Everything Will Be All Right (38 page)

—Darling, have a bath here. Eat with us. We'll go round together this evening and tackle the mess when you've rested.

—I've got to face up to it. I won't be able to rest until it's sorted. I'll be all right once I get going.

—I'd come with you now, but I've got Vera for tea.

—Only, really, Mum, if you could see it! I truly don't understand her. How can she be so utterly absorbed in herself? It's not just the mess. It's her complacency. It's her unshakable certainty that she's at the center of everything.

Joyce folded a shirt carefully.

—You've always had to be so busy, she said. I suppose if you'd been able to be at home more, she might have felt more secure and not needed to behave badly to get your attention. Of course it's wonderful the way you manage things. But I do feel sorry for anyone having to juggle family and career. I was grateful, when I was your age, that I didn't have to work.

—Oh, don't start that again, said Zoe. We've been over that argument so many times.

—And then, she hasn't ever had a father at home. Which wasn't your fault.

—She didn't need one. We've managed fine without.

—You should listen to
Woman's Hour.
Everyone thinks differently about that now.

*   *   *

At home alone, zoe burned up with energy. She ran buckets of hot water with disinfectant, she filled black bags with rubbish and fag ends and beer cans and bottles; she put on rubber gloves and wiped and scoured every surface, even the backs and seats of chairs, that they might have touched with their sticky hands. She grew to feel she was in intimate communion with “them,” down in their dirt and their discards: Pearl's gang, who congregated at weekends around the standing stones on the heath in further pursuit of their ever more incestuously entangled intimacies, probably thinking it was an ancient sacred site although in fact it was a nineteenth-century folly. Their heterogeneous uniform of droopy tops and baggy ripped trousers and dangling scarves and strings and laces was a more mannered rerun of the fashions of Zoe's own teenage years. Some of “them” she could picture, the inner circle of familiar friends: a few sweet ones she was fond of, a couple of losers and no-goods. Some of them she fantasized, louche and sinister strangers, men mostly, taking advantage of Zoe's absence and her goodwill, peddling drugs perhaps, hunting after sex. She snooped through the ashtrays and the debris in search of evidence of anything worse than the dope and the pills she knew about (though she wasn't clear what the evidence might be). She scrubbed the toilet and the bathtub and the sink and the bathroom floor; she put all the towels in the laundry basket. She washed down the wall behind the plants; she scraped the kitchen rug free of flapjack and put it into the washing machine together with the sodden bath mat. After she had tried the dishwasher and heard the horrible noise it made, she stood washing and drying up for what seemed like hours, soaking the pans that were too far gone.

She phoned Simon to tell him what time Pearl was arriving and warn him she might be ill.

—I've given her money for a taxi, she said. I don't know how she'll get on with Martha.

—Martha's in the States.

—Oh, right.

There was no point in holding on for more information. Martha was successor to Eve, successor to Ros, successor to Melanie. Zoe only knew about any of them because Pearl had told her. They didn't live in with Simon (at least, they kept their own places). They didn't bear his children (he only had Pearl). In Zoe's imagination they were a procession: stately, independent, striking.

—Does Pearl have a bedtime or anything? he asked. Or a time she has to be in at night?

—You have to be joking! Zoe laughed hollowly. Just give her a key and hope she doesn't bring back all her friends at four in the morning.

—Oh, I think we'll have to have some pretty clear rules laid down.

—At least at first she won't have any friends.

—I don't know yet if this is going to work out, or for how long. It's a provisional arrangement. And we'll have to think hard about her education.

—Her education! I don't know if you remember me telling you, but she didn't even show up for half her AS exams.

—Precisely. I'm interested as to why.

—Oh.

—Insofar as one's allowed to be interested in anything else, in the midst of the end of the world.

—You mean what's happening at the moment?

—We seem to be gathering ourselves ready for a just war. Isn't that right? It's very much your specialty, isn't it? Against the forces of evil.

