Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

As soon as the words had been said aloud and were floating in the chilly air above the bed, she was sure that sex wasn’t actually what Simon had meant at all. Really, he’d only been proffering friendliness and consolation. Perhaps he had even been intimating a willingness to hold her poor racked body in his arms while she went off to sleep; at the very thought of that possibility all accusation melted in her (for the moment). He had been offering her his hand across the rift between them; it might have been the beginning of everything changing. Instead, she felt him withdraw his kindness as immediately as if an electric current had cut off, and they lay jangled and motionless, apart. She knew she ought to speak — she could imagine the words of her apologetic explanation forming between them — but no sound came. She lay longing for him to touch her again. She wanted it so intensely that she was sure he must know; she couldn’t believe that such a power of desire aimed at someone close by wasn’t tangible. Oh, please, please, she willed.

She was sure he did know; but he wouldn’t touch her again because he couldn’t forgive her capacity to so grossly misunderstand him. After a while, without a word, he got up out of the bed and took his bathrobe from the door and went downstairs. He must have worked down there or slept in the armchair. In the morning, when Pearl woke at half past six and Zoe came down and lit the gas fire and put on the kettle to boil, she heard him go up and shut the bedroom door behind him, and the accusatory voice inside her thoughts struck up groggily again.

* * *

Simon could see the end of his thesis coming closer. Sometimes if he’d been reading late he found he was actually visualizing the coming end as a figure approaching from far off in flapping robes across a wasteland; one day it occurred to him that the image was from the scene in Pasolini’s The Gospel of St. Matthew where the devil comes to tempt Christ. He felt abashed that he had associated even in his subliminal awareness two such absurdly disproportionate testings — he didn’t really confuse his own petty intellectual agonies with those real ones — and he tried to suppress the picture.

Simon’s supervisor, Kevin Fry, had said already that Simon would be able to publish the thesis when it was finished. Kevin had joined the faculty while Simon was an undergraduate (amid some controversy because of open hostility in the establishment then toward critics influenced by the ideas coming out of France). Simon had been one of a select few students who met in Kevin’s rooms and drank with him; they adopted styles in imitation of his (French cigarettes, old suit waistcoats from the secondhand stall in the market worn over collarless shirts), and submitted to certain implacable judgments as to what one could and could not talk about (eighteenth century was good, Lawrence was beyond bad, T. S. Eliot was boring). When Simon had read more, he understood that some of what he had taken to be Kevin’s original thought derived in fact from the Yale Deconstructionists and Foucault, and he was puzzled that Kevin’s written work seemed dogged, never as fresh or dangerous as his speech.

At a certain point in the course of the PhD supervisions, while Simon was working on Stendhal (the thesis hinged on a comparison of the representations of incarceration in La Chartreuse de Parme and Little Dorrit ), he had felt Kevin relinquish his role at the prow of their relationship: he listened to Simon with a new relaxed assent, he marked the work more cursorily, and there was a distinct cooling of their friendship. His French wasn’t as good as Simon’s, but that wasn’t all; Kevin couldn’t keep up with him any longer. Simon had overtaken his mentor; he was better. It had been an almost weightless transaction, that exchange of authority. He had shut the doors to Kevin’s college room behind him one day (double doors made with a six-inch gap between, to insulate the concentrating one from all the noise of the world), and walked out to find spring sunshine after rain in the quad. Everything was altered, as if there had taken place a silent shift under the earth, and he had felt an elated triumphant lightness and a diminishment both at once (where would he put his marker now, to aspire toward?). He even began to have one or two undergraduate followers of his own, who listened to him to find out what to think. He knew you could live a lifetime dedicated to contesting such near-imperceptible shifts of intellectual power, and he was confident of his capacity to come out well in those contests. He did, however, ask himself whether this was the most serious use to which he could put his intelligence.

He was pursuing his thesis in all seriousness. It seemed to him that the only possible justification for academic work was to do something that was bigger than the mere turning over of familiar compost that the system required. One had to be able to work the system, of course; the ideal was to do that — persuasively, authoritatively — with one’s left hand and reach outside it with one’s right, away from the small world of university into the big worlds of history and art (here, of course, was where one put one’s marker for aspiration). One should always have a little bit of contempt in one’s manner for academic work. He thought seriously about other careers when the thesis was finished, the diplomatic service or news reporting from some war zone; he thought about getting a teaching certificate and going to work in the worst kind of schools in the state system. He thought he would be strong enough for any of these. On the other hand, he feared the constraints that would leave him without the space to be free to think largely.

The one ambition he didn’t allow himself (not yet, not yet, not for a long time yet), was to write “creatively” (the very word was absurd, evoking so precisely the dismal queue of hopefuls clutching yellowed carbon-copy typescripts). It was true, there were a few poems (Beckett-like, if anything); but no one had ever seen them, and they didn’t exist, God forbid, anywhere on paper; he only kept them in his mind. He had too vivid an imagination of disaster: a car smash or a fall from a high place, the poems discovered by Zoe or his mother going through his things, misguidedly shown round, the dissimulated smugness of those who had admired him at finding out their imperfections.

He was working, around the time that the baby was born, on his chapter on Tyranny. The idea of his work, and what was good in it, was his strongest happiness; when he wasn’t actually engaged in reading or writing for the thesis he was nonetheless constantly aware of the shape of it, hidden and precious like a smooth stone fitted to his hand inside a pocket or a secret matrix glowing in his chest. The paper he had given at Manchester was on Byron’s “Sonnet on Chillon” and the aristocratic ideal of individual freedom; his basic argument was that there had been an absolute shift in literature between the end of the eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth century, from representations of punishment as an issue between individuals, the tyrant and the oppressed one, to modern representations of it as the one-sided outcome of an implacable impersonal system, grinding individuality small in the name of normalization and regulation. The logic of these modern representations ended in Kafka, as he would suggest in his conclusion. His title — which had, in the context, an irony he enjoyed — was “The Chainless Mind,” from Byron.

He was succeeding in keeping all this work on schedule, despite the extra day at the market he had taken on and the broken nights that came with the baby. He had never slept well. Now, if Zoe couldn’t stop the baby crying, Simon got up and went out and walked the streets as he had done years before in the time of his worst insomnia, a solitary prowling in a world turned inside out in the dark. He had not wanted this baby. He had always had a horror of a certain kind of semi-academic domesticity: PhD students turned whey-faced and sour-tempered over their grubby-mouthed and badly behaved offspring; rented flats filled up with a detritus of toys; typewriter and books pushed resentfully aside to make room for plates of baby pap. It seemed to him self-evident that intelligent women with minds of their own would not make the best mothers; how could they bear, if they liked room to think and breathe and read, to be constrained as the mothers of small children must be to the sticky and endlessly repetitive routines of domestic life? He was sympathetic to the conundrum for feminism posed by this tension between motherhood and intelligent life (Kristeva’s fundamentalism was one kind of answer, though it didn’t convince him as the right one). He had reasoned with himself that he had no right to oppose Zoe if she was convinced that a baby was what she wanted (no doubt there were imperatives of female biology he was not equipped to understand); after that first week of hostilities, he had never brought up his reservations again.