Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

— Was she important after all, then?

— And since then I don’t sleep. Not nightmares, just awakeness. This power to hold up everything in my mind; it’s like a bright light switched on. Sometimes I think I can see everything. It’s like radar; when I look at a page I can see right through it, how it’s put together and why.

— Yes.

— I burnt Ricky’s letters. Couldn’t bear the thought of my mother getting her hands on them. Anyway, I got too old. Had to leave them behind.

— Why not your mother?

— Oh. You don’t know what they’re like. What they turned it all into.

He told her about the family house in St. Johns Wood, worth a quarter of a million; they also had a flat in Lewes and a house in Scotland. His father had been something big in ICI. There was a visitors’ book in the guest room (“they don’t have real friends, they wouldn’t know how”), and over the grand piano in the sitting room hung a portrait of his brother painted in his Winchester scholar’s gown.

— The piano isn’t there because they like music. Why did I have viola lessons every week for twelve years? It’s just “done.” How would you know you had children if you weren’t shelling out for the right school and all the appropriate cultural trimmings?

He told her how he’d fought with his father — physically, punching and kicking — when he was home from school one weekend age seventeen, and how his mother had called the police and had him arrested and he had spent the night in a police cell.

— It was because I was going around the streets at that time in bare feet. He tried to make me put shoes on. That’s why I kicked him first; he was trying to force these horrible brogues of his — you know, from some fucking Bond Street shoe shop — onto my feet. Without any socks or anything. But it was her fault. She started it. With some remark about her floors. I mean, as if my feet were any dirtier than shoes. But of course they were too naked. The real, forbidden kind of naked. Not the bikini, décolletage, socially sanctioned kind.

After Christmas his parents sent him a letter and a check (he was on the minimum grant, because of their income). Cross-legged on the stained and greasy carpet in the glow of the gas fire, his hair falling forward across his frown, Simon rolled himself a joint in fingers that actually shook: “to smoke them out of my mind.”

— It’s a kind enough letter, Zoe said lamely.

— That’s because you have no idea. Why couldn’t my father have given me the check when I was home? Then we could have looked each other in the eye for once. They’re angry with me because I won’t feel guilty taking their fucking money.

— There’s no sign that they’re angry with you. They seem very interested in what you’re doing.

— Anesthetized politeness alternating with bouts of inchoate violence. The bourgeois ethos precisely. The smothered horrors in its family life analogous precisely with its effects in the political world. How charming do you think Pinochet is at dinner parties? While at the very same moment — in the same synchronized moment in real time, say, that the Nuits-Saint Georges is being brought round by soundless-footed waiters — his special forces are dropping political prisoners out of helicopters over the sea. Under the same white moon.

— But your father isn’t Pinochet.

He looked on her darkly.

— You want to know what involvements ICI have in most of the places that figure pretty largely in Marty’s Amnesty handbook? How much time do you have?

— No, no, I do sort of know. But it’s not quite the same. I mean, there is a difference of scale. Your father hasn’t ordered anyone to be killed.

— That’s exactly the mistake that sentimental revisionism makes: imagining you can draw the line somewhere, not understanding the totalizing bourgeois worldview, how it contaminates everything it comes in contact with. It hollows out the truth and replaces it with shams that only look on the surface like real things. If you want to save yourself, you have to repudiate the whole lot, get it out from under your skin. It’s respectable housewives shopping for Yves Saint-Laurent in Selfridges who cause blood to be shed in Angola and Eritrea.

— So what should we do? asked Zoe, chastened. To live differently.

— Not torchlit Broad Left marches or picketing at Grunwick or sending telegrams of solidarity to the Chilean people, that’s for certain. Or the Nursery Action Group.

— What, then? she said, after a pause.

He shook back his hair impatiently.

— You have to change your mind. Actually change your mind.

Zoe bent over his mother’s letter again. There was news of relatives Zoe hadn’t heard of, of a dog who wasn’t well. Simon wasn’t to work too hard or forget to enjoy himself. This was written hastily, and then underlined, with “Please” and a question mark.

— It sounds as if she’s worried about you.

— And you can just imagine it. Is he taking drugs? Has he kept up the insurance on his viola? I hope if he’s sleeping with this girl he’s taking all the proper precautions. Is the mess produced by his grotty friends compromising the market value of the house we’ve invested in on his behalf?

— Perhaps she just wants you to be happy.

— Oh, well, he said, happy. Well then. Jesus Christ.

He stood abruptly and rummaged on top of his wardrobe among empty hi-fi boxes and cricket kit, squinting his eyes in the smoke from the roll-up drooping at the corner of his mouth. From underneath the mess he pulled out a brown viola case.

— Fuck the viola. Fuck that.

He put it on the floor between them. The instrument inside, when he pulled away a silk paisley scarf, was dark toffee-colored, gleaming, richly complex. Zoe for a moment thought with joy that he was going to play it. Jumbled in the case were rosin and tuning pipes and a homemade stuffed cloth chin rest with an elastic loop.

— Here’s what you have to do, he said. Here’s how to put an end to it.

And he raised his foot in its clumsy winter boot and brought it down on the viola, with a crunch and a tortured stifled jangling of the strings.

— Oh, no! cried Zoe. No! No!

* * *

In the spring she caught a virus and was ill with a high temperature for a few days. Simon made a surprisingly tender nurse. He called her a “sick little pony” and put her in his bed and brought her aspirins and made her drink glasses of lemon barley water; he wiped her face with a flannel wrung out in cold water and brushed her hair out of her way; he rang to cancel the supervision she was supposed to be having on her essay on the taxation policies of Edward III. Then he sat at his desk and worked, and through the vertiginous swoopings and retreats of her delirium she was aware of something deeply consoling in the steadily turned pages and the patterings of his Biro. He read her a poem by Beckett, and in her dreams, obedient to its instructions, she wandered back and forward in a shadowy bare corridor between doors that slid shut at her approach; after a while, though, she added some kind of brightly colored darting bird that had never been in the original, and then the corridor was lined in red velvet and ran twisting underground and became her sore throat, and the poem drifted away altogether.

She almost didn’t want to get better. There was something delicious in this enforced passivity, handing responsibility over to him, with no need to think or act for herself; although she also knew that she ought to be ashamed of such weakness and that he would think less of her if he ever found her faking. And then she was deeply touched by his gentleness. This must mean — mustn’t it? — that he cared for her. She was not allowed to ask if he loved her; she’d learned that very early on.