Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

She learned afterward that Simon’s touching her was always his preliminary to sex. In between times, he didn’t like any physical contact: he didn’t want her to kiss him or put her arms around him, he never held hands with her when they were walking together. Also, they were never to talk at other times about what they did in bed. Once Zoe had adjusted to all this, she didn’t mind it; she too came to feel that all that pawing and clinging to each other that other couples went in for was cloying and infantile; their sentimentalities and spilled-over confidences were a kind of rubbish that might contaminate what was real, which must be kept clear and utterly private.

When Simon took her to his bed that first time, while the party was still going on downstairs (her friend after all had to walk back to college on her own), she was so afraid that she shook while he undressed her and hoped he didn’t notice it. All longing had died down in her, and she only hoped the thing would be quickly over with and she would acquit herself without disgrace. Judging from her previous experiences, she supposed her role in the business would be primarily to be accommodating and instrumental, so she was taken aback and dismayed when, kneeling beside her in the near dark (he had spread out his duvet on the floor in the light of the gas fire), he turned his attentions to touching her with no sign of the urgency or male peremptory haste that she remembered. She had thought of these touchings as solitary secrets, or perhaps as teenage substitutions for the “real thing”: in the first moments she was so shy she tried to stop him, kept her legs together and twisted away from him onto her side, hugging her knees childishly. Then naturally as he persisted she forgot herself, and uncurled, and opened her legs, and lost herself, and even forgot, sooner or later, that this was him; and then she wasn’t afraid — although she was astonished and wincing at it afterward — of showing herself to him, greedy and inventive and exposed.

The next afternoon, even though she told herself brutally that he probably often did what he’d done to girls at parties and that it did not mean he would want any further connection with her, she cycled over from college, rang the doorbell until Marty let her in, picked her way through a deep disorder of bottles and beer cans and stale overflowing ashtrays — in that house the mess from parties was never really cleared up, it was just allowed to wear away with time — and presented herself with a thudding heart in Simon’s room. He was working. He made her wait while he finished; she sat on his bed in absolute silence for two hours while he typed, scribbled, opened up books and read absorbedly, sighed, wrapped his hand tightly in his hair in the intensity of his concentration, scribbled, typed again. She wondered sometimes afterward whether this had been a test, which she had passed. Even when he wound the last sheet of paper out of the typewriter, she was afraid he might send her away. But he didn’t. In a restless afternoon dusk — cars plowing home on the wet road outside, lights sliding across the ceiling, the door locked, the others rousing out of their beds and shouting round the house and, once, knocking — they began again (only it was always each time different) what they had left off the night before.

It was this devoted attentiveness of his to sex that she thought of as her great good luck. Each time when they came to touching she felt a little beat of fear that he might frown and make his face of fastidious dismissal and deplore the importance that she placed upon it. But he never let her down. Each time it was a blessed dispensation, that with a serious face and rapt attention he applied himself to making love to her with all his intelligence and grace.

Zoe could imagine having a child but not a baby. The child when she imagined it was a tiny elflike thing, her spirit companion, playful, laughing, looking at her with dark eyes full of knowingness. But she realized there was an intermediate phase before knowingness was possible, and that was a kind of blank to her. She couldn’t think what you would do with a baby all day.

That autumn when she was pregnant she was working three afternoons a week in a shop across the road from the entrance to the maternity hospital. She wasn’t very busy. It was a shop that sold handbags and luggage, and the customers were occasional and took a long time choosing. So she was often looking out of the windows across at the hospital when one of the new mothers came out and got into her husband’s car to be driven home for the first time. The mother would be followed by a nurse, ceremonially carrying the baby wrapped in a bundle of white shawls; the nurse would hand it to the mother when she was safely in the passenger seat. If Zoe tried to convince herself that she would one day soon have a bundle of white shawls of her own, what she pictured wrapped up inside it was something like a mouse or a kitten, something soft and mewling and tender, but remote.

Simon and Zoe didn’t have a car. She supposed she would take a taxi home with her baby. This would be just another way in which she was unlike the other women she met at the prenatal classes, unlikenesses that made her feel lacking and yet at the same time aloof, privately cherishing the original way she and Simon had of doing things. She supposed she would get in the taxi on her own, with her baby. When she arrived back at the little house they rented in the Kite, she didn’t know whether Simon would be waiting there for them. He might choose to go on one of his long walks that day or to be working on his thesis in the university library. He hadn’t wanted a baby. She had pretended that her pregnancy was an accident (the truth was, it was something between an accident and deliberate; she had left off her cap when she couldn’t quickly find it on one occasion, not knowing whether she hoped she would get away with it or hoped she wouldn’t). Even so, he hadn’t wanted it; he had said they should find a doctor to get rid of it. But she had left it too late for that before she told him.

The arrival of the baby still seemed far off. She swelled up and was in love with the extraordinary shape of herself in the bath, and then with the baby leaping and jumping inside her, but the days ticked by very dawdlingly toward the date they had given her at the hospital. They had fine weather that autumn: skies like old watercolors, powder blue with tall ragged white clouds; the massive city trees bronzing and crisping at the edges; the spires and turrets of the colleges sharp gray pencil lines against the air. She cycled between her jobs (as well as at the handbag shop, she worked one day a week on a greengrocer’s stall in the market and two evenings and Sunday mornings as a barmaid at the Portland Arms), standing up on her left pedal when she took off from the curb, glancing behind her and scooting off with her right foot like a real Cambridge lady-habituée, proud that she was strong and capable and that her pregnancy made no difference to her. (She cycled into the hospital the very day before she had the baby.) She pitied and was privately skeptical of the ones who moaned about backache and tiredness.

Unlike the other women at the classes, she hadn’t got everything ready. That was what they said to one another: “Have you got everything ready?” as if having a baby were a household routine like preparing a room or packing to go away on holiday. Zoe knew from novels that a new baby could sleep in a pulled-out drawer at first, as long as it was lined with soft blankets. She held off contemptuously from those practicalities that turned the baby’s arrival into another dreary opportunity for consumerism, for discussions of the purchase of prams or sterilizers or washing machines. (Her mother had washed all the nappies by hand, so she was sure she could do the same.) She changed nothing in the house, and she and Simon didn’t talk about what was coming. They made love from behind because her huge stomach got in the way; but still they didn’t actually ever mention the baby after that first terrible week of his cold furious insistence and her stubbornness, resisting him.