She heard in his voice a grim exulting pessimism. Simon never wanted to be caught out feeling shocked and appalled; he always wanted to have thought of the worst in advance. Then, whatever happened, he would be proved right; he would be ready with his irony.

—Actually, Simon, I don't really want to talk about this with you. I don't mean Pearl, I mean the rest of it. I've spent the whole weekend talking about nothing else. I need to shut it out for a few hours.

An instant retraction of intimacy was distinct as cold air in her ear.

—Who wants to talk about it? Isn't there already too much talk?

There was a note from Pearl on Zoe's dressing table. “No wonder you can't get a boyfriend, only sad Dyl. No wonder Dad didn't want to live with you.” Zoe had thought of phoning Dylan (who wasn't exactly a boyfriend, or just a friend, but something awkward in between); after she found the note she decided not to. What did Pearl mean by “no wonder”? No wonder because Zoe was so shrill, so puritanical, so vindictive? Or because she was growing older and plainer and had neglected herself? Perhaps this was why Pearl had left the note on the dressing table, where Zoe was supposed to work to make herself attractive: a warning from one female to another.

She studied her face with concentration in the mirror. She was forty-three. There must have been changes over the past couple of years, only she hadn't had time to take them in until today: a leaching of color from her skin and hair, perhaps; a loss of resilience, so that the little lines didn't spring back when she stopped grimacing. She worried now, when it was presumably too late, that she had never used anti-wrinkle cream or taken vitamins. Joyce spent at least half an hour in front of her mirror every day, “getting ready.” Zoe truly didn't know what you were supposed to do in all that time; in the mornings she washed her face and pulled a comb through her hair. She had thought she was too intelligent to worry over the usual women's trivia.

When she stripped her bed she found a used condom, shriveled and stuck to the sheet (certainly not hers; she and Dylan only slept together at his place, and not recently, and in any case she would never ever have forgotten such a thing and left it there). She picked it up in a tissue and buried it deep in the black bag on the landing with a shudder of distaste, thinking that at forty-three it was certain now she would never have another child, although she had always supposed that she probably would.

*   *   *

Zoe wasn't teaching again until wednesday. When she woke she didn't know what time it was, but it didn't matter. There was no Pearl to hurry off to classes at the city sixth-form college (where her attendance in spite of Zoe's efforts was insultingly perfunctory). Her watch had stopped; the battery must have died. She hadn't been able to find her alarm clock; presumably it was drowned somewhere under the mess in Pearl's room, the one place Zoe hadn't tackled in her cleaning mania (she had shut the door on it instead, containing an inland sea). Downstairs, Aunt Vera's clock said half past three, but this clock notoriously kept a time all of its own, and anyway it didn't feel like either kind of half past three, not the middle of the night or the middle of the afternoon. A fine gray rain swelled and ebbed against the windowpanes; it could have been the beginning or the ending of a day. She didn't know whether she had been asleep for six hours or twenty or (surely not) thirty-six. If she put the radio or the television on she could have discovered which, but she didn't want the intrusion of the world and its urgent claims upon her attention into this eerie nowhere space she had happened upon.

She would wait to see whether the light came or went.

Her sleep had been very deep and transforming, although she did not know where she had been and had no memory of her dreams. In her pajamas and a pair of thick socks and a sweater she boiled the kettle, made herself a cup of tea, and carried it steaming around the rooms of the house, turning the lights on and then off again, moving through the underwater texture of the deep quiet, sipping at the tea, lacing her fingers around it for warmth. Her rooms were restored to a chastened sobriety. She had thrown all the clothes she picked up through the door onto Pearl's bed. There were a few burns, a couple of breakages; the smell of cigarettes was still mingled perceptibly with the disinfectant. She would have to get Dyl to look at the dishwasher and fix the cupboard door. That was all. It was nothing.

