Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

— It’s not a word I use, he’d said. It’s a kind of sentimental bondage, like the bourgeois exchange of rings. Once I’ve said it to you, you’ll expect me to repeat it, and then sooner or later it will turn into a lie just by wearing out. The love words are dead words; they kill. You should hear it when my parents are arguing. “Don’t be ridiculous, dear .” “How dare you say that, darling? ”

When she was recovered from her virus they all went off for the day to Ely, in a car Marty borrowed from a friend who kept it illicitly (undergraduates weren’t supposed to have them). It was an effervescent spring day. The wide sky over the flatland looked washed clean as a pale sea, with a few lemon-glazed strips of cloud on the horizon and bright watery sunshine; birds put back their wings and made heart-shaped dives into the low-growing scrub. It was Zoe’s first visit; they went to the cathedral and then to the Old Fire Engine House for tea. In the Lady Chapel she was overcome by the lofty cool stone vaulting and wavering greenish light like a pool of air.

— Not that it would have been like this, said Lennard sternly. It would have all been painted in bright colors. Our sense of what’s beautiful in it belongs to a purely contemporary aesthetic.

— Whatever Lennard says, Zoe said softly to Simon, while the others made their way out of the chapel and down the deep fall of worn steps, hands in pockets, actively resisting awe, whatever he says, I love it here.

He smiled and put her hair out of her face, which she knew was earnest and heated. Nervous that he might disapprove, she told him about her obsessive passion for the past when she was a child, and the longings she had had for there to be a way into it out of the present, which had seemed so ugly.

— Oh, me too, said Simon, to her surprise. There was a door at school that was always kept locked — it was probably just a laundry room or something — and I built this whole fantasy world, that if I could only press through the door I’d find myself in another time and space. I was convinced it was only a failure of my imagination that prevented me. Of course, if I got through I was always conveniently going to emerge as a member of the landed aristocracy.

— Oh, yes, me too!

— Late sixteenth century, I favored. Hawking and riding to hounds and probably getting caught up in Essex’s doomed rebellion against the old queen.

— I liked the nineteenth century.

— God, no. Who wants to come after the stinking Industrial Revolution? And all that lachrymose prudery?

— Well, I see that now.

Later, in the same spell of good weather, Simon took her punting; she brought a couple of her girlfriends who did history. He had spent the previous summer working for Scudamore’s, hiring punts out to visitors, so he was fast and flawlessly competent, as steady on his bare feet on the back of the punt as if he were on land. He stood braced with his jeans rolled up, dropping the pole through his hands until it hit the bottom, bending his knees to push against it when they were in deeper water, using it like a rudder to steer. Deftly he skimmed the dithering punts full of beginners, not even acknowledging in his expression their separate existence. The girls lay back and watched; the low-slung punt enforced the postures of idling privilege even in these studious girls, dressed in sober jeans and draggled Indian print cheesecloth skirts. They would have liked to be teasing and ironic with Simon — this was their comfortable mode — but his silence and good looks made them shy, and they slipped along the lapping green-smelling river with its flotsam of twigs and duck feathers and fag packets mostly without talking. Possibly it was not for all of them the occasion of unalloyed pleasure it must have looked to anyone watching. Yet even while Zoe was full of worried consideration for her friends (who clambered onto dry land at Grantchester as if they were made clumsier by Simon’s hand held out to help), she couldn’t help the sight of him dancing joyously on her eyelids, closed against the bright sunshine.

And one night he played her an old 78 of Kathleen Ferrier singing the “Abschied” from Das Lied von der Erde, in a recording made by a private collector at Carnegie Hall, so crackling and distorted that it was difficult to listen to.

— There was a period when I was quite seriously deluded, he said. I found this in a junk shop in the sixth form. I was convinced that I could hear Ricky speaking to me in the crackling. Pretty weird. But don’t you think, if the dead could come back and speak to us, it might sound like this?

— O Schönbeit , the voice sang, through a storm of interference, O ewigen Liebens, Lebens trunken Welt!

— What does it mean? Zoe asked. She didn’t know much about classical music; this slightly sickened her, its suspenseful nervous expectancy and its fullness of longing.

— It’s about how the dead are in love with the world they have to leave behind.

She knew Simon was thinking about death all the time, in a way she could not imagine for herself. This was understandable — sacrosanct and forbidden territory — because of his brother. She knew that she, with her shallower life, had no authority to try to speak to him of these dark things. She only hoped that when they were making love she could pass over some healing into him out of her own deep reservoir of hopefulness and belief.

* * *

There was a wedding in zoe’s family that summer. zoe’s uncle Peter (who wasn’t strictly her uncle but her mother’s cousin) came back from America to live and work in England. He was leaving behind the American wife he had been married to for seventeen years and bringing home a new bride (English, though she had been working with him in New York), closer in age to his oldest daughter than to himself. Everyone was scandalized over the youth of the new bride; on the other hand, they couldn’t help being delighted at the thought of having Peter back among them, with his New York cleverness and sophistication. The first wife, although she was very dynamic, had fought bitterly with Peter. She had wanted to pursue her own career with a theatrical agency on Broadway and had demanded he do his share of running their household. Joyce and Ann sighed over Peter’s “chauvinism.” But they couldn’t help approving of someone who would look after him more appreciatively.

Joyce asked Zoe whether she would like to bring her “boyfriend.” Zoe winced at that awful word and thought for a moment they wouldn’t go. She had new standards of seriousness and a new sensitivity to what was right and wrong. Her parents hadn’t met Simon yet; her mother’s curiosity over the telephone (“We’re dying to get to know him, darling”) sounded almost predatory.

— He’s not my “boyfriend,” she said. It’s not like that.

— What do you mean? asked Joyce. Don’t you sleep together?

Zoe put the phone down in disgust.

They did go to the wedding anyway. Simon said he didn’t care, and secretly Zoe longed for everyone in her family to see him. Peter called them the celestial twins because they came dressed alike in white collarless shirts over jeans, and they were both tall and lean with long hair tucked behind their ears (only Simon didn’t have a fringe). The joke went around the wedding and Zoe heard other people use it, asking “Where are the twins?” and “What are the twins doing?” She felt a thrill at the idea of a connection visible to everyone, setting them apart. When Simon, as if it was not even an issue, said he was not going to sit down for the reception dinner but would wait outside, Zoe followed him into the garden without a qualm, wearing the same steady and remote smile as his (even though she’d seen where Joyce had written their names on little ornamented cards set out on a table with Daniel and their American cousins). They sat cross-legged in the sunshine beside an ornamental pond full of water lilies, smoking and watching iridescent dragonflies hovering above the lily pads. The reception was in a big eighteenth-century house in the Hilltop area of the city, which could be hired out for functions. Inside the orangery, the playing of a string quartet was half smothered by the noisy boisterousness of the wedding guests. Simon described to her a Berliner Ensemble production of Mother Courage.