Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

— Hi there. Lozzy got in first before Simon said anything.

— Lozzy missed his last bus home, lied Pearl lamely. I said you wouldn’t mind if he slept on my floor.

He did mind. But as there were no words in which he could imagine conveying this without indignity, he silently tested the kettle (empty), filled it splashily at the tap, felt an awareness in his shoulder blades that behind his back they were exchanging conspiratorially amused looks.

Simon’s own sleep patterns started to disintegrate. He had thought he left his childhood insomnia behind him (gentle-handed Ros, whom he had been involved with for a while a few years ago, had been a hypnotherapist and had done wonders with him, for all his skepticism). Now it returned to sap his days and nights of goodness and reason. Because of the agonized absurdity of his lying awake at night waiting for Pearl, he once or twice even went out walking round the streets in the small hours as he had done when he was young. Then during the day, because he wasn’t young anymore, he found his mind was clogged with tiredness; he even laid his head down sometimes on his arms and slept in front of the humming screen of his computer. He was astonished at how far, far down the soul could drop out of such a makeshift and snatched repose; hauling it up to consciousness again, when guilt roused him after fifteen or twenty minutes, felt like pulling his resisting heart out of a deep well. His dreams in the instant he tore free seemed voluminous, significant, absorbing; he ached to drop back into them.

How was he supposed to act with Pearl? The first time they crossed paths after his encounter with Lozzy, she looked at him as if she expected him to say something, but he didn’t know how to. Had he presided ingloriously over his daughter’s deflowering? Surely not; he had a distinct memory of Zoe’s telling him, although he hadn’t in the least wanted to hear it, that she and Pearl had talked about which contraception Pearl was using. No doubt Zoe had also told him which this was, although he had chosen not to remember that (and certainly wasn’t going to ask her about it now). When he put a wash in the machine, he found blood-stained knickers in the laundry basket, but then there were more straightforward explanations for that than the loss of anyone’s virginity (and he wasn’t going to ask Pearl about her periods either, although he did notice that over a few days the contents of the box of Tampax Martha kept in his bathroom was depleted). He prowled around in the spare room when Pearl was out and he was meant to be working. He picked up a book with a flowery cloth cover that might have been a diary; he weighed it in his hands and held it for some long minutes but didn’t open it, afraid of what he might read in there about himself, or about a whole kind of living he did not recognize and could not understand. He went away into the kitchen and made himself coffee and took up his collection of Adorno’s essays on music, forcing himself to concentrate on these and not to wonder what Pearl might have written. He was grateful for the teaching and for the ordinary administrative busyness that got him out of the flat and into his office in college. He looked forward to Martha’s return; this surely would fill up his days and steady him. There was something unseemly in his allowing his private angst to take up so much space in his thoughts at a time when the whole world was upside down.

— What did you make of the Turgenev? he asked Pearl tentatively.

— Yeah, I really liked it, it was so sad, she said. I guessed what was going to happen though, right from the first time his father saw the princess in the garden.

— Interesting that of all the Russians it is the Westernizing believer in enlightenment and progress who writes the saddest stories.

— Are they Russian? I thought that they were French. Didn’t they keep saying things in French?

He explained to her about the function of French-speaking in nineteenth-century aristocratic Russia. He also pointed out that the story was set in the country outside Moscow. Did she think that Moscow was in France?

— Oh, I never read the place names. My eye just sort of glances over them.

— I recommend you train yourself to glance back.

— The only bit I didn’t like was the end. I didn’t understand why she let herself be beaten. She kissed her arm where he hit her with his whip. That’s gross.

Simon considered.

— Perhaps your generation of women really won’t ever know about the kind of power that Zinaida has at the beginning; on license, for just as long as she’s young and beautiful and hasn’t given herself to anyone. The trouble is, it only makes fools out of the men; she can’t wait to exchange it for submission to a man worthy of mastering her. I suppose that arrangement sounds fairly horrible to you?

— It doesn’t make her very happy.

— It doesn’t make him very happy either. I’m not sure that happiness is quite the point.

— Why can’t they just be equals?

— Nowadays it would be possible to hope they could, of course. And you are quite right to wish for it. Everyone would be happier. Who would dare to put a name to what might be lost, now that we are inventing new patterns for men’s and women’s behavior? Only one wonders sometimes whether women will really want these bland new men that they have engineered.

— I shouldn’t worry about it, Pearl said. There’s probably a way to go yet, anyway, before we get to bland.

Another day when he was in her room he found English and history essays she must have done for her teachers at the sixth-form college, stuffed crumpled in the bottom of her backpack. (Left there out of profound indifference to such a form of work as if it were mere waste paper, or brought in case she dared to show them to him?) These he read greedily on the spot, frowning at the spelling, reliving the arguments he had had with Zoe when he had offered to pay for Pearl to go to private school. (“How can you?” Zoe had said. “When I think of what you used to profess to believe, once.” He wondered sometimes how he had ever tolerated Zoe’s righteousness, unambiguous as a ringing bell, even for the few years they had lived together.) If Pearl had gone to private school, she would have done better than this raw and unpolished work. There were gleams here and there, however, of something audacious and intelligent, unspoiled. Perhaps if she had gone to private school she would have been more knowing and less true. He was surprised by her penetration of some godawful sentimental-feminist poem she’d been given to analyze; shaken, even, as if he’d stumbled on something she’d concealed from him.

* * *

Martha came back. her summer of research work in the archives had gone well (this was for her book on women and politics in eighteenth-century America). She was surprised to find Pearl still around. Simon had told her on the phone that she was staying, but not for how long. Martha was less warm with her than she had been when Pearl had visited once or twice before for the weekend. She moved some clothes and bits and pieces out of his flat back into her own. When they made love it was at her place, and then Simon didn’t want to sleep the night there; he said he didn’t like to leave Pearl on her own.

Martha sat up in bed with the sheet over her breasts and smoothed her hair back behind her ears. Her hair was thick and very dark, as near as brown can come to black, with rich red lights in it. She wore it long, curling loose halfway down her back. She gave him a glance deep with accumulated questions; her eyes were brown too, almond-shaped and slanting (she had a Portuguese grandmother).

— It strikes me, she said, that Pearl is perfectly capable of looking after herself.