And for this she had let her beloved daughter go off alone into the crowd where anything could happen, without Pearl's even turning her head to exchange last glances. Zoe was afraid for herself, that she could not keep anything safe. How absurd that she had quarreled with Pearl over a bit of mess; didn't she profess not to care for material things? As soon as she knew what time it was, and if it was a time when Pearl was likely to be awake, Zoe would phone and ask her to come home (if you phoned when she was asleep, she snarled and cursed). Or perhaps she would go up to Oxford to see her, take her out to lunch, listen to her. How had she even for a moment wanted to catch her uniquely unknowable child in the net of her judgment?

Zoe wandered with her tea upstairs to the room she used as her study. The tide of the party had only just reached this far: she hadn't had to do anything in here when she was cleaning except straighten the cover on the bare mattress of the spare bed and take away one half-empty beer can. (And now she spotted a bitten-into piece of flapjack on a pile of papers.) She had promised to write a piece for
New Internationalist
about the implications of the current crisis in relation to the arms industry. When she first sat down at the desk she hadn't made any conscious decision to begin it; in fact, she hadn't thought she would be able to write anything again until she had Pearl back. Out of habit, however, she turned her computer on and opened a new document. Even when she started to type she threw down her first thoughts in easy freedom because she didn't seriously think she had begun (usually she wrote effortfully, anticipating dissent). But she had happened upon one of those precious air pockets of clear work. Her line of argument bloomed, it leaped forward; her words embodied her thought without contortion. She forgot herself; all the mess of her personal life was absorbed for the moment into a larger responsibility. She must be scrupulous to get this right.

She hadn't switched on the lamps; the study, if she lifted her head to glance blindly around at it, was eerie in the blue light from the screen. Then the blue was swelled by daylight, which grew outside the window (so it was morning, not night). The rain persisted; the blowing mist became an earnest earthward downpour, soaking and steady. Zoe wrote concentratedly for three hours, only dragging her attention away from the screen when she needed figures and information from the journals and papers on her shelves. Once she went downstairs to put the heat on and make more tea. When she was finally and suddenly too tired to do anymore, she saved her work on a disk and crawled back to bed, still in her socks and sweater. Only instead of choosing her own bed she went on an impulse into Pearl's room and plowed across the chaos of bedding heaped on the floor to climb under her daughter's duvet and fall asleep, curled up with her back to the warm radiator, cocooned among all the crumpled dirty clothes, pressing her face into a consoling inside-out T-shirt ripe with Pearl's young animal smell.

*   *   *

When pearl rang him said she was leaving home and cried and called him Daddy (mostly she called him Simon, and he had never given her the least sign of wanting anything else), he had thought this might be what he needed, to have a child in the house. He had said she could come for a week or two at least, to see how it went, but in his heart he had for a moment imagined foolish things: how their lives might slip around each other weightlessly in his flat (there would be none of the searing, if none of the excitement, that came with sexual cohabitation), how he might choose books for her and play her music, and how she might with her ingenuousness and chatter heal whatever was soured and thwarted in him. He had even pictured her sitting at his kitchen table, drawing as she used to do, and thought how he would put her pictures up on his fridge and on his kitchen walls, which were too austere. (He used to refuse to put them up, scornful of the smug sentimentality of estranged fathers parading their parenthood. He had kept them instead in a folder in his desk.)

Only Pearl wasn't a child anymore. She was something else.

Of course, he remembered now, she had given up drawing years ago.

Usually she only came for a weekend, and usually Martha was around to take her off his hands and make sure she was fed and watered and talked to about whatever it was girls talked about (Martha was not a girl but had at least been one, and fairly recently too). Now Martha had gone home to the States for a month, and he and Pearl were painfully exposed to each other. The first morning, he was already convinced he should never have let her come. When he got up at eight he put croissants in the oven and made coffee and squeezed fresh orange juice (he had shopped at the supermarket in honor of her arrival). He called her several times before he realized that, in spite of bleary assurances from behind her bedroom door, she wasn't going to join him. Then he sat absurdly amid the unaccustomed splendor of his breakfast (he usually only drank black coffee) and ate both croissants.