Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

Joyce had made up the packaway bed for Simon yesterday, although she had known he wasn’t likely to sleep in it. It had seemed a strange thing even so, to prepare a bed for a man in the room full of Zoe’s childish possessions, her teddy and favorite doll still on her white cotton bedspread, her storybooks muddled in with her A-level texts on the shelves in the alcove, her china animals on her treasure shelf. When Zoe first moved into the room years ago, she and Joyce had decorated it in blue and white; Joyce made blue curtains and covered the bedside table in blue, with a white fringe glued around it. On the wall were pictures Zoe had made on holiday in Wales out of shells picked up on a beach and an appliqué snowman Joyce sewed for her when she was a baby, with snowflakes in cross-stitching.

She pictured herself taking up the tea and cake and hearing from behind the closed door a quality of silence — paused and creaking, taut with held breath — which would make it impossible to knock. Or she would knock and say there was tea and Zoe would say muffledly, OK, she’d fetch it in a minute, and Joyce would have to carry the third cup downstairs with her again, so that they wouldn’t even know she’d tactlessly tried.

* * *

Zoe had had sex twice before she went up to cambridge, but those hadn’t been very happy experiences, both at parties, both drunk, one of them outside up against a wall, the boy seeming exasperated with her for her incompetence at managing what had surely been a near-impossible physical contortion, into which pleasure couldn’t imaginably have entered. She had decided that she was not going to be very good at this kind of thing. Therefore she had gone to her first few university social occasions expecting to be a shy observer, unnoticed and wondering and perhaps, if she could rise to it, somewhat ironic.

It was probably because she had thought herself more or less invisible that she had allowed herself to stare at Simon Macy. Josh, who was kind, had invited a first-year friend of Zoe’s to a party at his house, and she had begged Zoe to go with her so that she would have someone to walk back to college with afterward. Zoe hadn’t even realized when she agreed that Simon lived there, although she certainly hadn’t forgotten who he was; from time to time in those first weeks she had caught sight of him, each glimpse like a jolt of longing — unappeasable longing, she was quite clear about that — grounding itself through her. There was something in the particular combination of his nervous fine-boned features with his dark hair, and his absorbed obliviousness with his confidence, that answered exactly to her idea of a desirable male and set him apart in romance from all the other students. The romance thickened when the weather sharpened in November and she saw him in an old Oxfam-shop fur coat, the collar turned up around a lean face pinched and bruise-colored with cold. She knew perfectly — crushingly — well that she wasn’t alone in any of this. Loads of girls liked Simon Macy.

At the party she sat inconspicuously on the edge of a group of people she didn’t know, drinking mouthfuls of warm rioja from a plastic cup. She hadn’t dressed up, even that would have been presumptuous; as if anyone was likely to look at her. She was wearing her comfortable cords and her desert boots and an old navy V-neck sweater she used to wear to school, and her hair was tied back. She had, in honor of the party, fastened it with a blue ribbon. There were a couple of really beautiful girls there — one of them, she learned later, was Trina — with their eyes elaborately painted, wearing old 1930s dresses that showed off their silky curves. They were dancing and performing at the center of things; literally, they seemed to be acting out scenes from some play they had been in together at school. Watching them and swallowing down the rioja, Zoe felt sad, as if this was the youth that books and poetry celebrated and she was shut out from it by something helplessly prosaic in her constitution. At the same time, she couldn’t have wanted to be them; finally, there seemed to her something foolish and exposing in how they presumed upon admiring male attention.

Zoe had known Simon was there as soon as she arrived. He wasn’t in the room constantly, he came in and out (this was his habit at parties, she learned afterward). Once he came back eating an apple, once with his finger in a book, as if he had been distracted from reading in another room. The party, it was clear, was not quite enough for him. His only whole-hearted participation was when he sat cross-legged to roll another joint, tearing papers and strewing tobacco on the back of an LP cover (Velvet Underground).

At some point he was gone again and she didn’t see him come back in, and then with a scalding stir of adjustment she was aware that he was standing right beside where she sat. She was intimately close to his long bony feet with the big toes turned crookedly outward; she could have touched them with her hand. Then he dropped to squat beside her, offering her the joint. She would have accepted it, just so as not to seem like a stodgy little first-year, only she was afraid she’d choke and make a worse fool of herself.

— No, I don’t take it, she said idiotically, shaking her head.

— Oh, don’t you? He laughed. What do you take?

— Nothing, really, apart from this horrible wine.

— I meant, what subject do you take? If you are a student? Are you?

— I’m at your college, she said. I do history.

— That’s just what I would have guessed. You look calm and factual.

— Oh, dear. That’s probably exactly what I am. I was actually — just then — thinking about the medieval Italian banking system.

— The medieval Italian banking system! He seemed pleased with that, settling back to sit with his arms around his knees. You’ll have to tell me all about it sometime. I’m fascinated.

She was dizzy at the idea that he imagined they might have further conversation in the future.

— But you haven’t been thinking about medieval banking systems all evening. You were watching me.

— Oh, no! Zoe flushed guiltily. I’ve been watching everybody. I don’t really know anyone here.

— Don’t be embarrassed. I really thought you were. Every time I glanced up, you were looking at me.

Dumbly she shook her head.

— Not really.

— I thought you’d like it if I came over to talk.

— Well, I do like it. If you don’t mind.

— How did you know, anyway, which college I’m at?

— I’ve seen you around.

— You see? You have been watching!

This time she shook her head, not meeting his eyes, but smiling.

— Everybody knows you.

— No, they don’t. Not as well as you do.

— I don’t know you at all, she said sensibly.

— Well, would you like to?

She simply nodded.

And that was when he touched her for the first time: transferring the nearly smoked end of the joint to his left hand very deliberately, slipping his right hand under her thin wool sweater, and running it lightly around her waist until he found the top of her hipbone, pressing in against the bone under the waistband of her trousers. It was the deliberateness that undid and dissolved her when she replayed this moment of his choosing her afterward, over and over: the idea of his consciously coolly initiating their crossing over from talk into sex, not waiting to fumble into it later in the dark or through drink. His fingers were cool, though not cold; she could feel his long tapering fingertips and longish nails, and she was seized, just from this touch, by an excitement she certainly hadn’t felt those times with the other boys, although she knew something like it from occasions alone and dreaming. Disoriented because her dreaming desires had impossibly erupted into actual life, she sat amid the noise and chaos of the party in stillness and a kind of hallucinatory ease, as if like Alice in Wonderland she had grown larger than the room, looking around with eyes that saw everything and nothing.