Tessa Hadley: Everything Will Be All Right

He speculated as to what drugs she took when she was with her friends. He probed to see what in the world she knew about. She didn’t know the dates of the World Wars. She didn’t have any second language. She didn’t know who Stravinsky was, or Metternich, or Frantz Fanon, although she had vague ideas about Lenin and Germaine Greer (“Isn’t she some kind of feminist?”). She thought the Black Sea was “somewhere in Africa,” and she had never heard of the World Bank. Except when she was engaged in dialogue with her friends she spoke moderately clear English, although it was tainted with the cultish slang of the American teens. She didn’t seem to have read anything; astonishingly, when he asked her for her favorite book, she said it was To Kill a Mockingbird; how had that dinosaur of stuffy hopeful decency somehow endured into the age of techno and Ecstasy? Presumably it was something she had had to read at school.

As long as Simon didn’t criticize and was compliant, Pearl played at being sweet with him. She made weak dripping mugs of tea and brought them in to where he was working (he didn’t really drink tea; Zoe’s house would be a tea-drinking house, it went with the vegetarianism and the good causes). Because he couldn’t write what he ought to be writing, he was busying himself instead with reading and making notes he knew he didn’t need; to Pearl it must look as if all was as usual with the scholar in his study.

— You ought to get out more, Simon, she said. Apart from work and driving to the supermarket, you’ve been locked up in here with your books all week.

— I’ve been swimming, he replied defensively. (He went every day and did twenty lengths.) She was right, the air among his heaps of papers was stale.

— Just because Martha isn’t around, it doesn’t mean you have to shut yourself away.

— She says I’m a monk. Do you think I’m a monk?

She caught her bottom lip in her teeth, considering.

— You are going just a teeny bit bald, on top here.

— No. No, I’m not. He anxiously felt.

Then he had to go and inspect in the bathroom mirror; she held his shaving mirror up behind for him.

— It’s only a very, very small patch, she assured him.

— Good God, you’d need a magnifying glass.

He didn’t like it, though, even the small patch. He wondered what Pearl saw when she looked at him. Perhaps he seemed ancient to her. He hadn’t seriously thought much about what it meant to be growing older. Without children to hand, he had not had any markers against which to test how he appeared and whether he was showing the beginnings of absurdity.

He took her out to dinner at Le Petit Blanc. She spent hours dressing up for it in some of the new clothes she’d bought for herself with his money. She looked vivid and extravagant in a green top sewn with sequins cut low across her pushed-up breasts and some sort of short jacket with a fur trim. There were green combs in her pink hair. Her face was wide and slightly pasty (he could see a spot she had tried to cover with makeup); her pouting mouth with its swollen lower lip was glossy with dark paint; her eyes, drawn all around with kohl, were the real beauty of her face, commanding and deep-lidded. Girls her age did themselves up like this to attract attention and then froze rigid in the glare of it. He wondered what her contemporaries thought of her, whether the boys found her attractive or too overpowering. He knew there had been boyfriends, none of them “serious.” He thought she might be the kind of girl who has to wait until she’s older to generate passion in men.

If he was spotted by anyone he knew, would they guess Pearl was his daughter? They might decide disapprovingly that he was taking out one of his students. She grew talkative after several glasses of wine, although he still detected something guarded in her, a certain bright falsity of manner like a defense, clichés of expression behind which she eluded him. She never for one moment lost awareness of the crowd of others in the restaurant. When she smoked a cigarette she did it with studied nonchalance, as if she’d been practicing. She told him she was thinking of finding a job and taking a year off before starting her A-levels again.

— I need a break, she said.

He didn’t ask, A break from what exactly? What have you actually ever done?

— I’d like to travel.

— Travel’s OK, he said, but education’s better. If I were you, I wouldn’t want to be foolish. Knowledge is power, you know. I would want to find out what was going on. I would want to learn to understand it.

She looked down into her dessert, poking it with her spoon, blushing.

— I’m not so bad as you think. I did know where the Black Sea was, really, I just forgot. And I read a lot, honestly. I just said To Kill a Mockingbird because I thought it was something you’d approve of.

On their way home she slipped her arm into his and clung to him (perhaps it was the drink, perhaps he was walking too fast for her heels). She asked him to lend her one of his books.

— With all of those you’ve got, she said, there must be something I would like.

He thought about it, and when they were home he pulled down for her his copy of Turgenev’s First Love.

* * *

After a couple of weeks, pearl got a job working at virgin Records. She was taught to work the tills and the machine for the debit cards; then she stood behind a counter and took money for goods, over and over, all day long. She said it was boring but OK. A boy began to ring her at home, sometimes on the land line, which Simon answered, hearing his own voice frigid with hostility.

— I’ll just call her. Who did you say it was?

— Tell her it’s Lozzy.

The voice was educated, slurred, and complacent. In Oxford it was perfectly possible for people with those voices to work on the tills in chain stores. Simon couldn’t bring himself to repeat this absurd name to Pearl; he only informed her that she was wanted on the phone. He was swelling in fact with a violent and no doubt irrational mistrust of anyone who came after his daughter. He couldn’t believe that they could want her for herself, that she wasn’t being duped.

Pearl went out in the evenings, perhaps to meet Lozzy or perhaps other friends she had made at work. Simon told her to take care; he said he would be happy to come in the car to pick her up later, if she gave him a ring; he asked her what time she would be back. She threw him a fierce look as abrupt as a snap at his hand.

— Simon! Get off my back!

No one had spoken to him, ever, with such contempt.

He lay awake, listening for her to come home. Sometimes he didn’t hear her key in the door until two or three in the morning. One night he heard her and Lozzy come in together (presumably it was Lozzy? was it worse if it was someone else?), although they must have been tiptoeing scrupulously, taking much more elaborate care than she usually took to be quiet and not wake him. What made him know they were there was not even really distinct sound at all, it was more like the liquid overflow of something warm and sweet; at one point a low bubble of laughter erupted in Pearl’s voice, as if they were stumbling into each other in the dark in the passage, clinging to each other, stifling their mirth in each other’s clothes. Thank God the spare room was at the other end of the flat, the carpets were thick, and the old doors were heavy; there was no chance that he would hear them once they were in there. He strained his ears to make sure he was not hearing them, nonetheless.

That was it.

That was enough. She would have to go, if he was reduced to the grotesquerie of listening out for creaking bedsprings, like some greasy landlady in a northern realist novel. In the morning he lurked in his room, monitoring the progress of their furtive bathroom visits and breakfasting, then bursting out at a moment calculated to confront Lozzy face-to-face before they left for their day behind the counter. They both started guiltily where they were drinking tea in the kitchen, looking wan and used up (too much bed and not enough sleep; hadn’t that been the idiotic joke when he was a teenager?). He could see the beginnings of a sore beside Pearl’s lip. Lozzy was worse even than Simon had imagined: he had one of those white cocky faces, with a turned-up nose, thin lips rather full with blood, and rings in his eyebrows. His hair was cropped to a tight fuzz over his skull, dyed yellow.