before he died he had broken up with his girlfriend (but she wasn’t important, Simon said); also, he had only got a 2.1 in his PPE finals, when he had been predicted for a First. Simon’s brother had told him what to read and what to laugh at and how to play cricket. He had written letters to Simon at boarding school every week, with funny drawings of himself falling asleep over his books, or dancing at a party, or waving placards in some political demonstration.

— I was bewildered. His death bewildered me. At that age.

— Of course, she whispered.

— Bewilder: “to lose in pathless places.”

— Yes.

— A couple of years after that, I wanted to fuck his girlfriend. I mean, before I even knew how. Ex-girlfriend. The one who, maybe. That grew to a fixation for a bit. I thought I knew how to find her. I had this idea, about if I did.