Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

Ray found her standing naked in the bathroom. She was staring in the mirror, which she had wiped clear of steam with a towel. The water was almost at the top of the tub.

— What is all this about?

— Do I look like a grandmother?

— So that’s what it is. You could have a been a grandmother at thirty-six. Some women are. It doesn’t mean anything.

— But I’m not. I’m not thirty-six.

— You have the most beautiful body. Look at you. As beautiful as ever. I can’t resist the sight of you.

— You’re not enough, she said.

— I see. He looked crestfallen, resigned.

— Don’t be silly. I meant, you’re married to me, therefore it doesn’t count. It only counts from strangers. Only strangers see whether you look like a grandmother or not. Whether you’re someone they could want to make love to.

— So that’s why you don’t want to go and visit Zoe’s baby.

— She doesn’t want me anywhere near it, either. You know what they think of me. They think I’m a bourgeois housewife. They think all I care about is shopping and decorating.

— You’re almost certainly making all this up, he said.

— Maybe.

— We won’t go. It can wait. We’ll go when you’re ready.

He put his arms around her from behind; in the mirror, the sleeves of his suede jacket were brutal against her soft nakedness.

— Manet, he said. Déjeuner dans la salle de bain.

* * *

Other friends came to visit zoe in the hospital and saw pearl before Simon did. Probably some of the mothers on the ward thought Joshua was her husband, because he came in to see her twice at that hour when the husbands came (some alone and devoted, with flowers and lots of gazing into the crib; some with older children, being jolly with the new baby while the mother made up to the others, laughing at the clothes they were dressed in, asking what their father had been feeding them). Zoe was Mrs. Macy on the nameplate above the bed, the midwife had warned her of untold complications if she used her unmarried surname, so she had amusedly agreed to it. She didn’t however lie about this; she told the women who had become her friends in the beds to either side of her that she wasn’t married, that she and her boyfriend didn’t believe in it, that he was away and she hadn’t been able to contact him.

Joshua didn’t really make a very satisfactory husband substitute; he still wore his hair long and had a straggling beard and traipsed around in an old greatcoat, with a plastic carrier bag in which he kept his poems. He had got only low marks in his finals but seemed to find it impossible to leave Cambridge, so he took on small gardening or typing jobs and rented a dank basement room lit with a 40-watt bulb to save money. Zoe dreaded his visiting her at home because he stayed talking about books and music for hours, and if it was raining outside he took off his socks without asking and wrung them out and hung them to steam in front of the fire. Still, it was sweet of him to come to the hospital, and he got very excited about Pearl, holding her as if she were a particularly slippery kind of fish, adjusting his body position contortedly to her slightest stirrings. He asked if Zoe was planning to educate her at home and suggested that, if so, he could teach her Latin as part of a balanced curriculum. She looked forward more to visits from her friend who was a postgraduate at Churchill, and from the manageress at the bag shop, who brought her some baby sleep-suits Zoe was very grateful for. (She was beginning to wonder anxiously what she was going to do at home about the limited supply of baby clothes; they seemed to get wet and dirtied so quickly.)

None of these visitors from outside really seemed part of Zoe’s new life with the baby; she felt much closer to some of the other mothers. In the bed to her right was a good-looking blond woman with a hairdressing business. She had tried for a baby for eight years and then given up and started her business instead; just when it was really taking off she had discovered she was pregnant. She said she had cried every day of her pregnancy. Now she lay gazing in worship through the side of the transparent cot at her tiny son, although she still had no idea how she was going to manage looking after him. In the bed to Zoe’s left was a dumpy woman with a pudding-basin haircut who had three children already; they came in with her husband, who worked in haulage and wore a shiny suit to the hospital. Zoe was deeply impressed with this woman’s quiet competence at soothing and feeding her baby and managing the older ones. She confided tearfully, however, after her family had gone, that she hadn’t wanted more children but her husband wouldn’t let her use any contraceptives. Indignantly, Zoe and the hairdresser took her part.

— It’s your body, said the hairdresser. It’s you who has to go through that torture.

— Don’t get me wrong, said the woman. I will love the baby. But there’s no room for another one, and I’ve got no washing machine. And I’d just started at a little job of my own, which I won’t be able to manage now with her.

Zoe confessed to them about how she had accidentally on purpose lost her cap and not mentioned it to Simon. She was very moved by her intimacy with these women and by what seemed to her their quiet heroism (everything in those hormone-heady few days was heightened). She thought how glad she was to get away from everything associated with the university: she felt as though she was recovering in a grateful rush her conviction of how deep and complex and sustaining people’s lives were outside the lit circle of intellectual thought.

On the last day of the week she spent in the hospital, Simon came. It wasn’t even visiting hours; the Sister pursued him down the ward and wanted to send him away but relented when he shrugged and charmed her with what Zoe could tell was his mock-courteous, most exaggeratedly upper-class manner. People responded to this presumption of authority in him as part of his disconcerting physical appeal: he was tall and very thin, and his hair these days was cut so short it was like moleskin against his scalp, flickering with the change of his facial expressions. Zoe was changing Pearl’s nappy on the bed; Pearl was squirming and crying. Until she was aware of Simon coming down the ward toward her, Zoe had been dealing quite calmly with this, tucking under and pulling tight, with her fingers inside to safely guide the pin as she had been shown by the nurses, knowing she could calm her down afterward with feeding. When she saw Simon her hands were suddenly hot and fumbling, and the nappy fell open, so that when he came up to the bed he saw the whole raw little body, quivering and flailing in its distress, with the long slit up between its legs and the big plastic clip on its cord, which was drying out (nicely, the nurses said) into a greenish stump. The huge night-blue eyes fixed balefully upon Simon, and the baby’s whole head suffused with blood as she redoubled the intensity of her squalling.

Zoe knew that he was thinking the baby was ugly.

— So it’s a girl.

— It’s Pearl.

— Pearl Deare? That’s ridiculous. It sounds like a wartime cabaret singer.

— Not Deare. Pearl Macy. I thought she’d have your name. Officially.

— Officially? I see that officially you’ve taken my name too. (How had her nameplate caught his eye so quickly? She had been going to take it down when she knew he was coming in.) Is there some conspiracy to implicate me here?

He sounded as if he was joking, but she knew he wasn’t.

— The midwife said it would make things easier.

— I’ll bet she did.

— Anyway: how are you? she said brightly, trying to carry on with the nappy as if it were something ordinary to her. How did the paper go?