Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

— I’m mad about your view, she said. I’d like to stay looking at it all night. I could even be tempted to be rich, in return for this.

He was impressed with his sister in her public clothes: a narrow dark-green wool skirt and jacket with bone buttons, a little cream blouse with a square-cut collar, dangling chunky silver and green earrings. (At home she looked as if she didn’t bother to notice what she was putting on in the mornings.) She used no makeup, her hair was cropped short, she didn’t have any figure, and she wore flat shoes and strode about like a man, but he could see all this might appeal to a certain type. He put out bread and cheeses and cold meats on the glass-topped dining table and left the lights off so they seemed to float in the pink and orange sunset. She tucked in hungrily.

— Look at you, stuffing your face. But you’re such a beanpole. How come you never put on weight? I wish I could get away with it.

— Eat with me, she said with her mouth full, pushing bread and cheese across to him. Danny, it’s all delicious. What’s this one called?

— I’m not supposed to, I’ve already eaten. It’s raviggiolo: sheep’s milk cheese, from a new little place we’ve found in Umbria. You should eat it with the pear. Perhaps I’ll just cut myself a corner.

— It’s fantastic. The food was probably all right at the conference, but I’m always so busy talking I forget to have any. And today I was too nervous about my paper.

— Go well?

— Mmm.

She took a swallow of drink to clear her mouth so she could elaborate.

— Do you know how many deaths from small arms are estimated annually? Four million. Knocks road accidents at thirty thousand into a cocked hat. Ninety percent civilians. Eighty percent women and children. Most of them aren’t even war casualties. Revenge killings, murders, tribal conflict.

She sounded almost gloating. It was an occupational hazard, he supposed, that you would end up exulting over the excesses that proved your case. Her readiness to name horrors in ordinary conversation always embarrassed him, as if it was an error of taste.

— Flavia and I are starting to think it might not be a bad idea to move out of London. Wondering if this is really how we want to bring up our children and all that. I’d like them to know something about green fields. And, being realistic, if anything happens we’re right in the middle of it. I stood at these windows a few weeks ago expecting God knows what to fall out of the sky.

— You mustn’t think like that, said Zoe earnestly, wiping a smear of grease off her cheek with the napkin he gave her. If you start to think like that, they’ve really won.

— Well. Easily said.

— No, truly; if once we start to abdicate from these city spaces, we hand imagination of them over to the rhetoricians of apocalypse on both sides. And that brings their horrible endgame one step nearer. We have to go on asserting by sheer persistence that it’s possible to live here, live our ordinary hopeful life.

She was emphatic; he could imagine her waxing passionate like this in front of her audience, gesturing at them with those hands that seemed so big in proportion to her narrow thinness. (Perhaps she had used the very words she used to him, at the conference today.) She was drunk on power, probably, as well as the martini. He could guess how it could go to your head, all those faces turned your way, all that deferential assent and stimulating contest.

— Any male talent at your conference, Zo? Aren’t you academics supposed to get up to all sorts of wickedness when the papers are over and the bar is open?

He wondered if he’d got it right from the way she laughed, tearing off more bread, the usual tension in her posture unlocked and slack.

— Dear little brother. Concerned as ever for my happiness.

— I just worry that you pick them so deep. I wish you’d find one with a sense of humor.

— You sound just like our mother.

* * *

Zoe had a window seat in the train home on sunday morning. She had some work from one of her graduate students to mark, but she let it lie on the table in front of her; she couldn’t read more than a sentence before her mind was possessed again by images and snatches of remembered exchanges from the weekend. The aftermath of these high points for her was always a kind of excruciated awakening, as if she had been drunk or dreaming and must now sort over the rash things she had done in cold judgment. Even the talks she gave seemed to her afterward full of risk; she worried that she had stressed the wrong thing, or that in her fixation on certain interpretations of the facts she had allowed herself to be oblivious to others.

Now she had added to that usual exposure the foolishness of a flirtation. She wondered scaldingly how conspicuous it had been. Had she shown in her face how she glowed in response to his persistence, when he made everyone move up so he could sit beside her in the bar and introduce himself? It was that moment of his choosing her that snatched away her peace now, rather than the shy and fumbled kiss they had exchanged before they retired to their respective single rooms. He had been young. Not impossibly young, but quite a bit younger, in a skinny sweater with a little string of amber beads round his throat. (Perhaps he had only been trying to further his academic career.) She had danced; she never usually danced. It had not seemed stupid to her at the time. She had lain awake after they kissed good night, burning with the idea of him, fantasizing over and over that she got out of bed and went padding along the corridors in her pajamas to find his room (they were both in the same conference accommodation wing), or that he came knocking softly at her door. But now in the train she wrapped her arms tightly around herself and thought it was stupid. It was humiliating. It was particularly humiliating that they hadn’t even had sex together. What was she doing at her age, burning up at the idea of a look and half a kiss? Thank God at least that probably nobody would believe it had only been that. No one need know she was susceptible as a virgin girl.

She stared out of the windows at autumnal England. All the debate of the conference — retaliation, escalation, war — was a receding tide in her ears. Nothing happened here. Her irritation at it steadied her, the deep secretive fertility of this countryside, its dense thickets, the fur of its woods snuggled around the hills; it was all shelter for the sentimentalities of those who thought this was the “real” England, whatever else went on (even foot-and-mouth, even the burning pyres of stiff-limbed dead cattle). In the dells nestled mock-Tudor mansions and real Georgian ones, weathering attractively together; the pleasure boats cosied up on the river; the former farm-laborers’ cottages had been made over expensively for the nostalgic consumption of a different class. The creamy-mauve long grasses soughed and flattened themselves seductively in the fields.

But nowhere is safe, she thought.

Amid all the professional glooms and denunciations, it was easy to forget to be afraid. An irrational panic flapped a disorienting black wing across her thoughts. She was anxious to see Pearl. She had not been vigilant, she had not phoned; anything could have happened to her daughter while she was distracted. Pearl had been left alone in the house for all this time. (She was seventeen; she had reacted to the idea of a baby-sitter with outrage.) Zoe had called home from Paddington but she hadn’t answered. Probably she was still in bed. Often she didn’t get back from clubbing in town until three or four in the morning, and then she would sleep until late afternoon the next day. (A twinge of painful adjustment as usual on returning home: How was it possible that in the same world there existed students like the serious hard-working ones she met at these international conferences, burdened with gratitude for the opportunity of an education, and seventeen-year-olds dedicated as unswervingly as Pearl to her own pleasures?)