Tessa Hadley: Everything Will Be All Right

— My dad’s bought all this amazing stuff at the supermarket because he knew I was coming? she was saying, in an excited, swollen voice that rose up as if into a question at the end of almost every sentence. Like orange squash and chocolate spread and Dairylea cheese? They’re all the things I used to like when I was eight, it’s really funny! He’s so weird.

He hardly recognized himself, transformed into that funny “dad.”

— I haven’t got any clothes, she wouldn’t give me any time to pack, I’ve only got a really weird selection of things and none of them go together, so I won’t be able to go out of the door at all. She was really rabid; she just kind of stood over me while I packed up. I was scared, I was just thinking, Oh, my God, put anything in, I just wanna get out of here. So I’ve brought, like, no socks and two bottles of black nail polish?

Was she flirting? Was she talking to a girlfriend or a boy? She seemed to be making such efforts to please, to go through the hyperactive motions of this elaborated code, its language evacuated of apparent meaning. He could make no connection between this material of her life and what he remembered of himself when he was her age. Where had she learned to be so false? Disapproval overwhelmed him, like something rising in his throat; he withdrew soundlessly and went back to try and concentrate on the thesis in his study. She had left chocolate marks on his white sofa. He found himself scrubbing at them later with 1001 upholstery cleaner (the same stuff his mother used to use), when Pearl went out. He didn’t know where she had gone. She hadn’t called out any message before she banged the front door of the flat shut behind her.

* * *

When simon thought back now to his first book (the one on prisons and fictions that had been adapted from his PhD thesis) and to those obsessive writings and rewritings of it that had detained him for far too long, he saw now, in proportion to their results, he understood that he had been trying to disguise himself progressively further and further inside a language working as a self-enclosed system, purged of the treachery of personality. He knew now that such a language wasn’t possible. Literary criticism wasn’t physics. (He also thought that the book was too dependent on Foucauldian modelings of culture and power, of which he had since become more skeptical.) His new book on the representations of music in prose fiction, which he had been working on already for three years, was going to be much riper and warmer, was going to make the books that preceded it (the prisons book, the one on Dickens’s irony, the little one on the history of Madame Bovary in English) look like cautious apprenticeship pieces. He thought of it as a reclamation in a renewed language of some of the humanists’ old ground: a demonstration of a recovered trust, finally, in the best of the culture he was heir to. He had felt able, as he experimented with first drafts of sections on Tolstoy’s Kreuzer Sonata and Joyce’s The Dead, to use the words of value judgment he had once trained himself scrupulously to resist; he wrote about “greatness,” and “mastery,” and even used (carefully, and with explication) the term “classic.”

It wasn’t perfectly clear to him, given his deep confidence in it, why the writing of the book had stalled, just recently, in the few weeks since he and Martha came back from their visit with friends in Uppsala. It didn’t even seem to be an intellectual problem but more of a physical one. When he sat for the prescribed hours at his desk, it wasn’t that the complexity of his argument defeated him or that he was trying to do too much (as Martha somewhat bruisingly suggested); what he felt was a lassitude, a paralyzing indifference to adding one word more to what was already on his screen. He felt as if the book was written already somehow: the effort was expended, he was on the other side of it, and he didn’t have it in him to toil back up to the top of the mountain of his argument. He found himself playing for ages with a couple of sentences or scrolling up and down through what he’d finished, fiddling with the syntax, pouncing on awkward repetitions. In order to forge forward, he knew that something in the mind must tense itself: reject peripheral stimuli, lunge into new words, persist in pursuit of the idea and not let go. And suddenly he felt bored with that virtuous conquest which was his life’s story.

Pearl’s arrival was the last straw; or she was his convenient pretext. The mess she left around the flat stunned him. He was incredulous at how much time she spent in empty chatter with her friends at home on her mobile phone. He found himself actually counting on his watch the hours she spent watching television. An outraged awareness of the dissipation, the indiscipline, the pointlessness of her life would float like a fog between his eyes and the screen he was supposed to be focused upon. She spent money like water — his money — then asked him for more in a tone that presupposed her right and the bottomlessness of his responsibility to provide. Although he asked her not to smoke in the flat, he knew she sometimes did; he smelled it and found the fag ends carelessly half buried in the waste bin. She went out “shopping” every day (she claimed she was looking for a job too); even Martha, who was quite capable of using that horrible verb “to shop” without irony, didn’t indulge in it very often. If he didn’t quarrel with Pearl, not yet, not in their first week, it was because he saw any domestic bickering as the ultimate extension of the banality he couldn’t bear.

He did once mildly reproach her for cutting food on the kitchen surfaces without a board, leaving knife marks.

— Oh, God! You’re just like Mum, always getting at me! she’d snapped, with such flagrant injustice (it really was the very first complaint he’d made) that he’d been deflected from persisting by her sheer illogic.

He was curious as to how Zoe had managed things at home; he wondered what Pearl’s perceptions of her mother were. Zoe’s restless conscientiousness made her perpetually strained; he could imagine how that was hard on a child. And when Pearl was small Zoe had surely been too passionately and unremittingly attached to her, too anxiously guilty about managing employment and motherhood together. Pearl hadn’t responded well to that anxiety. He wondered if his daughter wasn’t temperamentally more like himself. In truth, he had probably felt flattered, even vindicated, when Pearl called him and asked to take refuge with him. It was difficult to resist attributing some of what he deplored in Pearl’s attitude to flaws in her mother’s system of child-raising.

Zoe phoned Pearl at Simon’s almost every day; Pearl was blithely offhand in response.

— No, I’m all right, she said. No, don’t come up, there’s no need.… No, it’s OK, I’m chilling out, it’s cool.

When he talked to Zoe himself she was very brisk.

— I’m busy, she told him. I’ve got a couple of articles to write, I’m teaching two new courses, and there’s a lecture in the States to prepare for, as well as the book. As you can imagine, this all feels rather urgent at the moment, in the context of what’s happening. So long as she’s OK with you. I’m amazed how much I can get done, with the house to myself. She’s missing her classes at college, but to be perfectly honest, with the levels of attendance she was managing last year, I don’t know why she was bothering with it at all.

Above all, Simon wanted to resist falling into Zoe’s pattern of conflict with Pearl, a cycle of repudiation and reconciliation she couldn’t break. He never wanted to hear his own voice rising in Zoe’s futility of indignant allegation: “She did this; she said that; I told her, once and for all; I really thought we were getting somewhere this time, but then last night she.…” He tried to focus his mind instead on the phenomenon of Pearl’s generation, so technologically well equipped, so well fed, so beset with innumerable trivial stimuli: the music that poured in at their ears, the flashing dancing pictures in front of their eyes, their swollen pay packets, the incitements to purchase and consume on every side, the exposed flesh promiscuously, blandly available everywhere (he couldn’t bear to look at the expanse of tender pale belly that Pearl bared bravely, even going to town, even in the middle of the afternoon).