Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

— And to be fair, of course, last night I had made a fuss about nothing and she was fine. He’d just taken her out for a perfectly innocent walk. So to him it must seem that I’m this sort of harridan, dementedly policing her routine, because he can’t imagine what it feels like, trying to cope with a new baby without support. Although that’s what I said to him, originally. I said he wouldn’t have to do anything. I promised him I’d manage it all by myself.

— But how could you have known what you were promising, then? protested Joyce. What kind of man could see the woman he loved struggling with looking after his own child and not want to be with her, helping her?

— He’s a pretty bloody mixed-up kid, said Ray.

— I wish you’d told us earlier.

— I could see he was very bright. But too careful. Afraid to give anything away.

— And how could he not think she’s the most beautiful baby in the world? Do you think she’ll come to me now? I can’t believe she’s got my hair. This was my dad’s hair, you know. I wish Mum was here to see her.

— I wish it too.

— We always found him hard work, to be honest, to spend time with.

— Ssh, Ray.

* * *

Ray’s sister fran had gone to live with the protesters against cruise missiles at Greenham Common. Her husband had died suddenly of heart failure, and after subsiding into disappointed widowhood for a couple of years Fran joined a woman’s group and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, changing her sensible school-secretary clothes for dungarees and a reefer jacket pinned with political badges. When she moved up to live under plastic at Green Gate she left three indignant teenage children to fend for themselves. Her house had always been immaculate; in her absence it descended headlong into a dismayingly filthy chaos. Sometimes Fran came home at weekends to clean the toilet and disinfect the sink and run the washing machine nonstop, but she didn’t seem to seriously care. Joyce had thought she was worried for Fran as well as for the children left behind to run wild. Fran was so trusting; who knew what kind of people she was getting involved with up there? She had lost her grip since Laurence died; she was making rash decisions that would affect her future. Ray reassured her. Fran had loved Girl Guide camp when she was a teenager and this was probably much the same sort of thing (privations and rivalries, high ideals and passionate crushes).

Now Joyce found herself telling Fran’s stories to Zoe enthusiastically: how the women danced in toy police helmets in mockery in front of the lines of policemen; how they lay across the entrances to the base and had to be dragged away; how wire-cutting parties forayed inside the compound and sprayed the missile silos with red paint. She couldn’t stop talking and being busy, as if Zoe’s arrival had gone to her head; she emptied cupboards to find baby blankets, ripped up perfectly good sheets for the cot, poured big gin and tonics at a time of the evening when she and Ray didn’t usually drink.

— You did the right thing, walking out of there. Starting off a completely new life. It wasn’t possible for the women of my generation; we didn’t know you could get away with it. I’m going to learn to drive. I don’t want to have to depend on your father for everything. Wouldn’t it be wonderful just to take off in the car whenever you felt like it and go anywhere you wanted? I so admire what Fran has done. Ray takes it for granted that I haven’t got it in me, but you never know.

— But you’re not unhappy? I mean, Dad isn’t unkind?

Joyce looked at her unfocusedly, as if across wastelands of complications.

— It’s not that. It’s nothing he does particularly. It’s just the whole house, the whole thing, keeping everything looking nice, worrying about everybody else. It’s my own fault. I ought to have the courage to walk away from it all.

Zoe was cautious.

— I think the driving lessons are a good idea.

* * *

Zoe had forgotten her pajamas. she had to borrow one of Joyce’s nightdresses: skimpy coffee-colored satin and lace, nothing she would ever normally have worn. She seemed to fall into sleep through layer upon layer of delicious awareness: the silky gown, clean sheets, Pearl in the Chanders’ crib, which Ray had put together with some exasperated difficulty, the bright luxurious comfort of the house, the promise of days and days of respite to come when she needn’t be perpetually on duty and vigilant. Joyce was only busy two mornings a week (she taught dressmaking classes); they could spend long hours talking and shopping and looking after Pearl together. They could talk on and on about Zoe’s leaving Simon; Joyce would be bottomlessly sympathetic. Of course Zoe would have to decide what she was going to do with her life — but not yet. (She might perhaps pick up her PhD again, transfer it down here. Anything might happen.)

And then as she fell down and down, radiant with relief and vindication, Zoe came all of a sudden to some deep sad place and knew she hadn’t quite told her parents the truth about Simon. What she had said looked like the truth, so that no one else but her would ever know the difference; but it wasn’t the whole truth. She would need to start out all over again if she wanted to describe what he was actually like, in justice. Only it was too late to start now, she was asleep, she was so nearly asleep that all she could muster to represent her nagging worry to herself was a picture of Simon filling his fountain pen from a bottle of black ink at his desk — absorbed and careful, wiping off the surplus with a tissue — which didn’t mean anything at all and was extinguished anyway the next moment in the oblivion that crashed upon her like an overwhelming sea.

Daniel had gone into business with Uncle Cliff; then he married an Italian girl and they set up their own company importing delicatessen foods. After the first few difficult years they had done very well. They had moved to London and bought a loft apartment in Butler’s Wharf. He and Zoe weren’t exactly close. He read some of his sister’s articles in academic journals; although he hadn’t been to university, he was good at quickly picking up an argument and testing it. He didn’t positively disagree with anything she wrote. The world of arms trading and nuclear buildup seemed very remote from his innocent trafficking in olive oils and salamis, but he suspected nonetheless that Zoe judged him as if he were contaminated by it (even when he and Flavia made the decision to source all their products with organic suppliers). Perhaps she thought that making money was in itself intrinsically compromising. In return, Daniel teased Zoe about the unworldliness of academics.

They got on all right. Sometimes when Zoe had to be in London she stayed with them; whenever Daniel went home to see his parents he called in on Zoe (especially if Ray was working up for one of his artist moods, feeling unappreciated and misunderstood). Daniel was privately amused that in spite of Zoe’s expertise in conflict resolution she didn’t seem to be able to control her own daughter. Pearl was disobedient and difficult: a nonsleeper, a scene maker. She howled in her push chair and threw her toys. When she was older she called her mother a bitch, played her music loud, had her ears and then her nose pierced without permission, came home late and drunk from escapades in town. Even Joyce, who adored Pearl (more, Daniel suspected, than she adored his own two much more charming and better behaved little boys), had to concede that she could be hard work.

After Zoe published her second book (on the history of the relationship between arms manufacturers and defense establishments in Western Europe during the Cold War), he saw her name around even more often. She sometimes wrote for the broadsheet newspapers now. She was invited to be one of the keynote speakers at a big conference on civilians in conflict, which was held (coincidentally) only a few weeks after the attack on the World Trade Center. She turned up at his place on the Saturday evening when the conference was over; Maryse, their Romanian girl, was putting the kids to bed; Flavia was out at the restaurant, which was their pet sideline. Zoe was still frantic with adrenaline; when she’d been to kiss the boys good night she started telling Daniel some involved story about Palestinian students on their way to the conference being interrogated at Heathrow by immigration officials. He mixed martinis, but he couldn’t make her sit down until she had drunk off the first one, standing watching out of the windows as the sun went down over the Thames, behind Tower Bridge.