Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

After lunch Dina found wellington boots for Zoe and put Pearl in a sort of backpack; Zoe had not known about these. (“Keep it. Megan’s much too big for it. It’s just clutter. See how she loves to look around her? You can get Si to carry her about in it. She’s obviously not the dopey sort of baby. Dopey’s much easier, of course. I’ll swear Charlie just slept for the first six months. I had to wake him up to feed him.”) They walked up the side of a steep plowed field in fresh wet air under a ragged sky, and then into some woods full of bluebells; the little girls in their bright waterproofs and boots went stumping in the puddles. When they got back, Dina made drop scones on a griddle and Zoe fed Pearl again at the kitchen table.

— I’ll tell you the strictest rule of motherhood, said Dina. Don’t eat what they leave. Look at this tummy of mine. That’s all fish fingers and bread-and-butter soldiers, truly.

— So what was Ricky like? Zoe asked.

A shock interrupted for an instant as rapid as a camera shutter the batter flowing from the spoon onto the smoking griddle. Dina turned an open and smiling face round to Zoe from the stove.

— Ricky? Oh, he was just a nice boy. A really happy, nice boy. Everyone loved Ricky.

— Simon worshiped him.

— It made a bloody mess of that family, the whole thing.

— Who’s Ricky? asked Bryony.

— Just someone Mummy used to know, who sadly died.

— What from? She put on a grown-up commiserating voice.

— He just got poorly.

— That’s sad. Was this long, long ago?

— It was, yes. In olden days.

Zoe didn’t know where Simon went, while she was with Dina all day. He came late to collect her. (“Oh, that’s so typical,” Dina said. “He never remembers.”) Zoe had stayed with the little girls when Dina drove to school, and then they drank tea, waiting for him, running out of conversation, while the children watched television and it began to rain outside.

On the way home, Zoe shook out a thought she hadn’t known she’d had.

— I suppose, she said, she was the girlfriend you once told me about. I mean your brother’s girlfriend, who you were angry with when he died.

— You invented angry. Simon concentrated past the pounding windscreen wipers.

— But she was that girl?

— She was a friend. They wrote to each other when they were both away at school.

The baby slept. Simon leaned forward to peer through the wind-screen because the rain was heavy, flickering in a confusing low light coming through a row of tall poplars beside the road.

— And I suppose you’ve had some sort of a thing going on with her at some point?

He was silent for long minutes, which she knew didn’t mean denial or assent, only a disavowal of her right to know, a disdain for the slack words she’d chosen.

— Are we going to start talking as if we own each other? he asked her.

* * *

Zoe got better at managing her new life. her stomach shrank back to flatness, she could get into her jeans, she washed her hair in the kitchen sink and then had it cut off as short as a boy’s. She grew less afraid of Pearl and manhandled her more boldly, kissing her with gobbling noises all over her head, blowing raspberries on her stomach while she was changing her until she laughed her throaty laugh. Pearl slept better at night and in the day, and then when Zoe heard her waking in her cot she hurried up the stairs to her with happy anticipation, eager to set eyes on her and hold her close again, as if even an hour’s separation awoke a yearning lack in her. Zoe discovered there could be a strenuous kind of pleasure in managing her house and her days. She set herself a routine and moved determinedly around inside it; at the end of the evening the dishes were washed and the kitchen floor was swept and the haricot beans were put on to soak. Then she sat up in bed, giving Pearl her midnight feed and running over in her head a list of tasks to be accomplished for the next day. This wasn’t the highest form of intelligent life, but it had its satisfactions.

This isn’t to say that there weren’t still bad days, of mess and mistakes and tedium. Four months after the birth she still hadn’t finished a book or been out in the evening. When she tried to have a coffee with Carol in Rose Crescent, Pearl cried and wouldn’t feed discreetly, and she had to take her outside and leave Carol to finish. She longed for adult company, and then when occasionally friends came round she feared she wouldn’t have enough to talk about: she couldn’t expect them to be interested for more than a few moments that she was trying Pearl on solid foods or that she had taken her to the Botanical Gardens to show her the ducks. She was impatient for Simon to come home, yet when he came he didn’t talk to her but sat in the cold front room to read.

She was thinking about Simon all the time, but not in the old way. There was a disorienting disproportion between their minimal actual contact and her passionate interior indictment of him that ran its dull marathon day after day inside her head. In the flesh they exchanged a few transactional words, friendly enough; they made their mutually considerate movements around the shared functional spaces of the little cottage — the bath, the kettle, the toilet in the yard — and in bed at night sometimes their feet touched accidentally or she woke to find that in her sleep she had bundled herself against his warm back and was breathing in his smell. And yet her argument with him was clamorous when he wasn’t there; in her imagination she appealed as if in some public forum and to witnesses, presenting all the evidence of his unnatural behavior. If they could see my life, she thought, burning with its injustice. He’s wrong, he’s wrong! He believes he’s so unassailably right, but he’s wrong. At the same time she was calculating how she could disguise this very madness of their private life from her parents when they came to stay.

Simon had taken over her job on the market, and she had had to give up any idea of going back to the bag shop; Carol had gallantly offered to have Pearl for a couple of afternoons (perhaps picturing a sleeping mouselike creature in its shawls as Zoe once had), but Pearl screamed and wouldn’t take milk from a bottle, Carol was helpless, and they gave it up after the second time. Then the landlord telephoned from the Portland Arms to ask if Zoe could do a couple of evenings, and because they needed the money they tried it. Simon stayed at home to baby-sit; it was usually in the evenings that Pearl slept best and longest, so he ought to be able to work without being interrupted. Zoe didn’t admit to him that she quite enjoyed the synthetic companionableness of the pub; she adopted his own air of uncomplaining stoicism.

One night when she came home at eleven-thirty, Simon and Pearl were gone. She stood in bewilderment looking into Pearl’s empty cot, breathing in the cigarette smoke soaked into her clothes; her long skirt was wet with beer at the hem where it had dragged in the mess behind the bar. Downstairs she saw that the pram was also gone from its place in the yard. She ran out into the lane at the back and up to the street that crossed it at one end, then ran back in case they came the other way and she missed them. It was a still summer’s night, as cold as stone; the moon stood in a chilly ring of light. Staring along the empty lane her arms goosefleshed; she went back inside and tidied up, expecting any minute to hear them come in. Pearl must have cried; he must have taken her out to calm her. His books were left open on his desk, his pen laid down on his page presumably when he went to pick her up. Zoe went outside again, looked up and down. It would have been so easy for Simon to leave her a note, explaining where he was taking her. She changed into her pajamas, to be ready for bed when they arrived; then she changed again into her jeans, thinking suddenly that if there were an emergency she needed to be ready to go at once.