Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

In the old days before Pearl, Zoe had hardly been aware of housework. She and Simon had developed a pattern of minimal engagement with the material substratum of their lives. The vacuum cleaner stood in a corner of the living room and occasionally one of them would plug it in and run it over the floor. In the mornings, whoever was last to leave rinsed through the few dishes in the sink. They cleaned out the ashes of the front-room coal fire when they made a new one. They bought little bits of shopping on their way home from work or the library; they never made a list. They lived on bread and cheese and olives and fruit and biscuits, and sometimes one of them, if in the mood, would cook soup or risotto. Mainly they lived on black coffee, which Simon always bought at one particular delicatessen; he oversaw the details of its making with fastidious care. They were both very thin (the nurses at prenatal had been worried about Zoe); they certainly never avowed thinness as anything they were aiming for (that was for idiots, demeaning), but they had had a disdain for the greedy corporeality which betrayed itself in sweet puddings, second helpings, thickened flesh. The only chore that presented itself as any kind of a burden or obligation was cleaning the toilet, and it was true that they had sometimes neglected this, but Zoe had cleaned it scrupulously before her parents came to stay (that was somehow why she had forgotten to provide them with sheets). Simon and Zoe had never talked together about any of these arrangements or choices; that would have been banal.

Now that she had Pearl, this order of life — in which the material arrangements floated lightly on the periphery and knowledge and books and music were the real dense substance at the center — was completely overturned. Zoe looked back upon the ruins of the old life with astonishment at her innocence then. Had she really believed you could exempt yourself so easily from the grown-up burdens, as if you were children playing house? To begin with, she knew now that she needed to eat. Not only was she hungry, starving hungry, all the time, she knew she must eat to make milk. One weekend when she had neglected to feed herself, her milk had started to fail. Pearl had screamed without stopping all one night, Simon walked out, and the Health Visitor made her go to bed for a couple of days. She had phoned Carol, who came over and cooked her fish pie and rice pudding and sausages and mash and sponge cake.

After that, Zoe knew she had to shop and prepare food properly (although she didn’t really have much idea of how to cook). And of course she could not pop out and do her shopping casually anytime, it was a whole expedition: she had to feed and change and bathe and dress Pearl first, and somehow wash and dress herself (she looked up in the booklet to try and find out what you were supposed to do with the baby at those moments when you needed both your hands). Usually the rocking of the pram in motion put Pearl to sleep while they were out, and this would be the best sleep she had all day. Sometimes when they got back after shopping Zoe would be able to leave her asleep in the pram in the yard while she flew inside to tidy up from the morning’s routine, rinse nappies and put them to soak, start a wash, make the bed, rinse the dishes. Then the hard little cry would come again.

Very early on, lying on her front, Pearl could half raise herself up on her arms when she woke, lifting her head with its gingery crest of hair to peer around for Zoe. If she was in the pram, Zoe could watch for a few moments that veering seeking head that couldn’t support its own weight for long, before Pearl discovered where she was or began to cry. These were moments of eerie quiet, both of them awake but separate, Zoe allowed to see Pearl as she was when she was alone: an instant’s premonition of her daughter’s capacity for life without her, liberating and lacerating at once. Sometimes Zoe hurried to pick her up and restore their tight-wound connection. Then if it was time for a feed (following the booklet, Zoe worked hard to establish these four-hourly), they settled down together in the chair with no arms that was best for nursing, and into a day that was mostly an inchoate mess there would bloom a session of healing calm while the baby sucked.

Zoe wore an old copper bracelet that she changed from wrist to wrist to remind herself which side they had started with last time. After her first urgent hunger was satisfied, Pearl’s hand would begin to wander exploringly across the surface of the breast and her eye would meet Zoe’s gazing down at her. Pearl’s look would heat up warmly, and grinning up at Zoe she would sometimes fall off the nipple, the bluish milk trickling out of her open mouth down Zoe’s front.

* * *

Simon didn’t watch the feeding, even when he was in the house. Mostly, he was out: at the market (he had taken over Zoe’s old job on the greengrocer’s stall) or at the library, with friends, or supervising students (he did some at home and some in a room in college). It was as if after the birth the house split into separate domains, his space in the front room, where he often didn’t bother to make a fire but sat in the cold, reading or typing or playing records; her space in the mess of the kitchen and living room with the gas fire on and the clothes horse laden with wet clothes or nappies steaming. If she had cooked he ate at the table with her and they exchanged polite information about their respective days, but he didn’t finish what she put on his plate: she tried putting less and less, but he never finished it. If he had a bath in the kitchen he pulled the curtain across.

In the middle of the night when Pearl was about a month old, Simon had reached out for Zoe in the dark. She had just climbed back into their bed after feeding Pearl and putting her down to sleep again. She lay huddled away from him; he put a hand on her shoulder and rubbed up and down her back. It was the first time he’d touched her deliberately since she’d come back from the hospital. He had taken Pearl from her a few times when she asked him to, always when she was sleeping or peaceful; he had carried her into his part of the house and sat studying her tiny face framed among the shawls with an intent concentration which for those minutes would make Zoe hope that he was coming to care for her. But as soon as she stirred or grizzled he handed her back to Zoe as if she were no further business of his.

Because he had only ever touched Zoe when he wanted to make love to her, it didn’t occur to her that he meant anything different by it now. Her body ached with ugliness; even in her tired fog she was conscious of unwashed hair, sweaty heat, a baggy stomach, swollen breasts. Her sexual self seemed buried several miles deep (probably buried, it had seemed to her then, forever). Also, she had just come from dropping tears onto the baby where she had been suckling her in the spare bed, dwelling angrily on Simon’s derelictions. How could he be so cold toward his own daughter? How could he keep up his punishment of Zoe, even if she had done wrong in tricking him into fathering the child? Could it be fair that the whole impossible labor of managing this baby fell upon her, even if that labor was precisely the reason he hadn’t wanted a baby in the first place? (He had said, “It will spoil everything. I’ve seen it happen. People drown in all that mucky stuff. Clever people get stupid, they forget what they used to be, they only think about rusks and sleep and potty training; they actually start to think that these are interesting.”) Zoe had wanted a baby; didn’t that count for anything? Much of her waking thought circled in the treadmill of this unspoken argument with Simon.

— How can you? she said that night when he touched her. How can you even think I would want to? I’m exhausted. You haven’t given me a kind look all day. And the doctor said anyway to wait six weeks.