Tessa Hadley: Everything Will Be All Right

Simon sat up too, so as not to be at a disadvantage.

— I think I ought to be there.

She waited as if for more explanation, but none came.

— What on earth does she do all day? What ever is she up to?

— She’s working almost full-time, Simon protested.

— Yes, but what kind of work? I mean, what are her plans? Aren’t you worried for her future?

He too had felt at first that Pearl’s life, without books, music, study, goals, had nothing in it, and this vacancy had produced in him an anxious desire to fill it up. Now, when Martha complained, he found himself thinking differently. He had come to look on Pearl’s idleness almost with envy. It would be possible to see his own zeal for improvement as a part of a whole history of cultural bullying, rooted in puritan self-punishing; to see Pearl’s resistance to it (her hours of telly watching, her days of sleep, the indifference with which she sold herself to the chain store for those long pointless sessions) as an irrecoverable freedom.

— I don’t think she has plans, he said.

Martha gave an impatient shrug of her naked shoulders. Her long tapering back with its hanging luxuriance of hair was poised and upright; she went to dance class twice a week. She was certainly not going to plead with him to stay.

* * *

At home alone one night, he fell asleep waiting for pearl to come in. He dreamed fitfully. One horrible dream was of a miniature flamingo, tiny and pink as a finger, sprawled and damp, unconscious. He was cutting off its little wings, pressing with his fingernail for a joint as if with a knife. He had forgotten that the creature might not be dead; it lifted its head and its neck writhed, so he dropped it and stepped down hard on it with his shoe, to put it out of its misery or out of its knowledge of what he was doing. He woke up covered in disgust.

He didn’t know whether Pearl had come in while he slept or not; he got up and wrapped himself in his bathrobe to check. Her bedroom door was closed, but he couldn’t remember whether it had been ajar before. He stood hesitating, not liking to open the door just in case she was in there with Lozzy. He heard a subdued moaning. He thought for a moment this could be sex and gathered himself for retreat; then he was sure that Pearl was crying. He knocked and opened the door. In the light from the hallway he saw she was alone, and awake, pushed up on her elbows to see him; she reached over to switch on the bedside lamp. The room flooded in pink light (she had put a red bulb in). She was wearing her usual grubby nightshirt (surely it was time that went into the wash?). Her face was blotched and wet with tears; there was makeup smeared on her pillow.

She was not beautiful. Martha was beautiful: five foot ten, slender and muscular, her cheekbones and jawbone sharp as if carved from flint. Pearl was too indefinite; her face seemed to change shape and character according to her mood and efforts, and her figure when she was older would grow soft and shapeless like Zoe’s mother’s. Her looks touched him, though, as if they were part of himself.

— What is it? he whispered awkwardly.

He had not had to comfort her since she was a small child; he did not know how to do it.

— Should I go away?

She shook her head in her hands, sobbing.

— It’s nothing.

He sat down on the side of the bed, tried to pat her hair.

— Well, evidently it’s not nothing.

— Lozzy took me out in his car after work.

The words were broken up by the weeping erupting painfully from inside.

His heart clenched, his blood pulsed thickly. She was going to tell him the story he dreaded, that lurked in the lower levels of his imagination: of a violation, an abuse of her tender youth, some obscene thing done to her that she hadn’t wanted.

— Well, it’s not actually his car, it’s his brother’s. But he knew we were borrowing it, he was cool. And it was great to get out, you know, from the city? Lozzy’s good like that, he really appreciates nature, he knows these fantastic places to go, woodland walks and country pubs and things.

So, not a violation. An accident? An arrest? They’d been done for possession of drugs? He was all ready to mobilize his authority, as a middle-class parent, as a member of the university. He would be cleverer than the police, he would rescue her (and even Lozzy if need be).

— Then we saw this dead fox beside the road.

— And?

She renewed her sobbing.

— You see, I knew you were going to say that. That’s all. It was just this little fox. It was only a baby. You couldn’t even see where it was damaged. It was just laid at the side of the road with its snout on its paws and a little frown wrinkling up its nose. It only looked as if it was asleep. Lozzy did get out to see if it was dead, though, and it was; it was cold, although it was still perfect. So we had to leave it there. And now I can’t stop thinking about it.

Simon sat utterly perplexed. What reassurance was he supposed to produce, in response to this crisis? If she’d asked him about the gas chambers, or the massacres in Rwanda, or nine-eleven, he might have had some form of words ready.

He noted, at least, that Lozzy had not been able to console her.

— There are so many of them, he said, in what he hoped was a voice replete with adult confidence in ultimate meanings. There will be plenty more baby foxes.

— But not that one. I just can’t stop thinking. It was alive this morning! And now it’s not. And what about its mother? She must be wondering where it is.

— Coincidentally, Simon said, remembering suddenly, I had a dream just now, just before I got up to see if you were home, that was about hurting an animal.

She grew more quiet.

— Did you? What kind of animal?

— A bizarre little dream creature. Like a tiny bird. I was crushing it. When I woke up I felt disgusted with myself.

She put her hand on his, and squeezed it, and leaned her head against his chest so he couldn’t see her face. He put his arm round her.

Her voice was muffled and reluctant, so he knew that what was coming now was the true core of her confession.

— What I can’t bear, Daddy, is what’s going to happen to the fox now. That it’s going to turn to rot.

— Someone will take it away. Crows will eat it. They’ll pick it clean.

— They don’t always. We saw others. Sometimes they just turn into a bag of brown rot.

Words of explanation ran in his head but they were nothing, he couldn’t speak them.

— It’ll be all right, he could only say to her. Everything will be all right.

— Don’t be stupid, Pearl said crossly. No it won’t.

They have telephoned from the retirement home. Uncle Dick has died, aged ninety-six.

Joyce spoke to him only a few hours ago. He “went peacefully, in his sleep,” they tell her, although the last few weeks have been far from peaceful. Dick has tried to escape from the home several times; he has grappled with the cook in the kitchen, accusing her of hiding his tin of Epsom salts, and rattling through her cupboards for it with his stick; one of his visitors found him sitting in his bed in soiled pajamas; he has been phoning Joyce at three, four, five in the morning, to beg and plead with her to help get him out from where he is being held prisoner. He seemed to think that he was somewhere in South Africa, and he could see the tall masts of the ships in the harbor from his window. If only he could get on board one of those ships, he confided urgently, he could sail home to his wife and children. Joyce has taken to unplugging the phone before she goes to bed. She and Ann have been dreading that the nice-ish retirement home (at least there is someone playing the piano sometimes; at least the garden is lovely and the doors unlocked) will say they cannot look after him any longer, that he needs to move on to one of the other kind of places, with nursing care. Ann, who is brave about this kind of thing, has looked into those other places.